“Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?”

Those stirring words come from one of the most durable spiritual guides of all time, the Rule of St. Benedict.  It’s been said everything one needs to know about living the spiritual life is contained in this little book. Over the past year, this 1,500-year-old treatise has become, for me, a constant companion.

Since June of 2008, I’ve had the extraordinary opportunity to spend an average of a week a month at Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery for women in Atchison, Kansas. I’ve been invited to share as deeply as a lay person can in the spiritual life of the sisters for a book I’ve been asked to write. I admit I questioned at first what practical wisdom a monastery might hold for a modern, married, professional woman like me. It turns out I’ve learned plenty.

I used to think of monasteries as outmoded remnants of a past era. But now, when I enter Mount St. Scholastica, I feel as if I’m peering into the future, a future our world so desperately needs—one that stresses community over competitiveness, service over self-aggrandizement, quietude over gratuitous talk, and simplicity over constant consumption. The Mount is a place where those who listen are valued as much as those who speak up; a place where people forgo personal wealth but want for nothing, where prayers are said for the victims of violent crime and bells are tolled when a Death Row prisoner is executed.

I identify now with the words of Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk and spiritual writer. After his first visit as a young man to the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton wrote in his journal: “I had wondered what was holding this country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. It is this monastery.”

Whenever I walk into Mount St. Scholastica, I have the sense that I’m entering a deeper reality. It starts with the beginning of the day. The sisters don’t wake up and immediately turn on National Public Radio or read The New York Times, as I do. Day begins with Morning Praise. The sisters trace the sign of the cross over their lips and say, “Lord, open my lips, and we shall proclaim your praise.” It’s a way of promising that the entire day is going to be a form of praise. It’s not about checking off all the things on one’s to-do list, or plotting to sell more things today than yesterday or, as in my case, writing more words than I did the day before. It’s about making sure everything we do in the course of the day is an act of praise, an expression of gratitude for life.

After the sisters say that little prayer, they sing. Imagine how different our days might begin, if we started out each morning singing—even just mentally singing something in our head. If you’re someone who loves Broadway show tunes, as I do, you might choose “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Or it could be a favorite hymn (“We Rise Again from Ashes” is one of my morning favorites).

People think of monasteries of very quiet, perhaps even lonely places. But the truth is they teem with activity. The sisters work outside at many different jobs: teaching, doing social work, counseling, and hospital chaplaincy (one at the Mount was even a firefighter, another a funeral director), but everyone also has a job to perform within the monastery. Each sister takes a turn at cleaning the bathrooms and doing the dishes (albeit with industrial-size mechanical dishwashers). Even the prioress and the PhDs have their “at bat” at these menial jobs. It’s a way of saying that all work is sacred. Ora et labora, work and prayer, is the Benedictine motto. I like to think of it not so much as work and prayer, but work as prayer.

“Let the cellarer [the monastery supply clerk] handle the kitchen utensils as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar,” St. Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a reminder to respect the common objects and utensils of our lives and a promise to extend that respect to the people around us, the community we live in, our natural resources, and our environment.

In his book on the Rule of St. Benedict (Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living, Morehouse Publishing, 1996) John McQuiston, a trial attorney, points out, “Everything we have is on loan. Our homes, businesses, rivers, closest relationships, bodies, and experiences, everything we have is ours in trust and must be returned at the end of our use of it.” This is the way of monastics. As we continue to reap the damages of our throw-away society, we can see just how far-sighted monasteries have been.

There are some old monastic customs that the sisters don’t follow anymore, and frankly I wish some of them could become a part of our everyday lives. My friend, Sister Thomasita Homan, told me that for many years, whenever a group of sisters were assigned to work together a project, they would bow to each other and say in German (the native language of the first Benedictines in Atchison), “Have patience with me.” Imagine doing that in today’s workplace! I think about how much more pleasant it might be, when I’m out reporting a story for PBS, if I bowed to the cameraman, bowed to the producer, and they to me, and we asked each other to have patience, please, with each others’ human frailties.

Such humility forms the core of monastic life. It is especially important for Benedictines, who take a vow of stability. The vow commits them to live—and grow—with the same group of people at the same monastery for the rest of their lives. Stability recognizes, as one sister put it, that “there’s nowhere else but here.”

At Mount St. Scholastica, there are sisters who have lived together for as many as 75 years. Having moved from state to state here in the U.S. and lived in three European cities over the course of my career, the notion of spending one’s entire life in the same place seems quite foreign to me. In fact, the whole concept is alien to our highly mobile American society. Stability reminds us to grow where we’re planted. A monk was asked, “What is it then to be stable?” And he answered, “You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere; that you do not need to seek God elsewhere. God is here, and it is useless to seek God elsewhere, because it is not God that is absent from us. It is we who are absent from God.”

Often that absence stems from a simple lack of balance. We have an abundance of food in this country, plenty of gadgets and opportunities for recreation. What we lack is time to enjoy them. The rhythm of monastic life opens the way for balance. Benedict in his Rule stipulates that monks get seven hours rest a night. Those who require more food because they are ill or weak should get it, and those who aren’t strong enough to do physical labor won’t be forced to do it. The Benedictines even go so far as to call leisure “holy.”

I saw firsthand the Benedictine way of balance when I was at Mount St. Scholastica as Lent began this year. First, the sisters enjoyed the monastic version of Mardi Gras. All of them, even the elderly ones living in the nursing home wing, gathered for beignets and hot chocolate. Not just any hot chocolate, but hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps. The sisters laughed and joked and were having a grand time. But at the appointed moment, everyone got up from their tables and walked in a procession from the community room to the dining room. There, a fire blazed in the fireplace. One of the sisters carried in the palms from last year’s Palm Sunday. One by one she threw the branches in the fire to create the ashes for this year’s Ash Wednesday, and from that moment on there was complete silence in the monastery for the rest of the night and all day Ash Wednesday. A time for fun and leisure, yes, and a time to be serious and prayerful. Balance.

Perhaps the most important word I’ve learned at the monastery is a Latin word: conversatio. It refers to another one of the vows taken specifically by Benedictine monks and sisters: conversatio morum, literally “conversion of morals.” The phrase is often loosely translated as “conversion of life.” But I like the definition Sister Thomasita once gave to me:  conversatio as a constant “turning toward,” a constant conversation with life.

I like the idea of turning because it connotes change, and there are certain aspects of my life I’ve been trying to change for a long time. Like my quick temper. I find that I like the person I am at the monastery much better than the person I am in my everyday life, because when I’m at the monastery I’m calm. I’m patient. I don’t lose my temper. Once, just a few days after I returned home from the monastery, I argued with my beautiful husband. It was a totally silly, unnecessary argument, and I emailed Sister Thomasita and asked, “Why do I have these stupid arguments with my husband, who’s the person as close to me as God? Why can’t I live conversatio in my day-to-day life with the people I’m closest to? And she answered, “You are living conversatio. Your struggle. That’s the conversatio.” And that gave me hope—hope that I don’t have to be a saint. I just have to be human.

“Keep death before you daily,” Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a potent reminder not to spend my life twisting in anger or caught up with what Thomas Merton called “useless care.” My stays at the monastery propel me every day to remember what is essential, what gives my life meaning. Merton referred to it as finding “the hidden ground of our being,” finding that place where we not only discover God, but where God can discover us.

I suppose I am just one of the many Benedict has spoken to through the ages who yearns for life and desires to see good days. “Run, then,” Benedict reminds me and all of us, “while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you.”

Judith Valente, a contributing correspondent for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, is also a poet and co-editor with Charles Reynard of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2005).

BOB FAW, correspondent: For people of faith, services which acknowledge, indeed commemorate, death can bring comfort or anguish. Thomas Beveridge’s Yizkor Requiem recognizes both. Performed here by the orchestra and chorus of London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the music is emotional and cerebral—suggestive, even, at times, haunting. Conducted by Sir Neville Marriner and recorded for the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, the Yizkor Requiem was composed by Beveridge not just to remind listeners of what Beveridge says “really matters,” but also to combine, musically, two faiths.

THOMAS BEVERIDGE (Composer and Conductor): I realized that I could put together a piece that kind of stands on the bridge between the two religions, the Christian religion and the Jewish religion, and takes a look at, simultaneously, at the ritual for the dead.

FAW: Beveridge says he was inspired to compose this piece after the 1991 death of his father, an Episcopal priest and scholar who immersed himself in both faiths. It was, says Beveridge, “a quest for spiritual roots.”

BEVERIDGE: My quest and my father’s quest. My father inspired me to look at the origins of Christian liturgy in the synagogue. I mean, that’s basically what we’re talking about here.

FAW: Was it an attempt to come to terms with his death, or to memorialize him, or both?

BEVERIDGE: I think both. I find it a very cathartic experience to make this effort in his memory, and in the process I learned a lot.

FAW: What Beveridge, a church organist, choir director, and composer of more than 600 works, learned over the two years he spent writing the Yizkor Requiem is that despite profound differences in theology, the two faiths share enormous common ground.

BEVERIDGE: I went through the Requiem Mass and found passages that were almost exactly the same as passages in the Yizkor service or in similar synagogue ritual, and that’s where the Mass came from. It came directly out of the synagogue.

FAW: “Yizkor,” Hebrew for “may he remember,” is a memorial service for the deceased. The Requiem is the music for a Catholic funeral service, seeking eternal rest for the departed. While a Requiem emphasizes comfort, and the Yizkor can be sad, musically they reinforce one another.

Here, for example, as the cantor sings the Kaddish in Hebrew, the chorus underneath sings the Lord’s Prayer in English—each of them a doxology, a hymn praising God.

BEVERIDGE: The Kaddish is a doxology. The Lord’s Prayer is a doxology, though the Yizkor Requiem begins with the Kaddish prayer, which is what every Jew says at the Yahrzeit, the annual remembrance of anyone in his family who has died.

FAW: Another similarity which Beveridge accents musically: the word “holy,” repeated here three times in Hebrew—kadosh, then three times in Latin—sanctus.

But make no mistake: while much of this composition is solemn, parts are also light-hearted, or what Beveridge calls “lickety-split.” “I wanted,” says Beveridge, “to give the impression of a train that gets going and keeps going, going along.”

BEVERIDGE: It’s not all very ponderous stuff. There’s a lot of joy in it—the joy of recognizing that a departed soul may be resting in Eden, in the Garden of Eden.

FAW: Perhaps the most dramatic moment of all in the Yizkor Requiem comes at the end, when a single flute plays a plaintive theme. Finally, with the soft refrain of “Amen” by the chorus, the flute slowly fades away.

BEVERIDGE: The flute player turns around and walks out of the building and disappears, and the last phrase is played over and over and over again until the player can hardly be heard any more. I wanted to depict the departing soul somehow, and the flute playing the melody of the ninth movement, the words of which are “the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God.”

FAW: What Beveridge has done, says one reviewer, is “bring us back to our beginnings—and our endings” in a work which Beveridge says is meant to be reassuring, a peaceful work about the experience of death.

BEVERIDGE: I mean we are the ones who are left. We’re the ones who have to deal with this event in our lives and to try to understand it, try to find a way, through ritual or through musical experience, of coming to terms with it.

FAW: A spiritual lesson in music—bridging traditions which differ, but which also experience the same thing and which here come together as one.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Washington.

Psalm 23

A psalm, by David.

God is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.
You lay me down in lush meadows.
You guide me toward tranquil waters,
reviving my soul.
You lead me down paths of righteousness
for that is your nature.
And when I walk though the valley, overshadowed by death,
I will fear no harm, for you are with me.
Your rod and staff—they comfort me.
You spread a table before me
in the face of my greatest fears.
You drench my head with oil;
my cup overflows past the brim.
Surely goodness and kindness
will accompany me all the days of my life
and I will have dwelt in the house of the Holy
for the length of my days.

Psalm 32

By David, a psalm of understanding.

Blessed is the one who lifts up her transgressions to God;
her sins will be forgiven.

Blessed is the one for whom the Holy One
need not reckon his faults;
whose spirit is clean of deceit.

When I ploughed the fields in silence,
my bones wasted away;
they groaned all day as I worked.

For day and night your hand weighed heavy against me;
the juice of my breast went dry, like the brittle fruit of summer–Selah.

I made my sin known to you.
My wrongs I no longer attempted to hide.

I said, I will confess my rebellions to the Eternal–
and you forgave my sins and errors–Selah.

For this, let the one who loves you
pray at any time she can find–
do not let the flood of waters overtake her.

You are a hiding place for me,
protecting me from anguish.
You surround me with a loud cry of rescue–Selah.

I will enlighten and illumine for you
the path you should walk.
My eyes will give witness.

Don’t be like a horse,
a mule without understanding
with a bridle and halter put on to restrain it.

In such a way God cannot approach you.

Many are the pains of those who persist in their wrongs,
but those who trust in their Creator are surrounded by love.

Take joy in God and let the righteous rejoice.
Cry out with gladness, all who are steadfast of heart.

Psalm 90

A prayer of Moses, man of God.

God, you have been a dwelling place for us
from one generation to the next.

Before mountains were born,
before earth and its people came to exist.

From eternity until eternity you are holy.

Mortals can turn to you until they are crushed.
You say, “Return, children of Adam.”

Because a thousand years you can hold in your sight
like a yesterday passing into today,
a watchman’s hour of relief at night.

You flood the years; they pass like sleep.
By morning, they vanish like grass.

At dawn a person flowers and is fragrant;
by evening we become withered and dry.

For by your wrath we are extinguished.
By your anger we are made to feel afraid.

You have laid out our transgressions before you,
our secrets are illumined by the light of your face.

All our hours pass by in your fury.
Our years come to an end as though imagined.

The days of our years are seventy;
if we are strong, maybe eighty.

All our boasts are toil and delusion,
because life passes and rushes and flies away.

Who can bear the force of your rejection?
Our fear of you seems to us like your anger.

Make known to us the portion of our days
so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Turn back to us, God—-Oh, how long?
Have compassion on those trying to serve your will.

Fill our morning with acts of your kindness
and we will sing and rejoice all our days.

Bring us joy in proportion to our days of affliction,
years we saw only strife.

May your acts be visible to your servants,
your splendor to their children’s eyes.

May the sweetness of the Holy One, our Creator,
be constantly before us.

And the work of our hands, give us direction.
And the work of our hands–give it direction toward you.

Psalm 27

By David.

You are my light and my hope,
whom should I fear?

You are the strength of my life,
before whom should I tremble?

When the wrongful approach to devour my flesh,
my oppressors and enemies,
it is they who stumble and fall.

If an encampment pitches tents against me,
my heart will not quiver.

If a war rises up against me,
in you I still trust:

One thing I have asked from you,
one thing I seek,

to dwell in your house
all the days of my life,

to behold your beauty,
to enter your innermost temple.

You cover me with the tabernacle of your presence
on days when hardship comes.

You shield me in concealment of your tent.
Upon a rock, you lift me high from harm.

And now, God, raise my head above troubles that surround me.

In your tent, I will make my songs into offerings,
singing forth all my melodies to your name.

Listen, God, to my voice when I call out.
With compassion, answer my need.

It is to you my heart calls,
“Seek out my face,”
because your face, God, is what I constantly search for.

Don’t hide your eyes from me.
Don’t push away your faithful in anger.

You have always been my help.

Don’t tear me out by the roots;
don’t abandon me–

for you are the one I count on for help.

My father and mother may leave me,
but you have gathered me in.

Teach me, Source of Joy, your ways.
and lead me down the level plain
because of the dangers that surround me on every side.

Don’t give me over to breath of my fears.

For distortions have risen up in name of truth,
they breathe out visions of destruction.

If only I could believe that I would see God’s goodness
in the land of the living…

Keep up your hope in God.
Strengthen your heart and sturdy it;
Keep up your hope in God.

This period is called either the High Holy Days, the High Holidays, the Awesome Days, and they incorporate the days of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and then ten days in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are called the ten days of repentance, and then Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There really are three basic questions that these ten days invite us to think about. One is can I change as a human being? Can I really become better? I think that’s a really hard question to ask. Can I become better or is this the way it is and I’m doing the best I can, and that’s it? And the second question is, is forgiveness possible? Can I forgive other people, and can I feel forgiven? I think that’s also a very difficult question. We talk a lot about forgiveness and wanting to be forgiven and to forgive other people, but it’s really hard. And the third question that runs through all of these days is am I accountable for my behavior? And whether you believe in a God in the sky or the cosmos or reality or the universe or whatever it is your belief system is, do you actually believe that you’re accountable for how you behave? And I think those three questions and themes run through the entire High Holy Day period.

Rabbi Irwin Kula

Can I really change? Can forgiveness be real in my life, and can I be accountable? You just can’t answer those questions. You actually have to practice answering them, and so it turns out that the 30 days before Rosh Hashanah—really the 40 days before Yom Kippur—are days devoted to practicing in those three areas. So, we actually practice asking what changes in our behavior do we have to make that would be more aligned with who we imagine we ought to be, who we think God wants us to be. We practice forgiveness. In other words, you can’t come on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, and expect some spiritual forgiveness experience without first preparing by asking people for forgiveness for things that you’ve done and by granting forgiveness to people who have done things to you. And, finally, unless you actually begin to think about your behavior and what you are accountable for and what have been the consequences of the previous year’s behavior, you’re not going to have a Yom Kippur experience.

The practice amongst the many practices in the forty days prior to Yom Kippur, first and foremost, [is] what I call a kind of spiritual, moral, or ethical inventory, and that is to go through one’s life, the different areas in one’s life. First, the family, family relationships, the most intimate relationships, extending out to friendships, then work relationships and how one is operating at work with other people and the work one is doing. Then the larger community, world, nature—to actually go through those areas. My practice, and the practice that I suggest, is to take two things. Take your checkbook and take your Day-Timer or Blackberry calendar and to look—how did I use my time this year? Because that says a lot about who we are. And how did I use my money this year? So there’s that piece, which is part of the practice in preparation, and then to actually recognize about where one is and ask people for forgiveness, and that means literally picking up the phone and saying “Hey, you know what? Earlier this year, I know, I dissed you” or “I did something that was very inappropriate,” or “I took credit for something,” whatever it is, or “I ignored you,” and to be able to come to terms and ask for forgiveness. It turns out the more you practice and prepare for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the richer that experience is.

In more traditional communities, in the mornings of the week before Rosh Hashanah there are penitential prayers. Those are prayers in which one asks for forgiveness, and it’s a kind of asking for forgiveness in general, in the hope that it’ll stimulate where, specifically, I need to ask for forgiveness, and that’s every morning for the week before. There’s also another practice starting the month before Rosh Hashanah—in other words, those forty days prior to Yom Kippur—of blowing the shofar, which is one of the central symbols of the High Holiday experience, blowing the shofar at the end of the morning prayer service, and the shofar is just a blast of the ram’s horn, and it, in a sense, wakes you up. You’re not used to hearing a blast of a ram’s horn, and it is supposed to cause you to become more alert to your own behavior.

What the Jewish wisdom tradition invites us to think is that before one can actually approach God, or what I call kind of the “vertical dimension,” one has to have the horizontal dimension in order. I would say it this way, that the moral alignment between us as individuals is a necessary component and base for the spiritual relationship that we want. I once heard a story about the Dalai Lama. He came to the United States, one of his first trips, and they brought him to a meditation center, and what struck him was that people were engaged in spiritual practice who hadn’t developed an ethical practice, and he said this was the first time he ever saw spiritual practice being built and created independent of ethical practice, and I think that most religious traditions and most spiritual wisdom traditions would suggest that the alienation or the disconnection between us and God is actually a consequence and a function of a deep disconnection between us and other human beings, and so the practice in Jewish life is you can’t come to God on Yom Kippur and ask for forgiveness or ask for a realignment in the relationship if you haven’t done the work between you and other human beings.

Changing your fate for the coming year is a part of a larger question: Do we believe that our behavior actually affects our destiny? Now we have to understand that in a fairly careful way because there’s not a direct cause-effect correspondence that we can generally pick up: “If I’m good, there’ll be no sickness; if I’m bad, I’ll be punished.” Well, it turns out that we know, most of us, that life doesn’t move that easily, and cause-effect is not that clean. But there’s a deeper sense, I think, at least in my experience, and I think this is most people’s experience, there’s a deeper sense that there’s a relationship between my behavior and my destiny, in how I feel about myself, in how I approach the world, in that whatever happens to me somehow I’m capable of dealing with what happens to me at a higher, more evolved level if my behavior is correct and aligned with the things and values that I hold most deeply. So there’s a sense on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which thousands of people gather together and go through many, many prayers in which we ask ourselves, “How have I done?” For illuminating and actually elucidating the variety of potential sins, and the word for sin in Hebrew is “chet,” which means “missing the mark,” the places where I’ve missed the mark and the sense that if I can discover some of those places and begin to correct them that my destiny will actually be better.

No matter what path you’re on, the path is always filled with unpredictability. The path is always filled with things that we can’t control and places that we can’t control. But what we can really control, as best we can, is our behavior up front and our responses to other people, and responses to the unpredictability and vulnerability and fragility in life. And Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur invite us to think about that. One of the most important prayers on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur comes right at the center of the worship service, when the most people are in the synagogue, is a prayer “Who shall live, and who shall die?” And that’s a question that we don’t often ask ourselves, and I don’t think we should ask it every day; if you ask it every day, it would be a little crazy. But once a year to come clean, to look around and say, “You know what? There’ are no guarantees here. There is a fragility to our lives. Given that, how do I want to live?” If I look at my job, I look at my spouse, I look at my friend, I look at my parents, and I say “Wow, what is really true about life or death is that I don’t know, no matter what I do, no matter how good I take care of people, I don’t know if next year at this time everybody’s going to be here.” Well, given that, what are my obligations? How do I want to treat the people both close to me, and how do I want to act in a world in which I may not be here a year from now? Now, confronting our mortality up front and surfacing the anxiety that that does produce, and then asking who do I want to be—given that, generally speaking, helps us become more ethical human beings and much more sensitive to life.

We know that we’re not going to be able to change everything, and, of course, the paradox is that we’ll probably be here the following Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, probably saying the exact same prayers and probably, for most of the things that we tried to change, having not been so successful. But part of what it means to be a human being is to stay in that game, to believe that yes, we can change, that the change happens incrementally, to not imagine that your life is over because you haven’t made those changes, and that’s part of the message of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. When I get to the service on Rosh Hashanah morning and get to those prayers that I know I said the exact same prayers—I’m 51-one years old—I remember saying them probably consciously since I’m about seven or eight. And it’s funny, pretty much for the last 25-30 years it’s the same ones that I’m still working on, you know? How to be a little bit more patient with the people I care about, how to be a little less oriented towards being in conflict with the people with whom I deeply disagree, how to be a little bit more generous and a little less ego-centered. So, you know, these are the ongoing dilemmas, and I think that if you have a regular, set time in a year, or even in a week or in a day, but here we’re talking about the High Holidays, if you have a regular, set time in which a community comes together by the thousands to do a little introspection and ask how am I aligned with other human beings, how am I aligned with God, and how am I aligned with who I deeply want to be, chances are we’ll be a little bit better.

The central activity of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the activity that defines almost everything that’s happening, is the word “teshuva.” Teshuva comes from the word, “shuv,” which means “to return,” and there’s this sense that deep down, deep, deep, deep, deep down, you know, in the privacy of your own heart and your own soul and mind and spirit, we know we want to be good people, deep down. But what happens in life is things get distorted, and we get hurt, and we become fearful and filled with anxiety and scared, and so we don’t act in light of what deep, deep, deep down we know we can be and want to be. Teshuva is this process over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which we return to that place deep, deep down of who we really want to be, and so everything having to do with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, all the prayers and all the liturgical readings and all the readings from scripture and the variety of practices, whether it’s blowing a shofar, or on Yom Kippur it’s fasting and staying in synagogue for most of the day, all of the practices are designed to help us make teshuva, return to that deepest path that we know we want to be on.

“Repent” would be a more Protestant or Christian term for the word for teshuva. We don’t actually have—there’s no word “repent” that way. But repent means to try to make up for what you do. We have a process in Jewish wisdom, and Maimonides was the most important articulator of this, we have a process of gaining forgiveness that I call the four R’s, and the first is to realize what one has done. You know, until you realize what you’ve done wrong, you can’t do anything about it, and realization is really hard. You know, you can tell a person they’ve done wrong, and a person can tell me “you did something wrong, you did something wrong.” But until you see it and realize it, you’re not in the game, the forgiveness game. So the first is to realize. The next is to regret, actually, that I did it. The next thing is to attempt to repair. Sometimes that repair is in a conversation. Sometimes that repair is in financial remuneration. Sometimes that repair is in actually diminishing myself a little bit to allow a realignment in the relationship and changing my behavior, and only then is there the fourth R—reconciliation, and it’s those four R’s together, which is the process of forgiveness, which for us, for Jews, is what we mean by repentance.

The last thing on Yom Kippur is a final long blast of the shofar, and at that moment I should feel two things exactly at the same time. One is I am really perfect and loved just the way I am, and I can do better, and to hold those two things together—I’m perfect and loved just as I am, and I can do better—is the process of teshuva working.

On Rosh Hashanah afternoon, after having been in synagogue most of the day and then coming and having a festive New Year’s meal, a practice developed called Tashlikh, from the word, l’hashlikh, to cast away or to throw away, and it is, like all ritual, a theatrical re-enactment, and we go to a brook or a river or a stream or an ocean, a body of water, and we symbolically, either taking bread or something, cast away our sins into the water, and, of course, the water carries them away, and having been in this process of teshuva, this process of spiritual and moral inventory, over the last thirty days, and now anticipating the next ten days to actually physically remove and cast away and stand at water that is a cleansing symbol to begin with, that carries away, in a sense, our sins is a very powerful interior, in a sense, re-enactment together as a community. So, literally, you just stand at the water and from young to old take a crumb of bread and throw it into the water. And there’s a passage that says “Cast away my sins, cast away my sins.” And then, very often, since it’s done kind of late afternoon and the sun is beginning to set, very often birds will come and they’ll take the bread away, and it has a wonderful theatrical feel and a sense of liberation, that my sins are being removed from me. And what that’s really saying is that I may sin, but I’m not sinful. And I think that’s a piece of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur experience. Very often, for ourselves and for other people, we confuse doing bad things with being bad people. And I’m not sure, really, if we can evolve and grow morally and psychologically and spiritually as long as we think we are bad people. We’re people who, very often, do bad things, who very often sin but have the capacity to cast away that sin, to work through those mistakes and become better people.

One of the interesting things about Rosh Hashanah in general and about the High Holiday period is that the celebratory aspect, which is Rosh Hashanah and the celebration of the New Year, actually comes before the atonement focus, which is Yom Kippur. One would expect that first I have to atone, first I have to make sure I’ve come to terms with who I am, and I’ve realized and regretted and repaired and gotten better, and then I get to celebrate. In fact, the Jewish calendar runs it in reverse. First we’re going to celebrate the New Year. Now in the context of celebration of a New Year, the change really is possible. Now let’s get down to the business of change. And I think pedagogically and methodologically and psychologically that’s a very, very important move. First, everything’s going to be okay. Now let’s work on things, as opposed to let’s work on things and see if everything’s going to be okay.

On Yom Kippur, five times during the day there’s a confessional, there’s a list of “for the sin that I did with my mouth, for the sin that I did with my eyes, for the sin that I did by stealing, for the sin that I did with arrogance,” and there’s five times during the Yom Kippur service one goes through, one goes “Al Khet” for the sin. It’s a practice of hitting one’s heart, kind of to get the heart going, that type of idea, and what’s interesting is almost all of the sins recognized are between human beings. They are not between the human being and God. On Yom Kippur, this intense, spiritual, introspective day, the vast majority of sins that are evoked or attempted to bring to consciousness are between human beings, which is a way of saying that if you really want to know God, you’d better start with the most visible symbol and image of God available, which is other human beings.

Atonement is really just a fancy word for the forgiveness process. The word Yom Kippurim, from the word “kappare,” really means to be engaged in this forgiveness process. Atonement is just a fancy word for “at one.” If you engage in forgiveness, if you do the introspection that is required during this period you will feel more at one with yourself, at one with other people, at one with the cosmos, or reality, or the universe, or God, whatever it is you call it. And that “at-one-ment,” that alignment is the goal of the Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur period.

In the central prayer of Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur, “Who shall live and who shall die,” in that prayer it says on Rosh Hashanah it is written (in other words your fate, your destiny is written down, is inscribed), and on Yom Kippur it’s sealed. And there is this sense, and again, whether one believes it literally or as a deep metaphor, the only issue for me is, do you take it seriously, and that our behavior does affect the nature of our life. I don’t know if it affects whether we literally live or die, but it surely affects whether we live or whether we die in life. In that respect, there’s the sense that on Rosh Hashanah, who we are going to be based on, how we make this assessment, is written down. And, yet, then you have another ten days in which to really go through that process even more deeply of asking who you are, and then it gets sealed. And “gets sealed” doesn’t mean that it’s closed forever, because of course, the paradox, or the joke, or the irony, or the, you know, in Jewish wisdom there’s as many traditions that say but it’s really not sealed until the end of the whole holiday period, or three weeks later, at the end of the Festival of Tabernacles and Simchat Torah, that it’s really not sealed. And even then it’s really not sealed, because every morning you go through a practice in which you ask for forgiveness. So “sealed” is a way of saying something does happen if you spend a full day on Yom Kippur and you spend full days on Rosh Hashanah, the forty days and the process of engaging in teshuvah and forgiveness, something does happen, and there’s a feeling that if I’ve missed that or not done it right, that it does affect who we are. It does affect our destiny.

The focus of the High Holiday period is not on death. The focus is on life. It turns out that one of the great ways to focus ourselves on life is to think about death. That just turns out to be the paradox. So if on Yom Kippur we fast, if on Yom Kippur we deny ourselves certain bodily pleasures and engage in a kind of deep introspection on the moral, psychological, and spiritual level, well, it turns out we will become better people. I mean, that’s just what happens, but again there are no guarantees. You can go through everything on Yom Kippur and go through the motions, and on the other hand you can sit in Yom Kippur and never use a prayer book, but just really think about who you are, and it can make a difference in your life.

Part of the ritual on Yom Kippur is by denying yourself these variety of bodily activities, eating, making love, washing, one begins to simulate in a way one’s bodily death, and, you know, by the end of the day on Yom Kippur, that hour before the final shofar blowing at sunset, people, you know, their faces are a little more craggy and their beards a little bit—and they’re running on empty a little bit, and one discovers that there’s a deeper life than simply the physical life. And if we can tap into that life, which I think every religious and spiritual wisdom tradition tries to do, to tap into that deeper dimension of life beyond just the material and physical and body, there is a deeper or new life that emerges, and that final blow of the shofar, and the shofar blow is only dependent on one’s breath; there’s no notes, you know, it’s just the breath of life. Sometimes I call it a kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for us. You know, you hear that sound and there is a rebirth and in that respect confronting one’s own mortality, at least for me confronting my own mortality. My mother passed away between last Yom Kippur and this Yom Kippur, and I know that, for me, that will be central in my mind. One of the major prayers in Yom Kippur is what’s called Yizkor, “to remember,” and the community as a whole remembers people who they loved and who’ve passed away, and you take that twenty minutes in the middle of the day and you remember someone who died and a lot of thoughts go, like, how did I really operate with that person and what do I need to do differently, and with time being so short, how do I want to love, and how do I want to be more compassionate, and how do I want to be there? And so it turns out confrontation with death is one of the great methodologies to make us appreciate life.

The central ritual on Yom Kippur, besides prayer itself, that’s most well known is fasting. Every single tradition has fasting. What fasting does is it says I’m not going to concentrate on my physical body right now. I’m going to concentrate on a different kind of food. Rather than nutrients for my body, I’m going to concentrate on the nutrients for my spirit, my heart, and my ethical way, and that surely does help. We know there’s physical aspects to this, too. If you don’t eat, certain ego structures begin to loosen up and you’re a little bit more open. I mean, it turns out there’s a lot more tears Yom Kippur afternoon when we talk about our lives than there are Yom Kippur morning, because in the end when one doesn’t eat, one’s a little bit less in control of all of the structures we build to defend against difficult truths, to defend against insights and illuminations that are going to cause pain and will force us to think about our lives in different ways. So we fast as a way to become more in tune with our spiritual and our inner life.

The most visible, really the only symbol of Rosh Hashanah, is the ram’s horn, which is blown—100 different sounds or times is it blown. There are three basic sounds to the Rosh Hashanah. One is a longer sound. That sound then is broken up into three, and that sound is broken up into nine, and each sound stimulates a kind of call. One is more plaintive, one is more a little bit frenzied, with more anxiety, and those calls together are to evoke and to wake us up. “Arise from the slumber” is what Maimonides says the shofar sounds are supposed to do, and there’ll be 1000 people or 2000 people in the room, in the synagogue, and it is perfectly silent except for the sound of the shofar that’s piercing through all of the armor, so to speak, the internal armor that we construct to avoid hearing the deepest call of our life, which is to be decent human beings.

On Yom Kippur, there’s no shofar blowing until the very, very last act at sunset. The sun is set, Yom Kippur ends. The ending of Yom Kippur is the reciting of “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” “God is God,” and that’s recited one time, another thing is recited three times, another thing is recited seven, but at the end of Yom Kippur the very final act is the longest blow of the entire High Holiday period, and it’s just one long blow.

Kol Nidre is the first prayer of the Yom Kippur service, which begins at evening and extends to the next night at sunset. Kol Nidre means “all my promises,” and it’s a paragraph in which the congregation comes together and says all the promises, all the obligations, all the bonds that I have made this year, all of them should be dissolved. Now, what that is really about is it’s making a claim that if I’m really going to assess who I am, I have to look at every promise, every obligation, every commitment that I’ve made, because that’s what defines us—our promises, our obligations, our commitments….It’s very frightening to imagine that we have no obligations…Now, once one has that experience, by the end of the Kol Nidre, which lasts about 10-15 minutes, it’s sung three times by the cantor in a very dramatic way, at the end of that all of my promises, all of my obligations are nullified. The rest of Yom Kippur, in a sense, is taking back the obligations, reassessing them….And as Yom Kippur unfolds, one takes back one’s promises in new commitments….So Kol Nidre is a very profound method and technology for stripping us of all promises and obligations that may distort us so that we stand there naked, just us, with the ability to take back promises, take back obligations over the next 25 hours….You’ve got no responsibilities now. You have no promises, no obligations. They’re all null and void. Now, who do you want to be?

KIM LAWTON, anchor: One of President Obama’s early moves when he took office six months ago was to establish an unprecedented new council of religious and secular leaders to advise him on faith-related social policy. Evangelical megachurch pastor Joel Hunter from Florida is part of that council. Hunter is becoming an increasingly influential leader for those he calls “a new kind of conservative.” I visited him at his church near Orlando.

KIM LAWTON: It’s Sunday morning and people are heading to church. One might expect them to be bringing along a Bible; maybe their tithes and offerings. But at Northland Church, just outside Orlando, they’re also bringing obsolete computers and printers, old stereos and other hard-to-recycle items. The evangelical megachurch has made a commitment to the environment — what members here call “creation care.” It’s part of a wide-ranging social agenda championed by Northland senior pastor Joel Hunter. He says that agenda signals a maturing of the evangelical movement.

“We want to equip people for living great lives where they are.”

Reverend JOEL HUNTER (Senior Pastor, Northland Church, Florida): We like to call it “growing up.” I think especially in the political realm we went through a phase more recently when we were known for what we were against rather than what we were for. We were pretty narrow in what we were paying attention to rather than very broad. Now that wasn’t true in Jesus’ time, because Jesus was very broad in what he did.

LAWTON: Like most evangelicals, Hunter opposes abortion and gay marriage. But his agenda also includes the environment and issues of poverty, torture, peace and interfaith dialogue. Hunter does describe himself as a pro-life registered Republican. Yet his views captured the attention of President Barack Obama. Hunter was part of a group of religious leaders who prayed privately with Obama during the campaign, and he’s now a member of Obama’s advisory council on faith-based and neighborhood partnerships.

Hunter believes evangelicals have a spiritual obligation to have a positive influence wherever God places them, even if that may be among Democrats.

Rev. HUNTER: I hope that along the way I could be of encouragement in the president’s spiritual life because that’s what a pastor does, that’s what we care about. But beyond that, I’m very excited about working with a very broad spectrum of people to see how our faith communities can really solve the problems, or help solve the problems, of this country.

LAWTON: Despite his national responsibilities, Hunter makes it clear that his base of operations is Northland. The nondenominational church was started by 11 people in 1972.  Hunter, who was a United Methodist pastor, came here in 1985. Today, about 12,000 people attend the church every week.  Northland calls itself “a Church Distributed.”

Rev. HUNTER: We emphasize what goes on outside the building rather than what goes on inside the building, and we want to equip people for living great lives where they are.

“Only God can move in the spirit to change somebody’s heart or to establish a relationship.”

LAWTON: The Internet helps with that distribution. Thousands of people around the world participate in the worship services through an innovative online Web cast.

Rev. HUNTER: So when we built this building, we built it as a communications device, and the selling point to the congregation was look, you’re not building a building that can just seat 3,000 people at a time. We can seat three million people at a time if we have enough broadband and we have enough people who can gather around a computer screen.

(speaking to audience):  And for those of you who are worshipping with us online . . .

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1:  Let’s hear from a couple of folks who worship with us online.

Rev. HUNTER:  Somebody texted in from the last service . . .

LAWTON: Some people watch individually, others gather in small groups in people’s homes, fast-food restaurants, even a prison. Northland knows of alternative worship sites as far away as Argentina, Egypt and Ukraine. As the church grew, so did Hunter’s vision of having an impact on the wider culture. In July of 2006, he was chosen to be the new president of the Christian Coalition of America, the political advocacy group founded by Pat Robertson. But Hunter withdrew even before he took office when it became clear that coalition members were uncomfortable with his broad issue agenda.

LAWTON: Mark Pinsky is a veteran religion writer in Orlando who has covered Hunter for 14 years.

MARK PINSKY (Religion Writer): Even though he didn’t take that job, eventually he was forced out, he really won, because the issues on which he lost his job were the right issues as far as the coming evangelical movement is concerned.

LAWTON: In many ways, Hunter has become a national voice for evangelicals seeking a new style of leadership.

Mark Pinsky

Rev. HUNTER: There is a whole new generation of young evangelicals that are coming up that really don’t care about any of the labels. I mean, they could care less — Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative — they don’t care. What they care about is can we change the world for the better?

LAWTON: But Hunter still gets push-back from evangelical traditionalists.

Mr. PINSKY: He believes in making coalitions on an issue-by-issue basis, and that puts them together with, sometimes, with people who support abortion rights, for example. But there are people in the evangelical movement both in his congregation and nationally who won’t do that, who won’t sit down at the table with people they don’t agree with on other issues.

LAWTON: Hunter has also made some evangelicals uncomfortable by building coalitions with people from other faiths. He’s part of a project to improve dialogue between Islam and the West, and he advocates building strong personal relationships with people from other religions.

Rev. HUNTER: The better relationship you build, the more free you are to share with people what you really believe, and then you let God take care of the rest. It’s not my job to convert people, you know? Only God can move in the spirit to change somebody’s heart or to establish a relationship.

LAWTON: Hunter raised a lot of eyebrows when he tried to show interfaith respect at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He was chosen to give the closing prayer after Obama’s acceptance speech. When he got to the end, he stopped and gave the crowd some instructions.

Rev. HUNTER (at DNC): On the count of three, I want all of you to end this prayer, your prayer, the way you usually end prayer.

To make somebody or to cow somebody into silence as you pray in Jesus’ name, or to somehow make them seem like they’re praying in Jesus’ name is really a sacrilege, because only Christians can pray in Jesus’ name.

(at DNC): One-two-three:  In Jesus’ name, Amen. Let’s go change the world for good.

LAWTON: He got some strong reactions afterward.

Rev. HUNTER: On the one side, I had a wonderful encouragement especially from non-Christians, you know, and from many Christians who understood what I was doing. I got raked over the coals with a lot of Christians because I didn’t hijack the prayer and pray it only for Christians.

LAWTON: There are those who worry that Hunter’s relationship with Obama, and his position on the advisory council, could hinder the pastor’s ability to speak truth to power.

Rev. HUNTER: The president has made it very clear — and this is another thing I like about him — is he is not looking for “yes” people here. He’s looking for people on this council that will have a prophetic voice, and all of us made the agreement that we would not be on the council unless we could be blunt-honest.

LAWTON: Hunter acknowledges it can be a heady thing to be inside the Oval Office, and he knows power can be seductive. He tries to keep it in perspective.

Rev. HUNTER: The idea here that goes through my mind is that this is not the person that I’m going to be answering to. That’s a way higher thing, and on judgment day when I stand before God, I’m going to have to answer to what I’ve said.

LAWTON: Hunter says his family and his church life keep him grounded. He says he doesn’t seek the limelight. In fact, he really doesn’t like it at all.

Rev. HUNTER: I have no desire for people to really know who I am. I’m an — you wouldn’t believe this — but I’m an introvert. You know, I could spend all day in a library and just be perfectly content as long as my wife was one stack over.

Mr. PINSKY: No one is perfect, and he’s not perfect. He’s a man of some ambition, I think he will admit to that. But he lives his faith, he has a good family life, at least that which we can see. He doesn’t live extravagantly. He’s relatively modest in the way he lives his life, and with him I really believe what you see is what you get.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2 (speaking to Rev. Hunter): I’ve probably trusted God more than I ever have.

Rev. HUNTER: That’s so great.  That is so great.

LAWTON: For Hunter, it all comes down to a simple calculus.

Rev. HUNTER: I think what I do is not so different than anybody else except maybe in different circles, but I just live my life as best I can, and I just pray that I’ll do God some good.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in Orlando.

Joel Hunter

Q: Tell me about Northland Church. Obviously, it’s grown so quickly. It’s so large. What need do you think the church is meeting? What is the niche that is really filled here?

A: This sounds awful, but I think we’re just a generic church. I think we care about people, we love people, we try to help them in their spiritual life, try to help them in their practical relationships. The thing that’s probably a little bit different is that we’re a distributed church in that we emphasize what goes on outside the building rather than what goes on inside the building, and we want to equip people for living great lives where they are. So we’re constantly trying to get the resources to them in their everyday lives rather than making them come to a building. But we are just one of 300,000 churches in the US and we don’t count ourselves any better or worse. We’re bigger and we’ve really never been able to figure out why. I got the statistics just for this month, and there is 1200 more attending this month this year than there were this month last year. Nobody can figure out why. We are not a “church growth” church. We just try to preach the best we can from Scripture, try to help people where they are in their lives and love them and encourage them—people are desperate for encouragement—and try to help the world get better. And whether that is about community service or it’s about shaping social policy, whatever that’s about, we are trying to make this world more like heaven. Jesus taught us to pray that “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” So that’s what we’re trying to do.

Q: You have also used technology, especially online. Why did you choose to use that route to help minister to more people?

A: Most people don’t really want to go into a church building. They have a very personal relationship with God, and they would rather be in a familiar territory when they worship. This goes a lot for the younger generation. My generation is kind of used to church, doing the “church” thing, but a lot of people aren’t. So when we built this building we built it as a communications device, and the selling point to the congregation was you are not building a building that can just seat 3000 people at a time. We can seat three million people at a time if we have enough broadband, and we have enough people who can gather around a computer screen, worship with others, and so we have people worshipping in Starbucks. We’ve had a person, when it came time to take membership vows, and he had to catch a plane, he was in the airport, he stood up in the airport and took his membership vows because he was online with us and he was going through the worship service with us. So we just wanted to not be geographically limited, and we have partners all over the world, and we don’t want to be culturally limited either, so we will worship with them periodically. We worship with our partners in Egypt or Ukraine or other places, and they do the same. There’s just a lot more of the church now that is using technology to build relationships, because people of my generation—it was important to be in a building together. For people who are 30 years old, that screen is intimacy to them. I mean, that’s a window to them, and there’s nothing artificial to them about that, and so we just wanted to connect with as many people as we could.

Q: Does that change the nature of what happens on Sunday morning, what happens inside the worship service?

A: It does. We are very aware of the congregation that is not in this building. We have several different congregations in buildings around central Florida. We have probably 1200 or 1500 sites around the nation and the world at any given time worshipping with us in the worship service. So when we take Communion we say at the beginning, “Get your Communion elements because we will be taking Communion together.” When we ask for people to contribute, for example, their favorite Scripture on hope, we will have some people in the main headquarters sanctuary, so to speak, but we will have somebody from Germany: “This just in from Christina in Germany, this in from Suzie in South Dakota., this is from…,” and so all of them can participate whether or not they are onsite.

Q: Shifting beyond here and looking at the evangelical world a little more broadly, I’ve heard some people suggest that perhaps evangelicalism is in a bit of identity crisis right now, trying to figure out who they are, where they are going. Do you agree with that characterization?

A: Well, we like to call it growing up. I think there is an ever-maturing identity for evangelicals. I think especially in the political realm we went through a phase more recently when we were known for what we were against rather than what we were for. We were pretty narrow in what we were paying attention to rather than very broad. Now that wasn’t true in Jesus’ time, because Jesus was very broad in what he did, very positive, very loving. And so I think the church in different cultures goes through different phases according to what is happening in that culture. But I do think that evangelicalism is changing, and you will always have people who are just kind of staunch and, you know, mad: “I want to talk about these, and anybody who doesn’t agree with me probably isn’t really, you know, on the mark.” But I think much more of evangelicalism now, especially when you talk about the next generation, really isn’t so bound up with some of the more institutional concerns. They really are saying, “Church? Fine. All the traditional things? Great. But just tell me how I can help. Tell me what I can do to be more like Jesus in world, to love people like he loved them, to serve people like he served them. It’s much more important to me than knowing theological intricacies to be practically of use and of good.” And so I think you’re seeing a maturing of the movement right now.

Q: I want to talk about politics in a minute, but what are the spiritual implications or challenges that go along with that kind of a shift?

A: The spiritual challenge here is that you have to know Scripture well enough to go back to the source and to be able to focus on God instead of an institutional church. Not in lieu of, you know, the institutional church is still valuable. It’s a place of belonging, it’s a place of help, it’s a place of teaching, but having said all that, if your emphasis is following God in your everyday life for the people who are right in front of you, then you’re going to have to have the kind of relationship with God, a personal relationship with God, that doesn’t require a church program in order for you to act. And so along with this maturing of evangelical Christianity, there has to be a more practical kind of education religiously. In other words, it can’t be just “I’ve got to memorize the Apostle’s Creed.” It is, “I’ve got to know in this situation what would Jesus do and I’ve got to take responsibility for doing it.” And so that’s kind of where things are going right now.

Q: Some people are suggesting there is a leadership void compared to previous generations. Do you see that?

A: It’s always tricky when you talk about Protestantism, because we don’t have a pope, you know? And with some of the passing of the old lions—you know, the Billy Graham, Bill Bright, and some these old folks that everybody kind of looked to because they were world-famous leaders—you do have another generation. And, again, with these past few decades people looked at some of the more public faces, the more mobilizing voices, the [Rev. D. James] Kennedys and the Falwells and all of the rest of the folks that really got a lot of media time. What you’re seeing is a very solid group of evangelical leaders developing and kind of a new constituency growing up with a broader agenda. You will never see just one person leading the way, because evangelicals don’t do that. We are much more collaborative in our leadership, much more appreciative of the differences, and we operate well in ambivalence. But what you will see is a new generation of leaders, some of them my age, some of the younger, because they’re gifted, they have great visions, they mobilize great organizations. So that’s what you’re going to see in the years to come.

Q: What are your hopes for Obama’s faith advisory council that you’re a part of?

A: The hopes are very new, because this has just started, just started, so I’m not sure of all of their hopes for this advisory council. I know we have been given four priorities, but there is a larger development here. First of all, I have great respect for the president, and I respect his personal belief in God and his desire to want to do the right thing as far as God is concerned, and I so respect his observation and respect for the largely religious character of this nation and his acknowledgment that you can’t separate that religious character from political life, and so why not try to incorporate it in its breadth, in a broad spectrum, and use the mobilization possibilities to really get people of faith to serve and improve the nation? So I love that. That’s what I would hope for this particular advisory council—that we could work on a broad policy agenda that would mobilize people to actualize their faith. Now as a pastor, see, I always want to be of spiritual encouragement to someone, so I hope that along the way I could be of encouragement to the president’s spiritual life, because that’s what a pastor does. That’s what we care about. But beyond that I’m very excited about working with a very broad spectrum of people to see how our faith communities can really solve the problems, or help solve the problems of this country. The problems of this country and of the world are way too big for a government to solve, and way too big for faith communities to solve. We have to partner together, and if we can do it in ways that don’t blur the lines between the institutions of religion and government, and that’s very important, the institutions, I say, you know, not the individuals, because those lines are already blurred, but we’ve got to watch the boundaries of church and state. Those are very important. But there is so much that can be done. I mean, 99 percent of the stuff that we do can be done without even going near the boundaries of church and state, because they can be personal, they can be community-based, they can be faith-based individually, and for us to feel like we’re a part of solving the countries problems when we are in such deep weeds right now as a country, I mean economically, there’s so many people hurting economically, there’s so many people who are confused about the kind of lifestyle questions and the kind of cultural wars going on. If we can be called into service, then we cannot only help the country, we can help the church mature. This isn’t just about helping the country. The church needs to mature itself. Sometimes I think people think the church can save the country, when really some types of political responsibility can help save the church from just dabbling in religious intricacies.

Q: Is there a danger, though, that being in an official capacity, even though I understand it’s not government employment, could in some way blunt or make one reluctant to perhaps be prophetic or to, as people say, speak truth to power? I’ve had a conversation with someone who says no pastor or priest should be a part of something like that because then he or she can’t really speak the truth to these people.

A: Well, I agree that no coward should ever be part of something like this, but the president has made it very clear—and this is another thing I like about him—he is not looking for “yes” people here. He’s looking for people on this council that will have a prophetic voice, and all of us made the agreement that we would not be on the council unless we could be blunt-honest about the dangers we saw, about what was not going right, and what we had real problems with, and probably what we couldn’t participate in. And so there’s not only a permission to be prophetic, there’s a desire to hear that voice, because when that voice gets raised it’s not just your voice; it’s the constituency you come from, and any political leader, if he’s honest, and if he wants what he’s going to do to last, is going to have to hear what constituencies have to say, not just what people in his office will say in order to get into his good graces. So that is a danger, absolutely. But we’ve addressed that, and we will continue to address that.

Q: I interviewed some years ago a clergy member who was close to the Clintons. During a difficult time he was brought in as a spiritual advisor, and he was candid about sitting in the Oval Office and having the leader of the free world talk to him, and it’s pretty heady stuff, and I’m wondering if you’re at all concerned about being pulled into that in a way that might change you in some way or have an effect on you.

A: Yeah, you’re always concerned about that. I mean, if you are human and you realize the position of power that this person has, then you are aware that this is an honor, this is a privilege, I mean, to be in the Oval Office, to walk in there and to look at that desk where the presidents have just signed these tremendous bills and have changed—and all the people that have been in that Oval Office. There’s a sense of history, and I was a history and government major, and so there’s a real sense of privilege. However, you say all that, you can say all that, and you’ve got to realize what happens with me personally, I just don’t take myself that seriously. I mean, I don’t feel like I’m somebody that’s got that much power, or there’s nothing else I want to get to, you know, I’m going to be a pastor for the rest of my life. There’s nothing I have to lose. Here’s a guy that’s going to be there eight years at the longest, you know? And so the idea here that goes through my mind is this is not the person that I’m going to be answering to. That’s a way higher thing, and on Judgment Day when I stand before God I’m going to have to answer to what I’ve said. If I didn’t do things according to how I read them in Scripture, if I didn’t voice the truth in love as I saw it in Scripture, then I’m in judgment, I’m in trouble on Judgment Day for my works, not for my sins those have been paid for by Christ, but for my works, so that’s the accountability that I have, and for those of us that—you know, most of the people in that room have been in positions of authority for a long time. That’s why we’re in that room, and so we’re not quite as intimidated as—I mean, we’re used to talking with people in authority, we’re used to having phone conversations where you get off the phone and you go, how did I get to be in this place that I just had that conversation? So it’s not quite as intimidating as it might be, as it might seem, but yet you’ve got to watch yourself, and I have to keep saying, “Lord, this is for you. I’m here to do your work. I’m here to be a voice for the gospel as well as I can,” and if that gets me off the council in a record time, then I’m off the council in a record time.

Q: How do you stay spiritually grounded to have that kind of strength or fortitude?

A: Well, first of all it’s important for me every day to spend a good deal of time in Scripture and in prayer. That’s kind of like the, you know, I do the—physically I work out every day, you know, so I can stay healthy. Spiritually that keeps me healthy; it keeps me oriented in the right direction. Secondly, I’m surrounded by people who tell me the truth. My wife tells me the truth, but my wife is my biggest fan. She doesn’t tell me the truth to take me down a peg or two. She just thinks I hung the moon. I have no idea why she thinks that. She’s fooled herself all of these years, and I’m not telling her anything different. But the point is that I don’t have to seek approval of other people. I’ve got a wonderful family, my wife and my kids and our grandkids, so it’s not that I’m looking for something else, and when you are satisfied with the love that you have, when you realize that you walk in the grace of God, when you realize that your family is just as crazy about you and you’re crazy about your family, then it’s fairly simple not to take yourself so seriously and have to be a world-changer and get all distracted with all of these grandiose ideals and ideas. You can just get up every day and do what’s right with what’s right in front of you, help out whoever you can, and go to bed every night and sleep like a baby, and so that’s just—I think I’ve got a life like anybody else. I think what I do is not so different than anybody else, except maybe in different circles, but I just live my life as best I can, and I just pray that I’ll do God some good.

Q: You’ve been active in some interfaith circles. I know you’ve worked on Islamic-US issues and other interfaith things. How do you relate across religious lines, offering respect to people you differ with theologically without in some way compromising your own faith or what you believe to be truth? How do you walk that line? A lot of people have a hard time figuring out how to do that.

A: First of all, it’s fairly simple to maintain respect and even admiration when you get to know people. I love these guys, I really do. I mean these other faith leaders, as I listen to them I’m much more fascinated in listening to their stories and their perspectives. I need their perspectives to get a fuller picture of who God is as a Christian, I mean, because it’s not like God is absent or God has somehow avoided Muslims or Jews or all the rest of these folks. They have a faith that I think appreciates a side of God that I could find in Christianity, but I see it more readily when I’m with them. So in a way they are a spiritual mentor to me. Having said that, though, Christianity is a faith of relationships, of a personal relationship with God made possible through Jesus Christ and his sacrifice, so therefore, as I have these relationships with other faith leaders, as they get closer, we are very free in talking about what we believe and about—I am more free many times in talking in about what Christ has done for me and about what price he paid on the cross for all people with another religious leader who wants to hear what I want to say. He doesn’t want me to tip-toe around it; he wants me to be honest. I’m sometimes more free with a person like that than I am with a person in an elevator where he may have been a Christian a long time ago, and my eye starts twitching when I start talking about it. So the point here is that the better relationship you build, the more free you are to share with people what you really believe, and then you let God take care of the rest. It’s not my job to convert people, you know? Only God can move in the spirit to change somebody’s heart and establish a relationship. I can’t do that, so I don’t have to worry about it. I just love them and serve them as best I can, and we swap stories, and I leave the rest to God.

Q: How serious do you think the issues of these interfaith relations are in our world today?

A: I think they are absolutely critical for the future. I cannot picture a long-lasting peace without religious leaders having actual relationship together and caring about one another, because if all you have are these tender and vulnerable treaties, you know, these diplomatic papers, and you still have a bunch of people at these grass roots or a bunch of religious leaders that not only distrust people who are different but that are angry at people who are different, then that peace isn’t going to last very long at all, and we’ll never be able to cooperate in solving some of the larger problems of the world. However, if faith leaders and ultimately people of different faiths can serve together, can get to know each other on a personal basis, can appreciate each other as a person and as a person of faith, I’m telling you, that will move the ball down the field when it comes to world peace. So I just don’t see long-lasting peace in any section of the world happening without faith-based community relationships, interfaith relationships.

Q: What have you learned from your relationships, especially with Muslims, which has been a particularly tense one in our country?

A: Yeah, it has, and I have such a deep appreciation for my relationships with Muslim leaders. First of all, they are very honest about what they think and about—Christians by and large are scared to death of Muslims. But Muslims have at least been trained as to respect Jesus. They believe Jesus was a prophet. They believe in the virgin birth. They believe in many of the issues, and so for many Muslims it’s good to talk with a Christian. What are we scared about here? In this culture, we have been so slanted by the association of Islam with terrorism that we’re very reluctant to have that conversation. So every conversation I get in, it’s really one of respect. Muslims have a tremendous reverence for God, tremendous reverence for God, and I love that, and they have—they really want to know what you think, and how we can work together, and what are we afraid of here? So I have built several very close relationships in the Muslim world, a very close relationship with an imam here in town. He’s one of my very good friends. We do a lot together. I love him, and I love his family. The same ob-gyn delivers his babies that deliver my grandbabies. We’ve just got this relationship. So basically what I’ve learned is we’re trying to love God as best we can, and we’re trying to work together to love other people.

Q: We have footage of a recycling event your church has done, and I know this has been an issue for you quite some time—creation care. I am wondering if you are seeing with the evangelical world a greater embrace of this issue. For a long time there just seemed to be a real reluctance to get involved. Are you seeing that change, and have you felt that impact?

A: There is a change. Again, this may have to be a generational change, but we’re talking more and more with leaders. We just hosted an event last week of evangelical leaders here addressing just exactly that challenge. There’s two problems here. First of all, people are generally ignorant about the science. All they hear are the sound bites on the radio and the sound bites on the television, and they have been linking this issue with a political agenda rather than an actual consensus of science, and so many evangelical Christians are reluctant to see this as a consensus, so there’s a lot of teaching that needs to be done. The second problem is people really don’t address a problem until it’s an emergency, and so they’ll look out the window and say, “Man, it really looks cold out there. Must not be global warming, you know?” And they’ll read this stuff that says coldest January on record and say pshaw, and so instead of understanding this is not about global warming, it’s about global weirding, about the nonlinear effects of climate change, and there are very many new nuances of climate change and understanding the interaction of a very complex system, but yet the ultimate and undeniable effect that this is going to have on the poor—they just kind of brush it off, so we have our work laid out for us. But I do believe that, again, this administration is going to be helpful because they take the problem seriously, and maybe as more and more leaders acknowledge the problem the general population will, too, but in the evangelical world we’re still having a push back.

Q: Our show did a survey which found that larger numbers of younger evangelicals do see things like the environment and poverty as pro-life issues.

A: Exactly. Again, this goes along with expanding the issue, not in lieu of, not denying the others. Pro-life is very important and will always remain in the foreseeable future a central issue for me and other evangelical leaders. But to expand the pro-life movement to the life outside the womb, to understand that 5,000 children under five die every day from poverty-related causes, directly related to poverty, that’s a pro-life issue; to understand that AIDS is a pro-life issue; to understand that climate change, to understand that even in some instances our issues with immigration, all these other issues, certainly peace, world peace—pro-life issues. These should be just as important to us, those lives should be just as important to us as the baby in the womb, and so we just have to expand that picture.

Q: I want to ask you about your prayer at the Democratic Convention. The issue is always whether or not to pray in Jesus’ name, and you chose to work around that. What kind of reaction did you get?

A: Oh, on the one side I had a wonderful encouragement, especially from non-Christians and from many Christians who understood what I was doing. I got raked over the coals with a lot of Christians because I didn’t hijack the prayer and only pray it for Christians. But as I explained, several things: first of all, we did get, the Christians got to say “in Jesus’ name,” so we didn’t deny anybody that, and if you were there the stadium was booming with that. By the same token, to make somebody or to cow somebody to silence as you pray in Jesus’ name, or to somehow make them seem like they’re praying in Jesus’ name, is really a sacrilege because only Christians can pray in Jesus’ name. It’s in the power of Jesus, so it’s the wrong way to use that ending. If you’re serious about it you can’t use it asking people who don’t believe it to say it. Ultimately, the greatest thing about this was that not only was it a prayer appropriate for a public venue where people had different faith traditions, but my wife sat beside a lady on a plane on the way back, and she said, “Your husband was the one who said that prayer?” and she said “Yeah.” She said, “I was so shocked that an evangelical would respect those of us, I’m an atheist, but I was so shocked that an evangelical would actually respect me enough not to make me go there and not hijack that prayer.” And Becky said, because she’s just really interested in people, “Tell me about what you believe, tell me why you’re an atheist.” Well, they talked for the whole plane ride, and by the time the plane landed the lady goes, “I live 30 minutes from your church. Give me your address, and I’m going to show up just to check it out.” Well, I mean, just the—this isn’t about who gets converted, this is about someone feeling respected enough that they would give a window in their life, as it was very apparent from the beginning of that conversation that she wanted nothing to do with the evangelicals, but because I had respected her then there’s some openness to say, well, maybe we can have a relationship. That was wonderful.

Q: As you’ve done interviews and gotten more attention, people around the country are getting to know you. I’m wondering what you feel people don’t know about you that you wish they did, as they’re making judgments and assumptions?

A: You know, I don’t—I have no desire for people to really know who I am. I’m an—you wouldn’t believe this, but I’m an introvert. I could spend all day in a library and just be perfectly content, as long as my wife was one stack over. These things really stretch me, you know. I feel like I’m put here for a reason, but I’m not a very self-revealing person. I just do what I can, and there’s really not much there to know, honestly. I’m just real simple. I get up every day and I eat and I study and I talk to people and I try to help where I can, so there’s not much to find out.

Professor Michael Emerson

Q: Fewer than ten percent of churches in America are integrated.

A: Yeah, that comes from our research here, actually.

Q: The number is that low?

A: Yeah, seven percent. That’s what it is.

Q: Were you surprised at that?

A: Yes. Well, yes and no. But yeah, that’s pretty low.

Q: Why? What are the reasons for its being so low?

A: There are three things, and it depends on the group that we’re talking about, but there’s history, there’s culture, and then there’s social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches.

Q: They worshipped together before the Civil War?

A: Absolutely. In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: “You’re going to worship with us.” Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they’d even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together. So we didn’t get the denominations and the separate congregations really till about into Civil War time. What’s happened then, of course, is now that we’ve had well over 100 years of this history to establish separate cultures, different ways of worshipping, and different ways of understanding theology so that when people try to come together makes it very difficult. And then, of course, social networks, you know, how do we find a place to worship? We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you’re immigrants, you’re not part of that history. So it’s a little bit different experience. So it may be a language that separates you — again, social networks. But second-generation Asian and Hispanics, second, and third and fourth and so on, they are much more likely to be in integrated churches than are blacks or whites.

Q: Are churches a reflection of our society? We live in different neighborhoods. We work in different jobs.

A: They are. But what we found in the study is that churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in. So there’s something more going on than just reflecting the neighborhood, yeah.

Q: What is going on? Is it cultural — that it is difficult to accept an outsider? Is a black church accepting whites, or the other way around?

A: I’ve been in both settings and observed, and I think when non-blacks visit a black church they will feel, they always talk about feeling so welcomed and warmly greeted but being surprised or shocked or whatever by the length of the service, by the different worship style. If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn’t feel that warmly received. But so — and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.

Q: Generally white services are more calm and by the book and a lot more emotion in black services. Is that difficult for whites when they go into a black church?

A: Right, right. Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn’t happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they’re quite a bit different.

Q: The congregation saying “Amen”?

A: Call-and-response style, yes, exactly. So whenever different groups get together then there has to be this long period of negotiation. How will we worship? What’s acceptable? What’s not? If I want to say “Amen” can I? It’s one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say “Amen,” maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be.

Q: What is most likely, a black church that’s integrated with whites or vice versa?

A: We rarely see that. Almost never.

Q: Why is that?

A: Because I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, “People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?” I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, “I’m going to do that.” Now there are whites in African-American churches. They’re interracially married. They’re highly committed. Maybe there’s a professor or two, or a student. Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it’s a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they’re overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.

Q: If the pastor is black, are whites going to be less likely to go to that church because the pastor is black and in charge?

A: Yup. It’s the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.

Q: But a white church doesn’t feel very welcoming to African Americans, right?

A: That’s right, that’s right. So you can see what is the difficulty. I mean, how do you make these things happen? We’ve done a lot of studies to see when they do happen, why, and I mean there’s a variety of reasons. But one, it starts with a commitment where they decide this is going to be who we are. Maybe it’s out of their faith, a new way of looking at their faith, that we must be integrated across race. So they actually put it into their mission statement, and they start changing things as a result. They may change how worship works. They may actively recruit folks and try and get them to come and help them to feel comfortable and get them involved in leadership, and there’s a variety of ways.

Q: Are they glad they did it? Does the church end up being richer for it?

A: I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, it’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you’re trying to go across cultures, and you don’t understand, you didn’t mean to offend somebody but you’ve offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something. They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.

Q: Would our society be a better society if we had more integrated churches?

A: I certainly think so, and I argue so, and I give talks on that. Are there risks by putting people together? Absolutely. Is there value in the black church? Absolutely. Is there value in having immigrant churches? Absolutely. But if we don’t have congregations gathering with people of different races, what we’re doing is we are redefining racial division, a racial inequality. I spent a lot of time developing in books why worshipping separately actually impacts inequality, economic, social, on and on. So I really do believe there are huge advantages to being together even though it’s difficult, even though we have a lot to learn.

Q: Is this integration happening more in one part of the country than in another part?

A: It happens a little bit more in the West, where there’s more fluid — where everybody’s originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it’s a bigger social cost. One of the things we find when we talk to people that attend these congregations, they all have social cost to it. People want to know why they’re doing that. Sometimes they’re questions about selling out on their race or “Are we not good enough that you have to go to this kind of congregation and not ours?” So there are costs to it, and I think they’re a little bit higher in the South because of its history.

Q: I guess a pastor really sometimes has to walk a tightrope as well as really be an amazing politician, too.

A: Absolutely. Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they’re African American they’ll say, “I’m not black enough for African Americans. I’m not white enough for the whites. I’m not Hispanic enough.” There’s always that sense of because we’re so racially defined, if you’re trying to cross the boundaries you don’t fit into any particular space. We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There’s something different. They are somebody who — they don’t exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other. So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

Q: There is an impression that in many ways church has meant more to the black community over the years than any other particular section of America.

A: Absolutely. It may be changing, but still it’s the one place, that total control of an institution, that African Americans have. So sometimes, you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.” It’s also, of course, as we know, the seat of political organization and the affirming of your blackness and so on.

Q: And hearing liberation theology. Is that fairly common, as in Jeremiah Wright’s church?

A: Yeah, there are variations of it. He says that very strongly, and you’ll find congregations that do that and others that would not say it as strongly. But it is a very common strain. Yeah, absolutely.

Q: Do African Americans worry that if whites come to my church, they’re going to take over?

A: Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate then. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power. So they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Q: I imagine there are phrases in the Bible they have to be very careful how they use.

A: Absolutely. There’s a lot of terminology, like “washes whiter than snow,” and these things which when they’re said in a uniracial congregation, they just go fine. But when they’re said in a mixed congregation, some people will get offended and wonder, “Why are you saying that? What are you saying?” And sometimes the clergy are blindsided by that. Other times they realize that ahead of time and say they’re not going to use those terms. So it gets complicated for sure.

Q: Is there a trend? Even though it may be slow, are we seeing more integrated churches?

A: We’re going to see more, and we are seeing more, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Not because white and black are more likely to get together. Only a third of the seven percent of congregations that are interracial are black and white. What’s happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures. We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it’s] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture. If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I’ll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I’m in somebody else’s homeland. So I’m going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean. But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, “I have the right to hold onto my culture,” and that’s what makes it difficult.

Q: If you have a white church and Asians move in and Hispanics move in, is it less of a problem than if African Americans –

A: Yeah, I think it’s still a problem, but I think it’s easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that’s why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.

Q: But if you have a white church, and you have a mix of Asians and Hispanics, it makes it easier for African Americans to come?

A: Yes and no, because what happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they’re mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it’s still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.

Q: Music is very, very important in a black church.

A: Absolutely, although every congregation will say, you know, every worship leader will say it’s vital. It’s very important, but again these are, you know, these are different cultural styles. So the tradition from Europe is that you’re supposed to emphasize the mind over the body, so you sing from a very kind of staid perspective. Again, there are charismatic white congregations all over, and they don’t sing that way. But, you know, on the average.

Q: I was recently in South Philly in a neighborhood that has a lot of violence. If the churches there were more integrated, do you think that would work more toward healing the wounds that are there?

A: It would because, you know, think about it. I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you’re an integrated congregation? It doesn’t happen. But I see it happen in uniracial congregations all the time. But people — when they’re in mixed company, we speak differently. So one of the profound things we found when studying these congregations, the mixed ones, is just how much overlap and interracial ties that develop not only with the people in the congregation, but they start meeting each other’s families, and their friends, and they go to each other’s neighborhoods if they live in different neighborhoods, and at work they meet people they wouldn’t otherwise met, and so it creates a whole new definition of what the group is. So I think it’s a lot harder then to have racial violence against each other.

Q: Are you familiar with the City of Refuge Church and Reverend Rufus Smith?

A: I think they’re doing an amazing thing in that they have all groups. But they have large segments of white and black, and so I think it’s the most difficult of these kinds of congregations to have, and it takes a very deft leader, and him being African American, I mean I’m sure it’ll be interesting when you talk with him. He’ll have to be very knowledgeable of white culture, black culture, and walk these fine lines.

Q: His is more multiracial than, say, Pastor Woo’s –

A: Oh, Pastor [Rodney] Woo would be more multiracial and more groups, right. I think they have people from 40-some different countries. International church is what I would call it. They’re immigrants from all over the world, be they black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern.

Q: I assume that Pastor Woo’s church is the way it is either because the congregation wanted it, or because he wanted it. How did it end up being that way?

A: It was an all-white church. It was starting to decline. They had to hire a new pastor, and they hired him. But he came under the condition that “I want and I’m called to make this a multiethnic church.” So they knew. He’s interesting because he’s part-Asian, part-white. He’s married to a Hispanic woman, so that’s their family and that’s their vision.

Q: What’s it feel like in one of his services? I’m sure you’ve been there.

A: I think it’s pretty dynamic. There’s a lot of energy there and life, and you’ll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they’re listening in Spanish.

Q: So it’s a rich cultural experience.

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: And Pastor Rufus Smith and the City of Refuge. Tell me a little bit about that.

A: Same thing. There’s a lot of life there, but it’s a different sort, because there’s a lot less immigrants and a lot more racial, the mix of black and white in particular. I’ve actually never been to their worship for an extended period of time, so I can’t comment wisely on it. I can say that I’ve talked to people in both congregations, and there are both positives and negatives. I mean, so if I’ve talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they’ll wonder, “Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?” And what’s happening is they’re falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It’s not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That’s certainly common in mixed churches.

Q: So there are downsides, but the downsides are outweighed by the upsides?

A: Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start — they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just — a lot of times they’ll say, “I couldn’t live without it. I just have to be there.”

Q: You see it manifest in any other ways, for instance, in the neighborhood? Do they socialize together if they go to church together?

A: They do, and that’s what really surprised us, because it was such strong effects. They’re more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods after they start being in these kinds of congregations. They are much more likely to say that their two very best friends are of a different race, that their circle of friends, their friends in the church, but also in their whole social network, absolutely. We’ve had people say, “Now when I go to work, I don’t feel uncomfortable talking to people of different races, and I go up and introduce myself, and I start making a new friend I wouldn’t have done otherwise.” And again, this connection that you get: I meet Joe at church. Joe’s connected to a whole network of people I don’t know. Joe likes me. He invites me over to his son’s birthday party, and I meet his whole family. I meet his friends. I get to know his neighborhood. That happens all the time.

Q: Will the election of Barack Obama have an impact on interracial churches? Will we see more of them?

A: Oh, yeah. I think with President Obama there’s going to be a discussion, because he himself is multiracial, because we have for the first time a non-white president. There’s going to be talk about what does this mean? What is it? Are we in a new era? And I think it’s going to open up a wider place for a discussion about we ought to come together in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our clubs and our networks. I think it’ll be more acceptable to talk about it. We’ll see what happens. It’ll take some time. But I think it will.

Q: But generally you think it will be positive.

A: Yes.

Q: Can you talk a little bit more about why it is difficult to integrate churches?

A: What sort of difficulties would happen when people of different cultures try to come together to worship? Tiny little things such as let’s tell jokes with each other. Humor is so culturally based that when I try to tell a joke as me being a white American, if I tell other white Americans, they’ll laugh. If I tell an African American, they might not laugh. In fact, they either might not find it funny, or they might find it offensive, and I didn’t mean it to be offensive. So these are the sort of little things that build up over time, just like in a marriage. You know, the little things can build up over time. Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don’t. So I ask the clergy why don’t I see myself represented in leadership? And I’m told, and this happens quite a bit, “We don’t think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job.” So then I have to conclude, oh, the best people are all somebody other than my own race. So that’s difficult. How do we interpret the Bible? Should we stress things like justice and that God is somebody who cares about equality of all people? Or is he a God of love and a God who’s there to give me an afterlife? And different traditions stress different — so then there’s that. I talked to an African American who says before she goes into an interracial church, she sits in her car and she listens to gospel music to get her fill, and she goes into an interracial church where they don’t do gospel music, and she’s ready to accept the other sorts of ways of worshipping. So there’s that. There’s always the question of time. Does time at 10:00 mean 10:00 sharp? Or does it mean give or take a few minutes? And a few minutes, is that plus or minus two minutes? Or plus or minus ten, or maybe a half an hour each way? So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we’re going to work through these.

Q: Are you looking at Protestant churches, Catholic churches?

A: Protestant, Catholic, even Muslim. We studied a mosque, and this is when we were at Notre Dame, and in this mosque they had people from a variety of countries, most of them immigrants. In some of the countries, when you go into a mosque you remove your shoes. To not do so could be punishable even by death in that nation. In other countries, it would be a great offense to remove their shoes when they come into the mosque, a sign of disrespect. So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn’t remove your shoes and someone’s taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship. And then they would have the shoe removers on one side, and the non-shoe removers on the other side until they could work through coming to understand why we might both be trying to worship authentically, and because of our cultural background we have these different ideas. But it took a while.

Q: Any particular denominations that you’ve seen the most progress?

A: You find the most in not any particular denomination specifically. It’s the style of worship. So if we have what we call a charismatic worship style, that means upbeat music and a more lively style of preaching usually, people are allowed to clap, say “Amen,” whether they’re mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, and Catholics, whatever, they’re much more likely to be integrated. There’s one denomination in particular, though, that has pushed very hard to be multiracial in its denomination — not only its denomination but, I mean, in its congregations, and it’s called the Evangelical Covenant Church, http://www.covchurch.org/ which is headquartered in Chicago. Their whole goal is that’s the kind of churches they start, multiracial, and I think they say now 20 percent of their churches are that.

Q: Is there particular Christian scripture that points to interracial acceptance?

A: Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we’ve broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That’s when they were called Christians. So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they’re stressing. They’re talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together. But you know, interestingly enough, those things were not talked about much at all for a few hundred years at least.

Q: But it’s there. It’s a fundamental part of Christianity that you should welcome people of all races.

A: That’s right.

TIM O’BRIEN, anchor: Music and religion have some deep and common roots, and some of the world’s greatest musicians have taken their inspiration from a higher power.  Jazz musicians, too, like the legendary Dave Brubeck—still performing at age 88. Our reporter Bob Faw takes a look at Brubeck the man, some of his music, and the faith that makes it all happen.

BOB FAW: For nearly six decades, Dave Brubeck has been dazzling listeners worldwide. With his unique, inventive style, he has become a jazz immortal. What is less known, and just as remarkable, is that for much of that time, Brubeck has also composed religious music like “The Commandments,” which he recorded for the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music. In his religious scores, Brubeck achieves what he cannot achieve in jazz.

DAVE BRUBECK: When I write a piece, a sacred piece, I’m looking hard and trying to discover what I’m about, and what my parents were about and the world is about.

FAW: You think religious music can change people?

BRUBECK: Yeah, sure!

FAW: Brubeck says his service in World War II convinced him “something should be done musically to strengthen man’s knowledge of God.” In his choral work “Gates of Justice,” also recorded for the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, he pleads for brotherhood and invokes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Soloists singing from “Gates of Justice”: ”If we don’t live together as brothers, we will die.”

FAW: In “The Commandments,” Brubeck’s message is strictly biblical.

Chorus singing from “The Commandments”: “Keep my commandments.”

FAW: His masterwork, performed here by the Russian National Chorus, in Moscow:

Chorus singing: ”Alleluia, alleluia”

FAW: Brubeck’s classic is a Mass which Brubeck wrote at the request of a Catholic organization and entitled “To Hope: A Celebration.”

BRUBECK: The priest said, “Dave, I want people to be happy. I’m tired of people coming up for Communion with sad looks on their faces when it should be the happiest day of their week. So will you make it rhythmic and kind of feeling of something to make people move up the aisle, maybe swinging a little.”

FAW: Which explains why, in the midst of something reverential, Brubeck’s quartet launches into toe-tapping, rollicking jazz. For Dave Brubeck, jazz not only embraces, it also enhances religion.

FAW (to Dave Brubeck): How does the jazz magnify the religious message?

BRUBECK: Well, it would go back to the spirituals and the gospel singing that is so wonderful, so rhythmic and so great in certain churches, and you reach that audience if you have that gospel feeling.

FAW: Sometimes, says Brubeck, the music shapes the text. Sometimes, he says, it’s just the opposite.

Iola and Dave Brubeck

FAW: I heard you at one point say “my basic approach is to sing the text until something seems right.”

BRUBECK: Yeah, that’s it: “All my hope, all my hope is in you, oh Lord, you are my rock and my strength.”

FAW: As for those lyrics, it turns out that’s the realm of Dave Brubeck’s wife.

BRUBECK: My wife was driving, and I said, “I’ve finished this.” And she said, “No, you haven’t finished it.” And I said, “Well, what did I leave out?” And she said, “God’s love made visible. He is invincible.”

“God’s love made visible.” So that’s the way it finished.

FAW: Iola Brubeck, his wife of nearly 63 years (he calls her “the brains of the outfit”), chooses the texts for most of his religious scores.

IOLA BRUBECK: After I catch on to what he’s after, then I start reading and thinking about, well, what could apply? He thinks very musically. I tend to think more in forms of the narrative.

FAW: Have you ever had occasion to say, “Ah, dear, this isn’t quite working. We ought to go another direction”? Would you ever say that to the great Dave Brubeck?

IOLA BRUBECK: I don’t think I’ve ever said we should go in another direction. I think I have been bold enough to say, you know, I just don’t think this is quite saying what you want to say.

FAW: Sometimes, though, even a wifely intervention isn’t enough. Listen to Brubeck’s haunting “Our Father” in “To Hope”:

Soloist: Deliver us from evil.”

FAW: All this, says Brubeck, was composed in a dream.

Soloist: ”In your mercy , keep us free.“

BRUBECK: But I did dream it that night, and it turned out pretty good.

FAW: Do you dream in harmony? Do you dream an instrument, or do you dream a melody? What’s the dream?

BRUBECK: Melody, orchestration. It’s a pretty complete thing.

FAW: And is it true that after you had the dream and after you wrote it down you then decided to become a Catholic?

BRUBECK: Yeah, I figured somebody’s trying to tell me something, and go with the flow.

FAW: Whatever the source, whatever the musical framework, this living legend always tries, he says, to convey the same message: love your enemies.

BRUBECK: You go by all kinds of churches, and they don’t seem to know what Christ was trying to tell us.

FAW: You think it’s a very simple message, what he was trying to tell us?

BRUBECK: No, it’s profound. Probably the most profound thing in the Bible is ”love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” This is what, to me, is the essence of Christianity.

FAW: And the essence of the 88-year-old Brubeck, though slowed recently by illness, is that he is still improvising, still composing.

BRUBECK: I didn’t play it that way when you asked me because my hands don’t work.

FAW: Yeah, but your mind still does.

BRUBECK: Yeah.

FAW: Because what Dave Brubeck has learned is that while jazz can energize, even thrill, his religious music can transform.

FAW: You have found music to be a vehicle to communicate God’s command to love one another more deeply. That’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it?

BRUBECK. Yeah.

FAW: You do that through your music.

BRUBECK: Right.

FAW: Through it all his wife says Brubeck has grown, musically and spiritually. In part, he says, because when the composition does succeed, there is nothing quite like it.

BRUBECK: You have a certain idea of what you wrote should sound like. And sometimes it doesn’t sound that good, and sometimes if you’ve got a great orchestra and great conductor, it sounds better than you ever thought it could sound. And that’s when you want to jump and holler and say, “Yeah, man!”

FAW: Dave Brubeck, taking jazz back to its roots, to church. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Washington, DC.

Reverend BILL GAVENTA (Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities): In every faith community there is a scriptural basis for welcome and hospitality. But you’ve also got congregations who live in cultures where people with disabilities have been hidden and ostracized and devalued in lots of ways, and too often faith communities sanctify prejudices in the community rather than challenge them. It shouldn’t be easier to get into a bar than a church.

Safiyyah A. Muhammad

SAFIYYAH A. MUHAMMAD: When I think back as a child, I don’t remember seeing anyone like Sufyaan at the mosque, no one. I don’t remember any children or adults like Sufyaan attending the mosque, and I don’t think that was by mistake. I think that we parents look at it as not just a distraction but an embarrassment. But he deserves to pray. He has a right to faith, too.

Well, the first time that Sufyaan attended the mosque not only was he talking out loud and using his hand motions, but he was running in and out of the rows. It wasn’t received well. There were whispers, there were talk: “He’s a bad kid. He obviously wasn’t raised right. That’s bad parenting.”

Imam W. DEEN SHAREEF (Masjid Waarith Ud Deen, Irvington, NJ): I think the primary challenge is a lack of knowledge, because sometimes families conceal the information that they have family members that have disabilities. Sister Safiyyah Muhammad made us aware of her son’s disability in terms of autism, and she’s made it almost like a quest for our community to become more knowledgeable about it.

SAFIYYAH: When the Koran refers to the believers it doesn’t say the believers except for the insane. Love for your brother what you want for yourself, and Sufyaan, autism or not, is considered a brother to another person who does not have autism.

Rev. GAVENTA: I’ve had families say to me, “I’ve fought all week to get my kid included in a school or whatever. I shouldn’t—I don’t want to have to fight when it comes to Sunday morning or Saturday.”

CYNTHIA MCCURDY (to her children): Are you guys ready to go?

In other families that I’ve talked to there’s been numerous instances of “We don’t know what to do with your kind” or “Please don’t come back.”

Katie

(to daughter Katie): Okay, that looks good.

FEMALE VOICE AT CHURCH: Katie’s going to definitely do the sign language.

KATIE: Hello.

WOMAN: You look nice in your white top.

KATIE: Why thank you.

BOY: How you been?

CYNTHIA: We noticed that people with disabilities were missing from communities of faith. It wasn’t that people with disabilities didn’t exist. They just weren’t being invited and welcomed into their houses of worship.

KATIE: I carry the banners that like, kind of like a spirit does too. And the Gospel, I have to read the Gospel. I have to study for it. Then we read the Gospel.

Pastor MARK SINGH-HUETER (St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Exton, PA, addressing congregation): We begin in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Dear Lord, forgive the things I have done…

Everything’s presented in a way that really is much more interactive, whether they’re in the choir, whether they’re part of the skit, whether they’re doing readings, and so everybody gets to use their gifts and get involved.

BILLY: I’m reaching up to the Lord because of my voice. I can sing unto his praise.

Billy

SUSAN: Frankly, I would not feel comfortable just walking into any church for a service because of the noisiness, and we usually make some kind of a scene—like we are right now, pulling hair—where here, you know, we really don’t have to worry about it. A lot of times when we’re out in public, Joshua does experience a lot of stares when we go into restaurants and things. So we find that we really don’t go to a lot of the public places. This is wonderful, because not only does he get time to come and be exposed to worship, but I get to come back to church, too.

CYNTHIA: When I see individuals of all abilities feeling free to be themselves and to worship as God has intended them to be, I feel the Holy Spirit moving within everyone.

Rev. GAVENTA: Faith communities have gone from doing nothing to doing special things for people, with this sort of special services for special people and special religious education, to then hearing families and others say don’t do anything special for us. Just include us.

Rabbi DAN GROSSMAN (Adath Israel Congregation, Lawrenceville, NJ): Several families moved to this community because we make it an inclusive community. I don’t want a synagogue that doesn’t let Jews in. Isaac was blind—in most synagogues he couldn’t find his way around. Moses stuttered—in most synagogues he couldn’t read from the Torah that’s called the Books of Moses. So you got to create the environment where everybody has a place, and if you start with that notion, then everything flows from there.

SAM’S MOTHER: We were at a different synagogue. Sam’s autism, you know, outbursts occasionally, was really not tolerated. So we came here. Immediately the whole synagogue accepted us. He learned Hebrew and loves to be on the bema.

Rabbi Dan Grossman

Rabbi GROSSMAN (signing): So when I come back in the summer, in August, we can study together? Alright. You’re a good guy.

BOY AT SYNAGOGUE: Not many deaf people read the Torah. My dad always said to me I am better reading in Hebrew than English.

Rabbi GROSSMAN: We have a reputation that we are a special needs community, when in fact that probably only makes up a small percentage of the active community in the synagogue. I think it defines the synagogue because it simply doesn’t happen elsewhere.

WOMAN: I happen to be married to a gentleman who’s a quadriplegic and in a power wheel chair. There’s lots of ways of creating access to the bema. But what’s really special to him is that everyone uses the ramp. That’s the first time he’s felt—when he’s been in a synagogue, accessible or not—where he’s felt there’s true inclusion.

Rabbi GROSSMAN: There are seats that can accommodate wheelchairs in a row, so you’re not stuck in an aisle separate from everybody else. There are large print prayer books, Braille prayer books. Most synagogues have Torahs usually higher; you have to lean forward into it. By having them free-hanging like this anyone can roll up literally in a wheelchair, take the Torah, lift it, and come out with it.

FATHER: What would happen to these kids if a synagogue like this wasn’t around?

Rev. GAVENTA: If everybody is created in the image of God our community should be a reflection of the diversity and the wonder of God’s creation.

Rabbi GROSSMAN: I’ve had so many people over the years say it feels like they’re part of a real, living community as opposed to an artificial community where only perfect people are sitting here.

SAFIYYAH: Some people would say what is he getting out of it? Why is he here? He’s a distraction. We need prayer more than he does.

But the fact is who’s to determine who gets more blessings and who doesn’t?