DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: It’s often called the Emerald Isle—and with good reason. Ireland is as green as ever. But the country that once was a bastion of Roman Catholicism has changed. The vast majority of people here still call themselves Catholic—87 percent on the most recent census. But many of the most faithful church-goers in Ireland today aren’t even Irish. This Sunday Mass in Limerick is said in Polish for some of the thousands of immigrants who poured in during the economic boom of the past decade. But it’s hard to find an Irish congregation this packed, and especially this young, in bigger cities.

PATSY McGARRY (Religious Affairs Correspondent, The Irish Times): People still identify themselves as culturally Catholic even though they no longer go to Mass or go to confession. You’ll see them at first communions, you’ll see them at confirmations, and you’ll see them at funerals. They’re taking very much an a la carte view to the practice of their religion.

POTTER: As recently as the 1970s, almost 90 percent of Irish Catholics went to Mass at least once a week. Today, the number is closer to 25 percent. And in some parts of Dublin, just two or three percent of self-described Catholics regularly go to church.

(speaking to Irish woman): Did you grow up Catholic by chance?

WOMAN: Yes.

POTTER: Do you go to Mass now?

WOMAN: Not really that much. No, not much at all.

MAN: Weddings and funerals, things like that. That’s basically it.

POTTER: Those who do go for special occasions like this prayer service in County Galway can’t help but notice that the people in the pews have changed.

REV. TONY FLANNERY (Association of Catholic Priests): They’re old. That is the main thing. When you look down at a congregation from the altar now you’ll see mostly gray heads. The young people, the under 40s, have largely deserted the church in Ireland now.

POTTER: Irish priests are aging, too—on average, they’re well over 60. Many are still working into their 80s, and replacements have slowed to a trickle. At Maynooth, the country’s only Catholic seminary, the number of students being ordained to the priesthood has never been lower.

REV. HUGH CONNOLLY (President, Maynooth Seminary): Twenty years ago you could have been certainly over 20, maybe not that unusual to have a year where there would have been 30. Now we’re more likely to have somewhere under 10. Six, seven, that kind of thing.

POTTER: In the diocese of Dublin, not a single priest will be ordained this year—or next year. It’s been a stunning decline for a church that once virtually ruled the country.

McGARRY: It was a huge organization. It was like an alternative state within the state. It ran our schools, it ran our orphanages, it ran our reformatories, it ran most of our hospitals, and so therefore you can get an idea of the scale of what the Catholic Church was. It was an alternative society within Ireland.

POTTER: The Catholic Church here in Ireland saw its influence begin to wane with the social upheaval of the 1960s. But in the past twenty years, two factors combined to accelerate its decline: sudden prosperity and the shocking revelations of sexual abuse. The worldwide recession stopped the so-called Celtic Tiger in its tracks, but consumerism had already weakened the church’s hold on the Irish people, who had become far better educated over the previous 40 years.

McGARRY: They questioned their faith, they questioned the right of bishops to tell them how to live their lives.

POTTER: The body blow, however, came from the clergy abuse scandals that hit harder and closer to home in Ireland than anywhere else. Here, almost everyone knows someone who’s been affected.

FIRST WOMAN: Maybe we as older people did a lot of covering up. Also, we were very much into appearances, putting our best foot forward, saying the right things.

SECOND WOMAN: I think with all the scandals that have been revealed, it certainly made people think more and question a lot of things that were happening.

PEADAR CREMIN (President, Mary Immaculate College): Those who had a shaky faith now had an excuse for walking, because why would you go to the church every Sunday morning to hear somebody who potentially is in league with child abusers, and I think many people used the backlash against child abuse as a basis for saying, “Do I really want to subscribe, do I want to contribute, do I want to be part of that type of a church anymore?” I think at the heart of our problem is in a sense the church has lost its moral authority. The church has lost its right to speak out on issues.

POTTER: The abuse was a betrayal of trust, Pope Benedict acknowledged in a pastoral letter last year to Irish Catholics, his first-ever apology for the sexual abuse of children by priests. This year, during an extraordinary liturgy of lament and repentance at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, the Archbishop of Dublin and Boston’s Cardinal O’Malley prostrated themselves, asking God and the victims for forgiveness. But it hasn’t been enough.

CREMIN: People are still waiting, I think, for the kind of great atonement and the kind of fundamental change that will convince them that things have changed. There isn’t enough evidence yet that things have fundamentally changed.

FLANNERY: It’s a crisis, and it’s not one of the future. It’s one of right now. It’s quite extraordinary an organization as big and as ancient as the church that we cannot face a crisis that’s right at our doorsteps and begin to talk realistically about it.

POTTER: The kind of change Father Flannery advocates would be dramatic.

FLANNERY: Opening up the ministry of the church to lay people, to married people, to priests, to women. In other words, not confining it to the male celibate priesthood as we’ve had in the past, because clearly that is not working now, so we have to begin to think in different ways, but the Vatican is increasingly forbidding any discussion on that.

POTTER: Still, there are small signs of renewal. Some parishes now have lay people in positions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Kevin Mullally is a full-time pastoral worker. Sheena Darcy works for the International Eucharistic Congress.

SHEENA DARCY: I’ve seen young people come back to know God’s love. I’ve seen young people get more involved in the church.

KEVIN MULLALLY: They’re also searching for basic things, belonging and love and, you know, acceptance and tolerance, and all those elements go together in a spirituality.

SHEENA DARCY: Yes, there’s that acknowledgment that what happened was dreadful. It was absolutely dreadful. However, we do also, we do need to move on.

POTTER: Whatever happens, the Catholic Church in Ireland has already changed irrevocably.

McGARRY: I do believe Catholicism will continue, will survive in Ireland, and I do believe the clerical church will not. That doesn’t mean there won’t be priests, of course there will be, but I don’t think as a force it will ever again, in my lifetime certainly, will never have the power it had when I was a child. And I think that’s a good thing because it abused its power massively, and it became, I mean, a dictatorship in a democracy which was answerable to nobody.

CREMIN: I still have the view that what’s happening is actually something quite healthy, because the church we will end up with will be a church of committed, passionate, and dedicated people who will live the gospels rather than talk about them.

POTTER: That undoubtedly means the Irish Catholic Church will be smaller, but it may be, in a very different way, stronger.

For Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Dublin.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s early morning at Washington Hospital Center and time for a quick prayer before Flavia Walton heads into surgery. For eight years, Flavia’s husband, Bill, has had severe kidney disease, and Flavia is donating a kidney. But her kidney isn’t going to Bill. They weren’t compatible enough—at least when it came to kidneys. So Bill had to be put on the transplant list.

BILL WALTON: You are placed on the list, and then the wait begins, and it goes on and on and on, and your only hope is you can check the list on the Internet and see if the numbers are getting any smaller. But they never do.

LAWTON: Then Bill and Flavia heard about a program known as a paired kidney exchange, where Flavia could donate her kidney to somebody else, and in exchange Bill would get a kidney from another donor who was a perfect match.

BILL WALTON: Bottom line here is you’ve got to give one to get one.

LAWTON: The Waltons were part of the world’s largest kidney swap to date, sponsored by Washington Hospital Center and Georgetown University Hospital. It involved a complex chain of 28 surgeries at four different hospitals. Most of the donors gave a kidney in order to benefit a friend or family member. But a couple of donors did it out of a sense of altruism, with no particular recipient in mind. In the end 14 patients who had been particularly hard to match received kidney transplants. The donors and recipients were introduced to each other at an emotional news conference.

RALPH WOLFE (kidney donor speaking at press conference): I love this guy. I don’t even know him, but I love him.

GARY JOHNSON (kidney recipient speaking at press conference): You can’t imagine how fortunate I feel that somebody from somewhere in the universe came and gave me a kidney.

FLAVIA WALTON (speaking at press conference): To see someone that you love most it the world deteriorate is a sense of helplessness and powerlessness that you just cannot comprehend unless you’ve been there. But to be able to do something is so empowering, but it is such a blessing.

LAWTON: More than 100,000 Americans are currently on the waiting list for an organ transplant, the vast majority of them waiting for a kidney. Over the last decade, an estimated 60,000 people died while still waiting for a transplant. Given those numbers, many experts say there is a moral obligation to encourage more people to become organ donors.

PROFESSOR ROBERT VEATCH (Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University): Just a little nudge would do enormous amounts of good in terms of saving lives and making sick people’s lives better.

LAWTON: The incentive for Flavia Walton to become an organ donor was clearly to benefit her husband of 42 years.

FLAVIA WALTON: If God could give his son for me, or for us, I could certainly give a kidney to keep someone else alive. And I certainly want to keep him around as long as possible. I don’t know if he wants to keep me around that much longer.

BILL WALTON: No, I got no complaints.

FLAVIA: Okay, okay. But no, it was not a hard decision at all.

LAWTON: Living donors are screened psychologically to ensure they are not being unduly pressured into the surgery. It is major surgery, but because of medical advances the risks to the donors are quite low. Because of these factors, Professor Veatch at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics says there are few ethical problems with kidney swaps such as the one the Waltons were part of.

VEATCH: If we can get a living donor we get a better kidney, a more viable kidney, and it shows up in the survival-rate statistics.

LAWTON: His main ethical concern with the swaps is making sure that kidney patients without a loved one willing to donate are not pushed lower on the waiting list, particularly those with hard-to-match blood types.

VEATCH: We at least want to be fair with the people on the wait list who don’t have a family member available. Being fair might mean waiting a trivial extra amount of time, but we certainly don’t want to make those people wait years extra just because of the swap arrangements.

LAWTON: While the swap program has been successful, some other strategies to encourage organ donation have run into roadblocks because of the National Organ Transplant Act, which forbids any monetary compensation for organ donation. Twenty-five years ago, Veatch testified in support of that law, but he’s now urging that it be revisited. He’s calling for experimentation with some token financial incentives. For example, he would support a modest discount on driver’s license renewals for people who sign up to be organ donors. Or, he says, there could be a question on income tax returns asking people to be donors, and even offering a tax deduction for those who say yes.

VEATCH: It sort of taints the altruism of organ donation. On the other hand, real human lives are at stake here, and I would be willing to compromise the altruism at the margins if we can really save some lives.

LAWTON: Veatch also says the religious community should do more to promote organ donation.

VEATCH: It’s considered an altruistic, charitable act, and all the major religions look favorably upon that behavior.

LAWTON: Veatch tries to counter one theological concern he hears among some conservative Christians, especially in the black church, who believe individuals will be bodily resurrected in the end times, and therefore they worry about the implications of organ donation.

VEATCH: The doctrine is when you are resurrected you will be resurrected to look like you, but with all the bad stuff fixed. So if you had cancer, the cancer won’t be there, and if organs had been procured, or consumed by fire, you will get a new version of the body.

LAWTON: Flavia Walton, who is a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, says she tries to address that theological issue in her community as well.

FLAVIA WALTON: I think that there’s some notion or some belief among many that feel that when we meet our maker, we have to meet our maker all in one piece. For me, it means I just want to meet the maker. I don’t think the maker cares whether I’m all in one piece or not. I don’t think that’s the issue.

LAWTON: The Waltons say organ donation is of particular concern to African Americans because more than 60 percent of patients who need transplants are non-white. At the same time, African Americans have a disproportionately low rate of organ donation. The Waltons hope their story can help change that.

BILL WALTON: Exposure is key, and the more we can expose to that population that it works and we’re examples of that, the more emphasis we can get out there that spread the word and let’s proceed.

LAWTON: After two years on dialysis, Bill says he can’t believe how great he feels now. He says the gift of someone else’s kidney has meant everything to him.

BILL WALTON: Life, basically. You can’t get any more basic than that—life with a little ginger thrown in, because it’s a life that is much more comfortable than what I had.

LAWTON: Flavia says donating a kidney turned out to be a spiritual experience for her, definitely worth the short time she spent recovering from surgery.

FLAVIA WALTON: Just feeling good that I’ve been able to do something and that hopefully I’ll be able to make a difference not only in the life of the recipient of my kidney, but hopefully it’ll spread, and hopefully I’ll be able to make a difference in helping other people make a decision to make a difference in the lives of others.

LAWTON: And as politicians and ethicists wrestle over how to encourage more organ donations, the Waltons hope stories like theirs will be the best incentive of all.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

by David E. Anderson

The Pastor: A Memoir by Eugene H. Peterson (HarperOne, 2011) Excerpt

Eugene Peterson is a master storyteller. He is also a narrative theologian attuned to the way stories shape the biblical message and the lives of Christian believers and congregations, and the skills of both are in play throughout The Pastor, Peterson’s graceful memoir of his long career in congregational ministry.

Best known for The Message, his contemporary English translation/paraphrase of the Bible that has sold millions of copies, Peterson is less well known for the 29 years he spent in the pulpit, starting and then pastoring Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, a community not far from Baltimore.

The Pastor is not the conventional story of a call to ministry or a road-to-Damascus experience. Peterson cites poet Denise Levertov’s phrase “every step an arrival” as a metaphor for his changing understanding of ministry as new experiences and challenges brought him to new perspectives. “I never knew where I was headed, and at some point I realized it was pastor,” he explained in a recent interview.

Two constants, however, grounded Peterson’s moral imagination as his understanding of self and vocation developed. One was the Rocky Mountain landscape of western Montana, where he grew up. The other was John of Patmos, author of the New Testament Book of Revelation.

But it is not John as apocalyptic prophet of the second coming, the end times, or the rapture Peterson identifies with so much as John the exiled pastor to seven congregations “embedded, of all places, in the massive, arrogant, bullying Roman Empire.’’ As he worked part-time in a Presbyterian church in Westchester County, New York, Peterson began to imagine himself in “that intersecting work and world” of Patmos and White Plains: “In this world, sin was not a word defined in a lexicon. Salvation was not a reference traced down in a concordance. Every act of sin and every event of salvation involved a personal name in a grammar of imperatives and promises in a messy community of friends and neighbors, parents and grandparents, none of whom fit a stereotype.’’

This understanding of the pastor as exile recalls Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann’s book Cadences of Home: Preaching among Exiles, where Brueggemann writes of the Israelite exile experience as “a loss of the structured, reliable world which gave them meaning and coherence, and they found themselves in a context where their most treasured and trusted symbols of faith were mocked, trivialized and dismissed. Exile is not primarily geographical, but it is social, moral and cultural.’’

Peterson, too, sets himself against the dominant trends in both church and culture. “The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans,’’ he writes early on in a scathing critique of much of what passes for pastoral ministry in contemporary American culture. Indeed, he says, it is that very culture the pastor must navigate and resist.

“I love being an American,’’ Peterson writes. “I love this place in which I have been placed—its language, its history, its energy. But I don’t love ‘the American way,’ its culture and values. I don’t love the rampant consumerism that treats God as a product to be marketed….The cultural conditions in which I am immersed require, at least for me, a kind of fierce vigilance to guard my vocation from these cultural pollutants so dangerously toxic to persons who want to follow Jesus in the way that he is Jesus.’’

Peterson takes for the book’s epigraph a sentence from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: “To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.” It is, again, Peterson’s response to the business model of pastoral ministry, and he returns to it late in the book in a chapter called “Invisible Six Days a Week,” where he writes about the “unbusy pastor” and necessary idleness. “Melville’s harpooner,” he explains, “found company in my imagination with Jesus’ metaphors that feature the single, the small, and the quiet—salt, leaven, seed that have effects far in excess of their appearance. Our culture publicizes the opposite: the big, the multitudinous, the noisy. Is it not, then, a strategic necessity that some of us deliberately ally ourselves with the quiet, poised harpooner, and not leap frenzied to the oars?’’

Peterson describes his route to becoming a pastor and realizing his vocation as “haphazard.’’ From the first, he says, he believed that being a pastor was what you did when you couldn’t do anything else. But while the journey may have been haphazard, the construction of this memoir is anything but. Loosely chronological and following the contours of his life, from his growing up and schooling to his pastorate and then briefly, near the end of his career, working in academia, the book is essentially anecdotal and episodic. Yet it is carefully structured around a series of marvelously realized short stories that illuminate elements of Peterson’s growth and allow him to reflect on various aspects of congregational ministry and his own deepening understanding of the nature of churches and congregations.

Peterson has maintained a home or the slopes of the Rocky Mountains since his father bought two acres of land there and began building a cabin overlooking Flathead Lake in 1948 when Peterson was 16. In his descriptions the place becomes “sacred space’’ and “holy land,” invested with biblical echoes and a theological resonance that make it more than a vacation or retirement home: “By buying this lakefront property and building a cabin, my father provided me and, as it turned out, many others, with a rooting and grounding, a sense of thisness and hereness, for the faith that was maturing in me.’’ Peterson argues, in a theme repeated throughout the memoir, that “the life of faith cannot be lived in general or by abstractions. All the great realities that we can’t touch or see take form on ground that we can touch and see.’’

It is this very concreteness that brings to life the stories that follow. Peterson’s Pentecostal mother, who preached and sang and told stories “out of scripture and out of life,” and his father, a butcher, provided him with traits and characteristics that formed him as a pastor. Both are wonderfully rendered. “That butcher shop,’’ Peterson realizes in retrospect, “was my introduction to the world of the congregation. The people who came into our shop were not just customers. Something else defined them. It always seemed more like a congregation than a store.” Here again, Peterson’s criticism of the church growth movement that turns congregants into consumers and churches into stores, something he considers a “blasphemous desecration’’ of ministry, works its way into his recollections.

Other mentors—living and dead, literary and not—as well as friends and parishioners are sketched in brief chapters that follow the trajectory of Peterson’s career and the growth of his Maryland congregation, providing him with insights and challenges that enrich his sense of vocation and the nature of the church: “It had taken me a long time, with considerable help from wise Christians both dead and alive, to come to this understanding of church: a colony of heaven in the country of death, a strategy of the Holy Spirit for giving witness to the already inaugurated kingdom of God.’’

Not surprisingly, one of the book’s most important characters is his wife, Jan, who felt “called to be a pastor’s wife,” we are told. It seems an unusual calling in this day and age, and Peterson’s generous descriptions of her life—he says she came to regard what she had entered into as “holy orders” and “a vowed life of eucharistic hospitality”—make one long to hear her own voice commenting on her sense of vocation and their life together. “For Jan,’’ Peterson writes, “‘pastor’s wife’ was not just being married to a pastor; it was far more vocational than that, a way of life. It meant participation in an intricate web of hospitality, living at the intersection of human need and God’s grace.”

Peterson also writes wisely and poignantly about low times in pastoral ministry, in particular a period of spiritual malaise he calls “the badlands.’’ He later came to understand it as a time of dormancy that followed, for him as well as his congregation, the emotional rush of first gathering together a worshiping community in the basement of his home and then building its permanent home.

The all-embracing openness that characterizes Peterson’s thinking is evident in the many sources he cites as influences—Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Protestant theologian Karl Barth, sixteenth-century Carmelites St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Scottish minister Alexander Whyte, Baron Friedrich von Hugel. Peterson is widely and deeply read, a Christian humanist who came into the ministry during a time of great ecumenical and interfaith cross-fertilization and receptivity to learning from all kinds of faith streams and currents.

One odd note in the book is the virtual invisibility of the social turmoil—the struggle for racial justice, the campaign against the war in Vietnam, the movement for women’s equality, the political assassinations and urban riots—that was so much a part of the 1960s and 1970s, when Peterson and his congregation were being formed as pastor and church. It is hard to believe those conflicts, in which American religious life was so significantly implicated, were not more resonant in their lives.

And Peterson’s admission in the book’s closing “Letter to a Young Pastor,” that after 50 years as a pastor he has “almost no sense of achievement,” sounds a bit disingenuous. It is one thing to be self-effacing and humble, but this claim just doesn’t ring true. Perhaps more convincing is Peterson’s conclusion that being a pastor “makes for lonely work” in a culture that “doesn’t quite know what to make of us.”

Still, The Pastor is a profound and important meditation on the pastoral vocation. It is filled with insight and serves as a necessary reaffirmation of the true nature of a calling that in current American religious life seems largely lost.

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion New Service. He has written previously for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on writers John Updike, Marilynne Robinson, Flannery O’Connor, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Walt Whitman.

Originally published April 20, 2010

BENYAMIN COHEN (Author of “My Jesus Year”): I grew up in the heart of the Bible belt in Atlanta, Georgia, one of eight children, the son of an Orthodox rabbi. I’m the only one that didn’t go into the family business. They are all rabbis or married rabbis.

I was always jealous. I grew up across the street from a Methodist church, and literally my bedroom window looked out at the church parking lot, and every Sunday morning I would see it was packed, and living in the Bible belt there are churches on every street corner, and their parking lots are full every week. Maybe I could go to church—not to convert to Christianity. I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to go to find out what got people excited about worship, what got people excited about their religion. Maybe I could go and tap into that spirituality and find out the secret that I was never taught growing up, and maybe I could bring that back and apply it to my own Judaism.

Here’s one thing that I learned. I haven’t even walked into a church, and here’s already one thing I could write down and tell my rabbi—first-time visitor parking. I’m not talking about bringing Jesus into the synagogue. It wouldn’t hurt, it wouldn’t kill you to put a little first-time visitor parking sign in the parking lot.

I didn’t know going to church that they talk about the Old Testament. I assumed Jews have the Old Testament and Christians have the New Testament. I didn’t realize they have both, and this pastor got up and started giving an Old Testament sermon, and the way he was describing his interpretation was completely antithetical to what I had learned growing up. What came out of that moment was that I didn’t realize I cared so much about my own Bible.

At this Episcopal church they had a ritualistic service every week, and they had these nice traditions, and I was like that’s such a nice, sweet thing to have traditions and ancient rituals. I was like that sounds familiar. We have that in synagogue, and it kind of made me look at my own rituals with a new, fresh perspective.

Orthodox Jewry and Mormonism have a lot in common. We are both minorities in America. We both have special dietary—they can’t drink caffeine, and we have to keep kosher. They wear special undergarments, we wear special undergarments. There’s a lot of laws that dictate all their lives, and so for me I felt a real kinship with the Mormon community, and I went knocking door to door with these two female Mormon missionaries, and their conviction, these are girls 19- and 20-years-old, and their conviction for their religion was just awe-inspiring to me. I’m sure the woman whose house we were visiting, I’m sure she’s wondering why the Mormons brought their accountant with them. You know, what is he doing here?

I was feeling guilty at the end of the year that I kind of strayed from my own religion, and so I wanted to cleanse myself of that guilt, so I did what any good Jewish boy does, and that’s go to confession. I asked my Catholic friend, Vince, if I could do this, and he said, “No, only Catholics can go to confession, but I will sneak you in.” It was a very meaningful spiritual experience, and an interesting postscript to that whole episode is that the priest, now that the book has come out, the priest actually knows that I went to confession with him, and he called me and thanked me. He is so happy that I had a meaningful experience with him.

I for one feel a lot closer to a religious Christian than I do a non-religious Jew, because we have so much in common. People ask me if I found Jesus in church, and I personally did not, so to speak, find Jesus, but what I did find was true spirituality. That’s what I found in these places: the lack of cynicism, the openness to the experience, and the belief in God, whoever that God may be.

Click outside box to close
In 1996, Tom and Kitty Stoner started the TKF Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland, to create spaces that would “offer a temporary place of sanctuary, encourage reflection, provide solace, and engender peace.” The foundation has helped develop more than one hundred sites, from urban community gardens to labyrinths and healing spaces at hospitals, medical centers, churches, prisons, and correctional facilities. Each project is developed in partnership with local community leaders. We talked with Tom Stoner and executive director Mary Wyatt who explained why these open spaces are also sacred places.

Produced by Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly production assistant Fabio Lomelino and Web producer Fred Yi

In 1996, Tom and Kitty Stoner started the TKF Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland, to create spaces that would “offer a temporary place of sanctuary, encourage reflection, provide solace, and engender peace.” The foundation has helped develop more than one hundred sites, from urban community gardens to labyrinths and healing spaces at hospitals, medical centers, churches, prisons, and correctional facilities. Each project is developed in partnership with local community leaders. Watch founder Tom Stoner and executive director Mary Wyatt explain why these open spaces are also sacred places.

BENYAMIN COHEN (Author of “My Jesus Year”): I grew up in the heart of the Bible belt in Atlanta, Georgia, one of eight children, the son of an Orthodox rabbi. I’m the only one that didn’t go into the family business. They are all rabbis or married rabbis.

I was always jealous. I grew up across the street from a Methodist church, and literally my bedroom window looked out at the church parking lot, and every Sunday morning I would see it was packed, and living in the Bible belt there are churches on every street corner, and their parking lots are full every week. Maybe I could go to church—not to convert to Christianity. I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to go to find out what got people excited about worship, what got people excited about their religion. Maybe I could go and tap into that spirituality and find out the secret that I was never taught growing up, and maybe I could bring that back and apply it to my own Judaism.

Here’s one thing that I learned. I haven’t even walked into a church, and here’s already one thing I could write down and tell my rabbi—first-time visitor parking. I’m not talking about bringing Jesus into the synagogue. It wouldn’t hurt, it wouldn’t kill you to put a little first-time visitor parking sign in the parking lot.

I didn’t know going to church that they talk about the Old Testament. I assumed Jews have the Old Testament and Christians have the New Testament. I didn’t realize they have both, and this pastor got up and started giving an Old Testament sermon, and the way he was describing his interpretation was completely antithetical to what I had learned growing up. What came out of that moment was that I didn’t realize I cared so much about my own Bible.

At this Episcopal church they had a ritualistic service every week, and they had these nice traditions, and I was like that’s such a nice, sweet thing to have traditions and ancient rituals. I was like that sounds familiar. We have that in synagogue, and it kind of made me look at my own rituals with a new, fresh perspective.

Orthodox Jewry and Mormonism have a lot in common. We are both minorities in America. We both have special dietary—they can’t drink caffeine, and we have to keep kosher. They wear special undergarments, we wear special undergarments. There’s a lot of laws that dictate all their lives, and so for me I felt a real kinship with the Mormon community, and I went knocking door to door with these two female Mormon missionaries, and their conviction, these are girls 19- and 20-years-old, and their conviction for their religion was just awe-inspiring to me. I’m sure the woman whose house we were visiting, I’m sure she’s wondering why the Mormons brought their accountant with them. You know, what is he doing here?

I was feeling guilty at the end of the year that I kind of strayed from my own religion, and so I wanted to cleanse myself of that guilt, so I did what any good Jewish boy does, and that’s go to confession. I asked my Catholic friend, Vince, if I could do this, and he said, “No, only Catholics can go to confession, but I will sneak you in.” It was a very meaningful spiritual experience, and an interesting postscript to that whole episode is that the priest, now that the book has come out, the priest actually knows that I went to confession with him, and he called me and thanked me. He is so happy that I had a meaningful experience with him.

I for one feel a lot closer to a religious Christian than I do a non-religious Jew, because we have so much in common. People ask me if I found Jesus in church, and I personally did not, so to speak, find Jesus, but what I did find was true spirituality. That’s what I found in these places: the lack of cynicism, the openness to the experience, and the belief in God, whoever that God may be.