BOB ABERNETHY (anchor): Now, a profile of a best-selling writer of fantasy and adventure long before J.K. Rowling created Harry Potter. She is Madeleine L’Engle, whose science fiction, beginning with A WRINKLE IN TIME, like the Harry Potter books, has been both widely read by young people and strongly criticized by some religious conservatives. I spoke with Madeleine L’Engle a year ago about Christianity, censorship, science, suffering, and love.

Madeleine L’Engle broke her hip last year, and that has slowed her down. But on this evening, as an Episcopal lay woman she was saying vespers with the nine Episcopal nuns at New York’s Community of the Holy Spirit. L’Engle prays and reads the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer every morning and evening. For many years, she did her writing at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where she is still librarian and writer-in-residence. So does all that Christian practice make her a Christian writer?

MADELEINE L’ENGLE: No. I am a writer. That’s it. No adjectives. The first thing is writing. Christian is secondary.

ABERNETHY: At occasional workshops for other writers, Madeleine passes on her unsentimental, uncomplaining approach to life and her craft.

L’ENGLE: Basically one word: write. So who would like to be the first to read?

A young poet went to Colette and complained that he was unhappy. And she said, “Who asked you to be happy? Write.” And I think that is very good advice.

ABERNETHY: Madeleine is working now on a book about aging and an article about hate. She has written more than 50 books, of which the most famous is A WRINKLE IN TIME, published in 1961 after more than 30 rejections. The heroine is a teenager named Meg who expresses L’Engle’s own deepest belief.

L’ENGLE: Meg finally realizes that love is stronger than hate. Hate may seem to win for a while, but love is stronger than hate.

ABERNETHY: A WRINKLE IN TIME is a science-fiction fantasy that has sold more than six million copies and is now in its 66th printing. Readers still send Madeleine copies of that book and others to autograph, and she says she never tires of signing them.

L’ENGLE: Never, because anybody who has received as many rejection slips as I have is not going to complain about autographs.

ABERNETHY: Many Christians have found in Madeleine L’Engle’s books a profound religious message. Others have seen her witches and dark forces as essentially un-Christian, and their complaints to schools and libraries have made L’Engle one of the ten most banned writers in the country.

MS. L’ENGLE: We have always liked banning. And Hitler and his cohorts started banning books and then to killing people. You have got to be very careful of banning. What you ban is not going to hurt anybody, usually. But the act of banning is.

ABERNETHY: L’Engle’s view of the universe has been shaped by both Christianity and science. Often, at night, she reads both the Bible and books about particle physics, and she sees no conflict between them.

L’ENGLE: Religion and science? One and the same. I don’t have any trouble with it. A lot of people do. They have to put one here and one there, and I think they’re much more like that, each one informing the other.

ABERNETHY: But isn’t the skeptical scientific attitude a challenge to faith?

L’ENGLE: Religion is less accepting than science. Science knows things move and change, and religion doesn’t want that. So I am more comfortable with science. At the same time, I am not throwing God out the window.

ABERNETHY: But you’re making a distinction between religion and God.

L’ENGLE: Temple, the archbishop in the 19th century, said, “God is not chiefly interested in religion.” I like that.

ABERNETHY: L’Engle has experienced a lot of loss in her life: the death of her husband, Hugh Franklin, an actor well-known for his role as a doctor in the TV series ALL MY CHILDREN. She wrote about their marriage and his death in her book TWO-PART INVENTION. She wrote about her mother’s death in THE SUMMER OF THE GREAT GRANDMOTHER. Many of Madeleine’s close friends have died, and last Christmastime so did her son, Bion.

MS. L’ENGLE(reading from her journal): It’s late at night on Christmas Eve. We went to the Cathedral for the midnight mass. Bion died a week ago today. I still don’t believe it. Bion’s death has ripped the fabric of the universe.

ABERNETHY: Madeleine has kept journals almost all her life, and she says writing in them about grief makes it easier to bear.

L’ENGLE: I am very grateful that I have a journal and that I can write, because that helps me to objectify things that might just mess me around emotionally otherwise. I can no longer look at this and weep and feel sorry for myself. I see it more clearly. And it sends me back to work.

ABERNETHY: Eventually, Madeleine says, she will write about her son. Madeleine sees suffering as a normal part of life, and she also says she feels closest to God when she suffers.

L’ENGLE: In times when we are not particularly suffering we do not have enough time for God. We are too busy with other things. And then the intense suffering comes, and we can’t be busy with other things. And then God comes into the equation: “Help.” And we should never be afraid of crying out, “Help.”

ABERNETHY: Madeleine also sees suffering as necessary for a full life.

L’ENGLE: Where there is no suffering nothing happens. One time, my godmother went to visit my mother, who was her best friend, and something awful had happened. I don’t know what. And she burst into tears, instead of offering comfort, and said, “I envy you. I envy you. You had a terrible life, but you have lived.”

ABERNETHY: L’Engle insists that, in the end, life and the universe are good. She remembers singing a sad ballad to one of her two granddaughters when she was a child.

L’ENGLE: And she said, “Gran, you know that is a bad one.” And I said, “What?” “Gran, you know that’s a bad one.” And I said, “Why, Charlotte? Because everybody dies?” And she said, “No, Gran. Nobody loved anybody.” And then it was the next night, putting them to bed, that Lena just looked at me cosmically and said, “Gran, is it all right?” She didn’t mean any thing … She meant the whole thing. “Is it all right?” And I swallowed my heart and my everything and said, “Yes, Lena. It’s all right.”

ABERNETHY: Madeleine grew up an only and, she says, a lonely child. So she loves family gatherings such as this one, with four generations. She says she expects to keep enjoying good company, good food, good talk, and work for another twenty years.

L’ENGLE: I was writing in my journal yesterday and ended a paragraph with, “I think it smells like hope.” And we have to hang on to that.

ELIZABETH (speaking in Stephen Ministry training session): I just don’t know what to do.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: Sometimes you just need someone to listen.

ELIZABETH: I just don’t know how to resolve this in my head. I’m just really upset. I can’t forgive myself.

POTTER: Sometimes you need something more—a hand to hold, and maybe a prayer.

PAMELA (praying with Elizabeth): Dear Lord, Thank you for watching over all of us today. In your name we pray.

ELIZABETH: Amen. Thank you. I feel so much better.

POTTER: At Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, parishioners are training to become caregivers.

STEPHEN MINISTRY TRAINEE: The key thing that I saw is you leaned into her. You engaged her and told her, “I’m listening to you.”

POTTER: They’re learning to be Stephen ministers, named for Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr who cared for the poor. Parishioners are recruited and interviewed by the pastor, then trained to offer one-to-one care to people in and around their congregation. They commit to be available as needed for two years, but many serve longer. Pam Montgomery has been involved for two decades, balancing Stephen Ministry with responsibilities at home. But sometimes the caregiver is the one who needs care.

PAM MONTGOMERY (Stephen Minister): This is my dad and my mom.

POTTER: Seven years ago, Pam’s father died of cancer. Just two weeks later she lost her grandmother. As she grappled with her grief, a friend surprised her with a suggestion: What if Pam herself asked for a Stephen minister?

MONTGOMERY: When you’re so close to it I didn’t even think about me having one, and that Stephen minister was the best gift I could have given myself. She came week after week after week when other people, even my wonderful neighbors, even my wonderful friends, stopped asking, “You doing okay?” She came and she prayed for me, just for me, and that’s really powerful.

REV. KENNETH HAUGK (Founder, Stephen Ministries): When a person allows you into their life and shares their feelings and their hurts with you, they are giving you a fantastic gift, and I think when you listen to them and when you accept their feelings and when you love, share Christ’s love to them, you are giving them a similarly powerful gift.

Rev. Kenneth Haugk

POTTER: Kenneth Haugk started Stephen Ministries in 1975, when as pastor of a church in St. Louis he found he just couldn’t do it all. So drawing on his background as a clinical psychologist, he enlisted and trained a handful of lay people to offer confidential care to their fellow parishioners. And then it spread, becoming a nonprofit juggernaut.

Good Shepherd is one of 10,000 congregations around the world where parishioners serve as Stephen ministers. More than 150 Christian denominations have adopted the program.

HAUGK: Christianity is not a spectator sport. It was never intended to be a spectator sport. God gave to the church apostles, evangelists, and pastors and teachers whose job is to equip the saints for ministry.

MONTGOMERY (speaking to trainees): How did it feel to have your confession treated in that way?

POTTER: Stephen ministers go through 50 hours of instruction and practice, learning to help care receivers express their feelings, to listen without judging, and how to bring faith and the Bible into the conversation.

ALLAN (speaking in training session): Can we pray? Dear God, give Rene the absolute confidence of his forgiveness…

POTTER: They also study specific situations, like dealing with grief and divorce. But Stephen ministers are not counselors, so they also learn when to call in professional help from a pastor or therapist. Their work is supervised at the parish level, and if a care-giving relationship doesn’t work out, which does happen sometimes, either party can be reassigned.

Good Shepherd’s senior pastor, David Sloop, introduced the program here in 1987.

REVEREND DAVID SLOOP (Senior Pastor, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Raleigh, NC): It took a while for people to say, instead of “I need to speak to the pastor,” to also say, “Or can I have a Stephen minister?” And that’s a cultural shift, but it did occur, and we’re grateful it did. That old Lutheran concept of the priesthood of all believers—Stephen Ministry helps you live that out.

MONTGOMERY (speaking to trainees): Consider your stewardship of a precious resource: God’s gifted people…

POTTER: To enroll in the program, parishes pay a one-time fee of about $1700, giving them access to materials and leadership sessions like this one in Orlando, Florida, where experienced Stephen ministers and pastors learn how to train more care givers back home.

JACLYN HICKS: I was a care receiver, and I tell everybody, even before I became a Stephen minister, about my experience.

POTTER: Jaclyn Hicks and her husband were struggling with infertility when her pastor at Church of the Savior United Methodist in Cincinnati suggested a Stephen minister.

HICKS: It changed my life. It changed my life just having somebody be there for you, supporting you.

POTTER: After becoming pregnant and having a daughter, Hicks became a Stephen minister herself.

Jaclyn Hicks

HICKS: It’s huge to be on the flip side, to be able to just care for someone during their time of need. It’s been a tremendous blessing, and I get, as a Stephen minister, just as much out of it as I feel my care receivers do.

POTTER: Care-giving relationships are always same-gender, and the program tends to attract more women than men. Rene Anctil of Good Shepherd wasn’t sure at first that he was cut out to be a Stephen minister.

RENE ANCTIL: I tended to rely on myself a lot, and throughout this process I’ve kind of learned that I’m truly the care giver. I’m not the cure giver, and that’s God’s part.

POTTER: While Stephen Ministry relationships are strictly confidential, Anctil’s care receiver, Ed, said we could sit in on one of their weekly sessions. They started meeting more than a year ago, after Ed’s wife died.

ANCTIL: You mentioned that your daughter mentioned to you that she thought you were depressed.

ED: Yeah, oh yeah.

ANCTIL: How did that make you feel?

ED: I don’t think I’m depressed, but you get moody once in a while. Your body wears out when you get old. You always want to do something that you can’t do. That’s the hardest part.

ANCTIL: I think I recognize God in my life a lot more than I had in the past, and a lot of it is because of Stephen Ministry. I see God working not only with my care receiver but with me, which I never saw before.

POTTER: In the 35 years since the program started, half a million people have been trained as Stephen ministers, each one touching at least one other person—and being touched in return.

ANCTIL: I’m not going to go away. I’m going to be there as long as he needs me. I don’t know where the end’s going to be, but we’re going to do it together.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Raleigh, North Carolina.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Faith-based and international aid groups rushed to help victims of the catastrophes in Japan. It’s estimated that more than 10,000 people were killed by the massive earthquake and tsunami. Japanese officials say more than 450,000 are homeless and in need of supplies. Humanitarian efforts, however, have been severely complicated by radiation from four of the country’s nuclear reactors.

We get more from Dave Toycen, the president and chief executive officer of the Christian aid group World Vision Canada. We spoke to him by phone from Tokyo on Friday night (March 18). Dave, thanks so much for staying up so late to talk with us. Are you and the others doing relief work there, are you able to get to all the people who need help, and do you have the supplies you need to help them?

DAVE TOYCEN (President and CEO, World Vision Canada): Well, basically we do. We’re anticipating we’ll be raising somewhere between $10 and $20 million, so our team here has already spent, you know, a chunk of that because they know it’s coming. But of course we believe we’re going to be able to raise that amount of money, and of course that turns into supplies and things that we can provide here. So, yes, I am positive about that.

ABERNETHY: But you are able to, or the people who are in need are able to get help from you or from the government or from somebody else, right?

TOYCEN: Yes, generally so. My perception is, in the conversations we’ve had, what I’ve seen first hand, people are getting at least the basics of life. That means water, food on a daily basis, and most people now are in schools, gymnasiums, community centers, so that they are at least not out in the elements. It was minus four this morning with about ten, well, eight inches of snow.

ABERNETHY: What have you seen that moved you the most?

TOYCEN: Well, I think one of the things that moves me so much is in every one of these centers they have sheets of paper with people either saying yes, I’m alive and I’m at this location. The other ones that are even more poignant are the ones where you read where people are saying I am looking for my son, my daughter, do you know about them? And that always touches your heart. That just really, really touches your heart. And today I had a mother say to me, you know, this has been awful, but it’s my kids. The fact that my kids are alive, and children are precious because they remind us that life is about hope, and even our children in the midst of these difficult circumstances they still find the time to be happy and joyful. That’s humbling.

ABERNETHY: Dave, very quickly, we are almost out of time, but a lot of people are saying, well, we don’t need to give anything because Japan is a first-world country. It’s well organized. They don’t need as much help as perhaps people at other places and other disasters. How would you respond to them?

TOYCEN: Well, my first comment is yes, you’re right to a certain extent. They don’t need as much help. This is a first-world country. But, on the other hand, my experience is that most of us, or many of us at least, when somebody’s in trouble we have a sense we want to help out in some ways. And then when you think about, even I think of. say. Hurricane Katrina in the United States, how much Americans appreciated, at least that’s the feedback I got, when people from Canada and other places in the world came in and pitched in and gave, either volunteered or gave some money. So I think everybody has to make their choice, and we’re so pleased at World Vision. We’ve had so many people who want to step up and say we’re willing to help in Japan and send a message of hope.

ABERNETHY: Dave Toycen of World Vision Canada. Many thanks.

Faith groups around the world held prayer services this week for victims of the disasters. Meanwhile, some observers have spoken about the strong cultural and spiritual resources the Japanese have displayed as they deal with the catastrophe. Reverend Maggie Izutsu is an Episcopal priest who is also an expert on Asian bereavement rituals. She lived in Japan for many years and joins us now from Austin, Texas, where she leads the organization the Rite Source. Maggie, welcome.

REV. MAGGIE IZUTSU: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.

ABNERNETHY: As you see the way the Japanese people are responding to these tragedies, what stands out for you?

IZUTSU: I guess one of the things that my mind keeps going to is how they don’t ask the question “why me?” They’re not consumed with wondering what put them in harm’s way. They know they’re in harm’s way. They are very attentive to their surroundings, and they have a great reverence and fear of nature.

ABERNETHY: And so a disaster is just part of life? Multiple disasters are just part of life? You accept it and get on with things—pick up and continue you life?

IZUTSU: Yes, I believe so. I think that partly comes from their Shinto tradition of this reverence for nature and their understanding of the vicissitudes of nature and capriciousness of nature. It’s also part of their Buddhist tradition that understands that all things are impermanent and things are subject to change, and they don’t see themselves as entitled to good fortune all the time or even good fortune ever. Of course, they seek that and they strive for that, but that’s not their focus.

ABERNETHY: We’ve seen a little disruption—frustrations of trying to get supplies and things. But, in general, the images have been of people who are very orderly and very respectful of each other. Talk about that a little bit.

IZUTSU: Yes, well, I think that may come from very early training that is part and parcel of the Confucian tradition, which was imported from China, that seeks to make every opportunity in life—in daily life, secular life, as well as spiritual life or, more pointedly, religious life—an opportunity for moral self-cultivation, and it starts at a very early age. For instance, my son in a three-year-old’s class at nursery school’s teacher would talk about how she went home every night to try to understand how she could better inculcate a sense of little Johnny’s effect on little Tommy in terms of how he was behaving. So that sensibility of commiseration or empathy or understanding how our behavior affects other people starts there at a very early age.

ABERNETHY: And now there is the grieving and the rituals that are available, too, for helping people through that. What are the most important of those?

IZUTSU: The Buddhist tradition, as well as the new religions, have these very elaborate, very elongated memorial services—a sequence of memorial rites that go on literally ad infinitem, and they’re a wonderful occasion for families and friends of the deceased to come together at sporadic intervals to remember the deceased and share in the support that they can offer each other in that process. It also serves, I think, as a context for remembering the relative nature of our own egos, and the place that we have in this vast line of our ancestors and hopefully the progeny that will yet be coming, and to remember our place in society, and that also becomes a context for remembering that behaving well is a very important attribute of living.

ABERNETHY: Reverend Maggie Izutsu of the Rite Source in Austin, Texas. Many thanks.

IZUTSU: Thank you.

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“Part of what’s in a pilgrim’s heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey,” says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed’s Warrior Transition Brigade. Produced and edited by Patti Jette Hanley.

CHAPLAIN RANDY HAYCOCK (Walter Reed Army Medical Center): Certainly the idea of pilgrimage is common to many faith traditions, as well as just to human experience. Part of the pilgrimage experience, and a lot of what we do at Walter Reed, is to help people again reconnect with what it means to be a safe, whole, healthy human being.

Speaking in Cathedral: Just relax and try and be in the present moment.

One of the questions that a lot of warriors have when they come to Walter Reed is what’s my life for? They’re looking for a sense of purpose and meaning, and that’s sort of the idea behind the life journey exercise at the beginning is to just get them to stop and reflect a little bit about their life. It’s become for me a kind of metaphor for life itself—that really we’re all on journeys and learning how to deal with things like loss and the horror of engaging in war.

Speaking in Cathedral: Many warriors tell me that they sometimes feel guilty that their friend had died and they hadn’t.

I think that’s part of what’s in a pilgrim’s heart. There’s this kind of longing for more in life, and the idea of being on a journey with someone else is something that people get well in military life, because your life depends on the people around you. You gotta know people have your back.

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll walk this way and go into the War Memorial Chapel.

The War Memorial Chapel where they have the opportunity to talk about how their own journey intersected with the journey of their friend and basically just to do some grief work, and telling the story is an important part of healing in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Pilgrim-Soldier: It was like losing a brother, losing, you know, a family member, and that’s just always kind of haunted me.

Thousands of people have come into that little piece of geography to remember their war dead. So I think there is a kind of energy field here that, you know, I could come and just bring soldiers into that space and say “blah blah blah” and something would still happen simply because of the prayers and tears and, you know, heartfelt emotions that others have let loose in that place.

The next step is to gather around the High Altar, and then using that [Eric] Clapton song [“Tears in Heaven”] — there couldn’t be a better song written for warriors, because many of them feel like what’s the sense of going on?

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll call off the names of those we have come to remember…

Pilgrim-Soldier: Lance Cpl. Joseph Jose Gutierrez…

Concluding the way the army ordinarily does with coming to attention, calling off their names, sounding taps helps them to make a letting go of their friend so that they can get on the with the rest of their life.

CHAPLAIN RANDY HAYCOCK (Walter Reed Army Medical Center): Certainly the idea of pilgrimage is common to many faith traditions, as well as just a human experience. Part of the pilgrimage experience, and a lot of what we do at Walter Reed, is to help people again reconnect with what it means to be a safe, whole, healthy human being.

Speaking in Cathedral: Just relax and try and be in the present moment.

One of the questions that a lot of warriors have when they come to Walter Reed is what’s my life for? They’re looking for a sense of purpose and meaning, and that’s sort of the idea behind the life journey exercise at the beginning is to just get them to stop and reflect a little bit about their life. It’s become for me a kind of metaphor for life itself—that really we’re all on journeys and learning how to deal with things like loss and the horror of engaging in war.

Speaking in Cathedral: Many warriors tell me that they sometimes feel guilty that their friend had died and they hadn’t.

I think that’s part of what’s in a pilgrim’s heart. There’s this kind of longing for more in life, and the idea of being on a journey with someone else is something that people get well in military life, because your life depends on the people around you. You gotta know people have your back.

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll walk this way and go into the War Memorial Chapel.

The War Memorial Chapel where they have the opportunity to talk about how their own journey intersected with the journey of their friend and basically just to do some grief work, and telling the story is an important part of healing in cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Pilgrim-Soldier: It was like losing a brother, losing, you know, a family member, and that’s just always kind of haunted me.

Thousands of people have come into that little piece of geography to remember their war dead. So I think there is a kind of energy field here that, you know, I could come and just bring soldiers into that space and say “blah blah blah” and something would still happen simply because of the prayers and tears and, you know, heartfelt emotions that others have let loose in that place.

The next step is to gather around the High Altar, and then using that [Eric] Clapton song [“Tears in Heaven”] — there couldn’t be a better song written for warriors, because many of them feel like what’s the sense of going on?

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll call off the names of those we have come to remember…

Pilgrim-Soldier: Lance Cpl. Joseph Jose Gutierrez…

Concluding the way the army ordinarily does with coming to attention, calling off their name, sounding taps helps them to make a letting go of their friend so that they can get on the with the rest of their life.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: Everywhere you look it’s “happy holiday” time, and despite the bad economy shoppers are still buying. After all, it’s the “most wonderful time of the year,” as that old Christmas song puts it, with everyone telling you “be of good cheer.” But for some people, the season is not merry and bright. For Kate O’Dwyer Randall, Christmas is a time for missing her brother, Jim, who died of a sudden heart attack five years ago at the age of 37.

KATE O’DWYER RANDALL (Associate University Chaplain, University of Richmond): If you’re grieving, there’s always the sense that there’s a chair there that’s empty, that the person that was here once, last year, is no longer here. It’s personal, and it’s private, and it’s very pronounced.

Kate O’Dwyer Randall

POTTER: But Randall does not grieve alone. On this day in early December, a small group gathers for a special service at Cannon Memorial Chapel on the campus of the University of Richmond, where Randall is associate chaplain.

RANDALL (speaking to congregation): Friends, welcome to Blue Christmas. We’re so glad that you’ve joined us, and we’re so sorry for the reasons that you have.

POTTER: Susie Reid came to mourn the death of her brother, Billy, just six weeks ago.

SUSIE REID: I thought this would be a good way to kind of accept that the holidays are here and that we’re going to have them, you know, without Billy this year, and just be with other people who are also, you know, that understand, you know, that sometimes the holidays are not happy.

CARNISHA JONES (speaking to congregation): I’m not really a singer, but I thought I would share what’s in my heart.

POTTER: Carnisha Jones is mourning the death of her mother.

JONES (singing): Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long, long way from home.

POTTER: Others have brought their own private pain to the service, one of hundreds being held in churches across the country this month for people facing the holidays with a heavy heart.

RANDALL: People can be honest about that grief, so they don’t have to go and sing “Jingle Bells.” They can actually come and cry with other people who are grieving. The church is going to say we’re not going to give you a platitude. We’re going to say to you this is hard, and God is in the midst of this, and this is hard—all at the same time.

POTTER: The interfaith service is quiet and simple. There are no scripture readings, just personal stories and poems.

ELIZABETH BOONE (speaking before the congregation): My God, you call to me in the silence: Do not be afraid. I am with you. And I answer behind tears: I’m trying. Stay there.

RANDALL (speaking to congregation): We feel, particularly in this season, that grief is permanent and hope is fleeting, but I encourage you and remind you today that it’s actually the other way around.

POTTER: Randall invites everyone to light a candle, put a name to their grief, and join in saying the names together.

RANDALL: Stay in your seats if you’d like. Think, reflect, and pray. But for those that choose to come forward, your brave statement will be met with the congregants repeating it.

Congregant: I light this for my friend, Patrick.

Congregation: For Patrick.

Congregant: For Valerie.

Congregation: For Valerie.

Congregant: This is for my mom, Addie

Congregation: For Addie.

Congregant: I light this candle for my brother, Billy.

Congregation: For Billy.

POTTER: For four years, Billy Reid battled cancer with his sister by his side. The loss has hit her hard.

REID: I had never thought about how true it is that people—I think they think that they’re going to upset you if they mention, you know, the person’s name that’s passed away. It doesn’t. I’d like to hear it. I want to talk about him like he’s, you know, still around, like he’s still important, you know, and not talking about him and not saying his name emphasizes his absence, and lighting a candle in a church, you know, is just very meaningful. And I know he watched me do it.

Singing of “Silent Night.”

RANDALL: Something happens in this service. I don’t know if it’s being with other people who are grieving, or being able to say the name out loud, but something happens in this service every year, and people are so touched and moved. I know it helps healing. I know it helps.

POTTER: As the service ends, the candles burn on.

RANDALL: We thank you for the lives of those that we’ve named today. Let us be people of faith and hope, always and often.

POTTER: There may not be joy this season for many here, but today there is comfort.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Richmond, Virginia.

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In 2002, we aired a profile of the young, bestselling poet Mattie Stepanek and his mother Jeni. They both suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy. The messages of hope and peace in Mattie’s writings inspired millions of people around the world. Mattie died in 2004, but Jeni is working to keep his memory alive. She talked with Kim Lawton about how her faith gives her the strength to move forward.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s standing room only at the Border’s Bookstore in Bethesda, Maryland, where Jeni Stepanek is talking about her new book called Messenger. The book is about her son Mattie, the New York Times bestselling inspirational poet who died five years ago at the age of 13. Mattie had a rare form of muscular dystrophy, the same disease that afflicts Jeni. This is the store where Mattie had launched his books, too, and the fact that he’s not here tonight highlights the loss that’s still raw.

JENI STEPANEK: Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I have had mornings where I’m not quite sure what the sane reason is to bother getting out of bed. I always find one, and if I can’t find one, what I’ve learned is to allow other people to give me a sane reason to get out of bed.

LAWTON: One of Jeni’s biggest reasons for getting out of bed every day is her quest to keep Mattie’s legacy alive. In his short life Mattie wrote six books of poetry and a collection of essays that he collaborated on with Jimmy Carter. He became a friend to the rich and famous and touched millions of people around the world with his message of hope and peace.

MATTIE STEPANEK: God gives me hope that there is something greater than us, something better and bigger than the here and now that can help us live.

LAWTON: Mattie told us in an interview seven years ago that he believed God had a plan for his life.

MATTIE STEPANEK: I feel that God has given me a very special opportunity that I should not let go to waste. I use the gift he has given me.

LAWTON: Jeni says from the time he was just a little boy, Mattie told her God was putting messages in his heart.

JENI STEPANEK: And I began to get concerned, actually, and ask him questions like, “Are you hearing voices? Is God’s voice a man’s voice or a woman’s voice?” And he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “Mommy, God’s voice is not like this. It’s a message in my heart.”

LAWTON: Mattie believed God wanted him to give voice to those messages, and he did that through his poems, which he called his “heartsongs.” Jeni says there were several basic themes.

JENI STEPANEK: Hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy. The best I can understand it is that it really is the universal truth. It’s what Jesus Christ taught us, it’s what Gandhi teaches us, it’s what Martin Luther King teaches us, it’s what any good speaker, any peacemaker teaches us: In giving we shall receive, in doing good, good happens.

LAWTON: Since Mattie died, Jeni has gotten thousands of letters and emails from people who say he continues to inspire them. There’s even a grassroots movement of people who want the Roman Catholic Church to open an official investigation into whether Mattie should be recognized as a saint.

JENI STEPANEK: I have had people who have contacted me to say they believe Mattie has interceded in their lives. They believe that Mattie has healed their child, or touched their spirit, or turned them back to God, or prevented them from suicide.

LAWTON: As the mom of a kid who loved practical jokes and didn’t always make his bed, she finds it all humbling and, a bit overwhelming.

JENI STEPANEK: I feel the responsibility to share with people the truth of my son’s life. What I don’t want people doing is thinking, oh Mattie, you know, and putting him up on a pedestal: he’s a little guru, he was perfect, he never got angry, he never got sad, he only spoke bits of wisdom. I mean, he wasn’t. That’s not who Mattie was.

LAWTON: Jeni chairs a foundation named for Mattie that tries to make his message as accessible as possible. There are school curriculum projects based on Mattie’s writings, and parks like this one in Rockville, Maryland, that has a life-sized statue of Mattie and his beloved service dog, Micah, who is now Jeni’s. Jeni herself has also become an inspiration to many. Mattie was her fourth child to die of the disease that she didn’t even know she was carrying.

JENI STEPANEK: When I was having these children, I did not know I was going to give birth to children with this condition. When I was having children I was apparently healthy, active, running two to five miles a day, coaching and playing sports, working on my first doctoral degree.

LAWTON: She was diagnosed when Mattie was nearly two, after her oldest two children had already died and her third child was also dying from the disease. She and her husband divorced, so her focus became being a single mom.

JENI STEPANEK: So even though you grieve the loss of your child, when there’s still another living child, not that the grief isn’t there, but you have to focus on celebrating life with that child, with the one that’s still alive. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role?

LAWTON: Jeni says her Catholic faith helped her cope, and she says despite some times of questioning God, her faith has grown dramatically.

JENI STEPANEK: I’m very good at, through prayer, giving God a to-do list, all right? Dear God, this is where I need you, and this is how you can meet my needs, and I give God the little to-do list, and I think I began to realize towards the end of Mattie’s life prayer is not just giving God your wishes. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day.

LAWTON: She also has a close circle of friends, chief among them her roommate, Sandy Newcomb, and Sandy’s extended family, whom Mattie called their “kin family.” Jeni says they’ve made all the difference in her life.

SANDY NEWCOMB: I’d like to think in some way that my support of Jeni and Mattie has helped them to be able to do what God wants them to do.

LAWTON: Jeni’s own health continues to deteriorate. She says the most difficult thing is giving up independence and control.

JENI STEPANEK: It’s really hard knowing I will always be the passenger in a car. I will never be driving again. That’s a really, really tough thing when I’m a doer, a giver, a be-er, and you have to be the recipient and call someone and ask them to do something for you. That’s a tough lesson for me.

LAWTON: Although people tell her they’ve felt Mattie’s spirit, Jeni never has.

JENI STEPANEK: And what I would give to have my son come and stand and just say “hi” or “yo,” just say anything, just touch me. But I know that that would be wrong, and I think that my son is wiser than that, because if my son came and spoke to me or touched me, and I knew without doubt this is my son, I so miss him that I’m afraid I’d never emotionally or physically be able to move from that spot.

LAWTON: She says near the end of his life Mattie knew he was dying and tried to prepare her. But she couldn’t accept it.

JENI STEPANEK: It was one of my mommy decisions that I regret. You know, I should’ve just put my arm around him and said that must be really difficult. You must feel very alone. I just, I couldn’t tend to it, and I feel very badly. I will forever feel badly about that. But I don’t think he holds that against me. I think he knew that I was being a mommy.

LAWTON: Still, she says Mattie gave her the hope and faith to move forward.

JENI STEPANEK: He said when I’m gone promise me you will choose to inhale, not breathe merely to exist, and that means finding some worthy reason to move into each next moment, and that’s the most difficult choice I face every single day. But it’s the most worthy choice.

LAWTON: She says she’s learned that it’s not how long you live that matters, but the depth with which you live those days. I’m Kim Lawton in Rockville, Maryland.

Read more excerpts from Mary Alice Williams’s interview with Princeton historian Elaine Pagels, author of BEYOND BELIEF: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF THOMAS (Random House):

Q: What is the Gospel of Thomas?

A: The Gospel of Thomas claims to be the secret sayings of Jesus. There are 114 of them, so it says many things, but the central message is that Jesus is the one who reveals the divine light that brought the universe into being, and that you and I also reveal that light.

That image is in every tradition — Buddhist, Christian, Jewish. But most Christian tradition speaks of Jesus as the divine light incarnate in the universe, and the rest of us [as] in darkness, needing to be enlightened from him alone.

Q: What do you think this quote from the Gospel of Thomas says to us: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”?

A: That’s a remarkable saying. It was because of that that I first wrote THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS. I took that psychologically. I took it to mean you bring forth what is potential within you. Or, if you suppress what is potential, this is damaging to the personality. I think that’s true enough, as artists know, [as] anyone creative knows. But now I understand it’s also a spiritual statement. It’s about bringing forth what is within you. It’s not just your natural potential, but it’s that we are created in the image of God and, therefore, we have this divine energy that can be accessed or suppressed.

Q: How did Gnostics view Jesus?

A: I don’t think there’s a single way to answer that, and I’m not sure that I would even call the Gospel of Thomas “Gnostic” anymore. But the way they see Jesus is as a person who manifests the divine and who shows others how to find access to that source within themselves.

Q: He was more guide than God?

A: Yes. Perhaps more like a Buddhist kind of teaching — that he is a man, but he is an enlightened one. He’s not a god and you, too, can become enlightened in that way.

Q: How are the Gnostic Gospels different from the Synoptic Gospels?

A: We use the word “synoptic” to talk about Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and it really means “seeing together,” because they all have a similar perspective. Matthew and Luke — whoever wrote those Gospels — used Mark as a focus and as a basic story. So all of them have a lot in common.

What we call the Gnostic Gospels are a range of other Gospels, some of them recently discovered and previously unknown but probably very ancient. We simply had never known them. They weren’t part of the New Testament. What’s different about the Gospel of Thomas is that, instead of focusing entirely on who Jesus is and the wonderful works of Jesus, it focuses on how you and I can find the kingdom of God, or life in the presence of God.

Q: What is the argument between the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas?

A: The Gospel of John speaks of Jesus as the “light of the world,” the divine one who comes into the world to rescue the human race from sin and darkness, and says if you believe in him, you can be saved; you can have everlasting life. If you don’t believe in him, you go to everlasting death.

The Gospel of Thomas, on the other hand, speaks of Jesus as the divine light that comes from heaven, but says “and you, too, have access to that divine source within yourself,” even apart from Jesus.

What we now realize — and more clearly than ever because of the newly discovered Gospels — is that, instead of one tradition about Jesus, there were in the early Christian movement ranges of traditions about Jesus, several traditions, and they were associated with different disciples. So you would have the gospel according to Matthew, who taught some of the teachings of Jesus, and the gospel according to John, which taught others, [and] the gospel according to Thomas.

When we look at Thomas and John together, we see that they have a lot in common. They used the same kind of language. But I can now see that John was written to say, “Well, yes, Thomas almost gets it right but misses the main point,” which for John is that you must believe in Jesus in order to be saved and that he alone offers the only access.

Q: What is the historical background on this?

A: Everybody who wants to study the beginning of Christianity usually has the same motivation that I had. It was totally typical: if we go back to the beginning, we’ll find what really happened, the original, the perfect, golden nugget. We’ll find the words of Jesus.

What we actually find when we go back there is that the earliest evidence is very diverse. That’s not the story we were told as Christians, because the Christian church chose to simplify it and give us a single version of the story and cut out, therefore, the kind of diversity that we can now see.

Q: Was it political?

A: It was certainly political. It was also religious. Those were not separate.

Q: Was Thomas’s talking about each of us being seekers of God a difficult concept to organize an orthodox institution around?

A: Yes. If you’re going to have a church that says, as one of the primary church leaders, Irenaeus, did, “Outside the church there is no salvation,” there are certain things you might not want Jesus to have said, if he said them. For example: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.” That might suggest you don’t need a church, or a priest, or an institution.

Q: Why was it important that an institution be established?

A: People who study the way religions develop have shown that if you have a charismatic teacher and you don’t have an institution develop around that teacher within about a generation to transmit succession within the group, the movement just dies. So the survival of Christianity in the way that we know it probably depends on the development of institutions.

Q: If all of the Gospels that were found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi had been part of our Christian heritage, what would have changed?

A: It would have been harder to maintain the idea of a single, authoritative, doctrinal teaching. You could say, “These are the basic teachings of the church, and beyond that you can explore this, or this, or this.” But what the church has often said is, “These are the authoritative teachings, and that’s it.”

Q: Are we impoverished because of that?

A: I think very much so, because the openness to discovery, the openness to different interpretations, which you do find in the early communities, was, in some cases, limited.

Q: Suppressed?

A: Deliberately suppressed, because the question of whose authority rules the church became of enormous importance in the fourth century, when the church became powerful and politically established and wealthy. And ruling the church was a matter of enormous prestige and power. Politics and religion are quite inseparable in this respect. If you have a strong religious conviction, it may well have political implications.

Q: And if the Gnostic Gospels had not been suppressed?

A: I think [Christianity] could’ve been much more open in its scope. What these Gospels offer, in fact, you find in some Eastern Orthodox churches — a great deal of openness to revelation, to understanding the speculation. You find it also in Pentecostal churches — the conviction that you can be inspired by the Holy Spirit. You find this in many churches. But it’s not part of official teaching very often. So yes, I think it could’ve been very much more open-ended. But one would have sacrificed the claim to a kind of sacrosanct authority that certain Christian leaders have always liked to claim.

At the time, I think it was absolutely essential for the survival of the movement, because it was so much threatened by persecution and by complete scattering. It was necessary at that time, probably, to consolidate the church and try to make a simple message accessible and universal.

Q: Say more about the story of the discovery of the Gnostic texts.

A: A library of ancient Christian texts was found quite by accident when a villager in upper Egypt, Mohammad Ali al-Samman, went out of his village with his brothers to dig for birdlime to fertilize their crops. As they were digging near an ancient cliff, they found a six-foot jar, and in it were 13 books that were bound in tooled gazelle leather. What he discovered in these were over 50 ancient, early Christian texts and Gospels. It was an astonishing discovery, and it’s completely changed the way we understand the history of Christianity. The texts were written originally in Greek, like all of the early Christian writings, [including] the New Testament. But they were found translated from Greek into Coptic, an ancient African language. We have to read Coptic and understand the Greek to try to read these texts.

Q: You say John says Jesus was the “son of God.” Didn’t they all say that?

A: All of the Gospels talk about Jesus as the “son of God.” When I was growing up, I thought that meant some kind of divine, unique, special being unlike anyone else. When you study it historically, you see that this term “son of God” would be used for a king. So David, the king of Israel, was the “son of God.” Or, the king of Egypt could be the son of the god Ra. That’s just the way you talked about a king. Often the language about “son of God” is a language about kingly prerogative.

But what the Gospels don’t all say is that Jesus is some kind of very different being. That’s what we often think — he’s the son of God, and we’re mere humans. The Gospel of John says, “He is not a human being like you and me. He began in heaven. He originated with God himself, and he became incarnate in a human body in which he dwelt.” So he wasn’t a human. In Paul’s words, “He came in human form.” But that doesn’t mean he was a human as you and I are.

Of course, anyone who knows Christian theology will say, “Well, that’s wrong. Jesus is truly human and truly divine.” That becomes the orthodox teaching — that Jesus is, in fact, truly human and truly divine. But that is quite different from what you see in the Gospel of John. If you just read John alone and you don’t read all [the Gospels] as a collage the way we usually do, as if they all meant the same thing, it’s as though Jesus is a being of light that comes into the world and speaks as if he were God walking on earth. That’s what makes his speech so offensive and so strange in the Gospel of John: “Before Abraham was, I am.” People pick up rocks to throw at him because they think he’s making himself God — which, in fact, he is. And the author of John will say, “Well, yes. But, you see, of course he was.”

Q: Had the church gone with Thomas’s version, would the church be radically different? Would it have existed at all?

A: The Christian church at the time the New Testament was shaped, at the time these Gospels were being considered, was under enormous pressure of persecution. It was, perhaps, in danger of being completely annihilated through the persecution and the execution of its members. That kind of church under siege needed a tremendous amount of close organization, and that was given to the church by the leaders who chose the Gospels that we have in the New Testament. It might have worked [with the Gospel of Thomas] had we had a number of Gospels the way we do now. I think it might’ve worked very well. But all we know is what really happened, and that is that some of the leaders said, “No, we don’t want anything that invites speculation, anything that invites creative imagination, anything that invites inspiration. We just want to have a clear message and a clear community. We want to know who’s in and who’s out.”

Q: What about those who might say that you have given John short shrift?

A: When I began to realize that the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas were part of an intense conversation or argument in the early Christian movement between different groups of followers of Jesus, each trying to understand the teachings and interpret them, I focused on the difference. However, I [also] talk about the enormous range of ways the Gospel of John can be interpreted. You think about the many poets, like St. John of the Cross in Catholic tradition or T. S. Eliot in Anglican tradition, who love the Gospel of John, [and] the many theologians who’ve interpreted it. The Gospel of John is very rich, as its tradition shows.

We also know there were people in the second and third century who could read all those Gospels together and find them completely congenial.

Q: You were raised in a family that was religiously nonobservant, and you joined an evangelical church for a while. Did that have a major impact on how you see religion?

A: Well, certainly. I think that most of us who study religion do so because we have some engagement in the matter, obviously. Why would we devote our life [to] studying this? I find some of these texts, as well as some of the texts of the New Testament, enormously spiritually powerful.

The kind of churches that I went to as a child — liberal Christian churches — don’t have the kind of intensity and power that many evangelical churches do. When I encountered that, I realized there was something very powerful about the Christian tradition. One feels that also in Catholic churches and many other churches — all kinds of churches. And when I realized that, I thought, “I was brought up to think that Christianity would just become obsolete. Why is it that here we are in the twenty-first century, and religion is enormously alive and well?”

Q: The more orthodox religion is, the more it grows?

A: In some cases, I think that’s true, because it has the intensity that it may lack if you start adding too many things. However, many people who are engaged in evangelical Christianity have thought, “Well, if you’re not an evangelical, what relevance could your faith possibly have when you’re in need, when you’re in distress, when you’re really up against it one way or the other?” And yet, there are many of us for whom that kind of search is still an essential part of our lives.

Q: You begin your new book by describing how you walked into the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City after learning that your son had been diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension.

A: I went into that church not actually intending to go to a service. I found I was enormously moved by the worship, by the music, by the congregation assembled. And I realized there is much that I love about Christian tradition — and much that I needed about Christian tradition.

What I also realized was that it wasn’t primarily about a set of beliefs: “Do I believe in this and that and the other thing?” It was the congregation gathered together for worship, it was the music, it was the common values, it was what was felt and experienced and shared in that worship. It’s not that I say beliefs don’t matter — by no means; but they were not the focus. For many Christians, [beliefs] have been right in the center: If people say, “Are you a Christian?” and you then say, “What do you mean by that?” the usual follow-up question is, “Well, do you believe that Jesus is the son of God?” or “Do you believe that such and such?”

Q: What does religion have to say in times of grief?

A: In times of grief, speaking for myself, one can’t hear about belief very much, I think. In times of grief, people often go to churches. They go for the worship. They go for the funeral. They go for a way to cope with the unimaginable. We don’t have many ways to do that. People most often go back to those powerful, simple, enormously compelling means of dealing with grief.

Q: You buried the two loves of your life, your son and your husband, within 15 months of each other. What did religion offer you?

A: It offered a very slender thread of a way to survive and to continue to hope. In times of grief, it’s hard to hear what is being said about beliefs or about heaven or any of that. But one can find a path in that, nevertheless.

Q: And communion with other people?

A: Absolutely. That’s, perhaps, the most important thing. What one can find in a time of grief has a lot to do with the sharing with other people, and also, I think, importantly, with a sense of a spiritual dimension in our lives.

Q: What happened to your faith after the deaths of your husband and your son?

A: It’s hard to talk about that. It depends what you mean, I guess, by “faith.” One somehow has to go on and find a way to hope again. I found in that church, in the people gathered there, in various ways, some solace and some help. Of course, also with friends and others; it wasn’t the only way, but it was an important way.

Of course you get angry. How can you not get angry? I don’t think I subscribed to the theory of a morally ordered universe. My late husband was an elementary particle physicist who worked on chaos theory. I didn’t think of the universe as morally ordered in some obvious sense. But there is a basic assumption [you] make about the world and about the way things happen. And those assumptions do get shattered in times like that. One can think, “Well, I’ve been doing pretty well, and things should turn out well.” When we do that and things turn out horrendously, our impulse, because of our tradition, is to blame ourselves. After all, if you read the book of Genesis, it says people who do good things receive good things. And people who do bad things have terrible things happen. So it’s usual, when people have catastrophes happen, for them to say, “Why is this happening to me?” as if that were some kind of anomaly in the universe. I don’t think it is. That is the way things happen in the universe. But it certainly would have shattered any kind of conventional faith.

Q: You’re so careful not to say “I.”

A: Well — yes.

Q: It didn’t shatter your conventional faith?

A: I didn’t have one. I guess I didn’t have a conventional kind of belief in all of these things. But it clarified for me that belief was not the primary issue. Long before those things happened, when I had my original family intact, I was working on THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS and I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I’d heard when I was growing up were simply made up long after the fact. If I had had a conventional kind of faith, I wouldn’t have been studying the beginnings of Christianity, because people who do that are doing it because they need to explore what they mean by “faith.” I had been doing that for a long time already, so there wasn’t that kind of belief structure to fall apart. However, my world did fall apart. It was absolutely devastating. It’s a kind of maelstrom.

Q: Did the community of the faithful, as it were, help you through it?

A: They certainly did, and many people outside the church, as well. But the sense of a spiritual dimension was something essential for me.

Q: Why? Because it gives you hope in a time of fear?

A: I think so. Not fear so much as just devastation. [It gives you] some kind of hope — yes.

Q: Tell me about your life now.

A: I felt that my world had been completely shattered and devastated, as it was. My late husband and I had adopted two children, one of whom was three months old at the time. The other was two-and-a half. I couldn’t ever imagine having a life again. And I find it amazing, 15 years later, to be remarried to somebody who had also been widowed and suffered a devastating loss and to have three more children included in our family, his wonderful sons. Both of us learned how to go on. Both of us learned that we could remember the ones that we loved very much, still, and also include new families and new joy in our lives.

Q: You have said, “When you go through terrible tragedy, you have a choice. You can either live as a victim or a hero.”

A: I don’t feel much like a hero. I just think anyone who can survive it is about as heroic as you get.

Q: Did the Gospel of Thomas always resonate with you?

A: From the time I began to read the Gospel of Thomas, I was expecting it to be abominable, blasphemous heresy. That’s what I was told. One of my teachers said to me recently, “We just thought the Gospel of Thomas was weird.” So when I started to read it, I expected to find it to be weird. In fact, I find it very moving and spiritually resonant.

I also thought that it would be contrary to the gospels of the New Testament. What I now see is that it’s not necessarily contrary, it’s complementary. And it can open up new vistas on that tradition.

Q: Do we know from these texts whether women played a much larger role in Christianity than one would think?

A: In the Gospel of Mary, for example, Mary Magdalene appears not as a prostitute but as a disciple — not only a disciple, but a special disciple who was entrusted with particularly deep understandings of the teachings of Jesus, as the Gospel of Thomas suggests about Thomas. In some of these other Gospels, we find women in very different positions, with very different kinds of respect — as disciples, as apostles, as teachers — than you find in the Gospels of the New Testament.

Q: In fact, some of the early Christian churches were led by women?

A: Yes, many of them were. But women were not allowed positions of formal authority after the second century in orthodox churches.

Q: What would have been the effect if we had looked at Jesus in the way Thomas did?

A: If the Gospel of Thomas had survived within the tradition, we would have had just simply a greater range of understandings of Jesus. One could see him as a sacrifice for sin. One could see him as a teacher of righteousness, a teacher of love for the other and love for God. And one could also see him as a manifestation of what is potential in everyone.

Q: Did the early church fathers suppress information in order to tailor an orthodox institution in their own narrow, patriarchal way?

A: That is certainly a possible interpretation of it. I think there was much more at stake. I would say that in the early Christian movement, many different groups claimed to have the best possible understanding of Jesus. And one of those groups which was widely consolidated and widely spread prevailed over the others. You can give it that kind of very negative read, and some of us may agree about that. But they were, from their point of view, trying to salvage the church as they saw it.

Q: Why was the church afraid of the Gnostic Gospels?

A: The people who disliked these other Gospels included leaders such as Bishop Athanasius, who was very much concerned about establishing his authority over all the monks in Egypt.

Q: And who ordered them burned?

A: Right. These books were treasured in one of the oldest monasteries in Egypt by monks who saw them as guides to spiritual development. There are monks today who see them that way, as well. But the bishop, who wanted authority consolidated in himself, told them, “Get rid of all those books. You don’t need all those books. All you need are the ones that I will mention now.” He mentions a list, which is our first list of the 27 books of the New Testament. He told them, “Get rid of your library, and just keep these.”

Q: Do you think that belief in Jesus as God has been overemphasized in Christianity?

A: I think it has. Christianity as we know it is almost defined as belief in Jesus as God. What we lose when we see it that way [are] many other perspectives. The Gospel of Mark doesn’t picture Jesus as God. The Gospel of Matthew doesn’t picture Jesus as God. Matthew pictures Jesus as a rabbi, as a new Moses who teaches the divine Torah — “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says to people, “Do not call me good. There’s only one who is good, and that is God.” The Gospel of Matthew does not suggest that Jesus is in any way God. It is a much more traditionally Jewish book which speaks about love of God and love of the neighbor as the essential devotion of any person.

Q: Why do you think your books resonate so with the public? Why is a book about religion on the best-seller list?

A: For many people the sense of a spiritual dimension in our lives is really essential, but it’s a kind of unspoken need in many people who have left Christianity behind, or left whatever religious tradition with which they grew up behind, because they think of it as childish, as delusional, as sentimental. They don’t acknowledge that this, in fact, is a very deep part of our nature. They also are taught that you can’t think about religion, that there’s something antireligious in exploring, in thinking, in discussing — as though that were somehow an act of faithlessness. This book [BEYOND BELIEF] and this kind of work are an invitation to explore it from many different perspectives.

Q: Can you doubt or even reject certain canonical teachings and still be religious?

A: It seems to me that if we think that to be a participant in a Christian church you have to believe a whole set of teachings, say, in the creed, before you can even participate in worship, this is a great loss. If one has to swallow the whole tradition as taught by this person or that person, one can often find it completely indigestible. What many people do is simply leave it all behind, instead of doing what Christians have always done in every denomination, which is choose what they find they have the most affinity with and what speaks to their deepest understanding, leaving aside other things.

Christians have been taught, you’re not supposed to pick and choose. Picking and choosing is called “heresy.” The word “heresy” means “choice.” And heresy — that is, choosing — has been considered a terrible thing for Christians to do. I don’t agree with that, as you can tell.

Q: Do most people want a rigid set of beliefs to cling to?

A: I don’t think it’s necessary. Most people think that if you’re talking about religion, you are talking about what you believe. It’s not all about what you believe. It’s about what values we share. It’s about what commitments we have to the sacredness of life, for example. There’s much else that’s wider and deeper in this tradition than a particular set of beliefs on which Christians in different denominations would disagree.

Q: Some say that you smack of New Age religiosity.

A: People have said that this sounds like a New Age kind of teaching, and that I find kind of humorous. I mean, if 2,000 years is “new,” then I suppose it is.

Q: You’ve said that spiritual exploration takes many forms. What do you mean by that?

A: Look at Christian tradition today that extends from Pentecostal, Baptist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Serbian, Coptic, Ethiopic churches — churches all over the world of every kind. There’s a huge range of them. It’s often been the tradition of various churches to say, “This is the only true church, and all the others are heretics.” Do we still believe that?

Q: What about the notion that the Holy Spirit guided the selection of the Gospels, and so it’s right?

A: I was taught that the religious understanding of the history of Christianity is that the Holy Spirit guides the church, and that’s why it follows the “true” path. That may work for people who are staying within a theological framework. I couldn’t help asking the question, “But what actually happened on a human level?” And there I find that, besides the Holy Spirit, there is a great deal of political, social, and religious controversy that is unacknowledged unless you begin to look at the historical picture in a more realistic way.

Q: Do the Christian creeds exclude mysticism?

A: The creeds do not explicitly exclude mysticism, but mystics within Christian tradition have to walk very carefully to say, “Yes, I may have a relationship with God, but I am a miserable human, and God, of course, is a divine being.” You read how Teresa of Avila abases herself — or any of the mystics — because they want to avoid what is heresy. Heresy in Christian tradition, and also in some Jewish and Muslim traditions, has to do with speaking of yourself and God as if they were on some kind of continuum, instead of opposites. And yet, that is the language that mystics have instinctively spoken. That is the language you find in the Gospel of Thomas.

Q: BEYOND BELIEF, the title of your book — what does that mean?

A: To me, it meant that there is a great deal in Christian tradition which goes beyond the simple question of what you believe and what you don’t believe. There’s worship, there is community, there are shared values, there’s spiritual discovery.

Q: You’ve said that demonization is one of the plagues of religious tradition.

A: When I was working on a book on Satan, I realized that there are very dark and potentially evil sides to religious tradition, including Christian tradition. In the tradition that I know best, demonizing other people and claiming that they are “agents of the devil” has, in the history of Christianity, allowed for terrible violence in the name of religion, in the name of God’s truth. That, of course, is not exclusive to Christianity.

Q: Should Christianity be understood as a set system of beliefs or an ongoing search for the spiritual? And are they mutually exclusive?

A: I think one can see both. Certainly there are sets of beliefs that are part of any religious tradition. Is that all? Well, one can say, “No, that’s not all.” There is also spiritual inquiry. In the early Christian movement, these seemed to be completely compatible. It’s only in the third and fourth century that some leaders of the church tried to separate the two and say, “No. You must take these beliefs and no more exploration.” They’ve always been compatible for many people within Christian tradition. For saints of the church, it’s always been understood that you don’t simply stop with certain beliefs, but you keep on exploring. And that exploration can lead to new discoveries.

Q: How do people usually react to your work?

A: The response to this kind of work is usually very visceral and powerful. It’s often deep, and it’s been overwhelmingly positive. There are people who are genuinely outraged and shaken by this kind of exploration, either because it’s unfamiliar or because they think it’s faithless or antithetical and damaging to God’s truth. I’m not one of those people.

Q: What attracted you to studying and teaching religion?

A: I just realized that there was something very powerful about Christian tradition, about religious tradition, and I wanted to understand something about how it moves us so much, how it becomes so compelling, why it is still an enormously powerful force in our lives.

Q: You try very hard not to personalize any of this and not to use words like “suppress.”

A: I’m trying not to use polemical language. After I wrote THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS, I realized that the perspective was particularly Protestant. It was rooting for the underdog — in this case the heretics — against the authorities in the church and the bishops and the hierarchy. Now I realize that’s a little oversimplified. To write history well, one has to be on both sides of a controversy. You could write the history of the Civil War, but if you’re only on one side, it’s not going to be a very powerful story. In this work, I’m really trying to engage the controversy as fully as I can.

Q: It’s interesting that the victor always writes the history. And in this case, for 1,600 years the vanquished were hidden.

A: That’s right. And for 1,600 years, the books were gone, so we were told that heretics say blasphemous and terrible things, but we never knew what they said. This is really our first opportunity to look at a whole library of writings that were called “heretical” and see the enormous range and diversity of what Christians were doing in the first few centuries. We are rewriting the history of Christianity.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Even more than five weeks later, America remains deeply shaken by the events of September 11th — no more so than in New York, where, as one psychotherapist put it, “Everyone who lived through this is at some level operating as a trauma survivor.” We talked with three religious New Yorkers to see how they were affected. Our correspondent Betty Rollin reports.

BETTY ROLLIN: Helen Cha-Pyo, a United Methodist, is the associate music director at New York’s Riverside Church. These days she’s conducting an opera at the church with her usual vigor. Six weeks ago, she says, she could hardly get herself to move.

HELEN CHA-PYO: For the first time in a long time in my life, I felt like I couldn’t do anything, except for taking care of my son; everything was irrelevant.

ROLLIN: Helen feels her music has been a great source of comfort to her, as it has been to others.

MS. CHA-PYO: It was also a way for me to connect to God; the way God created me, my given talent, what I do best is music.

ROLLIN: Some people who suffer feel closer to God; some, more distant. For Helen, September 11th forced her to ask how a Christian could love even a terrorist.

MS. CHA-PYO: For me, the center of Jesus’ teaching is about love; the one I struggle the most [with] and I want to live by every day is love your neighbor as yourself, love your enemies as yourself.

JOAN KAVANAUGH (on phone): I’m going to see you on Monday.

ROLLIN: Joan Kavanaugh is both a minister and a psychotherapist who does counseling at the Riverside Church.

MS. KAVANAUGH: When this first happened, there was a kind of natural numbing effect and a lot of people sat around in their own apartments hiding out for days and we’re really beginning to see a lot more people calling in now. Maybe they haven’t lost anybody or didn’t know anyone in particular, but they feel deeply identified with everything that has happened and they’re thrown.

ROLLIN: Have you run across anyone whose faith has been shaken by this?

MS. KAVANAUGH: Absolutely. For anyone whose belief in God was based on a protective view of God, if you are a good person and you pray and you feel connected to God, do the right things, then that God will protect you. Then what does that imply? What kind of God was there for all the 5,000 who were killed that day? So people have to overcome their idea of God as the protector, who protects us in life, and move more to a level where they are understanding that we have a God who is with us in terrible things but who does not protect us.

ROLLIN: So what you are describing is a kind of religious maturity?

MS. KAVANAUGH: That it has to be a journey and a deepening maturity of your religious faith.

ROLLIN: Along with hundreds of other Jewish New Yorkers, Anne Mintz observed the month anniversary of September 11th at a special memorial service. Jews traditionally mark the one month anniversary of a death.

Coincidentally, one week after the attack, the Jewish high holidays began — for Anne, a well-timed source of comfort and community.

MS. MINTZ: There is a lot of liturgy that talks about the fragility of life and who shall live and who shall die, and it was right there and available to us in the synagogue.

It connected me to something that was much larger than me, that made me feel part of a community. I didn’t have to make a phone call to have all these people I knew be at the same place at the same time, to feel the way I was feeling.

ROLLIN: New York has the largest Muslim population in America. Muslim organizations were quick to condemn the terrorism, and Muslims here have been as traumatized as anyone else, but they’ve had the additional fear of being targeted by their fellow Americans.

Hence a constant police presence at this mosque.

MR. NAEEM BAIG: There was a guy who spat at my sister while she was stopped at the gas station and passed on racial slurs.

ROLLIN: Naeem Baig, a Muslim originally from Pakistan, is mourning those who died and worrying for his religion.

MR. BAIG: I felt whatever we gained in the last 10 years in America, the Muslim community, we lost on that day.

ROLLIN: Naeem’s own faith in Allah is unshaken.

MR. BAIG: Everything and anything which happens in the world cannot happen without the permission of the Almighty God.

ROLLIN: But Naeem is aware of the obvious question: How could Allah have allowed this to happen?

MR. BAIG: How can Almighty God, merciful, let that happen to innocent people?

ROLLIN: What is the answer?

MR. BAIG: The answer is that through these tragedies, Almighty God is giving us lessons, is judging us, how we are going to behave.

ROLLIN: Has any good come from these horrific events? Joan Kavanaugh thinks so.

MS. KAVANAUGH: When you come up against death, you also come up against the preciousness of life, and one of the most meaningful things for me is the injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy where God says, “Place before you life and death — therefore, choose life.” And that’s what we all have to figure out how to do.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Betty Rollin in New York.

Credits:
Zamir Chorale, directed by Matthew Lazar
Debbie Friedman, who sang the Jewish healing prayer “Mi She-Berach”