Q: Why was it important to you to tell Mattie’s story now?

There were a couple of reasons. One is Mattie’s been gone for five years now, and in those five years more and more good things have come from his life. We have parks and libraries and school curriculum, school curricula growing, the Just Peace Summit where teens come from all over the world to study his message, and I thought, people are so inspired by Mattie’s writings, by Mattie’s message of hope and peace, I thought it mattered that people know who was the child behind that message, that people know the details of Mattie’s life story, particularly because Mattie believed that he was a messenger, that that was his reason for being. and I knew that if something happened to me, nobody would ever know the truth of Mattie’s story. So that was one goal, was to really lay down the details of Mattie’s life. The other reason that I wanted to tell Mattie’s story is people very often come to me and they say, “I’m so inspired. How could I ever be like this child?” And what I wanted people to know is that he was really an ordinary little boy who made extraordinary choices and that each of us can make those same choices, that each of us can live an extraordinary life regardless of the blessings and burdens that are balanced into each day. And I thought that that mattered to share with people so they could identify with Mattie and—you can’t be Mattie, you can’t raise your child to be Mattie, we can’t ever be another human being, but we can use other human beings as our role models, and I wanted to show how plain and simple my son was. He was as witty as he was wise.

Q: You write in the book about how he really did feel that he was a messenger. In what way? How did he feel that? He really felt it came from God.

Mattie first started telling me when he was about three or four years old that God put messages in his heart, and that his reason for being, that God’s role, God’s plan for him was that he was good with words and that he was to shape words around God’s messages and offer them to other people so that they would hear God’s message as well. Now when your three- and four-year-old says this, I thought it was very sweet, I thought he had some nice things to say, but I couldn’t understand—I didn’t really understand about what he was trying to tell me about God putting messages in his heart, and when he hit about four years old, he began doing things like, in the middle of playing, he would drop to his knees, meditate for two minutes, 10 minutes, and then stand up and say, “I need to write this down. I have a message from God, and I need to put words to it.” 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? High pitched, low pitched?” I didn’t understand what he was saying, 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, and my job is to give words, to give voice to God’s message.” Mattie spent his entire life saying things like this, and I spoke with priests and rabbis and ministers about this, and I have to admit I don’t think I ever, during his lifetime, fully understood his role as a messenger. I believe he believed that he was a messenger for God. I believed that what he was saying and doing was all good.  I could not understand how you could actually hear God’s voice in your heart and use your own words and voice to offer a message to others. I think it’s been more since he died, and the ongoing letters and emails and calls that I get from people who tell me that they remember Mattie from when he was alive, or they’re just learning about Mattie now, and how he continues to inspire them—that is almost like they’re getting a message from God. And I think I’m now beginning to understand that he really—his spirituality and morality were really intertwined, that he did hear messages from God, not in a voice, not in some delusion, but that he was truly inspired with something good, which is God.

Q: What were some of those messages? For people who aren’t familiar with him and his poems, how do you distill the messages?

I think the messages that Mattie offered us from God really fell into two categories, and one could easily be summed up as hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy, and he has poem after poem, essay after essay, speech after speech where he discusses, or shares in a literary form, how those look. You know, why hope is real, why it’s not just wearing rose colored glasses or being in denial or turning your head to the truth, that hope begins with an attitude and an attitude is a choice. So I think that’s really one part of the message is all about hope and peace and life, regardless of challenges or the joys in somebody’s life. And then the other side, the other flow of messages that he talked about as coming from God, was what he started calling “heart songs” when he was about 5 years old, and trying to help people understand that we all have a reason for being. Just like you read, or hear, in church God’s plan—Mattie called it our reason for being, our heart song. And 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 taught 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. That doesn’t mean you become rich in money. It doesn’t mean you get miracle after miracle and you live longer. It doesn’t mean that your life is peachy because you’re doing good things, but it means that if you’re open to God being a part of your life, if you can understand your reason for being and offer that to other people, it will come back to you. [It] took me a long time to understand that as well, and I finally came to understand that what he meant by heart song—he told me once when he was about 12 years old, because I said I don’t know what my heart song is, I really, I don’t know my heart song. And he said, “What do you need? What do you want most in life? What do you ache for? What would you do anything to have in your life?” He said that’s the first part of your heart song, because you know why it matters. You’re close to it. If you need money, if you need love, if you need happiness, if you need to be known, you understand why that matters. Your reason for being is to offer that to others. And what Mattie needed and wanted was happiness and love that lead to hope and peace. So he gave that freely to other people through his writings, through his speeches, and in giving other people these messages of hope and peace, that came back to him, and I began to understand that—that is God’s plan for us, to be fully who we were created to be. And what we need we offer it to others, because we get why that matters.

Q: And that’s a spiritual ministry? I think people hear some of the poems and miss the spiritual dimension that seems to be the foundation.

Yes. Now not every poem that he wrote had a spiritual dimension. Some were just pure fun. Some were—people would often ask him to write poetry for an organization or for a specific cause. But the bulk of his poetry, if you really read it carefully, there is a message of hope, of peace, of life, of offering, of finding what’s at your core. When he—I mean one of the most depressing poems I think he ever wrote is called “Abyss,” and it’s when he began really wondering, is my life ending? Am I going to get another miracle? When is my mortality going to end? And he really wasn’t looking forward to death, and he just really felt that he was in a dark space. But in writing about this so people go, “Yeah, I understand and I feel like this,” he said when you’re in this abyss, all you have to do is look up and realize even if you’re at the bottom, there’s the light. You just have to choose what you look at, choose your vision, and once you see it you climb right out. So even when he was struggling, he still would find some way to find inspiration or offer inspiration to other people by identifying with other people’s challenges or sharing his own so that other people could identify with him.

Q: What do you hear from people? You still get letters and emails. What kinds of things do people say, even today?

I get a lot of letters from school children who didn’t think they liked poetry until they started reading Mattie’s material, and then they realized poetry is not something beyond them, it’s not something way intellectual and that you can’t understand, that it’s shaping words in a special way on a page and carefully choosing each word so that it matters. I would say the bulk of what I get is where people say this is how my life has changed because of Mattie, because of what I’ve read, because I saw him on TV, because a friend gave me one of his books. Right now there’s History Associates, a local archive company. They’ve taken 50 boxes from my basement of fan mail and publicity information about Mattie, and they met with me a couple of weeks ago, and they said, “We’ve really tried to sort it, because everybody says they’re inspired.” So they’re trying to say I’m inspired to be a better person, I’m inspired to pray, I’m inspired to be a better parent, I’m inspired to think gentler, to be less judging. They’re trying to now categorize what that inspiration looks like or feels like to different people. I also, especially since it’s been 5 years since he died, get lots, or a fair number, of letters and emails from people who ask questions like when is Mattie going to have a committee for sainthood? What is the prayer I can pray for Mattie, for his cause? I’ve had a dozen or so people ask me for relics. And I go back and I tell people there’s been talk, but there is no formal committee. That doesn’t even begin until year five. But I even get, after he died I got mail from people all over the world that was addressed to “Mattie—Child Poet of America.” Or “St. Mattie—First Child Saint of America,” no other address, and these things would just end up in my mail box which, was very—I mean that’s an overwhelming—it’s beautiful, but the responsibility for me, when I sit back and think my son not only touched lives when he was alive, but since he died, he is continuing to touch lives, to inspire people. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world to have somebody write to you.…

Q: What’s that like as a mother, to know people think your child is a saint?

Well, I’m really careful with that because, one, he’s not recognized as a saint. I mean, if you take a saint as an ordinary person who lived an extraordinary life of holiness and called others to be their best self, absolutely my son is a saint, though not recognized. There are many, many people who are saints though not recognized, and yes, I do hope that one day there is an investigation for his cause, not because that would make me proud, because I think my son could continue being a source of intercession and inspiration for the world, which—that happens more when people are aware of him. So yes, for that reason, I think it would be lovely. But, you know, when I step back and think of me as Mattie’s mom, well, I was the one who would say, “Mattie is your bed made?” And he would say, “Does it look made?” It’s like, well, that wasn’t the question. I was the one that would have to answer his questions of, “If I’m going to be a writer and peacemaker, why do I need trigonometry and chemistry courses?” I saw the little boy, the human side, the child who cried when his feelings were hurt, who was scared of certain things. So I think that’s a blessing for me that I saw the full spectrum of my son. But the responsibility that I feel and the privilege that I feel to think that my son is touching people and touching lives long after my lifetime, long after this generation’s lifetime, is a profound thought that is very humbling, very, very humbling to sit back and think as rough as my life is I would never will or wish my life on anyone else in the world, but how grateful I am that I was chosen to be this child’s mother, that that was part of my reason to be. What a beautiful gift that was that I got to be Mattie’s mom, including the unmade bed. I’m just thrilled about that.

Q: What is that responsibility that you feel?

I think the responsibility is to—part of that was the reason I chose to write this book. 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. So I think the responsibility is for me to share as much information as I can about my son, about his life, so that people do know that he was real. They do know that living a good life doesn’t mean living a perfect life. It means always having God being a part of your life, always, if you have one of those dark moments, that you know instead of saying well, okay, I’m down, I might as well stay here. You pick yourself up, you choose to get out of bed another day. I think it’s my responsibility to offer that information to other people which was kind of hard for me, because I’m more of a private person. Mattie’s an extrovert. I mean he just loved sharing anything and everything with crowds. I’m a little more private, and it was a little more difficult to go out in public to share all the details of our life, but I think when the details of your life can inspire people to find hope when they’re really struggling, or to realize,  you know what, I am doing a good job parenting, or despite my burdens I have blessings—whatever the inspiration is that you draw for yourself, for you family, for your coworkers in whatever you’re doing, I feel like it’s my responsibility and my privilege, they’re hand in hand, to share that message—my story, Mattie’s story—and to share those details in a way that brings people closer to him in a very real way—not in a little guru way, but in a very real way.

Q: How has your faith changed in the last five years? How has everything that happened affected your spiritual journey?

I don’t know that my faith has changed dramatically in the last five years. I can say that my faith has grown dramatically across the 20 years that I had with my children, and it’s continued to grow on that spectrum since I’ve buried my fourth and only surviving child, which was Mattie. I think one of the greatest changes I had in faith came during Mattie’s final months. 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 and your to-do list, it’s asking God to be on my to-do list for the day. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day, so that really started before Mattie died. Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I think about a year and half after he died, you know, people think if you get through that first year it’s all going to be okay, you get through that first year, and everybody’s there for the first anniversary, because everybody remembers Mattie died. Even my first three children, people are there for the first Christmas, the first birthday, the first anniversary. But then people go back to their everyday life, they go back to their norms, and I can never go back to my everyday life. I can’t go back to my norms because my norm was parenting my children. And it’s not that your life ends, but there’s this dramatic shift. Your path is no longer—you’re still going to end up at the same end point in your life, but you’re taking a totally unplanned path. You’re really starting all over again. 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. And I think that’s one of the gifts from God, is that God is present in other people, in my kin family, in my friends. So as sad as some days are, and as much as I miss my children, I really work hard to open my spirit to God’s presence through other people, because I believe my children are with God. I don’t believe that heaven is some place up in the sky, up in a cloud. When people say, oh, Mattie’s right up there, I don’t see that. I see Mattie as right up here. I see spirit and heaven as being wherever there’s goodness, and if that goodness is in a space or in nature or in other people, that goodness is God, and my children are with God. So, you know, I seek to feel what I am looking for, a connection through heaven and goodness, through whatever I can find in the world that’s good.  I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but that’s where I am. I’m more praying that God just shows me doors and windows, because I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to be doing in life other than doing good, being my best self. So I ask God to help me recognize any opportunities to do that.

Q: You have an incredible support network. You have some really close people who’ve walked with you from the very beginning. Talk a little more about the role those people have played in your life.

I think if you were to stop and think about the details of Mattie’s life and my life, you think, okay, there’s been financial problems. There’s been a divorce. There’s been four children with disabilities who’ve died. I have a disability that’s progressing every year. You think about those details, and you think, wow, what a horrible life. And since all of my children have died you would look at me and think I’m very much alone. And in all honesty, there are times when I feel alone, because I love my children and miss them. I will never stop mourning the loss of my children, but I also don’t go through each day miserable, because Mattie and I have always had people around us that bring light to our life. In the book you learn more about what Mattie called our “kin family,” and he said you’re related to kin through life, not necessarily blood. It may or may not be blood. But he said blood relations can sometimes be sweet or sour, and kin relations are through life, and life is always good. So Sandy Newcomb is more like a sister to me than a friend, and her three children, who are now adults, two of them with their own children now, they’re like family to me. They’re my kin, and we celebrate holidays and, you know, when one person’s sad we’re all sad, and when one person’s having a moment of joy we all feel joy. I do talk about in the book at one point Mattie asked Sandy, why do you always do such good things for my mom and me? And when Mattie asked her this question he had been in the ICU for about 5 months. At the time Sandy still had two children living at home. She was working two jobs. She herself is divorced and a single parent, and yet she came to the hospital at least three days a week and would spend most of the night there with Mattie so that I could go in the waiting room and take a little break. And she said because that’s all that God asks us to do is to do good for others, to love your neighbor. And she told Mattie that your neighbor is whoever God puts in the path of your life, and if we just all reorganize that and do what we can in the moments that we can, life goes on. Mattie and I have often prayed in gratitude that we have people like that in our lives, that we have such an incredible circle of support. I mean, I’m in two different churches. I’m a Roman Catholic, I love Catholicism. I love the Holy Eucharist. Sandy is Presbyterian. I go with her to her church as well, where I find the most wonderful fellowship, the group of people that are there, just—there are good people everywhere. You just have to be open to that.

Q: You’ve mentioned your speech about not looking at life as how long you live, but how you live. Tell me about that.

One of the speeches that I give is called “Our Dash in Time.” I first heard it in the Presbyterian church from a minister who was talking about the difference between chronos and kairos. Chronos is really a two-dimensional look. It’s a measurement of life in seconds and centuries, whereas your kairos isn’t just seconds and centuries, it’s looking at the depth of the time that you live. So you can look at Mattie’s life, and the dash that marks 1990 to 2004 was not quite 14 years, and you think, what could somebody do in less that 14 years? But because of how Mattie chose to live, because of the kairos of Mattie’s life, the depth of his time, my gosh, I mean he lived an incredibly full life—not just with opportunities to do things, but with how he thought, how he chose to treasure a sunrise, a sunset, a baby holding his finger, I mean, just taking little tiny moments and cherishing them and making them that memorable, that celebrated, and inspiring others to do the same. Not that we don’t want many, many moments in our life; everybody wants to have as many heartbeats as they can. But it really is the measurement of your heart songs, or the depth of your life, that is how we’re going to be remembered. So Mattie, in less than 14 years, is remembered with this powerful legacy, and people smile when they hear his name. It’s sad that he’s gone, and people shake their head at that. But anybody that you say the word “Mattie” to that knows who he is. They smile. That’s powerful. That’s how I want to be remembered, with a smile, not as, oh, that poor woman, she buried her four children, but, wow, that poor woman, she buried her four children, but boy did she love life, and boy those kids were sure happy. I want to be remembered as a smile on people’s faces just like Mattie, and that comes from how you life your life, not how long you live your life.

Q: How are you feeling these days?

Health-wise I have a progressive condition, which is very frustrating. Mattie and I are very resilient, optimistic people. When you have a disease that’s constantly changing, getting worse, you can’t ever just get used to it. You know, we moved into this house a little over three years ago, set it up accessible, and everything was right where I could reach it. Oh, my goodness, a year later, it’s like, well, I can’t reach this anymore, I can’t reach this, so you change things.  It’s like, every year, you don’t notice it day to day, but when you go to decorate your Christmas tree or when you go back to the same place, you go to the beach every summer, and you suddenly realize I can’t lift my arm high enough to do this, I can’t transfer independently, you know, out of my wheelchair, I can’t decorate even the closest branch on my Christmas tree anymore. That’s not a lot of fun. Losing the ability to drive, you know, I feel like as I hit middle age, where you have the opportunity to really synthesize academic knowledge and experiential knowledge and spiritual knowledge, and you’re hitting a point where you just feel so blessed with it’s beginning to come together, you actually can do less and less and less physically, and you become dependent on other people, and that’s been really hard for me. And medically I’ve hit a few scares in the last year, with, like, cardiac-type things. It’s kind of scary, but I try as hard as I can to live in each moment and to not think about what’s going to happen. You have to think about what’s going to happen tomorrow, but you can’t focus on that. You have to have a vision for it but not get lost dwelling on it, in the same way with the past you can’t look at the past and get stuck in it in a way that you can’t move forward, and you can’t look at the future and what might happen tomorrow in such a way that you’re afraid to enter it. So I think that’s what Mattie meant with hope. You don’t live in denial, you don’t say the past didn’t happen and the future’s not going to bring its challenges, but you move through it the best you can and have a good attitude. You reflect the moment in a way that God’s there with you.

Q: For a lot of people it’s about control—what you can control and what you can’t.

I’m all about control. I’m an OCD, love control, absolutely, and it’s hard giving that up, you know, and it’s little things, you know. I like cleaning my own house. I like folding my own laundry because I fold in thirds. I’ve learned compulsive people fold in thirds. But now it’s I’m so grateful for anybody that does my laundry I don’t care if it’s folded in quarters or halves or thirds or fifths. I’m happy that people are doing it. But it’s really hard letting go of that control. 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.

Q: What are you doing professionally these days?

I would say I’m an advocate and a consultant, a motivational speaker. I love writing, speaking, doing research, and the fields that I work with range from education, health care and family-centered care collaboration, but also peace and hope. I do a lot of mentoring of teenagers around the world who want to understand, how is peace possible? And I help people understand Mattie’s premises. Mattie called it the three choices for peace. What are these choices, how can we embrace them—that peace is not just an absence of violence, peace is also a conversation with people you don’t know or don’t understand. Peace is taking care of the earth. Just helping people understand how basic needs, equitably meeting basic needs of people, leads to peace. So my speeches are everything from how to work with families whose children might be dying to why does it matter that people feel happiness, hope, and have food and water and education? How does that lead to peace? And I love the work that I do.

Q: And the Mattie J.T. Stepanek Foundation?

After Mattie died, people that are in my neighborhood, in the city of Rockville [Maryland] in the King Farm community, they said Mattie’s message is not one that we want to get lost with the fact that he died barely a teenager. Had Mattie been [in his] 30s or 40s when he died, there’s a chance that he would have had an automatic place in history, and there were people who knew Mattie as a person, and part of the reason that I said I wrote this book—that  he wasn’t a guru, he was witty and wise, he was very real. So people who were his neighbors said we need to make sure people understand who Mattie was, what was his message. So they started the Mattie Stepanek Foundation, and really the mission of our foundation is to make Mattie’s message available and accessible, accessible meaning understandable. So we are working on curriculum guides so that teachers who want to incorporate peace or poetry or character development into preschool, into high school, into a university course, that there’s different worksheets or presentations, videos that they could rely on to introduce anything from “Heartsongs” to the three choices for peace to their students, and there are actually schools around the country who are already doing this type of work, and we’re trying to help incorporate what they’re doing with what we are doing. But it’s really just keeping that message of hope and peace out there and alive, and I think what we believe the foundation is, is that Mattie’s message is not unique. He offered us the universal message, you know: Give and you shall receive. Mattie’s life was unique. Mattie’s experiences were unique. Mattie’s choices as a young child were unique. So as a messenger he’s very powerful, you know. People listen when they hear Mattie’s words either on a page or on TV or even in the park named after him, the sound bites you can listen to. So because of that the message is the same thing other people say, but as a messenger he’s very unique, and people are drawn to him for any number of reasons. So it’s to keep that available for people, and I’m proud to be the eternal chair of this foundation.

Q: Other people say they have sensed Mattie. Have you?

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. I have gotten messages; some of the messages I think are very profound and very believable. Some I think are people who want to feel something good. I personally have not felt my son, I would love to feel him, but I think if—I think my son, if he is speaking into people’s hearts or spirits, if he is interceding in people’s lives, and people recognize it…things like that are very powerful for me to hear, 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. I would be trapped, thinking OK, if he could do it once, this must be the magic portal. I’m going to stay right here, and I find that the people who tell me they have received some message from Mattie are ones that are able to move on after that. Those are the ones I believe more….

Before Mattie died, in the final week of his life, I mean, Mattie knew he was dying and I did, too. But a parent can never, ever just say, OK, it’s time, you can go. I mean, that’s a really tough thing, even as your child is dying in front of your eyes and your heart. You can’t give them permission. You can’t be OK with it. You can give them permission, but you can’t really be OK because that goes against everything that parenting is. It’s not okay to bury a child, it’s not OK. No matter how good a life that child lived, no matter how graceful the death is, the death of a child—nothing makes it right. So Mattie was clearly ready to go but wanted me to be, he wanted me to let him know that I’d be OK, and he had said things that he had said to other people before: you can’t lie down in the ashes of another person’s life. He had said all kinds of profound things: Take my message forward. Your message, my message are so similar, Mom, be a messenger for me. You know, take the torch, give more light to your own message, beautiful things. I think the thought that was most meaningful, and if I ever write about my life story about grief—because this book is not my story, it’s Mattie’s story. It’s not my story of loss. It’s his story of life—if I ever wrote my own story it would be called “Choosing to Inhale,” because that was the challenge my son gave me. 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. Once I’ve made that choice to move forward, to move with God, to be a messenger, to give a speech, to write a book, to serve as a consultant, all the different things I do, I have to choose that, because the easiest thing to do would be to lay in bed until it’s my time to be with my son again. But he challenged me to make life more than breathing. Choose to inhale.

I had four children in a four-and-a-half year time span, which makes me a very firm, good Irish Catholic woman, which is what I am. But 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, had no clue—and it was clear something was wrong with the children, but they were misdiagnosed, and with the misdiagnoses came the misprognoses of recurrence. So I thought the first one was a fluke of nature, the second one was recessive, you know, they told me the third one would be healthy. Mattie’s my fourth. I had, I mean, I was doing, practicing many ways not to have a fourth. He was clearly a spirit meant to be, not an accident, a spirit meant to be. So yes, by the time Mattie was born I had already buried two children and had a third that was going to die from the same condition, and I knew that Mattie, short of a miracle, was going to have this mystery ailment that afflicted my children. We found out when Mattie was two what was wrong with me, and that’s when they went back and backtracked and figured out what was wrong with the kids, and I had no more children after that. What kept me going through all of that—while one of my children was alive, what keeps you going is very different than what keeps me going now. When your child’s alive, your number one focus is keep that child alive, and if the child’s not in an active medical crisis, then make that child know life is good despite the equipment, despite the ventilator, the trach, the needles, being in the hospital. Why would you want to celebrate life? Why would you want to live longer?  So how I coped during the bulk of the 20 years when I had my children was by teaching them that life is a celebration….I gave my children a celebration of life in whatever few months or years they had. 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. You can’t give them your grief just because you miss their sibling. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role? It’s really difficult to be a mommy to children who have died. You know, bringing flowers to their grave, cutting the grass around their marker, that’s—it’s a very unnatural role, but you don’t suddenly not feel like you’re a mommy any more. You want to nurture, you want to take care of things, and you want to teach somebody to celebrate life. So while my children were alive, clearly I coped, you know, through religion, through faith, through spirituality, but also I had my children. That was my celebration. It’s a very different thing once there is no child there, and you really are relying on God, your spirituality, and the kin family of support that’s around you to help you choose to inhale everyday.

Mattie knew his entire life that he had a condition that could lead to early death, that he had a life-threatening condition. When he was 10 years old, he realized that that possibility of an early death was becoming more of a probability. We really thought he was going to die before his 11th birthday.  We’re not quite sure how he eked out those last three years. We’re thrilled that he did. I think it was when Mattie was 13, it was the fall of 2003, Mattie had several conversations with me where he said, “God’s no longer giving me messages. God’s just walking with me through my life,” and at that point he realized his time on earth was complete and that he would probably die sometime during the coming year because he had fulfilled his reason to be. And he was not excited about that. He really wanted God to say you’ve done such a good job I’m going to give you five bonus years. I mean, he was not anxious to die. But I think he realized when he was 13, I’ve done what I came to do. I’ve done it well. There was a sense of urgency that he felt to get as much in place as possible that could go on after him. He called it his echo and his silhouette. You know, get as much writing down; get as many video tapes in so that things would last. So he always knew that he would die soon. I think at 13, I think on the day that he turned 13 he knew he was not going to turn 14. He was very clear. He tried to tell me spring of 2004 before he went into cardiac arrest. He kept trying to prepare me for what was about to come, and I couldn’t listen to him. I just—I couldn’t. I knew what he wanted to say, and I thought, if I listen to you I’m going to tell you, it’s almost like saying, OK, all right, and I couldn’t do it, and I feel very badly about that now. I feel like I didn’t—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. But I thought if I did that he’d think I’m saying, wow, this is really sad but it’s—you’re right. So I wouldn’t even let him talk to me about it. 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.

Q: Let me begin by inviting you to sum up, if you would, the central idea of The Future of Faith.

A: Let’s say it’s a tripartite thesis in this book. One is that the resurgence of religion around the world and the various religious traditions, which is unexpected, global—there were people who were predicting the marginalization and even disappearance of religion in my early years as a teacher. That disappearance, marginalization, didn’t happen, and in various religious traditions, almost all of them, there’s been a resurgence for complicated reasons. I do not think that is a mere transient phenomenon.  I think it’s a basic change in the nature of our civilization, that it will continue, and so, therefore, programs like this one probably have a future. You deal with religion and ethics. The second part of the thesis, however, is that fundamentalisms, I use the word in the plural, which have often been associated with this resurgence of religion, at least in the popular mind, are on the decline. I do not think that they’re going to last out much longer. It’s a recent phenomenon, began in the early 20th century and has appeared in various different religious traditions, always as a kind of a reaction against something that’s going on in that tradition. They claim to be very traditional, but they’re not. It’s really a modern movement, and I think there’s evidence that, in every one of the religions, they are on the decline. The third part of the thesis, and I think it’s one of the most important, not the central part, is that we’re seeing a change in what I call the nature of religiousness, that what it means to be a religious person, or frequently now people will say a spiritual person, they have some questions, occasionally, or often, about the word “religion.” We’re seeing a fundamental change there so that it means something now different than it did 50 or 100 years ago, to say nothing of 500 years ago. And that’s the main thesis of the book. It’s a a mixture of some of the things we’re talking about here as well as some autobiographical illustrations—my experience with liberation theologians, my experience with Pentecostals, with the Catholic Church, in fact with the present pope, and also my early years of formation in a Baptist evangelical congregation. I think it’s important when people are reading about issues as important as this that they know something about where I’m coming from when I’m saying these things and what life experiences have led me to make the kind of statements that I have here.

Q: So how is it changing? Tell me what the elements are of this new thing that you see.

A: For Christianity, in particular, to single it out among the various world religions, there’s a movement away from a more belief-and-doctrinal formulation of religion into a more experiential, practical, you might even say pragmatic understanding: How do I get through the day? How do I get through my life? What resources do I have—spiritual resources? There’s a very distinct move in that direction away, from hierarchical kinds of structures in religion toward a more egalitarian form of religious organization. I think the major evidence for that is the enormously new and important role that women are playing which they didn’t play 50 years ago, and there are other evidences for this egalitarian tendency.

Q: Let me take you back to the emphasis on faith and the movement of the spirit and the presence of the spirit in people’s lives, or the hope for it, and contrast that to 1,500 years in which beliefs and doctrines were primary.

A: I contend in this book that for roughly the first 300 years, early Christianity was a faith movement. They didn’t have creeds until the early fourth century, until Constantine. They didn’t have hierarchies. There was enormous variety of different expressions of Christianity which we’re now uncovering, with the different scrolls that are found, have been there all that time. Then, around the early fourth century, with Constantine in particular, there was a massive movement toward hierarchy, a clerical elite, and a creed. Now remember that the creed was insisted upon by the emperor. Not by the bishops, not by the pope. He wanted a creed so he had a uniform expression of Christianity as an imperial project. He wanted something that would bring the empire together. Now it didn’t work that well for him. Nonetheless, I think the creedal understanding, that is, the rather doctrinal and hierarchical understanding, goes back to that very, very unfortunate term under Constantine, which then set the pattern for the next centuries. Now we’re in a new phase in which that is no longer the case, a third phase.

Q: Define for me, if you would, just what are the principle components of this turn toward emphasis on faith?

A: I call it an age of the spirit, with the age of faith in those early years, and then the age of belief, and now this movement toward an age of the spirit, because the spirit indicates, at least in Christian history, the personal, communal, even subjective element as opposed to the hierarchical and doctrinal element in Christianity, and that’s where everything is moving, I think, clearly. The fastest growing movement in Christianity today is the Pentecostal charismatic expression of Christianity—vast variety of them. Nonetheless, what they have in common is an enormous emphasis on community and spirit and experience, and that’s drawing a lot of people away from these previous forms.

Q: Why do you think that is? I mean, why is there this emphasis on the spirit now, as opposed to creeds and beliefs?

A: Well, I think that, given the fact that we are often deprived, in modern technical society, of very much chance for deep, personal experience—we pass each other by in elevators—the yearning for some kind of personal experience, even the yearning for some kind of let’s call it an ecstatic encounter with God or with the divine is there, and the Pentecostals offer this, and they offer it in a community where people support and take care of each other, where there’s also healing. A lot of people are drawn in by the healing. So I think it combines elements that have an enormous appeal. It has no hierarchies. That’s why it branches out in so many different directions.

Q: But you have said that this is not just among Pentecostals, that this movement of the spirit, this emphasis on the spirit, is very broad.

A: It is very broad. I think in the mainline Protestant churches and the Catholic Church the emphasis on community and experience, and also the language of the spirit—and one of the favorite ways for women theologians and ministers now to refer to God is using the language of spirit, because the traditional language of the sovereign God and so on seems, and is, rather hierarchical and masculine.

Q: People have said when they’re referring to this experiential part of the heart it is often described as the heart versus the head—that for a religion to be healthy, it has to have both the spirit and some kind of structure, creeds, or beliefs, to hang all the rest of the feelings on.

A: I agree with that completely, and I think what we’re seeing now is a compensation for centuries in which the main emphasis was on doctrinal assent, hierarchical control suspicious of laity and lay movements, and now we’re seeing a kind of reaction to that, if you will, which inevitably is going to have to find some balance. I study the Pentecostal movement pretty carefully. The younger Pentecostals now are saying, “Hey, we ought to deal with the head a little bit here, too, you know,” some doctrinal or philosophical basis. So you’re noticing that, and they’ll work on that, as well. But what it is is really a complementary movement.

Q: I was particularly interested in your idea that the so-called apostolic succession after Jesus  wasn’t something that right back to his giving the keys of the kingdom to St. Peter, but it was something that was created by human beings some centuries later, and I’m wondering if you could describe how that happened and then tell me, particularly, how you think that affects the authority of the Catholic Church.

A: Well, I think the evidence is now in that the whole idea of apostolic authority, apostolic succession, came in much later, let’s say in the 200s and 300s, when Christianity was growing and people were looking around for some way to assert, especially the early bishops, their own authority, and you can see this emerging. The bishops would say, “Well, I go back to Matthew” or “I go back to Peter,” and they would even construct or write gospels and statements that were really—we would call them forgeries. They didn’t have that term in those days. And the interesting thing now is we’re beginning to find these things. You know, that whole stash of documents in Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Peter, and all those things, which are late. They’re not early. They’re not the apostles doing that. But it was an invention. It was an invention to secure the authority of the church leaders who needed to have some kind of historical backing. I think it means a rather serious rethinking of the basis on which churches that claim the apostolic authority continue to assert their authority. Now, whether they are going to do that or not is another whole question. But when you find out that the historical basis for this is a little shaky, does that affect the way you exercise authority today? I think it should.

Q: Not only how you exercise it, but how the rest of us look at it. Does the scholarship you refer to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church?

A: Well, yes. I think it does. You know, there was a document around just about the time of the Renaissance called the Donation of Constantine. You may have heard of it, and it was supposed to be a document by which Constantine gave a lot of the property in central Italy to the church, and they used that to claim the church’s sovereignty over that. It was proven to be a forgery, and the Catholic Church made the adjustment, and eventually they gave up, many years later, secular sovereignty over central Italy and in some ways the moral authority of the pope became greater after he didn’t also have to be a secular sovereign. I think the Catholic Church can adjust to this quite well, and maybe it’s a very good thing that they have this coming. Now, I don’t know. I’ll be interested to watch, but they have to deal with the fact that the early historical grounding for apostolic succession is really no longer held by most scholars.

Q: In 1965, you published a book called The Secular City in which you thought that the role of religion in modern city life was becoming pretty less important than it had been, and some people said you were wrong about that assertion.

A: The original title of that book was God in the Secular City. Most people don’t know that, and the thesis of the book was the decline of institutional religion should not be viewed as a catastrophe, because God is not just present in religious institutions. God is present in all of creation, in other kinds of movements and institutions and to be discerned, presence of God to be discerned there and responded to.  The publisher said no “God in the Secular.” It’s too complicated. Let’s just call it The Secular City. So I’ve lived with that title now for—that was 44 years ago, and I have learned a few things since then. I wouldn’t swear by every sentence in that book. Nonetheless, the central thesis of the presence of God in all of creation and historical institutions, culture, and politics and family I would certainly hold to enthusiastically and say that what I say in this book is the decline of creedal Christianity and hierarchical Christianity is also not a catastrophe. Maybe it points to a really important renewal of facets of Christianity that have been repressed over many, many years. I think it does.

Q: What are the implications of an age of the spirit for everybody who’s religious?

A: Well, I think it means, among other things, that we’ll be seeing, and should be welcoming and affirming, a much wider range of expressions of Christianity. I’ve often been thought of as normative over these 1,500 years of what I call Constantinian Christianity. We see it happening frequently, now, all around the world, especially since Christianity is no longer a western religion. That’s a central and important change in the composition of the Christian world—dates back to only about 20, 25 years. The majority of Christians in the world are no longer in the old steer of Christendom in which Constantinianism was the rule. So we see all kinds of very interesting new theological and liturgical and ethical movements emerging, often around what we used to think of as the periphery. But it’s not the periphery anymore.

Q: And what are the implications of that for the influence of religious life?

A: Oh, I think the influence of religious life is continuing. Not necessarily institutional, hierarchical religious life, but the influence of people who are religiously informed and inspired and supported in communities, working in various kinds of even nonreligious structures and movements. I think that’s on the increase and will continue to be.

Q: The spread of this kind of emotional Christianity throughout the southern part of the world—what do you think that implies for the future of Christian practice in the United States?

A: You know, the term “emotional” doesn’t quite do it.  I would prefer personal, experiential. Emotion is part of that, but the experience of community and hope and of affirmation is part of it, too, but they are experiences. I think it’s already having its impact. Somebody has talked recently about the reverse missionary movement of Christians coming from South America, or especially Korea, into the United States and influencing American—or Africa, most recently, African religious movements coming in and influencing American Christianity. I think that’s really going to be a big development in the future.

Q: Influencing it in what ways?

A: Well, toward a more communal and more experiential direction, largely. There may be other influences as well, but I think that’s mainly the way it will influence.

Q: In your teaching and writing career, you’ve been well known as someone wit an uncanny ability to spot new developments in religious life. One of them, certainly, was liberation theology.

A: Liberation theology emerged in Latin America as a way of understanding Christianity, a new way of understanding it from the perspective of those who had been excluded and not part of the clerical elite or the theological elite. They talked about the preferential option for the poor—not just doing something for the poor, but helping the poor to understand the claims they can make on the basis of the gospel. I have a chapter in the book on that as illustrative, precisely of this movement away from the control of hierarchies and creeds, because the basic structure of liberation theology, or what they call the ecclesial base communities, small groups of people, tens of thousands of them, all over Latin America and in other places, getting together, sharing, reading, sharing food, singing, studying biblical texts and thinking about how that would apply in their own lives, and it made, and continues to make, a very significant impact not just on that continent and not just among Catholics. It’s going strong, especially among people who had their first experience within these base communities and are now in other kinds of institutions, especially political, and journalism and education and things like that. That’s where its impact is being felt at this point.

Q: We talked about Pentecostalism a little bit. What are the real implications of that for us?

A: The most important development in the world Pentecostal movement is a movement toward social ministries. They didn’t used to be interested in that in their early years. They were really very much fixed on “my own experience” and, really, getting to heaven. There’s a recent book on Pentecostalism in which the author has coined the term progressive Pentecostalism. They went around and studied congregations all over the world, especially in the nonwestern world, and found that the ones that were involved in community service, in clinics, in hospitals and schools and all of that mainly were Pentecostal and charismatic churches. And they said this is the major trend now. This is what’s happening. So this combination of social ministry and experiential worship is a dynamite combination, and I think that is really going to be influential on North American and, eventually, even European Christianity, which, we all know, needs kind of an injection of life at this point, and it could happen there as well.

Q: Why did the mainline Protestants suffer such a decline over the last 20, 30 years?

A: Well, I think one of the reasons is the mainline churches did allow themselves to drift toward a more hierarchical, less communitarian structure—away from where they were, let’s say, 50 years ago. People need to have a sense of belonging, and that wasn’t there. It was a little bit too audience-oriented: There’s the pulpit there, and here’s the congregation and a choir performing for—now the Pentecostals: everybody sings. Everybody testifies. Jimmy Durante used to say, “Everybody gets into the act,” and it’s richly participatory—if you want to be a participant.

Q: I’ve heard it argued that they became too intellectual and not enough spirit.

A: I think that’s another way of saying the same thing. The clergy—and I take some responsibility for this, having been involved in it for over 40 years—was trained in Christian thought, Christian philosophy, Christian theology, how you deal with the problem of the modern world and all of this, you know, and not enough in how to nurture the experience of God, the experience of the spirit and encounter with Christ, and so the churches which have brought that back in, I think, are finding that it appeals to people.

Q: And what about the place today of what we call the religious right?

A: By religious right I think of a particular political expression of conservative evangelical Christianity, and I think that movement, if it indeed ever was a movement, is now divided and declining in many ways. The agenda used to be driven by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and a couple other people. That whole generation is now either dead or really gone, in one way or another, and you have a whole variety of people now in the evangelical community, and they have a political agenda which is far more diverse. I mean, you think of the evangelicals for ecological causes, or the ones who got together to sign the petition against torture, and the opposition to the war in Iraq, where a lot of evangelicals became involved. I don’t consider that a religious right. I consider that religious involvement in the public sphere, which they ought to be doing. I mean, as Christians and as citizens, you ought to be involved.  But I think the last couple of presidential elections and by-elections have exposed the religious right as really kind of being, in part, a paper tiger. They just didn’t produce the votes. They were really kind of angry—the fact that they didn’t get a Republican nominee that suited their profile. And I think they’re in considerable disarray, and frankly I’m not mourning over that.

Q: Let me ask you to look around the country and size up what you see going on there. A lot of people think that there’s been a rise of selfishness that perhaps was of basic reason for what happened to Wall Street, what happened with sub-prime mortgages and in other parts of life. What do you see as the problems in this society right now? We’ll get to religion’s role. What’s wrong?

A: It’s the best of times and the worst of times, I think, and I’ll explain that in a minute. But there is no doubt that a rampant culture of market and consumer values really has a grip on many people in America, and therefore accumulating, getting things, getting ahead is for many kind of a principle life goal. I’m told we work harder in America than any country in the world. Productivity is up. But everybody seems to be driven by, especially, the lure of advertising, which says, “You ought to have this. You really need this. You owe it to yourself to have this and that,” and therefore mounting credit card debt, and these people who buy houses on mortgages that they’re not going to be able to afford. I think the role of religion at this point is to make very clear that this structure of values, of consumer values is not coherent with Christianity, with the gospel, with the life and example of Jesus. That’s not what he was talking about at all, so we in the religious community need to take a much more critical, even confrontational, role about this, I think, than we have in the past. There have been moments in the history of American Christianity in which there has been a more confrontational role between Christian values and the values of consumer society. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of my great teachers, was really a great spokesman for that, But that seems to have faded out as the churches have largely simply adjusted to this, even taken over some of those kinds of advertising techniques and consumerist values. But I think we have to get tougher about that and really remind people that this is not what we mean by a Christian way of living.

Q: There is what’s called a prosperity gospel, and lots of ministers preach that God will reward you with everything you want.

A: Yeah. Can you imagine that kind of sermon coming from the mouth of Jesus himself? No. I mean, it’s a rank contradiction, the prosperity gospel. When Jesus says blessed are those who serve and have compassion on the poor, beware of riches, it’s very hard to get into the kingdom of God—passage after passage. It’s right there. You don’t have to look very far for it. The contrast is quite stark, and yet you’re right. There are ministers and preachers who pick up on this prosperity gospel, promise this to people, and I think it’s really, let’s call it by its name, it’s a heresy and needs to be pointed out as such.

Q: You spoke about religious leaders needing to stand up to consumerism. What do you want the churches to do?

A: Well, I think it does start with the ministers and priests in the pulpit, with the congregations, and then I think churches have to speak publicly, and some of them have, about the dangers to the soul of consumerist values, the lethal danger that the accumulationist light poses for you spiritually. There has to be more of that, which is really quite the opposite of the prosperity gospel. I said this is the best of times and the worst of times. I notice increasingly among my students, both undergraduates and students in the divinity school, a deep suspicion of this life of accumulating, consuming, and a realization that a truly spiritual life is going to be more simple and more oriented toward building community rather than competition with the other guy to see who gets ahead. It’s a canard about all young people, that they’re all “me first,” “I first” oriented. I don’t think that’s true. There are many who are. But let me tell you that the urge to graduate from college, like this one, and immediately go down to a Wall Street investment firm is greatly shrunken this year from what it was last year. We’re learning something from this—that this is not only economically, but spiritually a dangerous way to think of your life. I think there’s real hope in a younger generation coming along with that viewpoint.

Q: You’ve been teaching here for 44 years, since ‘65. You’ve seen a lot, you’ve written a lot, you’ve studied a lot, you’ve taught a lot. What are the most important things you’ve learned?

A: I have learned how to think about Christianity as one of the possible symbolic ways to approach reality, among others. I used to think of other world religions as kind of exotic, and they’re out there, and they’re kind of curiosities. Now I have made a big adjustment, I think, in my life, and many people are, to say this is the way we see it. Other people see it other ways. This doesn’t invalidate, at all, our way of understanding reality. Rather, we have to look for the common threads, common values, and with these other folks, with Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims, even secular people. That is how to live with radical pluralism. The other big change that I’ve seen is the enormous growth in the hunger and interest in religion and spirituality among students at this university. It’s phenomenal. When I first came here, we didn’t even have a religious studies program at Harvard College. Didn’t exist. We had a very small divinity school. Since then, we have a religious studies program. We can’t add enough courses to respond to all the interest. Furthermore, if you clocked how many students here, on any given weekend, are worshipping, one way or another either at a church or a synagogue or a mosque or Memorial Church, there are more now than probably in the history of the college—a vast variety of ways of worshipping, and being spiritual, religious. It’s not singular. But—there it is. And I think they’re very interested. It’s intellectual curiosity. It’s also personal quest. And we have a responsibility, I think, to help them with that. I’m talking about the students now. But I think it’s also true in the public at large, maybe especially in the younger cohorts of the public at large.

Q: On this question of being open to the wisdom in lots of other religious traditions: If a Christian says, well, I’m a Christian, but of course that’s just one way among many others, what does that do to that person’s confidence and passion about his own faith?

A: Well, it requires a transitioning. It requires a maturation. I think we all grow up with serving ourselves, the center of the world. Then we learn that there are other centers gradually. Not only do I not think it diminishes the validity or power of the faith, in some ways I think it enriches it. I wrote a book about this some years ago called Many Mansions. You know, Jesus says at one point, “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” I would even argue that the plurality of religions in the world is a check on any one of them, including ours, not to get too pretentious and think that we have the whole truth. One of the most dangerous things in any religion is to identify my understanding of the truth, my take on it, with the truth itself. The truth itself is something out there, it’s absolute, but my take on it is relative. Otherwise, I’m guilty of the sin of pride. I mean, I identify my view with God’s view. God is larger than this. God is much larger than any particular understanding of God.

Q: So I can be just as faithful, I can be just as active.  I can be just as convinced of the importance of what I’m doing with my life if I say mine is just one tradition among many others?

A: Some of the most faithful and zealous Christians I’ve run into in the last 20 years traveling around the world are precisely those Christians who are living in India, Korea, China, Indonesia, Africa where they are surrounded by people of other religions. It has not in any way diminished how they feel, or their faith. They believe that they have unique contribution to make. It’s different from these other. But it hasn’t diminished it at all. In fact, in many ways it’s enhanced it. And I have a feeling that’s the way it’s going to go.

Q: You are an American Baptist married to a Jewish woman. You have one son by that marriage, and I think a lot of people would be interested in how you accomplish the religious education of your son when the mother is Jewish and you are Protestant?

A: Well, as you can imagine, my wife, Nina, and I talked about this a lot before we were married. We did not want our marriage to be one of these religion-free zones. She’s a serious, practicing Jewish woman. I’m a serious Christian. And we decided that what we would do was to try to learn about and participate in each other’s traditions to the extent that conscience permits. And so that’s what we’ve done. And we also decided before that I would respect the Jewish custom, and indeed Jewish law, that the child of a Jewish woman is Jewish and should be raised with that understanding of himself or herself.  And I said, “Look, I agree with this. I endorse it—on one condition: that I also, maybe mainly me, will be responsible for his religious education and formation.” And I was. When he had his bar mitzvah, she’s the one who sent out the invitations and prepared the reception. I was the one who prepared him in studying his Torah passage, and he gave a wonderful exposition of his Torah passage at the bar mitzvah. Now I have to say that, of course, as the son of a Protestant Christian theologian, he got very interested in Christianity and is, I would say, very sympathetic to it and has studied, at Princeton, early Christianity and some recent thought. He’s interested in the phenomenon of religion at large. But he considers himself Jewish, with this interest in religion in general and Christianity, of course, as his father’s particular way of life. So we think it worked out very satisfactorily. Both of us are quite pleased with the way it’s gone. And when I am asked by people about this, “What would you have done if you were Jewish and you’re marrying a non-Jewish woman?” I don’t know. That’s a theoretical question, because the child would not then, by Jewish custom and law, have been Jewish. That would have to be negotiated otherwise. But that’s the way we did it and are continuing to do it. We mark the Sabbath every week, with the lighting of candles and prayers. I go to the Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. She comes with me to various Christian festivals, as does Nicholas. We have successfully shared in each other’s spiritual traditions, I think, and it can be done, and it’s also very enriching. I mean, I really believe that I understand Christianity better for having participated in Jewish life—and remember, Jesus was a rabbi—than I would have if I hadn’t done that.

Q: How do you pray? What are your practices? How do you attend to these things through the day?

A: I start the day with a prayer, just turning the day over to God, thanking God for this day. We have prayers at all of our meals, a mixture of Jewish prayers and Christian prayers, depending on how we feel. We mark the Sabbath. I have told my friends I’m in search of the perfect congregation. I haven’t found it yet. So I’m one of those people who bounces from one congregation to—I’m somewhere every week, but I go back and forth between the Baptist church which I belong to here, and an Episcopal church in our neighborhood, a black Pentecostal church, and sometimes Memorial Church, the university church here, and I get something from all of them. I feel a little guilty that I’m not sort of committing completely to one of them. But that’s how I do it.

Q: You have the reputation of being a pretty staunch liberal theologically and in every way.  Is that fair, or has it changed at all over the years?

A: I’m a chastened liberal, as they say, both theologically and politically. I have been greatly enriched in my fairly liberal understanding of Christianity by my evangelical boyhood, by very significant experiences among Catholics, especially liberation theologians, and others, by my experience with Pentecostals. So I’m an unusual kind of liberal in that—maybe that’s what a liberal should be, one who can affirm and learn from a lot of different sources. But I suppose the label is still a useful one, yeah, and not one to be shied away from.

Q: Have you become more committed to that position as the years have gone by?

A: More committed to the position of being open to learning from various sources? Yes, yes, I have. I started early with that, and it’s really kind of a hallmark of who I am. I think you have to be anchored, though, and I’m really pretty anchored in a form of Protestant Free Church Christianity. That’s pretty secure. That allows me, then, to be open to think other things that I can participate in without feeling that I’m floating away. I have something secure as an anchor.

Q: There came a day in 2006 when you received a call from your physician. Tell me the story.

A: He called right after I’d had a barium esophagram and said, “Bad news. It looks like you have inoperable esophageal cancer.” I asked him how long. He said, “Months, and probably a few. We’ll try to make you comfortable.” My wife was just taking off that very day for India, and my first major task was to make sure she kept her life going while I was helping to keep mine from falling apart. For about three weeks I thought I had three months to live. It soon became clear that they could operate. They did. They operated successfully, and then I had a reprieve before the cancer came back again in February of 2008 in an incurable form.

Q: What’s your outlook now?

A: The treatment has been remarkably successful. I’m on an experimental treatment, and I’m being gifted a month at a time and rejoicing in that. But eventually the treatment will lose its valance, and the barbarians will storm the gate.

Q: How long do you think you have?

A: I’ve stopped guessing. I’ve predicted my demise too often and too early to continue to do so. So I will just accept whatever comes. I would guess less than a year. If I’m lucky — I’m already lucky — this eventually will stop working, this treatment, and then the cancer — I’ve got cancer in my lungs and in my liver, and it will quickly spread, and then I will not be resistant to it.

Q: You have written about your surprising acceptance of what has happened.

Rev. Forrest Church

A: It was right after my wife went away for three days. I sat down with my closest friends and with Gary Dorrien of Union Theological Seminary and just to sort of test this acceptance. I didn’t bargain. I didn’t get angry. I was surprised to go almost directly to acceptance. I skipped disbelief and anger and shock and resentment. And I tested that because I was unsure of it, whether I was just hiding myself in a pink cloud. Every minister spends a lifetime preparing to ace the death test. I mean, that’s what we do. We can’t fail that test, having gone through with so many others. It would cast a shadow back on his or her ministry if he or she were not able to embrace death and welcome it as an actual part of living as much as one has encouraged one’s parishioners to do. But I did discover something that I hadn’t really recognized before, and at least I think it works in some cases. I’ve always been amazed that some people, regardless of how physically ill they are, seem to go gentle into that good night and some seem to just fight bitterly all the way. And there’s some courage in the fighting. I understand that. But it came to me that there may be a difference. All of us die in the middle of our story. There may be a difference, however, between having ongoing business, which we all have, and having unfinished business. And we have unfinished business, and each person knows what it is in his or her life. The one thing you’ve postponed doing, waiting for the right time. Whatever it happens to be, if you’re given a terminal sentence, you do not have time to finish your unfinished business, and that casts a pall of regret over your life. And so your final days are lived regretting what you have not done, or have not stopped doing in some cases, and not freeing you to embrace the past, say yes to it, and then live fully in the present in a way that you really are not ever able to do before.

Q: That’s what’s happening to you now?

A: That’s what’s happening to me, and this is something I’ve preached on. It’s a Buddhist notion, in many ways. I call it having nostalgia for the present, looking forward to the present, not being caught up in things we can’t do anything about. But when you’re living in the rush of life it’s very, very difficult actually spiritually to focus on that present. When you are given a terminal illness and you are not regretful of your past, so that you can embrace it and say yes to it, then you can live in each day and fill it with all of its amplitude, all of its glory, and you can celebrate what is, not mourn what isn’t.

Q: Suppose you do have a lot of regrets a lot of unfinished business. What then? What do you do?

A: Well, I have seen some amazing two-minute drills — people who have, during their last months, just worked all out to reconcile with their children, to do the things that they need to do to make peace with life, to make peace with God, and who have pulled it off. I mean, these are spectacular acts of courage. The level of difficulty of the dive is high, however. You don’t have much time, and it does mean that you are concentrating your whole life on redeeming that which is past, rather than moving gently forward and embracingly into the next chapter.

Q: What has been the role of God in all this experience?

A: Well, God is what sustains me. I am connected umbilically, I feel, with that grace and power. It’s not an omnipotent God. God didn’t do this to me. God doesn’t throw babies out of third-story windows or cause tsunamis. But God is that which is greater than all and present in each. And when that which is present in you relates to that which is present in all, you are sustained. You are billowed by the ocean of divinity, and you are made safe. There’s a great degree of safety in that being a part of, rather than being apart from.

Q: As a Unitarian Universalist, what was your idea of God in years past, and how did that evolve or change?

A: I began believing in a kind of abstract God. It was an intellectual — it was a head-trip God. I was closer to a Jeffersonian Unitarian than I was to an Emersonian Unitarian. It was much more of a scientific entrée. I divided the rational from the irrational. It was a kind of a search and destroy mission where I was taking the butterfly and pinning it on the board and examining it very carefully and deciding that it was very beautiful, but it doesn’t fly. And over time, partly through crises in my own life, very much through sitting by my parishioners at their bedsides, and through my father’s death, I began to sense that this moved from my head to my heart. And I began to believe that I — in some ways, without God there is nothing. I did not — as I said many times, God is not God’s name. It’s our name for that which is greater than all, and yet present in each. It’s our construct. It’s our symbol. But it’s an arrow pointing toward a reality that is invested in us.

Q: Is God, for you, a person?

A: I am a person, so I relate to the personal part of God’s amplitude. God is so much more than a person. Otherwise, God becomes an idol. Sometimes I believe that we’re divided between fundamentalists of the left and the fundamentalists of the right, and the fundamentalists of the left or the right set up a tiny, little God on their altar and worship it. And the fundamentalists of the left torch that God and throw it down and say there is no God. I ask people to tell me a little about the God they believe in, because I probably don’t believe in him, either. I believe in something that’s much more capacious, much more mysterious, something like Rudolph Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans — the tremendous and fearful, powerful, fascinating mystery.

Q: How did that move from an intellectual sense of God to one that was very open to mystery affect your reaction to your condition?

A: I have long believed that religion itself is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are the religious animal. We asked, “Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? What is life’s meaning? What is life’s purpose?” Now, we don’t always come out with religious answers. But these are religious questions we ask. We’re not the animal with advanced tools or advanced language. We’re the religious animal, and so at some point death requires our search for meaning. Without death, we would not have to search for meaning, and we would not have to search for purpose. My own sense of the purpose of life, it’s to live in such a way that your lives will prove to be worth dying for. And that puts an enormous moral, ethical impetus behind our work in this world. I take it one world at a time. I’m agnostic about the afterlife. I haven’t gone there. It could not be, though, any stranger than this. There’s no afterlife that could be stranger than life itself. And we need, first and foremost, even as we’re dying, to celebrate the miracle of this day.

Q: I want to take you back just a moment to this question of dealing with unfinished business. You have a reference in your book to those sad words, “if only.”

A: The two saddest words in the English language are “if only,” and they ring with the most poignancy at a time when a person gets a word that he or she has a terminal illness. If only I had stopped drinking. If only I had dared to change careers when I could. If only I had reconciled with my father when I had a chance. Those “if only” questions which cannot easily or even practicably be answered in the last innings of one’s life cast a pall over those days and lead to an enormous feeling of regret.

Q: How then do you make up for it?

A: There are some things you cannot make up for. There are some things that therapy over a lifetime helps you to make up for. What you try to do is to jar yourself into the moment if you possibly can, to take your regrets and your expectation and try to let go of them so that if you’ve blown that, don’t blow this. You still have so much time. In my case, when I was talking about not having unfinished business, my wife quickly pointed out to me, “Well, you may not have unfinished business, Forrest. But your children have unfinished business, and I have unfinished business, and let’s get down to it.” I realized this wasn’t about my death. This was our death, and that focused me in on them, on their needs, on our shared journey, and all of a sudden life was filled with intrigue and wonder and challenge, but a different challenge than I had imagined.

Q: What did you say to your children, and what did you invite them to say to you?

A: Well, each one is different. We have four children, and each child had a different set of issues. But the one thing I learned was that I couldn’t make this right for them. One of my jobs in life is, I’ve always felt, to make things right, to make things work, to make them happy. I couldn’t do that. So I had to listen to their pain. I had to let them express it. I still have to do that, although we’ve now, since I’ve had these dual six-month diagnoses, we’re getting pretty good at circling the wagons and lighting the campfires and crying together and then singing the old songs.

Q: A lot of crying?

A: There was a lot of crying, often the crying ignited in me from them. Again, I didn’t want my death to be a bother to people, and that was just simply a wrong call. I wanted everything to just go on as if nothing were happening. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there’s a truth to it as well. Particularly around my family. Wanted the house to be happy. House wasn’t going to be happy. It’s one thing for me to make my peace with God and leave. It’s another thing for my children or my wife to be abandoned, and that actually was where I had my growing, in letting them call the shots, letting them let me know what they needed when they needed it and responding to their needs with listening more than with talking. I’ve always talked my way through and out of things. This was a time to listen, embrace, and say I’m so sorry, and that brought them around to the point that now they are, in a certain way, embracing my death and have learned from my death, even as I hope they have learned from my life.

Q: You referred to your late father and indicated you wished you had been able to reconcile with him?

A: I did reconcile with him in the early ’70s. When he ran for president in 1976, I took off six months from school and campaigned for him. So my reconciliation with him — he was very much against the Vietnam War, but I didn’t believe that he’d gone far enough, and I was a flaming radical in the late 1960s and I basically washed my hands of my father and his establishment corruption. We had made complete peace by the ’70s. He died in 1984. So that wasn’t the issue. He had always said, “I wish I were just walking down the road and struck in the middle of a thought and struck by a heart attack and died.” He had had cancer when he was 25 and I was two months old and given himself only three months to live. So, I began my life in a bassinet of cancer. But this made him commit himself to living his life as fully, richly, and quickly as he could. He did die young. He died at 59. That’s when I was diagnosed with my own cancer, and I felt that was clearly going to be the end of the story. But I did notice something about his — he had three months, and it was a period for him of reconciliation with his own lack of confidence in his legacy. He believed that once you were out of office and once you were out of power, you were instantly forgotten, and those three months were an opportunity to just celebrate him. And the one gift of a terminal illness that is given to us which is not given to someone who is struck down by a stroke or struck down a heart attack and does not come back to life is that we are given the opportunity to receive all of this love, and we’re given the opportunity to return all of this love, and that’s why these months can be the most precious months of one’s life.

Q: You have made great use of these months. You have been very productive and you’ve put down on paper your deepest beliefs. Let’s talk about some of those.

A: In a way, love and death allowed me to write a coda to my theology, to my lifelong belief that love and death interwoven were the heartstrings of religion. I do have a mantra that I’ve come to live by over the past three years, and it’s served me very well. It’s “Do what you can, want what you have, and be who you are.” Doing what you can is doing all you can. It’s not just, you know, muckin’ by, but it’s not trying to do more than you can, stretching yourself out and forcing you into a failure. Wanting what you have is to recognize that we tend to only want things that we don’t have. It’s like we’re looking out through a lightly stained glass window with all sorts of different projects, our vocational and avocational and parent and children projects, and then our health is down there. But you never try to look through the glass that says “health” until it clouds over. Then we push our nose right up against it, and all we can see is the darkness in the glass, and our whole world goes dark. If we back up from it and say, “I want friends who love me. I want a family who’s helping me. I want the sun to come up, and I want the day to be beautiful.” All of these things, all those prayers get answered, and if you want what you have, finally you come around to saying, “I wouldn’t be appreciating all of these things with nearly the same intensity if this one pane had not gotten dark.” And then to be who you are, probably the hardest of all, is not to try to fake your existence. It is to accept, embrace who God has made you. Each one of us unique, each one of us with flaws and gifts, and each one of us special, and then to take that and return it to the world in such a way that you will live your life in such a way that it will prove to be worth dying for.

Q: You referred to the idea of getting permission to die. What does that mean?

A: Well, there is a sense that I have gotten often from deathbeds when I was in my parish, my parsonage role — that people feel that they’re failing their loved ones when they die. And I can understand that. The father is abandoning his family, let’s say, or a mother is abandoning her children. And there is this sense that they have to hang on, that death is a defeat, and as long as everyone is telling them, “You can make it. Don’t — you can beat this,” if a kind of lie surrounds the proceedings, then when the person is not making it and is not beating it, she’s going to feel a failure and she’s going to feel that she’s failed the people who said, “You’re going to make it” — her children. So the children have an obligation and the spouses have an obligation, when the time comes, to say, “It’s okay. We’re ready for you to go. We love you. We thank you for everything you’ve done.” And then, in a way, giving death becomes like giving birth. It’s “You’re getting closer. We’re holding hands. You’re going to make it. It’s beautiful. You’re doing great.” That’s the way when my father-in-law died, my wife and her mother basically were coaches to him, holding his hand and urging him onward and telling him that it was going to be okay, that he was almost there. He’s really going to do it. That’s giving permission for people to die, and then they can do it without their last thought being, “I have failed my family” or “I have failed my loved ones.”

Q: You have expressed an idea about talking to your children as the end came.

A: In its very essence, it is to shut up and just listen, to hear where they are coming from, what their needs are, not to try to make things that aren’t right for them prematurely right. Let them express themselves. Let them work it through and embrace wherever they are, and then you move slowly from there. It’s not a one-evening proposition. And different of the children will respond in different ways. Different of them will have much more expressed needs. Others will have to be sort of sought out and tell me what you really feel. You need to almost be direct with them.

Q: Can you give an example of how that works?

A: Well, with one of my children, it was clear that she was enormously bereft, and I was trying to make her feel better. And before I could make her feel better, I had to allow her to feel worse. And I had to allow her to express her sense of abandonment, and her sense of loss and her sense of fear. And we did that kind of in a dance. But when we came through the dance, she came up to me one day and she said, “By the way, Dad, don’t talk about this any more, about us, because I’m now just fine with this. I think you’re done a wonderful job.” And it wasn’t I who did the wonderful job. It was she who did the wonderful job working it through.

Q: Back to the core beliefs you’ve identified and put down. You said the secret of it all is “it’s not about me.”

A: It’s not about me. That’s right. We stand in our own light. Not only that, when we get days in light we forget, like, what a shadow we might be casting. We somehow have to recognize that self-consciousness and consciousness are opposites. To the extent that we’re self-conscious, self-absorbed, we cannot be conscious of the world around us, of God, of our neighbors, and believing that Jesus’ two great commandments, to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, are the hearthstone of my faith and I have got to get out of the way of that if I’m able to perform those functions. Fortunately for a minister, it’s a little bit easier because whenever we get too caught up in our own petty grievances, or our own petty resentments, or disappointments, or failures, the window blows open and death blows through and blows all the detritus off of our plate, and we encounter that which really matters, and we are in the bosom of a family that is grieving, and trying to come together, and trying to make sense of what life is and what death is, and all these little things that are nagging at us just become almost embarrassments. They just disappear from the plate.

Q: There’s another sentence that you wrote: The greatest of all truths, you said, is that love never dies.

A: Well, the greatest of all truths is that love never dies. I’m not certain about life. Life may go on forever and may not. I don’t know about the afterlife. I know that love is immortal, that every act of love we perform in this life is carried on almost like a little patina of pearls. It’s carried on into another life and passed on into another life so that centuries from now, not named with our name, not signed with our signature, but initiated by us and carried on through our heirs, the dependent web of being which we’re a part, this network of neighbors and lovers and strangers, the love carries, and that’s the work of religion. The work of religion is to make sure that the love carries more strongly and further than the division and the hate, and there is the danger of religion — that we will end up defining ourselves against rather than defining ourselves with. But I do believe that love never dies, and that is the gift that one can give immediately, of course, most importantly, to one’s family and close friends. But it spreads far beyond that.

Q: Is that what you mean when you speak about love after death?

A: There is love after death. I’m not certain about life after. There’s some kind of life. I’m just not certain that it’s a personalized life. We came from the cosmos. We return to the cosmos. But the thing that we ought to be amazed about — the odds against our being here are just infinitesimal, just infinitesimal. You have to go back not just to the right egg and the right sperms of your parents. You have to go back all the way through history. None of our grandparents and great-grandparents going on died before puberty. None of them died in the Great Plague. If you go back to the 11th or 12th century, most of us have 2.5 million ancestors, all of who made it and connected at the right time. Then you go back beyond that to the pre-human ancestors and the urparamecium and then to the pinball of stars back to the Big Bang, and we’re kinetically and genetically connected to everything that preceded us. The universe was pregnant with us when it was born. The odds against this are staggering. And so we tend to miss it when we say, what did I do to deserve this? Well, we didn’t do anything to deserve being alive. With life comes the certitude, the promise of death, and we need to embrace that with the same kind of celebration, almost, that we embrace our birth.

Q: For traditional Christians beliefs in the afterlife, eternal life with God, heaven — these are very, very important beliefs and give people close to death great comfort. What is it that gives you great comfort?

A: I do believe I came from God and that I shall return to God. It’s just that the definitions of heaven I received and hear about almost seem like punishment for good behavior — an eternity of anything to me is frightening almost. I see eternity as a depth in time, not a length of time. I see us connecting spiritually within the temple zone but in an eternal trench, as it were, that can get us deep or help us soar, and that is available to me every minute I live. I have no idea what happens after we die. It cannot be stranger than this. Being alive is too strange for words. So I won’t be the least bit surprised if all of a sudden everything is topsy-turvy and I’m in a new world. But I can promise you it won’t be the world that is predicted. And the other thing I’m concerned about would be afterlife. I see a lot of religion as being a life-defining exercise. It’s almost as if we put this world down and this life down in order to live forever in one that is promised to us, and that leads us away from the love to God and love to neighbor injunctions. It leads us away from our ethical imperative, from expressing our ultimate concerns in ways that are redemptive in this world and in our larger neighborhood. And so I go with Henry David Thoreau, who when he was asked about the afterlife said, “Madam, I prefer to take it one life at a time.”

Q: Let’s talk again about the relationship between love and death.

A: The opposite of love is not death. It is fear. Fear is what armors our hearts. If our hearts are armored, they’ll never be broken. We do not have to worry as much about grief and pain at a time of loss and a terminal illness or even betrayal. We don’t have to worry about those things because we have armored our hearts. When you open your heart, you become vulnerable, which means susceptible to being wounded. Grief is in a way a gift because the more we grieve, the more we loved. The more we care, the more we’re hurt, the more we gained in our relationship. And so there’s a ratio between grief and love that can be tampered down by not opening your heart, or it can be extremely painful if you have opened your heart because there’s such a deep sense of loss. But in the balance of time the gain is so much greater than the loss that one can only celebrate the time together, one can only celebrate the love, and the grief becomes an afterthought to the love. But love is grief’s advance party. There’s no question about that.

Q: There’s an undertaker in Michigan I interviewed, Thomas Lynch. He’s a poet, too. He says grief is the tax we pay on loving people.

A: There you go. That’s it. That’s good. That’s a beautiful summation of that, and I have seen so many people get hurt in love and then try to protect themselves against it, and when they protect themselves against love, they protect themselves against the only thing that is worth living for.

Q: You also have some interesting things, I think, to say about visiting in hospitals.

A: It’s amazing how uncomfortable people are in hospitals, understandably. You’re surrounded by death. You feel that you might catch it. You look through all of these doors as a kind of impersonality about the place. You’re afraid you’re going to say the wrong thing, that you will not get it right with the person you’re going to visit. People stay away from their friends for those very reasons. But then what happens is you go into the hospital room and you don’t know how to act, and there’s some very simple tricks. First of all, touch the person that you’re with, because all the touch that they’re getting is invasive. It hurts. Goodness knows, the nurses are trying to do their best and they’re wonderful. But they are hurting you when they touch you. So touch. Also sit down at the level of the person in the bed. Everyone’s looking down at you. You begin to feel like a lab rat or something when you’re in the hospital. And if your friends stand up and look down at you, they become sort of confused with the medical authorities. So that’s another thing. And then simply to open the conversation by, “How are you feeling? How are you feeling spiritually? This must be hard.” Let the person take the lead. But don’t talk about nothing. Let it come out. The worst thing you can say to a person who is clearly dying is, “Don’t worry about it. You’re going to beat this. You’re going to get better.” It’s just like an insult to that person’s living reality. Whereas if you say, “This must be really hard,” they will tell you to what extent it is and to what extent it isn’t. And then they will be connecting with you at a deep, human level. There are fewer occasions in life that we imagine to really connect from one person to another at their very depth. The times of death and dying are among the most precious of those.

Q: And don’t stay too long, you say.

A: And the other thing is don’t stay too long. Don’t prove your love by wearing the poor person out. Five to ten minutes is perfect, enough time for you to bless them and then not to fatigue them.

Q: As you look ahead to your own death, is there anything about either death itself or the immediate time leading up to it that frightens you? Are you afraid?

A: I’m not afraid, because I’m living so much in the present. I’m not afraid of what’s going to happen in the immediate weeks, say, before I die. I’ve seen, however, that it can be brutal, and I anticipate it being painful, being disoriented. I’m not going to live through that before it happens. I do know, and I know this from particularly my experience with my father, but other parishioners, that there is a tendency among some people to disappear into themselves as they go through the final passage, and that involves some pain for all of your loved ones, because you are cutting them off. Perhaps this is natural. It is you’re letting go of your ties so that you can leave more freely when you’re leaving. But it’s something that I’m going to hope not to do. I’m going to hope to hold on to them and remember that they are as important as I am and that this is more painful for them than it is for me. I will be at peace wherever I am, whether I’m in heaven or sleeping eternally in the earth. I will be at peace, and they will be in turmoil, and I pray that I will be able to overcome my own instinct, perhaps, to just let go and hold on to them long enough and well enough that they will recognize my presence and my love even as I’m dying.

Q: You mentioned praying. To whom do you pray, and how do you pray?

A: Every day I pray to God for what I have. I pray to God for my children. I pray to God for giving me– with my parents. I pray to God for the sun coming up. I pray to God for the tasks I have to do, even today when they’re more limited, the limited tasks I’m still able to do. I pray to God for all of those things that I would otherwise take for granted. And once I pray, I know that I will receive — my prayers will come true. I don’t pray for miracles. I don’t pray to cure my incurable cancer. I receive and consecrate each day that I’m given as a gift, and those are the prayers of consecration, and if I’ve done something wrong, which I do every day despite this attempt to live in the present and be always living, I always do things wrong. I ask for forgiveness for that, and part of that is so that I’m able to forgive myself and get back to the program.

Q: When you pray to God, do you have a picture in your head?

A: I don’t have a picture. I have a sense of peace. I’m praying to the deepest part of me and the deepest part of the cosmos, the Creator. I’m just connecting. I’m reaching out, getting outside of myself, getting as far out as possible. I don’t anticipate that there is a little set of headphones up there taking my instructions down and fastening them onto underlings in a cosmic bureaucracy to act on or against. My God doesn’t work that way. It is a sense of being connected to the All, to that which is greater than all, in fact, and present, and age. And that connection is a healing connection because it connects us to ourselves, gives us integrity, gives us peace to our bidding for forgiveness and our confession. It connects us to others through reconciliation. I also pray for people from who I’m anywhere estranged that they will have a good day. I picture their faces in my mind and remind myself that they’re going to die. We’re all mysteriously born and fated to die. The same sun sets on each of our horizons. Truly, we are one. And those moments of oneness are the moments of religious peace for me. And then I pray to be reconciled with or one with God, that the Creator and the cosmos, all three of those things, bring unity and an integrity to me — and they’re very traditional ways of praying. But the goal is to move from division, which I believe to be sin. When you’re divided against yourself, when you’re estranged from your neighbor, when you’re alienated from God to salvation, when you’re are peace with yourself, you can say yes to your neighbor and can say yes to God.

Q: For you, what is the essence of Christianity?

A: The essence of a truly living faith, I believe, is awe and humility. We must be awestruck by the fact that we’re here and by the cosmos itself, and we must be humbled. The most beautiful of all etymologies is human, humane, humility, humble, humus. It’s dust to dust, ashes to ashes. That brings us humility, but also the awe for being able to even comprehend that or to embrace it. I’m a Christian Universalist. I believe that the same light shines through every religious window, and it’s interpreted. The windows are different. It’s interpreted in different ways. It refracts in different ways. The fundamentalist of the right says that the light shines only through their window. The fundamentalist of the left says, looking at the bewildering variety of windows and worshipers, that there is no light. But the windows aren’t the light. The windows are where the light shines through. You cannot pass through every window and get enlightened by it. You must find, and often you’re born into, a faith that will teach you the elements that will save you, and for me Christianity is that faith. It is a faith about love, love to God and love to neighbor that is right in the heart of my very being. I also believe that Christ created the church in dying, by passing his love on to his disciples. The church is truly the body of Christ in that sense. I think that’s the key. The key is the love imperative, often forgotten, often denied by the church through history. Often Jesus continues to be sacrificed on the altar built in his own name, but I do think that essential reminder stands not only at the heart of Christianity, but at the heart of my own form of universalism.

Q: What do you do if you can’t love?

A: If you can’t love, you have been probably very badly hurt. There are some people who are pathologic. There are some people who simply are born, evidently, without the empathy gene. I exclude them from my general analysis. They certainly exclude me. But for most of us, love is always an opportunity that can very easily be trampled on, sacrificed, from the very earliest days of one’s life. I mean, child beating can take away your trust in life. Abandonment can take away your trust in life. So there are many reasons to harden one’s heart. But for as good a reason as you may have, and I counsel with people who at the age of 55 and 60 are still agonizing over what their parents are doing to them or did to them, the only way to reconcile yourself, make peace with yourself, make peace with your neighbor, make peace with God, find salvation, is to break through and love, to forgive and to love. You don’t change the person you forgive. You chance your own heart. So anything that you can do to reconcile also means that at the end of your life, when you’re given a few months to live, you can look back without regret, you can look back at peace, and you can move forward with an embrace of each day that is given to you and the opportunities that it affords, and the depth that it gives you to relate more profoundly with your family, your loved ones, and your God.

Q: That ability to live in the now is something you are experiencing greatly?

A: I have preached on living in the present for my entire career — nostalgia for the present, looking forward to the present — and I was always preaching to myself, because I was hung up in the past, and I was apprehensive about the future, mostly about things that never happened. But I knew that was right, that we could only end the here and now act, that the past is a chimera. We make it up as much as we experience it, and the future is a complete crapshoot. So only in the here and now can we love God and love our neighbor, can we redeem the day. One of the beautiful things about a terminal illness, one of the truly beautiful things — yes, there’s a lot of pain and discomfort and sometimes agony, but if you have made peace with your past and have no unfinished business, you do not have a full plate for the future, and you are invited into the present, and your friendships become stronger. Your loved ones become more vital and more present. Each day becomes more beautiful. Every day is a gift unto itself, and you just unwrap it. You unwrap the present and receive it as the gift it is. And that is, for me anyway, an unexpected boon during this time of trial. You walk through the valley of the shadow, and it’s riddled with light.

Q: Slow Medicine seems to draw on or at least be informed by a range of spiritual values, religious traditions, and philosophies — Buddhism, Christianity, Quaker values, the way you call each stage of old age a “station.” What relationships do you see between religion, spirituality, and Slow Medicine?

Dr. Dennis McCullough

A: My experience working both here and abroad is that spiritual questions become more regularly addressed closer to death by many, if not most, people. This happens through all the religious avenues you mention. Yet there are deeply spiritual people who are surprised by their responses when facing aging and death. Ram Dass, for example, in a wonderful book and film (”Fierce Grace”) about him, talks of facing his own death and finding that he was reacting in a way he never expected. His thoughts turned to his immediate physical situation and not to his spiritual (Buddhist) practices or spiritual life. John Fanestil, a minister and author of “Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death,” talks about the need to not have life near its end become so “medicalized” that there is no room or energy for engaging spiritual issues and preparing for death. None of us will really know our reactions until we face this more directly. Slow Medicine says, “Engage these issues earlier and give them more time.”

Q: Your book acknowledges several congregations and ministers and you do some speaking about Slow Medicine in church settings. How have faith communities, members of the clergy, chaplains, religious leaders, and spiritual practices contributed to your experience and understanding of Slow Medicine?

A: I have been a member of faith communities (Lake Wobegon Lutheran, Harvard interdenominational, Quaker, United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalist) intermittently and find that there is more need for connections between all these faith communities and medical care professionals. We have drifted apart over time, yet our patients benefit from our joint participation in spiritual discussions.

Q: What are your own spiritual practices and traditions, and how do they inform your clinical practices?

A: Over the years I have “worshipped” more and more in the privacy of my garden and with brief meditation time at home. These activities are as close to spiritual practice as I presently get.

Q: How do you compare Slow Medicine and running a “slow code” in a hospital, that is, responding slowly to a patient when a doctor thinks resuscitation is futile? What are the ethical dilemmas, issues, and questions at stake in both practices?

A: I believe that the biggest ethical dilemma relates to medical professionals and institutions truly embracing the practice of supporting the real autonomy that elders desire. It is only superficially encouraged, really. The second and very much related ethical dilemma is how to balance that individual elder autonomy with the family input and involvement, which so often is very great and of great consequence (personal, financial, etc.) for family members. How can all three important parties (elders, family, and health professionals) come together to work through this ethical balancing act? Running a “slow code” is an example of how these dilemmas are handled if the ethical issues aren’t addressed openly.

Q: What has been your impression here at Lambeth, in the midst of so much diversity?

A: I think my impression overall so far is that, unlike the last Lambeth when I was here, there’s been a tremendous opportunity for people to talk and to share their theological views, their views about mission, and the people have been listening to one another, in some pretty deep ways, on the work that we do together.

Q: The format was different this year — no legislation, no voting, and all of that. How did that change the tone or the content of the meeting?

A: I think it’s changed the meeting in that people seem much more willing to listen to each other than they were in the past when there was legislation that we had to face and you were either for it or you were against it. This one seems to allow for more dialogue so far.

Q: We know some tough issues have been on the table, and some controversial subjects have been raised, especially about the US Church. How is the rest of the Communion seeing some of the things that are happening in the US?

Bishop Tom Shaw

A: I think up until a certain point I was encouraged because of the conversation, the way people were listening to one another. I think when the hearings on the Windsor Report have come up in the conference, that’s not going to help the conversation, and it feels to me as though we’re getting back into a juridical understanding of how we’re going to be one Communion, and I think that that’s the wrong way for us to be examining the kinds of issues that we face.

Q: What kinds of things are you hearing? What are some of those tough issues that are really causing tensions?

A: Well, I think the toughest issue is human sexuality and I think that that’s — there are lots of other issues that are around that issue, but that’s the one that seems to be the hot point for everybody.

Q: And what are you hearing from your fellow bishops on that issue?

A: Well, you hear the whole spectrum, from people that basically agree with the role that the American church has taken in examining this issue, and people that disagree with us but still want to work together in mission and still want to be in Communion, and then there are those parts of the Communion who feel that the Episcopal Church has gone too far, and they want us to leave the Communion or be part of it in a different way.

Q: How is that working out in the dialogue? Is it frustrating relationships?

A: Well, for me whenever we move into that place where we’re talking about the juridical aspects of this, it makes me think that we’re not going to move forward as a Communion and that we’re not going to be able to be patient with one another, we’re not listening to one another and really taking an issue that’s a huge issue, that represents a whole lot of other issues, and try and talk them through.

Q: It does seem like there’s almost a stalemate. Do you see any forward motion, or does it feel like the same arguments over and over again?

A: Well, it depends on the day you talk to me. On some days I’ve had really significant conversations with individual bishops and groups, and I get a sense that we really are listening to one another and trying to find a path forward, and then on other days it doesn’t seem like really talking to one another, and it’s hard for me to see how we can go forward.

Q: How much is the Anglican identity at stake, what it really means to be an Anglican today?

A: I think part of being an Anglican is not being a confessing church but being a catholic and a community church, and I think that if we were to become a confessing church, by not allowing for the breadth of opinion and the breadth of interpretation of Scripture, that that would really threaten our Anglican identity.

Q: Do you get a sense here of great diversity, not just ethnically but also theologically or ideologically? With your fellow bishops do you get that sense of the bigness of the Anglican Church?

A: Oh, yeah. I’m in a fascinating Bible study, studying the Bible with people of Africa and from New Zealand and from Great Britain and from the United States and from Japan, so I do every day, and in going over Scripture I get of sense of the breadth of the Anglican Communion, and it’s exciting, and it’s challenging.

Q: And in a global, fast-changing world is that difficult, then, to work out under the Anglican umbrella?

A: Well, I think that’s the challenge that we’re facing, ultimately, is how are we going to be this Anglican Communion, how are we going to be this Anglican Communion in the 21st century? That’s the real question behind all the disagreement over Scripture and about human sexuality and all the rest of it is how are we going to do this in the future with the challenges that we have in the 21st century?

Q: A lot of people aren’t here. A significant group of bishops aren’t here. Some are boycotting, some weren’t invited. What does that say about the challenges?

A: Well, I think that the most unfortunate thing is that we miss their voices. We miss something of the breadth of the Anglican Communion, whether it’s Gene Robinson who hasn’t been invited or whether it’s members of GAFCON [Global Anglican Future Conference] who decided not to come. Those voices would be tremendously important to this conversation that we’re trying to have. But I also have to say that the conversation goes on, and it’s still very, very fruitful.

Q: How did your parish come to be associated with the Anglican Church of Uganda?

Rev. Eric Dudley

A: As we struggled through all of the issues in the Episcopal Church, in trying to discern what God was calling us to do, I did some of that struggling alone, or with fellow priests. I had some wonderful priests on the staff and went back and forth and back and forth in heart and mind trying to figure out what I could do, and at one point I had decided that I would just go back to South Carolina, which is where I’m from. But I had a dear woman who visited me in my office one day, and she said, I don’t know what you’re thinking about doing with this whole Episcopal mess, but if you should choose to leave and go back home, she said, what probably is going to happen here is we’re all going to go to different places. We’ll have people that go to Catholic churches or Baptists churches or whatever, and we’ll lose this community we have, and I hope that you won’t do that. And then along the way I had other parishioners here and there dropping that hint: I hope that we will create some strong Anglican presence here, and we won’t just give up on having Anglican worship in Tallahassee that’s faithful. So I kept struggling with that as a possibility, and then I had this fellow who had served on vestry who came to me late in my decision-making process, and he said to me, I don’t know where you are in the struggle, but I want you to know this. If you should decide that you’re going to create an Anglican church, I’ve got a building for you. And I said you’re kidding. What are you talking about? And this is a fellow who is a builder and commercial developer here in town, and he had been out at his barbecue grill one night with the next-door neighbor, who had bought this [United] Church of Christ that was defunct and was about to turn it into office buildings and was asking him to go in with him in this deal, and he said he got in bed that night and all he could think was Anglican church. So he got up the next morning and came to my office and said I just want to put this out there. So I went home to my wife who knew where I was in all these struggles, and I said okay, now I just had a building dropped in my lap. So that sort of was the end of the deal for me. Instead of going back to South Carolina and creating an Anglican church there, which I had considered doing, I decided maybe it was best that I just stay here. And so I left St. John’s, where I’d been rector for 10 years, and I left happily. I loved it, it was a wonderful church for 10 years, but on my last day I preached a sermon just reminiscing about all the wonderful times we’d shared together, and then at the peace I said a farewell. I told them they knew this had been a long and hard struggle for me, and that my family and I couldn’t bear this struggle any longer, and that I wished them well. And I left, and then the very next week – well, one thing I did say, at that very last moment, I didn’t invite people to come join me, I didn’t try to raise a crowd, but what I said is I’m going to create an Anglican church here in town and I hope to begin worship next week, and I left, and my friend had gotten a dozen men together and bought this building from his friend and said it’s available for you to use however long you need it, and so the very next Sunday we worshipped here, and that’s sort of how it came about.

Q: How many people from the original church came with you, and how many people do you have now worshipping in your parish?

A: We average around 600 folks on a given Sunday. We had a little more than 800 show up for our first Sunday, which was astounding, because I’ve got to tell you I had no idea who might show up. I knew I’d be here, and I knew that my family would be here, and I knew of a handful of staff members and some vestry that would definitely be here, so I thought you know what, if we have 30, 35, 40 people we’re going to have church, and I was just blown away when I walked out that morning and came over here and there were, you know, we were bursting at the seams. There were people standing, people had to be outside, there wasn’t adequate space. So I would say that somewhere around 800 came from the previous parish. We averaged over there about 650 in worship, so we had a lot of regular worshippers over there and some who probably weren’t very regular worshippers over there who came here. That first day I’m sure we also had people who had no intention of being members of this church who just showed up to show support, who were part of other Episcopal churches who wanted to show support. So we started with somewhere around 800 members, and we’ve grown. Now we’re a little over 1200 members, but really about 600 people who are in worship. Of course you don’t have the same 600 every week. It fluxuates, but 600 is what we average.

Q: Why did you feel you could no longer be a part of the Episcopal Church?

A. That was a long and difficult struggle for me. I had been happy as an Episcopal priest for many years, served 10 years as rector of St. John’s, loved the people, loved the church, and I could be okay for a long time with having a renegade priest or bishop here or there taking odd positions on things, you know, some bishop who said he didn’t believe in the Virgin Birth, some priest over here who said it wasn’t necessary to believe that Jesus was historically, physically raised from the dead, some other priest over here presiding at same-sex unions. But then when it came to the point that it was the church’s official position, that the church officially was endorsing some of these beliefs, then it was a very different issue for me, because that church is what I’m representing. I’m under the umbrella of the Episcopal Church. I’m a priest at that church, and can I in good conscience continue to bring people, innocent people who are seeking to know and love the Lord, into such a church? And that became really apparent for me one particular day when I had a young man who came to visit my office. He was kind of a good old Southern boy, brought up down South, and had never been in a church his whole life. His family was unchurched, and then he started dating a girl who came to our church. She was a Florida State student, and they started dating, and she started pulling him into church, and he started attending some classes, and he began to really believe all this business about Jesus and resurrection and scripture and sin and redemption, and he wanted to talk to a priest, so he came, and he sat in my office, and we had the most wonderful conversation, and there was a real earnest seeking-for-faith in this fellow, and when he left my office that day instead of my feeling jubilant, joyous that this fellow was coming into the church, I felt depressed. I thought, you know, is this a good thing? Am I guiding him in the wrong way? Have I brought him into a church that is going to mislead him? Does he think he’s getting into something that’s very different from what he’s really getting into? And then I had to really struggle with whether I could really keep doing catechumen classes and continue drawing people into the life of a church that is obviously going in a very different direction than I felt I could go, and that really began the move for me. I had a bishop friend who sat down with me at one point and pled with me to reconsider. Please don’t leave the church, stay in the church, we need you to stay in the church, and I said can you tell me any strongly orthodox priest or bishop who feels that we could win the battle? That it’s worth staying here and fighting this fight for the sake of this church? And he got tears in his eyes, and he said no, I don’t know anybody who thinks that this battle can be won. And I said then tell me why I should stay. And he said because there’s still a possibility. Not for your children, or your grandchildren, but maybe for your great-grandchildren. If you can hang in there, then some day this church is going to come around. And I said, so you’re telling me that I should give the next 25 years of my ministry fighting battles in the hope that just maybe some day for my great-grandchildren there might be a shred of gospel orthodoxy left? I said there’s no way. I’d much rather pour my energies out into building some strong, new church that’s still faithful to Anglicanism but that’s strongly, unapologetically orthodox. A church where I don’t have to continually be fighting battles with things that I think should be givens. And so that was the issue for me. I didn’t change as a priest, that’s the thing. I was still believing and practicing the things I’d always believed and practiced. I hadn’t changed an iota in my theology. I was still practicing those things that priests 100 years ago were practicing. I felt that a church had moved away from me, not me away from the church, and not only away from me, but away from many priests and lay people who were earnestly seeking to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus. So that’s where it all started for me.

Q: A lot of churches coming to the same decision you did are still trying to hang on to their church buildings, and there are some protracted legal battles about who should stay on the property. Why did you decide not to go that route?

A: I personally could never go the legal route, and for me it’s not biblical. It’s not the thing to do. I think to drag the dirty laundry of the church out into the public arena and to have these horrible, protracted battles in secular courts over property is just the wrong thing. St. Paul warns us about it in Corinthians, but I can’t judge other priests who have made other decisions and maybe for reasons that I don’t understand. I do understand a priest who is in a church that is relatively new and a hundred percent of the congregation wants to leave the Episcopal Church, and it’s those same people who actually built that church, paid for it, and bought the land 25 years ago. I can understand that priest really, really thinking that it would be just that the Episcopal Church should allow them to take the property. I think it becomes more murky maybe with older buildings that have been around, and especially with churches that have divided memberships. In the church that I was serving, St. John’s, it was a divided membership. I had a large number of people, obviously, who shared my commitments, but there were still many others there who didn’t, and yes, we could have had a battle, and I think the majority of the parish, the majority of the participating parish, certainly, would have stood where I stood, and it would have been a long, bloody battle, but what do you win at the end of it? You win some bricks, but what have you done to the gospel, what have you done to the witness of the gospel in this community, and what have you done to relationships between people? Because long after that battle’s over, you’re still going to have serious hatred between people who have been members of the same parish, and so for me that’s not the way to go, and I had told people there, I had some folks who had visited with me some months before I made this decision, where I think they saw that in my soul I was struggling deeply. And they came to me and they said honestly we’re worried that you’re going to end up leaving and trying to take this church with you, and I said, well I can’t tell you that I won’t leave the Episcopal Church, because I may not be able to do this long term, but I promise you that I will never, ever try to take this building. And so when it came time for me to make that decision I knew I had to be true to that promise, so there was never for me a thought of entering into some legal battle. The thing, though, that was shocking to me was the number of people who had a long history in that parish. Their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents helped build the place, they were married there, baptized there, they have family members in the grave there, they have stained glass windows in the names of family members, and they chose to come, a number of them, and so really the sacrifice was much greater on the part of some of those laypeople, who had a long history in that particular church, than it was for me, because I had only 10 years of history in that church.

Q: Let’s talk about your affiliation with the Anglican Church of Uganda. For a lot of Americans that seems strange, that a group of US Episcopalians would now all of a sudden be a part of the church of Uganda. How does that work, and why did you want to affiliate with them?

A: Well, first I think it’s wonderfully ironic that you got a bunch of wealthy, white mostly, Americans who found their salvation, so to speak, in a bunch of poor Africans. I mean, you know God smiles at that. When I was preparing to leave, I clearly wanted to remain in the Anglican tradition. I care about being an Anglican priest, and I didn’t want to give up that heritage. I didn’t want to go off and do my own thing as one independent clergyman, and so did the associate priests who were with me, so obviously we had to be under the authority of some bishop somewhere, and we struggled with how to affiliate. What should we do? And one of the possibilities was the Anglican Mission of America, and I just had a great love and respect for the Anglican Mission, but at that time it was pretty hardnosed about the ordination of women, and that is not an issue for us, and we didn’t want to get pulled into all of that, and so that couldn’t be a possibility for us at that time. So I called my bishop, the bishop of Florida, who had retired and moved to Dallas, Texas, Steven Jecko, and I called Bishop Jecko in Texas, and I said here’s my quandary. I have come to this place where I can’t stay in the Episcopal Church. I’ve got to leave, but I’ve got to be under some bishop somewhere, and I need your help. Would you be willing to help me find a bishop? And he said yes, I will, I will find you a bishop. And so I put it in his hands, and I went on about my daily duties, and then three days before I announced to the congregation that I was leaving, I was beginning to sweat a bit, and he called me on the phone, and he said, I have put you under a bishop, and I said who? And he said, well, I’ve put you under the archbishop of Uganda, and he said I put you there because number one he’s willing, the ordination of women is not an issue for him, and he’s someone you already know. And he’s right. We already had relationships with Africans because of mission work we were doing in Africa, and so I said, well that’s awesome, we do have a relationship with many Africans, and that’s great that he’s willing to take us. So Bishop Orombi through Bishop Jecko had signed off on that. We sent all our paperwork to him, and we were immediately under his authority, so that’s how it worked. That’s how it came about to be Africa, and it’s been a remarkable thing, wonderful in many ways. We have 24 churches in north Florida who have been a part of the diocese of Florida, now Anglican churches that are a part of an Anglican alliance, and they’re priests that I’ve known for years and are sitting around the table, are having coffee and prayer with them for years, and here we are sitting around the table again together, and you look about and here’s this one priest who’s under Bolivia and this other priest who’s under Uganda and another under Kenya, and it’s just kind of neat to see the way that God’s church universal is sitting together right there at that same table.

Q: How important is that? You mentioned Anglican identity. Why is that so important to you?

A: Well, you know, it might seem odd, but I read too much Wesley along the way. I read too much of John Wesley, and I had a great love at the end of college and the beginning of seminary for John Wesley, for his evangelical zeal, but also for his catholic commitments, his commitment to the centrality of Eucharist, his commitment to common prayer, his commitment to order and discipline and structure, and that really appealed to me, and Wesley, you probably know, never intended to start a new church, Methodism, and when he died in 1791 he was still a faithful Anglican. So Anglicanism has for a long time meant much to me. I guess I don’t fit real well in the Free Church tradition that is very Protestant and focused only on scripture, and it separates itself from any sacramental notion of much of anything, but neither am I completely comfortable in a Catholic church that sometimes doesn’t give the kind of time and energy at all to scripture and that takes hold of some other beliefs that I struggle with that I think don’t have a scriptural foundation. So in Anglicanism I see the marriage of the two. I see the very best Protestantism and the very best Catholicism coming together in one, and for me it’s enormously appealing and faithful and rich, and I care about that, and I want my children to be nurtured in that kind of gospel, rich tradition, and so that’s why I’m an Anglican. I’m not willing to give that up. I don’t ever, ever want to give that up. I don’t want my children to have to give that up.

Q: Bishop John Guernsey is not being invited to the Lambeth Conference, just like Bishop Gene Robinson was not invited. What does that say to you?

A: I think you’re right, I think that Guernsey, my bishop, and a number of the bishops have not been invited to Lambeth, and you’re right, Gene Robinson has not been invited to Lambeth, but I think what that reflects is the reality of a broken Communion. It is broken. My archbishop, who obviously has been invited to Lambeth, Archbishop Orombi, has chosen not to go, and 300 other bishops in the Anglican Communion have chosen not to go. There may be more. At least those 300 who are part of the Southern Cone who were at GAFCON [Global Anglican Future Conference] in Jerusalem have chosen not to be part of Lambeth, and I think it simply reflects the reality that we’re dealing with of broken communion.

Q: What would you like to see happen at Lambeth to address the situation?

A: Well, there was a possibility early on that Lambeth might really get focused on creating a covenant that all Anglicans must give themselves to in order to be a part of this Anglican Communion, but in recent weeks it looks like that’s really not going to happen. And they’ve made clear that they’re not going to put forth any resolutions whatsoever, so at the end of the day it’s really not going to be much more than tea with the Queen, I’m afraid, but that seems to be the focus. It’s all about fellowship and not really much substance, so I don’t think there’s any hope that anything of any great magnitude is going to come out of Lambeth.

Q: You’ve articulated how you want to be part of that Anglican tradition, yet it seems like the structures of Anglicanism are struggling with how someone like you can still fit. Is that difficult for you?

A: No, because I don’t think the struggle is trying to figure out how somebody like me can fit in Anglicanism. I think the struggle is how Anglicanism can still hold onto people like the Episcopal Church. I’m a part of the larger majority of Anglicans. I mean, the overwhelming majority of Anglicans stand where I do on these issues, and we’re being true to classical Anglicanism. We haven’t changed in those commitments. It’s the same commitment. Go back and look through the last several hundred years of Anglicanism, and where we stand is where they stood. The changes come with the American church and the Canadian church, and they’re the ones who have stepped outside of Anglicanism, and I think that they’re the ones creating the division. So the possibility for the future in terms of having a united Anglicanism, that is an Anglicanism that includes all the people that heretofore have been included, will rely wholly in their hands, whether or not they choose to come back into the orthodox faith.

Q: What do you see happening structurally, though, to resolve the crisis?

A: Well, I think very sadly the American church over and again has been clear that it will not go back on its commitments. It’s made a commitment to the gay agenda. It sees it as a prophetic commitment, it sees itself as leading the rest of the church to what the future must be, a complete embrace of the gay and lesbian lifestyle, and that means the ordination of practicing homosexuals, the blessing of same sex unions, that all of that must be embraced. And they see that, many of these leaders, including the presiding bishop of the American church, sees that as a prophetic calling, and they’re not going to back up on that. That’s not going to change. And unfortunately because of that I don’t see any possibility of any union any time in the near future between the Episcopal Church in America and the larger body of Anglicanism. I think what you see happening as a result of GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference that took place in Jerusalem with my bishops, is that they’re seeking to create a fellowship of confessing Anglicans, that is, those who want to be clear in their commitments to orthodox faith. And they’re going to have a council of bishops that moderate it, that fellowship, and I think that’s where it’s going to end up, that I’ll be part of an American Anglicanism that is under the fellowship of this global structure, and there will be other people, like the Episcopal Church in America, that seeks to be a part of some other branch of Anglicanism. That’s how I see it coming down, sadly, unfortunately. I sure wouldn’t want that. My hope would be that we could all stay together, but I think that I — It’s sort of like this: Several years ago I attended a meeting in Dallas, Texas, and the archbishop of Uganda was there, and being good Anglicans like we are, all the priests were very anxious about the archbishop of Canterbury, and so they kept raising their hands asking questions of the archbishop of Uganda, well, what about this with Canterbury, and what about that with Canterbury, and what about this with Canterbury, and the archbishop of Uganda said, my brothers and sisters, I have great love and respect for the archbishop of Canterbury, but the archbishop of Canterbury did not die on a cross to save me from my sin. And I think he’s right. At the end of the day it’s about gospel faithfulness, above and beyond all the rest.

Q: So does what happens at Lambeth ultimately make a difference? Does it matter?

A: I think what happened in Lambeth in 1998 is they all signed off, the majority, strong majority signed off on Resolution 110 which made clear that the Anglican Church believes that homosexuality is in conflict with scripture, and that the blessing of unions and the consecration and ordination of practicing homosexuals is not acceptable. And that still where we stand, to this day, officially, that is still the position that has been reaffirmed over and over by the Anglican Church. Now the thing about it is, this Lambeth has made it clear it’s not doing anything about any new resolutions. So if no new resolutions are coming forward, and this is still the resolution that stands, then officially that’s where we are as a body. So again I don’t think anything’s going to come of this Lambeth, because they’ve stated, the archbishop has stated, the presiding bishop has stated, that there will be no new resolutions.

Q: What is your message to those bishops who will be at Lambeth?

A: I guess my message to those bishops who are choosing to attend Lambeth would be if they have any hope whatsoever to have this Communion continue to move together as a united body, then they have to stand by Resolution 110 from the 1998 Lambeth Conference, and they have to call the American and the Canadian church to repentance. I think that would be the solution.

Q: What about your local parish? Are you on hold waiting for something to happen, or are you moving forward?

A: I don’t think we’re on hold at all. We haven’t been on hold from day one. This is an energetic, vigorous, vibrant parish that is strongly moving forward with the gospel of the Lord. These people care about Anglicanism, so many of them lifelong Anglicans and some of them African Anglicans and English Anglicans, not just American Anglicans. And they’re moving forward with the gospel. I told our folks our first week, I said don’t you dare go to blog sites. Don’t do it. Stay away from it. Don’t get pulled into all that mire of anger and political tension. Leave it behind us. We made a decision about that fight, and we left, and we’re moving forward with the gospel of Jesus, and for those that are still in that mire, let them have that fight. They have to make their decisions, but we’ve moved on, and we’re joyfully under the archbishop of Uganda, and we’re joyfully under Bishop Guernsey in Virginia, who is a wonderful man, and we’re just here to serve, and so no, we’ve moved beyond it, and at the end of the day yes, we care what happens to Anglicanism worldwide, but we’re not bogged down in the fight.

Q: How important is Easter on the Christian calendar?

A: Easter is the pivotal feast day. It is the most important day of the year for a Christian. The awesome thing about Easter is the way in which it takes what would have been a tremendous tragedy, the death of Jesus on Good Friday, and turns it into the great triumph of God over death, and that changes everything for us. We wouldn’t be Christian if it wasn’t for that … It was what turned the disciples into Christians, when they realized that Jesus was raised from the dead, that he really was the Messiah that they were waiting for and that somehow the world changed in that magnificent sacrifice. That was what gave them the energy, the joy to go out and to preach the Gospel to all people, and many of them were martyred because of it. So that deep, profound faith in themselves and the deepness of who they were was what sustained them in times of their struggles and their trials. A theology or a philosophy that doesn’t deal with death is not going to be helpful to you when you’re in times of suffering and trial. I often find that people talk very nonchalantly about God and religion, and I sometimes think to myself, well, wait until you have difficulties. What will sustain you? The power of the crucifixion is the fact that it was a horrible way to die. That Jesus allowed himself to be killed that way — he could have avoided it if he wanted to. There are other times in the Bible where it talks about the leaders and authorities and people trying to stone him, but he went back to Jerusalem knowing that he had so stirred up the people and the authorities that they were so angry at him that they wanted to crucify him, and he knew that was what he needed to do, so he did it out of his own free will. The pain of that, the sorrow, the struggle, the conflict of that horrible day all turn into joy with the knowledge that he was resurrected from the dead. So suddenly what had been a great failure — the greatest tragedy, the worst thing that could have happened — became the greatest joy, the most wondrous thing, the great triumph of God over death.

Q: How important is music to this season?

A: We know that Jesus, when he met with his disciples on what we call Maundy Thursday — it comes from the Latin mandatum, a mandate, and the mandate actually was to wash each other’s feet. The mandate was to serve each other, to love each other as Christ loves us. At this Passover meal that Jesus was sharing with his disciples, he picked up the bread that he had and broke it and gave it to them and said, “This is my body,” and he picked up the cup of wine and thanked God and said, “This is my blood,” and passed it around. Little did they know that this was going to be the last meal with him. What they knew was that he was very emotional and that he seemed to be telling them things that they knew they needed to remember. One of the last things they did in this celebration of the Passover meal was to sing a hymn. We don’t know what hymn it was, but it would have been a Hebrew chant that would have been sung at the Passover table, and knowing that Jesus was a singer and that he sang with his disciples makes you realize how ancient this form is and how deeply it is engrained in the soul.

Hymns are one of the oldest things we human beings do together communally. What’s wonderful about singing is that you actually breathe together. You say it in the same tempo. It’s the difference between saying a creed together in church, where ir might not be exactly the same tempo, or actually singing it, where everyone has the same tempo. You’re breathing at the end of the phrase together. It is a wonderful moment where we become one. In Christianity we talk about being one body in Christ, and to be able to breathe together and sing together as one is one of the most profound ways to experience that.

The wonderful thing about hymns is that they are encoded with different memories of singing them in different places. I imagine that the disciples remembered that hymn hauntingly the next two days, that they remembered him singing with them, and it probably made them cry as they remembered. And then, when Jesus was resurrected from the dead, then that singing with him became something else. Probably for the rest of their lives they could always see him and hear him singing with them whenever they sang that hymn. That’s the power of music.

The other thing that happened at this Passover meal is that Jesus surprised them by getting down on his knees in front of them, by taking a towel and actually washing their feet. Peter, one of the disciples, immediately said, “No, No, you shouldn’t be washing my feet.” And Jesus said, “If I don’t wash you then you are not part of this whole thing,” and then he said, of course, “Well, then wash everything.” And Jesus said, “No, only the feet.” But this simple, very powerful act of not being the kind of leader one would expect, not being the kind of person who would lord it over them — “Yes, I am God” — Jesus never did that, and that was the most amazing thing, that he of his own free will gave up his life, knowing that was the only way to break the power of death, to be the one who did not deserve to die, but who died in our stead.

Q: What does knowing that Jesus sang with the disciples do for you, and how does that make the importance of music central to this season in the church year?

A: Knowing that Jesus sang meant that he was like me, that I sing, he sang, that he was a fully human being, and that he enjoyed being with people and singing together. One of the greatest things about singing is the way in which it immediately creates community. If you’re breathing together with each other, if you’re singing the same words, you’re experiencing the same feeling. There’s a way in which different hymns give us a different sense of emotion. So, for example, with “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” it is a very personal piety: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble.” Well, if you’ve been in profound grief, you know what that is. That hymn may sound silly to you when you’re in a good mood, and everything’s going fine. But when someone close to you dies suddenly, lingering on the words “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble” will be exactly where you are. So the hymn picks up an emotion and carries it to a place where we can share it with others in a way we don’t do otherwise. Some of the great moments of hymn singing have been at the funeral of some great, tragic figure. When we sing together “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” there’s something comforting about singing a hymn that has gone through many, many, many different tragedies and carries us together at that moment … We seek to be in community with each other, and singing is one of the greatest ways to allow us to do that, where we can feel the same emotion, and we can say the same words at the same time, and we can truly be one body.

Q: There is special music for this season that most Christians don’t usually sing at other times of the year.

A: One of the great hymns, “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” was actually a Latin hymn. I believe it dates back to the 14th century. It started in Bohemia. It became very popular, and there’s version of it that came in 1708 in English translation, and we’re still using that hymn and that melody. It is ecstatic in the way that you have “Alleluia,” which is “praise to God,” and that alleluia repeats after every phrase, so it gets the sense of total joy. If you’ve ever been with somebody you thought was dying, and then they make it through the night, and the doctors refer to it as a miracle, that’s the kind of joy which was, “We thought he was dead, but now he is alive. Hallelujah!”

Q: Much Easter music uses alleluia or hallelujah. Why is that?

A: “Alleluia” is the Latin form of “praise to God.” “Hallelujah” is the Hebrew form of “praise to God.” They’re both ecstatic, and I think the sound of it is why we haven’t translated them, because “Alleluia,” the way it falls off the ear, and “Hallelujah” — just that sense of almost moving into the non-verbal, not a translation of “praise to God” but “Hallelujah,” that sheer joy, sheer ecstasy.

Q: And why are those words used especially at Easter?

A: Not only do we use them especially at Easter, but we don’t say them in the Christian Church during Lent. We bury the alleluias and return them on Easter Sunday because we are walking with Jesus through this Lenten period. One of the earliest services in the Christian Church is the Easter Vigil, waiting through the night, being reminded of the great story and waiting for dawn to come, waiting for that moment when Christ is risen. And the early church then began to precede that with two fast days, so you’re having a Paschal fast before the Paschal feast, and eventually, within a number of centuries it became a whole week, what we now term Holy Week … During Lent we work on our relationship with God and prepare ourselves to get to the point each year so that we can walk with Jesus during these final three days. The gift of the Triduum Sacrum, these three holy days, is that we walk in real time with Jesus, and we meditate on everything that happened to him during those times.

Q: How does the music of the season reflect that journey, those moods?

A: The songs and the hymns, especially for Good Friday, reflect the pain, the conflict, the torture, the incredible sadness and mourning around the death of someone you love. Any of us who have had that kind of experience know that it’s like having the rug pulled out from underneath you. You can’t imagine the world without this person. You can’t imagine going on. Your life has totally changed.

In “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” we have a wonderful hymn. It started as a Latin hymn. It got translated into German and then into English. One of the early English translations was “O head so full of bruises,” which I don’t think we’d still be singing today. But the translation, the music, the harmonization — what’s so wonderful about it is the way it holds complex theological issues together. There are moments in major keys, moments in minor keys, there are dissonances and consonances, there is tension that gets resolved. It takes you on a journey, takes you on a long journey through the text. It’s a meditation on Christ and on his body, specifically his head and on the gift of his sacrifice, so encoded in the music, in the sonorities, in the choice of chords, in the way in which the melody moves, in the way in which the harmony flows. We hear the anguish and that suffering, and we linger with it. “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” if you sing all the verses, takes a long time, and in general the songs we sing on Good Friday are longer. They are slow, they may be in a minor key, they have a sense of suffering, of sorrow, of mourning, and that is a great gift. To be able to stand together in that emotion and do it together as a body is the gift to us. If you’ve been to a funeral, where suddenly everyone is singing together, there’s something very comforting about that, that you’re not alone. Death happens to all of us. That is one of the great tragedies of being human.

Q: And then there is a big contrast from the emotion of Good Friday to Easter.

A: I don’t think anyone can tell you that you must believe Jesus rose from the dead. I think that we all struggle with that in our own time … I’ve been through all the doubt, so I understand why people can’t just say, “Yes, this is for me.” But I also know in my heart that my Redeemer lives, that I’ve seen miracles surrounding the deaths of good friends of mine, and I know that there’s something more than what we see. I know somehow that the invisible is louder than the visible, that there are saints and angels that sing their praises. So on the Sunday morning of Easter, the cathedral is totally changed from Good Friday. On Good Friday, it’s been stark. We’ve cleared off the altar; there is little there. We have the cross, the starkness of the cross, and the sadness — no flowers, no incense. And then on Easter Sunday the church is filled with lilies and spring flowers. The smells are overwhelming, the incense comes back, the lights are up high and bright, the music is loud and joyous and fast and fills us with such happiness to know that our God lives, that love has triumphed over evil.

Q: How does the music convey the Easter message?

A: The theology of Easter is one of joy, triumph, resurrection, rebirth, surprise. The joy of Easter is in the triumph of the resurrection. It’s an incredible and profound joy knowing that God has broken through and that love has triumphed, and so the music tends to be more straightforward, less lingering on harmonies and dissonance, very straightforward, a joyous, faster tempo … One of the things people love about Easter hymns is the incredible joy and happiness of singing them. The tempi are faster. The organ plays loud. We can let ourselves sing at the top of our lungs, and no one is going to yell at us for singing loudly. We have ecstatic moments and hallelujahs. We have just the sheer joy of knowing that love has triumphed. The message of Easter is encoded in the music. We hear the joy, we hear the triumph. We sing fast music, we sing it joyously, it’s in a major key, and it helps us to feel that this is the day the Lord has made.

Q: How is the message expressed differently in different cultural and theological traditions?

A: Every hymn is the result of someone’s spirituality. What’s so interesting about hymn writing and hymn composing is that we take together a text, sometimes it’s a Latin text from the 12th, 13th century, it’s connected with a translation, it might be translated into German and then into English. We have the piety of all those people who are working on that. We have a tune. We have someone else who might harmonize it. All of these pieces fall into place. It is always a miracle as to which hymn people decide is the one they want to sing. “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” was a hit tune the moment it appeared in 1708 in its current form, and we have been singing it every Easter since. This wonderful hymn “Because He Lives I Can Face Tomorrow”: Being able to have that as your core theology, singing it so that you remember it, so that it’s in your mind the rest of the week, waiting to sing it until Easter Sunday, and that is a profound theology. That’s absolutely helpful to you, and so as you have that tune going through your head the rest of the week, you’re thinking about the Easter message, the core message, which is Jesus lives, Jesus was resurrected, therefore my life has a new meaning. Death is not the end of me.

Q: At Easter time, there are traditional hymns that are sung pretty universally, but there are lots of new songs as well, much more so than Christmas. What does this say theologically?

A: It actually is terribly theologically important that we keep composing and writing new music. If we stick with all the old music, then somehow there lingers this idea that God is dead. The Holy Spirit in my theology is still moving in the world and is still encouraging us to write new songs, to write new texts, to write new poetry, and the gift of a living faith is rediscovering again what that means for you … What we love about something new is that we see an old idea or an old truth with new eyes, and that’s a great gift to the world. So we absolutely need new Easter hymns, new Easter songs, and it’s lovely that these different traditions all have their own hymns that pop up.

Q: So many of the Easter songs have the image of Jesus as a lamb.

A: Jesus and his disciples had that Passover meal, and at that they would have had lamb. The sacrificial lamb is deep in Jewish theology — the idea of one sacrifice representing the sins of all. And so that was an obvious thing for the early church to come to, the idea of Jesus being the paschal lamb, being the lamb of Pesach, of Passover, and because of him our sins are passed over. In the early church, the idea of crucifixion was so horrendous; it was such a horrible way to die that they couldn’t imagine using that as a symbol. Constantine saw a vision of the cross in the sky before he overcame his enemies, and two years after that he decided crucifixions should be banned. There is no symbolism of crucifixions or crosses in the fourth century or the fifth, and it’s only later that people began to portray that, when it’s not a form of death, a form of execution that’s being used all the time.

Q: And the Hallelujah Chorus. Why is that such a common staple of Easter music?

A: I think the Hallelujah Chorus, which comes from Handel’s Messiah, somehow represents the sheer ecstasy of the joy of knowing that our life has meaning, of knowing that love has triumphed, of knowing that God is and that there is more to life than just the dreariness of the day — that Christ has triumphed over death, that we can hope for greater things, that there is life after death. There are some hymns and songs that seem fine on paper, but when you sing them they don’t resonate, and then there are other hymns and songs that the first time they are sung, somehow everybody knows this speaks an eternal truth. “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” is one of those hymns.

Q: Many of the Good Friday and Easter songs emphasize blood.

A: The truth of the reality is that we are dealing with life and death issues. The idea of blood, which is so horrifying — when you bleed you are terrified that you are going to die — but to use that as a symbol, then, of new life is the gift of it as symbol. There is much poetry that is written that seems sort of gory, but the best of it transcends that and calls us to a different place. It reminds us that yes, we are human and that we die: Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. And yet it reminds us that there is another side to that, that the story doesn’t end there, that we end in resurrection.

KIM LAWTON, guest anchor: Mitt Romney’s campaign advisors had been debating for months about whether the candidate should give a frank speech about his Mormon faith. On Thursday (December 6), Romney made that speech. At the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, Romney said he would be true to his Mormon beliefs, but his presidency would not be dictated by them.

MITT ROMNEY (Republican Presidential Candidate): I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law.

LAWTON: Romney also criticized what he called “the religion of secularism” that is trying to push religion out of American public life. Many experts believe the speech was designed to reach out especially to evangelicals who may be uncomfortable with the idea of voting for a Mormon.

Joining me now is Shaun Casey, associate professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington and the author of a book coming out next year about religion and John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. Casey is also an advisor to Senator Barack Obama’s campaign.

Shaun, did Mitt Romney’s speech this week reassure evangelicals and others who might have had concerns about the notion of a Mormon president?

Dr. SHAUN CASEY, (Associate Professor, Christian Ethics, Wesley Theological Seminary): I think the jury’s probably still out on that. I think in terms of rank-and-file evangelicals the speech left a lot to be desired. I think in terms of evangelical leaders, they were pleased with what he said and they, while not having endorsed him, are still considering that option, I think, down the road. I think in terms of the national press the jury is still out. Some people were impressed; some were not. And in terms of Americans beyond that community of evangelicals, it was a pale imitation, I think, of Kennedy’s speech in 1960.

LAWTON: Well, I wanted to ask you about Kennedy’s speech, but first let me just ask you what was it in the speech that maybe didn’t satisfy the rank and file evangelicals?

Dr. CASEY: I think there was one particular dramatic moment when he talked about the question he gets asked about: Who is Jesus and what does he think about him? He gave a great answer in terms of evangelicals where he said Jesus is Lord and Savior of mankind, son of God. But then he said Mormon doctrine essentially differs from there about who Jesus Christ is — from evangelical doctrine. I think a lot of evangelicals at that point left very, very troubled.

LAWTON: Why does it matter? Why does it matter to the voters, you know, what he believes about Jesus?

Dr. CASEY: Well, in the current ethos, the current age, particularly in the Republican Party over the last eight years, it’s been fairly essential that a candidate demonstrate that they are theologically orthodox from a conservative Protestant perspective, and that answer didn’t meet that standard.

LAWTON: Was it a “Kennedyesque” speech? Was it the same thing that Kennedy did when he talked about his Catholicism?

Dr. CASEY: It was similar. I mean, the environment is different, but both were responding to external political forces. Neither candidate wanted to give the speech at that time, but both had to because an opponent was forcing them to that position. Kennedy talked more about separation of church and state, because that was the attack that was launched against him. Romney’s problem is different in the sense that people see his Mormonism as exotic or esoteric, and he has to knock that down without being too explicit about what Mormon doctrine really is.

LAWTON: So, very quickly, what will voters take away from this when they head to the polls?

Dr. CASEY: I think in Iowa he’s still in trouble. I think Mike Huckabee has overtaken him among evangelicals. I don’t think this speech changed that trend.

LAWTON: Okay, we’ll leave it there. Shaun Casey, thank you very much.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The 280 U.S. Catholic bishops meet this coming week (November 12-15) in Baltimore, with a sharp debate likely over religion and politics, specifically on how much weight the issue of abortion should have in Catholic decisions on how to vote. Joining us to explore the arguments is Father Tom Reese, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center and a longtime authority on the U.S. bishops. Tom, welcome.

Father THOMAS J. REESE, S.J. (Senior Fellow, Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: The bishops don’t tell Catholics how to vote, do they?

Fr. REESE: No. What the bishops want to do is provide ethical guidelines — guidance — to help people make the decision themselves on how to vote.

ABERNETHY: And this draft that they’ll be debating this coming week, this long draft says about abortion that it is “intrinsically evil.” But it also says, or at least implies, that there are some circumstances under which a Catholic might in good conscience vote for somebody who’s pro-choice. Those seem to me difficult to put together.

Fr. REESE: Well, each voter has to weigh the various issues involved, and the bishops are saying abortion is extremely important. But it may be that if you make the judgment that abortion is never going to be illegal, then you may want to look for a candidate who is going to help reduce the number of abortions by voting for social programs — healthcare, education, training — that will help women have the ability to choose life rather than abortion.

ABERNETHY: Some bishops have said that they will not give Communion to a Catholic candidate who is pro-choice. To what extent is that representative of the bishops as a whole?

Fr. REESE: Well, during the last presidential election only about 12 bishops said they would not give Communion to Senator Kerry. I always thought the headline should have been, “180 Bishops Say Nothing about Communion and Kerry.” We’ll just have to see in this election. Especially if Giuliani is nominated, we’ll have a pro-choice Republican Catholic as president, and we’ll see whether — how many bishops say he should not receive Communion.

ABERNETHY: The bishops have an enormous number of positions in this draft document that they lay out for people to read. Where would you put the bishops on the scale from left to right, politically?

Fr. REESE: Well, they’re — on most issues of social, economic justice, war and peace they’re to the left of Democrats. They want to help the poor. On the other hand, on abortion, they’re much more with the Republicans. The bishops are not at home in either party.

ABERNETHY: And do they have the moral authority now that they used to? After the sex abuse scandal a lot of people thought that the bishops had suffered greatly in that regard. Do Catholics listen now when the bishops offer advice?

Fr. REESE: Well, I think Catholics will listen and read this document and study it. But then, you know, they’re going to make up their own minds about who to vote for, and really that’s what the bishops want them to do.

ABERNETHY: Father Tom Reese, many thanks.

Fr. REESE: Thank you.