RICHARD ROHR: There’s no place where you can’t pray.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Richard Rohr, a Catholic priest, is addressing a packed house at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon.

ROHR: I love beautiful spaces. But if creating beautiful spaces like this for one moment leads you to think that God is not equally out there on the streets of Portland, then religion is not doing its job.

VALENTE: For the past 25 years, Rohr, a Franciscan [priest], has run the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque. He calls himself a “radical traditionalist.” For example:

ROHR: It’s not correct to say Jesus is God. Now, don’t run and report me to the bishop, all right? It’s not correct to say that — Jesus is the union of the human and the divine. That’s different. I’ve been a priest 43 years. Most of the Catholics Christians I’ve met would for all practical purposes believe Jesus is God only, and we are human only. We missed the big point. The point is the integration, both in Jesus and ourselves.

VALENTE: Such provocative ideas make him an enigma to some, and a modern day prophet to others. Richard Rohr is one of the most popular spirituality authors and speakers in the world. His ideas appeal to people across faith traditions, and to spiritual seekers as well. Rohr argues that most organized religions dispense doctrine when they should be encouraging personal transformation.

ROHR: Without transformation, you can assume you’re at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.

VALENTE: Rohr’s popularity may be surprising since his ideas are highly nuanced and draw deeply from mythology, philosophy and psychology. He’s lectured across the globe. And his books have been translated into numerous languages. His latest book is called “Falling Upward,” and addresses the importance of the spiritual journey.

ROHR: It feels like falling but it isn’t falling, it’s learning. It’s transcending.

VALENTE: In what he calls the first half of life, Rohr says we’re mostly concerned with everyday interests: building our self-image.

ROHR: Our culture is made to order for that. Defining the self almost entirely by external achievements, by external appearance, by skin color, by the car you drive, where you live, and so forth. You know, that… all great spiritual traditions will call that illusion. Illusion. Foolishness. There’s a further journey. There’s something more than, you know, accumulating more money in the stock market.

VALENTE: But in the second part of life, the spiritual part, we are more likely to see meaning in the losses, disappointments and failures we have suffered. It is not necessarily a chronological period. It can occur at any age, but is always characterized by a greater ability to appreciate mystery and paradox.

ROHR: It’s the holding of tensions, of ambiguity, of pain, if you will, that in fact teaches us wisdom. There’s an increased capacity for compassion, forgiveness, love.

VALENTE: He calls himself a loyal Catholic, but maintains too many churches emphasize teaching, which can leave us stranded in a “religious comfort zone.”

ROHR: We ask Catholics to believe that Mary was a Virgin and Jesus is God and you know, that’s no skin off your back. I believe that. Believe that, believe that, believe that. So what?

VALENTE: Rohr says that there is such a thing as absolute truth, and that religious doctrine has its place. But he maintains that a rigid adherence to doctrine is sometimes part of the problem.

ROHR: Without honest self-knowledge religion ends up, I’m going to say it, being more a part of the problem than the solution. I mean, we’ve seen it now for centuries, that people who call themselves Christian can be utterly racist, utterly sexist, utterly greedy, no questions asked. This is the kind of religion we end up with when you don’t do your shadowboxing.

VALENTE: Shadowboxing, to Rohr, means taking a hard look at our flaws, our weaknesses and biases. It’s an important first step, Rohr says, toward uncovering what he calls “the true self.”

ROHR: The spiritual life is very much a matter of cleaning the lens, clarifying how you see. So the shadow is what you don’t want to see. Shadowboxing never stops, that you keep seeing the parts of yourself that are paranoid, angry, defensive, accusatory, fearful, attacking.

VALENTE: Rohr calls solitude “a cure for loneliness” and describes it as an essential element for living a more contemplative — and compassionate — life.

ROHR: Whenever you have a return to solitude and silence, you know that there’s been a rediscovery of the contemplative mind. I think we should close down every pastoral program in a diocese and just teach our people how to pray. It’s the built-in therapy to let go of your addiction to yourself and to your repetitive obsessive thoughts, which just screws up just about everything.

Without the contemplative mind, which at this point in history we have to be taught, you simply don’t have the wherewithal to deal with great spiritual truths.

VALENTE: According to Rohr, our society has plenty of elderly people, but lacks true “elders.”

ROHR: Elder is a capacity of soul that allows you to patiently understand things, and again I’m going to repeat our word for that is wisdom. It is not chronological maturity. It’s how you’ve dealt with the dark side and how successfully you’ve dealt with disappointment, betrayal, abandonment, failure, and rejection.

VALENTE: Do you think that the spiritual journey only begins in earnest when we hit rock bottom?

ROHR: Only at that point which they call powerlessness do you learn to draw upon a bigger source. There’s no other reason you will. And that’s what I would call the spiritual journey. Up to that point, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, but up to that point it’s largely religion. Religion isn’t bad, but until religion becomes actual spiritual experience, it is just religion.

I think of the Catholic parents who’ve demanded that their kids go to Mass every Sunday, but then they’re sitting there themselves bored to death and hate every minute of it and walk out early and, I mean, the kids knows by three, “This is not a good thing to go to Mass,” you know?

VALENTE: The things he sometimes says have, so far, not gotten him into trouble with the official church.

ROHR: You can’t just have Catholic truth, Methodist truth, Buddhist truth. If it’s true, it’s always true, and that’s what we mean by the perennial tradition. This desire to find the big patterns that are always true. I think that’s been my desire and right on the heels of that has been my equal desire to show that Christianity has always taught those truths. So in that sense I’m very traditional Catholic, even though I often say it in different ways that make people think I’m not.

VALENTE: He maintains he’s neither a skeptic, nor a rebel. He speaks of faith and mystery this way:

ROHR: I love to define mystery as not that which is unknowable, but that which is endlessly knowable. So you never get to the point where I know it all. And wouldn’t we assume that would be the nature of God? That God will always by definition be mystery. More knowability, more knowability, deeper experience, deeper surrender. So that’s the meaning of faith, and why faith has such power, not just to transform people but to keep them on an ongoing path of transformation and growth.

VALENTE: To take that path, Rohr says, is to choose a life of growth, over spiritual stagnation.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Judy Valente in Portland, Oregon.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Martin Sheen says “The Way” is ultimately about a journey—a journey of the spirit as well as the flesh.

WOMAN (in film clip): So what is it, on a pilgrimage to change your life?

TOM (in film clip): Something like that.

MARTIN SHEEN: All of our journeys are personal, deeply personal, and they’re all mysterious, you know. We’re all looking for that transcendence, but we’re looking to each other, and we identify with each other. I think the genius of God is choosing to dwell where we are least likely to look, within the depths of our own being.

DANIEL (in film clip): If I don’t have your blessing that’s fine, but don’t judge this. Don’t judge me.

DANIEL (in film clip): You don’t choose a life, Dad. You live one.

LAWTON: The story centers around Sheen’s character, Tom, a doctor who has a strained relationship with his free-spirited son, Daniel. Daniel dies in a freak storm in Europe, and when Tom goes to collect his remains, he discovers his son had been walking the famed 500-mile pilgrimage across Spain known as El Camino de Santiago—The Way of Saint James.

MAN (in film clip): We believers are told that the remains of Saint James, the apostle of Jesus, are interned there, and so we make pilgrimage. This is what your son, Daniel, was doing.

LAWTON: Grief-stricken, Tom decides to finish the pilgrimage himself, sprinkling Daniel’s ashes as he goes. Along the way he meets three other pilgrims, and together they search for healing and ultimate meaning in their lives. The story was inspired by a trip Sheen took to the Camino several years ago, although he drove instead of walking. He came home and told Estevez they needed to do a project around it. Estevez wrote the script, casting his father, who is a practicing Catholic, against type.

FATHER FRANK (in film clip): Are you a Catholic?

FATHER FRANK: No, please take it. There are a lot of lapsed Catholics on the Camino, kid. Besides…

EMILIO ESTEVEZ: There cannot be conversion if you already start out being devout. Let’s open the film where you’re not even interested in praying with your parish priest, right? He’s reached bottom now. He’s a widower, he’s now lost his son. He’s totally alone in the world, he’s without family. His idea of community is, you know, playing golf with his fellow doctors at the country club, and so I needed him to be at that place so that by the time this character arrives at the end of the film, there is a transformation. He is awake. He is converted.

LAWTON: Sheen says his Catholic faith was strengthened by seeing and experiencing the rituals of the Camino pilgrimage and the Mass that takes place at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela when the pilgrims finally arrive.

SHEEN: The botafumiero, you know, the incense ceremony at the end of the Mass, brings out a deeply moving exaltation from the congregation. They burst into applause, and many of them burst into tears. And, you know, the incense is an offering to God, you know, but it’s also an ancient tradition and ritual, and we don’t have a whole lot of ritual in our lives. You know, we’ve lost more and more of ritual just within our own family structures—evening meals, evening, you know, family prayer. So I think people are—they respond to ritual. It’s something that you can get reconnected with, in a way. You know, they’ve been doing that since the Middle Ages.

LAWTON: And you had mentioned earlier just with pilgrimage, the sense of the physical, the flesh and the spiritual coming together. How did you see that, especially there?

SHEEN: Well, you know, pilgrimage is kind of a demanding struggle. It must be to take you out of your comfort zone. So you go to a place, whether it’s Mecca or Santiago or Tibet or Rome, Jerusalem, wherever it is—you’re seeking something, and you’re going to have to do it on your own. Nobody can carry your pack. Nobody can walk in your shoes. You must do it alone, but you cannot do it without community.

LAWTON: The difficulty of the journey, he says, touches the soul.

SHEEN: You begin the journey within. Now the real pilgrimage begins, because now you have to open up the dungeons and jail cells of your heart and release all of the things that have been keeping you from being yourself, keeping you from, you know, discovering who you really are. So you let go of your resentments and your anger and your jealousies and your hatreds and all the dark parts, and eventually you’ll become free, you’ll become yourself, and you’ll become part of your extended family, which is community.

ESTEVEZ: And sometimes that family and those people you pick up along the Camino are not necessarily people you would choose. They choose you in many ways, and yet those are the people that we sometimes learn the greatest lessons from.

LAWTON: Estevez describes his own spiritual situation as still evolving.

ESTEVEZ: I’m what my mother likes to call a work in progress. My parents—I grew up in a house where my parents differed on what religion was all about. She was raised Southern Baptist, wasn’t allowed to see movies or dance. It was very, very strict. He was raised a devout Catholic.

SHEEN: We sang and danced all the time.

ESTEVEZ: So as a young boy—I was baptized Catholic, but all I heard were arguments about religion. There was no talk about spirituality. So I sort of had to take a step back from that.

LAWTON: He says this film has opened him up to new spiritual possibilities.

ESTEVEZ: I think it’s an example, a shining example of where I’m at right now in terms of my spiritual path, the path I’m on.

SHEEN: Are you saying there’s a chance you could become a Catholic?

ESTEVEZ: I’m just saying there’s a possibility of everything. I’m open to the possibility of absolutely everything.

SHEEN: Buddhist even?

ESTEVEZ: I said everything.

SHEEN: Okay, I’m just asking. We don’t get this opportunity.

JACK (in film clip): So far, there are some 15 percent say they are doing it for health. Fewer than 5 percent say they are actually looking for a miracle.

TOM (in film clip): Miracles are in short supply these days, Jack.

LAWTON: Despite the setting and themes, the film’s religious messages are subtle.  Estevez says he didn’t want to hit people over the head. But they have been marketing “The Way” at special screenings for Catholic groups—and for evangelical audiences, too.

ESTEVEZ: People will stand up and begin to witness and give testimony, and probably 60 percent of the Q and As really have no Qs. They basically just want to stand up and say thank you for making this film, and this movie touched me because…

LAWTON: What’s been the reaction of the church, the Catholic Church?

ESTEVEZ: Amazing. Yeah, amazing. Across the board. And it started in Spain. You know, we screened the film in, opened the film in Santiago. We were there for the pope’s Mass last October, and then two days later we screened the film for the archbishop of Santiago and the government of Galicia, and we were sitting in a little tiny box in a 200-year-old theater, and we were sweating because we were so nervous about how they would react.

SHEEN: They were the first audience.

ESTEVEZ: Right, and so the archbishop turned to my father after the screening and hugged him and said, “This film is a gift. Thank you.”

SHEEN: They were very relieved, basically.

ESTEVEZ: And so were we.

LAWTON: They say they hope their audiences get as much out of this project as they did.

SHEEN: Whatever the audience takes away is going to be their gift, if you will. We offer this gift. If they accept it, we’re delighted.

ESTEVEZ: We don’t impose our Camino on anyone, but we say get outside of yourself and join us on this journey.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

DR. JAMES OLESKE (University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey): I don’t have a big lap like Santa. Do you like that rabbit? That’s yours. It’s a purple rabbit. That’s purple. Alright, I was told that three times he was in the ICU?

In the US we’ve been mostly concentrating on curing every child. We’re not going to let a child die. Now that’s a great challenge to motivate by, but the ones we can’t cure we just wash our hands and move on, and they’re left to their, by themselves.

Balloons! I guess this is part of our play therapy.

I went into pediatrics because I loved children, and I thought I would help children, and I wasn’t prepared to go to funerals, so many at least, in the beginning of my career. My teeth were cut on all the AIDS kids I took care of, and kids would come in, you know, with all their baby teeth were blackened down to the gum line. They’d have abscesses, and their thrush was so bad it would make it impossible for them to swallow or eat. So then you have an infant….In the beginning of the epidemic, when people were initially afraid, people who had AIDS and who were dying—they were left alone. Everyone shuns you, even your doctor. In that era I would reach my hand through the bars, because kids are always in these cages, and just hold their hand or leg and just, I guess, in my own way pray and hope and wish and lay hands on.

One of the reasons I’ve gotten into the Circle of Life and palliative and pain management is that I saw what a bad job I did in AIDS—very painful disease, and I wasn’t aggressive in the beginning. I am now, but I learned. One of the patients I learned from was Quinetta. She had a tumor throughout her GI tract, and the only way she could relieve her pain, because I wasn’t giving her enough morphine, was to sit in bed scooched over and rocking, and somehow that helped her pain, I guess. When she died, I went in to talk to her grandmother, who I was very close with. I went into the room to tell her, and the next thing I know I’m in her arms crying, and she’s comforting me.

I just wanted to point out to the medical students that pain management and what I like to call palliative care in chronic diseases is not just taking care of children who are dying and end of life care like hospice. This is a much more long-term approach to how we improve the lives of children, and pain management has not been a great success by pediatricians in the past. I mean, we’ve been afraid to use drugs that really control pain and have undertreated pain for such a long period of time.

Less than 1 percent of patients with chronic illnesses ever get addicted and use drugs for drugs’ sake use. Ninety-nine percent of them never happen. So what we do is we don’t treat the 99 percent because we’re worried about this 1 percent, and it’s crazy. So for children it’s even more of an argument you have to make because people, “you’re going to make them addicts.” We’re not going to make them addicts.

Medical Student: She’s a 12-month-old female who has a history of MRSA positive abscess, who was readmitted on Sunday and started on a five-day course of antibiotics. She’s been doing well. She’s been afebrile the entire time.

Dr. Oleske: And we can take that nasty old IV out.

Medical Student: Yes, since she’s done with her antibiotics it can come out.

Dr. Oleske: Great. I’m going to give you this rabbit so you have two of them.

What the Circle of Life is all about is any child with a chronic illness that’s causing pain to be as aggressive with the pain management as you are with treating whatever the disease the child has so that when they do live longer it’s quality of life, and when the children are ready to go on Circle of Life is also committed to helping families deal with that dying process.

And we’re struggling. We have two non-paid physicians, we have two paid nurses, a half-time bereavement counselor, and yet we’ve been able to service so many families in New Jersey and make a difference.

Mr. Schorbel: Dr. Oleske, how are you? It’s good to see you. We’re glad you’re here.

Dr. Oleske: You know she is my favorite patient.

Mrs. Schorbel: I know.

Dr. Oleske: I’m not supposed to say that.

I already had a group of patients that I think needed and would benefit from palliative care. One of them was my favorite patient of all times, Leann Schorbel.

Dr. Oleske: Is that light too much?

Leann was a special person. She sort of arrested, if you will, her mental and physical growth because of an endocrine problem she had, added to the GI problem she had…

Dr. Oleske: Two times in one week, huh?

…added to the immunology problem she had, added to the anatomical, ventricular, brain and blood supply system that she had. I almost wonder how she survived.

Dr. Oleske: If you were closer I’d come and draw your blood like I used to.

And I sort of grew up with Leann over the 25 years I’ve known her, trying to treat her immune deficiency.

Dr. Oleske: Well, you know that the specialist at the hospital should be able to draw blood. I’m not the only person that can do that.

Leann Schorbel: Yes, you are!

Mrs. Schorbel: Circle of Life will keep her at home. That’s what we need, and that’s the people that we want to be here. It keeps her surrounded by the things that she loves and still not feeling well it keeps us as a family together. We’re not separated because when you’re in the hospital you’re totally separated.

Mrs. Schorbel to Leann: There was one person that you like that was on it, and who was that?

Leann Schorbel: Justin Bieber.

Mrs. Schorbel: She knows that mommy and daddy are with her and that the people that will come in to help her are loving people that are very gentle and kind and they are going to respect what makes her feel good and they are not going to scare her.

Dr. Oleske to mother on ward: This baby looks really beautiful…

If you look at the history of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, he made statements like doing good, kind act to others is important, but relieving the suffering of others the reward is God. And if you look at the Christian ethics, you have Christ saying, “Suffer the little children unto me.” It reminded me of the AIDS kids, you know. Christ, if he was here, he would have embraced the AIDS kids. He wouldn’t have said, ugh, I don’t want to get this disease. He wouldn’t have put on a gown and mask and gloves. He would have embraced them.

Dr. Oleske to nurse: So you want to tell me a little bit about the baby…

Nurse: This baby is 20 days old.

Our role as physicians, as healers, is to relieve pain and suffering and to also meet the spiritual needs of the families and children. That doesn’t mean that you take on the role of their religious advisors but that, first of all, you respect what their religious and spiritual beliefs are, and I think it’s important for physicians to have some type of spiritual bedrock if they’re going to do this.

Nurse: We can dim the lights according to the time of the day.

When I was first in AIDS people would interview me and say you’re a pioneer, and I never knew what that meant. Did I carry a fork and I had overalls on? But maybe, in a way, Circle of Life is a little pioneering, but I’m hoping that instead of just being a pioneer we end up being the standard of care…

Dr. Oleske to patient: You have my bunny! I have the same one. We match!

…that what Circle of Life does is done for every child in New Jersey…

Dr. Oleske: This is a very beautiful young girl, mommy…

…every child in the United States, and internationally.

“Folk songs are evasive — the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be.” — Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One

How many personas does Bob Dylan have?

How many pages are there in a book? Or days in a year? Or, perhaps most important, how many songs in a story?

“A folk song,” Dylan wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, “Chronicles,” “has over a thousand faces, and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.”

Over the course of his long career, Bob Dylan has become one of the world’s most important cultural figures. By the sheer magnitude of his talent and duration of his survival, Dylan is now an entertainment icon and elder statesman whose Delphic riddling rhymes and gnomic puns are no longer part of the countercultural margins but are sought out by such paragons of mainstream culture as 60 Minutes and Newsweek magazine.

His influence has extended well beyond the United States and well beyond his chosen genre of songwriting to literature, film, politics, and religion. His work and his many personae are, at turns, not only insightful and inspirational, wise, difficult, and mysterious but also contradictory, inconsistent and, yes, self-serving.

As he approaches his 70th birthday on May 24, one is tempted to speculate that he is also tamed, enjoying a new kind of fame — that of the establishment. Yet such acceptance — an honorary degree from Princeton, a set of Grammys, a Kennedy Center award, among many other accolades after a decade and a half of being dismissed as passé and something of a has-been — has made Dylan no easier to understand, no easier to parse, and no less compelling a writer, one who both shapes and is shaped by the best and worst of America.

You can pick your badge of honor or outrage. He sang in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, denounced the war in Vietnam, embraced a strident and judgmental Protestant fundamentalism, lauded the poetry of the gay Beat and Buddhist poet Allen Ginsberg, condemned corporate greed, remained silent on Central America, celebrated Zionist nationalism, failed to credit members of the band on one of his major albums, and appeared in a Victoria’s Secret lingerie commercial.

As attention again focuses on him, the critical debates also rage about who he is, what his work means, and what of his vast oeuvre matters.

He is hailed, but not unanimously, as a superb songwriter and musician and lauded as one of the best poets of the second half of the 20th century. He is the subject of hundreds of academic articles, numerous college courses, and dozens of books, including literary critic Christopher Ricks’s “Dylan’s Vision of Sin” and New Testament scholar Michael J. Gilmour’s “Tangled Up in the Bible: Bob Dylan and Scripture.”. A more complete edition of his song lyrics has been published, providing both fans and scholars ready access to the songs as written (but not necessarily as performed).

Over the years, Dylan has refused to be confined to the boxes into which his fans — and sometimes critics — seek to put him, whether political, religious, or even musical. He seems almost a caricature of the American Adam, constantly reinventing his public and musical self, always ready, like Huck Finn, “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” when Aunt Sally and “sivilization” (his fans and critics) threaten to hem him in. We all should have learned by now that “he not busy being born is busy dying.”

Still, as a 21st-century version of Walt Whitman, the poet he perhaps most emulates, he has consistencies and repeated themes in his many selves and their reinventions, whether amid the radicalism of the 1960s or the religiosity of the 1980s. From his first recordings, when he was still apprenticing himself to the folk and blues traditions, religious concerns and moral motifs have permeated the work as they do those musical traditions. Religious and biblical language has been a consistent but always complex and sometimes contradictory element. As he said in a 1963 interview, “There’s mystery, magic, truth, and the Bible in great folk music. I can’t hope to touch that. But I’m going to try.”

Such language seems to run through his work in the way theologians once talked about some “red thread” versions of the Bible used to denote the words of Jesus. Religious and biblical language has been part of the many public versions of Dylan, whether political, religious, countercultural, or minstrel. He may well be among the last generation for whom biblical language is a normal part of literary allusion and discourse and not an affectation or a necessary signal of a dogmatic belief system.

Thus it is important to note that at root, as English critic Michael Gray has pointed out, Dylan is a moralist rather than the prophet many of his fans, both secular and religious, have longed for. His songs are about the struggle for a moral code, and it is, ultimately, the music that provides his religious framework. As Gray puts it in his important study of Dylan, “Song and Dance Man III,” “Along with this unfailing sense of the need for moral clarity, Dylan’s work has also been consistently characterized by a yearning for salvation. In fact the quest for salvation might well be called the central theme of Bob Dylan’s entire output. To survive, you must attain that clarity of morality: you won’t even get by without going that far, and then you must go beyond — get rescued from the chaos and purgatory and find some spiritual home.”

Dylan’s use of religious motifs and biblical imagery has sparked a host of commentaries and critical analyses, many by evangelical Christians. As fans and critics in the 1960s sought to make Dylan a spokesman for a generation involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements (a role he ultimately rejected, as he writes movingly but not always convincingly in “Chronicles”), so too many evangelicals welcomed his celebrated conversion to fundamentalist Christianity and sought to define the minstrel as minister. For a brief period after his 1978 conversion, Dylan appeared willing to play that role, sometimes preaching from the stage, just as he had, for an equally brief time, embraced the persona of himself as the reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, social critic.

For some evangelical Christian critics who were drawn to the music but not to the civil rights and peace politics of the 1960s and who dismissed Dylan’s “contemptuous insult-songs,” such as “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side,” the conversion to fundamentalist Protestantism was a vindication of their politics, an affirmation of their religion and their notion of the “prophetic.” The simplistic contempt for the “unsaved” in Dylan’s “born-again” songs (”Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One” and “Gotta Serve Somebody”) didn’t seem to bother them at all, and some even admitted to smirking at the discomfort of Dylan’s non-evangelical fans who were either puzzled or turned off by the thoroughgoing religious songs.

But the fundamentalist phase didn’t last long, either. Dylan was soon back to playing his old songs, even if he kept his public distance from their politics, and writing new material that was less strident in its religious expression. Yet it should be noted that he has not renounced or recanted the songs of his fundamentalist period any more than the songs of his political protest period. The best of both continue to be part of his repertoire.

While certainty of conviction can be a virtue in religious belief systems, it can work against creativity, which requires the artist to go beyond the last poem, the last canvas, to a new configuration. For a songwriter and performer like Dylan, there is always a new story to tell, a new way of telling the old story, and unlike dogmatic formulas, such new tellings change the meanings of the old versions.

In a famous interview with David Gates of Newsweek, Dylan put it this way: “I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me. … I find the religiosity and the philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. … I believe the songs.”

Ultimately, that is what “Chronicles” is — a kind of musical memoir rather than an autobiography. It is the past remembered and refracted through time and the imagination, not a literal reconstruction. There is very little of politics or religion or any of the other controversies that have marked Dylan’s career. For all the sense of intimacy, there is little for those seeking clues to Dylan’s “real” life — the private life — beyond the songs. Those wanting details of the 1966 motorcycle accident or the role of drugs or the Bible study at the Vineyard church won’t find much in the book. Perhaps in the promised volumes two and three.

What they will find is a warm and generous and at times exuberant reflection by Dylan on points of his pilgrimage — the first days in Greenwich Village; the making of the 1989 “Oh Mercy” album at perhaps one of the lowest points in his career after the born-again phase; his incubator time in Minneapolis, where he was exposed to many of the folk traditions that were growing in popularity.

“Chronicles” is also instructive for critics and theologians like Ricks and Gilmour, whose interpretations of Dylan’s work, while often fascinating, informative, and suggestive, are sometimes overdetermined. Dylan writes, for example, of trying to “fix” the last line of “Ring Them Bells” — “breaking down the distance between right and wrong.” Ricks stresses Dylan’s use of the word “distance” rather than “difference” between right and wrong. “This makes all the difference in the world and in the other world,” he writes.

But Dylan writes that “while the line fit, it didn’t verify what I felt. Right or wrong, like it fits in the Wanda Jackson song, or right from wrong, like the Billy Tate song, that makes sense, but not right and wrong. The concept didn’t exist in my subconscious mind. I’d always been confused about that kind of stuff, didn’t see any moral ideal played out there. The concept of being morally right or morally wrong seems to be wired to the wrong frequency.”

Reading “Chronicles” is a little bit like listening to a Dylan album. There are always stunning moments, puzzling moments, and some clinkers. The book is studded with wonderful lines that defy easy explication. Of Roy Orbison he writes: “He sang like a professional criminal.” You know it’s a compliment, but what exactly does it mean?

Among the off notes is a chapter called “The Lost Land,” which reads a little like every celebrity’s put-down of the price of fame even as they pursue it. It is cliche-ridden (”Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race”) and unconvincing (”I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper” and “what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard”). Sure, Bob. Yet there is nothing here of family, nothing of the meaning and significance of fatherhood, only the textureless assertion of the fantasy.

What shines in “Chronicles,” however, is Dylan’s warm and generous assessment of other musicians, those he learned from, those he admired, and even, like Joan Baez, those with whom he has broken. Many fans will be surprised at the wide range of his musical tastes and interests. There are, of course, the obvious folk, blues, and gospel performers such as Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Odetta, along with his own contemporaries, especially Dave Von Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Mike Seeger. But he also expresses regard for many of the performers dismissed by folk “purists” of the 1960s, such as the Kingston Trio, and voices appreciation for the music of jazz musicians Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington, as well as pop and early rock singers such as Ricky Nelson.

Which is to say that “Chronicles,” like the person — and for good or ill — is mostly about the music and his own highs and lows in relationship to it.

“A song is like a dream,” writes Dylan, and it seems true of his long career as well, “and you try and make it come true.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor for Religion News Service.

PROFESSOR CARLOS EIRE (speaking to class at Yale University): In 1517, something happens that has happened many times before…

BOB FAW, correspondent: Carlos Eire is at a pinnacle of the academic world. With an endowed chair at Yale, where he teaches religious studies, he’s also written six books, including the memoir “Waiting for Snow in Havana,” which won the National Book Award. But just as remarkable as his rise from Cuban refugee to professor of distinction is Carlos Eire’s spiritual odyssey.

EIRE: It is an incomprehensible and in many ways an indescribable experience. What had been scary to me, what had been frightful, suddenly turned into the most beautiful thing.

FAW: In pre-Castro Cuba, Eire’s was a life of privilege—the festive holidays and lavish birthday parties at grand estates befitting the son of a wealth and influential judge and a gorgeous mother. But their Spanish Catholicism terrified young Carlos.

EIRE: There was no place in the world scarier for me as a child than a church. Actually my worst nightmare was being locked in a church all night long, because the images were so frightening.

FAW: What tormented him most, Eire recalls, was his father’s collection of icons of Christ.

EIRE: The crown of thorns on his head bleeding. It was in his study, right near the Jesus plate with the eyes that followed you.

FAW: Eire’s comfortable life came crashing down when Fidel Castro seized power. Only 11, Eire knew his life had changed when the new regime prevented him from seeing a Walt Disney film, “20000 Leagues Under the Sea,” that he had already seen seven times.

EIRE: That was the turning point for me. I really felt like someone was trying to steal my soul, not just invade but claim it as their own, some authority outside of me, and that’s when I just began to see everything in a different light.

FAW: Fearful, their world collapsing, Eire’s parents sent him and his brother, Tony, to the United States in 1962, two of 14,000 Cuban children airlifted from Cuba in an operation dubbed “Pedro Pan.” Like many of the other children, Carlos and Tony lived with foster families. Never again would they see their father, and their mother would join them only years later. When Carlos left Cuba, his parents gave him a book which they said would bring him comfort.

EIRE: It was “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas à Kempis—for centuries had been a very popular text in Spanish-speaking cultures. It’s all about self-denial. It’s about not being part of the world. It’s very monastic in its outlook.

FAW: You wrote in the Miami book, “It scared me half to death. It is the most depressing book ever written by any human being in all of human history.”

EIRE: From a child’s perspective, yes, definitely.

FAW: But in Miami, living with foster parents who were Jewish but who made him go to a Catholic church every Sunday, Eire was unshackled for the first time from the Catholicism of Cuba and its troubling images of pain and suffering.

EIRE: After I had come to the US and seen churches that were free of such images, I realized that Spanish Catholicism and Latin American Catholicism was very different from American Catholicism in that respect and sort of put a less scary pall over religion.

FAW: Later, when Eire and his brother moved in with his uncle in Illinois, there were no more gory images of Jesus.

EIRE: My uncle had this very Protestant image of Jesus above his armchair—totally unscary, a friendlier, more accessible Jesus.

FAW: Though liberated from the demons of his youth, Eire says he was still plagued, even crippled by what he calls “the void.”

EIRE: It attacked me, because it seemed to come from outside of me. it was a feeling of utter abandonment and emptiness and having no connection to anything or anyone, and having no one or anything beyond one’s self. Everything was turning dark.

FAW: But as Carlos Eire so movingly writes in his second memoir, “Learning to Die in Miami,” that overwhelming despair was shattered on Holy Thursday 1965 in a profound religious experience.

EIRE: It was at that period when I started reading “The Imitation of Christ,” not just little passages, but actually getting into the meaning, and it brought me to this experience, a profoundly religious experience. I think it’s fair to call it a conversion experience.

FAW: “Everything changes,” you wrote. “Everything changes from top to bottom. A void rips loudly and light pours through.”

EIRE: Up until that point I always thought that spirit was insubstantial. It’s with that experience that I realized that spirit is more substantial than matter, because it is connected to eternity. Time stops. All there is is now, and this now is forever.

FAW: After experiencing what he calls “that presence,” Carlos Eire says religion became his salvation and he was able, he says, “to let go.”

EIRE: Thinking that there’s something beyond this life helps one immensely in letting go. Without some other dimension, letting go, to me, is too painful—impossible.

FAW: You wrote, “He who knows best how to let go will enjoy the greater peace, because he is conqueror of himself.”

EIRE: Letting go of your attachment to things and even your attachment to your own will and your own attempt to make sense of the world your own way and kind of open yourself up to something higher.

FAW: Not all those haunting images from his past have been excised. He anguishes, he says, over what is happening in Cuba today.

EIRE: I could not, in a sense, stop feeling the pain. The so-called free education and free medical care come at the cost of slavery. Cubans right now are no different than slaves in a plantation in the American South before the Civil War. Europeans and Canadians who go to Cuba to have a good time—I can’t understand it. It would be like vacationing in the Third Reich and having a good time and ignoring Auschwitz.

FAW: And while Cuba, he says, “is a wound that will not close,” the scars from his earlier religious trauma have healed.

EIRE: Yes, there is pain and suffering, but it can be transcended, and it can be redemptive. I was able to let go of everything I had lost, including my parents, and I was able to focus on what the purpose of life should be. Not as regaining everything I had lost, but rather giving one’s self to others.

FAW: Carlos Eire—a long way from Cuba, but waiting no more.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in New Haven, Connecticut.

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BOB FAW, correspondent: Ernest Gaines is older now, 78, and hobbled by a bad back, but as he slowly makes his way to the church where as a boy he rang the bell at funerals he will not, indeed, cannot forget the debt he owes to his ancestors in this Louisiana bayou country.

ERNEST J. GAINES: Without them, buried back there under those pecan trees, I would not be the writer today, if I would be a writer at all.

FAW: For more than 50 years, he has brought them to life in short stories and novels, some made into major films. Perhaps his most famous novel, “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” charts the dawn of the civil rights movement from her days as a slave.

From “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman”: “I’ve been carrying a scar on my back ever since I was a slave.”

FAW: Miss Jane Pittman was inspired by Gaines’s Aunt Augusteen, whom he calls the greatest influence in his life.

FAW: She could not walk.

GAINES: She could not walk. She crawled over the floor all her life, but she did everything in the world for me.

FAW: She could not walk, but you say she taught you how to stand.

GAINES: Right. By her action, by her overcoming all the obstacles.

FAW: Gaines remembers his aunt and other forebears as he sits in the church which he has restored on plantation land where he once picked cotton.

GAINES: When I’m sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.

FAW: And Gaines feels so indebted to his elders that on his own property he has also lovingly restored and now maintains this cemetery where many of those elders are buried.

GAINES: I’d always go back to the cemetery and sit on one of those tombs back there, and I felt more at peace at that time than any other time in my life. I could feel their spirit there with me.

FAW: That connection helps explain why Gaines writes so passionately about the people and places in his past—because he worries that past is facing extinction.

From “A Gathering of Old Men”: “That tractor was getting closer and closer to the graveyard, and I got scared that that tractor would plow up them graves and get rid of all the proof that we ever was.”

GAINES: All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

FAW: John Lowe, professor of literature at Louisiana State University, is an expert on Ernest Gaines.

PROFESSOR JOHN LOWE: He’s writing for his people. You know, there’s an old African proverb that says no people should be hungry for their own image. That world was missing, and he’s put that world on the stage now.

FAW: There is in that world darkness, then hope. In “A Lesson Before Dying,” an innocent man, Jefferson, will be executed. But before that he learns to face death with dignity.

From “A Lesson Before Dying”: “Good-bye, Mr. Wiggins. Tell the children I’m strong. Tell them I am a man.”

LOWE: His works radiate that spirituality that Gaines has always seen as part of the human condition—that man has to believe in something bigger than himself, and it might be religion, it could be any number of things. Jefferson does walk to the electric chair as a man, because he has come to understand that his life has meaning for other people in the community, and it makes a big difference to them how he handles that situation, and so he does, indeed, endorse something bigger than himself.

FAW: Through Jefferson’s transformation his teacher, Grant Wiggins, also grows and emerges stronger.

From “A Gathering of Old Men”: “Ain’t going to be no lynching tonight.”

FAW: And in “A Gathering of Old Men” an entire community, long beaten down, finds self-respect.

MARCIA GAUDET: There is a sense of hope.

FAW: Marcia Gaudet is the director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

GAUDET: It may not be perfectly optimistic hope, but there’s certainly the possibility of hope, and that’s a much more realistic thing.

FAW: Raised a Baptist, Gaines attended Catholic school for three years. He doesn’t want readers to overstate religious symbolism in his work, but many scholars find it there—from Miss Jane Pittman’s religious conversion to the Christ-like figure of Jefferson in “A Lesson before Dying.”

LOWE: Gaines was raised in a religious tradition, and this is a pretty religious state even today, and it’s quite understandable that his work would be permeated everywhere, you know, with this kind of religious symbolism. In the South, our great mythology is the Bible. It’s not Greek or Roman myth like it is in Europe. It’s the Bible.

From: “A Gathering of Old Men”: Go home, Jameson. I don’t want to have to tell you anymore.”

FAW: Black clergymen in Gaines’s novels are sometimes portrayed as sanctimonious and ineffectual. When in “A Gathering of Old Men” a group of black men stand up to white oppression for the first time in their lives, the minister tries to stop them.

From: “A Gathering of Old Men”: “Reverend Jameson, nobody listening to you today. You old bootlegger, shut up.”

LOWE: Gaines understands the importance of the church, particularly during the civil rights movement. But at the same time he’s also aware because of the way the white community imposed it on the slave community to keep blacks in line. I think he has a very mixed attitude about the church.

FAW: For the black church, Gaines is awed by its role as a sanctuary.

GAINES: What I miss today more than anything else—I don’t go to church as much anymore—but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.

FAW: Do you regard yourself as a religious person?

GAINES: I think I’m a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don’t only believe in God, I know there’s God.

FAW: Gaines wrote the first draft of all his novels by hand. While he isn’t writing much now, he still remembers 1948, when he first left the plantation land around False River, carrying with him an imaginary block of wood.

GAINES: The old people told me that okay, you can leave us, but you would carry this, this symbolic big piece of wood that I must struggle with for the rest of my life until I’ve completely finished that wood, which I doubt that I ever will. But there will always be something to chip away and to carve into something nice and beautiful.

FAW: Ernest Gaines—honoring the past, making it come alive because he must.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Oscar, Louisiana.

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