JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Seventy-eight-year-old Sister Phyllis is near death. Over a period of three days around the clock, the sisters have been taking turns keeping vigil at her bedside.

SISTER ANNE SHEPARD (Prioress of Mount St. Scholastica): In our monastery, sisters do not die alone. We stay with the sisters night and day, so that they know, they’re comforted by the fact that they joined a community, and as community they’re going to go home—the real home that we’ve been waiting for.

VALENTE: The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica die much as they live—peacefully, prayerfully, and surrounded by community. It’s a way of life that Benedictine monasteries have shown the world for more than 15 centuries, and it’s a message that still resonates.

SHEPARD: When I look at the condition of the world today, I see a world where there’s violence, one where there’s greed, one where there’s selfishness. But also one where there’s a craving for a rejuvenation of family life, a rejuvenation of spiritual life. It speaks to me of the need more than ever of a monastic presence in this world.

VALENTE: Monasteries such as this one stand in contrast to the prevailing culture. They value community over competition, service over self-interest, and in a world of Internet, cell phones, and 24-hour talk, they stress listening and silence.

SHEPARD: It’s a way of life here. It’s an absence of noise and clutter, and we come together first, and we’re just silent. We’re in the presence of God. It’s not a deadly silence. It’s a very reverent and beautiful silence. We don’t need noise to be productive. It’s just the opposite. We don’t need noise to communicate. It’s just the opposite.

Monastic life is a life of living together in prayer and community. We as Benedictines, we monastics—we’re not founded to do a particular work. The particular work of a monastery is community, and believe me, that’s hard work. Living with 165 women is hard work.

Sister saying grace at mealtime: Ever faithful God, bless the food we are about to eat and unite us in mind and heart to your son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

SHEPARD: The common table is central to who we are. You listen, and you listen with the ear of your heart. You listen with what’s inside you. That’s what it means to be a listening person, and that’s going to happen in the dining room.

VALENTE: Sister Anne says these and other practices at the monastery can be applied to family life and even to the professional world.

SHEPARD: You bring in everybody into a decision and learn from the newest members, as well as the wisdom of the older members and everything in between. So you have prioresses and former prioresses and PhDs in English and math doing dishes along with those that just entered, that don’t have those same higher degrees. That’s a radically different way than a top-down way of doing business.

VALENTE: The monastery reflects a spiritual way of life, but one that also contains practical wisdom.

SHEPARD: A major countercultural difference is that we hold things in common. That is a major thing, that it’s not the greed, that if I have a computer, if I have a laptop, it’s because it’s for the use of the community. For us, the less we have the more single our purpose. We don’t need things. We need the gospel call, and we need one another.

VALENTE: The sisters do a variety of work. They teach at Benedictine College. They operate a women’s center in nearby Kansas City, Kansas, where volunteers teach money management…

Sister teaching money management class: Budgeting is simple but it will bring, you know, a little bit of the peace of mind to your house.

VALENTE: …English as a second language…

Sister teaching language class: Out? Ought. Ought? Ought.

VALENTE: …and provide child care for mothers taking classes. Others work in the medical profession or in massage therapy. Until recently, one was even a firefighter; another, a funeral director. But the most important work of the monastery is prayer.

SHEPARD: We use the words of the Psalms and of the scriptures that nurture us, that give us life, that give us meaning. Our life is about seeking God together and bringing that God into our hearts. It’s so profound, it’s hard to even explain. But it’s the daily-ness of the prayer. It’s that we need the prayer.

VALENTE: Monastic life began to flourish after the fall of the Roman Empire. Men and women retreated to the desert to live solitary lives of prayer and penance. In the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia, known for his spiritual wisdom, left the solitary life behind and founded communities where like-minded individuals could seek learning, find security, and live a life of prayer. Today, every monastic order in the world, whether Benedictine or not, follows Benedict’s model to some extent.

A young woman comes to the monastery for music lessons from Sister Joachim Holthaus, a composer. Ever since the time of St. Benedict, monasteries have been important centers of learning and culture. This is Sister Paula Howard. Eight years ago, at age 77, she discovered her talent for creating icons, which the monastery then sells. She’s done nearly 200.

SISTER PAULA HOWARD: Well, I think all appreciation of beauty lifts your heart—that beauty belongs here. It’s a foretaste of heaven, we hope, and I just think that beauty is an image of God.

VALENTE: Both artistic beauty and the beauty of nature.

SHEPARD: A contemplative life is being in tune with the spirit, in tune with nature, in tune with creation. It’s a communion with all that is around you. It’s a sense that everything we do is significant—the way I plant a garden and care for the garden. Everything that we do has meaning, and it has meaning because we’re intentionally trying to be more prayerful. You can live a contemplative life outside of a monastery. As a matter of fact, that is our hope, that people can come here and find a sense of peace.

VALENTE: The sisters earn some income by offering spiritual retreats. These high school girls are spending several days here. The monastery has 70 lay employees and an annual budget of $4 million. Most of it goes toward operating a nursing care facility for elderly sisters. The monastery also receives donations and bequests and government funding for its nursing home. Another source of income: the salaries of sisters who do outside work, like Sister Mary Palarino, a clinical social worker.

VALENTE: You could do this work as a lay person. I’m wondering what you think being a sister brings to this.

SISTER MARY PALARINO: You know, I really don’t think I could do it as holistically and as comprehensively unless I were a member of my community and living the Benedictine way of life.

VALENTE: Mount St. Scholastica is nearly 150 years old. Some 2,000 women religious have passed through its doors. Today the vast majority of the sisters here are over the age of 55.

PALARINO: I do get concerned about people not joining us, and I don’t understand that, I mean, because it seems like young people today are—they seek, and they have a hunger for community, for prayer life, for social justice issues. They have a hunger, you know, to follow something greater. We have that.

VALENTE: Sister Anne Shepard:

SHEPARD: Where it’s going to go in the future? It’s going to go wherever God takes us. We’re going to be smaller. We’re going to be just as vibrant. But it’s not easy. Any genuine commitment isn’t easy. That gift of unselfishness is the reason we make a promise to be faithful for all our lives, every day of our lives.

VALENTE: These sisters believe that as long as there is a need in the world for quietude, simplicity, balance, prayer, and community, there will always be a purpose to monastic life.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente at Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: It’s hard work on a warm day, but Bob Lewis never shirks.

BOB LEWIS (Garden Volunteer): I garden at home. On off days, I’m out here.

POTTER: “Here” is a vegetable patch in front of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in suburban Washington, tended by volunteers from the parish.

VOLUNTEER: We got a bumper crop and more coming in!

POTTER: Last year, this garden was just an idea—something the rector dreamed up.

REV. STEPHANIE NAGLEY (Rector, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland): I think “come eat, go serve” is becoming our slogan.

POTTER: For Reverend Stephanie Nagley, the garden as a way of living out what she sees as God’s call to give away what you’ve been given, especially in tough times. St. Luke’s is one of several churches across the country that planted vegetable gardens for the first time this spring, partly in response to the recession. Most of their food goes to local food banks, but what comes out of this garden goes right next door. All of the produce grown at the church is donated to St. Luke’s House, a mental health facility the parish helped to found almost 30 years ago.

VOLUNTEER (to class members): You want to help us get all this stuff rinsed?

POTTER: Cooking class is offered daily as part of a life skills program. The goal of the class is to help these adults with mental illness learn to live more independently.

(to class member): What are you learning?

CLASS MEMBER: How to cook different veggies.

POTTER:  The fact that those veggies come from the church next door isn’t lost on anyone at St. Luke’s House.

BETH WELCH (Client, St. Luke’s House): I think it’s really absolutely nice. We get a lot more veggies to eat.

MARK ROBBINS (Client, St. Luke’s House): I really appreciate it. I really should thank them sometime, I guess.

ERIC GORDON (Staff, St. Luke’s House) I think the clients get a real kick out of it. One guy in particular is always double-checking: Are you guys really using that in your cooking classes? Are you sure? Yes, we definitely are using this in our cooking classes.

POTTER: The clients and staff of St. Luke’s House benefit from the garden’s bounty, but that’s not its only value. Parishioner Anne Elsbree organized the 30 volunteers who tilled the ground, planted the seeds, and now harvest the crops.

ANNE ELSBREE (Garden Organizer) I think it’s produced good teamwork at church. We’ve all been working on a project together and getting results, so it’s been very satisfying.

REV. STEPHANIE NAGLEY: In some ways, I think a lot of this was just sort of an unconscious bubbling up of people’s faith, and now I think it’s sort of come to this next era, where it’s really now articulated, and we’re making it clear that this is what we’ve been about all along.

POTTER: Cara Gonzalez worships at St. Luke’s and has brought the local youth organization she works with to help out in the garden.

CARA GONZALEZ (Parishioner): There’s definitely something spiritual about working with the earth and feeling a relationship with all of God’s creation, and then taking that and making it into a human relationship with those who benefit in the cooking program and with the youth who benefit. I think it’s all about that connectedness, and that’s very spiritual.

POTTER: This year’s harvest was such a success that St. Luke’s plans to keep the garden going next year and make it bigger, so it can feed even more people, body and spirit.

CARA GONZALEZ (holding out fresh basil): Amazing. Here, take a sniff. Tell me that’s not spiritual right there. Amazing.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Bethesda, Maryland.

Gardening is never simply about gardens. It is work that reveals the meaning and character of humanity, and is an exercise and demonstration of who we take ourselves and creation to be. It is the most direct and practical site where we can learn the art and discipline of being creatures. Here we concretely and practically see how we relate to the natural world, to other creatures, and ultimately to the Creator. We discover whether we are prepared to honor these relations by nurture and care and celebration, or despise and abuse them. Gardens are a microcosm of the universe in which all the living and nonliving elements of life meet, elements ranging from geological formations and countless biochemical reactions to human inventiveness and age-old traditions about cuisine and beauty. When and how we garden gives expression to how we think we fit in the world. Through the many ways we produce and consume food, we bear witness to our ability or failure to gratefully and humbly receive creation as a gift from God.

*

To garden effectively is to bring human living into fairly close, appreciative, and sympathetic alignment with the life going on in the garden. It requires us to know a particular plot of land and understand its potential, and then work harmoniously with it. To garden is to unseat oneself as the center of primary importance, and to instead turn one’s life into various forms of service that will strengthen and maintain the many memberships that make up the garden. It is to give up the much-trumpeted goal of modern and postmodern life—individual autonomy—and instead live the life of care and responsible interdependence. This is what the biblical command to “till and keep” the garden means. When we garden well, devoting ourselves to the strengthening of the memberships of creation, personal ego and ambition gradually recede from the lines of sight so that the blessings and glory of God can shine through what we see. When we serve a garden well by learning to calibrate our schedules and desires to complement gardening realities, life has the chance to thrive and smell and taste really good.

*

Gardening, besides being a practical, life-nurturing task, is also always a spiritual activity. In it people attempt to make visible and tasty what is good, beautiful, and even holy. Every act of gardening presupposes and embodies a way of relating to creation, a way that invariably invokes moral and spiritual decisions. Though membership in a garden is a given, how we will take our place in the membership is not. Our aim must be to develop into good gardeners, gardeners who work harmoniously among the flows of life. This means that besides vegetables, flowers, and fruit, gardeners are themselves undergoing a spiritual cultivation into something beautiful and sympathetic and healthy. A caring, faithful, and worshipping humanity is one of the garden’s most important crops.

Norman Wirzba is Research Professor of Theology, Ecology, and Rural Life at Duke Divinity School. These excerpts are from his book Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Now, a profile of writer, liberal activist, and Harvard University theologian Harvey Cox on the occasion of his remarkable retirement ceremony after 44 years of scholarship and teaching. The celebration had everything—good weather, old friends, short speeches, laughter, and music, all starring the honoree.

That’s Cox, the Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, on the tenor sax with his big swing band the Soft Touch. The chair Cox has held was endowed in colonial times, when some professors got to graze cows in Harvard Yard.

REV. PETER GOMES (Minister in the Memorial Church, Harvard University): Pasturing cows in those days was equivalent to parking privileges today.

ABERNETHY: For this occasion, Cox borrowed a cow whose name turned out to be Pride. Cox pretended that he had been worried that a cow so named might be inappropriate for an event at the divinity school, but then another professor reassured him.

PROFESSOR HARVEY COX: He said, “Harvey, at Harvard we do not consider pride to be a sin.”

ABERNETHY: There was a tuba ensemble, a speech in Latin, and many tributes to Cox’s lifetime of combining the study and teaching of religion with a commitment to liberal activism—and, of course, the more or less contented cow and signed copies of Cox’s latest book, The Future of Faith. We talked with Cox about what he sees as religion’s surprising strength.

COX: 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, that marginalization did not happen. It’s a basic change in the nature of our civilization. It will continue.

ABERNETHY: Except for fundamentalisms, Cox says, in all religions.

COX: Fundamentalisms—I use the word in the plural. I do not think that they’re going to last out much longer.

ABERNETHY: For Cox, that includes the religious right.

COX: The last couple of elections have exposed the religious right as really kind of being in part a paper tiger. They just didn’t produce the votes. I think they are in considerable disarray and, frankly, I’m not mourning over that.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, especially in Christianity, Cox sees a shift away from beliefs and hierarchies to an emphasis on individual faith.

COX: I call it an age of the spirit, 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.

ABERNETHY: Cox sees this most clearly in Pentecostalism, which he calls the fastest growing branch of Christianity. He also says Pentecostalism is now balancing its well-known exuberance with more and more social service.

COX: This combination of social ministry and experiential worship is a dynamite combination.

ABERNETHY: Within Protestantism, Cox takes some of the blame for the decline of many of the old mainline churches.

COX: 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 and not enough in how to nurture the experience of God, the experience of the spirit and encounter with Christ.

ABERNETHY: As Cox looks at the US, he sees a huge social problem.

COX: A rampant culture of market-consumer values really has a grip on many people in America. 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. 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.

ABERNETHY: Cox condemns the so-called prosperity gospel, preaching that says if people are faithful God will make them rich.

COX: Can you imagine that kind of sermon coming from the mouth of Jesus himself? No. I mean, it’s a rank contradiction. It’s really, let’s call it by its name—it’s a heresy.

ABERNETHY: Cox has been a popular teacher. One year a thousand students signed up for one of his courses. It is the students now who give him a lot of hope.

COX: The 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. I notice increasingly among my students, both undergraduates and students in the divinity school, a deep suspicion of this life of accumulating, consuming, to the soul, the dangers to the soul of consumerist values. 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.

ABERNETHY: At his retirement ceremony, Cox’s wife Nina was beside him. She, too, is a scholar and professor. She is also Jewish. Cox is an American Baptist. They have a college-age son.

COX: We did not want our marriage to be one of these religion-free zones.

ABERNETHY: So out of respect for Jewish law and custom when the mother is Jewish, their son was raised Jewish. Cox became his Judaism teacher.

COX: We have successfully shared in each other’s spiritual traditions, and it can be done, and it’s also very enriching. I really believe that I understand Christianity better having participated in Jewish life—and remember, Jesus was a rabbi—than I would have if I hadn’t done that.

ABERNETHY: Cox also told a bookstore audience this week about religions borrowing from each other.

COX: I’ve been to three or four synagogues recently where they have quite obviously introduced forms of Buddhist meditation within the synagogue service. When we have the opening chant here let’s hold it for a very long time, the way you might hold “Om”—but they say “Shalom.”

ABERNETHY: As Cox studies the variety of religions in the world, he says he has made a big adjustment.

COX: I have learned how to think about Christianity as one of the possible religious and symbolic ways to approach reality, among others. 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. God is larger than this. God is much larger than any particular understanding of God.

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.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Roman Catholic priests deal a lot with spiritual food, but Father Leo Patalinghug works with food of a more earthly nature as well.

REV. LEO PATALINGHUG (at Delaware State Fair): And I’ve got myself here a nice, beautiful piece of flank steak.

LAWTON: Father Leo is a chef who has his own Web-based cooking show called “Grace Before Meals.” It gets more than 10,000 hits a day from around the world. He’s written a cookbook with the same title.

REV. PATALINGHUG (on “Grace Before Meals” show): We ask God to bless us this holy season and the food we’re about to receive.

LAWTON: He says food is very much part of his priestly ministry.

REV. PATALINGHUG: Theologically, this is what Jesus did. Most of his greatest lessons were taught around a dinner table.

LAWTON: In his day job, Father Leo is director of pastoral field education at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the second oldest and second largest Catholic seminary in the country.

REV. PATALINGHUG: Sometimes I like to say I’m teaching future shepherds how to feed their hungry flock.

LAWTON: He teaches classes on a variety of subjects, such as how to give a good sermon, and even here, he finds a connection with food.

REV. PATALINGHUG: I teach a preaching class, which means I can’t have guys dishing out stale, boring leftovers, but dynamic things that are going to make their appetites just expand, and to whet their appetites to show that what we have to offer is good news

LAWTON: Father Leo says his mother taught him how to cook when he was a kid.

REV. PATALINGHUG: My love for cooking started just because I like to eat!

(Cooking at state fair): I love that sound.

After doing my activities I would get bored quickly. Mother would invite me to help her with cooking because it’s a multi-tasking thing, and that actually piqued my interest.

LAWTON: Father Leo grew up in Baltimore, where his family had emigrated from the Philippines. He says faith and food were both very important in his family’s life.

REV. PATALINGHUG: My family style of eating is very much a feast day celebration and yes, we prayed before every meal, and it was something serious, because in my country not everyone gets a chance to eat, and so they reminded us that even though we were living in America, a land of plenty, there are a lot of people who don’t have the blessings on the table as well as the blessings around the table.

LAWTON: He didn’t always know he would become a priest. He first dabbled in several other fields, from break dancing to martial arts.

REV. PATALINGHUG (at state fair): I used to be a martial artist. I still practice a little of it. Third-degree black belt instructor in tae kwon do, as well as a full-contact Filippino martial art called arnis. So if you asked what I did for fun before I became a priest, I used to beat people up with sticks. That’s what I did.

LAWTON: In the midst of it all, he says a series of events, including a skiing accident and a breakup with his girlfriend, had him turning to God in prayer. Then, he says, he traveled to the Philippines with the US stick-fighting team.

REV. PATALINGHUG: I remember going to this one village, and we were handing out candy to people, and there was one little boy who only had a t-shirt, on and he came up to me, and I gave him a piece of candy, and I looked in his eyes, and I thought to myself, had it not been for my dad bringing us to America, that could have been me.

LAWTON: He felt that God was calling him to help people like that boy, and to do so by becoming a priest. He entered seminary and was ordained ten years ago when he was 29. Father Leo says the food part of the ministry evolved naturally as he began building relationships with his parishioners. He often scheduled counseling sessions around meal times.

REV. PATALINGHUG: They call me Father. I’ m supposed to be part of their family. So I would help them, we would gather in the kitchen, we would cook, I helped set up the table, and they saw the human side to me and not just the spiritual side.

(on “Grace Before Meals” show): Bless this food.

LAWTON: The idea for a cooking show was born just after the attacks on September 11, 2001.

REV. PATALINGHUG: So after a very tragic weekend worth of Masses where the churches were full, hungering for an inspiration of hope, we ourselves, the ministers, we were spent. So we went on a little retreat together, and I did all the cooking—comfort food. So one of the priests suggested, “I love watching you cook. It would be great if I had a video camera and taped all of this. You could talk about food, faith, family and culture.” And I looked at him and said, “That’s one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard.”

LAWTON: But his fellow priests didn’t think it was so dumb. Father Leo says they kept nagging him about it and eventually connected him with a producer and a production company who loved the idea of a priest cooking show.

REV. PATALINGHUG (on “Grace Before Meals” show): Ketchup—do you see that slob right there? That’s what confession is for.

LAWTON: He now does “webisodes” of the cooking show online, often with the help of his seminarians, and his Web site has recipes and blogs.

REV. PATALINGHUG (on “Grace Before Meals” show): Cleanliness is next to…you know what I mean.

LAWTON: He’s also become a much sought-after speaker, and he does cooking demonstrations around the country, such as this appearance at the Delaware State Fair.

REV. PATALINGHUG (at state fair): This beef is going to—oh, my gosh, it’s making me pray already.

LAWTON: His motto is feeding people, mind, body and soul, and he believes that families are strengthened when they share meals together.

REV. PATALINGHUG: We know that families are buying so much into the fast-food mentality that they spend no time with each other. My objective for “Grace Before Meals” is to create mini-Thanksgivings throughout the year.

LAWTON: When he speaks to a secular audience, he tries not to be aggressively religious.

REV. PATALINGHUG (at state fair): We all are hungering for something, and that’s why people go everywhere to find something to satisfy them. What I would like you to consider is to make sure you have a balanced diet for your body, your mind, and your soul.

Unidentified woman at state fair: I loved how he brought the spirituality into the mealtime and the family. I think that’s what drew everybody’s attention. And the food was delicious!

LAWTON: He’s gaining international attention and was just challenged to a cooking competition by celebrity chef Bobby Flay. I asked him how he keeps it all from going to his head.

REV. PATALINGHUG: I guess the celebrity status can be a temptation for anyone, but as a priest I’m somewhat protected in this. I’m required to spend time in quiet prayer and reflection. A holy hour a day gives me a great perspective. I’m just me doing something good for God.

LAWTON: Father Leo does get criticism from some Catholics who think it’s inappropriate for a priest to be doing what he does. But he asserts that his food ministry is deeply Christian.

REV. PATALINGHUG: We believe, at least in the Catholic Church, what binds us together and what binds God to us is food: a piece of bread turned into the body and blood of Christ in which we are incorporated into his family.

(at state fair): I’ve got to tell you that I know that the collar freaks people out a little bit.

LAWTON: Father Leo says for him, one of the most important parts of his cooking ministry is reaching out to people who may be uncomfortable with priests and helping them learn a little about God.

REV. PATALINGHUG: He can take a break-dancing, board-breaking, bread-breaking priest and, you know, give hope to people who might not understand the church or who might not understand the priest.

LAWTON: And that, he says, is a grace that extends beyond every meal.

I’m Kim Lawton in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

Read more of Kim Lawton’s interview with Father Leo Patalinghug, director of pastoral field education at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, and watch him talk about his television cook-off with celebrity chef and restaurateur Bobby Flay:

Q: Tell us a little bit about how you started cooking.

A: My love for cooking started just because I like to eat, and my mom would bring me into the kitchen when I was younger. After doing my activities I would get bored quickly. Mother would invite me to help her with cooking because it’s a multitasking thing and that actually piqued my interest.

Q: And where did you grow up? Talk a little bit about your memories of your family coming together over meals.

A: Being a traditional Filipino family growing up in Baltimore, I joke with people and say the reason why I had friends as a kid was because my mom cooked so well, and so we would eat traditional Filipino food, so for me to go to my friend’s house and eat Mac ‘n Cheese was exotic. But we had a real sense of eating together as a family. Every meal was together.

Q: Did faith play a role for your family as well when you were growing up?

A: Because we were immigrants, my mother needed a connection back to her own homeland, and the universality of the Catholic Church gave her that. In fact, we moved in location to our church. She would only go to a place, a home that was close enough where she could walk with her children to church.

Q: And did you have that memory of eating together—you know, food, grace before meals—there?

A: My family style of eating is very much a feast day celebration and yes, we prayed before every meal, and it was something serious because in my country not everyone gets a chance to eat. And so they reminded us that even though we were living in America, a land of plenty, there are a lot of people who don’t have the blessings on the table as well as the blessings around the table.

Q: Let’s jump over to your journey to the priesthood. Tell us a little about how that happened. I know that wasn’t necessarily your original path that you started on.

A: No, the original path for me was to do something in journalism or to do something in law. But at the same time I wanted to do something that was service-oriented, and it was only after what is now known as a conversion I realized that there is a God, God has a plan for me, and after a few years of discerning that, praying through it, going to retreats, I felt at peace in this calling and this lifestyle, even though most of my friends would be very surprised I decided to become a priest. I was 29 years old when I was ordained. I entered when I was 24 years old.

Q: What was happening that led to that conversion or led you to really start listening and seeking, is this something that is for me?

A: I think I was given a great, for lack of a better word, grace/opportunity to think about the big picture in life: What do I want to do? I was a deeper thinker than most. I wanted to not just take care of the temporal things, but knew that there was emotions, that there’s a spirit to people and how can I help with that? There were many events that made me turn to God and prayer, whether it be a major skiing accident, whether it be a breakup with a girlfriend, whether it be trying to find the right job, whether it be a very special moment of prayer. And there was one in particular when I went back to the Philippines and I was working—not working, I went back to the Philippines and I was a participant in a world stick-fighting competition because I was a martial artist, and I was with the USA team, and we had brought some supplies over just to give to some of the poor children in the area. I remember going to this one village and we were handing out candy to people and there was one little boy who only had a t-shirt on and he came up to me and I gave him a piece of candy and I looked in his eyes and I thought to myself, had it not been for my dad bringing us to America, that could have been me, and it just made me stop and think of the hunger of the people in the world. But even though this was a poor baby, he had a bigger smile than some of our children who have plenty to keep them occupied. And so I began to think more deeply of that and obviously through the assistance of good priests as spiritual directors and confessors, I was able to come to a peace that maybe God is calling me to the priesthood. So I walked into a seminary and six years later I was ordained a priest.

Q: Did that freak you out when you even started considering that possibility?

A: Yes, it was a very shocking thing. I actually played a joke on my mother. It was Halloween, and I was in a cast and I was teaching karate, and our karate school was having a big Halloween costume [party], and I couldn’t think of a costume with this cast on, and I was going to be a mummy but that was just too much cloth. So I had this black shirt on, I had a white thing around my neck, and I looked in the mirror and I thought, “Oh gosh, I could pull this off.” So I wrapped it around and it looked like a priest collar! And I remember crutching into my mother’s room and showing her. She was obviously very shocked and all the karate students at the time said, “You look good in that.” But it was a real shocker when I put it on for the first time as a seminarian.

Q: How did you start incorporating the cooking after you started going down the seminary/priesthood path? How did the cooking come into play there?

A: Well, the cooking has always been a part of my whole family’s life, and when I studied at the North American College in Rome, I realized the importance of a family meal, that seminary required the men to come together for every pronzo, which is a lunch or a supper, dinner experience, and so coming together we developed more than friendships. We developed a brotherhood, and that was abundantly clear being so far from my family that Thanksgivings, although I missed being with my family, were nonetheless special because I was with this family celebrating a meal. As far as it becoming a ministry, it’s basically the natural becoming more apparent, simply because families in the parish would invite me to come to their home for dinner, and that was code word for, “I’d like to talk to you, Father, about something.” So I would actually show up, but about forty-five minutes earlier, which really shocked them. But I wanted to see them interacting normally. I didn’t need them to put on a front. I needed them just to be a family, because they call me Father. I’m supposed to be part of their family, and so I would help them. We would gather in the kitchen. We would help cook, I’d help set up the table, and they saw the human side to me and not just the spiritual side. They realized that as I priest I had just as many feelings and questions and needs to pray about as they do. And in that camaraderie around the table I began to think theologically: this is what Jesus did. Most of his greatest lessons were taught around a dinner table.

Q: What is that connection between food and spirituality?

A: Food and spirituality’s connectors are so evident, because it addresses hungers. What are we hungering for? If it’s just food without company, then we could be living a very secluded life. That’s why we make an effort to reach out to people on those holidays. How? Through soup kitchens. Through handing out food. The word “religion” is something that everyone’s afraid of, but the Latin verb is simply religere which means “to bind.” What brings people together and in what forum? We believe, at least in the Catholic Church, what binds us together and what binds God to us is food—piece of bread turned into the body and blood of Christ in which we are incorporated into his family, and so when we look at food as a connector, we not only look at the hunger, we also look at what we’re being fed with, and so we think that food can also be inspiring.

Q: I’ve watched some of your shows on the Web, and I know that you talk about being fed mind, body, and soul. What’s that all about?

A: Being fed body, mind, and soul is a reminder that people can’t just live in the corporeal world, just to address the earthly things that make me feel good in body, because I know a lot of people who feel good in body, but their minds are so distraught with either guilt or shame and their heart is broken because of maybe of a bad relationship. People walk around this world with a great mask looking very good in the body but being very broken in the insides. My objective is to make sure that there is a connection, to not live a dualist spirituality, to live in this world as, the word is “hypocrite,” which means “actor.” I’m very happy on the outside but broken on the inside. We need to bring those two together.

Q: When you started doing the cooking shows that went online, why did you decide to take that route? You’re doing it for your parish; you’re doing it for the fellow priests and all of that. Why did you decide to go public?

A: Going public—I mean, there are so many angles to answer this question. The “Grace Before Meals” started because I simply took a hobby and I put it in God’s hands. He turned my hobby into a ministry. It became very apparent to me that people wanted this, hungered for something like this. If I could say, after September 11, it really was September 11, we know what happened, 2001. I was actually supposed to go to France on a pilgrimage with two other priests, but all the flights were canceled. So after a very tragic weekend worth of Masses, where the churches were full, hungering for an inspiration of hope, we ourselves, the ministers, we were spent. So we went a little retreat together, and I did all the cooking—comfort food. And it really made it a clear message that we were all hungering for support from one another. So one of the priests suggested, “I love watching you cook. It would be great if I had a video camera and taped all of this. You could talk about food, faith, family and culture.” And I looked at him and said, “That’s one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard.” But they kept egging me about it, and so I kind of took it seriously, but half seriously-half jokingly said, “Oh fine, well let’s do that and we’ll call it Grace Before Meals.” I thought that was the end of the story until one day when I was in the sacristy where the priests vest, and I was disrobing from the liturgical vestments, and a man walks in wanting to meet the new priest, me. And there was another priest there who was “inside” on that joke. He started coming to church regularly because he was looking for meaning. His son has autism and that’s hard for a family. So we started to go to daily Mass. In meeting him I just generically asked, “What is it that you do, Tim?” He said, “Well, I produce TV shows and commercials for Comcast.” Immediately the other priest said, “Well I’ve got an idea for you!” And I’m looking and going, “It’s a joke.” He said, “It’s called Grace Before Meals, it’s a priest cooking show.” I didn’t think anything of it until I get an email, and he says, “Father Leo, I’m flying in red-eye from LA. Can I have a breakfast meeting with you to discuss GBM?” It’s now given an acronym. I didn’t even know what “GBM” is. I tell people I thought he was talking about the “Great Blessed Mother” But he simply said, “I’d like to discuss in a Hollywood minute, which is thirty seconds or less, what’s Grace Before Meals.” I told him it’s a joke. He said, “No I’m serious.” So I said, “Fine. Grace Before Meals is maybe a show or a movement about a priest helping families, strengthening their relationship the way Jesus did, and it’s ultimately my responsibility to feed people body, mind and soul.” He said, “I love it.” And I said, “You’re sick” And from there, a very slow start, it’s turned into a pretty big movement.

Q: How do you balance that, the movement, with your responsibilities here at the seminary, your responsibilities as a priest? I know this is your ministry, but do you ever feel there is a conflict, or do you get pulled in different directions?

A: I’m blessed to have a rector, an archbishop, and faculty and seminarians who see the need to not live many ministries, but to try to bring them together as one. So this is connected to what I do here. As the pastoral field educator, my job is to teach future shepherds how to feed their flock. I teach a preaching class, which means I can’t have guys dishing out stale, boring leftovers, but dynamic things that are going to make their appetites just expand, and to whet their appetites to show that what we have to offer is good news. You can take corned beef hash, but if you put it on a beautiful square plate, make sure that the potatoes are perfectly scalloped, normal ordinary food becomes something worth celebrating. So, to a degree, this is my job. Does it put a strain on my schedule? Yes, which is why I make sure that I master my schedule rather than it master me, and also I have great access to spiritual companions who help me to keep focused on what it is that I’m supposed to be doing.

Q: I well know, being in front of the camera, being out there can have almost a seductive aspect to it, where you like being in the limelight. It can pull you in. Is there a struggle for you as a priest, to keep that humility virtue when you’re getting all the accolades and people want to get your autograph and all of that?

A: I guess the celebrity status could be a temptation for anyone. But as a priest I’m somewhat protected in this. I’m required to spend time in quiet prayer and reflection. A holy hour a day gives me a great perspective, and honestly, Leo, you’re not that good looking. You should be taller and more blonde. You should have straighter teeth. You should be thinner. I’m just me doing something good for God. I know ultimately what my faults and failures are because of confession and because I spend time in prayer. If there’s one thing that has actually been helpful about being in front of a camera, it has taught me patience and humility. Hurry up to wait, and then I look at myself or listen to myself and say, “Is that what I look like? Is that what I sound like?” I’ve got to approach this ministry seriously, but not take myself seriously.

Q: It’s very clear that you have fun and that you try to have fun with this and project a really fun image. I’ve seen you online break dancing and doing other stuff like that. What do you make of the image of priests that you’re projecting, especially given the stereotypes many people in the wider society might have?

A: If there’s anything that “Grace Before Meals” has been able to do, it’s to shatter some of those stereotypes. We are human just like everyone else. But we’re not satisfied with that. We want to be better at what we do, and God uses even our broken past to help us turn toward a better future. A lot of people are surprised that before I was a priest I used to teach martial arts, third-degree black belt structured taekwondo, full-contact Filipino stick fighting on our knees, I wanted to either be a journalist or a lawyer, I used to teach speech and debate, and yes, the rumor is true, I used to break dance. You take a guy like that and the next logical step is priesthood, right? No, it just shows that God can use anything if we are willing to give it to him. Who would have thunk in a million years that cooking a meal with a family would inspire so many people around the world who email me and say this has been an inspiration for me. Who would’ve thunk? If we’re generous with who we are, and God has given all the priests tremendous gifts and talents, if they’re willing to put that in his hands, he can turn six fish sandwiches into a feast for five thousand. He can take a break-dancing, board-breaking, bread-breaking priest and give hope to people who might not understand the church or might not understand a priest. It’s just one more connection that I’m not ashamed of, because Jesus used food all the time to make connections with others.

Q: I know you say your bishop and seminary have been very supportive, but are there other folks who say, “I don’t really think a priest should be doing this”?

A: Absolutely. I have experienced enough criticism just because we’re public people. But priests are going to experience criticism all the time by the evangelical message which might be hard for people to accept, by other religions that might not agree with the dogma. But one thing we’ve got to do is live on this earth together and help each other get to heaven and maybe one thing I can do is bring people closer to the table by sharing with them a little bit of our culture through food and maybe learning a little bit from them too. I’d love to have an opportunity to have either a show or a radio show, and “A Place at the Table” is what I’d like to call it, where we can just bring people of diverse opinions together, share a meal, celebrate what we have in common and respectfully discuss what we don’t have in common, and if there’s anything that we have in common it’s that: Was this food tasty or not? Are you walking away unsatisfied or dissatisfied? I think it’s one of my personal objectives to make sure I can feed people at least on one level.

The family is important to “Grace Before Meals” because I think families have bought into the fast food mentality, which basically says I’m too busy for you. I’m too busy to care about what you’re eating. I’m too busy to care about who’s feeding you. And there was a commercial at one point that said, “It’s ten o’clock, do you know where your children are?” Just rephrase the question: It’s dinner time; do you know where they are? Do you know what they’re eating? Do you know who’s feeding them? Because it’s easy to swallow a bunch of lies, and this about the family being the infrastructure of society, the basic building blocks for society, we know that families are buying so much into the fast food mentality that they spend no time with each other. My objective for “Grace Before Meals” is to create mini-Thanksgivings throughout the year, a time to celebrate the blessings we have not just on the table, but around the table.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Scientists have long found an association between relaxation and health. Now, there is new evidence that meditation and other spiritual practices have a beneficial and measurable effect on the brain. In a new book, “How God Changes Your Brain,” Andrew Newberg reports that meditation improves memory and reduces stress and that the kind of God you worship can affect the structure of your brain. Lucky Severson has the story.

VINCENT FEDOR (meditating and reciting mantra): Sa, ta, na, ma…

LUCKY SEVERSON: As unlikely as it may seem, Vincent Fedor is practicing meditation.

VINCENT FEDOR: …and you go into the whisper sa, ta, na, ma…

SEVERSON: Vincent and his wife, Judy, started meditation after they answered a questionnaire about improving their memory. That was one objective of Dr. Andrew Newberg. The other was that he wanted to scan their brains while they did it. Here are Vincent’s scans before he learned to meditate and after he had been doing it for eight weeks.

DR. ANDREW NEWBERG (University of Pennsylvania, with brain scans): Okay, so it is asymmetric, more active here than here, and after meditation it’s more active here than here. So simply doing the practice of the meditation he has altered the activity in this very, very important part of the brain, and this is really important, because this means he has changed the way his brain is working.

SEVERSON: Since meditating Vincent feels he’s become a better high school track coach.

VINCENT FEDOR: I think I’ve become a calmer, more tolerant person. If the situation comes up I don’t go to the angry side. I go take the calmer road. And you know, I think the kids see this. I think I’ve become a better coach because of it.

NEWBERG: It makes sense that if by doing this practice he has increased the activity in that frontal lobe, he’s actually able to improve the way in which he monitors his emotional responses to people and perhaps can treat them with more compassion.

SEVERSON: Dr. Newberg has studied nuns who do repetitive prayer, and he has seen the same kind of results. He’s been studying the effects of meditation and prayer on the brain for several years and is considered one of the leading experts in a new field called neurotheology.

DR. NEWBERG: We’ve learned that being religious or spiritual has a very profound effect on who we are, has a very profound effect on our biology and on our brain, and what we’ve found more recently is that not only does it have a profound influence on who we are, but it actually can change our brain and to change ourselves over times.

SEVERSON: Here at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Spirituality and the Mind, images of the brain are taken during or after a person prays or meditates.

Dr. NEWBERG: The more you use a part of the brain the more blood flow it gets and the brighter or more red it looks on the scans.

SEVERSON: Over the years Dr. Newberg has adapted a 12-step mediation exercise that includes sound, movement, and breathing.

JUDY FEDOR: Sa, ta, na, ma. The first two minutes the mantra is sung. The second two minutes the mantra is whispered. The third sequence is silence, back into the whisper and finishing with the song. After that it’s deep breathing, holding in, that’s done three times, body relaxes, and the mantra is completed.

The minute I can start doing it and moving my fingers my body gets calmer. It’s very soothing. To me it gets almost in a passive mode, and then you have energy afterwards because you became so calm.

Dr. NEWBERG: Religion and spirituality do help to lower a person’s feelings of depression, anxiety, gives them some meaning in life, helps them to cope with things, and that’s going to have a potentially very beneficial effect.

SEVERSON: But Newberg has made another discovery, a controversial one, that our belief system, how we view God, can make a huge difference in how it affects our well being.  If we believe in a loving God it can have a positive effect, even prolong our lives. But believing in a judgmental, authoritarian God can produce fear, anger, and stress, and that’s not healthy.

Dr. NEWBERG: When it ultimately turns towards hatred, and whether it’s people who believe in abortion versus those who don’t, whether it’s just one religion versus another, when you hear rhetoric which is hateful, filled with anger, that turns on the different parts of the brain that are involved in our stress response and our anger response.

SEVERSON: George Handzo is a chaplain with the Healthcare Chaplaincy of New York City. He says Newberg’s conclusions, that a person’s belief in a certain kind of God can be unhealthy, is bound to be controversial among people of faith.

CHAPLAIN GEORGE HANDZO (Healthcare Chaplaincy of NYC): They’re saying that there is one word of God, and God commands us to follow that word, and if we want to save people from God’s anger and condemnation we’re obliged to get other people to believe as we do

Dr. NEWBERG: I’m not arguing that people need to change their beliefs per se.  I mean if they feel that their perspective on God is right, I mean then that’s terrific.  But I think that  what we have to all be careful about is the anger and the hatred. That’s what has detrimental effects both on the individual as well as on society as a whole.

SEVERSON: Skeptics of Newberg’s work question if science should be delving into religion and spirituality in the first place, and they ask if his research has actually proven much of anything.

HANDZO: Faith is, by definition, reliance on things you cannot see and cannot know. Faith is something we believe God gives to us. It’s not something we invent. As a person of faith, this whole debate about what is going to be knowable is not a particularly interesting question to me.

Dr. NEWBERG: You know, if we get a brain scan of somebody while they’re experiencing being in God’s presence, as I’ve always said, that doesn’t prove that God was in the room. It doesn’t prove that God wasn’t in the room. What it proves is that when the person had the experience of interacting with God this is what change was going on in their brain.

DONNA MORGAN: Can I just praise the Lord right now? I feel like if I don’t praise the Lord I’m going to bust…Thank you Jesus. Thank you Jesus…

SEVERSON: Dr. Newberg has found there are some religious practices where the person is intensely focused and others where they just allow themselves to be taken over, for example,  speaking in tongues. Dr. Newberg has scanned the brains of people of all belief systems, of people with no faith, and those of deep conviction, like Donna Morgan, who is a Pentecostal.

DONNA MORGAN: When are you in that realm of praise you just give over to the Holy Spirit. Then you let him take control, and when he’s taking control, right, you can speak in tongues, if you’ve been given that gift.

Dr. NEWBERG (with brain scans): Speaking in tongues you’re going to see that the frontal lobes are going to decrease in activity. So that means the frontal lobes, the part of the brain that normally makes them feel like they are in control of what they are doing, is shutting down.

SEVERSON (to Dr. Newberg): It is shutting down because…

Dr. NEWBERG: It is consistent with the feeling that they are not in charge of the process.

SEVERSON: There are some who argue that certain people are predisposed or hard-wired toward transcendent experiences, and some are not. It’s an argument Chaplain Handzo disagrees with.

HANDZO: I don’t believe in a God that creates people, especially selectively, in a way that makes it difficult for them to access this God. That’s not my God.

Dr. NEWBERG: I think to some degree we all are hard-wired to be able to think about things on these levels. It’s just a matter of how much we engage that and if we find a path that does help us to engage that for ourselves.

SEVERSON: Newberg says people of faith shouldn’t worry that his research will ever diminish their faith.

Dr. NEWBERG: I don’t think that our science is going to be able to definitively prove that God exists or doesn’t exist. It is, ultimately, a leap of faith.

SEVERSON: Newberg believes the number one activity that can exercise your brain and enrich your life is faith.

Dr. NEWBERG: When you have those kind of positive, optimistic beliefs in the world, in God or religion, depending on the person, that that really, over the long haul, seems to be the thing that really provides a benefit for us in terms our mental state and in terms of our physical health and well-being.

SEVERSON: As for his own faith, he describes himself as a searcher who is still searching. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Philadelphia.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO (guest anchor): Earlier this month in France an annual event took place that has been described as perhaps the largest public expression of traditional Catholicism in the world. It is a three-day, 72-mile pilgrimage from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to the cathedral at Chartres. A history professor from New York City who has made the pilgrimage several times describes the experience.

Dr. JOHN RAO (Associate Professor of History, St. John’s University, New York): My name is John Rao. I’m associate professor of history at St. John’s University. I’ve done the pilgrimage to Chartres about six or seven times. The regular preparations involve making sure you’ve got the right footwear more than anything else. Being a New Yorker and not owning a car, I walk a lot.

You’ve started from a point, Notre Dame, which has this extraordinary impact on you because of its beauty and because of the fervor of the people praying and singing in it. And what the architecture of the cathedral and the light passing through the windows does is it makes it clear that God, the Father of lights, provides us a world which was incredibly more diverse and beautiful than anyone might think.

The route to Chartres begins the first morning mostly in Paris and the surrounding areas.

When we’re talking about the people who make up the pilgrimage, the first thing to note is that probably about 70 percent of them are young people — people in their late teens and in their early 20s. There are people from all over Europe. The majority are French, of course, but from every country that I can imagine, from Africa, from Asia, from the United States.

A lot of these chapters are groups that stick together at home, and they have a lot of their own particular songs, which are not specifically religious but more focused on just subjects involving history and culture of the country as well.

It’s so clear, it’s so sunny. By the afternoon people are going to start suffering from heat. The big thing for people who haven’t done it before is to get them to drink water.

The Mass on the first day is usually in a field. The Masses that are held during the pilgrimage and at Chartres itself are the traditional Latin Mass. In other words, the liturgy before the reforms that are associated with Pope Paul VI.

You have, perhaps, certainly at least 100 priests who are hearing confessions during all of this, and they’re scattered all through these lunch scenes and in the woods and in little deserted areas.

Their Catholicism is a fervent Catholicism, traditional in the sense that it’s very much focused on a spirituality that uses the traditional liturgy of the Church, takes that very seriously, the traditional devotions, the traditional Latin liturgy. And then they have to give communion to as many as 10,000 people.

The pilgrimage began in the Middle Ages. Chartres was always an important place and had great meaning in the life of the Christian world in the kingdom of France in the Middle Ages. Joan of Arc made this pilgrimage. Louis XIV, I believe, made the pilgrimage. After Vatican II there were — there was a lot of confusion that developed in Catholic believers’ minds about what they ought to be doing, what they ought not to be doing, whether they were putting too much of an emphasis on particular practices that somehow or other had become outmoded, and as a consequence things like pilgrimages ended up suffering. It resumed precisely due to the concerns of groups that, by this point, were calling themselves traditionalists who wanted to commit themselves to maintaining practices which they felt to be, spiritually, extremely beneficial.

The second day of the pilgrimage, the Mass is in the woods — same kind of Mass, beautiful music, priests hearing confession.

MICHAEL MATT (speaking to pilgrims): My name is Michael Matt. I’m the head of the American contingent, the American chapter for the Chartres pilgrimage.

It’s definitely a youth movement. They very easily, in many instances, can really tap into this whole tradition, the foundation of the Catholic faith. It doesn’t matter that they don’t understand every word of the Latin. They’re attracted to the centrality of the liturgy. They’re attracted to the rubric and the ritual and to the idea of suffering for what you believe in.

PILGRIM: Can you smell the grass? Can you feel your feet? This is the real world, especially when you put rosaries into it, traditional Masses, allegiance to the Holy Father. This is the real world that we’re all seeking for.

Dr. RAO: The entire pilgrimage is of an impact that’s hard to describe. A pilgrimage is a microcosm of what life is. Life, from a Catholic standpoint, is a pilgrimage—from birth to death, from our birth to our ultimate, eternal experience with God—and what the pilgrimage does is it takes you, for a short space of time, to a time out of time. You’re out of your ordinary daily experiences. All of the ordinary things that bother one during the course of a day just disappear, even to the point in a physical way that, after a couple of days, you don’t care what you look like.

PILGRIM: I’m pretty tired, but other than that it’s invigorating. Spiritually lifted, that’s for sure. It’s amazing to be with tons of Catholics — thousands of them.

Dr. RAO: I find myself thinking about everything that I ought to do in life — everything that I have done wrong. I go back through all of the experiences of my life and where I thought that I should have done something better.

The third day, the last day of the pilgrimage, everyone is exuberant, because if you’d made it to that last day you know you’re going to make it. You know you’re really going to make it. You’re in forests, you’re in fields — endless, endless fields. You at least get to see, after a certain point, the spires of Chartres in front of you. It can become particularly grueling because it takes a long time for that spire in the distance to really get truly bigger.

There was more of a, maybe a penitential spirit yesterday, but today it’s joy. It’s just joy. When you get onto the roads, in the real suburbs of Chartres, then you can see it looming more and more, and then you begin this walk, which is a last torturous walk up this long shaded path that takes you up into the town itself. That’s when you see it there, you know, in all of its glory.

What most stirs me up is the fact that you’ve managed to do it. You’ve managed to do it. You’ve finished it. When we’re at Chartres we have a solemn High Mass, and all of this is surrounded with a great deal of ritual and ceremony.

You could see 10,000, or 15,000 fervent Catholics, most of them young people, deeply committed to this traditional rite of Mass. These people who are part of the pilgrimage, and then who finish the pilgrimage with us as well, their spiritual fervor is accompanied with, again, a great love for music. By the time it’s over, the feeling of exaltation is hard to describe, just hard to describe.

The newer generation found what that old rite had to offer — spiritually satisfying, spiritually uplifting, and in a way that you could see almost in no other event that took place in the annual life of the church. The entire three days is emotional.

What to do in the future? This spirit of pilgrimage should be continued on the day-to-day basis for the rest of your life.

JUDY VALENTE: Sunrise at the Abbey of Gethsemani in the misty hills south of Louisville, Kentucky. The 55 Trappist monks who live here awake at 3:00 a.m. to begin their daily regimen of prayer and work — in silence. They gather for communal prayer several times a day. They will rarely venture outside the walls. For most, their lives will end here. The monks support the abbey by making fruitcakes and other products which are sold to the public. Much of the monastery’s 2,300 acres is leased to local farmers.

Brother PAUL QUENON (Trappist Monk, Abbey of Gethsemani): The essence of the Trappist life would be living in God, and I don’t think I would want to say much more than that. And of course, you’re living in God with other people in the same community, and it’s a life of continual prayer, and it’s a life of deepening — going deeper into your own capacity to love and live with God.

VALENTE: In 1941, Merton, then an aspiring young writer and a recent convert to Catholicism arrived here seeking to radically change his life. Merton was to have a striking message.

MORGAN ATKINSON (Documentary Producer): He said that anybody could have a deeply spiritual life it they care to. Any person on the street, if they were committed to it and devoted to trying it, then that path was open to them.

VALENTE: For Merton, the deeply spiritual life meant the experience of God’s presence and love at all times, combining that with action in everyday life. Paul Pearson oversees the Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville.

Paul Pearson

Dr. PAUL PEARSON (Director and Archivist, The Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University): The essence of Merton’s spirituality is, I think, the humanity of it, that he really speaks to ordinary people. He knows so well the great classics of Christian spirituality, but he can interpret them in a way that people in our world today can understand and relate to.

VALENTE: He spoke especially to lay Catholics in what was then a firmly hierarchical church.

Dr. PEARSON: Spirituality really belonged to the monks and nuns and bishops and what have you, whereas, you know, your ordinary lay person went to Mass on Sundays, the Mass was in Latin, they said the rosary, and that was the extent of it. And Merton, I think, really opened up that whole realm of contemplation and spirituality for people.

VALENTE: Merton’s parents had died when he was young. By his own account, he lived a rootless, hedonistic life. It was rumored he had fathered a child out of wedlock while a student at the University of Cambridge. At New York’s Columbia University, he continued to feel morally adrift, emotionally bereft. As a world-weary 26-year-old, Merton wrote these words, read by Morgan Atkinson.

Mr. ATKINSON (reading from Merton’s journal): Finally has come the time to go the Trappists and try to get in and be completely quiet in the front of the face of peace. It is time to stop being sick and get really well. Out here I could think and yet could not get to any conclusions. But there was one thought running around and around in my mind: to be a monk — to be a monk!

VALENTE: Thomas Merton not only became a monk. He would become a best-selling author and one of the most influential spiritual thinkers of his time. A fellow writer called him “an investigative reporter going into the inner workings of the soul.” As a novice at Gethsemani, Brother Paul Quenon received spiritual direction from Merton, known as Father Louis.

Brother Paul Quenon

Brother QUENON: He doesn’t think of the whole world as, you know, monks. But on the other hand, he can talk to the monk in each person. He sees it as a deep enough thing, that somehow everybody has the capacity to come to the same intensity and depth of experience of God.

Dr. PEARSON: This exhibit is all of Merton’s published work with their varying editions and foreign translations. Merton’s now been translated into I think it’s 30 languages.

VALENTE: In 1948, when he was 33 years old, Merton published his autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” taking his title from a scene in Dante’s “Purgatory.” The book became an overnight bestseller.  Sister Suzanne Zuercher is a Benedictine nun who has written extensively about Merton.

Sister SUZANNE ZUERCHER, OSB: I knew I needed to be in monastic life. I knew he was someone who spoke to me as no one had every spoken to me. He’s funny, he’s profound, he’s human, he’s down to earth, he’s practical, he’s concrete.

VALENTE: Mike Brennan is a baggage handler for American Airlines in Chicago. His home is full of Merton books and memorabilia.

MIKE BRENNAN (Baggage Handler, American Airlines): Working at O’Hare Airport, noisy, crazy, constant activity, constant stimulation, it’s really nice to find a way to let go of all that stimulus and activity and think of being connected with the Lord, and I learned than from Merton.

VALENTE: Merton’s fame allowed him to correspond with presidents, popes, and Nobel Prize winners. But as his public reputation grew, he retreated further into solitude and silence. He would spend a few hours a day in this small wooden shed writing and meditating. But it wasn’t enough.

Brother QUENON: He wanted to have more time for writing, for meditation.

VALENTE: He would later get permission from his abbot to live as a hermit in this tiny cottage about a half-mile from the monastery.

Brother QUENON: He loved being in the midst of nature, you know. The birds were his friends.

VALENTE: What do you think he did out here?

Brother QUENON: Well, read a lot and wrote. For him, praying was just to abide in the presence, the presence of the Lord.

(touring cottage): There’s the kitchen and then a bedroom, and then a chapel was added later on.

VALENTE: Merton wrote this in his journal:

Mr. ATKINSON (reading from Merton’s journal): For myself I have only one desire and that is the desire for solitude: to disappear into God; to be submerged in His peace; to be lost in the secret of His space. I have gone to the hermitage not because I hate the world. I go to the hermitage to deepen my consciousness, to be more in communion with the world.

Thomas Merton

VALENTE: His output was enormous. Over a 20-year period he would write 60 books on topics ranging from contemplative prayer to nonviolence. He also wrote poetry, essays, and criticism. In the 1960s, Merton became increasingly controversial. He began writing on issues of the day like civil rights, materialism, and the nuclear arms race. His superiors blocked the publication of some of his most strident anti-war writings.

Dr. PEARSON: As he changed from the world-denying monk to the world-embracing monk of the ’60s, you know, people began to think “why should he be writing on these issues. He’s away in a monastery. What does he know about them?’”

VALENTE: In 1966, Merton spent several weeks in a Louisville hospital, recovering from back surgery. There he met and fell in love with a young student nurse. He was 51 years old at the time.

Sister SUZANNE ZUERCHER, O.S.B. (Merton Author): It was very brief. It was very intense. It was very passionate. He sometimes felt he had abandoned his vows, and at other times he felt he was living the vows of growth and fulfillment.

VALENTE: The two would sometimes meet clandestinely in secluded parts of the monastery grounds. Within a matter of months, the relationship was over. But Merton had been changed.

Sr. SUZANNE: From that time on he never again thought of himself as being unloved or unlovable, and he himself learned to love in this relationship and that it was the part of himself that he always felt had been underdeveloped.

VALENTE: Merton rededicated himself to his monastic life. He became increasingly interested in Buddhism and Asian monasticism. In 1968, he received permission to attend a conference on monasticism in Bangkok. There is rare footage of Merton from that conference.

THOMAS MERTON (in video from 1968 Bangkok conference): That’s a thing of the past now, to be suspicious of other religions, and to look always at what is weakest in other religions and what is highest in our own religion. This double standard of dealing with religions — this has to stop.

“Our real journey is interior.”

VALENTE: Hours after this film was made Merton was dead, electrocuted after touching a fan with faulty wiring in his hotel room. He was 53. His reputation has only grown since his death. Working with manuscripts he left behind, scholars have published 60 more of his books, including seven volumes of his personal journals. But as a monk, Merton left behind few personal possessions: his work shirt, a cup, boots, eyeglasses.

Dr. PEARSON: With the death of Thomas Merton we lost really one of the great Catholic voices, one of the great prophetic figures within the Catholic Church, and I think that’s why his books are still selling, why they’re still being translated, because that message is as relevant today as when he wrote it.

VALENTE: Toward the end of his life Merton wrote, “Our real journey is interior.” For those seeking to take that journey, he remains an essential guide.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Judy Valente at the Abbey of Gethsemani.