We always have to use discernment about the magical aspect of prayer, not to think that God is a giant puppet on a string. But I think it's important to recognize the magical aspect of prayer. Despite the fact that biblical tradition has very strong denunciations of sorcery, there are certainly magical elements of prayer in the power of the divine name and in some of the scenes, for instance, in the New Testament, where Jesus heals using touch, using spittle, using strange, archaic words and calling on the Father with special kinds of language. Those are suggestive of magical prayer, and there's a long tradition of Jewish and Christian magical prayer, of Greco-Roman magical prayer that, I think, continues to linger, to some extent, in our experience of prayer today, whether it's someone putting a statue of St. Joseph in the ground when they're trying to sell their house; the magical use of prayer cards, religious medals. This is a strong, animating aspect of folk piety.

Q: And a lot of paraphernalia -- beads, icons, prayer wheels.
Philip Zaleski: I imagine if someone set out to collect all the prayer paraphernalia in the world, it could fill a museum the size of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It's just astonishing what people have used for prayer. All of us are familiar with prayer beads. We know that people use drums, and we've heard about Tibetan prayer flags and that sort of thing. It's hard to imagine something that isn't used for prayer --articles of furniture we might sit on, or kneelers; specialized clothing which is used in various types of prayer that are appropriate to that clothing; elements from the natural world. I was looking at a picture yesterday of some Sioux Indians in prayer blowing on their eagle-bone whistles. It's just amazing. And it seems right, because all of the material world is understood to somehow be given to us to use to make us closer to God. These things aren't alien to us. They're part of the gifts of God, and we can use them in return, to go back to God. It seems perfectly appropriate that we would use all these extraordinary elements of the world to pray.

Q: How do we approach God with our bodies to pray?
Carol Zaleski: There's a body language in prayer, as well as a verbal language. The gestures and postures that people use in prayer are tremendously expressive and tell you a lot about what state of mind that prayer is intended to elicit. For example, kneeling or prostration suggests and elicits in the person who's doing it a sense of humility, surrender, obeisance; but not of servile humility. It's not obsequious groveling in front of a tyrant. I think there is a sense, when people kneel or prostrate themselves in prayer -- as they do regularly in the Islamic daily prayer five times a day - of establishing a relationship to God that acknowledges your total dependence on God, but that is also a great source of a sense of dignity. That relationship is one that uplifts. It doesn't grind you down. If you were kneeling and prostrating yourself that way before a human tyrant, you would be ground down by it. But kneeling and prostrating yourself before the divine uplifts people. That's certainly one of the key postures.

In some contrast, perhaps, is the famous lotus position. If you sit in a contemplative state in meditation with your legs like a pretzel, you're completely contained within yourself. You are in a position of stabilization, with your spine erect, like the axis of the universe is running right through you. You're sitting in imitation of great meditators before you. If you're a Buddhist, it's a kind of "imitatio" of the Buddha (like we say "imitation Christi"). You're mimicking in your body the way a statue of the Buddha in meditation would look. That's a way of conforming yourself to that ideal. It's not so much a gesture of surrender, but of stability and serenity and being centered within oneself.

Then there are many hand gestures in prayer that are tremendously expressive. Standing in prayer is a very important gesture and posture which could be contrasted to kneeling; it is more suggestive of the dignity of the human being as a creature of (or, as the Muslims say, as vice regent with) God. The interesting thing is that in many traditions you get to combine these postures and alternate -- from the sense of your dependence on God and kneeling in prayer, to standing before God, which is saying, "I am God's creature, and I've been endowed with free will and with dignity. I'm going to carry myself with a sense of self-respect and respect for God as I stand there in prayer."

Of course, there are many other variations, many postures. And each one of them tells a story.

Q: Talk a little bit about the importance, the usefulness and the tradition of fixed-hour prayer -- stopping what you're doing and praying at certain hours through the day
Philip Zaleski: The idea of stopping throughout the day for prayer is very important, and one finds it in may different religions. The most famous example is Muslims, who do stop five times a day, each time for a series of prayers and prostrations and ablutions and so on.

The idea is that throughout the day, we tend to get lost. We wander away from what really matters, and every time we stop and are called back to prayer and to God, we return to that which really matters. It's like a baseball player coming back to home base, or anyone coming home, coming back to the center of life.

It's interesting that the Christian tradition has lost this idea. You'll find monks and nuns who still sing the Divine Office, stopping for prayer seven or eight times a day. But it doesn't exist in the life of most ordinary Christians. People pray before they go to bed, and they pray when they wake up in the morning, which is a taste of this, and I think that's very important. People find that praying in the morning as soon as you wake up sets the tone for the whole day. Praying at the end of the day allows you to recapitulate and evaluate the day and set the tone for the next morning, and it also gets you through the night. But this is something that's been lost in the Christian tradition, or at least it is something we don't have to the extent we should.

There was a monk named Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection who talked about the practice of the presence of God. He was a cook in a monastery, and he was rather famous for dropping his pans in the middle of fixing a soufflŽ to pray to God and to feel the presence of God. He would -- he would do this at any given moment of the day or night, and eventually it became a continuous practice with him. Eventually, it ties into ideas of continuous or never-ending prayer. It's something all Christians might want to consider how to bring back into the tradition.

Q: What about the Jesus Prayer and how it works?
Carol Zaleski: St. Paul said, in the first letter to the Thessalonians, that we should "pray without ceasing." That's a tall order, to be praying at all times. There's a story in a famous nineteenth-century book called THE WAY OF A PILGRIM about someone who tries to do that literally. He hears in church this command that we should pray without ceasing, and he takes it to heart and tries to figure out how is he going to pray without ceasing. After he has lost his family and all his worldly goods, he sets out as a pilgrim, wandering throughout Russia, trying to find spiritual teachers who will give him a technique for praying without ceasing.

The technique they offer him is what we know partly because of J.D. Salinger's FRANNIE AND ZOOEY, in which Frannie reads THE WAY OF A PILGRIM. We know it as the Jesus Prayer. It's also called the Prayer of the Heart, and it involves repetition of a prayer that pretty much always takes this form: "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Sometimes it's shorter than that; sometimes it's just the repetition of the name of Jesus. In that sense, it might be likened to a mantra or a magical invocation.

In any case, the pilgrim is taught to repeat this formula, which really is understood to encapsulate all of the gospels. It has the essential elements of prayer. It has all the essential elements that are in The Lord's Prayer, according to the Eastern Christian tradition and many Western Christians as well, who have adopted this practice.

The pilgrim practices it over and over, 12,000 times a day, 36,000 times a day until, eventually, he says it becomes self-acting. And it becomes really part of his heartbeat, and it orients himself to this continuous sense of the presence of God. It gives him a tremendous sense of freedom. It bears many wonderful fruits in his life.

He's also in harmony with animals and with every person he meets. He's much more open to everybody. You might think he's wandering around in a hypnotic daze with this thing going over and over and over again in his mind, but according to this famous tale (we don't know the author; it was probably an orthodox monk), he, in fact, becomes more humanly competent, rather than less. He becomes a teacher to others and a help to others in his travels.

That's a famous practice that has some of the same features as this regular, punctuated series of prayers, like the Divine Office in the Christian tradition. All these kinds of formal liturgical prayers done throughout the course of the day are also attempts to fulfill the injunction to "pray without ceasing" -- not by chronic, constant prayer; but by regular prayer that goes along with the changing hours of the day and seasons of the year, to give you a complete cycle of prayer.

Q: Is it important for a group or a congregation to pray together?
Carol Zaleski: I think that prayer is actually never solitary, even when people pray by themselves. In principle, prayer is corporate. People learn their prayers from a tradition and, in praying, especially if they're praying for somebody else, there are bonds that link them, one to the other; it is, in fact, a more natural way of praying if you are praying with other people. You have sayings like that of Jesus, "Wherever two or three are gathered, I am there in the midst of them." There are similar sayings in other traditions that emphasize the corporate nature of prayer. It's partly to counteract, perhaps, a selfish understanding of personal prayer.

Q: Is it rights to pray for worldly success?
Philip Zaleski: I suppose it depends on what sort of worldly success you're looking for. My impression, in reading THE BOOK OF JABEZ, and listening to the author speak, and listening to people who pray that prayer (which comes from Second Chronicles in the Old Testament -- it's a prayer of a man who asks God to enlarge his territory, and God does do so) is that almost all the people who read that book and pray that prayer are asking for worldly success for themselves; but worldly success so that they can then turn around and spread the riches to other people. It's not really entirely a selfish request. It's a request for the enlargement of the self, so that the self can then reach out and bring help and love and goodness to other people. It seems to me to be a perfectly just motivation.

I think it's inevitable that people will ask for personal success in one way or another. Again, we return to the child asking to do well on a test. Well, not only is there nothing wrong with that, but I would find something strange about a child who didn't ask to do well on a test. It's just the right thing to do Ñ to ask to fulfill your responsibilities and to use your energies and your talents as best you can to enhance yourself and to enhance the world.

Q: What's your understanding of the effectiveness of prayers for healing?
Carol Zaleski: A great many studies of prayer have attempted to put the exploration of the meaning and function of prayer into a clinical and controlled setting, and some of it's a little bit funny; to try to have a control group of people that aren't prayed over -- there's something almost comical about it.

What's not comical is that it reflects the fact that people in the health professions are taking seriously something that most people of the world have always known to be the case, that prayer does help people, and that prayer does bear fruit in the lives of those who pray and those who are prayed for. Now there's an attempt to put this on a scientific footing.

My sense is that nothing conclusive has come from those studies, but what has come from it is an atmosphere which is a bit more receptive to encouraging prayer and to creating a cultural climate in which prayer is seen as having this value, and in which the spiritual life of patients might be taken more seriously by those who are charged with their healing. Those are the fruits of that work on the larger scale, but I don't think those studies are going to be convincing to anyone not already predisposed to think that prayer works.

Q: What about the relationship between prayer and free will?
Carol Zaleski: Prayer is a way of asking for divine help, and it also means expressing the idea that, "I can't do it by myself." Many religious traditions teach that human beings have a certain degree of control over themselves. If they didn't have that control over what they do, we couldn't hold them accountable, so there could be no morality. Free will is an extremely important idea in many religious traditions, certainly in Judaism and Christianity.

When you pray, you're asking God to step in, but you're not necessarily asking God to overrule your free will. In fact, if you had a sense that everything was completely predestined, if you had a fatalistic sense of things, then there would, perhaps, be less reason to pray. This is an issue that arises in Islamic prayer, as it also may have arisen for [18th-century American theologian] Jonathan Edwards. What's the role of petitionary prayer when God predestines people to be elect or not?

The Muslim answer to that question is that God also intended for you to pray and intended for you to collaborate in the working out of the destiny that God had in mind for you. So, when you pray, you put yourself in a very delicate relationship of offering up your will and asking for God's will to be done -- but not in such a way that it annihilates your freedom or annihilates the freedom of others.

That may be one of the answers to the problem of unanswered prayer. If God answered all our prayers, that would mean that He was acting like a puppet master, because some of our prayers that evil may be averted have to do with the use of free will that will be made use of by others in this world. If we pray for peace, we're praying for people to stop making war. But they're using their free will, and [it] may not be that our prayer can be answered in such an automatic way without ruling out that use of or abuse of their free will, which may be viewed as a greater good. [It] may be greater that we have free will and can abuse it than it would be if we were hardwired always to choose the good, like robots.

Q: One of the ongoing big controversies is whether there should be prayer in public schools.
Philip Zaleski: I'm not going to suggest an answer to the problem, but I want to underscore the severity of the problem by pointing out that prayer binds together communities. The other day, I was studying the Sioux Indian sun dance, a prayer ritual that goes on for four days and brings fertility and renewed life to the Sioux people. It was banned by the U.S. government when we were trying to suppress the American Indians. The government knew full well that the sun dance was what brought life to the Sioux people, so they outlawed it. Fortunately, it was carried on illegally by the Sioux people during all these years of the banishment, and it allowed them to sustain their nation. The idea behind the sun dance is that prayer brings the blessings of God down upon the people and allows the people to be a people. I think we find this idea in Judaism and Christianity and Islam and all the great religions of the world. Yet, here we are in a pluralistic culture, in a society where, in order to have different people of different faiths live together, our response has been to erase religion from the public square to a great extent. The most obvious, the most famous example of this is that we don't allow prayer in the schools, which means that children are taught that education has nothing to do with prayer and nothing to do with God.

This may be a social necessity, but it's something that's never been done before in world history. It's in many ways a dangerous thing to do, because it's cutting us off (in one of the most vital aspects of our life, which is that of educating our children) from God and from a relationship with God. It may be necessary for us to cut ourselves off. I can't answer that. But I do know that it's a very serious act, and people need to realize the seriousness of the situation.

Carol Zaleski: I think there have been efforts to change the language of prayer that are very controversial and very indicative of wider changes in our culture. For example, if you pick up a hymnal in almost any church, you'll see essentially bowdlerized versions of the great hymns. Take "Amazing Grace." Instead of saying, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me," the "wretch like me" is very often gone. In a church that we go to, it just says, "that saved and set me free."

"Amazing Grace" is being sung on many public occasions now, when we're trying to come together for a sense of mutual support in the face of grief and crisis and mourning. And it is a tremendously moving song. It reflects the experience of a former slave trader who nearly lost his life, survived and felt this tremendous need to give thanks and to acknowledge his own sinfulness and his need for grace.

I find it very interesting that this song has captured people's imaginations so much, because it's commonly said that our culture has lost the sense of the reality of sin. And, yet, "Amazing Grace" is a very strong statement of my "wretchedness" and my need for grace.

There's a tendency to get rid of strongly penitential language, strongly other-worldly language and strongly martial language -- some of the martial sounding "Onward, Christian Soldiers" hymns have been toned down to remove potentially offensive, triumphal notes. Maybe that was necessary, but that's one way in which there have been changes sometimes imposed from above. People get Ph.D.'s in religious studies, liturgical studies, and they feel that the language needs to be changed as part of a social engineering project, so that we will be more democratic, less monarchical, less triumphal, less sexist -- so you change the language of prayer.

One of the difficulties with that kind of change is that prayer really underwrites a lot of aspects of our culture, not all of which are visible to us. When you change a prayer text, and when it's not as familiar to people anymore, they lose their bearings, to some extent. If it's not the prayer they remember from their childhood days, if it is either too simple or too complex, if it sounds too modern and too up-to-date, it will lack some of the numinous quality that prayer needs to have.

There are two countervailing tendencies in our culture: We do have a very large and generous capacity for humility and an instinct for surrender. The other place I see that manifested is in the Alcoholics Anonymous movement, the recovery movement, where you have people willing to stand up in meetings and say, "My life has been a wreck, and I have to come to a higher power. I'm at the end of my rope, and I can't do it by myself." That's one strain in American popular common piety, that willingness to surrender, that need to take refuge in a higher power.

Another strain of American popular spirituality, you could say, is the self-help, therapeutic approach where, instead of saying "wretch like me," I'd want to [make] positive affirmations to myself: "Every day, in every way I'm getting better and better." That mantra of mind cure, or "healthy-minded religion," as William James put it, also influences the way we pray.

We have the "Amazing Grace" strand, and we have the positive thinking strand in our prayer culture. I'm not sure we always know how to integrate those two.

Another example [of change] has been in the reform of the liturgy within the Roman Catholic Church, with the transition to the vernacular. The vernacular translations themselves have tended (even more strongly than the reformed Latin text within the Roman Catholic mass) to downplay the penitential, the monarchical, the other-worldly, the sense of Heaven and the angels and all of that. And there's a great longing for all of that. People will look for it elsewhere if it's suppressed within the language of prayer.

Another way in which prayer has changed, I think, is that it's more private. This relates to the fact that we are pluralistic, and it has been felt necessary to have less overt public prayer. So prayer becomes more private, and it tends to be colored by the therapeutic orientation of our culture. We pray personally. We pray in order to feel better, in order to get healing and energy, as a kind of self-help technique.

Q: Can you talk about the connection between prayer and poetry, or how they relate to each other?
Philip Zaleski: We've been talking a lot about spontaneous prayer: "Lord, help me in my hour of need." But there's another kind of prayer which is tremendously important. These are composed prayers, the most famous being The Lord's Prayer, which Jesus himself composed. There are composed prayers in all the traditions. The five prayers a day that Muslims say draw on the Koran, transcribed by Mohammed from a book that sits in Heaven.

Whenever you have a composed prayer, you have a prayer which seeks to get to the heart of the human being and to turn that human being toward God. Beauty and precision and eloquence all play a part, and that means the skills of poetry come into play in composed prayers. Poets, in fact, have often tried to compose prayers, and sometimes very successfully. Some of the most beautiful prayers in the language are prayers written by some of our famous novelists and poets, precisely because they have the skills to create the sort of beauty that we want in a prayer.

When we see prayers like the psalms, or all the prayers that run through the King James Bible (which is certainly the most beautiful translation of the Bible, if not the most accurate), we have a sense that we're getting close to poetry.

I think some the most interesting experiments involving prayer have been attempts by poets to create poems that bring the person who reads the poem into a state of prayer. There's a very famous Japanese poet named Basho, who really refined and established the whole style of poetry known as haiku, which are very short poems that distill the sense of (the Japanese term might be) the "suchness" of nature, the way in which nature expresses the truth of the cosmos as it is at any moment. This is a contemplative sort of poetry that really is the same as a prayer.

And in the West, we have Gerard Manly Hopkins, a Catholic priest who, through the use of extraordinarily explosive imagery and alliteration and digging into the very sound of language, tried to get beyond language itself, to use language's magical qualities to get beyond language into the mystery of God and God's expression through language that can awaken us all to the reality of the supernatural.

This relationship between poetry and prayer always exists, and I'm looking forward to future experiments in the same line.

Carol Zaleski: Every culture and every generation has its great prayer poets. One aspect of our pluralistic experience right now is that we have unprecedented access to the great prayer poets of many traditions. You just walk to your corner bookstore or go online, and you can get the greatest prayer poems of all time from many traditions.

Right now, the prayer poems, you might call them, of Rumi, for example, are extremely popular. They embody some of the ecstatic quality of Rumi's Islamic mysticism -- Sufism. They are the verbal counterpart to the experience of the whirling dervishes, who enact the movements of the planets and the orbiting of the soul around the soul's beloved. Rumi captures that same experience in words, in prayers, in sounds that are actually quite difficult to translate well.

Many of the popular translations of Rumi's poetry are geared to a contemporary sensibility, and they don't give us Rumi himself; instead, they represent a dialogue between contemporary Western seekers and this great Islamic, mystical tradition. They're being translated into a contemporary idiom, so that what people take away from reading Rumi's poetry today is a free spirit that is ecstatic, intoxicated with love of the divine and a quest of the divine, a never-ending pilgrimage of love. That idea comes across in contemporary translations of Rumi's poetry. [They] evoke a sense of a seeker who is inflamed with love of the divine and is searching for the beloved in every aspect of life. That's an idea that appeals to people today, because many people do feel they are seeking and that they haven't arrived. They feel this great longing for communion with the divine and for ecstasy and freedom from all boundaries.

What many of the contemporary translations of Rumi don't capture so well is the original context of Rumi's Sufism, the extent to which it is embedded in orthodox Islamic thought and ascetic discipline, aspects of which are extremely demanding and wouldn't have great appeal to contemporary sensibility. We do tend to pick and choose, and we have our fads and fancies in prayer, just as in other aspects of culture. Very often, translation of works from other times and places is a way of making material available to us in a guise that is palatable. It isn't always the recreation of those other worlds.

Rumi is the best-selling poet in the United States today, which tells us a great deal about the extent to which poetry and religious longing and religious quest are linked in our contemporary experience.

It also raises questions as to the authenticity of the transmission of the prayer poetry and religious ideals of a figure from so long ago, from a tradition which may not be shared by most of the people who are buying his books. It raises some very interesting questions about that.

I think we're missing something when we read Rumi as a fantastic new Beat poet. He's not Gregory Corso; he's a teacher within orthodox Islam. To understand something of the tremendous sense of longing and the experience of annihilation in the presence of the Beloved, you would really have to learn and immerse yourself in the Islamic tradition. While mysticism is only one strand of Islamic thought, it is deeply rooted in the sense of the absolute majesty, the overpowering reality of God. My littleness in the face of that God is a strong affirmation of the whole Islamic tradition. Rumi's mysticism comes out of that tradition, and isn't just a free-floating love-mysticism, which is the way I think we are sometimes receiving him today.

It just goes to show, though, that prayer poetry and prayer practices taken out of context may lose some of their original meaning. But the fact that they appeal to people is a sign that there's a hunger for prayer, and it can lead people into a fuller experience of what the fully realized religious traditions of the world have to offer by way of prayer and spiritual discipline.

Q: We talked about your own prayers in wartime, but more generally, how do you pray?
Carol Zaleski: For me, essentially, prayer is an attitude of thankfulness, a sense of awe, a sense of not knowing how I got here and feeling thrown into this life and a sense of its continual miracle. Prayer is just a response to that continual miracle which is always unfolding -- in my family every time I look at my children. Every time I take a step and don't fall into an abyss, I have something to be thankful for. That comes first. And then asking for things comes from that. It comes from that sense that I've been showered with blessings, and one of those blessings is the ability even to ask for help. I think it's just gratitude and awareness, which is a gift.

It's also not something that you can summon up for yourself at will, which is why I'm also grateful for the fact that there are formal, set prayers -- ordinary prayers that I could turn to even when I'm feeling very dry and desolate, without needing to feel that I even have to summon up an emotion that goes with them. I can simply do the prayers.

Philip Zaleski: I learned to pray as a child. I was raised Catholic and learned the rote prayers of the Church, the "Our Father" and the "Hail Mary." And then as a young adult, I put all that behind me and explored Eastern forms of prayer, meditation, contemplative prayer in various modes.

Now, as I get older and pray with my children, I find that, for one thing, I'm returning to the rote prayers, because they're prayers that a child can learn and enjoy and use. I find I get new meaning and strength out of them. I still do some contemplative prayer, but I find beyond both those things, prayer for me now, above all, is just talking to God. I do this at various times of day. I tend to do it by myself, because other people might think I was acting funny. But I don't find it funny. I just talk to God, sometimes get on my knees. And I don't know if God answers, but I have a sense that He's listening.

I have a very strong sense of -- of God's beauty and His power, and of my smallness and inadequacy in relationship to that. So, I'm thankful that God lets me be here and lets me carry on, especially with my family and my children, my wife.

But I also have a sense of adoring this magnificent, inconceivable person who has given life to this whole world. And, in that mixed rush of adoration and gratitude and thankfulness, I suppose I find the finest and best moments in my prayer.

Carol Zaleski: As a child, I didn't know much about praying. I grew up in a family that didn't practice religion. My heritage is Jewish, and I still consider myself Jewish - and Christian. I had to learn about religion from books, and I have to say I'm grateful for that, actually. I'm grateful for not having had religion stuffed down my throat. I probably would've reacted against it.

But, instead, I was exposed to it in such a gentle and non-intrusive way that, on the one hand, I didn't develop a discipline of prayer, and I didn't have a repertoire of prayers; but I did have a sense that there's something there to explore, and that I would gradually, over a lifetime, get to know it better. And this would happen for me partly through studying. That's why I'm a religion professor -- I was looking for religion. And the only way I knew how to look was through books. I was a bookworm as a child.

That's how I prayed, really -- through books and through the libretto of Bach's B-Minor Mass and things like that. It was a cultured household, and so, in a sense, the culture of prayer was available to me through Shakespeare, through the one copy of the Bible I had, called "The Bible as Literature. My grandmother gave it to me. She was in [the ethical culture movement], and she thought I should have a Bible so I wouldn't be illiterate on such matters. But she didn't want to give me a regular Bible. She wanted me to see it as an expression of something cultural.

That reading was a search for God through books and for prayer through books. But I still didn't really know how to put these things into practice. For a long time, I was studying and learning about monastic life in the Middle Ages, and I thought, "How wonderful if this sort of thing were still going on, if people were actually praying seven times a day and meditating and all of that. Too bad it's not still going on."

But then I discovered it is still going on, in fact. I had only to look.

It helped a lot, though, to develop over the years with Phil a groundedness, a rootedness in a tradition, and not simply to be spiritually eclectic. It was really important for us. This was a very gradual process with a certain amount of experimentation along the way that has taken us to the point where just the ordinary rote, routine prayers are a great delight for us as a family and for us individually, as well.

Philip Zaleski: Even while I was doing Eastern meditative practices, I would still slip in the occasional prayer from my childhood. The sense of a relationship with God never really left me, even when intellectually I would have said I didn't believe in God. In my heart, I was certain that God existed and I did feel close to Him.

I suppose, in a way, it was two streams, one being the Eastern stream, and the other being a Western stream, the Christian stream. And, for me, the Christian stream eventually became the ocean.