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I have been preoccupied with religion since I was a child. Perhaps it was because I grappled with health issues from a young age, and felt the frailty of life earlier than some or maybe it's because nuns run in my family – for whatever reason, I have long been aware of the concept of God. The questions began when I was five or so, and started having night time wakings when for a moment the world cracked open and was utterly and painfully clear; we were all so vulnerable, so alone, every one of us. How could the world not wound us? How could we protect ourselves and each other? As if in response, my young imagination conjured the possibility that we were not alone, not so vulnerable, that we were being rocked in the gentle arms of some greater presence. This was not a God that had been described to me, but my own nascent sense of a divine presence. I found myself drawn to people and places that would bring me closer to an understanding of this presence. I was the only one in my family who went to church. I sang in the choir of our local Episcopal Church. The singing was fun, but mostly what drew me was the place itself; the colored windows, the blanketing silence, the cool, scented air, the soaring sense of space. I could think here. Or not think. It seemed important enough just to BE in such a grand space. I thought, if a Christian God inspired such architecture, there might be something to this religion business. I wasn’t as interested in the sermons, which seemed like long stories with obscure plots. It was with our babysitters, our "summer girls," that I was initiated into doctrine – it was with them that (unbeknownst to my parents) I found my first religious practice. These young women would live with us for months at a time, and they almost all had some sort of religious affiliation. There was Rosie, the guitar strumming mid-western Christian; Carol, the Roman Catholic who swam fully clothed; Anna the quilt-making Born Again Christian; Dorrie, the stylish Jewish girl who talked on the phone a lot. I grilled them all with questions because it seemed they all believed something different. What religion are you? Does your God need you to pray? How often? Is there a heaven? How do you get in? Does your God punish children who snitch an extra granola bar from the cupboard? What I wanted was a rule book. The most complete manual came from Carol, the unshakable Roman Catholic, whose faith was Teflon tough and whom I came to love. She was not only kind and patient – she gave me something to do. Carol told me that prayers were like checks to get into heaven. The more checks, the better. I knew a few prayers, but this was heaven we were talking about – it was clear I needed to learn more. I worked my way up to fifteen prayers before bed every night. Mornings, I had some free time in the school bus, so I started praying then too. It seemed like cheating to say them silently, so I moved my lips as I recited them. This went on for years. Finally, the prayers became too time consuming. My homework, not to mention my social life, was suffering. I gave in to shortening my list. When no one of this world or beyond communicated any sign of dissatisfaction, I whittled down the prayers to my original three. As the years passed, I was still haunted by something I had yearned for as a child – a deeper sense of needing to belong. Still, the only place I knew of where people got together to think about bigger things was a church. This need weighed on my decision to attend Georgetown University. The rigorous Jesuit discipline appealed to me, but so did the spiritual requirements. Students had to take courses in religion and philosophy. Priests walked around in their Spartan black garb endowing the campus with a comforting gravitas. These were serious people. I felt like I was in the right place. When I arrived on campus, I promptly signed up to attend a religious retreat. I had been boning up on the Catholic Church and had amassed questions. I was eager to get some answers hoping to confirm these were my people. The retreat, however, turned out to be silent. Students were spoken to but we couldn’t speak back. This was agony. Finally I requested a private audience with the head priest. We took a little walk. The questions flew out of me. I was interested in the Catholic faith, I assured him, but I had to have some answers first. How, for instance, with the church’s history as it was – full of violence, persecution, duplicity and hypocrisy – was one to trust the church as a guiding force? The priest smiled and told me that the church was run by men, and men were imperfect. Then why should we trust them? I asked. Because, he said, they are doing the best they can. But what about power, I pressed on, doesn’t it corrupt them? That’s not what the church is about, he said. The church is about God, and faith. If power isn’t part of the church, I said, why is it so hierarchical? The priest smiled at this. Why are there so many rules? I pressed. Why aren’t there any women? He was a patient man, and he genuinely seemed to understand my distress. His final answer was: sometimes ours is not to question. Sometimes we must simply have faith. Slipping back into my envelope of silence, I felt totally uncomforted, totally alone. I wasn't being given answers, I was being told not to ask. Maybe these were not my people after all. I found my first significant answer much closer to home, with someone who did not at all mind questions. My grandmother was an Episcopal nun. She had two lives; the first as a wife and mother of four, the second as a silent contemplative. I never knew her in her first life; I never saw her out of her long, black habit. She was unusual for a person of faith in that she was deeply interested in the events of the secular world. She read everything: Not just The New York Times and USA Today, but Reader’s Digest, The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Atlantic. In her silent community on the Upper West Side of Manhattan we would sit in the little “talking room” and I would listen to her quietly hold forth on both the life of the mind and the life of the soul. I remember asking her if she really believed in God. She smiled and said, yes, but not in some gray-beard up in the clouds. She told me she came to religion when she understood that God lives not in the clouds, but in the hearts of people. She added that she wished she was more like some of the novices in her order, and that faith came easily. She had to fight every day for it. The intellect, she said, was a great stumbling block. But it was dangerous to exclude it. You had to bring all parts of yourself to your faith. You had to come to it on your own terms; it was dangerous to divide yourself. It was with my grandmother that I first learned you could cross safely from the land of the learning to the land of faith, that the two were not, as it sometimes seems, at war. Like my grandmother, I believe there is something more out there: a divine plan and order, though personally I cannot assign this belief to one religion. I have kept my mind (and soul) open and found answers – and great similarities – in everything from meditation to the great religions of Judaism, Islam and Buddhism – not to mention Christianity. The issue of faith is present in most everything I've written. Resurrection shares themes of my first published book, An Obvious Enchantment. I guess you could call it "religious anthropology", though Enchantment centered on Islam and the Koran. Resurrection centers on the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Gospels in Egypt, 1945. This astonishing archeological find opened a window to a branch of Christianity most don't know existed. These Gnostic Christians were considered a threat to the forming Catholic Church, partly because they believed that the way to God was through gnosis, or self-knowledge, and that there was no need for an intermediary or church. In the fourth century, the Gnostics were labeled "heretics" and their texts were outlawed and ordered destroyed by the Church Fathers. It seems, however, that these "heretical" texts were well known and loved. Someone found a way to preserve them. The story that unfolds in Resurrection involves some of the real life events that took place around the appearance of these texts in Cairo in the 1940's. While wrapped in a larger tale of love, war and murder, Resurrection is primarily a story about faith. It is a story about a Christianity we never knew, and a faith that was buried – a faith that instructs one not to ignore learning, and to seek God within. I am moved beyond words by what I learned researching this book, and sharing this knowledge – this lost faith – with others has become a primary motivation for writing it. |