by Sally Quinn
By the time we did the interview, she no longer called herself an atheist. “I call myself a freelance. I can’t see any one of the great religions as superior to others. . . . I’m seeking to make sense of life, looking for its meaning and how we can have a better humanity.” She told me then that her own religious beliefs were a “work in progress” and over the past decade they had continued to evolve.
She said that it was through the act of writing her books that she found out what she actually thought about religion and that it was in her study that she felt most spiritual. In The Great Transformation, she compared four religions that emerged concurrently during the Axial Age (900–200 BC)—Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in the area of Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. She reveals her surprise at their similarities even though they didn’t have much contact with one another. For one thing, she said, they did not seek to impose their own views on the others. “What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved.”
It is interesting to me now how much the thinking of those in the Axial Age reflects a lot of what is going on with so many of our country’s people today. Those referred to as the “nones” have rejected institutional religion for a more personal spiritual path, turning to a practice that the Chinese called “jian ai,” or concern for everybody, not just your own group.
Karen believed then, and still does, that it’s a mistake to define God. “I gave that up a long time ago,” she said.
My habit has always been that when I do interviews with people about their faith, I ask them to tell me what they mean when they refer to God. Their responses are never the same.
The most affecting thing that Karen, whose mother had died recently, talked to me about was sadness, pain, and grief. “Being spiritual means allowing your heart to break,” she told me, adding, “In the end, death is the great mystery, the terrible mystery.”
What really resonated with me was her invoking the Sanskrit word dukkha, an important Buddhist concept, with which I was unfamiliar at the time, that means suffering. Karen elaborated: “Buddha would say that life is suffering. There is no why to it. Suffering and unsatisfactoriness. Indians say start with the pain of life and let it crack you open.”
Somehow I had always felt that you were weak if you allowed yourself to even admit to suffering. I was constantly trying to avoid it and deny suffering a foothold anywhere close to me—very unsuccessfully I might add. Steven Wolin once said to me that I had absolutely zero capacity for denial. No wonder it was so hard. It didn’t work. I was not capable of denying suffering.
There were times after Quinn was born, my mother had her stroke, my father got sick, and Ben started becoming confused that I didn’t think I could bear the pain. It was really only after Ben died that I accepted dukkha, that I let the pain crack me open. That was the way I survived.
Surprisingly, unsatisfactoriness—or dissatisfaction with life—was never my problem. I always had an unsurpassed capacity for joy. Ben used to call me a “joyous creature.” In order to deal with the pain, I always turned to joy, embraced it. I was always filled with hope. I became more grateful, too. Gratitude was something I miraculously developed throughout all those difficult times. As trite as it may sound, to this day gratitude sustains me. I don’t know how this happened. It just did, and for that I am eternally grateful.
When I first heard the song “Dayenu”—one of the most beloved Passover songs in the Jewish faith—the words were a reminder to never forget all the miracles in our lives. The word dayenu is repeated and translates to if I only had this much, “it would have been enough.” I find that I will often whisper “Dayenu” to myself, when I’m feeling especially grateful.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe how fortunate I am. Why? I have no answers for that. I realize that this book is written from a privileged point of view, of an educated and richly experienced life. How can I possibly tell others less fortunate to “find magic” when their lives are so filled with despair? But then I think they might look up at the stars and see something beautiful. They might cradle a new child in their arms. They might feel the love of someone. Something allows them to live and accept their suffering. Could it be faith? I have found that those who suffer the most and have the least are often the most faithful. That could be magic.
* * *
As I began reading and studying more about religion, I started going to a conference, the Faith Angle Forum, for journalists to discuss ways to bring faith into their reporting on and coverage of national and global politics. I also began to pay more attention to the role religion played in the world. Some of the books that left a huge impression on me were The World’s Religions, by Huston Smith; A History of God, The Great Transformation, and The Spiral Staircase, all by Karen Armstrong; Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis; The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine; The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels; and The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker.
As I was reading I was becoming even more aware of how much influence religion had on our national politics and our foreign policy. Although Jon had pointed this out to me in his usual diplomatic way, I was also shocked and ashamed at how little I knew about religion and how uninformed I had been about something that suffuses the lives of such a huge percentage of the world’s population.
I felt the Post wasn’t covering the stories surrounding all aspects of religion as adequately as we should. I wrote several memos to the editor suggesting that we beef up our coverage, but my notes fell on deaf ears. Religion just wasn’t on most people’s radar at the paper.
Finally, partly out of frustration and partly because I value his ability to listen and his always thoughtful insights, I asked the Post’s owner and chairman of the Washington Post Company, Don Graham, if we could have lunch. When we met, I voiced my concern about the lack of religion reporting in the paper. He wholeheartedly agreed and had an idea. He suggested I start a religion website for the newspaper. I was floored.
“Don,” I said, “I don’t know anything about religion and even less about the Internet. I can barely do e-mail.”
“Well,” he said, echoing Ben’s comment from three and a half decades earlier when I had admitted at a job interview with him that I hadn’t ever written anything, “nobody’s perfect.”
I laughed and said yes, and the Washington Post website On Faith was born.
* * *
The first thing I did was tell Don that I felt I couldn’t even begin to tackle this task if I didn’t have Jon Meacham, soon to be the editor of Newsweek (which was also owned by the Washington Post Company at the time), by my side as co-moderator. Don gave me his blessing to ask Jon.
I had turned to Jon for so many reasons. Beyond being my friend, he is brilliant, a beautiful writer, an inspiring editor, and a religion scholar. He’s also one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever known, on any subject. He has an elegant mind, maybe the most dazzling mind I have ever come across. It’s not just that he’s a true intellectual, it’s the way he processes information and expresses himself. He has a wry, even wicked and self-deprecating sense of humor. He is humble but not apologetic. Wise beyond his years, he never takes himself too seriously.
When Jon became a child managing editor at Newsweek magazine at age twenty-nine and then editor in chief at age thirty-seven, he was referred to as the youngest geezer on the planet. Now, in his late forties, he’s too old to be a young geezer, but not old enough to be a real one either. He seems to get wiser every day. His perceptions, insights, and judgments are flawless. He has an enviable quality of being able to step back and observe with equanimity even the most outrageous and absurd situations, which makes his reporting, his writing, and his worldview so invaluable. He is universally admired and respected.
The difference between Jon and so many others in the political, journalistic, and academic world is that he is a truly kind person. He is sincere, thoughtful, and generous, not only with his advice and attention but wit
h his time as well. No matter how busy Jon is, he is always there when you need him.
As I have been lucky (and happy) to get to know Jon well over the years, especially since I began studying religion, I understand better now what makes him unique. It is his profound sense of faith, his belief in God and the tenets of Christianity—without apology—and his total acceptance of everyone of every faith and no faith. In 2006, he had just published (to universally rave reviews) his book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. This may have been the book that had the biggest impact on me. In it he wrote “Belief in God is central to the country’s experience, yet for the broad center, faith is a matter of choice, not coercion.” He quoted George Washington as saying America is “open to receive . . . the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions. . . . They may be Mohometans, Jews or Christians of any sect, or they may be atheists.” “For many,” wrote Jon, “reverence of one’s own tradition is not incompatible with respect for the traditions of others.”
Jon and I and the Founding Fathers were clearly on the same page. From the point of view of the founders, Jon would be the most exemplary of Americans. He represents exactly what this country stood for at its inception and should stand for now.
* * *
When I approached him about co-moderating the new site, Jon immediately agreed with the important and necessary caveat that he did have a day job and that this would be my baby. He would write occasional pieces and help me put together a large group of thinkers and writers, religion scholars and theologians. He had the street cred that I was sorely lacking. He started calling me “Mother Superior,” a sobriquet I felt I had to earn, and I called him “Your Holiness,” a title I felt was well deserved.
The Post had recently started its own website, housed across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, seemingly on another planet. This was in the digital dark age of 2006. With Jon on board, though, I whipped across Key Bridge every day to a completely new world, new culture, and new language: eager young people, concrete floors, a Ping-Pong table, jeans and casual clothes for everyone, whiteboards, free coffee, bagels with cream cheese and peanut butter, computer nerds, URLs, traffic. It was exhilarating.
To my mind newspapering has always been the most exciting profession because there’s a different story every day. Especially for me as an army brat, where I thrived on change, it was the perfect profession. The Internet took it to a new level. It wasn’t a different story every day, it was a different story every minute. You could post things in real time. There was also no bureaucracy over the river. It was like the Wild West. We could do almost anything we wanted to. Seemingly everything was possible, experimenting was encouraged, new ideas were embraced and applauded. A religion website? Sure, let’s do it.
We had a great team from the start. The idea was to have a group of between twenty and fifty people in our stable of experts, and each week we would pose a question to a panel pulled together from a few of the commenters on religion and faith. Their responses would be our content. Although this was not my world, I did have four friends I was able to call on initially who all helped us jump-start the site. One of them was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a South African religion leader and Nelson Mandela’s close friend. Others were Karen Armstrong, whose work I had admired for years, Martin Marty of the University of Chicago Divinity School (and a former adviser to my brother when Bill was doing his graduate work there, along with his other doctoral advisers, Mircea Eliade and Wendy Doniger), and Elaine Pagels, another well-known religion scholar. Happily, they all said yes.
Jon had a lot of heavy-hitting friends in the religion field and he added many panelists to our gathering of contributors. With great bravado I announced that I would get the Dalai Lama to write a piece for the launch. Everybody died laughing. I got the Dalai Lama.
An example of one of our early questions was “Does Satan exist? Where do you see the devil (literally or metaphorically) at work in today’s headlines?” One answer from Christian Scientist Phil Davis was eerily prescient. “If you want to know if the devil exists, look at today’s headlines. It sure seems that way, doesn’t it? Genocide, corruption, disintegrating economies—well, the list of the bad and the ugly goes on and on.”
Mark Tauber, publisher of HarperOne, responded, equally relevantly: “We may want the devil today, but do we really need a Satan when we have such horribly real folks as Robert Mugabe, Omar al-Bashir, and Than Shwe? . . . In the end, of course, one’s idea about Satan depends a lot on one’s idea about God.”
What I had envisioned for the site from the beginning was a safe and sacred place for conversations about the most important issues in the world. I wanted a place where people could come to discover and learn and have a dialogue about what informed their lives and the lives of their friends and families and people around the globe. I wanted a site where there were no “others,” where everyone was accepted for what he or she believed or didn’t believe and felt supported and understood.
As it turned out, this is what we created. I found as I went along and continued to write about religion and study and learn, my focus became more spiritual and less news oriented. This happened over time.
We hired a fabulous religion editor, Dave Waters, who totally got what we wanted to do. With him at the helm and Hal Straus as producer, and of course Jon being always available albeit from a distance, the site took off. It surprised nearly everyone but me—I was sure people needed and wanted an outlet for sharing their own thoughts and faith. Soon our traffic was over 100,000 page views per month. Here’s where Ganesh, the Hindu god known as the remover of obstacles, came into my life. A colleague of mine, Amar Bakshi, had told me about this god, and I immediately made him our talisman. He seemed to be doing the trick.
One of the first things we wanted to do was to explore Islam. I had long felt it was seriously misunderstood as a religion, and especially after 9/11 Muslims had become objects of suspicion and distrust. We formed a partnership with Georgetown University and arranged to have a forum on Islam there called “What It Means to be Muslim in America.” We focused on four categories or groupings of Muslim identity: Islam as a moral compass, a political agenda, a spiritual journey, and a culture apart. We ended up with a distinguished panel, which Jon and I moderated. We had Eboo Patel, a dynamic young Muslim leader from Chicago; Ingrid Mattson, from Harvard, then the head of the Islamic Society of North America; Imam Hendi, a Muslim religious leader at Georgetown; Sherman Jackson, a Black Muslim leader; and Pakistani Salman Ahmad, a Sufi rock star, leader of the band Junoon. The panel was a smash.
What was so exciting about it to me was that everyone present learned something. It was an eye-opener for the packed house of students as well as the media. The Internet can be so remote and distancing, but this live event with real people made me realize what a powerful tool the website could be to educate, inform, and open people’s minds. The reaction and reception were even greater than we’d hoped for. I was ecstatic and encouraged about doing more.
What I did right from the beginning was write some columns for the website. One of the first pieces I wrote was about saying grace at Thanksgiving, shortly before my mother’s debilitating stroke.
When I was 13 . . . I announced to my father that I was an atheist and that I would never say grace again. I thought it was stupid, I told him. It nearly broke his heart. I wasn’t able to articulate clearly what I thought was stupid about it. It was only later when I read about St. Thomas Aquinas’s objections to petitionary prayer that I understood what was bothering me. And then Immanuel Kant’s take on Aquinas made total sense to me. “Praying,” he said, “thought of as an inner formal service of God and hence as a means of grace, is a superstitious illusion (a fetish-making), for it is no more than a stated wish directed to a Being who needs no such information regarding the inner disposition of the wisher: therefore, nothing is accomplished by it.”
. . . When I got my own house and began having Thanksgiving
and Christmas dinners here I would ask my father to respect my wishes and not say a prayer at the table, and for years we did nothing. So I have no explanation for why, that Thanksgiving, . . . I sat at the opposite end of the table and asked my father to say grace. There was stunned silence for a moment, and then without a word, we all held hands and my father began, “Lord, make us truly thankful . . .”
. . . What was I feeling? Truly thankful. I had a wonderful loving family and many blessings. Why, I asked myself, had I been so against allowing my father to express those feelings in a way that was meaningful to him? . . .
This year, though, I’m going to say grace. I haven’t become a believer, but I do feel overwhelmed with gratitude for all the wonders of my family and friends and the gifts I have been given. After all, what is grace anyway, what does it mean but gratitude?
Here’s what I’m going to say: “Let us be truly thankful for these blessings which we are about to receive. Amen.”
Another column I wrote that has stayed with me over the intervening years was one that we titled “What My Son Taught Me About God.” Quinn was twenty-four at the time and I actually didn’t know until a few days before I wrote the piece that he believed in God. When we sat down to talk, he began by saying, “My image of God is what Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.” He continued:
God is a man stronger and more powerful than everybody else. I also believe that if you think about God, if you say his name all the time, then you will believe in him. He will be in your subconscious. . . .
I had always struggled with what to tell Quinn about God. I didn’t know enough to actually teach him about different religions and beliefs, but I wanted to expose him to religion so he could eventually choose for himself. When as a child he went to spend the night with my parents, they read him Bible stories and talked to him about God. For myself, I didn’t want to lie to him, so when he was old enough to take it in, I told him I didn’t believe in God, but I added that believing gave many people a lot of comfort.
