by Sally Quinn
He told me that although he didn’t know what atheist meant, he thought it was “a harsh word, a very ugly word.” He had decided that his own medical and learning problems had taught him that everything happens for a reason and that “maybe it’s God’s plan for me to go through this because I can handle it.”
Our mother-son conversation ended with me asking him if he was angry with Ben and me for not giving him a real religious education. His response was poignant and telling:
Not at all. I’m happy with the way I was brought up religiously. If you had taught me there was only one thing I was supposed to believe then I wouldn’t have options. You taught me I could believe in anything. . . . I could choose what I wanted to believe in. In a way, believing in God is like having a girlfriend you love and care about. You feel safe with her. You feel safe with God, the way you would with your girlfriend. When you get married she will be with you in sickness and in health. That’s what I believe God will do when I’m going through the hard times of life.
Finally, I asked Quinn what he thought about my new venture in religion as a moderator of On Faith. “Well,” he replied quickly, but with a mischievous grin, “you started out as an atheist. Now you’re a freethinker. I think you’re on your way to believing in God.”
* * *
The hour-long video interviews I began to do with prominent people about their faith were especially exciting to me. I also persuaded the Washington Post to change the name of its Saturday religion page to On Faith and started writing occasional columns that appeared in both the paper and on the website.
In the interviews, every one of the people I spoke with was interesting and thoughtful and eager to talk about their faith in any and all its manifestations. I called the series “Divine Impulses” because I believe that we all have them and I wanted to know what they are. I have to think that one of my most important and personal divine impulses was being involved with On Faith.
The first video interview I did was with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I recall him talking about loving God and yet getting angry with him: “I get very angry with God, but I rarely remonstrate him and don’t say, ‘For goodness sake, how in the name of everything that is good, can you allow this sort of thing to happen?’” I also remember the power of his message: “God loves me. God loves you. God is incredible. Actually, sometimes it’s mind-blowing to think that I, with all of my foibles and my weaknesses and my sins, am loved.”
Actor Richard Gere, a serious Buddhist and close friend of the Dalai Lama’s, told me that he didn’t see God as a creator, as some outside entity or puppeteer who is somehow making things magically happen, assigning roles to everyone: “You are going to be happy, you are going to jail, you get a good parent, you don’t. . . . No, no. I don’t believe that,” Gere said emphatically. “I believe that we are totally responsible for our experience, we ourselves. Ultimately completely fully, we are responsible, and I find that very liberating. I can change my experience. I don’t have to beg someone else to change it. . . . I have the resources myself. My mind is vast, my heart is vast, and I am really responsible for my being.”
Another person I interviewed as part of “Divine Impulses” was my good friend the late Tim Russert, then the moderator of Meet the Press. Tim was a practicing Catholic and talked thoughtfully about the influence of his faith: “In the end there is a reason it’s called faith, it’s something you believe in. . . . I absolutely know for certain that this is exactly what happens, you hope and you believe and it gives a sense of purpose and meaning which I find very helpful.” The Jesuits believe, he went on to say, “we have an obligation to help people who are less fortunate, who are needy. That is where you see the presence of God in others. That’s the central piece of my faith that I think is more important than any other.”
Also I spoke with my friend the late Christopher Hitchens, a well-known and outspoken atheist. Christopher was dying of cancer. When I asked him whether it might be nice to believe that there was someone up there in the heavens looking after him, he answered at length:
No, which is why I say in fact, very deliberately, that I’m not an atheist, I’m an anti-atheist. In other words, I’m not just one who’s concluded it’s not true, or rather that there is absolutely no evidence to think that it is true. I’m glad there’s no evidence for it, because if it were to be true, one would be living under a permanent surveillance, around-the-clock celestial dictatorship that watched you while you slept and could convict you of thought crime, could indict you for things you thought in the privacy of your own skull, and sentence you to quite a long stretch—namely eternity—of punishment or alternatively dangle a not to me very attractive award of a life of eternal praise and groveling and sprawling and singing the praises of someone that you are ordered to love, someone you must both love and fear. That [concept] used to distress me when I was little as well. How are you supposed to love someone you’re afraid of?
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I’ve always liked the idea of Pascal’s wager, which essentially offers a rational reason for believing in God: in light of the impossibility of knowing unequivocally if God exists, one should live as though God does, because that path leads to potential gains if indeed God exists and there’s nothing to lose if not. Pascal’s is a pragmatic approach to thinking about and deciding on one’s beliefs. If you gain, you gain a great deal. If you lose, you lose little to nothing. An added benefit is that it’s possible that living as if one has faith could actually lead to faith.
For Leon Wieseltier, the whole idea of faith hinges on Pascal’s belief, advocated by William James, that “if belief in religion is going to change your life for the better, then you have every reason to hold that belief because what matters is its practical effect on how you live.”
* * *
Some years later, and only a few months before he died, I sat down with Ben for a video interview at the Post. Especially as he aged and his faculties faltered, Ben never wanted to talk about religion or spirituality or his beliefs. I knew he wouldn’t answer my questions in private, but to my surprise he agreed to sit for an interview and have it be public. I started by putting the question to him, “If I asked you today if you believed in God, what would you say?” His answer came right away: “I believe there is a force for right, that is called a hundred different things, but whatever it’s called I believe in it. And if I couldn’t believe in the force, then I wouldn’t be an honest person.”
In a part of the tape that was lost he also told me he thought God had saved him in World War II when his destroyer was being bombed. I asked him if he ever prayed, to which he answered, “I don’t know what you call it, but, yeah, sometimes I do.” When I asked him if he thought God had a plan for him, he replied: “I think he had a plan for how to handle my life.”
Finally I asked him what gave his life meaning. He pointed to me. I lost it.
* * *
What shocked me about the Internet—then and now—were the vile comments on columns or transcripts or commentaries that appeared. Many of them seemed to have been written by crazy people, sitting in their pajamas (or underwear) in their basements, sending out hate-filled screeds at all hours of the day and night.
As part of my Muslim outreach I was able to get Queen Rania of Jordan to write a piece for the site about the role of women in Islam. Her piece came in, and we ran it along with the queen’s picture, which was beautiful. Everyone involved with the site was thrilled. However, the day after it ran, I got a call at three A.M. from the palace in Jordan. All officialdom was going crazy. I was sound asleep and at first didn’t understand what was being talked about, what seemingly several voices at once were saying. Then I realized they were upset by the first comment that ran after her story went up. Apparently some sensitive guy had written, “Boy, would I like to bang her.”
That was the last time she wrote for On Faith. It was years before the Post could get a handle on how to control some of the worst comments. I refused to read any about me and
my columns. My editors did, though, and others monitored the comments and passed this one along: “I hope you get in an automobile accident and the gasoline spills out and catches on fire and you burn alive and end up in hell.”
That one was from a self-described evangelical Christian. Interestingly, most all the negative comments came from Christians. The second worst were from atheists. I never got a hostile comment from a Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or Hindu that I know of.
This gave new meaning to the question “What would Jesus do?”
* * *
One of the most controversial and still ongoing events in Washington is the National Prayer Breakfast, held every February, when the president, vice president, and more than three thousand people—many of them in positions of power, turn up to show their religious bona fides. The original idea of the prayer breakfast was to build relationships among the business, social, and political communities. Recently, it seemed clear that the prayer breakfast had devolved into something that it had not started out to be.
I was there one year when Darrell Waltrip, former NASCAR driver and the keynote speaker, told those assembled, including President Obama and the Dalai Lama: “Let me tell you something: Good guys go to hell. If you don’t know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, if you don’t have a relationship, if He’s not the Master of your life, if you’ve never gotten on your knees and asked Him to forgive you of your sins, or if you are just a pretty good guy or a pretty good gal, you’re going to go to hell.”
One can only imagine what the Dalai Lama, a Buddhist who does not believe that Jesus was the son of God, thought. Hearing this in a traditionally nondenominational setting was, for me, the moment of the end of the prayer breakfast as it was originally meant to be.
As President Obama would say when speaking at the same breakfast: “We see faith driving us to do right. We also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge—or worse, sometimes as a weapon.”
Author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Leon Wieseltier once remarked: “One place where prayer is certainly not possible is at the National Prayer Breakfast. It is an annual institution for the degradation of prayer.”
Of course, there are prayer groups and circles meeting all over town, in Congress, in the White House, in the military and the diplomatic corps. The churches and synagogues and mosques are filled on holy days with observant families. There is “one nation under God” and “in God we trust” and there are Senate and House chaplains who begin the sessions with prayers. The president rarely speaks without ending with “God bless you and God bless the United States of America.” But, boy, when the starting bell rings, all bets are off.
* * *
Five years after I had founded On Faith, I wrote a piece looking back over those rich, full years, concluding that I had been enthralled with the entire subject of religion and spirituality and had learned a great deal across a range of issues. Never had I been so fulfilled by a subject. I summarized five lessons I had learned about faith:
Nobody knows.
Religions are the same—and not.
Everything is about religion.
We are all looking for meaning.
Why there is suffering.
My ultimate conclusion to that fifth lesson is that there is certainly no one answer—and perhaps no good answer, but certainly no “right” answer—to why there is suffering. Even some of the great theologians have simply “thrown up their hands.”
At the end of this column I asked myself the question “Do I believe in God now?” Certainly, as I wrote, “Where I am with this question has changed many times since I began On Faith.” A final thing I learned is this: “God is what you or I or anyone else thinks God is.”
I would find as the years went by that I agreed with this concept of God, but it turned out to be a lot more complicated. I still think this is the case.
Jon Meacham believed that On Faith was a success in the beginning because it gave “unlikely scholarly and expert voices a big audience to talk about unlikely things.” He felt it was also a time when the subject of religion had real news value and a moment when religiously charged issues were particularly sulfurous. It was a moment when the topic of religion, especially after 9/11, was very much in the public square. It was also a time when the United States was experiencing what Jon called “the rise of atheist chic,” a significant intellectual struggle in the country about issues of beliefs and disbeliefs. He felt that climate was essential to the success of the conversations of On Faith.
Jon also felt that what I contributed to On Faith could be summed up by thinking of my contributions as three tributaries: my inherent curiosity, deepened by my years of working as a journalist; my competence as a social convener in the tradition (according to him) of Dolley Madison and Katharine Graham, both of whom were lowercase republicans who created social spaces for public life to unfold; and my own restlessness about my personal faith journey, which he once characterized to me as my “inability to be satisfied with a given moment.” (He may be right about this last one.)
Jon described what we tried to do with On Faith from the beginning: “It’s that we threw the most interesting party about religious beliefs in the first decade of the twenty-first century. And when people get together things happen. Ideas are exchanged. Friendships are formed. Affairs begin. Wars end. Everything that happens in a human context comes onto the radar. On Faith created that context where one did not exist before.” It became almost a form of participatory religion.
By the time On Faith was launched, I realized Jon was my road to Damascus. He provided illumination along the way to my own transformation of attitude and belief.
Chapter 19
The quest of the human heart for meaning is the heartbeat of every religion.
—Brother David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer
At the beginning of 2007 I received a brochure in the mail advertising a trip around the world. It was called “Great Faiths: A Journey to the World’s Sacred Places.” The starting date was in a few months, still in the early months of On Faith. The places to be visited read like a Grand Tour of the Holiest of Holies of many important world religions, including Rome and Vatican City; Jerusalem and Bethlehem; Varanasi, India; Kyoto, Japan; and on to Ethiopia, Egypt, Armenia, and Turkey. I didn’t hesitate.
“Travel with world-class scholars,” the brochure read, “walk in the footsteps of pilgrims, explore some of the world’s holiest sites and gain insights into humankind’s search for meaning.” I knew I was ready to walk in pilgrims’ footsteps and signed up immediately. I thought it was a godsend. I was never fully aware of the significance of the word until that brochure dropped from the mail slot onto my floor.
Not only was it a fabulous way for me to learn about religion, a real crash course, but it was also an escape of sorts, a way for me to get some distance from Ben and try to understand what was happening to him, to me, to us.
Perhaps if I were gone for three weeks, it might help Ben change his strange behavior or I might come to some greater understanding of the cause of it. We had never been apart longer than two weeks in our entire marriage and then, only twice, for reporting trips I took. Since he had stepped down as editor at the paper in 1991, we had not been apart for more than a day or two. This would be a huge departure, literally, from our normal lives.
He was terribly upset when I told him I was going and for how long I would be away, and especially dazed when I said I had already bought my tickets. As that reality took hold, I began to realize how uncharacteristic it was for me not to have talked with him about this whole new part of my life. He seemed so uninterested and lacked any curiosity about it that I found his attitude surprising and hurtful. He even made fun of me about it. What an upheaval this entire period had been. We were moving into new territory separately and together.
I was scared but exhilarated, which fed my thinking that I needed this. I felt that something momentous was about to happen to me
. I wasn’t thinking that this would be a big step in my serious search for meaning. I wanted to know much more about religion and the faiths and beliefs of others, and I also needed and wanted to rediscover the magic that had always been such a central part of our lives together.
* * *
Rome, a city I love, was our first stop on the tour. I’d been there many times. In fact, I was there just the year before with Ben. We had a private tour of the Sistine Chapel. It was breathtaking. For one brief moment I felt a presence larger than I was. The art and whole experience were transcendent.
The Vatican, however, is surprisingly one of the least spiritual places I’ve ever visited. It seemed like a big bastion of bureaucracy, secrecy, and dogma.
The only real emotional moment I had in Rome was the walk through the old Jewish ghetto and learning some of the history of how the Jews in Rome had been persecuted.
I’m sure others visiting Rome on the trip had a different experience, but to me this visit didn’t represent at all what I hoped to discover about religion. This first stop didn’t manifest itself spiritually. Never once did I have the slightest intimation of the divine.
* * *
From Rome we traveled to Israel where we stayed in Jerusalem. I had been enthralled by the city on my first trip to Israel as a reporter. The last time I was there I stayed in the old part of Jerusalem, the Arab part, and I was always transported by the magical sounds of the muezzin calling to prayer throughout the day. This time we were at the King David Hotel in the more Jewish part of Jerusalem, which is not as quaint as the older part and is now and was then quite modern and filled with bustling world travelers.
On our visit to Bethlehem, we were struck by the wall that the Israelis built to keep out the Palestinians and to protect themselves from attack, the wall that has become a symbol of intolerance and persecution to many around the world. What was really shocking was how run-down Bethlehem was. The visit to the Church of the Nativity was even more disappointing. Dark and dusty, it looked as if it had been abandoned years earlier. There were bare lightbulbs, debris, piles of ladders, holes in the walls that our Palestinian guide said came from people having stolen pictures, cheap wall hangings, a torn canvas Bible, water damage, dead flowers, broken oil lamps. The entire church smelled musty, like old shoes.
