What a great, thought-provoking post. It is exactly the topic that was on my mind as I was driving yesterday. Our local public radio station is doing a fund drive and they played "Imagine" and got a huge influx of new pledges, so they played it off and on for the rest of the day.

It is a song I love but that I always find myself asking the question that you pose here.

You have named a lot of the things I would have, but I add these:

No Etty Hillesum

No Franz Jaegerstaetter

No Stabat Mater by Poulenc

No Dorothy Day or Catholic Worker movement

No William Sloane Coffin

No Fellowship of Reconciliation

Those are but a few. There is so much darkness that religion, particularly my own Catholic church has spawned, but in the end I come back to the essence of what Jesus is and I am returned to what matters.

I suspect that darkness would be there no matter what, under a different mantle.

It is my fervent prayer and hope, and hopefully my own actions along with others that bring more good. Is that not communion in the end?

Thanks for posting this, it helped me give voice to what I was thinking about and it helped to expand my heart.

Fran Rossi Szpylczyn

Adding -

No Dalai Lama

No Thich Naht Hanh

No Peace Pilgrim

No Abraham Joshua Heschel

No Rumi

No Parker Palmer

Fran Rossi Szpylczyn

Devil's? advocate here. I submit we would still have all of these wonderful people and greater beauty, music, and thought. In many ways, our best people were, and still are, pedaling uphill. It is what it is, and we deal with the hand we're dealt in becoming our best selves. Where might we go if our aim were cultivating our sweetest, natural, best selves, and trying to be present for others to do the same? No need for religion, just a lifetime of open, creative love. I've always thought that the real work of the church is to put itself out of business. Another way of looking at it comes from John O'Donohue's blessing "In Praise of Water" which seems apropos:
"The well whose liquid root worked through the long night of clay,
Trusting ahead of itself openings
That would yield to its yearning
Until at last it arises in the desire of light
To discover the pure quiver of itself
Flowing crystal clear and free
Through delighted emptiness."

From To Bless the Space Between Us (Doubleday).

In its worst, religion is about as bad as you can get, but at its best, it is quite wonderful. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay. Thank you for it. Lord knows, your thoughts resonate with so many people today who are most definitely longing for meaning and purpose in their lives, but may also see far too much hypocrisy in "religion."

I love Fran's response with some of the other side of the coin...

No Oscar Romero

No Sunday School where I found love of neighbor to be lived out

No Rock Point Summer Conferences where I experienced God in Community

No stories of hope from the Bible

No Bates College (founded by Abolitionists as a seminary) where I went to school

....

Peter Carey

Dear Donald,

I’ll echo others in thanking you for a wonderful and thoroughly thought provoking post.

Whenever I imagine no religion, I don’t know what I’m left with. “What happens to Bach, Martin Luther King, Dostoyevsky, Bonhoeffer, and Stevie Wonder?” is the shorthand version of the question, which extends to every realm of our existence. It’s as if we’ve built our house around a large tree and are now considering uprooting it, even though the roots extend under the entire foundation and out into the surrounding wilderness.

One of my favorite prayers is made during the Good Friday service:

For those who have never heard the word of salvation

For those who have lost their faith 

For those hardened by sin or indifference 

For the contemptuous and the scornful 

For those who are enemies of the cross of Christ and persecutors of his disciples 

For those who in the name of Christ have persecuted others

I always want to shout out in affirmation after that last line. I wish we said prayers of repentance for the sins of the church every week. How much that would say to visitors. What a great alternative to “Imagine no religion” that would make.

Donald, I come at this from my storytelling perspective...religion is part of every human culture I've ever heard of. So - if we imagine no religion - then people would construct one, and we would have to go through the whole sorry centuries-long process yet again of disentangling religion from government, disentangling religion from slavery, disentangling religion from exclusion.

Religion is not alien to human culture. Wherever we are, we'll make one.

I think that culture always contains and passes through time a dance, a braiding-together, of encouraging or containing or educating human impulses. That's what we are. Religion is part of the dance. Our part is to dance it - during our brief time in the dance - with as much justice and compassion as we can, hoping thereby to change the dance in the direction of compassion and justice.

Pamela Grenfell Smith
Bloomington, Indiana

No Anglican chant

No Service of Nine Lessons and Carols

No Perkins School of Theology

No Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, or Palestrina

No Sacred Harp singing

No "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

No Triduum

No reorganized Episcopal Diocese of Ft. Worth

No Justice Revival

...I could go on and on.

Timely! Thanks Donald! My daughter's homework last night was to rebut a mysoginistic essay by two Dominican Friars written in 1484. The textbook chapter was titled "Wars of Religion." But I think historians have shown that in many instances Protestants and Catholics were aligned in the 15th and 16th centuries when they had something to gain politically/economically. This they had to finesse; it was much easier for politicians/princes when they could use religion to justify what they wanted materially. I know that religion has inspired violence for some people, but I think that religion has more often been used to justify actions ranging from war to simple and personal exclusion from the circle. We are all guilty of that kind of mimetic violence from time to time, I think, though most of us in not terrible and dramatic ways (by the grace of God!) The good news, as I see it, is that we have a means of repenting and communing again: religion at its best! Thanks be to God!

(Editor's note: thanks for this comment. If Elle Celeste isn't your full name, please give us your full name next time around.)

Others here have hinted at this, but I'd like to say it clearly. The way in which the "Imagine No Religion" and many responses to it operate under the same logical fallacy: the false dilemma. We simply can't assume that without religion Bach wouldn't have given us wonderful music Indeed, without religion maybe he could've spent less time lacing some of his music with anti-Semitism.) Nor can we assume that we needed religion to come up with such disgustingly creative ways to torture and kill each other.

As Pamela points out, it's not a matter of religion of not, but more a matter of which religion. And as the Freedom From Religion folks are clear in their atheism, they must also believe that religions are man made. That ultimately implies that it is not religion at all that creates such beauty and atrocity but rather humans and human nature. Religion is not the root cause of any of it. (Someone over on the FB post said, "Imagine there's no PEOPLE.") We create all sorts of constructs for good and evil, and many that have the capacity for both. Government is an obvious example. And speaking of that, it's interesting to notice that so many of religion's atrocities occur(ed) when religion was closely intertwined with the government - or indeed was the government.

For me, religion, like the bible, does not have a life of its own. It doesn't speak, teach, compose or kill. Rather we come to religion and interpret, use and influence it. Again like the bible, I'm not interested in whether or not religion is a weapon or something like one, but rather why it is that some people use it in that way.

What would life be like if there were no pride? No delusion? No desire? No greed? No envy? No narcissism? No will to power?

Greg Jones

No Hebrew Scriptures

No Pauline epistles

No Guy Mansini, O.S.B.

No Gerard Manley Hopkins

No Texas Muslim Women's Foundation

No Bar or Bat Mitzvahs

No Islamic Association of North Texas, or North Dallas Mosque

No Hindu festivals

No Zen Buddhism

No Gregorian Chant

No liturgical dance

No "Vicar of Dibley"

With "no religion" I would find life a crashing bore.

Food for thought, Donald. In addition to all that you would miss, I would like to add painting. Imagine a world without the exquisite works of art on religious themes! For a long time, secular subjects were rare indeed in the works of Old Masters.

Hmmm... what exactly do we mean by "religion"? I'm not familiar with Freedom From Religion, and don't hate me for saying this but I feel that "spirit", love, God and all the beautiful creativity and "faith" that we experience today would still exist even without religion. Because God exists, and our connection to God exists, and that results in all this beautiful expression.

So the absence of religion would not mean the absence of faith. I think the pressure to relate to God a certain way would drop without religion, and that would be a very good thing. But I'm not convinced that religion is necessary for the good spiritual stuff to exist. I definately don't think religion's necessary for spiritual connection and growth to happen, because those can be well obtained without the formal confines of religion (which again begs the question, what exactly do we mean by religion?).

I think that religions have value to the degree that they provide positive opportunities for people to growth spiritually in community with each other and the wider world. That "community" aspect is hard to get as an individual spiritual seeker. The problem is that it's hard to provide without also bringing in some of what we think of as the typical "religious baggage". Frankly, I think of the San Francisco dinner fellowship as being about as pure of a spiritual community experience as one could ask for. And we're now trying to recreate it down here in Southern California.

(Editor's note: Thanks, Diane. We need your full name next time.)

Other than the references that everyone else has listed, and the fact that I don't know what I'd do without the social gospel...

Religion quite literally saved my life. I was in seminary when I was diagnosed with cancer. Because I was a full-time student, I was required to carry health insurance. Thus, I had access to care when I was worried about a bump on my skin. It did not progress beyond the point of being curable.

I would have had community around me, anywhere I'd been. But I'd not have had that one. I would not have had people to hold me when I fell apart in chapel at school, and to laugh with me when my forgotten cell phone rang during that same service. I would not have had people on four continents praying for me, and I would not have felt the strength of those prayers when I couldn't pray for myself. (Thank you, blogging community.) I would not still, even now, be on the prayer list of an extraordinarily loving group of people in the Diamond Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. I would not have had my faculty not only give me the academic grace I needed, but pray for me constantly--and let me know about it.

I was diagnosed during Easter season, and finished chemotherapy fourteen months later. Without religion, I would not have known absolutely what it meant to trample death. I'd not have had the Resurrection to cling to, and to live into.

I have a biopsy scar on my neck. You have to know it's there to see it, but I know it, because the nerves still feel tingly. Would I know, without what my faith has taught me, that this scar makes me human?

My own faith, and that of my community, gave me the coherence I needed to keep my head in the fearful beginning, and to stay faithful to the process of injecting myself with a substance that made me feel constantly ill, three times a week, for the eleven months prescribed to me. Would I have done it without that greater context? Yes. But I have no idea how.

I would have been loved through my illness, wherever I had been and whatever I had believed. Secular friends surely would have cared for me. The experience was so thoroughly infused with sacredness, I cannot imagine it not being so.

dear Fran, Ana, Peter, Jake, Pamela, E.H., Elle, Grant, Nigel, Diane, and Kirstin,

Thank you for such rich and satisfying response and all your reflections. I also got some really intriguing personal email in response to this.
Here's some things I see in our conversation (I write this trying to listen to what we've said today, not simply reiterating something I'd figured out before -

- the invitation 'Imagine no Religion' doesn't invite us into either a 'proof' or religion's badness or a reductio ad absurdem of a world devastated without religion. It's not a proof or an argument but a useful exploration of what and how we believe (or don't believe).

- in our lists of what we'd really miss with no religion there are two distinct kinds of entries - holy people and
work or groups that flow from shared practice.

- As we explore the 'imagine' invitation, those two kinds of entries are somewhat different. The people we named might very well be themselves - open, graced, particularly alive to life, mystery and one another - even without religion.
But the shared practice and what it produces the great buildings and liturgical art and music,
the groups of people working together for justice and works of mercy,
the Sunday School,
the Truth and Justice Commission,
the choir,
pastoral care in community,
some of our specifics as they appear on our lists are actually rooted directly in specific shared religious practice rather than the more personal inspiration of spirituality (how ever we'd care to define it - openness to ultimate things, deep, truthful roots in being, grateful living).
These things on our lists point to religious practice ordered by shared and chosen acceptance of a common life. In the form we know them, at least, they embody the way religion structures and supports spirituality in ongoing community.
Could such structuring happen without religion? I don't think we actually know. There are non-religious spiritual groups, communities, and shared practices in our world. But we know them in a world and human culture deeply shaped (and yes, sometimes marred) by religion. So, what I'm noting in our shared list is that religious structure has, sometimes made a safe, encouraging, inspiring space for something we cherish.

- Overall, our lists didn't pick up the freeing side of John Lennon's invitation, the side that asks anyone to look critically at religion and imagine human good without it, or at least to consider where we would see less damage to people, society and the world without religion.
That part of the invitation to 'Imagine No Religion' offers us not only a challenge (which our several responses do address in various ways) but also a healing antidote to hypocrisy or over-simplification. Is religion a force for good? The truthful answer is 'sometimes yes and sometimes quite the opposite.'
Our willingness as religious folk, practitioners, to say we know religion can be killing or numbing may or may not make us more credible to our critics, but it does serve our own spirits for sheer truthfulness. I'm thinking of St. Paul's saying in I Corinthians 13, "Love delights in the truth."

Dostoyevsky's newspaper clipping exercise is spiritual/religious exercise looking for even-handed truthtelling. In fact, carrying this great mystical writer's impulse further, I'd want to say of the Spanish Inquisition (which appears in his 'Grand Inquisitor' as a 'them,' Jesuitical, Catholic, other - 'No, Fyodor, WE did that," (not Anglicans, not Orthodox moved at the hope of the 'Russian Christ' embracing all humanity, not contemporary Christians, but still emphatically US - all of us believers, followers of Jesus, Christians). The Inquisition is as much ours as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
We gain by disciplining ourselves with that part of the story. And it's a religious gain, the practice of humility and truthfulness in deliberate, committed spiritual community.

I also had Dostoyevsky in mind yesterday as I listened to Teri Gross interview Roseanne Cash about her new recording 'The List,' and the very hard times she'd come through in the last few years. Teri Gross asked Cash if facing loss of her voice (polyps on her vocal cords, at the time possibly ending her singing career), her parents' death, and then pending brain surgery, had she turned to religion (as her father Johnny Cash certainly had repeatedly turned to Jesus his own crises). Roseanne Cash said 'No,' and that her religion was music and people she loved.
I hold Dostoyevsky's newspaper clipping up as a spiritual practice and thank him for it. But I hear Roseanne Cash and part company with Dostoyevsky on the predictions he made repeatedly (and fictionalized he thought prophetically in The Possessed) that atheism would bring us nothing but nihilism and death. Roseanne Cash is a secular mystic. Her courage and grace facing death, her generosity, her hope in that interview moved me to give thanks to God. Dostoyevsky didn't imagine the non-religious, non-theistic resources a person like Roseanne Cash could find to live a graceful, open-hearted life.
Already in the 19th Century he was seeing the sprouting seeds that would flower and bear dark fruit in Lenin and Stalin's Russia. But "The Possessed" is not the whole story. There are people whose hearts and consciences we do trust, atheists and agnostics who are formed simply by some inner goodness and not belief in God or any religious practice.

Mark Twain said he wrote Huckleberry Finn to portray the triumph of a good heart over a bad conscience, the struggle of Huck's heart in which his love for Jim, the slave who longs to escape, and Huck's basic decency steer him downriver and into considerable danger to do what he judges a terrible moral wrong, helping Jim escape.

Huck was convinced that a 'good' boy like Tom Sawyer wouldn't do such a thing. In our terms here Twain was showing us in Huck the triumph of good spirituality over bad religious formation.
For Huck 'imagine no religion' is part of the dangerous path he takes to defy 'goodness' for the sake of Jim's freedom.

I agree with those who've said we can't prove the world is better for having religions in it (or would be better without them).
Meanwhile, I emphatically do think the religious story we tell matters, that its rooting in real human experience matters, and I do want us to speak a deliberately Christian voice into the conversation of how we serve human good and practice love.
Christians MUST acknowledge what appalling things we have done in Jesus' name. And still, it matters to live into his hope and promise of drawing all humanity together (as we'd say into his embrace).

With the great harm done in Jesus' name, we'd better be well prepared to offer our good reasons to keep him in the reconciling story we tell. A pan-religious, non-doctrinal reconciliation has a certain attraction if Jesus adds nothing to general monotheism or human goodwill.
I think his presence and his story take us to astonishing and unexpected places. I see in Jesus' willingness to turn his back on claims of personal purity and righteousness and to identify himself with the worst of us and in each of us our real hope that the best in each of us can be shared fearlessly for the life of all. Keeping Jesus costs us, but I believe losing Jesus is too high a price.
To me 'imagine no religion' invites us to an exercise in humility and truthfulness that keeps us asking how following Jesus adds life and depth to the good we know from spirituality and shared religious practice, and how following him unites us to other people (including those who don't claim him or are not moved by his story at all) are blessed by his life, the story we tell, and if we're courageous and truthful enough, by us ourselves.

Again, thanks to you all for speaking up here.
donald

I think in a discussion of this sort it is crucial to define terms and agree about exactly what is meant by our words. It makes a world of difference whether by 'religion' one means 'the various human institutions that have more or less controlled people's relationships to God' or something else.

This is my definition of religion:
"What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).

I don't want to imagine a world without that.

My dear friend Donald,

As a member of the Episcopal clergy who, like Thomas Clarkson, has become "more or less a Quaker," I need to respond to your eloquent apologetic. I'm hesitant to say this, but I think you build something of a straw horse. You provide an honest, if less than ample list of the ways in which religion has been used to justify various crimes against humanity. You then give us a longer list of personages and their various virtues, which you imply are rooted in the Christian faith and not found elsewhere. Poets, playwrights, musicians, abolitionists, healers and hospitalists, all of these you suggest would not, or could not exist without religion.

But why is it that you think these evidences of beauty, or honesty, compassion, love, or any virtue could not have occurred without Christianity or some other religion? We could trade figure for figure those who are religious and those who are not, but suffice to say from that from Socrates to Marcus Aurelius to Albert Schweitzer, the list of the virtuous who might fit the modern category of atheism is very long, remarkably so, considering how dangerous it has been through much of Western history to refute or even simply disregard religious claims upon daily life.

I regret that I have never seen a convincing argument that religion creates "goodness." Rather, I suggest that "good" people tend to seek out the company of other "good" people. In American society were voluntary associations usurp and replace the cultural requirements of old, one of the places where good people find other good people is in religious organizations. What is also increasingly clear is that as those cultural requirements of old fade from collective memory, "good" is finding good in other places and other associations. Several instances come to mind: my father and grandfather both served in volunteer fire departments for much of their adult lives. They spent hours each week in meetings and training, and downing beers in the local firehouse. Then they met the needs of their communities for firefighting as often as they were called. For both my father and my grandfather, the firehouse replaced the church. They had little or no interest in religion, but they had a great deal of interest in being "good" neighbors.

As another example, I mention that I practice Zen Buddhism on a daily basis. I and many other practitioners understand this to be a philosophical practice rather than a religion. We do not speak of gods, angels or demons, nor do we speak of saints or of holiness. We value tradition and especially those teachings that have been tested by time and practice. Likewise, many of my friends who participate in Quaker meetings applaud the slow movement of Quakerism away from Christianity. I join them in finding that the magical thinking that underlies religion carries with it some enormous dangers.

Donald, you include a substantial but far from complete list of the ways in which religion has been used to justify violence against individuals, or indeed against peoples and nations. I cannot help but want to add to that list a number of 20th-century examples. But, we need look no further into the past than yesterday and the horrific terror that has been unleashed in sub-Saharan and central Africa. Region after region seems to be falling into a war of Moslem against Christian, Christian against Muslim, and both Christian and Muslim against so-called "animists."

Most Western observers find that this is another case of religion being used for political purposes. But I cannot wonder if it is not actually a case of politics being used for religious purposes. Certainly much of this conflict could be said to be about the distribution of resources and wealth. But, just as certainly, we can say that these conflicts are a result of fundamentalist intolerance. The practice of Christianity in Africa, seen by some Westerners as so filled with vitality, is the religion that gives us Archbishop Tutu, but it is also the religion that gives us Archbishop Akinola. Indeed Christians of almost every stripe have been found to be complicit in the genocides of Rwanda, Liberia, and the Congo. What is most disturbing is not that Christians participate in such horrors, but that they use their Christianity to justify atrocities.

Just as the thin colonial line between religion and politics has disappeared in much of Africa, so too, this line, long understood as vital to the American Republic, has been perforated over and over again by the marriage of the political right and Christian fundamentalism in the United States. Here, as in Africa, it is difficult to tell whether the political right in the United States has co-opted religion, or that fundamentalist Christianity has co-opted the political right. I suspect that both are true. What I can never forget is the image of the sober funeral for Matthew Fox, crucified on a barbed wire fence, while fundamentalist extremists gathered outside to scream "Faggots burn in hell." I recognize that there is a broad spectrum of belief among Christians in the United States and that a majority found the outcries of the Kansan fundamentalists to be terribly offensive. But, I also recognize that large numbers of fundamentalist Christians in the United States nodded in quiet agreement, saying in their hearts that Matthew brought his fate down upon himself.

While the percentage of Americans actually practicing religion is declining, even if ever so slowly, fundamentalist religions continue to claim a greater and greater portion of what remains. Why is this so frightening? We need only look at the political claims put forward by these fundamentalists as to be truly terrified. Listen, if you have the stomach to Pat Robertson or for that matter any of the televangelists and you will find that Margaret Atwood's dark fiction of America's future "The Handmaid's Tale," is fundamentalism light. Some may scoff at the possibility of such a future, but history provides all too many examples of rapid political and religious turns. The last election notwithstanding, an American political system co-opted by fundamentalism is not impossible. Some on the religious right would say not even unlikely.

Leaving aside the political aspirations of American fundamentalists, I suspect that religions will play a very small role in developing those understandings and practices which in the long run are truly good and beneficial. For the most part Christianity and Islam have turned their back on environmentalism and the very real possibility of human extinction. Where is the religious voice that calls us back from the brink of ecological holocaust? Where is the religious training that equips our children with the skills and fundamental attitudes requisite to repair the damage their parents have done. Likewise, where is the religious voice that calls for nuclear disarmament? In the last decade we have experienced levels of nuclear proliferation unimaginable to previous generations. Here again there is a real possibility of human extinction. Where is the religious voice? For either of these terrifying concerns we can find examples of religiously motivated people who are diligently concerned activists. But, they are such a tiny minority. Is there anywhere in religion that we can find a sense of large-scale urgency? These two issues have a capacity of imminent widespread devastation, but where is the Christian voice, the Islamic voice, the Jewish voice that speaks, not through a tiny minority, but in some more general, more demanding and effective manner. I think that we may pray ourselves into heaven far sooner than we intended.

This I think is my final critique: Christianity and Islam share an overarching concern for life after death. Where there is concern for life itself, it is only as a prehension of the present by some more saintly future. Indeed, the notion of life as a kind of school for divinity finds its roots in St. Paul and again in the Cappadocian fathers of whom we are both so fond. But today life, not after life, needs us. The good all people are called to is not in service of some other life, but rather the life that we have before us.

It is the life on earth itself that is at risk. This thin layer of life, thinner on the earth than is the skin on an apple, is at risk and it calls to us. How much rather I would that we should have ears to hear this voice that speaks in the wind and the rain, in the seas and in the high places and in the deserts. But, it is not some distant God that speaks through these things, but these things themselves that speak. The wind and the rain, the high places and the deserts call to us if we care to listen. What I look for is not a fiery bush but rather a thousand or thousand thousand men and women with fire in their bellies, who love the earth and the life it gives. When religion gives us this, then I will listen to religion.

Sorry about that!

David Hermanson

David, thank you for your thoughtful response. I can't help asking if you are still functioning as a priest.

David,

Thank you for a rich and provocative response. And I'm glad I could offer you Thomas Clarkson, Anglican deacon turned Quaker from his passion for justice and long simmering impatience with our church.

Your response to 'imagine no religion' simply moves me, it's got to be OUR question and OUR dilemma if 'people of faith' are to be faithful. But your response also makes me wonder if my original piece and my long-ish response to the good conversation that followed it weren't simple and clear enough.

I didn't intend to argue that there would be no goodness, beauty, compassion, worthy invention and discovery, etc. without religion. And John Lennon's invitation appeals so strongly to so many people (including some like me and various friends who stubbornly continue a religious practice) because he's on to something. Religion has done enormous damage to humanity and has diminished the human spirit. There's a hint of what that's about, I think, when we observe the 20th century discovery that institutionalized militant atheism does much the same.

I certainly don't believe that we can 'answer' the question of whether somehow something in religion might still be ultimately true or on balance good for us by tallying up a list of people and things people have done and made on 'the other side.' But somehow the specificity of both potentially enormous lists (no religion no loss/no religion real loss) matters. That's why I particularly like reading of Teresa of Avila's wiliness steering just barely clear of the Inquisition and reading of her deliberate defiance of 'old Christian' standards of faith in admitting sisters to her communities whom she knew were conversos, and why I particularly appreciate the so far unanswered question of whether she knew her grandfather had experienced being marched through the streets of Toledo while neighbors shouted taunts of 'Jew' at his family. How do we finally get that the outsider, the unbeliever, the stranger IS US or we're dead? Maybe Teresa knew that her great grandfather had bought their Avila title and certificate of pure, 'old Christian' status. Maybe not. She certainly understood the religious issue of scapegoating and her prayer, her encounter with a relentlessly provocative Jesus wouldn't let her play that game.

Would we have Hagia Sophia without religion? No. What about Wendell Berry? (I think of him because he's a more difficult case than Desmond Tutu). I heard him answering questions after a reading once. Someone said, 'Mr. Berry, sometimes you seem like a completely pagan nature poet and sometimes you seem like a completely Christian poet.' Berry responded, 'Yes, that's me. Now, is there a question you wanted to ask about it?' The questioner was either satisfied or stumped. I think what we'd like to ask him is whether he could be the poet that his heart and spirit are asking him to be if he wasn't sometimes the Christian poet. Another questioner asked him if he carried a notebook while he was plowing so he could make notes on poems. Berry laughed and said, 'You know, farming pretty much all my attention when I'm doing it.' Kind of zen.

When my kids were growing up and getting a lot of 'you must believe' from schoolmates because the religious right was so loud and so publicly and systematically determined to claim the adjective Christian as wholly their own, I used to tell them that we belonged to the same church as Desmond Tutu...and George H. Bush.

Would I be who I am or you be who you are without the years of struggling with the Jesus story and trying to sort through what it gives us now, how people have distorted it and co-opted him and his message, how we may be doing the same? I don't think so.

I don't think the organized/institutionalized religion vs. spirituality distinction gets us past the dilemma of practice. Your Buddhist practice, sitting without turning it into theology and certainly sitting without checking yours or other people's religious or philosophical or psychological opinions lest you or they contaminate their practice by sitting with...whomever isn't just spiritual.

I think it's both an open and urgent question for religious people whether religion is 'worth it,' and how we face and stand up to the history (and present manifestations) of damage done in the name of God and for Christians more specifically in the name of Jesus.

With all that I'd like to turn my eyes from and never see again, I'm still grateful for how Jesus' story and those who have told it have changed me, and I'm even still grateful for evangelical roots and formation that open me to moments of knowing him present, though, beyond that background I find him showing up in the most surprising unreligious moments and ways.

Some months ago I also wrote about my practice of 'my other religion,' daily Aikido. Five days a week, an hour at a time, my praayer and practice looks for whole bodied honesty, openness to an 'attacker' as a partner, responding collaboratively and without force or fear, and welcoming the joy of a kind of communion with mat partners and the whole morning's practice and a gratitude that's as deep as any I've found in church. I don't ask my practice partners to share my faith (though I'm glad to talk about it in the dressing room and have as occasions have come up over the years). My hope is that I can continue practice into old age and I'm inspired by an eighty year old woman I've practiced with for more than a quarter century.

What I learn on the mat does inform my Christian faith and practice. And if I were living a conscientious life as an agnostic, I expect it would inform that life.

If shared practice of faith doesn't make our lives more open, doesn't equip us to face the dreadful challenges of global and local politics, tribalism, greed, and scorn for the earth's and life's well-being, living for the promise of ultimate reconciliation somewhere beyond life or after life seems like either a sucker's game or stupid, small-mindedness smugness.

Are there profoundly good inspired lives lived wholly without religious faith? Yes, I agree with you, there are. Do they lack practice too? I'm not so sure about that. Does it matter to us ultimately to gather and trust the hints that the whole of life is held in the embrace of a forgiving, compassionate love? It does matter to me. And I respect and love people who either say, "I don't go there," or "I've never seen or felt or experienced enough of a hint to even hope for that."

My not practicing youngest actor and artist son is inclined to punctuate whatever he's facing with the refrain, 'It's all good.' It's very, very clear to me that his work is deeply rooted in practice, shared practice, ordered, communal shared practice. We talk about that and he gets the continuity that gives me means to recognize how a company of actors in rehearsal or performance is very, very like a community of people gathered around the table for Eucharist. And when he says, 'it's all good,' I've told him I hear the voice of Julian or Norwich, 'All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.' And still, does consideration of the question necessarily end with a statement of faith? No. Circling back, here's where I'm so grateful for Dostoyevsky's newspaper clipping practice. When Matthew Shepard died alone in Wyoming, whether he died praying or in bitter despair, unless it's all included, all blessed, all part of Infinite Compassion bringing life out of chaos and the abyss, good out of evil, it's over for all of us. I love the Cappadocians and Julian of Norwich for their universalism. When Gregory of Nyssa says the 'image of God' and 'body of Christ' is all humanity, he's unflinchingly including Matthew Shepard and his killers. It's the gesture of refusing to exclude that can and sometimes does deliver organized religion from its organization and answers.

It's good to hear from you, old friend. I'm really grateful for what you wrote, and I hope this bit moves our conversation forward. And I'm grateful to hear you're sitting zazen.

Dear Jim,

Due to illness, I retired from active ministry four years ago. I am a partial quadriplegic (the term "partial" means that I have some motion, but lacks strength control and sensation in all four limbs.) I live full time in a wheelchair.

David Hermanson

[ "I can't help asking if you are still functioning as a priest." - Jim Naughton ]