Introduction

"Imagine him, speaking,

and don't worry about what is reality,

or what is plain, or what is mysterious."

---from Mary Oliver, "Logos," in Why I Wake Early

In an earlier incarnation, I served as a chaplain to a pack of nuns who ran a college up in New Hampshire. One Sunday I was asked to preside at a Mass for all of their sisters in the state and found myself preaching to over three hundred women, most of whom, I had no doubt, possessed a better spiritual pedigree than I, and more of a reason to be up front talking.

The gospel for the Mass was one of the stories of Jesus calling his first disciples into service. You know the story: Jesus, while strolling along the Sea of Galilee, comes upon two sets of brothers—Peter and Andrew, and Zebedee’s sons James and John—and completely without warning and with no introductions, challenges them: “Come, follow me,” he says. And they do.

Now, I ask you: what would you say about this gospel to three hundred nuns, three hundred people who had already heard this gospel as a personal invitation to drop everything and chase their Lord down the beach?

I punted.

Assuming I could beg forgiveness later, I stepped into the center aisle of the church and walked over to Sister Pauline, a younger member of the congregation who I figured could roll with whatever I doled out.

Her raised left eyebrow signaled that she knew something was up.

“Yo, Pauline,” I said. “I need a visual aid. Will you help me out?”

“Yes,” she said. Pauline talks like that. Very direct and to the point.

“Come on up,” I said, the way they used to in one of those pre-Survivor reality shows (remember them? Supermarket sweep was my favorite), and she got out of the pew and stood next to me.

I positioned her facing the altar up front and then stood as close as decently possible in front of her, also facing the altar. Her face was practically nestled in my back.

“OK, Pauline,” I said. “Follow me.”

But I didn’t move.

“Um, sister,” I said. “Follow me.”

Again, I didn’t move.

“Pauline,” I admonished her, back still in her face, “you said you would help me out.”

“I will,” she said.

“Well, I said ‘follow me’” and I still didn’t move.

Now, Sister Pauline has a short fuse sometimes; indeed, I was counting on it, and it wasn’t long before she blew. I turned to her and with cloyingly exaggerated exasperation, asked her, “Why aren’t you following me?”

“Because you aren’t moving, asshole!” she replied. Actually, she only implied the asshole part with her eyes and tone of voice. Many of my nun friends are good at this, implication.

I thanked her and she sat down.

Before I opened my mouth to “preach,” Pauline and her sisters had gotten the point. You can only follow someone who is moving; if the person stands still, so do you. And if there is one thing that Jesus hardly ever does in the gospels it is stand still. To follow him, therefore, means to move.

We are not talking “profound original insight” here. Long before Dante famously reached the middle of the journey of our life and found himself in a dark wood, or Chaucer’s colorful collection of characters set off on their pilgrimage to Canterbury, the followers of Jesus characterized their lives as a journey. Recall the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus at the end of the gospel of Luke. As it does in English, the Greek word for “road” (hodos) bears a number of shades of meaning; in addition to the macadam-covered space outside your house, hodos could mean a way, a path, or a journey, and we find that at least some of the first Christians referred to their new way of life as “the Way,” (see Acts 9:2), using the same Greek word.

To follow Jesus is to chase after someone on the move.


I had lunch yesterday with my friend and former student Clarissa, a bright and beautiful woman in her mid-twenties.

Her email message last week was characteristically brief: “What do you know about Unitarians?”
Clarissa’s a Catholic and not primarily a student of religion—she was an English major and is a gifted writer—so I knew the query was more than idle. She couldn’t be marrying a Unitarian; if she had gotten that close to someone, I would have known about it.

Once we had settled into our booth and ordered lunch, she clarified.

“It was the clipboard,” she said. “Another damn clipboard!”

“A clipboard. Say more.”

Though she is out on her own now, Clarissa still goes to church most Sundays at her parents’ suburban parish west of Boston. And the people of the archdiocese of Boston find themselves, willingly or not, in the middle of a number of dust-ups concerning some of the most disturbing social controversies of our day. As one arrives for Mass, it is not uncommon to be accosted by a petitioner in the vestibule of the church, someone carrying a clipboard.

“For weeks now,” Clarissa said, “they’ve been strong-arming us about gay marriage.”

I had heard that the archdiocese was spearheading the movement to insert a ban on gay marriage into the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, the first state, as you surely know, to recognize and protect the right of every citizen to marry any other citizen s/he chooses.

No one strong-arms Clarissa for long.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Oh, Dad, don’t worry,” she sighed, using her usual appellation for me. “I just pushed the clipboard back at the guy and told him absolutely not.”

She sipped her iced tea.

“I wanted to deck the guy but my mother was with me.”

“That’s nice,” I sighed in return.

“For God’s sake,” she said, her anger rising. “My sister, my mother’s other daughter, is a lesbian. How would you feel in my mom’s place, a faithful Catholic all her life, faced with those damn clipboards?”

“So,” I said. “Fight or flight. To the Unitarians, perhaps.”

“I want out,” she said. “Even my mother wants out. But we don’t know where to go.”


For decades now I have been a professor of religious studies. Lately, though, I have felt more like a first responder at a disaster as people crawl out from under the debris of their collapsed churches—not by any means all of them Catholic. Clarissa curses the clipboard. A friend, his brother molested by a priest, is scandalized at the idolization of a pope who turned a blind eye to the abuse. Another friend realized one day, as he was reading a brochure for mutual funds, that he could have been reading recent theology. He calls it “investment grade Christianity:” work hard, believe the right things, and by the time you die, what you have done will have compounded into eternal salvation. Save early, though.

The list goes on and on: people upset by the latest denunciations of self-styled pastors like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell; a president who venerates the Prince of Peace at Christmas but claims the right to wage pre-emptive war; bishops who say they work for justice but build palaces for themselves while at the same time locking down church property on cold nights rather than allow the homeless a place to sleep.

People turn their backs on the hypocrisy of the snake oil salesmen and the sanctimony of politicians and hierarchs and look for . . . for what? For something new? Not really. Most folks don’t want a new religion. They seem to want the religion they grew up with to grow up with them. They hang on as long as they can, but then they walk.

They instinctively know that they have to keep moving.


It is not my intention here to analyze how the churches got to this point. Nor is it my desire to smooth over discord and dismay with false hope. We live in perilous times and many American Christians find themselves shivering through a deep spiritual winter.

What I do want to do is share with you my own journey. Not the tortured path that led up to the collapse of my own religious devotion, which was—considering my rigorous training as a priest and biblical scholar—surprisingly without guilt, drama, or even much rancor. No, the journey I want to share with you is the one to which I found myself invited after the collapse of what was.

Late in his very long life, Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, wrote a series of memoirs; with the last volume, he summarized his life in a single title: The Journey Not the Arrival Matters. Very true, up to a point. But just to let you know in advance: the journey I am on, the one I want to share with you, does arrive somewhere. “Behold,” the enigmatic figure of the Lord proclaims in the biblical book of Revelation, “I make all things new.” I am convinced that, with respect to matters spiritual, no, with respect to everything that is important to us, we live in between what was and what will be. Perhaps that is the state of affairs perceived by every generation, but certainly our time, our interval, is unique; no generation before ours has had the ability to see through a hundred billion galaxies back to the origins of the universe, and no generation, not in recorded history, anyway, has found itself in ringside seats as our little part of that universe prepares to wipe clean from the world the climate and environment that make civilization a possibility.

How can we live in the mean time?

What I hold before you, audacious wretch that I am, is a way—bold as I am, I will suggest that it just might be The Way—to journey to a safe place, a place to thrive, even, as one attempts to live out a Christian’s life honestly and faithfully, in the mean time, in this mean time, as we await the birth of all things new.

One thing about what follows: This will not be an autobiography, but a novel. And so you should know: aside from a few incidental prompts to get the action going, none of what will be recorded here ever happened.

But all of it is true.

Oh, and one last note of introduction: I invite you to think of this blog as an interactive “novel of ideas,” as well as a work in perpetual progress, always evolving, never done. Sort of like each of us. I am looking for your reactions, your comments. This takes place in the seventies (at least for now, it does). Were you around then? If so, is it accurate? Any blatantly false notes? Please keep in mind that I am an educator, not a novelist, so forgive me if the prose stumbles, the plot lumbers along too slowly, or when I post links and books for further reading and reflection for those so inclined. My goal is to entertain, but moreso to encourage a small community of readers to think about the issues the story will raise. Feel free to comment on what I write in any of its aspects, and also to react to comments that others post. I anticipate that I will be presenting some challenging stuff here, not at first, but eventually. To follow Jesus, in my understanding, is not to undertake a comfortable (or comforting) journey into what is known. I hope that any who read and react will do so with care, but also with charity.

The content of this blog is original and copyrighted by the author, 2009.

[Coming soon: The Tale of the Purloined Mermaid]