Opening Words of New Book

Opening Passage

I shared the closing of my new book, The Many Faces of Prayer: How  the Human Family Meets Its Spiritual Needs. Now here is the opening. (If you want more, it'll be out next Spring.) 

From the Preface:

The work before you flows from a lifelong interest in cross-cultural spirituality and ritual. As I think back over the decades, it seems like everything was so simple early in life. Home, school and church. Everyone singing the same music. Hosanna, Jesus loves me, long division and Lebanon bologna. Simple.  Then, sometime around my eleventh birthday, I began to hear the different drummers.

          As a Baby Boomer growing up in an ethnically homogenous (i.e., lower class white) Protestant neighborhood in Reading, Pennsylvania, I was fortunate to attend Thirteenth and Union Elementary School, which reached beyond the brick row houses into more prosperous neighborhoods, where degrees from college were expected of the next generation. Not exactly diverse by today’s standards—we had one African American pupil— nevertheless the school had a significant minority of Jewish and Catholic students. We were also blessed with vibrant faculties who exposed us to the new, post-colonial, post WWII world. Albert Schweitzer and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. We never spoke of religions in the emerging new countries, but teachers shared an enthusiasm for a wide range of cultures, East and West. And the Jewish and Catholic students sitting around me in class represented alien worlds to a Pennsylvania Dutch kid.

          Sometimes a Jewish friend would invite me to the family Shabbat meal, where I donned a skullcap and listened to readings from the sacred text, previously known to me only as the “Old” Testament. It began to occur to me that people I cared deeply about—my friends and classmates--included those who saw the world quite differently than the  way it had been presented  at Zion’s Reformed Church. The struggle to make sense of life has always had a spiritual dimension for me, yet here were young people who didn’t believe in Jesus, and others who said they were Christians but prayed in the presence of full-sized idols. Where in the Bible did Jesus’ mom get promoted to some kind of goddess? My friends, not just walking to a different drummer, but worshipping a different deity? Wasn’t that the very definition of sin?

          I loved and respected my elders at Zion’s—which was a kindly place full of Townhouse Crackers and Bible stories, and nothing approaching judgmentalism. We never spoke of hell at Zion’s Reformed Church, because that was for bad people and we didn’t know anybody like that. Oh, sure. Hell was still on the books—like a law against emptying your bedpan from a second-story window—but it just didn’t apply. And these kids were my friends who believed differently. And there was also my crabby agnostic Uncle Gibb, who sneered that Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had not found God when he orbited the earth in 1961.

          I suppose that’s when I discovered I had become a universalist, even before moving away from childhood to travel the world. Travel doesn’t just broaden, it deepens.  I encountered ever more diversity--Baha’is, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, an endless array of spiritual traditions which, by comparison, made Jews and Catholics seem like co-religionists to a woefully ignorant Protestant like me.

          The common theme I began to discover in spirituality and prayer was the need to make sense out of life and live it successfully. Different groups understood differently what “live it successfully” meant, but the impetus for a balanced, meaningful life flows horizontally through all the cultures of humanity and reflects in the religions we create to meet those needs. The central theme of this book is that humans do not share the same answers, we share the same questions, which we have answered differently.

          As a theologian and teacher of graduate students, I tend to look at the questions through an analytic, cross-cultural lens, but after four decades in ministry the residual pastor within me still loves and appreciates the practical aspects of human spirituality. My goal in writing The Many Faces of Prayer was to present a multi-cultural look at prayer, meditation and ritual which addresses both the intellectual and devotional sides of the topic. Obviously, with a world of religious traditions to draw upon, this study cannot pretend to be exhaustive. Behind each door leading to a major faith group is another room full of doors, each with corridors full of sub-groups, denominations, and geo-cultural practices.