and discussion in American Catholic colleges and universities. During that period, when an almost ferocious evangelical movement seemed determined to influence local and national politics, the question, “Who is God?” sounded almost heretical. Believers knew for sure who God was. If the Bible didn’t tell them so, they knew absolutely that the Holy Spirit was the guiding presence in the Christian church and family. Even the most hidebound understood the commonality of the different Christian communities and were beginning to open themselves to the idea that non-Christians were worshipping the same God.
For some of us, self-professed spiritualists in an emerging culture of non-belief, especially in Manhattan, where I lived for many years, it seemed a truism that if the Bible was revealed truth, so were Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and Henri Matisse and Shakespeare, not to mention Einstein and Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison and about a million other creative people who somehow channeled new visions and new understanding of the universe, continually unlocking what had been called “the secrets” in physics, chemistry, and biology. Talk to any composer; he or she might tell you they serve as vehicles for energies that come through them, from where they are never sure. I remember a literary agent many years ago, no doubt in flight from some kind of orthodoxy, who ridiculed that idea outright: “Channeling—what a fanciful superstition”! But she wasn’t a composer, was she?
In the early seventies, still a Jesuit, after my three years at the Yale School of Drama, where I also served as a deacon for the Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., as well as being Writer in Residence at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre one year, I worked for five years as Project Director of the Jesuit-sponsored Woodstock Center for Religion and Worship, no connection to the rock festival, at the Interchurch Center, 475 Riverside Drive, New York. Its mission was the exploration and renewal of liturgy in collaboration with such leading anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and theologians as Rollo May and Jungian Edward C. Whitmont. Dr. Whitmont, a former colleague of Carl Jung, spoke about the revelation of personal and collective truth in dreams and trance states. He had also experienced his patients in group therapy dreaming the same dreams. He spoke of patients reexperiencing trauma from past lives. In short, the language of belief was expanding before us. During that time, I also wrote a series of Prayers of the Faithful for Benziger Brothers, a liturgical press that offered contemporary language to the Prayers of the Faithful for the Youth Mass, as it was called. The prayers invoked everyone from John Lennon to Billie Holiday and Nelson Mandela. The idea was to stimulate like-minded language and thinking—to open up windows and doors to the world, especially the world of creativity, often in a surrounding landscape of suffering and violence. My thinking even then, aligned with Martin Luther’s idea that all believers were priests.
Once again, the question loomed: Who decides what voices come from God? Who draws the line between the secular and the profane? One might as well ask who has the authority to recognize love. Are we so blinded by the horrors of the twentieth century that we cannot see the light in the darkness?
By the time I left the Society of Jesus after 14 years in 1973, a prominent theologian made the public comment that what believers shared in common were not doctrinal certainties or any clear definition of God, but that in an age of increasing non-belief we were asking the eternal questions—and the questions said it all: “Who is God? Who are we in relation to God? What happens when we die”? The operative point: how could any belief system pin down God? You’d have to be arrogant or stupid to think so.
In the beginning of my new life outside the institutional Church, I chose not to be ordained a priest. The gulf between my personal beliefs and the official teaching had grown too wide. Since then, after a lifetime of questioning, I embrace all religions with love and reverence and take orders from none.
Today, my wife, Joy, and I live in South Carolina. As mayor of a small city here I spent many hours in many churches, especially at funerals and anniversary services praising the name of God. The South is a culture of hymns and blessings. As we press forward with our exuberant spirits in this extraordinary place, we also live with ghosts. If we listen carefully, we can hear the shouts and cries from the Indian wars, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and feel the sorrows of the enslaved.
My journey into the mysteries of spiritual awareness has been a long one and continues to open into the future. I wrote A Carolina Psalter for people who are looking to know God, as I am, a God who cannot be reduced to anthropological identity, a God, if you will, beyond gods, a God almost beyond understanding—beyond ritual and inherited prayer, a God of a trillion stars and planets, who we have been told by his prophets lives in our simple hearts as the God of love. Let us hope.
A Carolina Psalter—but one voice. Read the Psalms. Read the poems. Then, speak in your own voice. Share what comes to you. We will listen.
Psalm One
1 Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the wicked,Nor standeth in the way of sinners,Nor sitteth in the seat of scoffers:2 But his delight is in the law of God;And on his law doth he meditate day and night.3 And he shall be like a tree planted by the streams of water,That bringeth forth its fruit in its season,Whose leaf also doth not wither;And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.4 The wicked are not so,But are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.5 Therefore the wicked shall not stand in the judgment,Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.6 For God knoweth the way of the righteous;But the way of the wicked shall perish.
Have a blessed day, we say
Blessed be me for not walking in step with the wicked
That be the invocation.
That be the deal
What fool can say she or he is not depraved?
We draw pride from our arsenal
We do
Blessed be our nuclear bombs
Our missile defenses
Protecting us as You never could
Or would
Gospoodi pomiluj
And
Inshallah
Yes Sir
We ourselves could be the enemy
Blessed be the one who meditates on You
Night and day
Feasting on Clozaril
Olanzapine
Flupentixol
We are like trees planted by streams
Our destiny to bear fruit
We pray
The sun not disappear
Or the stream change course
Our delight lies in being alive
Open to sunlight
And laughter
Contradictions
And questioning
At our very core
That’s what we say
We do
