Goodbye Harvard Divinity School, hello America.

This is my quest: Find the soul of America.

How hard can that be, right? We’ll find out together.

America’s faith story is not simply Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim, but all these things -- and Native American, Taoist, Pagan, agnostic, atheist, and other beliefs, too. It is a story that crosses religions, generations, geographies, cultures, ethnicities and genders. And it is a story that may look a lot different than it did a century or two ago.

For the next six months, I will travel around the United States for On Faith in search of who we are and what we believe. The purpose is to explore America’s new religious landscape. This is not an academic study. I saw plenty of statistics and scholarly papers during three challenging and exciting years studying religion in society at Harvard. What I didn’t see was average people explaining and living their faith. I found my mind wandering outside those Ivy League walls, back to mosques and synagogues and churches I visited as a journalist. I thought back to the mentally ill mother who said she killed her toddler so he could be with God, the days sitting in churches covering political candidates on the campaign trail, the Virgin Mary in the cheese sandwich, the small-town minister who after a hurricane destroyed his church told of standing in a field outside the shredded building to deliver his service but no one came. Those stories too are part of the American religious landscape.

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STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. -- Claire G. Williams was 29 when she modeled for Norman Rockwell, whose illustrations for Saturday Evening Post still define for men and women of a certain generation what it means to be a good, patriotic and faithful American.

Some 49 years have passed since Rockwell himself phoned her. She still remembers the event in detail. The periwinkle dress she wore. Her two-hour studio session with Rockwell -- she posed while he sketched. Rockwell’s studio, now preserved on the grounds of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., looks exactly as it did then. The Shalom sign, the brushes meticulously cleaned, an African Christ hanging on a cross, a Zenith radio.

“We came through the door right there,” Claire said on one of her recent tours. She's retired now, and her husband has passed away, but she still volunteers at the museum.

Many of Claire's former neighbors show up in Rockwell's famous illustrations. The postmaster is a model for an Imam in The Golden Rule. The dry goods store owner is a town hall clerk, waiting on a young couple applying for a marriage license. Then there's a classic Rockwell painting called "The Runaway," in which a little boy and a policeman are sitting together at a lunch counter. "That's Dick Clemens," she said of the policeman. "I went to school with him, and he really did grow up to be a state trooper." The boy who modeled for the runaway is a maintenance person in the area, she said.

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NEW LEBANON, N.Y. -- A typical vision of Sufism might look like whirling dervishes or religious aesthetics in white robes participating in Islamic art, music or dance as a form of religious expression. Americans, if they’ve heard of Sufism at all, have probably heard of the poet and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, who died in 1273 and is arguably the most widely known Sufi in the world.

Rumi, whirling dervishes and Islam aren’t the subjects of casual conversation in the former mill town areas of Western Massachusetts. So it was a surprise to learn that Joseph Aubert, manager of visitor services at the Norman Rockwell Museum, is a member of the Sufi Order International and a religious retreat center called The Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York.

“Technically, I’m not a Buddhist or a Muslim, but I honor all traditions,” said Aubert, a 62-year-old administrator who wears a suit and tie to work.

Aubert grew up Methodist but now calls himself an interfaith minister. He belongs to the Abode of the Message, a religious center that follows the teachings of an Indian mystic, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. Its leaders describe the Abode as a “spiritual school,” comparable with Buddhism or yoga. An estimated 10,000 members participate in its spiritual training, “for the purpose of spiritual awakening, and also for service to God and humanity.”

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GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. -- Folk singer and social activist Arlo Guthrie’s church here is the kind of place someone could get lost in – or maybe even found.

But not through any traditional sense of religion.

“We’re not trying to start a religion,” said Guthrie Center Director George Laye, who answered the church door one recent afternoon in jeans, a black sweater and white sneakers – a far cry from the uniform of tie-dye and bell-bottom pants that reigned during the wild beatnik and hippie days when Alice and Ray Brock, of Alice’s Restaurant fame, lived in the building. “I don’t think God was religious.”

From the road, the rainbow peace flag in the front window hints at the building’s purposes now. A full-size modern industrial kitchen visible through the glass helps the center feed the hungry and the homeless. The sanctuary-turned-sound stage seats 110 people for musical acts that benefit the center. Although couples have been married at the Guthrie Center, no formal religious ceremonies are held there.

“Basically, we’re here to serve and take care of folks,” said Laye, who has been working for Arlo Guthrie for 30 years, the last three running activities at the Center.

A jumbled collection of religious icons displays the Center’s commitment to tolerance for all religions. A faded and weathered cross that may have once sat on the top of the building, which was burned then rebuilt by Connecticut shipwrights in 1866, now graces the walls. Church members found it discarded in nearby bushes. Pictures of Arlo’s guru, Ma, and her guru, dot a makeshift altar beneath a stained glass rose window upstairs. Incense, Hindu statues, crosses and other symbols compete for space on the low cloth-covered table. What once was the altar of the church is now a sound stage for folk acts. Upstairs, in the bell tower, the bell once used to call worshipers to prayer still works.

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GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. -- Chris Borek will look you straight in the eye and tell you absolutely positively there is no God.

It's not that she hasn't thought about it. She has.

"I believe that there is no God. I think that this is it. It's all a scientific process. I don't believe we have a soul," said Borek, a 37-year-old nurse. "I think we have our lives to live."

In the absence of God, there is still faith, says Borek, who was volunteering at the Guthrie Center here on a recent Friday. "I don't know if it's faith in humanity, or constant striving to have faith in humanity."

Borek was raised Catholic and shopped for different churches before finally rejecting all religion.

Her move to Great Barrington was in part a quest for a church-like community. She wanted to be near its "benevolent souls," as she calls them. A folk music fan, she loves the musical acts that perform there. But there's also a safe sense of community that nurtures all religious beliefs, including the absence of one.

"We don't have any dogma here," she said. "We just come together to support the community at large."

ACTON, Mass. -- It is summer and a van full of older teenage girls has pulled into the driveway of Hybid Farm. Some have eating disorders. Others may abuse alcohol or drugs. Some cut themselves. Some may have engaged in prostitution. None of this really matters.

For two hours of grooming, saddling and riding horses, they are simply like every other Hybid student – they are children who ride horses.

During the lesson, I lead an older teen on a horse at a trot, half steadying her with my hand on her calf while I run beside the horse and teach her how to balance and steer. She is scared but completely thrilled. Many of these kids have never touched a horse let alone ridden one. My heart is in my throat as I think how brave she is.

Later, back in the barn, Rita-Marie McConnon threads through the crowd of teens and helpers getting horses groomed and put away before dark. Along the way, she helps show the girls little skills like which brushes to use, how to pick rocks out hooves, how to lead the horses.

She brushes past me in the aisle full of horses and people, her smile lit from within. She stops and bends toward my ear. “This is why we’re here,” she whispers.

By that, she means this is why we teach. But she also means we all have a calling -- to love each other and to love God.

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Our Lady of Divine Mercy.

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. -- The stone building is awash in the pregnant silence of mausoleums or empty football stadiums, punctuated by a cough or the cracking of knees bending toward the floor for silent prayer.

A nun in black kneels on the gleaming floor of the church of Our Lady of Divine Mercy, her fingers clutching a rosary, her eyes cast toward the Virgin Mary and elaborately carved and painted figures behind the altar. A middle-aged woman in brown slacks and tan sweater perches nearby on the edge of a pew, her hands tented in prayer. A man in a blue parka stands in the marble aisle, his eyes transfixed on holy scenes depicted in stained glass.

It is late on a Friday at this religious shrine which draws an estimated 40,000 Catholic faithful a year to the hill over looking Stockbridge. They swarm off tour buses over the pastoral grounds. They light candles and clutch their rosaries, as they pray and seek spiritual renewal and healing.

But on this day, most pilgrims have left. The confessionals in back of the church are dark, empty of sinners. The gift shop below is closing.

Only Brother Andrew Davy, a 26-year-old American University graduate in philosophy, lingers to talk with me about faith.

Brother Davy, who lives in Washington, D.C., is young and in love with his calling. He is in love with the Trinitarian God; in love with the rituals that have tied him to Catholicism his whole life; in love with his faith.

“It’s trust in God,” says Brother Davy, trying to explain his charismatic Catholic’s view of faith, “the Trinitarian God: The Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.”

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HARRIMAN, N.Y. -- When John Steinbeck searched for America for his book "Travels with Charley," he did so with a Standard Poodle, a hefty advance from his publisher and a cache of guns, whiskey, and tools in a large, handsome truck named Rocinante, the letters written in Sixteenth-Century script on the side.

I’m a reporter and recent divinity school graduate about to criss-cross the country on a shoestring budget -- with Diet Dr. Pepper, a laptop computer, a video camera, and a backpack full of clothes. My Rocinante is a trusty old two-door coupe that leaks oil like a sieve and bears the scars of three years of on-street parking in an urban neighborhood where parallel parking is a contact sport. I thought about calling the car Hermes after the Greek messenger god. But I think it’s best to go with something less pretentious … like Bob.

I would like to go on the record right here: Bob has never failed. Still, the grim humor of the situation was apparent as I peered down dark driveways somewhere out in the New York countryside on a recent Sunday night. I was trying to ignore the thumping sounds coming from the car as I looked for signs of a convent.

It had been two and a half years since I’d seen Sister Eileen Kelly, although I’d talked with her briefly by phone and by email.

I met Eileen at Harvard, just after she returned from 25 years of service at Holy Redeemer Church on Cat Island in the Bahamas. Some events in a person’s life shape them so profoundly that to reflect on them is to realize when one has felt truly alive. Cat Island and its people -- the 31-year-old grandmother who died of AIDS, the 14-year-old mother, the family matriarchs who dispensed wisdom with a stern stare or a parable – so shaped Eileen’s life that when she returned to the states as a nun in her late 60s, she had trouble re-envisioning what life stateside was going to be like.

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Sister Eileen Kelly.

HARRIMAN, N.Y. -- Before daybreak, in the upstairs parlor of the Sisters of Charity convent, a single candle flame flickers in the middle of a bookshelf-lined TV room. Four gray-haired women, their voices sleep-tinged, take turns reading Psalm 33 from prayer books open on their laps.

“It’s the source that binds us to other women like ourselves who live in groups,” Sister Eileen explains the daily prayer sessions later.

The nuns sit in armchairs or on a worn couch, beside floor lamps that bathe their books and the room in a kind of warm yellow light. They face the center and each other. And the road noise of early morning commuters on the busy highway below the hill gives the impression of an interior and exterior world – the world of the farmhouse-convent and the world of work and school and the struggle and joy of daily life. And for a moment, it is as if these four nuns are pouring their prayers into the universe.

Every weekday morning, the women gather to pray as daylight breaks. They then attend Mass at a local parish in shifts before scattering for their respective callings – teaching, counseling, administering. This might be the only time of day that they’re all in one room.

The practice of daily communal prayer also taps into an ancient cycle of praying rounds that bound Christians together before telephones, mass transportation, or the Internet.

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Two days with the sisters have provided plenty to think about.

One great challenge with having faith, Eileen says, is suffering. The questions of why we suffer and who is responsible for suffering are some of the biggest we face. In a monotheistic tradition – a religious tradition that believes in one God -- who do believers blame when a child dies? Or when innocent human beings are killed and tortured? When disease or drugs or crippling poverty lay waste to humanity?

Eileen believes we do “God’s work” while we’re here, but “not as puppets. We’re not manipulated.”

God refuses to withdraw the element of freedom to choose, whatever the consequences of those choices might be, she says. “There’s a part of the mystery in freedom that is the essence of living.”

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Wedged between a walkway and an Episcopal Divinity School building here, a statue entitled Christ in the Garden of Gesthemane and a plaque commemorate the life of a former divinity school student, Jonathan Myrick Daniels.

Daniels was killed during the Civil Rights struggle in Hayneville, Alabama, in 1966, by a shotgun blast meant for an African-American teenager named Ruby Sales, who he pushed out of the way.

Rev. Ed Rodman, who became an Episcopal priest in 1967, attended school with Daniels. And if you look closely, past the figurine and the iron peace symbol Rodman wears on a leather cord around his neck, the cigarette smoldering in his fingers, the eyes half-closed in concentration in that strong, weathered face on a Boston fall afternoon, you might see all the way back to the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s – movements centered in large part around issues of racism that tore and split much of a country.

Rodman, 65, grew up in Virginia and, like Daniels, was part of the student movements that helped desegregate public schools, lunch counters and other public places.

He is now an Episcopal priest and professor at the Episcopal Divinity School, where he studied as a student 40 years ago. The school has a strong history of social justice activism.

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Rev. Ed Rodman.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- I was curious about former Civil Rights activist and Episcopal priest Rev. Ed Rodman's view of terrorism, and how he thinks our definition of terrorism has changed since he was demonstrating for racial justice in the 1960s. Rodman counseled the Weathermen and terrorist factions of the Black Panthers against using violence to bring about social change.

He says terrorism hasn't changed at all. The terrorism of 1960s America -- the bombings, the killings, the beatings -- is the same as today's terrorism. It's the same tactic -- acts of violence aimed directly at hurting people -- since humanity began.

He understands that "one person's terrorist is another's patriot."

“An advocate and a change agent has a face, is public and transparent, and is willing to take responsibility for their actions,” he said. “A terrorist is anonymous and only takes credit for their acts, not for the consequences of their actions.”

He tries to teach his students at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., that public policy and social advocacy happen within a political context. Who gets defined as a terrorist and who gets defined as an advocate can depend on who has power and who wins a battle.

"What do you do when the President of the United States on your behalf bombs Iraq or sets up Guantanamo Bay? That's where my class starts...making the case for nonviolent resistance as opposed to violence."

The third choice, he says, "is to give up and go fishing. That's what most people do."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- There’s something vaguely European about Mishy Harman, a Harvard undergrad I met during a candle lighting ceremony on a frigid afternoon this week of Hanukkah right across from the white New England steeple of Memorial Church in the Old Yard. Maybe it’s the plaid pants and the rainbow scarf and hat. Or maybe it’s that he seems at the same time young but also more grown up than many young Americans, at 24 having already traveled extensively to many different countries.

An Israeli citizen, Mishy grew up in a conservative Jewish household in Jerusalem. He considers himself secular now.

“I don’t think that much about questions of whether I believe in a God, and what kind of a God I believe in, whether it’s kind of a grandpa God with a big white beard sitting above, or some kind of God within us,” he said. “I mainly have faith in the power of being part of a group of people that together have faith.”

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One of the first people I called when I embarked on this blog was Harvard Professor Richard Parker. Parker, who teaches a course on religion and U.S. policy at the Kennedy School of Government, is an excellent tour guide for the 30,000-foot view of religion in America.

“What you’re going to see is an extraordinary variety” of religions and beliefs out there, Parker told me.

“You find people developing highly individualized interpretations of their faiths,” Parker said. “And the degree to which they hold onto those, the intensity with which they hold onto those, is part of why we have probably more than 1,200 different religious denominations in the United States today. If you counted one off parishes, congregations,” he said, “some sociologists of religion estimate there are as many as 10,000 different denominations functioning today.”

Just as blogging about faith in America is about as wide open as faith itself, no journey is complete without its sidetracks and shortcuts. Yes, the road is all out ahead of us and we’re adjusting course.

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DORCHESTER, Mass. -- Wait until four people have been murdered in one bloody spree beneath your daughter’s window, someone has shot into your house a few times, and your home has been burglarized six times before you tell the Rev. Eugene Rivers III you “know” about poverty.

Rivers lives in Dorchester, one of the poorer neighborhoods in the Boston area. Roxbury, Mattapan, and some slivers of Jamaica Plain and South Boston make up the others. Rivers, a former Harvard College student, is pastor at Azusa Christian Community, a Pentecostal congregation. Its ministries include the Ella J. Baker House, a non-profit organization that tries to curb youth violence by working through the courts and directly with at-risk young people.

There’s a disturbing corollary between violence and poverty, says Rivers, a sometimes embattled, often outspoken community leader who has been a point person between the poor and those in political power.

Rivers, 57, has been working with the poor most of his adult life – long enough to know faith grows from a youthful idealism that aims to save the world to a more mature perspective that aims to save as many as possible. He says he knows poverty can only be reduced, not eliminated. People clinging to the margins of life don’t provide any incentive, either as voters, campaign donors or taxpayers, for politicians to help the poor. And liberals have moved on to other more trendy concerns.

“Blacks are no longer interesting,” Rivers says. “It’s polar bears and the North Pole and the Earth.”

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BOSTON -- Wind, sleet and ice pelt volunteers and ministers of Common cathedral as they prepare for Sunday services – outdoors -- this week on the steps of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston.

The Rev. Kathy McAdams, wears a long ski parka, woolen hat and heavy gloves, as she directs traffic, hefts boxes and greets men who trickle up the stone stairs. Some are visiting pastors from other churches. Others are men she recognizes as regulars to Common Cathedral, a street ministry that tries to fulfill the spiritual needs of homeless men on Boston Common.

“How are you?” she asks one man with a backpack slung over one shoulder. Backpacks, duffles and plastic garbage sacks make up the baggage of homeless men and women always on the move from shelter to shelter, from bench to doorway to food line.

“Cold,” says the man, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and no coat.

“Where’d you stay last night?” she asks.

The answers, depending on the time of year and the weather, could be a shelter, or a doorway, or beneath blankets and tarps out in the open. McAdams greets the men with genuine interest and concern as ministers set up food and a makeshift altar on the damp steps of the historic church. A few men who attend these services are what some call passing-through homeless, but the priest will tell you that many have lived on these streets for years, decades even.

McAdams dispenses hugs and a kind and willing ear as she and her ministers prepare for an informal service, given against the backdrop of beeping machinery, honking car horns, and snow plows scraping paved paths across the street.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Fifteen years ago, when she was the communications director of Harvard Law School, the Rev. Dr. Deborah Little-Wyman had an epiphany that changed her life and started a movement.

“There was one day I was driving up Mass Avenue in Cambridge,” Little-Wyman says. “I was stopped at a stoplight, and I think I was dictating into a tape recorder and making notes on my lap … and I just happened to look over on the steps of an apartment building beside the car. And there was this woman there who I’m sure I described at the time as a bag lady with her bags around her. I had this instant desire -- it just happened so quickly – just a whole-hearted desire to have a life in which I could go and sit down next to that lady and stay with her until she got whatever she felt she needed.”

She struggled for six or seven years with the idea of going to seminary and becoming ordained as a priest and the overwhelming urge to “take the church to the street.”

In 1994, she began taking sandwiches and socks in a knapsack to the Boston Common.

“I was terrified going out to the street the first time, the first bunch of times,” she said. “I didn’t want to go. Having sandwiches in my backpack gave me a little confidence.”

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BOSTON -- Steven Maki threads his way between men and women clad in dark wool coats and carrying bags of Christmas gifts. He is under-dressed for Newbury Street, one of Boston’s high-rent shopping districts, stocked with $10,000 couture dresses, expensive hotels and soft Italian leather shoes.

Maki glances around, looking into corners and doorways.

At 31, he looks a little like a kid. He is small. He wears a thin beard, a nylon parka, dark pants, and sensible shoes. His bangs cut straight across his forehead. A silver stud pierces his right eyebrow. There is a hoop in his left ear. If you look past the piercings, you’ll notice that around his neck is the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

The Rev. Steven Maki, as he is properly known, has been on the job about one month, ministering to the homeless on the streets of Boston. He grew up in the Bay State and has recently come home after a stint in a small parish in Newfoundland, Canada.

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BOSTON—He was married once, for 13 years. They bought and sold a few houses together. One day she told him she was seeing someone else, and he packed his things and tucked them into a corner of the garage. Now, Jim Oldread’s things are few: A backpack, his clothes, the change in his pockets from the day’s panhandling with a cup on a sidewalk.

Back then, he still believed in heaven, or at least that Roman Catholic version of it he had learned in Sunday school. Now he believes more in what he calls karma, or “do the right thing and good things will happen to you. Do the wrong thing and bad things will happen to you.”

That’s the sum of pretty much everything life has taught him in 46 years, four of which he’s spent on the streets of Boston, mostly trying and failing to be sober.

Oldread comes by drinking naturally: He grew up admiring an alcoholic father and hard-drinking uncles who drank themselves senseless at Patriot’s games. Back in the years when he was married and living in a house, he and his buddy would split a six pack on their way home everyday from his construction job. He drank then, but not as much as he does today.

Now, there is nothing really stopping him, except the fear that this winter may be his last. Also, the nagging thought that if he’s ever going to do anything more with his life, he'd better get to detox.

He doesn’t know if there is a God in the formal sense that he’s been taught, but sometimes on a clear night before he sleeps, he looks up at the sky in wonder and thinks about all those stars.

“I know that there is something definitely bigger than me,” he says. “If people choose to call it God, fine.”

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GRANITE FALLS, Wash.— The road from Seattle to the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America winds past cities, strip malls and suburban sprawl, past old farms, mobile homes and lawns decorated with junk cars. It does not feel like a sacred pilgrimage.

But here, about an hour northeast of Seattle, the Rev. Koichi Barrish -- a former California surfer turned aikido teacher and Shinto priest -- prays, performs purification ceremonies, and teaches aikido, a Japanese martial art. The shrine itself consists mainly of a large open and airy hall with wooden floors, Japanese style doors, and windows that open out onto a statue garden. Beyond that is the Pilchuck River, which borders the 25-acre property.

The shine is a product of what initially began as Barrish’s fascination with human beings’ relationship to nature and blossomed into a full-scale Japanese style shrine, complete with fountains, stone archways, lions and Japanese lanterns.

“I was really interested in the idea of human beings in harmony with nature, that whole thing. Really being a part of stuff, really acting appropriately and not feeling a dichotomy between oneself and nature was really kind of a pretty big deal to me as a young person, and still is today,” Barrish, 57, said, explaining how he got from growing up surfing in 1960s California to Shinto.

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SEATTLE — On New Year’s Eve, families gather across the street from The Seattle Betsuin Buddhist Temple to hear the tolling of the bonsho. The same bell marks the beginning of Sunday services for 560 adult members every week, signaling a full minute of meditation before the chanting of Buddhist scriptures and giving thanks to the Amida Buddha.

It is here, between these walls, that Buddhism and American Christian traditions meet and sometimes intermingle in unexpected ways.

While some sects remain very traditional, others like the Rev. Don Castro’s, have gone further toward “Americanizing.” At Seattle Betsuin Buddhist Temple, where Castro has ministered for 22 years, congregants sit in pews in the main sanctuary. And the services can appear Christian in format, with a sermon and singing of hymns or gathas.

The Seattle temple, founded by Japanese Americans, rests on a hillside amid houses near Seattle University on a parcel of land developed by immigrants more than a century ago. Several doors away from its neat brick façade, an old wooden Baptist church sits, a testimony to the area’s religious diversity.

Seattle Betsuin Buddhist Temple, of the Jodo Shinshu or Shin Buddhist sect, is one of some 65 Buddhist temples of one denomination or another in the Seattle area, according to the Castro, a minister with Buddhist Churches of America for more than 30 years. Buddhism is the fifth largest religion in the United States.

Many, if not most, of Castro’s congregation, or sangha, are Japanese immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Still, he points out that there are many more Asian-American Christian churches than Buddhist temples.

The fact that Buddhism itself changes once in America may be a testimony to its fluidity as a religion.

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SEATTLE— They immigrated to America seeking new lives. Instead they re-discovered their old religion.

Grandmothers Junko Nakano and Aiko Fujii were new brides in those early years after World War II. Etsu Shimbo lived with family and studied in Seattle. All were in their early 20s and, for the most part, lived secular lives when they came to this country.

In Japan, where the three women grew up, Buddhism was “entwined in every day life,” explained Shimbo, a retired accountant whose religious training didn’t really begin until after she had children. “We didn’t have structure like we do here.”

Their families were required to belong to a Buddhist temple. For weddings, Nakano said, they would go to the Shinto shrine. For funerals, to the Buddhist temple.

But it was only in America that they discovered Buddhist teachings.

Maybe it was loneliness or searching for a meaning and identity that drove them back to their old religious roots. But immigrating to America somehow sparked in them a need to go deeper into their Buddhist beliefs.

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Jenny Sawyer at First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston.

BOSTON--When freelance writer Jenny Sawyer attends church, there is no preacher. No candles flicker. No incense wafts through the air. There isn’t even an altar.

This is the type of no frills religious service Sawyer knows her other Christian friends might find totally foreign. They might even find it boring.

Two elected lay people stand up on a raised platform in front of the members and read. One reads passages from the Bible. The other reads from Science and Health, a textbook on health and spirituality, written by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Sawyer’s religion. There are also hymns and silent prayer.

Sawyer, a member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, finds the simplicity soothing amid a frenetic and frantic world.

“For me, when I come to church, it’s kind of like there are no distractions. … You don’t even have someone sort of talking at you.”

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BOSTON—The first real deepening of faith for Phil Davis came during basic training in the military.

It came in the vortex of a personal and spiritual crisis so consuming he actually thought about taking his own life.

“I was suicidal,” said Davis, reflecting back on himself as a teen-aged soldier. “It seems like I’m talking about somebody completely different today. But it was a serious problem.”

Davis’s mother discovered Christian Science when he was in the fifth-grade. The religion, founded by Mary Baker Eddy, advocates “practical” healing through prayer and a closeness to God. Still, he said, his relationship with faith was casual then. He didn’t really accept the power of prayer in his life until his own spiritual crisis as a young man.

“I still remember the first day when I palpably felt God’s love,” he said. “I wasn’t asking for a religion. I wasn’t seeking a church. I was just honestly trying to find out if there was a God. And I felt that God was loving me.”

After two weeks of basic training, he had been allowed to go to a church service. He said he cried through it. “I realized I had come home, not to a church building, and not through a religion, but I had come home to a closeness to God. And I wanted more of it. I wanted to devote myself more to it.”

That was years ago. Davis completed his military service, married and became more involved in Christian Science. He is a spiritual practitioner and a leader in the First Church of Christ, Scientist.

He described his earliest sense of prayer as pleading to some distant God. But, he said he eventually realized, “It isn’t trying to get God to do something. It’s an affirmation, a declaration, a growth and understanding of who God is.

“I’m the one who’s learning. Sort of like if you don’t feel very close to God, it’s not God’s fault. It’s my need to move close to him.”

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—In a storefront temple here in this upscale college town, Zen Buddhists prostrate themselves before a large golden Buddha statue.

Three times, each kneels in socked feet, touches his or her forehead to a prayer cushion, rises, then repeats the ritual. Led by the abbess and a Buddhist nun in orange robes, the drum beating, bell ringing, and chanting of Buddhist scriptures, called sutras, continue for a solid hour. Sung in Chinese, the sutras sound vaguely haunting, sometimes so slow they appear almost keening, other times light and staccato.

“We meditate and observe the goodness of the Shakayamuni Buddha and learn from him,” says the Ven. Man Kuang, the abbess of the Greater Boston Buddhist Cultural Center, during a break in the all-day celebration. Soft-spoken and serene, Kuang leads the service, chanting into a handheld microphone and ringing a bell. Her head is shaved, and her movements are fluid, composed and purposeful.

This particular ceremony commemorates the Buddhism founder’s enlightenment day more than 2,500 years ago. According to tradition, the Buddha was a human being who obtained enlightenment, not through remote divine intervention, but through meditation. Chanting the sutras is not only a form of worship but also of meditation designed to turn the mind inward. In Zen Buddhism, each person is believed to have a Buddha nature. And through meditating and following the Buddhist precepts, each has the potential to obtain enlightenment, or Buddhahood.

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ARLINGTON, Va. — I stood on the hillside alone and looked toward the Washington Monument, the Capitol building, and the White House. Our nation’s capital. I have been here a number of times as a journalist. Once, many years ago, I came as a tourist. And now, today, I came to Arlington National Cemetery as a pilgrim-journalist, searching for the soul of America.

But it was not the soul of America I was thinking about in this stark, somber place. It was the souls of young men and women killed in their prime, the remains of old soldiers and war heroes and wives and presidents, all laying side by side underground. And the cavern their deaths left in the lives of wives and children, parents and siblings, and, collectively, a nation.

Amid the keening wail of Taps and a far-off 21-gun salute, I asked Andre Seth, a 27-year-old security guard, how he defined faith, if he could feel any trace of the men and women buried in this cemetery, if he could feel whether some small part of their souls lingered around those graves.

“Faith is believing in something you can’t see,” said Seth.

His job is to watch the tourists, to protect these grounds. He doesn’t feel the presence of the people buried there as much as he feels the force of history and the grief and heaviness of some who have come to find family or friends.

Go down to section 60, he said. That’s where you’ll see where the Afghanistan and Iraq soldiers are buried.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.— Vietnam veteran Leroy Lawson doesn’t believe in God. But he does believe in justice.

And, for that matter, war.

“I think it’s unavoidable,” said Lawson, an artist and teacher who lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

Take Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein, he said. “There are simply people on earth who are evil for their own sake.”

Lawson served in the United States military as an infantry platoon leader during Vietnam.
He knows what it’s like to watch friends die in combat. He is alive, he said, because another man died in his place. One day, he was supposed to go on a mission. A more seasoned soldier went in his place. He never came back. And today his name is on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Lawson’s task at the Memorial is to help people find their loved ones’ names on the 246-foot black granite wall that honors the men and women who were killed or missing in action. He and his fellow volunteers answer questions and make sure the men and women who come to the wall have the space they need to remember or grieve. In the process, he has found many of his old friends on the wall, although he says he has never intentionally looked anyone up.

Lawson doesn’t volunteer out of any sense of religious commitment.

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Rita McConnon.

My phone rang while I was walking through Arlington National Cemetery last week. It was Rita McConnon, a Massachusetts riding stable owner who helps children of all ages connect with something larger than themselves.

I had profiled Rita for one of my early posts on Finding Faith. She is what many would call a woman of faith, someone who sees each person as a “child of God,” someone whose lexicon includes the mantra: “Fear not. Have hope.”

I have news, she said. “I’m opening up a homeless shelter ... and it’s all because of you.”

I was speechless. It really wasn't me, of course. It was people I'd interviewed, people she'd never met but heard and read about.

I had told Rita about the Rev. Deborah Little-Wyman, a mere slip of a woman who had the guts to go wade out into the vast homeless community of Boston, armed only with sandwiches and socks and a vague notion of wanting to live the gospels like Jesus did.

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OPALOCKA, Fla. — For many people, faith can be as immediate as mixing water with drops of herbal essence, lighting a candle, having a reading, or communing with spirits or divinities.

“We have something for everyone here,” says Jesus Suarez, picking up small plastic bottles off the shelves of Botanica La Caridad, a religious supply store in an industrial park outside Miami.

Visitors to this botanica are greeted by statues of various orishas, or minor Santeria deities. Large crucifixes hang on one wall. Ordinary objects -- coconuts, conch shells, railroad spikes, river rocks, and cow horns – compete for space on the floor. All hold spiritual significance for believers of one religion or another. Shelves contain statues of Jesus on the cross, African deities, and Native American spirit guides, as well as potions with tantalizing names such as “Jinx Removal” and “Death Away.”

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MIAMI -- Sometimes, says Cuban-born Ernesto Pichardo, it seems like he's been campaigning nonstop for 30 years. Twenty-one years ago Pichardo, a Santeria priest, took a fight for the right to practice his religion all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court -- and won.

Now he wages a different campaign. The priest is leading an effort to make his religion's sacred text, the Book of Diagnosis in Ifa Divination, widely available for scholars. Written in Spanish and Yoruba, the book combines Yoruba and Afro-Cuban history with culture, philosophy, metaphysics, religion, and spiritual knowledge, according to a press release last month. Initially published in Cuba in the 1940s, the book has been in the hands of priests and priestesses but out of the public eye for 50 years.

"The consensus among the priests: That's what this book is, from the oral," says Pichardo, thumbing through a copy of the text on his dining room table. The pages are thin and brittle. Acid from the paper eats away at the edges. A thick black type, the kind used on an old manual typewriter, marches across the pages.

Pichardo's serious demeanor drops away as he finds a list of items needed in one spell, all typewritten in Yuroba. "Now look, look at the fees."

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MIAMI —The first dead woman who came to her was the spirit of an African slave.

“She came to tell my family that I was born with that ability and throughout my life I was going to be dedicated to do readings, take care of people, and help out with the spiritual world,” said Puerto-Rican born Nydia Pichardo, 49, of Miami.

With her cheerful brightly painted fingernails, feminine dress and friendly manner, Pichardo seems more like a cool neighbor than someone who talks to the dead. That is, if you believe in the ability to speak with the spirits of the dead – and there are, evidently, plenty of people in the world who do.

Pichardo is a Santeria priestess and medium who believes she has an extra-sensory ability that allows the dead to possess her and convey messages from the beyond. She says she can communicate with spirits and, if necessary, help them move on.

Americans don’t often talk about spiritual possession in casual conversation, at least not outside Hollywood. Maybe that is why it’s such a curiosity. Or maybe people want so badly to believe in spirits, in the souls of their deceased loved ones and ancestors lingering on earth, that they talk to them. Or maybe certain people can communicate with departed souls. They may feel overcome by good or disturbed spirits, or feel spirits in places like old cities, slave plantations, concentration camps, the Roman Coliseum or in old houses.

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HOUSTON—The words “faith” and “politics” held vastly different meanings for several dozen Texas clergy and other voters attending an Obama campaign forum on faith at Texas Southern University earlier this week.

Faith, people said, was about “spirituality,” “community,” “perseverance,” “God,” “Christ,” “belief,” and “hope” for a largely African-American Christian audience.

Politics brought to mind words like “sneaky,” “underhanded,” “shifty,” “charismatic,” “expediency,” “secular,” “bureaucracy,” “propaganda,” “disconnection,” “loyalty,” “petty,” “bias,” “liars” and “partisan.”

The forum held two purposes: Asking religious voters what is important to them, and showing Obama as a man of faith, a man they and their congregation or fellow church-goers can trust and relate to.

Some argue that religion has nothing to do with politics. But politicians, reporters and ministers like the Rev. Runwararo Fana, who attended the faith forum and volunteers for the Obama campaign in his community, know differently.

Churches can turn out the vote. A politician may not be allowed to actively campaign from the pulpit, but plenty show up in churches with entourages of reporters and cameramen around election day.

“For us, politics is sacred because it controls and touches every