Today's discussions about religion tend to leave everyone exhausted and discouraged. People debate about the existence of God, about the value of religious tradition, about God's role in the world -- and come away bitterly divided. Common ground seems a distant dream.

My interest in faith isn't about any of those debates. I come at religion from the perspective of the inner life.

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With neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney on the political landscape, both Republicans and Democrats in the presidential race are free to demand that we start over. Now more than ever, Americans feel we are at an ending and we need change by leaps and bounds.

This is where our religious experiences should be instructive, because starting over is fundamentally a spiritual invitation. At the deepest level, our longing for a restart points to our longing for beginning -- not a slight turn, but a fresh start. It's not incremental. When we're ready to start over, we want to start over -- cleansed, freed, opened. We want what we cannot give ourselves: We want faith.

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I can't remember where I read the comment, but it stayed with me: "If you get your grief wrong, you get everything wrong." I would add a correlate: It's really hard to get grief right, and few of us do.

Right now, I'm trying to get it right as I face the death of my surrogate father and friend of 25 years, Salvatore "Red" Verderame. Red, who died Saturday, was a mentor, a role model, an icon. If you live in Connecticut and are of a certain age, you know Red Verderame. In every way, he was larger than life.

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When I was a kid, Fidel Castro was referred to as a "godless Communist" and we were afraid of him. Now Castro, the last lion of the godless threat, is stepping down.

Ironically, we're no longer afraid of him or his type. Now, we're much more afraid of the God-full than the godless. The communist youth leagues have yielded to the fundamentalist youth leagues: same ideological fervor; same zealous combativeness, same threat to "our way of life."

Make no mistake: the Communists earned their godless title. Stalin and his henchmen made the crushing of religious institutions a part of their program. They closed and destroyed churches, executed religious leaders, and touted atheism as the vanguard of a new socialism. Invasions of countries like Afghanistan were designed in part to crush the religion of the place, Islam. Religion was to be destroyed.

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