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I. The Shadow of the Spirit

Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.

- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

In America, the irreligious live in the shadow of the spirit. We hear the Torah at suburban bat mitzvahs; see churches fill with cots after the storm. We encounter stray prophets in city streets and visit rough-hewn chapels in tiny hamlets. We receive birthday cards with short verses from Scripture, printed on thin throwaway stock; listen to pastors proclaim their support for the candidates at both major parties' conventions; read selections from the Qur’an and the Bhagavad Gita in Introduction to World Religions, fulfilling the requirement pass/fail. We experiment with new faiths as if trying on selves, eager to find one that suits us. We bow our heads and mouth "Amen." We offer thoughts and prayers. We feel, in other words, as if the space around us is already occupied, so suffused with the radiance of other people's convictions that our own seem to shrink in the shade.

To wit: I last attended Mass one faraway August, on the otherwise sparkling summer morning we buried my father's father, and it had been so long since I'd had the Lord in my heart I instinctively sat at the back of the nave, as if playing the tourist in Chartres. With a slight hiss in her voice, a family friend urged me forward—You don't know what you're supposed to do at a funeral? was her implicit question—but as I slid into a pew much nearer my parents, I knew that my hesitation was a function of the Mass, not the funeral. In part, this was a political position—resistance to the religion that treated my sexual orientation (I sleep with men) as an abomination, my organizing experience (I had interned at Planned Parenthood) as a crime—but it was also a spiritual one: reluctance to disrespect my grandfather's faith by performing Catholicism without crediting its truth content. Psalms suffocated me. Priests appeared medieval, no less a relic than the bones of some martyr displayed in the dim corner of a foreign church. And so, when I remained seated instead of accepting Communion, as row after row of the devout and the lapsed filed toward the altar for wafers and wine, I felt the eyes of those behind me settle on the back of my neck. Of the religion I'd been born into, I was now an outsider; part of the family but not in the fold.

It wasn't until later that I came to understand the problems and possibilities of catechism, of ritual, of congregation—that I came to see faith and its absence as states of being unbound by sacraments and church rolls, Biblical passages and mellifluous hymns. I still do not believe in God, in the sense that one might imagine an unimaginable figure creating and ordering the cosmos, but I am no longer convinced that this constitutes a barrier to certain varieties of religious experience. If religion is, as James suggests, "a man's total reaction upon life," then it is the reaction that sustains the religion, and not the reverse.