Rushdie says, 'Get religion'

It remains Salman Rushdie's fervent conviction that it's wrong for clergy, jurists or politicos to threaten writers' lives simply because they think their books are terrible.

Not even the shocking success of "The Da Vinci Code" has weakened his pro-novelist stance, he said, drawing laughter at Calvin College's recent Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Mich.

This faith in free speech isn't surprising since the apostate Muslim has lived in hiding ever since his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" inspired Iran's top ayatollah to issue a fatwa calling for his death. No one knows better than Rushdie – who calls himself a "dreadful old atheist" – that faith, ink and blood can be stirred into a deadly brew.

Nevertheless, he also believes that writers who refuse to wrestle with the power of faith and the supernatural are refusing to deal with real people in the real world. Consider, he said, the daily lives of the gods and believers in his homeland – India.

"The people in India do not think of the gods as abstractions," said Rushdie. "They think of them as real beings who move amongst them and work upon their lives every day. If you have something that you need, if somebody is sick, if a child needs to get into college or whatever it may be, you would go and find the relevant deity to make the offering to and you would believe that that would increase your chances of getting what you needed in life."

Rushdie, 58, understands India – with its tense mix of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity – from the inside out. As a child, he enjoyed asking his Muslim grandfather why he practiced a faith in which the prayer regime required him to spend so much time with his rear end higher than his head. Meanwhile, Rushdie's father was both an unbeliever and a Muslim historian.

After years of airing his doubts, the pre-teen iconoclast celebrated his own loss of faith with a symbolic culinary sin – a ham sandwich. The fact that God did not strike him dead with a thunderbolt confirmed his newborn atheism.

As a writer, Rushdie said that he has always insisted on treating religion as a "normal part of life." Thus, his goal was "not to give it special treatment, not to hedge it around with the language of taboo and respect because that has always seemed, to me, to be anti-intellectual."

However, skeptics have their own way of avoiding the truth when dealing with intensely religious cultures, he said. Even writers who are unbelievers must realize that almost everyone in a land like India believes in one god or another and views life through the lens of that faith. Skeptical writers who refuse to accept this reality are practicing another form of intellectually dishonesty.

Rushdie does not, of course, believe writers should surrender their right to deal with religion in an irreverent or critical manner. However, he stressed that skeptics must be willing to doubt their own doubts and remain open to the possibility that the believers may, in some mysterious way, be right.

After all, he said, the real world is not completely realistic. Ordinary people believe in miracles and their beliefs are considered normal. Even in modern America, real life contains moments that are utterly surreal.

"So the sense that the miraculous and the mundane, that the supernatural and the everyday, coexist in a completely natural way, is everywhere," he said. "The idea that, somehow, these are separate categories of thing is quite alien. So if you are going to write about that world, you have to take cognizance of that fact. You have to recognize that this is how people think."

Ultimately, religious faith is one of the most powerful forces shaping the myths and stories that bind together families, nations and cultures, said Rushdie. In a free society, people are free to tell and interpret their own stories. Tyranny is when other people have the right to censure or kill the storytellers who get out of line.

"We are, as human beings, storytelling animals," he insisted. "We are the only creature on the earth that tells itself stories in order to understand what it is and what its life means. Therefore the story is of unusual importance to us, whether we are writers or not. It is something unusually important to human nature."

Sacred meals, Baptist and Orthodox

It's hard to hold a proper Southern Baptist dinner on the grounds without someone bringing a lemon pound cake.

The recipe John David Finley grew up with was as down to earth as cooking can get, with one cup of butter, four eggs, the grated peel of half a lemon and the right amounts of flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla, salt and nutmeg.

But somewhere between the lines is the joy of his paternal grandmother, Lula Mae Finley. And those black-eyed peas – you'll need a ham bone – are just black-eyed peas, unless you have the chopped bell pepper and jalapenos in there. Then you're talking about New Year's dinner with Owen Jefferson "Popo" Finley, Sr. That homemade vanilla ice cream? That's part of the legacy of the Rev. Owen Jefferson Finley, Jr., who survived the hell of Omaha Beach on D-Day before spending 38 years as pastor of the Trinity Baptist Church in McAlester, Okla. The list goes on and on.

People used to teach old recipes to their children back in the days before interstate highways, fast-food empires and televisions ate the family dinner hour, said Father John David Finley, author of "Sacred Meals: From Our Family Table." It's a book about cooking, of course, but it's also a memoir about the ties that bind his past as a Southern Baptist preacher's kid to his adult life as an Eastern Orthodox priest, composer and evangelist in Southern California.

"One of the most important things I've learned in life is that food isn't just food," he said. "At some point, I realized that I was preparing and serving certain foods at certain times of the year not just to honor or remember my grandparents and my parents, but to enter into a kind of communion with them. ...

"Suddenly I saw the Communion of the Saints in a whole different way. I realized why food has been so important to the church's theology since the very beginning."

At the deepest level, there is the bread and wine consecrated in the altar rites of the Divine Liturgy. But the ordinary foods of life play key roles in the Eastern fasting traditions of Great Lent, the six-week season in which observant Orthodox believers strive not to eat meat and dairy products. The fasting traditions of Great Lent lead to Holy Week and the great feast of Pascha, or Easter. The Orthodox feast this year is on April 23, using the ancient Julian calendar.

Father Finley said the goal, through the church's feasts and fasts, is for families to realize that the meals they share together are also sacred. Thus, the altar table and the family table are linked. Both are "manifestations of the ways that God feeds us throughout our lives," he said.

It's hard to grasp this in an age in which food is surrounded by golden arches and plastic toys more often than golden vestments, incense and icons.

"There's no room for fellowship in a McDonald's culture," he said. "Every now and then people realize this. They feel isolated and rushed and cheated. They know something is wrong."

"Sacred Meals" features commentary on this subject from an Eastern Orthodox pioneer in North America, the late theologian Father Alexander Schmemann.

"Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian," he wrote. "A meal is still a rite – the last 'natural sacrament' of family and friendship, of life that is more than 'eating' and 'drinking.' To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nevertheless desire to celebrate it."

This is precisely what Finley and his family will celebrate Sunday when the midnight rites of Holy Pascha give way to a communal feast – rich in meats, cheeses, eggs and non-Lenten treats – that will last into the hours just before dawn.

"Our basket will have to include ham, because I can't imagine a Finley feast without ham," said the priest. "Then there is that great Pascha cheese that the Russians make. It's almost like cheesecake that you spread with a knife. They eat it with that wonderful bread called 'Kulich.'

"I have to make that for the children. You know a food has become a family tradition when the children yell at you if you don't make it."

Year 17 – Reporters, crow's ears, Karma Light nuns

The Vatican is known its complex rituals, rich in ancient symbols and mysterious details. Take, for example, the funeral of Pope John Paul II, as described by the International Herald Tribune.

"The 84-year-old John Paul was laid out in Clementine Hall, dressed in white and red vestments, his head covered with a white bishop's miter and propped up on three dark gold pillows," wrote Ian Fisher of the New York Times. "Tucked under his left arm was the silver staff, called the crow's ear, that he had carried in public."

Get the joke?

You see, that ornate silver shepherd's crook is actually called a crosier (or "crozier"), not a "crow's ear."

This is the kind of error that believers love to cite as evidence that too many journalists don't know which way is up when it comes to religion. Believe me, I receive more than my share of emails offering other examples. Did a BBC producer really write a subtitle saying that "Karma Light" nuns had gathered to mourn the pope?

Part of the problem is that religious people often speak in unknown tongues and it's hard for journalists to tell what they're saying. Thus, mistakes happen. It's a bad thing to mess up the words when many of the words are sacred.

Sometimes, it helps to laugh.

Once a year, I mark this column's anniversary – this is No. 18 – by collecting some of the strange words and events from the previous 12 months that just didn't fit anywhere in particular. Obviously, I know that journalists make mistakes on the "God beat." But, believe me, the folks in the pulpits and pews can get pretty strange, too.

* Pope John Paul II made headlines in 1986 when he visited a synagogue. Thus, a BBC writer said that the new Pope Benedict XVI's "visit to the Cologne synagogue ? will mark only the second time in history that a head of the Catholic Church has entered a Jewish place of worship." A reader sent me that item with this postscript: "Not counting the apostle Peter, obviously."

* I thought this was a hoax. But it does appear that South Bronx Episcopalians have created a hip-hop Book of Common Prayer. Thus saith Bishop Catherine Roskam: "If Jesus were alive today, he would have been a rapper."

I also love that the Episcopal Network for Animal Welfare is selling its own barbecue apron. Grill on.

* Anyone seeking information on the year's hottest musical trend should visit www.hasidicreggae.com. Yes, you read that right.

* Back to Pope Benedict XVI. It seems that someone at the Associated Press needs to bone up on church history. A story from Vatican City on Nov. 27 began this way: "Pope Benedict XVI ushered in the Christmas season Sunday, calling it a time for joy when Christians should find it within themselves to hope that they can change the world." Actually, the pope was marking the start of Advent, the penitential season that precedes Christmas. The 12-day Christmas season begins on Dec. 25.

* Speaking of the Christmas wars, a journalist sent me this rather understated headline from Miami Beach: "Blindfolded Santa Hanging From Noose At Home Upsets Neighborhood." I can understand that. What I cannot understand is why some schools allow students to sing "Feliz Navidad (happy Christmas)," but not "White Christmas" and other songs that contain the C-word.

* You knew this was coming. The truly devoted can now buy an "iBelieve" device that clicks on to the top of an Apple iPod Shuffle and turns it – yes – into a large white cross that can be worn around the neck.

I believe that has a bit more class than those gym shorts with the words "Left Behind" printed, well, you can imagine where.

* The publication of 12 caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad upset many readers. However, other readers were just as upset when newspapers declined to publish them, with editors saying – to a chorus of snickers in many pews – that they did not want to offend religious believers.

Thus, one Bob Flavell wrote to the Boston Globe and said: "I find all of your editorial cartoons deeply offensive, morally, religiously, philosophically and spiritually. In fact, I don't like your editorials, either. And the editorializing in your news coverage is annoying as well. In keeping with your cowardly policy not to offend anyone, kindly cease publication at once."

God and the intellect

It's hard to laugh about religion in Northern Ireland, but Oxford theologian Alister McGrath likes to tell the following joke that hints at the challenges he faced as a young skeptic in that troubled land.

While visiting Belfast, an Englishman was cornered by three thugs. The leader asked one question: "Are you a Protestant or are you a Catholic?"

After a diplomatic pause, the Englishman said: "I am an atheist."

Confused, his attacker asked: "Are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?"

The tough religion questions continued when McGrath entered Oxford University, where he became the rare student who traded his Marxist atheism for Christianity while studying science. He would eventually earn two doctorates – in molecular biology and theology.

Today, McGrath teaches at his alma mater and is admired by academic leaders around the world who are tired of being cornered and asked: Are you a Christian or are you an intellectual?

This was a big question during the 1960s when most secular educators believed that "religion was evil" and "on the way out," said McGrath, speaking last week in Grapevine, Texas, at a global forum sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

According to the "received wisdom" of that era, a "new secular age was about to dawn," he said. "The future was all about a godless culture and the church would just have to adapt to it and that was that."

These days, even the most skeptical of scholars admit that traditional forms of religion are on the rise and that millions of spiritually hungry students are questioning the chilly, strictly rational creeds of secular modernity. Faith is making a comeback and the high priests of mainstream academia cannot understand why, said McGrath. Thus, many are getting angry and, on occasion, shrill.

These tensions are even beginning to affect the bottom line.

A small wave of mainstream news reports have noted that enrollments are up 70.6 percent during the past 14 years at the 102 schools in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, the mostly evangelical Protestant network in which I teach journalism. Over the same period of time, enrollments rose 28 percent at secular private colleges and 12.8 percent at public colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, a national survey conducted by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute found that four in five students said they are interested in spiritual issues and 75 percent said they are searching for the meaning or purpose of life.

In this environment, said McGrath, it is crucial for leaders of religious colleges to know that they have two objectives instead of one. They must help students grow in their faith while also growing intellectually.

Failure on either side of this equation is failure in the whole process. This is tricky, because many educators believe that any affirmation of orthodoxy equals fundamentalism. Meanwhile, parents often question efforts to debate religious issues.

The goal, said McGrath, is to help young roots go deeper. Christian educators have a God-given responsibility to help the plants grow.

"We are not simply reassuring students that their faith is right, that it makes sense, ... that it connects up with reality," he told the forum. "One of the big distinctives between a more secular education and what you offer is the mirroring of this love of God for every individual, of helping them to dream dreams, to see visions of where they might be, of what God might do in them and through them."

This means that professors must accept that Christianity has, over the centuries, built up an unavoidable tradition of history, art, philosophy, ethics and theology that has implications all of life. Thus, McGrath stressed that education affects both the head and the heart and that it is unwise to create two zones on campus – one spiritual and one academic.

In other words, the Christian faith has intellectual content that cannot be locked inside the chapel.

"We need a generation of economists, of lawyers, of politicians who intentionally set out to connect their faith and what they will be doing in the world, not doing it by accident or an afterthought, but rather seeing this as a God-given calling," said McGrath. Professors want their students to ask, "If I were to enter politics, how could my values and beliefs be reflected in what I say and do? And likewise with chemistry, biology, psychology, you name it."