While browsing through the "recommended" section of books at our local public library, we spotted Spiritual Genius: The Mastery of Life's Meaning. Spot remover didn't work, so we bought the book, read it, and found our buddy Tony Campolo discussed as a spiritual peer of Huston Smith and Rabbi Lawrence Kushner — among other illustrious holy people. But as Winifred Gallagher searches for the meaning of spiritual genius, she also astutely compares Tony to that crazy speeding frog from Wind in the Willows, revealing true Doorish insight.
      Gallagher's previous book, Working on God, analyzes the struggle of modern people, herself included, to find spiritual truth. The New York Times listed her 1996 book, ID: How Heredity and Experience Make You Who You Are, as a Notable Book. Gallagher has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and now she humbly reaches the pinnacle of her career — The Door Interview.
     Always nervous about interacting with bona fide intellectuals, we carried on an email correspondence before we spoke, to smooth the way a bit. We gained great confidence when Gallagher quoted her favorite scripture, "Many sins are forgiven her, because she has loved much." And when she referred to Paul saying, "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up," we knew things would be OK.

THE DOOR MAGAZINE: You've been billed as a science writer for many years — are some of your readers skeptical about the spiritual bent your writing has taken lately?
WINIFRED GALLAGHER: I'm sure some critics are. There's a lot of hostility toward religion in the chattering classes. There are lots of people who thought I was writing about some pretty smart stuff, and kinda figured, "Well, what is she doing?" My first two books are about behavioral science, and the book I'm working on now is on behavioral science. The religion books really were, for me, a bit of a departure from my previous work. The great subject that I'm interested in is why we are the way we are. My first book was about how environment impacts the way we think and feel and act. My second book was about how genes and experience, nature and nurture, affect those same things. After examining the environment and the organisms, I was still left with some questions about why we are the way we are. I thought I would end up learning more about philosophy, but I ending up being led more toward religion. For most of human history there hasn't been a difference between religion and philosophy, and I found that the great treasure trove of information about questions of meaning lay within religion.
DOOR: Has your investigation into spiritual life given you any unexpected insight into questions about human identity?
GALLAGHER: What I've studied would confirm what all the great spiritual traditions, all in their different languages, say, which is that a part of human identity is the divine spark, the sacred spark. Whether you feel, as Hindus do, that it's a piece of God, or whether you call it a "soul," this is a deep intuition that all the great faiths share. We're not just a pile of meat — whether you say there's something about us that is trying to reach higher, or unify itself with some great whole — whatever language works for you. Religion says that we do have this element to us that science doesn't explain. Consciousness is mysterious, and whoever figures it out will get the Nobel prize. No scientist can prove there's a God, but Carl Sagan — who was at least an agnostic [Editor's Note: But also a Door fan] — also said that no scientist can prove that there isn't a God. It's a perfectly respectable intellectual position to believe in a transcendent, mysterious reality.
DOOR: Isn't it a lot harder to write about than chemistry or genetics or other things that we can wrap our hands and minds around?
GALLAGHER: I don't know that it is more difficult. The thing about God is that most people, I would say all people, have experiences of the divine. Some people, for one reason or another, don't recognize them. Either they haven't been taught to, or it's hard for them, or their other experiences contradict it. But when I allude to this sacred reality, anywhere in the world, people lock into it — and they know what I'm talking about, even if they can't articulate it. So compared to the number of people who can really understand genetic influences on personality, this is an awfully big group. This is very helpful in terms of global affairs, understanding, and tolerance.
     It's ironic that the world seems caught up in religious conflicts, or quarrels with lots of religious verbiage in them, because this is also an era of unprecedented religious tolerance in many countries. America has become a vastly more spiritually diverse place. In my mother's community in New Jersey, she's treated almost exclusively by Hindu doctors. People practicing non-Christian religions are everywhere in the U.S. There are more Muslims in the U.S. than Jews or Episcopalians, and the number is growing rapidly. The Dalai Lama has a huge audience here and around the world, an enormous number of whom don't know the first thing about Tibetan Buddhism, nor does that concern them. I can't think of another time in history when someone like the Dalai Lama could fill football stadiums. I think we have to keep both of those things in mind. Yes, there is terrible religious conflict, but there's also enormous effort at understanding.
DOOR: OK, then I'll skip the question about how you feel about "working on God" while wars are being fought in God's name ...
GALLAGHER: God didn't invent religion. People did. It's a human institution, like politics. Blaming religion for war is like blaming democracy for some failure in the Republican Party. Religion is only as good as we make it. It's our institution for approaching the sacred. It wasn't invented by the sacred for us.
DOOR: Is there a tension between working on God and being worked on by God?
GALLAGHER: My feeling is that God is always working on us, 24/7. Most of the time most of us don't see that, because we're not working on God. The more we work on God, the more we see God working on us. I would argue that a mystic, or a totally enlightened being, is a person who is in a constant state of consciousness of the reality of God, so that everything that happens is God's work. If a sparrow drops off a tree, that person is aware of God's finger. Ninety nine percent of the time, like everybody else, I'm not thinking about God at all. If something bad happens I ask, "Where the hell is He?" But I've noticed that the more energy I put into my spiritual life, the more conscious I am of God's presence. Spiritual fitness is a lot more like physical fitness than we like to think. We like everything to be comfortable; we want to be spiritual couch potatoes, but spiritual life is more like going to the gym. Religious orders understand this. Whether you're a Buddhist monk or a Christian monk, you have a real regimen laid out for you which has been created over the centuries. You spend a lot of your day working on God, or working on the sacred. These regimens of marking different times of the day by prayer so that you're constantly keeping God in your mind are not accidental. These traditions have sprung up all over the world. This works.
DOOR: Aren't there any spiritual steroids that could give similar results?
GALLAGHER: —
DOOR: Sorry. Bad karma day. Would you say that most of the people that you studied and interviewed for Spiritual Genius have that kind of awareness?
GALLAGHER: Yes. They're exceptionally enlightened beings. The book could have been called Ten Great Saints, except that "saints" is kind of a Christian word — although it's used in other traditions. I wanted to make it as universal as possible. These are extraordinary people who have a kind of unshakable root in ultimate reality, unlike the rest of us. The reason they can accomplish what they do is that they have this enormous energy that comes from not always wrestling with doubts and anxieties. They've decided that they know what ultimate reality is, and they're just going to cooperate with it nonstop. That helps explain why somebody like Dr. V (Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy) can end up curing hundreds of thousands of blind people, and do delicate eye operations, with hands that look like claws. Or why Brother James Kimpton can build 7,000 houses for the poorest of the poor, and then decide that's not enough because they also need medical care, schooling, dowries for the girls, orphanages ... how else can you explain that energy? He's one elderly guy. When we are clear about what we think is real, we can do unbelievable things.
DOOR: Is there a tension between spiritual seeking and writing about it? Do these things go together naturally?
GALLAGHER: For me they do. I just couldn't believe that I was getting paid to look into these spiritual questions. While I was doing the religion books there was no separation between my so-called private life, and my professional life. This was a rare privilege for which I will always be enormously grateful. My thing is to take a big squishy subject, like behavior, or God, and try to figure out ways that well-educated people are comfortable approaching these subjects, without being embarrassed.
DOOR: Boy, it's a good thing we're not well-educated!
GALLAGHER: If you look at the way psychology and behavior is covered in the mainstream media that's catering to educated people, like The New York Times, you'll see that it's treated with a lot of the same nervousness or aversion that religion gets. People in this country who have elite educations are trained along the lines of scientific materialism, so that science establishes what's real. If science can't prove it, then it isn't real. We're very nervous about things like feelings and religion, highly personal things, they don't seem scientific, they seem, I don't know, "womanish" — completely embarrassing. The people who seem to like what I work on are trying to approach religion in a way that respects their background, culture, and mindset. Not that it's right or wrong, but there are an awful lot of people who have trouble just finding a way to begin to think about a religious life because they've been trained that religion is for dummies.
DOOR: Somebody warned them about us. Hmm. In Working on God you posited that we were experiencing a significant millennial spiritual revolution. You don't think current spiritual conditions might be repeating a natural historical cycle resulting from religions and cultures aging and mingling?
GALLAGHER: No, I really do think something different is going on now. In survey after survey if you ask people what religion is, the great majority will say it's an experience, rather than it's a bunch of dogmatic beliefs. That's a big change, in America. But I don't think that's disassociated from the present global information exchange. I know that fundamentalists think that God only gave truth to Christians, but I'm Episcopalian, and it's very difficult for me to imagine that the two-thirds of the world that isn't Christian is just clueless. Thousands of years of religious philosophy in Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam is just a bunch of hokum? That seems to be a very difficult position, from my point of view, to defend.
     Many convinced Christians, Jews, Buddhists, whatever, are looking at religious insights and religious masters from other traditions. In sheer numbers of people, this is historically unprecedented. I think it's phenomenal that you can go to a church, and end up hearing a Buddhist speak. You can do yoga, a Hindu religious practice, in the church basement.
DOOR: Dang. So the fundamentalists were right about yoga.
GALLAGHER: Even people who don't think they have an eclectic spiritual life, if you look into it, they do. Many devout Jews and Christians practice Buddhist mindfulness. The Catholic Church's centering prayers are basically Buddhist mindfulness, it's now taught in monasteries, and lots of Catholics do this Buddhist practice.
DOOR: In Working on God, you also write about "neo-agnostics." How are they different from your basic plain old everyday run-of-the-mill neighborhood agnostics?
GALLAGHER: A plain old agnostic actually takes a rigorous intellectual position. The fathers of our country were kind of agnostic-deists. An atheist says, "There's no God, there's no sacred anything, it's just a lot of hooey, forget it." An agnostic says, "I think there's a God who got the whole ball rolling, but now it's up to us." I think a neo-agnostic is someone who says, "There may or may not be a God, who may or may not still be involved with us, I just don't know — I think there may be something, but I'm not sure." I think the reason there are so few real atheists or agnostics — combined, it's less than 2% of the American public — is because you have to do quite a bit of work to get to that point.
DOOR: We're too lazy to be atheists?
GALLAGHER: I think there's a much bigger group of people whose college experiences and friends encourage them to think that religion is for dummies, and that it's silly. Since no one can prove that there's a God, it's not all that respectable. On the other hand, they have these funny experiences, and what are they going to do about that? I love the surveys about religion and miracles. One of the Gallup polls showed that a third of the American public, about 80 million people or so, believed that they had experienced a miracle in their lives. That's a big statement. There was a large sample of people with post-graduate degrees that answered "No" to the question, "Do you believe in miracles?" but "Yes" to the question, "Have you ever had a miracle in your life?" There's the neo-agnostic.
DOOR: Well, I can't believe myself, either, a lot of the time ...
GALLAGHER: The neo-agnostic says, "My intellect can't really go there, but gosh, this funny thing happened to me the other day."
DOOR: You've gone to a lot of difficult places. What did you learn about God from your experience with your son's cancer?
GALLAGHER: I learned that I do believe this stuff. Let me backtrack a little. When my husband was a little boy, he lost his brother to leukemia, which was essentially untreatable back then. His whole family stopped going to church because it didn't seem like there could be a God any more. If there were a God, how could he let this happen to this wonderful little boy? I think that's a very real, common reaction. When my son got cancer, of course I prayed for him to be healed. But the thing that astounded me was that I remember being on my knees saying, "Even if the worst happens, I still believe that life is good, and that in some mysterious way that I can't possibly imagine, all of this, even this, will be redeemed. I believe in that. I'm not going to get mad, or bitter, or despair." That really impressed me. I thought, "Hey, I must really believe this stuff." I think it's easy to be fascinated by religion — it's arguably the most interesting subject anyone can study — even if they're not a believer. Religion is an enormous treasure trove of culture, art, philosophy, ideas, and history, and I love all that stuff, but this was a wake-up moment for me. This is not just an intellectual exercise that I'm doing — this is a worldview.
DOOR: What do you know about Jesus?
GALLAGHER: Jesus is the 900-pound gorilla for a lot of people. For me, a Christian is a person who in some way experiences Jesus as a presence right here, right now. I don't know whether "know" is the right word, but what I can say about Jesus is that sometimes He is right here right now for me in a way that I can't think of any other person. It's because of that, that I really can't be anything other than a Christian, you know?
DOOR: Yup. I do.
GALLAGHER: If you just think Jesus is a lovely sort of guy ...
DOOR: I'm not sure he's that lovely...
GALLAGHER: ... a wonderful teacher — a lot of people say he's one of the world's great wisdom teachers — he's right up there with Moses and Buddha. In an objective way, that can be quite true. But for me, He's also something else, in a way those others aren't. I just don't see how you can get around that. After a lot of churning and thrashing, I just decided to go with it. Jesus was a Jew, a rabbi. He was the first teacher in scripture to get the title, "rabbi." A rabbi and biblical scholar, Burt Visotzky, told me that, so I know it's right.
DOOR: So Gamaliel, the head of the Sanhedran at the time, wasn't called rabbi?
GALLAGHER: Burt Visotzky, a great scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary, said that Jesus is the first person to be called by that title. Jesus was a Jewish rabbi teaching Judaism. A lot of what Christians follow is Judaism — the ethical teachings are Jewish. What I think is different about Christianity, and what makes it easy to ridicule, is that Christians really believe that this guy did something, and does something, to people. We think that through a relationship with Him life is transformed. I guess I have to say I'm with them there!

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