An Interesting Journey, but Few Answers

As the countdown to the next millennium approaches its final climax, we are being inundated with what might be called “looking for God” books. The millennium may not mean anything empirically, but we have invested it with eschatological significance. It is a rare person who has not stopped suddenly in recent months, realized that the year 2000 is only X months away and wondered what, if anything, it all means.

Winifred Gallagher doesn’t specifically mention the millennium in “Working on God,” but this book about her three-year odyssey neatly fits the “looking for God” mold. “This is a book for people who aren’t sure about religion,” she begins, and it’s evident that she herself is one of those people, a neo-agnostic who is skeptical of religion yet can’t deny the occasional metaphysical feelings that overcome her. And so she embarks on a journey of discovery through three faiths--Judaism, Christianity and Zen Buddhism--and through New Age communities such as Esalen in Northern California. The result is a very American travelogue, a road-trip diary with dollops of pilgrimage narrative. Like the travelogue, Gallagher’s book is not about the destination but about the journey, and like a pilgrimage story, it takes the reader to specific religious places and recreates them. Gallagher arrives at the end of the book not with answers to “what is real” and “what are my choices,” but with a new set of questions, about how to live in the secular world in a secular city and still keep working on God.

Gallagher structures the book as a series of vignettes portraying the extreme diversity of her search: in a Zen monastery in California, in a Zen monastery in New York, talking with nuns in a convent, talking with theologians such as Huston Smith and Harvey Cox in Berkeley and Cambridge, sipping coffee in upper Manhattan with the rector of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, grappling with her Catholicism, having a vision in Jerusalem and studying Torah with different rabbis and different congregations at different synagogues.

Some of these experiences are quite touching. Gallagher’s prose is simple, direct and unadorned, much like Zen meditation is supposed to be. She appears neither self-indulgent nor overly self-involved, and it’s easy to relate to her as a typical white, educated, middle-class, middle-aged urban professional. Like the skilled reporter she is, Gallagher offers capsule portraits of monks, priests, rabbis, nuns and theologians. One of the best is of the ever-eclectic Huston Smith and his weekly regimen of yoga, Muslim prayer, church on Sunday, reading the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and then grounding himself in ecology by composting.

Her account of praying in St. John’s after learning of her son’s cancer is particularly affecting. She recalls the way total strangers came up to her as she sobbed in the middle of the Eucharist ceremony. “For the next several minutes,” she writes, “we all just sat there with the kind of event that makes plain just how much control over life we really have.” And in that moment of just sitting there, she felt the power of community that religion, at its strongest, can provide.

Overall, however, the total amounts to something less than the sum of its parts. It’s hard to justify a criticism of someone’s honest quest for God and meaning, but at the same time, it’s hard to justify more than 300 pages of what often feels like aimless rambling. Gallagher clearly learned about herself and about numerous different experiences of God and religion, and she frequently succeeds in conveying those experiences. But telling us what she saw and felt doesn’t rise to the level of a sustainable theme over the course of a book, and her writing isn’t poetic enough to be compelling on a purely literary level.

The millennium has cracked open the lid of secular culture, and faced with the low buzz of questioning, publishers are offering books that speak to what Gallagher calls “neo-agnostic” concerns. The problem lies not with the questions, but with the presumption that the questions alone are a sufficient basis for a narrative. No doubt some readers will identify with Gallagher or some of her subjects, and they will feel comforted to know that they are not alone in their search. Perhaps that is all she intended. Still, we can ask more from books and from authors. We can ask that they challenge us, that they make us think, that they make us pause, and that they let us reconsider that which we take for granted. We can ask that they take us on a journey, and that at its end, we have arrived somewhere where we weren’t before.

Zachary Karabell is a frequent contributor to the Times Religion page.