expresses in dramatic and corporeal form a sacred belief system in words, music, imagery, aromas, tastes, and bodily movement. In liturgy, worshippers both perform and observe, act out truth and have the truth act on them, remember the past and carry it into the future.” It’s weirdly powerful to open your arms in worship; the small physical act opens up the mind and makes vulnerable the heart.
The second ramp is the ramp of unabashed faith. You almost never see unabashed faith at a conservative Jewish shul, but you often see it at an Orthodox one, men enclosed in their tallit, rocking and wailing away, giving themselves over to worship. Similarly, you almost never see unabashed faith at a mainline Protestant church, unless it’s faith in the Sierra Club. But you do see it at charismatic churches, where the hands are up, the eyes are closed, the hallelujahs are at high decibel. Sure, there’s a performance element. But there is something contagious about faith that is unafraid to express itself.
The third ramp is prayer. I’m not a good prayer myself. I often end up directing my words more to the person I’m with than to God. I unfortunately always perform literary criticism on my prayers, while I’m saying them and just after—ugh, that one was boring, that one sort of lost coherence at the end. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert writes that “human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” My prayers are like that.
But even a person who is just on the way can pray. Prayer is an encounter and conversation with God. The easiest prayers to say are prayers of thanksgiving, for a meal or some other good thing. Even these easy prayers are good prayers, because gratitude is a soil in which egotism tends not to grow.
Our conversations change depending on whom we are talking to. Talking to God is a confrontation with grace, which is not just His unmerited love, but the kind of love that flows most powerfully to the demerits of the one who is receiving it. The deeper prayers thus have a wonderful quality that are not like conversation with normal people. The emotional tone of that kind of prayer is hard to capture in prose. Many people point to George Herbert’s poem:
Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
…
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise.
Over time prayer reorients the desires. The very act of talking to God inclines a person in a certain way; you want to have a conversation appropriate to Him; you want to bend your desires to please and glorify Him. Just as old couples become more like each other over time, the person who spends years hearing and responding to God’s company becomes more like Him, at the secret level, the places only God can see.
The fourth ramp is spiritual consciousness. We in the secular world tend to reduce everything to material cause and effect—economics, voting patterns, international relations. But that lens is constantly getting things wrong, because human beings are not just material creatures driven by narrowly defined economic and political self-interests.
When you are with the best of the faithful, no matter what you are talking about, you are having a richer conversation. Religious communities naturally talk about the whole person, the heart and soul as much as the body and mind. When religious communities minister to the poor, when religious colleges teach their students, they minister to and teach them as whole people, who need not just money but dignity, love, and purpose.
The fifth ramp is the language of good and evil. This language, too, has been largely abandoned in the public world. The word “sin” is now mostly used in reference to dessert. But if you want to talk about the deepest journey, you need words like “sin,” “soul,” “degradation,” “redemption,” “holiness,” and “grace.” If you want to have some conception of life on a vertical axis, you need some conception of the various gradations of goodness and badness. When you walk into the religious world and find even just a few people thinking and talking about these things subtly, intelligently, and carefully, it is