Can you believe it's been TWO CHURCHES since I updated? This is because I also have a job. And friends who have needs. And children who have more needs and a husband who has even more needs, if you can believe that. Oh yeah, and then there's this book I'm writing about 52 churches....which leads me to an explanation of this picture here to the left. That is the backside of a Hindu temple. My friend Laura and I attended a Pooja here. Attended is a misnomer. Crashed is, perhaps, more accurate. But the worshippers were quite accomodating. They received us well and with kindness, a little bit of explanation and a couple of sweet cookie balls that we (ok I) ate on the way home. Hinduism is a freaking old religion. The ceremony we watched - full of flowers and milk and honey and sandalwood and incense - transcended both time and geography and pulled us onto the lap of Indian history for a story of faith and sacrifice and adoration.

This picture, to the right, probably requires a bit more explanation but will have to pass with less, perhaps. Carrie took this one at her church, the church of Bono. Something I've learned so far is that religion is a very wide river. I promised to keep an open mind because I am most certainly not qualified to rate or judge or even define religion. When Carrie approached me with the idea that music is her religion I first thought, will that really fly? And then I thought, hell yeah it will. Because music in general, U2 in specific is the tributary with the power to connect my friend to that wide river. What more can a religion hope to do than cause a soul to shine, move a person to tears, bring a girl home?

First Church of Christ, Scientist

Yes, it is a science.

I think that fundamentally we want the same thing. I think there's a yearning inside of us, a plug which wants nothing more than to be connected. I think that part of life, a big part - a majorly big part - is finding the right outlet. There is no correct outlet, only the right one.

Christian Science takes the bible, disects it down to it's subatomic particles, plugs it into an equation and spends a lifetime applying and solving for X. There's another book called Science and Health, by the woman who actually founded the movement, Mary Baker Eddy. The book is something of a companion to the bible in that the bible appeals to the right side of the brain and Science and Health interprets it for the left. During the service the lay readers read out loud, alternately, from the bible and from Science and Health and the listeners analyze the readings and figure out how to apply them personally. And so if you listen very carefully and allow your brain to wallow in the information being provided, perhaps you will leave the service neither heavy on the left nor heavy on the right but with a balanced understanding of the principles of this life.

So......First Congregational. What did I think? I think if Jay Gatsby ever went to church it was here. I think Molly is the hippest pastor I've ever met in my life. The day I went, the last Sunday in January, the snow was falling, the radiator clinked and hissed, the wool mittens and sweaters steamed and I listened to a sermon on death and dying and growing old gracefully that was all at once difficult and poignant and funny. And then I was invited down into the underbelly of the church for one heck of a spread. Bagels and coffee and something that filled the air with the tang of curry. I met some really fun people...a man who can compose winter songs from mid-air, a Harvard Divinity School student who will make the most empathetical pastor someday, and a couple of girls who made me laugh and made me welcome.

And then.....we went to Mexico. Where we attended a blessing ceremony held by a Mayan Shaman.

We held hands in the middle of the jungle, ever aware of the proximity of uncountable jaguars and pumas and crocodiles, atop a ceynote where the corpses of great Mayan kings were thrown. The threshold of earth and the underworld. An ancient Mayan dressed in white, chanted something and burned a resin that smelled like sandalwood but came from a nearby tree and he blessed us - me, my husband, two Germans and four Canadians. I understood nothing. But I didn't have to because there a universal meaning to spirituality and sometimes the inability to understand makes things clearer.