God Factor Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People

Excerpted fromThe God Factorby Cathleen Falsani. Copyright 2006 by Cathleen Falsani. Published in March 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION Call them glimpses of grace, moments of clarity, or epiphanies. However you choose to describe them, we've all had themsplit seconds when something suddenly makes sense, when the pieces of the puzzle fit together. If you are particularly luckyblessed, some would sayyou can assemble those bits of transcendence into a clear vision of how things really are and how life, every now and again, comes full circle. The circle started for me in the living room of my friend Rob Lunetta's house in 1982, and it comes back around here, in this book. I can remember it vividly, a twelve-year-old me standing there with my buddy Rob, fiddling with the stereo, as he put on an album someone recently had given him. "I think you'll like it. They're an Irish rock band, but they're Christians," he said, as the first track started up. Drums faded in, a bass guitar thumped, and a man's rogue tenor voice the likes of which I'd never heard before started howling, "Gloria, glo-reeeee-aaah TWO, THREE, FOUR!" as a guitar began to keen. "I try to sing this song, I try to stand up but I can't find my feet, I try, I try to speak up but only in you I am complete.Gloria in te domine, Gloria exultate, Gloria, Gloria, O Lord, loosen my lips!" the guy yawped, guitars wailing. My soul did a backflip. "I try to sing this song, I try to get in but I can't find the door. The door is open, you're standing there, you let me inGLORIA!" The words were familiara psalm, a chant from the liturgy, an image of Christ standing at the door (of our hearts) and knocking. I recognized them all from church. But somehow they'd never had that kind of effect on me. As the next tracks played, one after the other filled with biblical imagery and declarations of spiritual yearning, I was absolutely transfixed by the extraordinary mix of faith with rock 'n' rolla forbidden fruit at my house, where we were supposed to be in the world but not of it. Who were these guys? How were they doing this? And who else was managing to do it, too? Hearing U2's albumOctoberfor the first time set me on a course that continues today: To discover God in the places some people say God isn't supposed to be. To look for the truly sacred in the supposedly profane. To find the kind of unmatched inspiration and spiritual elation elsewhere in culture that I had found that day in Rob's living room. I'd always been fascinated by religionmy parents tell stories of me at age five or six sitting on the floor of our family room poring over a coffee-table book of world religions, with its pictures of whirling dervishes, Muslim women in hijab, Hindu girls with hennaed hands, gilded icons of Russian Orthodoxy, and giant Japanese Buddhas. Religion was a huge part of my life growing up, first in Roman Catholicism and then in the strange new land of evangelical Protestantism. I wasand ama believer. But after my musical baptism, I became consumed by the idea that spirituality could be expressed just as articulately, perhaps even more so, outside a house of worship as in it, and that faith could be lived in radically different ways. Twenty-odd years later, I'm still looking, fascinated as ever. It's what motivated my decision to study journalism as well as theology with the intention of becoming a reporter who covers the diverse world of religion and spirFalsani, Cathleen is the author of 'God Factor Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People', published 2007 under ISBN 9780374530921 and ISBN 0374530920.