The Harvard undergraduate course catalog was the size of a phone book. I’d gone from having very limited choices while growing up to so many options, it was overwhelming. Two weeks before classes began, I was hiking up Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire on a freshmen orientation camping trip. Our hiking leader was a senior, so I thought I’d pick her brain.
“You should check out Diana Eck’s comparative world religions class,” she said.
“Um, okay . . . thanks.”
What I was thinking is, Uh, no thanks. I had little interest in religion. I was raised in a liberal, reform Jewish family that celebrated the High Holidays and Passover—sort of like Christian families who go to church only on Christmas and Easter. Mostly, my family enjoyed the cultural aspects of Judaism, especially eating large quantities of home-cooked food with loved ones. Outside of reading prayers during holiday services, there was no mention of any sort of “God.” I had no idea if anyone in my family even believed in one.
Culturally, I was raised a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). My family was one of only a few Jewish families in our tiny rural town where the deer outnumbered the people three to one. For those who remember the popular Preppy Handbook of the 1980s, those Muffys and Biffs in the bright pink Izods were my peers. I was the preppy who carried the lime green Bermuda bag but who occasionally ate latkes.
It wasn’t easy being one of the few Jewish kids in school.
“Where are your horns?” asked Evan, the boy who sat behind me in fourth grade.
“My mom says that Jews have horns because they killed Jesus.”
“I don’t have any horns!” I said, blushing.
When the head of the junior high cheerleaders found out I was Jewish, she nicknamed me “Hanny” for Hanukkah. For years, kids refused to call me by my real name.
One morning, I came running into class one minute before the bell rang and slid into my seat. As I put down my notebook, I noticed that someone had carved a swastika on my desk.
When it was time to enroll, my trip leader’s suggestion kept niggling at my brain. Finally, I decided to give the religion class a go.
When I walked in on the first day, I half expected to be welcomed by burning incense and meditation cushions in place of desks. Instead, I found a diverse, but fairly normal looking group. There were a few stand-outs: a bald, Burmese monk in a saffron robe, a girl with multiple piercings in Guatemalan print pants, and a guy in a dress shirt and slacks wearing a prayer shawl. But everyone else was just your regular college kid in jeans.
The passionate discussions, meanwhile, were anything but the norm.
“Religion is a pathetic crutch!” said Nat, the atheist.
“What do you believe in, then?” Tammy asked, perplexed. Earlier, she had invited me to the Catholic Student Association’s spaghetti dinner.
“I think we all need to detach from our definitions of religion,” said Cho. He was a Buddhist.
I was fascinated. I still felt like an outside observer, but I loved hearing what people believe at their deepest levels and why.
Our midterms were after the holiday break, so I only had a couple of weeks to get ready. Tilting back in my chair in my bedroom in New Jersey, I contemplated the stack of books in front of me. I picked up a thin paperback with a brown and black cover called Honest to God.
Within seconds, I was drawn in. The author was an English bishop named John A. T. Robinson who, while bedridden, took a hard look at his faith. Among other things, he questioned the expectation that people must instantly feel religious when the church bell rings. For him, the most authentic prayer was “waiting for the moment that drives us to our knees.”1
As I read his words, I felt a warm “lightning flash” inside my head and chest—a simultaneous intellectual and emotional “aha.” I’d always had trouble praying on demand and had just assumed I wasn’t religious. But if I understood Robinson correctly, the sense of something beyond myself that I often felt in nature and while writing in my journal was in fact a form of connection to a Higher Power. I didn’t have to follow the rules and dogma of any particular religion. I could pick out the teachings and rituals that resonated with me from different faiths and create some of my own, forging my own spiritual smorgasbord.
As this powerful realization sunk in, the colorful stripes on my childhood wallpaper started to blur and merge before my eyes. I no longer felt the desk and chair beneath me; I lost all awareness of my body. Soon, I completely dissolved—floating in a buzzing, limitless “electricity” that felt both like nothingness and all there is. Suddenly, a surge of warmth gushed in, and I was flooded with an incredible feeling of loving and of being loved and a deep understanding that I was connected to everything and everyone in the entire world. I stayed in this euphoric state until a chirping bird flew me back into my body at dawn.
I still didn’t consider myself a religious person, but one thing was certain: That night, there was no denying the inexplicable connection I felt to something much bigger than myself, and that something felt like pure love. Spirituality was no longer something merely intellectual and outside of me. I now recognized it as the deepest part of my being.
A few weeks later, I chose my field of study: Comparative World Religions with a minor in Psychology.
“Comparative what?” my mom asked.
I laughed. I knew exactly what she felt.
“Why don’t you major in computer science?”
“Ugh, banging on a keyboard all day and sitting in front of a screen? I’ll go mad! Besides, what could be more important than learning what matters most to people on their most profound level?”
“Take at least one programming class.”
“Forget it, Mom.”
Senior year, I had to write a culminating paper encapsulating all four years of my college studies. It was due in a few weeks, and I was still struggling to choose a topic. I had read and discussed every major religious text, from the Bible to the Buddhist Sutras, and studied all the foremost schools of psychology—Skinner, Freud, Jung, Maslow, and more—how could I put it all together into a thesis-length paper, focused around a single question?
I thought about my two favorite religious scholars, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Mahatma Gandhi. Smith was a renowned religious historian who pioneered the comparative study of religions. He discouraged the “we’re right, you’re wrong” attitude and instead advocated the “pluralist” view that all world religions are equally valid. Gandhi took it one step further and wrote, “Just as a tree has many branches but one root, similarly, the various religions are the leaves and branches of the same tree.”2
I was intrigued, yet confused. Were all religions leading to the same, shared “truth,” or was everyone walking toward different, but equal, truths? Did it matter?
That was it! I had to go find Smith, a comparative religion scholar who had taught at Harvard. I’d heard he was still alive and living in Toronto. My burning question was this: Did he, like Gandhi, believe that all world religions lead to the same ultimate truth?
Four days later, I was in his home. His wife Muriel welcomed me in, serving me tea and straightening the red and blue crocheted Afghan on her husband’s lap. Professor Smith was a kindly white-haired man with glasses, who spoke softly and thoughtfully while rocking in his mahogany chair. We talked for over three hours. By the end of our conversation, he confirmed that he did believe that all world religions were variations of the same ultimate reality. I thanked him profusely for his wisdom and hospitality.
After listening to the interview tape, I realized