Since I grew up in a nominally Episcopalian family — my parents did not go to church, and prayer was unknown in our home, even grace at meals — I suspect I learned some of the early sense of what I am comfortable calling God's presence from my nanny when I was very young, until I was five; that and roaming the woods, fields and lakeside near our home on Mercer Island. As Wordsworth says, it is the earth that is "apparell'd in celestial light" for those who have eyes to see.
My nanny's name was Marian. I have photographs but no real memory of her; she created a wonderful scrapbook of my life as infant and small child. I spent more time with her than with my parents. She put me to bed, played with me, dressed me, sat me on the pot (I was taught to shout "Finis!" to call her back), in effect raised me, along with the kind Secret Service agent assigned to my protection, Henry Hazen, who drove me back and forth to school and kept a watchful eye as I explored.
Later, when I was a more grown up boy, in the autumn of my eleventh year, I had a very long paper route. I took shopping news, not a real newspaper, from house to house along the streets of homes before the hill begins to rise above the town of Berkeley, California. It was a lonely time, despite my mother's best efforts to offer companionship.
I was grateful for the times we spent together, especially when we set up a card table in front of the television, ate our meal - I especially remember ground lamb on a stick, a ground lamb drumstick, with mint jelly - and watched a drama called "Studio One." But there were too few of those times. My mother worked during the days I went to Garfield Junior High School, and she had a boyfriend, a doctor named Leo Doyle. I recall little of those school days. The most vivid recollection is of the school library and the librarian, Nell Stone, who befriended me. I used to sit with a book in the cubby under her desk. I climbed trees, swinging from branch to branch like a monkey. And I loved to clamber onto people's house roofs at night, looking in at scenes of their lives, unobserved.
My father died that year in New York. He had suffered from recurrent depression for most of his life, and without work he respected, separated from the woman he loved, with almost no money other than a life insurance policy of which I was beneficiary (he returned his wife's check, unwilling to accept her assistance), he chose to jump from an eighth floor window of a hotel in mid-town Manhattan. Because of his connection with the Roosevelt family, the news of his suicide was in newspapers all over the country. Much later, I learned that he had left me a short note: "My dear Johnny, Goodbye my son. I love you dearly. I have faith and pride in you. You will make a great and useful man. I wish I could watch you grow. I love you. Pops"
I remember the telephone ringing in the early morning, my mother answering, the seriousness of her voice. Somehow I knew what she was hearing. I missed my father, and had received only postcards and Christmas presents from FAO Schwartz in the two years since we had last been together. I also feared him. Of his last visit to our home in Los Angeles, the only memory I have is that he drove a maroon Ford with a curmpled fender. Earlier, after he left our home in Phoenix, he took me to two dude ranches in Arizona. All my memories are of being frightened: his teaching me to shoot his pistol, waking in our cabin at night to see a figure standing over me, seeing a tarantula beside the swimming pool, feeding pigs that hungrily drove at me standing on a stump, an image of a wire stretching across a riding trail that seemed just the height to decapitate a boy on horseback.
I lay awake that morning of my eleventh year, knowing that my mother would come into my room to tell me. I pretended surprise. She said I didn't have to go to school that day, but I saw no reason not to go. What good would it do to stay home? When I walked into my homeroom, the teacher said she was sorry my father had died. "That's OK," I replied, as if I wanted to comfort her. I just wanted to escape her attention, be by myself. That afternoon, my mother asked her friend Leo to come in and ask me if I wanted to talk. With him? I thought. No way. So for many years, my mother thought I would ask to hear about my father "when I was ready."
She wrote my father's widow Virginia, "For the present I have decided not to show Johnny the farewell letter his father wrote him or any of the other letters, because Johnny still hasn't reached the stage where he talks naturally and normally about his father. As you say, we can never be quite sure of what goes on deep inside a child, and Johnny has been almost completely 'bottled up' about his father since he died.... So, all I can do at present, it seems to me, is to bring John into our conversations whenever it seems natural and easy, hoping that before long, whatever bothers him about his father's death will come out in the open and can be talked out." That readiness was long in coming.
One night during my college years, a decade later, I was living with my grandmother Eleanor. Her grandchildren called her Grandmère. I had given her that morning, as I was leaving for my summer job with a publishing house (pasting reviews into scrapbooks), a short essay I had written on the United Nations. At 1 or 2 AM, when I returned home, Grandmère was still up, at her desk dealing with a small mountain of correspondence, the only light a small gooseneck lamp over her desk. She was playing Gregorian chants on the phonograph.
When I arrived she asked me in. She told me that she had read my essay and enjoyed it, and said — this was what I was waiting for without knowing it — "Johnny, your writing reminds me of your father's writing." She asked me to join her sitting by the fireplace, and finally I began to learn about my father. My grandmother told me she had loved him. She was still troubled, a decade after his death, that she had been able to do nothing to save him.
I write all this because it was in a sense prelude to my experience of that endless paper route. Walking along, bored, throwing shopping news onto front porches, I began to talk with God. I suspected I was wishing I could talk with my father, imagining I could, if I made up his voice in my head. I did that a lot in the years to come. But this time felt different. How was I to know if I was talking with God, or my father, or my imagination? The solution came to me with the plainness of self-evidence. If the voice I heard used the word "altar," it was God speaking. No one else would know to use that word in talking with me. So I talked with God. I have no memory of what we said to each other, but I felt companionship. I was less alone.
Why "altar"? I have no idea. I thought of an altar not as a place of sacrifice but as a gathering place of sacred objects — the cross, a chalice of wine, a plate of bread, the body and blood of Christ, which I knew in some mysterious way became mine — all of ours — in the symbolic transsubstantiation that is communion, the eucharist.
I suppose I complained about my paper route, because soon after I took to leaving bundles of shopping news in the hedge, rather than delivering something that was so useless. It didn't occur to me that my sense of utility might have been different from the families along my route. One day the director of paper distribution came to our door, explained to my mother what I'd been doing, and I had to go with him and pull the sopping bundles out of the hedge. I was summarily dismissed from my job, which I may have thought God's will.
In fact, I didn't think that. I don't recall God's speaking to me about my practice, but I was sure he didn't approve. My mother certainly didn't, and she was about as close to God as I got in the years after those conversations along my lonely route.
Still, the memory of those conversations stayed with me, are still with me more than sixty years later. My rational mind says the presence, the voice that kept me companion, was my imagination. In fact, I have no way of knowing. My family is not particularly religious. But I loved to go to church. I often went to St. James Church in Hyde Park with my grandmother when no one else in the family staying with her would go.
The music, the prayers, the incense, the very words of the liturgy, the sign of the cross, the portraits of Mary with her son, the crucifixion, the mystery of the trinity, especially the ceremony of communion, all drew me. Later I liked to find a church, most often a Catholic church, to sit alone in contemplation.
I feel almost as much at home in a Zen Buddhist sangha, or in the congregation of which my son Joshua is rabbi. I remember significant moments: going early in the morning and serving the priest in a small service at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a time in Berkeley when I was asked to speak one of the passages from the Bible. I shook with nervousness. A hand reached out, touched my back from behind in reassurance, like the touch I described in the Zen story I wrote yesterday.
I no longer talk with God. Once in a lifetime is enough. I pray. I meditate. I sit in churches. If God responds, he does so unbeknownst to me, as mediator in my life, and for that I am grateful. The mystery remains.
There are many who in my adult years have had a formative role in enriching my spiritual experience. They include Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, poet Christian Wiman, Zen teacher Norman Fischer, my son, Rabbi Joshua Boettiger, the great Sufi mystic Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, the Hasidic stories of the Baal Shem Tov and his followers, translator and poet Stephen Mitchell (particularly his Gospel According to Jesus, his poem "Jerome," and his translation of The Book of Job), the scholar of Jewish mysticism Abraham Joshua Heschel, the monks of Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, my dear friend and founder of the Cornerstone Forum, Gil Bailie, the congregants of St. Olav's Church at Modum Bad, in Vikersund, Norway, Isak Dinesen's tales, particularly "Babette's Feast" and the extraordinary film made from that story, Beethoven's pair of crowning achievements, his Missa Solemnis and his Ninth Symphony, Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine, and some of the songs of Leonard Cohen.