Losing My Religion (4 page)

In the fall of 1997, I landed a meeting with the editor and the president of the Orange County edition, both of whom I knew well because of my work at Times Community News. We sat around a small conference table in the president’s office. I took a deep breath, said a quick silent prayer and made my pitch.

“What if I told you that you have an institution in Orange County that draws more than 15,000 people a weekend and that you haven’t written about it in years despite your army of 200 journalists in the county?”

They shook their heads and said they couldn’t imagine such a thing.

“It’s called Saddleback Church in Lake Forest. You guys are not covering Saddleback, and it’s like not reporting on the Anaheim Ducks or Angels.” I looked down at my other talking points and continued. “Orange County also has the second-largest Catholic diocese west of the Mississippi, the largest mosque in North America and one of the wealthiest Jewish communities in the nation. People give more money, by far, to their church, synagogue and mosque than to any other charitable organization in the county. Objectively, this is a huge story that you’re just not covering well. Faith matters to people. It’s at the center of their lives. But the Orange County edition tends to treat it as some sort of a novelty act. Not all the time, but too much of the time. Do you know, for example, that thousands of high school and college students from Orange County will spend their spring break this year building houses for families in Tijuana instead of drinking heavily in Palm Springs? That story would be a great read.

“I want to write a religion column that reads like a sports column. Something that’s written by someone who actually likes religion and knows it matters in people’s lives. This can be a really popular addition to
The Times
’s Orange County coverage.”

I slid across the table a list of 30 column ideas. The editor and president looked them over and nodded. They said the idea intrigued them, and they wanted to start something like this as soon as possible. They’d get back to me with the details. I felt like doing a little dance. I shook their hands and thanked them for their time. This was going to work! I had nailed the interview, and once more, God had delivered.

But three weeks went by without a word. And then I opened
The Times
one day and saw an announcement about a new religion column. At first, I thought it was strange to announce my new column without calling me first. But as I read the copy, I discovered that the columnist wasn’t me. He was a local college professor who studied religions. My heart sank. They had taken my idea and assigned it to someone else—without even an explanation. How could this have happened? Didn’t they think I could pull it off? Was it possible that two people came up with the same idea at the same time, and they decided to go with the academic? I wondered whether I had spent four years praying for nothing. Did I even have God’s desire for me right? Had I misunderstood His will? I was experiencing self-doubt, filtered through the conviction that there was a divine plan for each of us. As I fretted, I couldn’t bring myself simply to call
The Times
executives to find out the real reason—it was just too crushing.

After days of prayer and depression, I concluded that I didn’t have God’s will wrong at all. There was no mistaking the strong sense of direction I was receiving from above. I knew God wanted me to be a religion writer. I felt it.
The Times
blew its first opportunity at getting a great religion columnist. There had to be another chance coming, and I would be ready.

This time, it took less than half a year. A new editor took over the Orange County edition, and I quickly made friends with her. Before too long, I made the same pitch for a column and handed her my list of 30 ideas, noting the difference between what I proposed and the more scholarly column written by the professor. She studied my list. Finally she looked up and said the miraculous words: “Let’s do it. We can run it every other week. When can you get me the first one?”

I felt like one of the last tumblers in my Christian life had clicked into place. I was certain that God had made it happen; I was just His vessel. A sense of deep satisfaction engulfed me, along with a sense of awe about God’s power. I wasn’t going to waste this chance. That afternoon, I started to write. I wanted to show that some of the best stories in the paper could be found on the religion beat—dramatic tales that were so good they couldn’t be confined to the religion-page ghetto on Saturday, but would be sprinkled throughout the paper, including the front page.

A few weeks later, on December 19, 1998, I awoke to the sound of the newspaper hitting my walkway with a thud, and I jumped out of bed and walked outside to get my hands on it. I opened the paper in the pre-dawn gray, lifted out the Metro section, and turned to B4. There it was, my column profiling John Moorlach, the county’s treasurer–tax collector who a few years earlier had been the only person to predict the $1.5 billion Orange County bankruptcy. Though it was never reported at the time, Moorlach says he gained his financial wizardry from the Bible:

It’s not something John M.W. Moorlach shouts from the county Hall of Administration rooftop, but he’ll tell you if you ask. The Bible is the first book the Orange County treasurer–tax collector turns to for financial advice.

“The Bible is the greatest self-help financial book ever written,” says Moorlach, the Costa Mesa accountant who predicted the Orange County bankruptcy six months before it happened. “I added it up once, and I found more than 2,000 pieces of financial advice in the Bible.”

…Moorlach knows some of his constituents will blanch at the thought of a devout Christian in control of public finances. But Moorlach points out that Scriptural directives have formed the basis for sound financial planning for thousands of years—and their secular cousins are easily recognized.

“The Bible tells us to be content, to save, to avoid get-rich schemes, to diversify, to be honest, to be consistent, to exercise fidelity and stewardship,” says Moorlach, a 43-year-old married father of three who attends church at Costa Mesa’s Newport-Mesa Christian Center. “The Scriptural principles work, even if you’re not a Christian.”

 

As a believer, I loved the idea that Moorlach’s reliance on the Bible might have helped him, somehow, to predict the county’s shocking meltdown. Yet as a journalist, I also was drawn to the debate it would generate. I knew Moorlach’s admission would drive nonbelievers crazy—for them, it was like having a government employee consult an astrologer to determine where to invest tax dollars. I took a middle ground, believing that Moorlach’s basic financial principles were likely gleaned from the Bible but his ability to spot the impending bankruptcy was due more to his knowledge of Wall Street investing principles than to anything he found in Proverbs. Moorlach’s success was clear, yet believers and skeptics had no trouble explaining it from entirely different points of view. I knew in my gut that this type of controversy was deeply engaging—and that there were many more stories like this out there. I had struck a rich, largely untapped vein of journalism for which I had been searching.

This is the assurance we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.

—
JOHN
5:14–15

 

A
S
I
SUSPECTED
, I didn’t have much trouble gathering material for my “Getting Religion” column. I kept stumbling across one interesting religion story after another that illustrated how faith shaped people’s lives. I met extraordinary people everywhere I turned.

One was Madge Rodda, an elderly church organist, who woke up at three each Sunday morning and headed to a nearby Denny’s for some “spiritual Wheaties”—Bible study, quiet time and breakfast. It was the 70-year-old’s way of getting ready for 7:30 a.m. church services at Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa.

One Sunday at the restaurant, Madge went to the restroom. Hiding in the stall next to hers was a transient carnival worker named James Bridle. High on cocaine, he had been reading a pornographic magazine. With a knife in one hand, he was ready to attack. Madge said that when she emerged from the stall, there he was. The attack was vicious and long—maybe 15 minutes. After wedging the door shut with the porno magazine, Bridle choked her, bashed her head repeatedly on the tile floor, cut her throat and tried to sexually assault her.

Madge put up an amazing fight against the strapping 23-year-old attacker. She stands all of 4 feet, 11 inches and weighs 100 pounds. She said she hit and kicked and screamed out prayers (“Lord, help me! Lord, save me! Dear Jesus, only you can save me!”), though no one in the restaurant could hear her through the bathroom’s double doors. When the attack was over, she said Bridle turned to her—Madge’s white blouse was soaked in blood, her face swollen and bruised—and said, “I believe in God, too. But Satan is poisoning my mind. I need help. I know I need help.” And then he fled, but he didn’t get far. A Denny’s manager chased him down, then tackled and pinned him until police arrived.

This was where the story would usually end. “Elderly church organist attacked by carnival worker” might have rated a couple of paragraphs in the local paper. But in her bed at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, Madge changed all that with the first words she whispered to her daughter after the attack: “That poor man. That poor man. We must find a way of getting him a Bible.”

Not a lot of people understood what she was doing. The rape counselors insisted she was in denial and pleaded with her to “get [her] anger out.” Others thought she was a saint, a theory Madge laughed at. “It’s my nature to hold a grudge,” Madge said. “I can remember things from years and years ago that everyone else has probably forgotten.” Madge’s explanation is simply that the spirit of God moved her. “This wasn’t natural, it was supernatural.”

Madge and her attacker met again, this time in court. After a judge sentenced Bridle to 17 years in prison—which Madge thought was fair—she gave her assailant a Bible with verses she had highlighted to help him on his spiritual journey. And she began to set up a support network of Christian men to counsel Bridle when he is released from jail—most likely long after Madge has passed away.

“God knew this attack was going to happen,” she told me. “So he sent a little old lady organist who’d have no better sense than to stand up in court with a Bible and say to her attacker, ‘The word of God is all you need.’”

Another one of my stories profiled Donna Boggess. The natural impulse is to feel sorry for her. The relentless 30-year march of multiple sclerosis through her central nervous system has caused her body to mutiny. Her legs abandoned her long ago; her arms recently stopped working. She now relies on others to get her out of bed, help her to the bathroom, bathe her, comb her hair, put on her makeup and help her eat. And that’s before 9 a.m.

Yet if you meet Boggess, pity is the last thing you’ll feel. Try inspiration, awe and humility, for starters.

Sitting in a wheelchair, her arms frozen in the ever-tightening vise of multiple sclerosis, she tells you that because of God, her life is great. And the weird thing is, right off the bat, you believe her. You can see the evidence all around her.

First, there are her friends. She has lots of them. The phone rings constantly in her Mission Viejo apartment, and her home is filled with guests and laughter. On some days, a friend will come over, put Boggess in her red Miata convertible and drive, top down, all over the county, logging up to 150 miles in a day.

“The world gravitates toward Mom,” said daughter Keri, 26, who lives with her. “She touches everyone she talks to.”

Second, she has a budding career developing her own ministry. She gives Christ-centered inspirational talks, has produced a motivational tape (“A Walk to Joy”) and is writing—with the help of a voice-activated computer—a book.

This is in addition to her part-time work for Saddleback Church, where she makes phone calls each evening to remind parishioners of meetings and offer encouragement. She also runs a support group out of her apartment for chronic illness sufferers. And she’s most proud of the work she’s done raising two beautiful daughters.

And third, she’s just plain happy.

“I’m humbled because she has so many obstacles, and she handles them all with such grace,” said Jan Muncaster, Saddleback’s administrator. “She helps people with perspective. She literally never complains about her situation.”

The obvious question: How can a wheelchair-bound woman who needs help even to brush her teeth think life is so wonderful?

“God’s given her this happiness,” Keri said. “Maybe that’s God’s gift to her. People are drawn to that contrast—tragedy and happiness at the same time.”

Boggess has a different thought. “My problems aren’t any bigger than anyone else’s,” she said. “It’s just that mine are right out there for everyone to see. Some people struggle with bigger problems that they hold inside.”

When talking with Boggess, it’s not hard to imagine that 31 years ago she was a song leader at Tustin High School. At 49, she’s still cheerleader cute (and her daughter wants any eligible “godly men” out there to know that Mom’s single) and an extrovert who’s half Rosie O’Donnell, half Mother Teresa.

Since being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 19, Boggess has spent the past three decades battling the progressive disease and shaping her attitude toward it. She’s gone from cane to walker to wheelchair to electric wheelchair. Each year, the illness has chipped away at her freedom and made her increasingly dependent on God.

“I never know what my body’s not going to do today that it did yesterday,” Boggess said. “God’s with me every minute of the day, and I don’t know how I could do it by myself…I’ve learned to put all my worries at his feet. And when I do, the heavens open up and the blessings come down.”

Even after meeting Boggess, I still had to ask: “With everything that’s happened to you, do you ever wonder if there’s really a God?”

“How could there not be a God?” Boggess responded. “How could I do all this without God? God is my hope, my joy, my strength. He’s the love of my life.”

Just one more example: Sister Mary Norbert. She’s young, bright and attractive, razor sharp, once a promising litigator and partner in a Minnesota law firm. Now she lives a cloistered life in the Tehachapi mountains. She shares the modest convent with five other women from Orange County’s St. Michael’s Abbey, which recently launched the only house of Norbertine nuns in the United States.

St. Norbert, a German, lived in the early 12th century and gave up his wealth for life as a poor priest who followed a strict regimen of prayer and penance.

“There comes a point when you have a conversion, and everything changes,” said Sister Mary Norbert, who joined the order a year ago after feeling disenchanted with her career. “Part of the change in my life was my work. I was pushed out of the legal system, but there was also a pull from God.”

It has to be a strong pull. For the rest of their lives, the sisters will follow the same daily routine. They will rise at 4 a.m., go to sleep at 10 p.m. and get up again for midnight prayers. Prayer will take up most of their time, but they will also sing, study and develop a cottage industry (maybe data entry for companies on the Internet) that will make them self-sufficient. They will get one hour of free time each day.

It’s a lifestyle stripped down to essentials. There is no television, radio or newspapers, and there are few visitors and no trips off the 475-acre grounds except for doctor’s appointments and family emergencies.

The pioneering sisters volunteered for this austere life because they believe prayer matters. Intercessory prayer—prayer that asks God to help someone—works, they insist. And the best way to pray is to reduce life to its basics, allowing no worldly diversions to come between those praying and God.

A contemplative life is something not many people can understand, including some of the nuns’ family members and friends.

“When you live a life in the world and live that lifestyle, everything is normal,” Sister Mary Norbert said. “When you start to make changes, oftentimes those changes become frightening, and people are challenged by it because it makes them look at their own life.

“This was a conscious choice to give my life to God. It’s pretty radical, but Christ’s gospel is demanding. We’re here to save souls.”

Sister Mary Norbert, her eyes wide and alive, said of the day she became a nun, “I had a lot of peace, a lot of joy. I was ready for this. There is nothing else. God is everything. There is no other choice.”

I quickly found the religion beat to be different from others at the paper. One of my first interviews was with a pastor who had walked away from a six-figure job as a commercial real-estate broker to follow God’s call. He once had ordered custom dress shirts but was now shopping at the Goodwill so he could start a new career ministering to God’s people.

After escorting me into his tiny office, he said, “Do you mind if we first pray about your job and your responsibility?”

Praying with a source wasn’t the type of thing that was covered in the
Los Angeles Times
’s code of ethics, but it didn’t seem right. Was it a conflict of interest? Should I just pretend to pray so as not to offend him? The pastor kept looking quizzically at me, wondering why I was taking so long to respond.

“Sure,” I finally said, not wanting to make a big deal out of it. He bowed his head and started to pray. I lowered my head but kept my eyes open—that was the best compromise I could come up with at the moment. This would happen often on the faith beat, no matter the religion I was writing about.

More often than not, people I interviewed asked me first about my own faith. In covering other stories over the years, people rarely asked me personal questions, at least not right off the bat, and never about religion. Now I was treated either as suspect or possibly as a target for proselytizing. It wasn’t just paranoia among the faithful. Often, when it comes to stories about believers or religious questions, there is an unbridgeable gap in perception between believers and others. It is an extreme example of the proposition that what we bring to life determines what we take away from it.

My first reaction was to keep my faith private, because an answer might imply that my religious views would color my reporting. But since I wanted the interviewees to open up to me, I decided the least I could do was to give them a direct answer to their simple question.

“I’m a Christian,” I would say, and provide more details only if they asked. They often asked.

People of faith—it didn’t matter whether they were Christian, Jewish or Muslim—almost universally expressed relief that a journalist who was religious was assigned to write their story. This reaction was the mirror opposite of some newsroom talk that, in its most polite form, went like this: “Can an evangelical Christian cover faith objectively?” My feeling was that you could cover faith well whether you were an atheist or devoutly religious. What mattered was a desire to write about religion accurately, with context and nuance.

The same kind of question was rarely asked, especially in the newsroom, about other beat reporters. Could a reporter who’s a Democrat cover a Republican presidential primary fairly? (Indeed, the overwhelming majority of national political reporters are Democrats. Republican candidates are suspicious of them, and though I believe a liberal slant slips into media coverage, most of the bias reflects the laws of the marketplace. Bad news is easier to report, and it sells. Scandals and controversy get a lot of attention, regardless of party identification. Deep analysis of health care plans or Social Security reforms holds little popular appeal.) And what about sports writers who report on their favorite team? Or committed environmentalists whose beat is development? Every journalist is biased. What matters is the accuracy of the story. The readers and editors know soon enough if a reporter has an agenda, especially in the age of the Internet watchdog.

My only agenda was to make religion as fascinating to others as it was to me. Though I considered myself an evangelical Christian, I didn’t think my role was to promote the faith. First, the rules of journalism prohibit it. Second, it wasn’t my style. And third, a ham-fisted approach like that wouldn’t have worked with readers and would have led to the quick demise of my column.

Writing “Getting Religion” was a part-time job. I worked on it weekends and at night and then e-mailed the column to my editors. Yet I thought about it night and day. I felt as if I had been handed the key to an utterly fascinating world, and I was determined to explore every inch.

In retrospect, I can now see there were patterns in my columns. Whenever I had a question of faith, the answer found its way into my writing. For example, I doubted the wisdom of giving 10 percent of my income to the church. It felt like a bit of a gimmick by religious leaders to make sure their organizations were well funded. Plus, did God really expect someone on a journalist’s salary, living in Orange County with a growing family, to hand over 10 percent of his income (pre-tax, pastors always pointed out) to Him? I wasn’t sure I could afford it. But then I wrote about a multimillionaire named John Crean who gave half his income (50 percent of $176.8 million the year that I interviewed him) to charity. A half century before that, he had begun to tithe on the advice of his pastor. At the time, Crean was a struggling businessman whose company was $250,000 in debt.