‘Somehow, the prayers just fall out of your heart’

December 15, 12:36 PMSpiritual Life ExaminerRabbi Ben Kamin

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She visited the regal chapel at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana recently.  As with everything else, she took it in with full soul and fond disposition.  Strong-limbed yet tender-hearted, she sought the relief of a sanctuary in the midst of her usual tyranny of business meetings and corporate competition.  She’s an executive out there, but I know her in her natural manifestation: my beloved friend, my wife, muse, and partner.

Looking for respite in the cold sojourn, she found her way to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, with origins in the 17th century and based upon the Church of the Gesù in Rome, the mother church of the Society of Jesus designed by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola in 1568.   Audrey, born  a Catholic, but who describes her self-driven, teenage journey to Judaism as “a return to my spiritual roots,” does not feel that God is exclusive to any space.  She shares with me the sense that Judaism’s hallmark is the fact that it parented Christianity –in this concept is the foundation of our independent, interfaith, and nonjudgmental pastoral agency, Reconciliation: The Synagogue Without Walls, which we founded together in 2004.

Audrey has a better grip on her spirituality than most theologians I’ve met.  For her (and for most good people), the text is not the homeland, life is.  I love, study, and teach from the text, but don’t get stuck on it:  It needs to be interpreted, not rationalized to control others. 

The four children that we share in this second marriage, ranging in age from 28 to 13, from theater artist to video wizard, with a literary scholar and a teenage environmentalist in between, know that we regard faith as a deeply personal matter that inspires acts of social justice.

Our family gatherings for birthdays and holidays, from Passover to Christmas, are the constant realizations (not without normal frictions and resentments) of the best face of religiosity.  We are, thank God, a completely integrated cross-bred family of Jews, Christians, agnostics, Colombians, Canadians, New Yorkers, Buckeyes, and, oh yes, my Israeli mother.  It’s a cultural pastiche of hummus and empanadas and the liturgy is love.

So Audrey traveled to the plains of Indiana to discuss variable annuities but she took a brisk walk on the campus of one of the most esteemed Christian colleges on the continent.  Taking time to reflect in the Basilica, she then wrote me these words:  “Entering a house of prayer has a way of making you reflect on what’s really important in your life and somehow the prayers just fall out of your heart.” 

If only all the righteous rectors, cardinals, rabbis, imams, had gotten this memo.