The video above is an extended web version of an interview conducted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper that partially aired on August 5 (a transcript of the edited version can be found here). I’ve never thought of Cooper as much as an interviewer. This video proves me wrong. It’s insightful and fortunately does not focus solely upon Hitchens’ mortality and cancer (but understandably it’s the main focus).

It’s painful to see how physically diminished Hitchens is. But, despite his disbelief in my faith, I am praying for him to beat this thing. He states that he appreciates the sentiments behind the prayers, but he clearly believes it will do no good. I love how he wards off the possibility of a deathbed faith conversion in this interview, conceding he might convert if addled by the cancer or drugs. Hitchens clearly has examined about every damn angle. Good luck to him. I hope he’s around ticking me off for a very long time.

The Galilean Secret

I am grateful to my parents for many gifts, but I rank my Catholic education/upbringing and intellectual curiosity as among some of the best. While Evan Howard, the author of The Galilean Secret (released last month), are not of the exact same religion (he is the pastor of the Community Church of Providence [Rhode Island), given that we are both Christians and that he is even more intellectually curious than myself (as well as the owner of a doctorate in theology from Boston University)–well it made for a great interview. In this email interview we discuss his novel–which is described as follows:

“When Karim Musalaha, a Palestinian on the run, seeks refuge in a forgotten cave near Qumran, he discovers a half-buried clay jar that contains a fragile scroll. His quest to discover its origins takes him on a high-speed chase through hostile Jerusalem and West Bank neighborhoods. Caught between his brother’s relentless ambition for martyrdom and the forbidden love of a Jewish woman with ties to the highest levels of the Israeli army, he must choose between honoring his father and betraying him to serve a higher purpose.

The scroll’s message also resonates with Judith of Jerusalem, a first century Jewish woman who, under the cover of darkness, gallops into the desert with the brother of the man she was betrothed to marry. When her allegiance to the burgeoning Zealot revolution pits her against the Roman occupiers and their priestly collaborators, Judith sees the cruelty of war and realizes her mistake. But is it too late for her to escape and find forgiveness? A letter written by a mysterious Galilean rabbi holds the answers, but the Romans have placed a price on his head. Should she risk her life for a rabbi she hardly knows, or risk her soul for a cause and a man whose beliefs she now rejects?

Bound by a letter that spans two millennia, both Karim and Judith will either succumb to hatred, violence and hopelessness, or reveal a wisdom that could save us all.”

I’m grateful to Howard for his valuable time and thoughts, as well as Kelly Hughes for facilitating the interview. Go here to read the first chapter.

Tim O’Shea: Tackling two plots with historical complexities in one book is fairly ambitious. How much revision/aggressive editing was involved in the pursuit of balancing the respective narratives and their unique pacing for both stories?

Evan Howard: The decision to include plots in two different time periods came about unexpectedly.  As a first-time novelist I didn’t plan to use this method because of the difficulties involved, but readers of an earlier version of the book (which I had self-published) expressed frustration that I hadn’t resolved what happened to Karim, the Palestinian student who appears in the first chapter, the action of which takes place in the present.  Since the rest of the novel happens in the time of Jesus, at first I resisted developing Karim’s story because I thought it would be a very complicated undertaking, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw that having two time periods and multiple plots could make the novel more multi-dimensional and increase its suspense.  This process required that I write fifteen new chapters and blend them with the historical material.  It took me about seven months to do this and involved a great deal of revising and editing along the way.  Once I entered into this process, I found it highly challenging but also a lot of fun—like working on a giant literary jigsaw puzzle.  Since there is a lot of action in both stories, the issue of pacing wasn’t a major problem.

O’Shea: Given the passion and strong opinions that go hand and hand with topics like Israel & Palestine, was there any hesitation on your part to delve into such complex and volatile matters in your novel?

Howard: The divisions and conflicts in the Holy Land today and throughout history were part of what drew me to this setting.  It’s a land with so much promise but also so much tragedy, and that’s part of what makes it a fascinating setting for a novel.  It feels as if there has been a narrative of anguish superimposed on this land.  The conflicts have been with us for so long that they seem impossible to solve.  Writing The Galilean Secret was a way of offering an alternative narrative—one that dramatizes the possibility of hope, healing, and reconciliation.  It’s true that there are potentially many pitfalls that await an author who chooses to write about Israel and Palestine, but the potential rewards made the risk worth it.  I kept thinking of Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country, which is set in South Africa under apartheid.  Paton took readers into the emotions of that troubled land in a way that motivated them to work for change.  Art can sometimes have a cathartic effect that helps to inspire a new narrative of transformation, but creating it requires accepting controversy as part of this important work.

O’Shea: Which of Jesus’ disciples did you most enjoy writing in the book?

Howard: Oddly enough, it was probably Judas Iscariot, although I was also drawn to the stories of Nicodemus and Mary Magdalene, but neither of them was among the Twelve.  Judas fascinates me because he’s such a complex character in the Gospels.  His light drew him to follow Jesus, but his darkness eventually extinguished the light.  Originally, like all of the disciples, he came to Jesus with great idealism, believing that the Messianic age had finally come, but then he became disillusioned, his greed took over, and his life ended tragically—an all too human story.  I was also captivated by the question of why he betrayed Jesus and wondered if it was just because of disillusionment or greed.  Could there have been an element of jealousy involved, arising out of his experience of unrequited love?  To me, seeing the story in this way made it all the more real and relevant to the thorniest dilemmas of life.

O’Shea: What about the dynamics between Jesus and Mary Magdalene do you feel you most effectively tapped into and communicated in your story?

Howard: The Galilean Secret encourages the healing of our intimate relationships through its fresh perspective on these dynamics. Neither the canonical nor the noncanonical sources provide detailed information about Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene. Most of us are familiar with the two extreme positions on this matter—the church’s traditional claim that the relationship was only platonic, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the view of revisionist scholars, novelists, and filmmakers that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife and had a child.

I see problems with both of these views.  The traditional position puts forth a celibate Christ who never wrestles with his sexuality. Since most of us do wrestle with this essential component of being human, we can’t relate well to a Christ who doesn’t fully enter the struggle with us. On the other side of the spectrum, it’s hard to believe that Jesus was married because the nearly unanimous verdict of biblical scholars is that there’s no credible evidence to support such a notion.  The Galilean Secret explores the middle ground.  It presents a Christ who, as the Epistle to the Hebrews states, “was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.”

In The Galilean Secret, Jesus and Mary Magdalene struggle mightily with their attraction to one another, and the struggle forces them to ponder what it means to be created male and female “in the image of God,” as stated in the Torah.  The way toward healing and wholeness emerges from Jesus’ spiritual wisdom and his insights into how we can find God’s love and light in all areas of our lives, even the most perplexing ones.  My novel invites readers to ponder how Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene challenges us to integrate the masculine and feminine in ourselves and in the image of God.

O’Shea: How hard is it to write about love, when one’s addressing spiritual love versus romantic love as you are in this story?

Howard: Love has many different manifestations, a fact that the Greek language highlights by using several different terms for our one English word “love.”  There are different nuances of love, two of them being spiritual versus romantic, but because these two sometimes feel the same, it can be extremely difficult to distinguish between them.  In Greek, the word for spiritual love—the love of God–is agape, and the word for romantic/sexual love is eros.  A major theme of The Galilean Secret is the trouble and tragedy that result when we get spiritual and romantic love confused.  These expressions of love both originate in God and they are present in the best dating and marriage relationships. But it is also quite possible to develop romantic feelings for the wrong person at the wrong time, and when these feelings are mistaken for spiritual love, they can cause terrible heartbreak.  It’s a very emotional experience to write about such situations; in that sense, doing so is difficult, but the insights gained from the undertaking can also be quite therapeutic and helpful.

O’Shea: When delving into religion-based fiction, in some ways do you hope it serves to bolster someone’s religion when they read your writing?

Howard: I wrote The Galilean Secret out of my personal search for spiritual truth and for healing and wholeness.  I hope that the book will challenge and inspire others in their searches. I also hope that it presents an interpretation of Jesus that makes him more relevant and accessible to searching people.  I heard the well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens interviewed on C-Span recently and he painted all religions with a broad brush, declaring them equally harmful.  I hope that The Galilean Secret will help people who hold such views to give Christianity another chance.  The Jesus presented in the novel is very human but at the same time a messenger sent from God.  The people who encounter him find their lives transformed, and through his revolutionary spiritual movement, the hope of peace comes to the world. How could anyone, even an atheist, not be drawn to such a fascinating individual?  It has been said that Jesus must have been a historical figure because no one could have invented such a unique and multi-faceted person. The Galilean Secret is particularly provocative in suggesting that part of Jesus’ spiritual genius came from his integration of the masculine and feminine in both his person and his religious teachings.

O’Shea: On the flipside, do you think an agnostic or an atheist has the opportunity to be just as engaged in the novel as a religious reader may be?

Howard: An agnostic or atheist reader could definitely become engaged with this novel, provided that they bring an open mind to the process.  An online video features the prominent atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. In viewing the video, I noticed that although these atheists don’t believe in God, they believe that spiritual experiences are real. I would think that any inquisitive person would want to ask where these experiences come from.  Do they derive entirely from a person’s particular psychological type or history?  Are some people more prone to having spiritual experiences than others?  If we are honest in our quest for truth, how can we rule out that these experiences might come from the creative spiritual being that Christians and other theists call God?  The Galilean Secret explores the nature of these spiritual experiences as they relate to the human quest for love.  The life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are critically important to this quest because he brought humanity a fresh interpretation of love and died dramatizing its meaning.  Agnostics and atheists, like everyone else, need to love and be loved in order to find meaning in life.  The Galilean Secret explores the question, Where does love come from and how we can we better understand its many dimensions?  Only by asking and attempting to answer such questions can we find the love that we all crave.

O’Shea: Were there ways that in writing the book you found aspects that allowed you insight into things you were trying to teach at the church you pastor?

Howard: The short answer is yes, but writing a novel allowed me to go into much greater depth than I could in a sermon or Bible study.  Although there are some similarities, sermons and novels are different forms of communication.  Listeners to sermons would quickly get impatient and bored if the preacher used the time to ask deep questions and not give clear answers.  A story, on the other hand, is much more open-ended.  The best novels don’t offer black-and-white solutions to human problems.  They tell stories that must be interpreted by the reader, and often multiple interpretations are possible.  Hopefully readers of The Galilean Secret will receive a much richer, more nuanced, and ultimately more challenging and inspiring interpretation of love than I could ever communicate in a sermon.

O’Shea: In a modern age, do you think folks are more or less likely to believe that religion has the power to change the world (in a positive way)?

Howard: In his book When Religion Becomes Evil, the Christian theologian and ethicist Charles Kimball makes the point that religion is arguably the most powerful force in the world.  He says this because religion brings out both the very best and the very worst in people.  Out of love for God, people feed the hungry, care for the sick, establish orphanages, work for peace and justice, and engage in all manner of humanitarian and altruistic activities.  On the other hand, people enslave other people, oppress women, start wars, and become suicide bombers in the name of their God and their religion (to name just a few abuses).  Unfortunately, in our media-saturated world, the images of evil being done in the name of religion gets seared into viewers’ minds and they forget all the good that is done in its name.  This leads to a great deal of cynicism about religion in general.  The only way to change this is for people who practice their faith in an ethical and humane way to keep doing good works until evil religion becomes a thing of the past.  It will be a long journey toward God’s new world of love, peace, freedom, justice, and provision for all, but we must keep working toward that new world, and I hope that The Galilean Secret will help in some small way.

Angry Conversations chronicles Susan’s spiritual history, from childhood faith to a midlife crisis, and all the bizarre church experiences in between.”

And now for some info on the author:
“Susan is an actor, writer and comedienne with credits in TV, film, stage and radio, including Planes Trains & Automobiles, Scrooged, Seinfeld, and My Name Is Earl. She is an alumnus of the Groundlings Sunday Company and has an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California.”

My thanks to Isaacs for the interview. Keep an eye out for her this fall, as she goes on a multi-city tour, promoting the book.

Tim O’Shea: Most religious memoirs do not have a tinge of irreverence to them, did you fear alienating your potential audience by going this route?

Susan E. Isaacs: People who don’t handle irreverence or extreme language shouldn’t read Jeremiah, Elijah, or St. Paul. Like in Philippians 3, Paul considers his previous accomplishments “loss” compared to knowing Christ? The original Hebrew for “loss” is a vulgar term for excrement. But we can’t print St Paul’s original intent because we’re Christians. I think there’s a difference between gratuitous irreverence, and irreverence that’s necessary to the character and the story. I took out all but two or three instances of profanity where I felt they were necessary to show the character’s desperation. Like, in one instance I spelled it out phonetically to show how violent my father’s cursing sounded to me as a child.

Now I realize people have different thresholds. Those with delicate temperaments won’t like my book, and that’s OK with me. I wouldn’t want them to read it if it hurt their feelings. But they’ve already got a wealth of reverential books at the Christian bookstore to inspire those readers. There aren’t many books out there for the Christian who grew up with Saturday Night Live and Monty Python, who respond to a different tone and story. Anne Lamott and Donald Miller proved that there’s a huge hunger for a more frank, even cheeky take on the spiritual life.

The book was originally a solo show that I performed in front of a very secular, skeptical, spiritually searching Hollywood crowd. I needed to be irreverent; that’s how I broke down their suspicions about religion, got them to trust me, and allow me to take them on my spiritual journey.

Lastly, while I may have been irreverent depicting the ‘twisted god in my head;’ when the true God emerges in my book, there was no disrespecting or dismissing him.

O’Shea: You covered a lot of ground and a great many people who crossed your paths over the years–since the book’s release have you heard from folks who found out they got mentioned in the book?

Isaacs: Actually I’ve been back in touch with quite a few people, including my high school drama teacher, friends from childhood, college, and all the churches I attended over the years. They’re scattered all over the world, from Florida to Switzerland and Cyprus. Writing a memoir is one way to find lost friends. I haven’t heard from any of the ex-boyfriends, but one friend emailed thinking she was “Martha,” the churchy character in the book, and apologized for judging me. She wasn’t the real Martha. The real Martha loves the book and is a good sport.

O’Shea: Did Rudy read the book before it was published. If not, has he seen it? What does he think of the book?

Isaacs: Rudy read the book and loves it. His real name, which I can disclose, is Dr.Ron Boyer. Ron is still a therapist, but he also went back to pastoring a church. In Topanga of course.

O’Shea: You discuss a great many painful issues in the course of this book, werethere points in compiling the memoir that it almost got too painful to recount? Or was writing the book a form of therapy in its own way?

Isaacs: Ever had one of those dreams where you’re back at high school walking around naked thinking, “Why OH WHY did I come to school with no clothes on?” Once and a while someone asks a question like yours, I think “why, oh WHY was I so vulnerable in the book?!” But then I remember Ezekiel stood in the city gate naked for nine months. (He also cooked his food over a poop fire, but that’s where I draw the line).

Actually, I started writing this story when I was in the deepest part of my crisis. I had to write, just to try to grasp what was happening to me. Writing kept me sane. Of course some of my fellow classmates thought I was nuts. But when you have stared into the abyss, nothing scares you any more, even other people’s opinions. Later when I shaped it into the book, it was hard to relive some moments (I’m so easily plagued by regret) but it was therapeutic; like a confessional. It was transformative as well. I got to see the story and character arcs of my life – how God was shaping and directing me all along. There’s a book called Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography, or something like that. A friend at church told me about it. I think it’s a very therapeutic thing to do, and even more so if you can share it with the right kind of people, like a writers’ group or a pastor.

O’Shea: I was a kid who went to 12 years of Catholic school and am still a practicing Catholic–but with a very acerbic sense of humor–I wonder do you ever find yourself having to fight your sense of humor while attending your church’s services? For me, there are times where I’m thinking of a joke in my head and forgetting the reason I’m at church.

Isaacs: ALL THE TIME! Jokes are like apples on a tree. They drop suddenly from the boughs and you want to pick them while they’re ripe. A few weeks ago my husband and I were at a church where the pastor rambled incoherently for 45 minutes; then ended with, “But you don’t need another boring sermon.” I wanted to shout, “No. We didn’t.” The other night I was with a group of people and one woman averred, “Jesus traveled to England and Europe, you know; they have proof. It was on the History Channel!” I blurted out, “Maybe that was Para-History channel.” Everyone busted up, but I think it embarrassed her. I have to watch myself.

O’Shea: After writing this book, is there any chance you might try your hand at another book that combines your sense of humor with your perspective on religion?

Isaacs: Yes. I’m thinking of writing Racy Conversations With God (About Sex, Love And Dating). I experienced so much weirdness being a single Christian in my 20s and 30s. Our entire culture is experiencing a massive relationship famine. We may be fat and relatively rich, but we are starving relationally. The church is trying to deal with this epidemic, but it’s made some errors, espoused some strange ideas along the way. I and many friends have been the victims and perpetrators of those ideas. That’s what my next book is about. I talked about it some in Angry Conversations, so I’ll go into that in more depth. And I’ll be asking readers for their wacky stories!

O’Shea: This book grew out of a show you wrote ultimately into a book–were there aspects that you realized work better as being told orally in the show, versus being told in the book?

Isaacs: Most definitely. The audio version of my book runs 8 hours. Yikes. A live show has to be succinct. 90 minutes tops. And you can’t just transpose narrative: words that read well on a page can sound wooden or dorky out loud. The story was first a solo show, five years ago. Now I’m going back to the show but the story has changed. Five years ago I was stuck in the crisis of the second act; God wasn’t speaking and I didn’t know how the story was going to end. The counseling dialogues with God in the book didn’t exist in the solo show before, because God was silent. I’m working with a producer on the new solo show; he’s convinced the best part of the solo show will be those dialogues with God. So I guess I’ll be editing the dialogues, and finding succinct ways to plow through the narrative stories in between.

O’Shea: Do you think your sense of humor was enriched by your spiritual pursuits or vice versa or neither?

Isaacs: Well, yes and no. Yes: because good art deals with deep issues: who are we, why are we here, do we matter? Good comedy can show us who we are and maybe get us to see ourselves (and God) in a new way. My spiritual pursuits gave me a wisdom about life and forced me to see a deeper reality. If I can use them wisely my humor can be based not merely on jokes but on those deeper, universal truths about God and about humans: our frailty, our stupidity, our
weakness vulnerability, hope, etc. And I think my sense of humor has helped others see God in a different way.

No: in that comedy and the church are often at odds: similar to your question about reverence. Comedy is messy! Comedy is based on vulnerability, surprise, exposing weakness and frailty. The church is often uncomfortable with that kind of messiness. Most of my life I felt that my spiritual and artistic lives competed with each other. “Too wild for the church, too tame for the world.” I definitely see this changing, however, and that’s really encouraging.

O’Shea: As you tackle your spiritual journey in this book, do you fear that it may pigeonhole who you are or label you unfairly (as “too” religious) in some entertainment industry circles?

Isaacs: I tried for a long time to stay out of the Christian market, because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. But a good deal of my audience are Christians. So what was I gonna do, shoot myself in the foot? Ironically, my book was a hard sell with the Christian Booksellers Association. (Maybe because it says “Lutheran slut” on the inside book flap?) There it is again, too wild for the church, too tame for the world. Fortunately the book is starting to gain momentum, in Christian and secular bookstores, which is terrific. Like most of my life I’ve had to take a long view.

As for entertainment people unfairly pigeonholing me … as Glenn Close’s character said in the Big Chill … “f#&© ’em if they can’t take a joke.” I tried for so many years trying to crowbar my personality into whatever weekly role was being cast. Now I’m over 40; I can’t play Hanna Montana or the next a DD-cup hottie crime scene investigator. Hollywood may have been done with me anyway. So I’ve just got to do the story that’s in me, and God’s in the story. Maybe some entertainment types will come along for the ride.

O’Shea: Throughout the book, you described some pretty vivid dreams you had–do you still have such vivid dreams?

Isaacs: I got so burned during that charismatic period of my life, that I went in the other direction and stopped looking for any meaning in dreams. My husband did a lot of dream analysis in counseling, so he looks for the psychological angle. Maybe the psyche and the spirit and the Spirit are all linked. But many years ago I had a dream I was on a plane sitting next to the film director Sydney Pollack; and I felt an urgent need to share my faith. The next day, Mr. Pollack’s son died in a small-plane crash two blocks from my apartment – how do you explain that in psych terms? I’m only now allowing myself to think about dreams or the gifts of the spirit that my old charismatic churches used to emphasize.

O’Shea: Any parting thoughts?

Isaacs: Some people have read my book and said, “It was just hilarious!” I reply worriedly, “But did you see the spiritual depth in it too, right?” My secular Jewish lesbian friend said, “Wow it was way more serious than I expected.” I replied, “but you thought it was funny, right?” Still others say I was too angry and got too sinful; and I want to scream, “But didn’t you see the redemption? What kind of redemption is there when you’ve lived a sinless life?” But I’m just being an insecure weenie. People are going to get out of it what they get out of it. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to speak to people. It’s my job to get up and write the next book.