“Do you believe in God?”

“Many of us use God to represent our highest aspirations—our aspiration to discover and bear witness to the truth, our aspiration to be kind, merciful, just and loving. This sort of God I also believe in and revere.”

“So God represents no more than the sum of our aspirations?”

“You might say love represents no more than the sum of feelings for children, spouses, parents, and siblings and fellow men and women. But I think this misses something important. When our hearts are filled with love, the feeling becomes something in its own right, independent of its object.”

“Do you mean that our aspirations to be truthful, kind, merciful, just and loving fill our hearts with God, and that feeling becomes something in its own right.”

“Yes, I would agree with that.”

“But isn’t this something very different from what most people think of as God?”

“When I ask people what God means to them, some of them say a Father in Heaven. But when I ask what this Father demands of them, I often find it’s very similar to what my God demands of me.”

“For you it seems that God isn’t in Heaven, but rather in the mind.”

“According to Luke’s account, when Jesus was asked when the Kingdom of God would come, he replied ‘The Kingdom of God is within you.’”

“Perhaps the Kingdom of God, but God Himself?”

“Insofar as I wholeheartedly devote myself to truth, kindness, mercy, justice and love, I realize the Kingdom of God within me.”

“But don’t you think the task is too great for an individual? Doesn’t the individual need divine grace to realize the Kingdom of God within him?”

“We can not, should not, and certainly need not attempt to go it alone. We need the help of other individuals. I don’t object if we want to call those who help us divine. In this sense, Emerson and Tolstoy are divinities for me. But I do object to those who seek to divinize a single person or a single book.”

“Haven’t some of your critics accused you of promoting narcissism?”

“There's a common conception, particularly here in the U. S., that a life of action is preferable to a life of contemplation. We imagine that even if the motives that inspire us to act are impure or unholy, the virtue of activity makes up for it. But I don't agree with this. I find that when I don’t carefully examine the motives that lead me to act, I often later find that my actions were unhelpful. I try to devote a greater portion of my time to contemplation, not, like Narcissus, because I admire myself, but rather because I would like to find and correct my flaws and errors.”

“What's the point of correcting all my flaws and errors, and making my soul perfect, when I'm going to die eventually? Isn’t it all just wasted effort?”

“I understand how you feel. It's certainly important to impart what we learn to the next generation. But I believe we must never stop striving to perfect the soul. As soon as we stop striving, as soon as we give up on ourselves, we commit intellectual suicide. This makes me think of Rilke, the German poet. The longer he lived, Rilke said, the more urgent it seemed to him to transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to the very end, because it just might be the very last sentence that contains that ‘tiny, inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will suddenly be transformed into magnificent sense.’”