Here’s the deal. I just finished the second draft of my second book, which has the working title, God Is. Now What? It’s basically about having a working faith in God outside of the confines of organized religion. The manuscript is up at my agents, but I’m frankly hungry for feedback. Below is a piece of the “Note,” which opens things up. I’d love to hear reactions just to this tiny portion. What I’m trying to do is be part of what I see as a change in our conversation about faith.

“One bright May morning my husband Charlie, who’d just read the second draft of this book, asked me why I was writing it.

What a question! I realized I hadn’t a clue other than on the most subliminal level. I was writing about God because—as deeply as it made me blush even to think such a thing—I felt called to.

My first impulse was to say something vague about being interested in the subject and let it go at that, but I knew that wouldn’t pass muster with Charlie. He’d known my dad, the atheist, and my mother, the agnostic, and he’d known me for a long, long time. For years I’d been happily scribbling away at this and that—in between reporting gigs—and then, all of a sudden, I was hard at work on what he and I call “my God book.”

So Charlie, as usual, had asked a good question. No one writes about anything without some kind of personal motivation. And no one writes about God without setting oneself up for the charge of hubris: So what’s the deal here, lady? You think you understand God and the rest of us don’t?

Well, not exactly. What I think, actually, is that none of us understands God. And that, in itself, is partly what I want to write about.

But that didn’t fully answer Charlie’s question; so, in case you, like Charlie, are interested, here’s what I think is the answer.

I’m a long-time sober alcoholic and addict, and I go to 12 Step meetings to help ensure that I stay that way. At these meetings, I sit in rooms with people whose concepts of God range from Evangelical Christian to avowed atheists—and no one cares. The only thing that matters is that each of us has something going on with some Power other than our own. Each of us, in our own way, acknowledges that it is our relationship with that Power that helps keep us clean and sober, makes us want to live kind and productive lives, and makes us willing to put ourselves to considerable trouble in order to help each other and those who still struggle with active addictions. Faith is about more than just our own spiritual comfort; it is about how we live our lives. And none of us tries to explain how this Power works, or how our own relationships with It works; we just know that living in partnership with that Power does make a positive difference in our lives. And I, for one, am very grateful that I’ve got enough sense to live in partnership with whatever that Power as a useful human being again.

Sobriety, to me, is a good example of one’s relationship with God in action. It doesn’t matter to anyone in those rooms how I privately relate to God or even what I call God. We come together for just two reasons: 1) to enjoy God’s presence and power in each other’s company; 2) to figure out what our individual partnerships with God mean in the living of our daily lives.

So, I think I began writing this book when I found myself contrasting the practical spiritual tolerance I experience in 12 Step meetings with other kinds of religious practice. To me, a lot of religious practices use our hunger for spiritual connection in some pretty underhanded ways to recruit and keep followers. In God’s name, they offer an illusion of control over the uncontrollable, answers to unanswerable questions, explanations for the inexplicable, and—most cunningly of all—invented fears that they can then assuage. Religions involve a lot of people in a lot meetings in order to reinforce their own misinformation.

12 Step meetings, on the other hand, recognize that some Higher Power is part of whatever helps us stay sober, inspires us both to be kinder to other people and to think about what useful work we can do. The emphasis of meetings is on strengthening our individual connections with the Almighty towards a constructive purpose. And that purpose is lead a kinder, gentler, more productive—and, yes, happier—life.

So, this is what I said to Charlie: I’m writing this book because I want to challenge people of faith who are not drunks and addicts to get with the program; to eschew further discussion and argument about God’s mythology and methods, in favor of getting down to good work as people of faith in God. . .”