This was the age of Eisenhower, the era of "Togetherness" and "The Organization Man," when "Positive Thinking" was a creed of success, and the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" might have been a hymn of some of the popular religious movements of the time. I wrote an article in The Nation Magazine called "Slick-Paper Christianity" poking fun at a new Protestant periodical called "Together" that picked an "All-Methodist" Football team. I was righteous in my rage against what I felt was the watered-down, easy-to-take religious medicine of the day, and the salesmen-evangelists who were trying to get me to swallow it.

But there were other men and women of faith in New York in the Fifties who kept alive my respect for religion, and made the Christian faith of my childhood seem not only legitimate but noble. They were the quiet ones, the ones who never told me to believe as they did, but simply lived and spoke their faith—and let me draw my own conclusions, giving me room to respond in whatever way I wanted or needed.

Mark Van Doren was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who was one of the great teachers of the time as professor of English at Columbia. He had been an inspiration and a model of integrity for generations of students. Thomas Merton, author of the spiritual classic The Seven Storey Mountain, credited Van Doren's clear thinking with preparing him for his mission as a Trappist monk. After taking Van Doren's class in Shakespeare, a student named Jack Kerouac quit the Columbia football team to devote more time to reading and writing.

It was Van Doren's writing that inspired me to go from Indiana to New York to study with him at Columbia. The fourth of five sons of an Illinois country doctor, Van Doren retained his flat, midwestern accent, which made me feel at home in that perplexing and strange new city and college when I first heard him lecture. It was not just his accent but his way of thinking that was "plain," without frills or pretense, and livened with a sharp wit. In his course called The Narrative Art he lectured on the New Testament, and made me see Jesus in a new, powerful light—not as the bland salesman conformist of Fifties evangelism, but rather, the stern, demanding teacher who asked people to give up all to follow Him. "Jesus was the most ruthless of men," Van Doren said, in a tone clear as a struck bell.

So was Van Doren "ruthless" in his requirements of students, unyielding in his demand for integrity. I sat frozen in fear and awe one day as Van Doren ordered a student to leave the class who had not read the day's lesson. Van Doren handed you back your paper at the next class after it was due, with his own personal comment and grade written on it, but if you did not hand in the paper on time, you failed.

Van Doren never professed his faith, much less urged his students to adopt it; he simply lived and spoke and taught with the ruthless—that is, uncompromising—integrity he saw in Jesus. The way he taught us the Gospels as "literature" restored them to me and kept them alive for me as articles of faith to which I could—and would—someday return.

One of my Columbia classmates took me down to the Bowery one day to visit an unusual mission there called The Catholic Worker. It was founded by a woman named Dorothy Day, who I met, and wrote about, quoting her own words in the first issue of The Catholic Worker newspaper that sold for a penny, dedicating it to the homeless people of the Great Depression. The Catholic Worker "Hospitality House" (Dorothy thought the term "mission" was too condescending) did not make you "sing for your supper" or proclaim your religious faith— you only had to be hungry.

The Catholic Worker movement was not limited to any race or creed, but rather, as Dorothy put it in the editorial she wrote for the first edition of the paper, "For those who are sitting in benches in the warm spring sunlight. For those who are huddling in shelters trying to escape the rain. For those who are walking the streets in the all but futile search for work. For those who think there is no hope for the future, no recognition of the plight."

Dorothy Day served those people, selflessly, not "evangelizing" them, but rather, bringing many to faith by her example, by the way she lived her belief, put her life on the line for it, every day and night. Her example brought young people from all over the country to serve at The Catholic Worker House, to start similar work of their own, in desperate neighborhoods, where no one else heeded the plight or tried to meet the need of the outcasts, the poor, the hungry—the people Jesus sought and served in His own ministry.

What drew me to The Catholic Worker—first as a journalist and then as a friend and sympathizer, a sort of idealistic, atheistic fellow traveler—was a kind of mystique that drew young people from all across the country in the Fifties, offering in the midst of the Bowery's grim poverty something that all the glittering affluence around us lacked—a spirit, a purpose, a way of transcending self through service that Dorothy Day exemplified.

Dorothy's influence lives throughout the world today, in works and lives and deeds. When I looked up people who I'd known back then to interview them for my book on New York in the Fifties, I discovered that one of the friends from those days who I'd met at The Catholic Worker, the poet Ned O'Gorman, was now headmaster of "The Storefront School for Children in Harlem," which he founded and raises a million dollar budget to fund each year. Sitting with Ned in the basement kitchen of the school, he reminisced about the days at The Catholic Worker and said, "Dorothy's influence was profound. I sometimes think I'm here in some way because I soaked up her vision of the human family."

Another writer who was moved by Dorothy's vision of the human family was a young man named Michael Harrington, who came to New York from St. Louis and moved into the Catholic Worker house to serve the poor and needy people of The Bowery. It was there, in those years of service with Dorothy Day, that Mike began the research and developed the compassion and understanding that led to The Other America, his book that awoke the nation to the unseen face of hunger in this country, and served as the basis for Lyndon Johnson's poverty program of the Sixties.

At The Catholic Worker in 1957 I met three young women who had started a day care center in Spanish Harlem, inspired by Dorothy Day's example of service and living faith. I visited them in the neighborhood and became so engrossed in its life that I moved up there to East 100th Street in order to write a book that became Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem.

In that neighborhood I met another group of idealistic people who professed their faith by living it—the men and women of The East Harlem Protestant Parish, a group of young graduates of Union Theological Seminary of the era after World War II, who were unsatisfied by the mainstream religious movements of the time and went to live in the ghetto and open a series of storefront churches to serve the people of those neglected streets.

At first I didn't want to meet the Reverend Norman Eddy, simply because I was prejudiced against ministers then. But he and his wife, Peg, who was also a minister of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, were neighbors of mine on East 100th Street. Norm was also one of the founders and leaders of the neighborhood committee to help narcotic addicts, and I wanted to write about their work. I resigned myself to meeting him, expecting either a glad-hander who would try to recruit me for Jesus, or a long-faced missionary who would warn me darkly of the wages of sin.

Norm laughed when I later told him I had feared he would try to save me from atheism the way I assumed he tried to save narcotic addicts from drugs. Norm was an open, vital man with an easy laugh, and I had to admire him in spite of my prejudice against preachers, because he wasn't so much preaching his message as living it. Not only that, he obviously enjoyed it, and a joy bubbled up in his talk and his laughter. Never once did he try to get me to re-convert to the faith of my childhood. His evangelism was in the way he lived his life—in service to others.

These people made a deep impression on me, and the fact that they didn't try to proselytize me gave me even greater respect for them. It was as if they had faith in their own faith—they knew it was so powerful, so real, so life-giving, that they didn't have to "sell it" like a product. They lived it, and let the influence of that do its work.

At the time, I couldn't receive their faith or connect with it in my own life, yet their example was like a trail of bread crumbs, or a light in the forest, through the next quarter century, part of the path that eventually led me back to church, in 1980, when I reached my own darkest night of the soul, and found in The Cross, and in the community of King's Chapel in Boston (a Unitarian Church in the Christian tradition) my own point of "returning."

I know I was blessed by encountering Mark Van Doren, Dorothy Day, and Norman Eddy. No matter what superficial religious practices were gaining popularity in the America of the Fifties, no matter what latest fad was catching on to try to make Christianity more bland and thus more "acceptable," no matter whose voices were raised in recruiting tactics that would make a soap opera star blush, the example of these people's pure dedication and integrity shone for me like a beacon of hope and inspiration.

I believe we evangelize not by cornering people and lecturing them on how and what to believe, but by living our own beliefs, and by discovering the truth about them, and about our own struggles and even defeats and bafflements as well as our triumphs and joys in the faith. I believe when we explore our own story in the deep truth of a process like "spiritual autobiography," when we learn to tell it and write it in a plain, honest, un-frilly form, we catch people's true attention, we draw them to their own sources of spiritual strength and guidance, not by harangues or persuasions but by examples, by witness, if you will, of our own faith journey, with all its ups and downs, its depths as well as its peaks and ascents. And as we make the journey, each day, in all we do and say, we are telling a story—living a story— that has the most powerful effect on those around us, who are watching, and listening, for signs of what it means to try to live by the guidance of faith.

David Hardin: Dan, it seems that what you are saying I heard echoed when somebody once said, "What you are speaks so loudly that I can't hear what you say." If that is true, that who we are is what counts in terms of people seeing God in us and not what we say, then what is the role of preaching?

Dan Wakefield: I think in a way who we are is part of what we say. To me, great preaching is personal preaching and I think Emerson said it once about the preacher who speaks through the fire of his own experience.

I think I was really lucky when I went back to church to have Carl Scovel as my minister because that is the way his sermons are. I knew this wasn't just theory. This was something he had earned the hard way to tell me.

Hardin: It is not telling somebody what to do. It is saying, "Here is what happened. Take it or leave it."

Wakefield: That's right.

Hardin: You teach, I think with wonderful success, writing your own spiritual autobiography.

Why is that a good idea?

Wakefield: It is a wonderful process and it helps people discover and appreciate their own spiritual journey and everybody has one. I have been doing these workshops for about five years and I have yet to find somebody who didn't have a story. People love to tell the story. You just set up a kind of simple framework in which they can emerge with that story without competition.

I love what people write in spiritual autobiographies much better than what I get in creative writing workshops. There they are very competitive and are trying to write like Faulkner or trying to get in the "New Yorker." Here they are just trying to tell their story and that is the best writing.

Hardin: Don't you feel that people are afraid to reveal themselves and what you do is give them permission?

Wakefield: I think so. I think the group, the community, whatever it is of people who gather together, becomes a wonderful community. Once they hear one person read their story then they relax. Then I say, "We are not going to judge your story. We are just going to acknowledge it and thank you for giving it to us."

Hardin: So they can feel safe. Why do you think people come to this seminar?

Wakefield: I think because they want to plug into that spiritual experience. I have had people who come to adult education centers who are looking and who maybe don't belong to a religious community. They want to find a way to touch that part of their lives and to touch that dimension of their lives.

Hardin: If we are just watching you today, how do we do it? How do we get into spiritual autobiography?

Wakefield: I guess by reading some of the others to start with and then by trying as simply as possible to tell our own story. You can organize a group of friends, or people in your own church, or the neighborhood even, to share their stories. I think the writing is much more powerful than just telling the story.

Hardin: It's not a big deal.

Wakefield: No, it's not.

Hardin: We can take it on. Maybe that is the most important thing to know. Who might we read to get some ideas?

Wakefield: I think the great spiritual autobiography is Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. Of course, Frederick Buechner is wonderful and Rabbi Kushner is wonderful. There is a wonderful richness of spiritual autobiography that is available now.

Hardin: If we take those on, then we can begin to touch into it.

Wakefield: All of those people are very simply and very plainly writing out of their own experience.

Hardin: Thanks a great deal for being with us. It's been a lot of fun.