Rails To Redemption: A Spiritual Journey Across America
On a summer night in 2023, Rajah Bose boarded the midnight train out of Spokane, Washington, with John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie” in his backpack and a burning question that he couldn’t yet articulate.
The 45-year-old photojournalist and musician was embarking on a 9,000-mile journey across America by rail — from the Pacific Northwest to New York, down to New Orleans, over to Santa Fe, across to Los Angeles and back home.
What began as post-pandemic wanderlust became an unexpected pilgrimage, one that resurrected songs he’d written 20 years earlier and forced him to confront the spiritual inheritance of his mixed heritage.
“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found,” Bose said, quoting Steinbeck.
It’s a sentiment that captures his relationship with faith — the tension between a Catholic upbringing and an engineer father’s agnosticism, between institutional religion and personal spirituality.
Bose is the son of a Midwestern Catholic and a Bengali agnostic, a duality that has shaped his spiritual journey. Growing up, he attended Mass weekly with his mother while his father, an electrical engineering professor, participated only on Christmas and Easter.
“Inside me is this boy that wants to believe all of it,” Bose said. “And there’s also this deep critic ... this young man who became a journalist and started questioning things.”
As a musician, he goes by “Raj Saint Paul.” The songs that formed his debut album, “The First Sounds,” were born during another period of searching — when Bose first moved away from home to the Tri-Cities in Washington state in his early 20s. But the folk music lay dormant for a decade after a tragedy: the suicide of his band’s lead singer in 2013.
“That moment put like a wall up against my music,” Bose said. “I put my violin away, anything I was working on personally, I kind of forgot about it.”
It took a decade — and a cross-country train trip — to break down that wall.
The idea for the journey came from a previous train experience in India, where Bose and his wife, artist Ellen Picken, had traveled in 2019. When the pandemic lifted and friends began jetting off to beaches and resorts, the couple chose a different path.
“We thought we don’t really want to go to just a beach and put our feet up,” Bose said.
Finding America on the rails
The timing of their departure proved prophetic. They boarded their first train the day after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, entering a country grappling with questions of faith, identity and belonging — themes that echoed throughout their journey.
As protests began forming in Washington, D.C., and religious communities across America wrestled with responses to the crisis, Bose found himself witnessing firsthand how faith intersects with politics in personal ways.
“We accidentally walked into a protest of about 100 people ... Jews against the war, basically,” he said.
The moment crystallized something he’d been sensing: that Americans were searching for spiritual authenticity amid institutional fracturing.
To find that authenticity, Bose and Picken knew they needed to move slowly, deliberately, in ways that invited genuine encounters rather than quick observation.
“Most people we told were confused by that decision” to travel by train, Bose added. “But we knew that it would be the best way to travel for us. To be with the people, because the people are what a place is made of.”
On the train, which moved slowly, strangers shared intimate stories — couples who had lost children, families navigating divorce, widows seeking connection.
The journey also took them to family members they hadn’t seen in years, including Bose’s godmother, who passed away months later. And it reconnected them with friends scattered across the country while opening doors to new relationships with fellow travelers and Airbnb hosts.
Songs that help find a voice
Somewhere between the rhythm of the rails and the stories of strangers, the songs Bose had written decades earlier began to find their missing pieces.
“I think the rhythm of the train got into him, bringing out the songs that had been waiting all this time,” Picken said. “The long stretches of rail allowed for contemplation and thoughts to develop.”
The centerpiece of the album, “The Next Great American Novel,” is a 10-minute train song that opens with the line “Meet me in the morning and we’ll jump that train.” Bose had written those words years before ever setting foot on a long-distance train.
“I had waited 20 years for those lyrics to come to me,” he said. “Whether or not it was just me putting myself in the right place at that exact moment, or if it was some gift, I don’t know, but that’s the mystery of art.”
The song weaves together imagery of leaving Eden and America’s spiritual crossroads, with references to “church dividers” and “the prodigal son who never leaves.”
It’s both personal memoir and cultural commentary, capturing what Bose sees as America’s spiritual splintering while maintaining hope for connection.
Claiming the saint
The name “Raj Saint Paul” itself reflects his spiritual complexity. Raj is his given name, rooted in his Indian heritage. Paul references both his birthplace (Minneapolis-Saint Paul) and his mother’s maiden name. But the “Saint” designation carries deeper meaning.
“I’m claiming this idea of being a saint,” he said. “It’s not like I’m appropriating that in my mind. I’m reminding myself of the root of where I’m from, and these beliefs or faith or spiritual-centered self. It’s mostly for me, it’s a reminder of what is possible.”
That name comes with accountability.
“How are you going to speak?” he asked. “Will you shout somebody down, if you’re also saying that I look here for something, some inspiration, some guidance?”
“The spirituality that I’ve retained in my life has become such a personal one,” Bose said.
He still attends Mass with his mother on occasion and finds himself moved by the experience, even as he struggles with a church he sees as “being pulled apart by two radical sides.” Rather than abandon faith altogether, he’s found another vessel for spiritual expression.
His songs, he insists, aren’t specifically spiritual — they’re folk songs.
What he discovered in writing and singing them wasn’t a desire for fame, but “to feel recognized and seen.”
This revelation connected back to what he’d witnessed on the train: “We all have that desire to be known, and it is not an excess or sin to accept that love from one another and ourselves.”
Throughout the album, he grapples with themes of exile and return, referencing leaving “the garden” and the search for redemption. In “Something Coming On,” he sings of “the prodigal son who never leaves” and wrestles with questions of identity: “Who are we to ask / anything we thought, anything we see.”
The album’s opening track, “The First Sounds,” captures this spiritual searching in its final verses, moving from doubt to a call for love and connection, ending with the image of going to “where they left the sound / when it came to me instead” — suggesting grace found rather than earned.
In “The Interstate,” he explores the tension between agency and surrender, asking, “Who am i to you?” while declaring himself both “accomplice” and “son of god.” The song captures the complexity of faith in modern America, referencing both “saviors and saints” and “the echoes of machines.”
Picken has observed her husband’s unique creative process firsthand.
“Raj is a quiet observer. That is the writer and photographer in him,” she said. “Raj is a documentarian and collector. His camera and journal are his tools. The words and photos are his external memory. I wonder sometimes if he is emotionally present in social situations. Despite how social he can be, he can also be very quiet, or use his camera to enter a space without directly participating in what is going on. But he is engaged on some level, because the feelings come forward when he transforms his writing into music.”
When Bose performed the album live for the first time in June in Spokane, Washington, he experienced something that felt sacred.
“I can fire emoji a bunch of people’s stuff all day long. ... That doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “But the moment I finished that show, and people stood and clapped, and then they came up to me one at a time — I connected with those people on a level that I had never connected with them before.”
The performance included visual projections from the train trip and incorporated violin alongside guitar, creating what Bose calls a multimedia experience.
Picken said Bose’s music has transformative power.
“Once we were home, he started working seriously on this album, taking time like we had on the train to dedicate to his songs,” she said. “All of that emotion was saved for later. It transfers to anyone who listens. I can’t count the number of people I’ve seen cry while listening to his music.”
For Bose, this recognition represents a spiritual calling.
“I feel called to this music, this rebirth of some old truths,” he said. “Music has felt increasingly important and meaningful in these complicated times. I hope we can use it as communicators to simplify the conversation we are having.”
The road ahead
Bose is organizing a tour, ideally by train, visiting the communities he encountered on his cross-country journey. While dates haven’t been confirmed yet, updates will be posted at RajSaintPaul.com.
His project also includes a photographic memoir and potentially a film.
The train journey taught him a simple truth that resonates through his music: “It is better to know your neighbor than fear them.”
The songs, he says, “have helped me accept something about myself, and allowed me to contemplate this moment in a way outside of the social machine.”
For Bose, the train journey revealed what many Americans may be seeking: a reminder that “we have commonality, and ... we’re all doing the same thing out there.”
This story was written in partnership with FāVS News, a nonprofit newsroom covering faith and values in the Inland Northwest.
Tracy Simmons is an award-winning journalist specializing in religion reporting and digital entrepreneurship. In her approximate 20 years on the religion beat, Simmons has tucked a notepad in her pocket and found some of her favorite stories aboard cargo ships in New Jersey, on a police chase in Albuquerque, in dusty Texas church bell towers, on the streets of New York and in tent cities in Haiti. Simmons has worked as a multimedia journalist for newspapers across New Mexico, Texas, Connecticut and Washington. She is the executive director of FāVS.News, a digital journalism start-up covering religion news and commentary in Spokane, Washington. She also writes for The Spokesman-Review and national publications. She is a Scholarly Associate Professor of Journalism at Washington State University.