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One on One - Cathleen Falsani
344 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Gretchen Crowder interviews Cathleen Falsani.
Cathleen Falsani is a veteran, inveterate, and award-winning journalist specializing in the intersection of religion/faith/beliefs/spirituality and culture for more than two decades. Her work has taken her all over the world, always with her cameras and notebooks in tow, searching for enduring, transformational stories of the extraordinary in the ordinary (and the transcendent in the temporal) to share with the world. The author of several nonfiction books, she is an expert in her field and disciplines—contemporary religion and culture, grassroots spiritual trends, and public theology—bringing the eye of a trained observer to explorations of external adventure and internal geography.
Cathleen is an accomplished columnist and memoirist in short and long form. She is able both to be calmly dispassionate and wildly vulnerable, depending on what is required to serve best the narrative in her storytelling. She aspires to be brave and honest with her audience, daring and kind with herself.
You can find her at:
@godgrrl on Instagram
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If this episode hits home and you feel you have your own story to share, email Gretchen at .
Follow along and contribute to the conversation @lovedasyouarepod on Instagram.
Find more from Gretchen Crowder @gdcrowder as well as at gretchencrowder.com.
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Transcript
Introduction and New Year Greetings
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, and welcome back to Loved As You Are, an Ignatian podcast with me, Gretchen Crowder, and Happy New
Meet Kathleen Falsani: A Journey in Journalism
00:00:08
Speaker
Year. I had the great pleasure of having a conversation over this Christmas break with Kathleen Falsani, and I am so excited to share that conversation with you. Kathleen is a veteran, inveterate, and an award-winning journalist specializing in the intersection of religion, faith, beliefs, spirituality, and culture for more than two decades.
00:00:28
Speaker
Her work has taken her all over the world, always with her cameras and notebooks in tow, searching for enduring transformational stories of the extraordinary and the ordinary, and the transcendent and the temporal, always to share with the world. The author of several nonfiction books, she is an expert in her field and disciplines, contemporary religion and culture, grassroots spiritual trends, and public theology.
00:00:53
Speaker
bringing the eye of a trained observer to explorations of external adventure and internal geography. Kathleen is an accomplished columnist and memoirist in short and long form.
A Shared Love for Spirituality
00:01:05
Speaker
She is able both to be calmly dispassionate and wildly vulnerable, depending on what is required to serve best the narrative in her storytelling. She aspires to be brave and honest with our audience, daring and kind with herself.
00:01:20
Speaker
Her bio is expansive, and there are so many works of hers to check out, so please click the links in the show notes and learn more about Kathleen. I met Kathleen at the beginning of the fall semester when we were briefly in a class together at Loyola Chicago, and I am so glad we met. We both share a love of writing, particularly about spirituality, faith, and religion, and we have spoken as if we were old friends since our first conversation.
Spiritual Direction and Education
00:01:46
Speaker
This conversation could have gone on for hours,
00:01:50
Speaker
But I cut it off right around an hour and 20 minutes for you wonderful people who tune in. It's worth every single minute of your time to listen. I know you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did. It may just be the conversation you need to hear as 2024 begins. So here we go.
00:02:49
Speaker
Welcome Kathleen, I just finished introducing you to my listeners and in my introduction, I told them that you and I met in an online class this semester in Loyola Chicago's Institute of Pastoral Ministry program. It seems both of us had had an unrelenting tug towards spiritual direction for years. Can you tell my listeners a little bit about why you're enrolled in a spiritual direction program? It's really simply because of that tug. I really don't know
00:03:18
Speaker
what the end game is, or if this is just something that I need in my life as a human, or if it's something that's going to make me a better journalist and a better writer, or if it's something I'm actually going to practice as a spiritual director. I just don't know, but I was pretty sure of that tug because I tried to
00:03:40
Speaker
you know, Jonah, my way out of it there for a while. And it seemed like I was going to wind up doing this, whether I liked it or not. But I didn't. And again, there have been things in my life that I've resisted that were a clearer call for a longer time. And I think out of life experience and practicing that, it was like, there's that tug. I'm going to ignore that for a minute. And then it was like, there's that tug again, except it's louder this time.
00:04:08
Speaker
So I answered it. So yeah, so I've gone to seminary. I have an MTS from a Protestant seminary. I have been a religion journalist, which means I'm a mainstream media journalist who writes about religion and spirituality and faith and the big questions. And I've done that for more than 25 years. And why did I feel the need to go and get more training? Well,
00:04:38
Speaker
It wasn't because I didn't understand God in as much as one can understand God by studying theological things. It was that I felt I had a natural gifting toward listening to people and into helping them discern things. That's sort of been a theme throughout my life. And I wanted the skill set
00:05:07
Speaker
I wanted to have it so that if I were called to use it in a traditional spiritual direction setting, or not even, that I wouldn't hurt anyone by doing it in a way that's unhealthy. So that was the main reason.
00:05:22
Speaker
And then also just to explore. And because I'm a professional student, I've left my own devices. I feel that I am. I am as well. So I, you know, every every time I enroll in something new, my family's like, what are you doing this time?
Impact of Jesuit Education
00:05:36
Speaker
My best friend's the same way. She's but she's like two degrees ahead of me. Not that we're competitive at all. But we went we had just gone through the living school together for two years with the program, the Center for Action and Contemplation, Richard Roars joint.
00:05:52
Speaker
during COVID and that ended and she had gotten her, I don't know if she got a master's or a certificate, but she got her training in spiritual direction and had been practicing for a while. I thought not just, it wasn't out of competition, but I just thought what she was doing was interesting. When you've been friends, as long as we have, we're proving stones for each other, you know? And so when I saw that, and she's an educator,
00:06:20
Speaker
and is just about to retire after 25 years or so of doing theater with high school students. When I saw what it was kind of, how it was shaping her other vocations, it made me think about listening to that poll and what it might mean for me as well.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, I like that you said you don't know exactly what you're going to do with it, because I feel like in the first couple classes that I was in this semester, they were all like, okay, so then when you start your spiritual direction practice, and I was like, I think this is applicable, whether that's in game or not, like, I think it's, it's a lot of skills that are helping you learn to be better about listening to other people's spiritual journeys.
00:07:07
Speaker
whether that's in a one-on-one situation or it's in a larger situation or it's even reading somebody else's journey and trying to
00:07:17
Speaker
edited or work on it. Exactly, exactly. And because this isn't my first rodeo of going into a setting where people were expected to be one thing and not being that, I mean, I went to seminary as a journalist, which when I did it was very unusual. It's slightly less unusual these days to do that. But in having to explain to more than one professor through three years of seminary, like, no, no, no, I'm
00:07:46
Speaker
I'm not doing the MDiv track. And then they'd sort of switch and just think I was going to be an academic and I'd have to go, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to write about this for newspapers. And they're like, what? So I'd like to practice that. Wait, what did I say in class yesterday? Maybe I shouldn't say this in front of her. Everything was off the record at that point, but yeah, it was, yeah. So it's, it's a familiar feeling to be in a setting where there's an expectation of one thing when you're, and you're not that thing.
00:08:16
Speaker
But I largely, perhaps not in the class that you and I met in, but I largely felt that that was no problem whatsoever. And I felt really supported in the not knowingness of how I'm going to use this in a lot of the other encounters with faculty and staff and students. Is this the first Jesuit school that you've been a part of?
00:08:44
Speaker
Like a way back in my history, let me think. Yes, because I started out Roman Catholic as a child and my parents are Jesuit educated and my husband's Jesuit educated. A lot of my family are. But no, no, no. This is my first Jesuit experience as a student.
00:09:06
Speaker
Well, mine as well. I've worked in Jesuit education for 17 years and I talk about it and write about it and work with a variety of people on it, but I've never attended a Jesuit university till now. So now I can finally say that as well, which is it's I think it's great because there's such a plethora of different religious universities to get a little bit of everything so you can fully understand the picture instead of just immersing yourself
Understanding of God: Love and Grace
00:09:34
Speaker
in one
00:09:35
Speaker
one part of it. Well, if that's a good process, then I've got that covered. That's for sure. In my home, growing up, my parents were both educators, and both of them got their teaching degrees from Fairfield University in Connecticut, which is a Jesuit school.
00:09:53
Speaker
And so the Jesuit education, even though my father was working on a doctorate at Columbia and other, my mother had gone to school other places. They both have gone to school other places. Before a empirical university, it was sort of the gold standard in education, especially in spiritual education, at least for a time. I think my father always felt that my mother changed her mind in the mid eighties when she discovered evangelical Protestantism, but
00:10:19
Speaker
Even still, it was always like, ooh, Jesuit school, they're good. And I remember going to, trying to think what year this was, maybe 2015, 14 or 15. I did one of those fellowships for a week or so at one of the
00:10:41
Speaker
universities in the Vatican for journalists sort of like continuing education program and it was called Catholicism in the Age of Francis because I was covering his election when you know that very night and it was raining sideways and the bell wasn't supposed we weren't supposed to be having any more smoke that day and then suddenly there he was. I went back you know 18 months later to take this course and part of it was
00:11:09
Speaker
going into one of the oldest Jesuit buildings there and having somebody... Oh, actually it was the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. And having the priest who was giving us a tour explained to us that during the Crusades, the Jesuits were actually like mercenaries.
00:11:26
Speaker
I'm like, oh, so they're badasses. Can I see that they're asses? They're badasses too. Not just smarty pantses, but they were tough guys too. Not that that's something to aspire to the Crusades or being a mercenary, but it just sort of gave me a fuller picture of what the history of their community is.
00:11:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting when you look at the real full life stories of saints or you know, you get such a more interesting picture than the like little thing that's on the back of a prayer card, right? That doesn't really tell you all of the aspects of their life. Like a little book of saints I had as a kid growing up.
00:12:09
Speaker
Because I think of Jesuits now, if you say Jesuits to me, I picture Jim Martin, which I think is a good thing. If you're going to picture a Jesuit, he's not a bad one to think of. But I've known Jim for close to a couple of decades.
00:12:26
Speaker
Yeah, he's kind of in the fullness of all that the community of Jesus is meant to be. He's smart and kind and pastoral, but he's also not a pushover.
00:12:39
Speaker
Right. And I think one of the things that Jesuits in general embody, and all of us who also practice Ignatian spirituality, is that discernment process. That idea that God is not just talking to the community as a whole, but God is also talking to us individually. And so we have to be able to listen to that and able to have a discerning response to
The Path to Journalism
00:13:03
Speaker
other people.
00:13:04
Speaker
even when, you know, what we feel God is calling us to do or God is asking of us is something that not everybody will understand. Yeah, I mean, he tells that, Jim Martin tells that so beautifully in at least one of his books, I think in a class you and I didn't take together. The last book we read was The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything.
00:13:29
Speaker
And he talks about the process of disagreeing with his superior and feeling one thing and falling in love in the middle of things and how he had to manage his desires and his ego and his obedience and his relationship with God and his relationship with the community. I learned so much from
00:13:52
Speaker
him retelling that story, even though I'm not a religious, I don't live in a community, communities make me itchy. I think that's the point. The communities are meant to make us itchy. Yeah, I learned so very much about how to discern in my own process and then how to perhaps different ways of helping other people figure out how to discern
00:14:21
Speaker
their next step or their choices as well. That's the power of the story, you know, which again is something that Ignatius, the Ignatian spirituality just really emphasizes. Yeah, definitely that idea that you enter through somebody's door and you listen to their story before you try to walk forward together. So often we can try to just kind of throw our stuff on somebody else instead of being able to kind of figure out
00:14:51
Speaker
you know, what is God saying to them that might be helpful in my own journey, you know, and how can I, how can I learn from somebody else? Yeah, for sure.
00:15:00
Speaker
So you said at the beginning of this, but I also said in your introduction that you've been a writer, photographer for 25 plus years. And most of that has been on religion and spirituality. And most of what I write and speak about is on religion, spirituality. So I always get people asking me why, you know, when all the things that you could write about,
00:15:22
Speaker
all the things that you could, you know, why was my spirituality? And so I thought I'd ask you that same question, though I don't always know exactly the answer, except that it calls to me. So yeah, it's a good it's, it's a very good question. It's one I've been asked before. And it's one that I've, there's a chapter or an introduction of a book somewhere where I explain this. And
00:15:46
Speaker
So one of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor of our den. My parents were, they met overseas, they were world travelers, they were civilian teachers for the Air Force, and my mother lived in Japan, and they met in Germany, and my father had been in the Navy during the Korean War and had traveled extensively. So I grew up in Connecticut, which can be a very homogenous white space,
00:16:16
Speaker
My home was filled with influences from all over the world, including just books everywhere. And so I have this memory of sitting, I was probably three, I think it's before my brother was born.
00:16:30
Speaker
And he's three and a half years younger than me. So sitting on the floor with the Time Life books, not Encyclopedia Britannica, but like the little slim ones. And it was one about world religion. And I remember being fascinated not knowing what they were with the pictures of like huge Buddhas and whirling dervishes and
00:16:54
Speaker
people doing circumambulating during the Hajj and just wondering what all these things were. I grew up in it. My home, although the flavor changed over the years, was always a religious place. And I mean that in the fullest sense of religious, the technical and the sort of short-handed version. So when we were Catholic, we were very Catholic.
00:17:19
Speaker
Um, and then when we were evangelical Christians, we were very evangelical Christian, at least my, well, and I say we, my mother, um, but she was the dominant force and we all kind of went along. So it's not to rock the boat most of the time, um, until we did, but that's a different story. So I remember being fascinated and my question is, as much as I remember what I asked was why, or what are they doing?
00:17:44
Speaker
And my mother said, well, they're praying. And I was like, but why are they praying to this giant green person? It was a Buddha somewhere. And there was a picture and the woman was crying. She was weeping as she was praying. And I didn't understand that.
00:18:04
Speaker
And what I was trying to figure out was not so much what they were doing, but why they were doing it. And so that's the question. That's the question. Why did we do the things that we do? And so that led me into just being sort of fascinated by different cultures and people in general. But that's always the question. It's not like, what do you do for a living? But it's, why do you do that?
00:18:35
Speaker
whether you run marathons, but why do you run marathons? To me, that's the interesting part. And so when I thought about going into journalism, which was something I thought about doing from a very early age, I think somewhere in grammar school, the first year I was asked to write about what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was oceanographer. I grew up on the water and loved being beachcombing, basically. And then the second year I wrote it, it was journalists and it never changed.
00:19:07
Speaker
For a hot second, I thought I might be an international lawyer because that might be a way to do journalism abroad. This was not during a war time, so I couldn't figure out, like, how would you be a foreign correspondent if you weren't in a war zone? And I didn't really want to be in a war zone, and there wasn't really anything actively going on in the late 80s. So, you know, I didn't study journalism as an undergrad because the liberal arts school I went to didn't have it as a major, but I did journalism all through
00:19:36
Speaker
all four years of college. And by the time I was, you know, my second year on the student newspaper, I knew that that's really what I wanted to do because I wanted to tell people's stories. I wasn't so much, I wasn't interested in like political news unless it related to why people were doing what they were doing, why they were voting the way they were voting or why the candidate was saying the things he or she was saying, what do they actually believe about
00:20:05
Speaker
whatever it was they were saying, whether it was religious or not. And then, you know, I graduated from as an undergraduate in 92 when the job market was difficult. And so you could, it was very hard to walk into a newspaper without a graduate degree and get a job. I think it's
Evolving Spiritual Understanding
00:20:29
Speaker
almost impossible to do that now, but it was very difficult then. So I knew I had to go to graduate school.
00:20:35
Speaker
But I had this interest in religion as well, and I was trying to figure out how the two would go together. And I didn't know that there were religion reporters until I was enrolled in the program for religion reporters. And I was the first student enrolled in the program for religion reporters at Northwestern and one of the seminaries up there. It became clear to me that
00:21:02
Speaker
very quickly that that why question was still the one that motivated me with people. I wasn't interested in covering institutions of religion or annual meetings or the way that religion was sort of traditionally covered in newspapers. That was boring to me.
00:21:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's not how you do it. Like if you actually want to know what's happening in the world of religion, you got to talk to people in the pews or on the mat or on the floor or not in the buildings. So I my approach to covering religion as a beat. And I was really fortunate in that. The newspapers that I wrote for in Chicago and the Chicago area at the beginning of my career, the first 10, 15 years of my career,
00:21:49
Speaker
allowed me to do it my way. And so I went into what we would now maybe call public theology by looking at popular culture. And so I've done everything from interview the manager of the Cubs in the dugout at Wrigley Field about God.
00:22:10
Speaker
to going to the Playboy Mansion to talk to Hugh Hefner about God, to being in the West Wing, talking to people there about God, or about what they believed. Some people don't believe in God, but they still have beliefs about things that shape the way they live their life. So that's kind of, you know, it started with that curiosity as a child sitting on the floor with the Time Life Book of World Religions.
00:22:34
Speaker
and getting an answer that wasn't the answer I was actually looking for. And I continue to, and that's what propels me still. I mean, I can do straight news. I can do most of the stuff in my sleep, but the stuff, what really compels me are really deep stories of eternal things that matter about how somebody lives their life and why they're making the choices that they do.
00:23:03
Speaker
And I think that's what connects us to each other. I can imagine that your picture of who God is, your picture of why we're here, it just gets bigger or it gets more complete. Like you fill in more and more blanks, even though you'll never complete the picture. Every time you talk to somebody else, it kind of is like, okay, there's another piece of the puzzle I didn't have before.
00:23:26
Speaker
It's like a paint by number, but the more you fill it in, the less you have any idea of what it is or what it looks like. You have a better idea of what it is, but you have no idea what it looks like, if that makes any sense. It's like you start out thinking that it's representational and then suddenly it's huge abstract gernica and you're just working on a little tiny corner of it. And that's the mystery that I've grown more.
00:23:57
Speaker
comfortable with and also more attracted to as I've gotten older. That scared the Jesus out of me when I was younger.
00:24:05
Speaker
I think when we're little kids, especially, you know, I remember going to Catholic school and you'd have the images there and you'd have the stories there and it'd be like, this is exactly who God is, you know, that a six year old can interpret. And then as you grow up and you kind of experience people and experience God active in the world, which is another nation thing, right? God and all things. Uh, so.
00:24:28
Speaker
the more you experience it, yeah, the more blurry those pictures become. But I think that's kind of the point, right? Because God's divine. God's supposed to be unknowing. You know, we're supposed to have, search our whole lives to figure out this mystery that we're only going to figure out, you know, once we're gone. So. Right. Or, you know, we're all looking at not only the world, but God's broke last darkly. Then we rose colored sometimes. But, um,
00:24:58
Speaker
Yeah, and it's who God is has dramatically changed in some ways for me throughout my life, but also stayed exactly the base of it has always been the same. And that's not true for everybody, but it just happens to be true for me.
Writing and Spirituality
00:25:19
Speaker
God was always a God before I could articulate it this way. God was always a loving being.
00:25:27
Speaker
the creator of an extender of grace. And I got the words for it over time from different people by accident sometimes, by design. But that's always been a constant. I never, and that's a blessing. It's a gift. I never thought of God as an angry, judgmental being. There were plenty of times then and now that I hear about a God who would send
00:25:57
Speaker
is her, their beloved children to eternal suffering. And I go, that's not the God I know. That doesn't make any sense to me. And God doesn't have to make sense always, but that really just seems counter to God's nature as I understand it in the book that my tradition has given me and also from reading the book of nature as I'm starting to get better at doing. So I don't have that baggage of
00:26:28
Speaker
a damning God, you know, who's keeping track of all of our wrongs. Even though I was taught that at different points, it didn't stick. And for that, I'm immensely grateful. But who God is, it's always been Jesus as a big part of that. But that Jesus was God incarnate, is God incarnate. And I dig Jesus.
00:26:58
Speaker
I always big fan, um, celebrated his birthday couple days going, even though he was more than likely born in June, but you know, high fives symbolically, we're good. We're good. My son is adopted and we don't know. He was born in Africa and spent the first nine years of his life there. And we don't know when he was born. And so we eventually just the three of us, my husband, my son and I just chose a date together.
00:27:24
Speaker
Christmas? Nope, not Christmas. But I get it, you know, that maybe nobody really knew. And so somebody went, how about December 25th? And they were like, okay. And Jesus is like, sure, whatever. It doesn't really matter to me. And that's kind of how my son feels about it too. So I'm fine with it not being, but Jesus has always been my, one of the main door through which I understand in as much as one can understand God.
00:27:53
Speaker
but it's also become in recent years, God is bigger than anything we could possibly imagine. Even though God is, I do believe that Jesus is God. And this is the yes and the portion of the event, perhaps a lot more than that. And I'm only starting to learn what the rest of that might,
00:28:23
Speaker
be how we see in the world and it's largely through other people, which I think is what Jesus was sort of pointing out when he was here, you know, that we experienced God in other people and through other people and in community with other people and in how we treat other people and opportunities to extend grace and love. That's all. A lot of that at least comes through people. Yeah.
00:28:53
Speaker
I appreciate that you said that you ask all sorts of different people who God is or who you know who there is their foundation or what do they believe whether that's in God or something else because I think it
00:29:09
Speaker
allows people to become more human to us. Cause sometimes when you don't know a person very well because they they're famous or infamous and you don't have a lot of interaction with them, you don't have the ability to see what is really human about them. And also why, you know, God loves them just as much as God loves me or God loves somebody that I love. So by telling those stories in all sorts of places, you give people the opportunity
00:29:39
Speaker
to see that more than just our small little circles can be loved. Precisely, right. And also in letting somebody tell their story about what they believe and why and how it affects the way they live and the choices they make and the art that they make and the games that they play, we also see ourselves. And that makes us feel less alone.
00:30:04
Speaker
or gives us the opportunity to feel less alone and also gives us the opportunity to realize that the person that I'm looking at who I don't know anything about or I only know something about from reading about them or seeing them on television actually has a lot more in common with me than I thought.
Challenges in Journalism
00:30:20
Speaker
And that's very uncomfortable when the person we're talking about is somebody that you find repellent.
00:30:27
Speaker
for whatever reason. That's when it gets harder. It's when the rubber hits the road about like, God loves everyone equally. We're all precious children of the Creator.
00:30:42
Speaker
And when someone is misbehaving and being just generally a horrible human being, it's really hard to see that, but I think that's when it's the most important to be able to see that. Otherwise, we us and them the world into what we have right now going on in a lot of places, which is not what the Prince of Peace would want on his birthday, whether it's December 25th or not.
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah, when I wrote my first book started as a project in the Chicago Sun-Times where I was the religion writer for many years and we called the project The God Factor, God being a shorthand for religion and all those things. Even though not everybody I talked to believed in God, actually they were some of the more interesting conversations we had.
00:31:38
Speaker
When I started that project in the newspaper and when I continued it in book form and talked to a lot more people, the question I always opened up with, and I thought about it long and hard, especially when I didn't know as much about the person. I usually pick somebody who had said something that made me go, hmm, something interesting is going on there spiritually, whether they're aware of it or not.
00:32:05
Speaker
So the question I would ask instead of like, what do you believe or who is God to you or any of the other questions was how would you describe yourself spiritually? And some people gave me one word answer and some people talked for an hour. And it was fascinating. And that was largely an exercise and shutting up for me and just letting them talk. There's a lot of people don't, especially people who are
00:32:36
Speaker
in the public eye don't actually get a chance to talk about things that really mean something to them. And when you ask somebody about eternal questions, it's a really intimate thing for a stranger to, and sometimes people often, people invited me into their home to have this conversation.
00:32:58
Speaker
So there was a lot of trust involved, and I tried to always honor that by not leaving my preconceptions in the car, among other things. Harder to do when you pull up to the Playboy mansion, but very important to do when you're there to have the kind of conversation that Half and I did. Years ago, he was still with us on this side of the veil, and was a person who had a very interesting spirituality.
00:33:26
Speaker
who had spent a lot of time thinking about it, even though it might not have looked that way. But it was one of the things that compelled him throughout his life. The choices that he made might not have been the choices that you and I would make, but it was no less a significant compelling factor in how he lived and made the choices that he made. So, yeah.
00:33:50
Speaker
How do we invite people into this conversation in a way that they feel included and not afraid and not judged is always something I'm thinking about when I just did an interview with somebody that I kinda know recently. And even though it was an assignment and I was there to talk about a specific thing, I knew that this person was somebody for whom faith and in this person's case
00:34:20
Speaker
Catholic faith is very important, even though it might not look like it from the surface. And so we were able to touch on that a bit. And those always make the conversations about the other thing deeper and richer in my experience.
00:34:36
Speaker
Wanda, allow people the freedom to talk about their spirituality or their religion without judging the brasty of it. Does God really think that you are what you think you are or whatever? It's just what do you believe? How do you practice it? And having the freedom to be able to say that without
00:34:57
Speaker
any lenses being put on it from the other side. It took a lot of guts for some people, depending on what their vocation or their career choice was to do that. I was, again, I keep saying lucky, I actually don't believe in luck. Let's call it blessed. I was blessed to have the very first person, the very first interview I did for that series was a young state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.
00:35:25
Speaker
when he was running for U.S. Senate. And the most skittish when I have these conversations are almost always the politicians. Actors are a close second because they both, their livelihood and their power in the world depends on what other people think of them. I mean, it's supposed to does for all of us, but it really does for politicians and actors. So they don't want to say anything that's going to offend anyone or
00:35:52
Speaker
make their audience smaller. Right. Because that's how they're going to get elected. Right. And I just remember thinking how comfortable in his person Obama was because he showed up without notes, without a staff, without
00:36:14
Speaker
handler without, there was, I didn't get a note ahead of time that said you can't ask him about these 16 things. It was nothing. He just met me and just started talking. And I asked him that exact same question and he took a while to answer that first question.
00:36:30
Speaker
and then told me basically his spiritual history. And it was fascinating, but he did this one thing and I still, I think this is still true. I am the longest interview he's ever given about his faith. And that was in 2004. So it's been a while. Time for update if you're listening, I'm available for a follow-up. I always say that. He,
00:36:58
Speaker
He's telling me about his experience has largely been, well, entirely been in the Protestant church, Protestant Christian church. Even, I mean, he did live, live for a time in, I believe it was Indonesia where he attended a school that it was the local school. It happened to be in Madrasa, but he was never Muslim, but he was surrounded by that culture. He has people in his family are Muslim.
00:37:24
Speaker
even if his father is just nominally Muslim, as you know his father very well, blah, blah, blah. But his religious experience and his spiritual personal experience has all largely been almost 100% of it within Protestant Christianity. And he was telling me about the Sunday he went up for an altar call at a, was it a Baptist church? I know the church, I'm just trying to remember what flavor it is. Let's call it Baptist for shorthand.
00:37:53
Speaker
They like the altar calls, but it's not exclusive to Baptist. He went up and he could have just left it there. And we did, we went on and talked about something else. And, but he circled back and he wanted to clarify that that wasn't the moment where he decided to follow Jesus. It would have been so much easier for him politically if he had just left it, but he didn't. He went back and he's like, I just want you to understand that that was a public symbol of a
00:38:23
Speaker
an evolution that had happened in my life spiritually. And that was the moment I decided I wanted to just make a public affirmation of it, but it wasn't the moment that anything happened.
Spiritual Growth and Community
00:38:34
Speaker
It had been happening and it continues to happen. You know, I'm like high-fiving a million angels cause it's such a better answer, but he didn't need to go back for it and he did. So that always to me said something about the man himself. Um, that interview,
00:38:49
Speaker
with him is like a Rorschach test for people, largely politically, but sometimes spiritually too.
00:38:56
Speaker
You can come to that, and depending on what your preconceived notions about him are, you'll see it in what he says. And sometimes it's the polar opposite of what I heard when I was sitting across from him. But it's been used as a means to praise him as a faithful, humble servant of Jesus Christ, and also as, see, he's a closet Muslim, he's probably a terrorist, and actually doesn't believe in God and eats babies. I mean, people see what they want to see in it, which says more about us than anything it says about him.
00:39:26
Speaker
but that was having those kinds of conversations are enlightening and they're a gift and they're a gift to society and they're also kind of a lens by which we can sort of gauge what's going on for better or for worse in society too, which is why I continue to be fascinated by these things and have these conversations.
00:39:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting you saying that like how we listen to a conversation, we put all these lenses on it and we see what we want to see in a conversation as much as when we try to take all those off as best we can and just see the person and listen to the person, they're still there. We have to be able to identify them and take them off. One of the things that I think always
00:40:16
Speaker
influences how I view other people or how I have viewed other people is this idea of whether or not I really viewed myself as being loved as I was no matter what. And so part of the impetus for me to start writing on this but then also start this podcast was
00:40:36
Speaker
I always wonder if the way that we fail to love others well is really because we don't really get it. We don't really deep down inside understand that no matter what I do, what I say that might be wrong, what mistakes I might make, whether I'm successful or if I'm a failure,
00:40:56
Speaker
that we didn't have to earn that love that God has for us, right? And that that's maybe why we put the lenses on that we do when we view another person's story. It's not really as much about them. It's often more about ourselves. Almost always about us. We don't believe.
00:41:15
Speaker
what we, some of us who are in a position to preach, what we preach half the time. And we talk about this God of grace who loves us unconditionally, just as we are from the moment we were a whisper of a thought throughout our whole life. And at the end of it brings us back to God's self. So yeah, that's what we teach, right? That's what we say we believe, but we don't actually.
00:41:45
Speaker
And we don't actually believe it about ourselves. It's easier to believe it about other people. And it's harder because if we actually believe it about ourselves, then I think we behave a lot differently than we do. And I'm saying this about myself, you know, as a physician heal myself. I mean, we have this, there's another professor in the program at IPS who
00:42:12
Speaker
Like as we were turning into the last week or two of the semester, articulated something that I had kind of guessed was happening anyway. And that is this professor gives everybody an A. And he says, because everything that you've learned and everything that you've done and in every way that you've participated,
00:42:40
Speaker
or chosen not to and everything that you've written or not written, you are enough and it is adequate and you get an A. You don't have to earn anything. You just needed to be here for this. And it was like, wow. I mean, I think higher education would just completely
00:42:58
Speaker
implode if every professor was like that. And I think if going into the class, if he had, and he might have even said something, I had a clue that that was happening. So he must've said something early on, but to really just be like, everybody gets an A. And I think we have the God that we profess as Christian people, as Christians, Christians shouldn't be an adjective, it just should be a noun, as Christians.
00:43:29
Speaker
the God that we say we believe in gives all of us an A. You know, some people say that, no, no, no, no. You can get a C-plus and you might have to stay after or repeat a class or repeat a grade or you're in detention or you failed and you don't get to graduate. I don't actually think that's true. Yeah, it's interesting when we think about what motivates us. I mean, I'm definitely motivated by grades. I admit that. Oh, super me too.
00:43:58
Speaker
But I wonder, you know, when we subscribe to the idea that God is giving us a lower grade when we fail and that we have to work harder, that there's things we have to correct and fix about ourselves. We're about to be on January 1st in spiritual or not. We're all probably thinking, what are we going to fix about ourselves this coming year?
00:44:21
Speaker
But when we, you know, are we motivated by that? Like we have to rise to the occasion or if we instead thought we already have the A, God already loves us as we are, would we need motivated even more to do that for somebody else? You know, to work towards having somebody else recognize that truth
Balancing Life and Spiritual Calling
00:44:43
Speaker
too. Yeah. And to learn the things that we need to learn along the way.
00:44:50
Speaker
to help other people see that. I don't think I've ever worked as hard as I have in a class with anybody because I wasn't, I just wanted the wisdom and I wanted the experience of being in a classroom with somebody who, this person happens to be a spiritual director and watching him interact with people taught me more about how to be a spiritual director than anything else I read or anything else we attempted to practice.
00:45:20
Speaker
in a, in a more kind of lab like environment. So I was more engaged because of the freedom to not having to be trying to earn something. Um, I don't know if that would work as well for like, you know, physics or yeah. Well, I mean, any, any high school, any high school class, undergraduate class, these are grown people.
00:45:45
Speaker
But I do see part of understanding that we're loved as we are, no matter what, is also understanding that we're created for some unique purpose. And so when we go all in on what that is, when we figure out what that is, what our deepest desires, what are our passions, and we go all in on that, then we want
00:46:05
Speaker
to do the work. We want to learn more and get better at it and figure out how to contribute in a more effective way. When we're all trying to be the same thing, that's where it gets complicated. And I know that as a kid, you know, I was like, I want to be what that person is being because they're super cool and they're doing that. And why can't I do that like them? Yeah. And that kind of prevents you from doing well, right? When you're trying to be like everybody else.
00:46:35
Speaker
It does. And yet, now from the perspective of being an older people with some life experience and some wisdom and a little, well you a lot more than me, Ignatian spirituality and under our belts, there is something that, and you look back, I'm like, what was the thing that I was completely obsessed about when I was a kid? Like I really wanted this or I wanted to be like that.
00:47:05
Speaker
And what might that say about desire? And some of the desires that we have are God's way of showing us what we are meant to be doing in the world. I don't know if Gloria Vanderbilt jeans when I was in eighth grade spoke to anything deeper, but maybe they did.
00:47:26
Speaker
I've always loved clothes. I have a great appreciation for people who can sew and the way people choose to adorn themselves and move through the world as a way of saying, this is who I am. That's interesting to me. So maybe there was something more to it than just the jeans with the swan on the, yep.
00:47:51
Speaker
inside the little pocket that I had to, even when I was tiny, I used to have to lie down to like zip them up. Thank God we don't do that anymore.
00:47:59
Speaker
We don't? Oh, no, no, that's right. I don't lie down and zip them up anymore. If I can't get them above my I'm just like, never mind. I will just go for the jeggings. I don't care. That's true. That's true. No, you have a good point because I do remember, you know, I didn't start writing until five years ago, but I remember loving it as a kid. And I do think that that
00:48:25
Speaker
Not all grades are bad necessarily, but I do think that like putting myself up against somebody else's.
00:48:30
Speaker
stuff as a kid was like, well, this is clearly not something that God is asking me to do because look how well that person already does it, right? And look at how well they tell a story, whereas mine needs some work. So I think those things do, like when you go back and look at what you wanted as a child before anything got in the way of saying you weren't good enough added. Before somebody told you you were doing it wrong? Yeah, yeah. Why did you stop?
00:49:01
Speaker
And what made you start again? I think I stopped because of just self-consciousness and not feeling like I was going to do it well. Like I would write things for other people. I would be the person that would toast someone at a wedding or I would write a talk for somebody else to give. But I think it was really when I started to really get into Ignatian spirituality and think about this idea that
00:49:29
Speaker
God wasn't just calling me to write something for somebody else to say or as an off-handed notion, but also God was calling me to write as a form of prayer and as a way of communicating God to another person as well as communicating God to myself in a better way. And I had some mentors that were really influential in saying,
00:49:54
Speaker
Do it, like why are you not doing this yet? I had a couple of those who caught me early on. I mean, my dad was a beautiful writer, even though he's a math teacher. Like I didn't, sorry, Pop, he's not with us anymore, but he passed along his, he was a kind of Renaissance man in a very humble way. His artistic sensibilities, even though he could draw, I can't draw.
00:50:25
Speaker
his storytelling abilities and he's, he was a beautiful writer, but man, I got to somewhere just this side of trig and everything just shut down with the math. I majored in math, so. Oh my gosh. Amazing to me. To people who can do, you know, high calculus and stuff, that's like, it's magic. I mean, it's, it's as unattainable
00:50:51
Speaker
with my understanding of my skill set and whatever I've been blessed with abilities to do as like, you know, carving marble into a hedgehog. Like I can't fab I'm doing high math. So that's really interesting. What it taught me, however, is just because you can do something doesn't mean it's what God made you to do.
00:51:18
Speaker
Right. So if you are just a really good student and you can be a really good student in a variety of different things, but you're miserable doing something, it's God telling you like this is not. Yeah.
00:51:31
Speaker
This is not what I want you to use that for. And I think we get caught up in that. Many of us get caught up in that and this idea again of like, what would be the successful job? What would be the job that others want us to have? Or what would be the one that would keep me stable? And it goes back to that conversation or that idea of grace that God offers all the grace that you need.
00:51:58
Speaker
when you are pursuing the thing that God created you to do, right? And you are able to do things you didn't think you could do and fit. You know, I look back at this semester and I shouldn't have been able to do the things that I was doing in addition to the other things that I was doing. Yeah, I feel the same way. But if I had cut out those things, you know, everything would have gone slower. Like it just wouldn't have been what I learned so much so quickly because I was so busy.
00:52:27
Speaker
It doesn't always happen that way, but it did. I think we had similar experiences, just a lot going on from family stuff to physical stuff to work things and then all of this new information and new skills that we were trying to internalize. I don't remember a time in my life where I've learned so much so fast.
00:52:51
Speaker
like in a real tangible, it's now in the toolbox kind of way, not studying for an exam and then forgetting it as soon as the exam is over. And I think that's because the, perhaps that's because the intention was different. Because we weren't chasing the A. I mean, we always are a little bit, but that wasn't the
00:53:12
Speaker
That's not why you got into it. No, that wasn't the motivating factor, which also made it easier for I did something that I've not done before as a student and something wasn't working for me. And I said, something isn't working for me. And instead of withdrawing from a program, because I figured if I couldn't do it perfectly, then it mustn't be for me.
00:53:37
Speaker
still having learned enough even in the first few weeks to maybe not believe everything I thought.
Embracing Personal Spirituality
00:53:44
Speaker
I asked somebody to help me discern what I should do and that wasn't the answer. The answer was, no, no, stay. We'll figure this out. We'll make something else work for you. That doesn't work. Well, something else will. This is where you're supposed to be. I was like, no, I'm okay. But learning to do that, I mean, I'm 53.
00:54:02
Speaker
It took me that, I was that many years old when I realized that you can, if something isn't working for you, you can say, that's not working for you. You don't have, you don't have to power through in the way that it is. Yeah. And there was so much grace around that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the other thing it could have been. I mean, if somebody, I was trusting the people who are in place in the school that we attend to do precisely what they did, which was to help me figure out whether I should power through it. If there was a.
00:54:32
Speaker
alternative or this wasn't the time or whatever. And some of that was trusting people. I've never met in person. You and I have never met in person. I feel like I know you. But thank God for Zoom. Yeah, the challenge of online learning. Yeah. Sure. And I don't know that I would have been able to do this as, I was going to say as well, fully, it's called that, as fully.
00:55:01
Speaker
Um, if I hadn't done the two year program with the living school in the middle of a global pandemic, when I was, I can't tell you how many times I was like, why in the world am I doing this right now? This is not what it was supposed to be. I was supposed to be seeing people in person. I was supposed to be, I mean, some of it was supposed to be distance learning, but, and I can't tell you how many times I almost quit. And I'm so glad I didn't, you know, changed my life and just hung in there long enough for.
00:55:29
Speaker
the thread that I was tugging on to lead somewhere and for the picture to start to make a little more sense.
00:55:39
Speaker
What a great opportunity to learn from Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation because he's established such a wonderful thing there. We wish we could hold on to everything he's going to say for all eternity. Forever. They're doing the best that they can to make sure that we have everything. Thank God Richard is doing well. I don't think he's going anywhere anytime soon.
00:56:08
Speaker
It's a little touch and go there a little while ago, but my understanding is that he's doing quite well. Thank you, Jesus. Yeah. Well, there's so much to learn from a variety of voices, including his, right? And his voice has changed much like all of ours. The more that he writes, the more that he speaks, the more that he encounters other people, the more that he prays. His voice has also changed throughout the years, as many of ours has. His voice has changed his understanding of God.
00:56:38
Speaker
is, it is changed as in terms of, you know, his paint by numbers is getting weirder and bigger too. But that was another program that I mean, it's not a degree conferring, it was a lot of work. And it was a lot of unlearning.
00:56:57
Speaker
things with no, I mean, they literally get, it's one of my most prized possessions now, but it's a little piece of just, you know, printed out, like, it's not a fancy degree. It doesn't use scroll work. It's just sort of says like, Kathleen Falsani has completed two years of work at the living school. Hooray. That's sort of it. And that means more to me than all my fancy ones. How do you grade life to work? You don't, you don't.
00:57:26
Speaker
You know, but it was also very clear to us from the, from the beginning, it's like, here are all the, here's all the material, here are all the opportunities and all the tools, and they will be available to you for these two years and for at least a year afterwards. Take what you need and leave the rest for later or not. And that was a very different way of learning than anything I'd done before. So I think if I hadn't done that, I don't know what we're doing right now at Loyola would be.
00:57:55
Speaker
but I think I'd be a lot more panicky. That does resurface though, in the class when I was going to do my final presentation and I couldn't get my screen to share. Oh, I hate that. Or not being able to, I felt like Methuselah, the same presentation was supposed to be 10 to 12 minutes and I could not get mine under 15 minutes, couldn't do it.
00:58:24
Speaker
Oh, and I was crying at 13 and a half. Mine was supposed to be 10 to 12 as well, and it was 13 and a half. I couldn't do it. And, you know, got dinged for it. But, you know, the professor was like, this doesn't, I know you're not doing this for the grades. It's just, you know, she's, that professor does give grades. But, you know, and it wasn't, you know, an A minus, which I'm going to pretend doesn't actually bother me. No, I feel you. I feel you.
00:58:53
Speaker
But I learned so much that has nothing to do with those grades or that assignment, you know, from her and from that class and from the community students in the class too. So that way more than how to do a PowerPoint presentation in less than 15 minutes. I hope to never have to do one again. Well, you had a few more classes left to go, so. I know.
00:59:19
Speaker
Like, can I write haiku? Can I do an interpretive dance? Just not another PowerPoint, please. So this, I want to ask you this because I think either you have your own story or you have a story of somebody else that you've interviewed over the years. But this idea of being loved as you are, no matter what, I learned it from Ignatian spirituality. I learned it from the spiritual exercises. But we've all learned this idea, even though we're still trying to accept it, we've all learned this idea at some point.
00:59:50
Speaker
that God loves us as we are, no matter what. Is there a moment or story that you can point to where this kind of understanding? I'm laughing because the answer, I mean, I could give a very, it's a true answer, but it's more of a flip answer, but it's also a true answer. In part, I learned that from Bridget Jones. Which one? The first one? The first one.
01:00:18
Speaker
You like me just as I am. Oh, there you go. So a few years back, I co-edited a big compendium project with a friend of mine, a beautiful writer named Jennifer Grant, who's also there in Chicago, the Chicago area. Actually, in Chicago now, she used to live out in suburbs and she's there now. And we met at college at a school where having quiet time and your devotional
01:00:47
Speaker
time with, you know, your personal time with Jesus in the morning was like a thing that people would ask you about, how was your quiet time this morning? Like, not that it was anybody's business, but it was supposed to be done in a certain way, in a certain time with certain books. And we were laughing about how neither one of us ever did that particularly well. And I said, my quiet time was, I don't remember, one or the other of us said, my quiet time was never quiet. It was more disquiet time. And it was like, ding, ding, ding.
01:01:16
Speaker
So we put together a book called Disquiet Time, Ranced and Reflections on the Good Book by, it's got the world's longest subtitle that we didn't write. The Faithful, the Skeptical, and a Few Scoundrels, I think that's what it was. So what we did was, I am gonna answer your question, it's part of this, I promise. I'll come back to it. We asked people what were ideas or passages of scriptures or stories from the Bible.
01:01:45
Speaker
that they found disconcerting or let's say they weren't Christians. They aren't Christians or they weren't Christians or they're not Christians anymore, but there's still some meaning. There's a thing that they're drawn back to or they're hung up on or whatever it was. And so I think it's about three dozen people or three dozen stories that were told. Some of us wrote more than one. And one of mine
01:02:09
Speaker
was about, I can't remember, I don't have one close enough to look at the title, and it's been a minute, but I wrote about the idea of just exactly what you're saying, of that we are loved exactly as we are. And that part of that I learned from the Southern Baptists, which was the next stop on my spiritual journey after Roman Catholicism when my parents left the Catholic church and went to the church where my
01:02:40
Speaker
mother and then my father had a born-again experience in a Bible study that was run by Southern Baptist in Southern Connecticut, which is a very strange thing to be, kind of like being a Plutonian in the 80s. But there were hymns that basically told us over and over and over again that God loves us just as I am. Was that him? Just as I am, I come, I come.
01:03:09
Speaker
that we don't have to do, and we can't do anything to earn God's love or our salvation, that it's grace through faith. That's something that we can earn. And so that idea of grace, that the idea that the Baptist gave me, that once Jesus is, once you let Jesus in your heart, he never leaves and he's eternally making peanut butter and banana sandwiches in the kitchen of your heart. Like he's just, you can't get him out. He's just there.
01:03:40
Speaker
and loves you exactly as you are. Maybe there's some things that you can work on. We're all human, but there's nothing fundamental about how we are made. We are beautifully and wondrously made, and God loves us just exactly as we are.
01:03:56
Speaker
And when I was writing the chapter about that in the book, I said, it's like that scene from the first Bridget Jones book and movie where she's standing with Mark Darcy and Mark Darcy, who must be kind of neuroatypical now that I think about it, as he's presented in the book, kind of always is stepping in it and doesn't communicate his emotions particularly well or understand other people's emotions particularly well.
01:04:21
Speaker
But he says to her at this dinner party where she's just been humiliated for being the only single person there that he likes her just exactly as she is. And that's sort of the theme of the chapter I wrote. And that literally is one of the ways that I learned.
Grace, Works, and Love
01:04:40
Speaker
It wasn't a new idea to me, but in that exchange between Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth, I was like, yep, that's God saying, no, I don't think you're actually, yeah, you are ridiculous. And so is your mother, but I quite like you just as you are. So that's one of the places I went back. Well, so interesting that movie keeps popping up in my feed. And I'm like, I need to watch that again. So now there's another sign. I need to watch it. Sacred Echo, there you go.
01:05:11
Speaker
So in Catholicism we talk about faith and works and that you have to have both. It's a both and. What I always say is like when I say God loves me as I am no matter what, it doesn't mean that I'm
01:05:26
Speaker
absent of works. But I think what it means is if I accept that and I identify that, I want to do more to help that relationship with God. I want to do more to help other people and their relationships with God and with one another. So it's this idea that we sometimes think we have to work really, really, really hard while working to earn something as opposed to seeing the work as something you want to do.
01:05:55
Speaker
in return of the love that you've been given. And that's been my, I mean, I'm not saying that the Baptists are right about everything, clearly they're not. Not everybody has this all right. That's why I, you know, call myself a spiritual flutter, you know, that idea of the flutter is the French idea of somebody who just walks without a particular destination in mind. And that's kind of how I am. And I have found
01:06:23
Speaker
Unintentionally, that's how, that's just how I am. That's how my spiritual journey has been. And I'll be walking along and I'll learn a bunch of stuff from Catholicism and then I'll walk a little farther and I'll learn a bunch of stuff from Baptist and I'll walk a little farther and learn a bunch of stuff from Thich Nhat Hanh. And then, you know, from Ram Dass and then from Richard Rohrer and from Cynthia Bourgeois and from Mirabai Star and
01:06:50
Speaker
you know, from Julian and Norwich and just, it's just the wisdom and the understanding gets bigger and so does the mystery at the same time. But that whole idea of yes, and we are still loved in our fullness and in our weakness and just as we are.
01:07:17
Speaker
And when we really understand that it does, it's like being in a relationship, falling in love with someone and you just, maybe you don't like cilantro, but they do. And so you make things with cilantro in them. You don't eat them because they taste like palm olive, but you, you know, you do the thing for the person that you love because you want to make them happy.
God in Moments of Suffering
01:07:38
Speaker
And I think we, when we love God, even a scintilla of as
01:07:46
Speaker
of our understanding of how much God loves us, it makes us want to be that love in the world, which then leads us to hopefully do things that are helpful to other people, that, you know, foment peace and make the world a slightly more just and certainly more graceful place for everybody.
01:08:10
Speaker
One thing I always like to ask people, and I've been saying since I started this podcast, since I started in April in 2023, so I'm almost having to say in 2024, what do you think is most challenging about people being able to understand that they're loved as they are, no matter what? Well, there's so much, I can't think of a time in my life
01:08:39
Speaker
gather around children while I tell you a tale. In my low these 53 years, I remember how terrifying the first 36 hours after the planes hit the World Trade Center were, because nothing was safe anymore.
01:09:00
Speaker
And everything was up for grabs. This thing that we never thought could, as Americans, as people, as humans, as Christians, as whatever, just something completely beyond our imagining had happened. It actually happened. And it was terrifying. And that eventually
01:09:24
Speaker
lessened somewhat. And I say this as a white Christian straight person. I'm not a identifiably minority religion. I'm not a person of color. I'm not a gay or queer person. But that terror lessened.
01:09:53
Speaker
Now, it feels like so much has accumulated over time, particularly in the last seven or eight years, that it feels like we're living in that heightened first 36 hours after the plane hit the building terror all the time. All the time. And not just here, all around the world. And in some places, a whole lot worse than
01:10:22
Speaker
what you and I might be thinking about could happen next, wherever. We're not in Gaza right now. We weren't trying to worship on Christmas morning and had our church bombed on Christmas morning in Bethlehem. I mean, there are things that are going on that are, again, unthinkable.
01:10:45
Speaker
But here we are, and they're happening in such so consistently without us as a human race being able to catch our breath. And fear makes people do absolutely crazy things. Fear is the worst problem we have in the world is fear. There's famine, there's war, there's violence, there are illnesses, and
01:11:17
Speaker
Fear is how we react to those things. And fear doesn't make anything get any better. I mean, fear, there's some things that we have fear so that we don't touch a hot skillet. We have fear so that we don't just walk off a cliff. But the kind of fear that I'm talking about is different than that.
01:11:37
Speaker
A lot of it is the fear of the unknown, the fear of what's going to happen next, the fear of not being in control, and it makes us do crazy things, and it usually does not make us do loving things. So that, I think, is the biggest challenge that the world is facing right now.
01:11:58
Speaker
And it's the thing under the thing under the thing, tribalism, Christian nationalism, fascism, xenophobia, just all kinds of mean, horrible, nasty, ugly things to quote Arlo Guthrie are going on. But underneath all of that is this fear that's motivating more and more.
01:12:24
Speaker
And some people are making a lot of money and have made a lot of money off of scaring people. And we're living with the results of that in part. So how do we make a terrified world feel less afraid? And the best way to do that is to help them understand how loved they are. And this is where things get challenging because
01:12:54
Speaker
My understanding now, I would not have believed this even 10 years ago. I would have prayed for God to protect us from a laundry list of things and said prayers and laid on hands and all kinds of things. Now, I believe that God doesn't promise to protect us from anything, but that God promises to be with us and everything.
01:13:24
Speaker
That's a harder truth than thinking we just pray hard enough that the bomb won't land on our house. We just pray hard enough that there'll be peace in the Middle East. We just pray hard enough that man won't get reelected and dismantle democracy as we know it. It doesn't actually work like that. But whatever happens, God promises that God is with us in it
01:13:51
Speaker
I think a lot of your listeners have probably seen the photograph that was put outside the Lutheran church in Bethlehem, where it's the Nativity set that's set amongst the rubble. And that, you know, where is God? God's in the rubble. God's in the rubble. God's always in the rubble. God's everywhere.
Spreading Love and Compassion
01:14:21
Speaker
I think God is most powerfully present right now in places that are rubble, real or imagined, real or metaphorical. I think our work for 2024, those of us who are equipped to do it, is to help people feel loved so they can be less afraid and make better choices about how to behave toward others. One of my favorite lines
01:14:48
Speaker
in Scripture, and unlike some of my previous guests, I don't quote Scripture off the top of my head as much as other people do, like I always want to, and try to figure out where is that line that I'm thinking of. But the one I will never forget, probably because it's the shortest line in the Gospels, is Jesus wept. And I always think of that, especially with what you're saying, that
01:15:12
Speaker
before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, like before he knew if that was what Jesus was going to do, he paused and he wept with his friends over the sadness of losing someone he loved. And his friends were trying to rush him to get him there in time. He hadn't done that before. Yes, Jesus is God, but even God does stuff for the first time. And Lazarus was his friend, and he was late, and the dude was dead.
01:15:42
Speaker
So yeah, he cried and I bet he was afraid. Even in, um, even in omniscience, there's gotta be doubt. When we see that in the garden too, uh, before his crucifixion, you know, take this cup from me. So, you know, seeing that Jesus experienced fear and seeing that Jesus was experienced sorrow hopefully helps us to remember that God is doing that still. Yeah.
01:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, Emmanuel, God with us. Even and perhaps especially in times such as these and in situations such as these. I mean, it feels like God is more powerfully. I feel God's presence more powerfully. I have never felt God's presence more powerfully than I did the night I was sitting in an emergency. This is a year and a little bit ago.
01:16:40
Speaker
when I had just been bitten by a rattlesnake. I've never felt more terrified and more consoled in the same time as that. And that's when that, you know, it's something that Jim Finley, who's, you know, a mystic and a contemplative Catholic teacher, former monk from Gethsemane, the Trappist monastery, not the garden.
01:17:08
Speaker
He's the one who teaches that God doesn't promise to protect us from anything, but promises to be with us in all things. And somebody sent me that note reminding me of that first night when I was watching the poison creep up my leg and didn't know if I was going to lose my leg. New experience, new experience for the hospital team that was working with me.
01:17:38
Speaker
I was going to be, whatever happened, I was going to be okay because God was with me. Didn't stop the snake, but then I'm fine now. And I was fine pretty quickly because science is also a gift from God. But yeah, it's going to be a tough year, I feel. Yeah. Or I hope, I hope there will be many signs of hope.
01:18:05
Speaker
throughout it. Amen. I think it's going to be a tough one, but I think that in those difficulties, there'll be so much opportunity for grace and love and hope. And the hope is we can have more conversations like this one, more conversations in a variety of places that talk about how loved we are and how seen we are.
Conclusion and Reflections
01:18:32
Speaker
and that that can start to reverberate with how we treat other people and how we can continue to spread that. We've had a message for a long time of we aren't enough, that we have heard and we have kind of internalized. And so to be able to turn the corner on that might help change. It would. And if we could stop thinking in terms of us and them, that would also
01:19:01
Speaker
helpful and the Bible is a little complicated text when it comes to such things but I think if you saw what Jesus was trying to do it was to get rid of all those categories of us and them and you know there's that in various parts of Africa there's that concept of Ubuntu you know I am because we are or as somebody else I know says that there is no them only us
01:19:29
Speaker
When we realize that both the person dropping the bomb and the person being hit by the bomb are us, they're loved equally by God, that kind of changes a lot of things. Responsibility, the onus to change something.
01:19:53
Speaker
to protect one and educate and protect the other from themselves. I don't know. But when we see that we're all of those people, there's no sides really to humanity. I'm going to misquote this, but a friend of mine who's in the Orthodox tradition, I was saying sign of peace to him the other day and he said, the Christ in me, I think he said, if I remember correctly, the Christ in me sees the Christ in you.
01:20:22
Speaker
And there's some phrase that they say, in essence, something like that. And I was like, oh my gosh, I need to say that more. Say that again. Can I say that down? Don't just say namaste, which is the God in me or the highest and best in me greets the highest and best in you. And we believe that you and I believe that the highest and best would be Jesus. And so same thing.
01:20:45
Speaker
to be able to not only say words like that, but internalize them. And yes, to actually see it, to actually see it. I love all of the renditions of that. I've seen more and more of them in the last few years of the Holy Family this time of the year. Yeah. As you know, like a pregnant teenage Hispanic couple outside of Quickie Mart, you know, and she's not a donkey, but she's in a bush cart or, you know, a family fleeing
01:21:14
Speaker
across barbed wire on some border somewhere from some violence somewhere Somewhere that they that was home that they're not wanted Where there was no room for them. I love I just I love how our Creative imagination around what a holy family Looks like like literally looks like would look like today. It does look like today how that's a
01:21:42
Speaker
changed in popular consciousness. I think that's hopeful to me when I see that, you know, baby steps, but it's some things that, you know, art is there for a reason and changes as much as any concept or argument, maybe even more so can. And when those ideas that, you know, people talk about representation, excuse me, representation in art is important, it sure is.
01:22:12
Speaker
And when you can see yourself, or better yet, see someone else in the depiction of an archetype that's so transcendent, that is enough to sow the seeds of change that can actually make lasting change, as well as diplomacy and good homilizing and a lot of prayer. It's kind of an all hands on deck moments, like whatever you can do.
01:22:42
Speaker
Get that love out there. Do it. Knit it, sing it, decapage it.
01:22:52
Speaker
Yes, definitely a variety of ways to continue to try and bring hope to the world when there's challenges. Well, Kathleen, this conversation could definitely go on forever because I keep thinking of new things I want to talk about or ask you. But I don't know if podcasters will listen for very much longer since we're, you know, but I know this will not be the last conversation that we'll have on this topic. Thank you so much for coming in, coming on and talking.
01:23:19
Speaker
with me about being loved as you are and I look forward to the next time we'll be able to do that. Yeah, me too. And to all your listeners out there in the new year, just never forget that you haven't met everybody yet who will love you and you haven't met everyone yet who you will love. And sometimes that's enough to keep it going. Definitely. Thank you so much, Kathleen. You're very welcome.
01:24:09
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kathleen. I learned so much from this time with her, and I really encourage you to check out some of her other wisdom contained in her books, articles, her sub-stack, and more. You can find her websites, Instagram, and more linked in the show notes. Do you think you or someone you know has a story about being loved as you are that would fit with this podcast? Please reach out to me and let me know by emailing me at lovedasurpod at gmail.com.
01:24:39
Speaker
I have another exciting guest coming your way very soon, but for now, happy new year. And even in the more challenging moments at the start of this new year, remember to be who you are, because that's exactly who God wants you to be.