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149. The Courage to be Brave- with Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde
153 Plays2 years ago
Mariann Edgar Budde is the bishop and spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., and the Washington National Cathedral. Prior to her election in 2011, she was a parish priest in Minneapolis for eighteen years. She has appeared on PBS NewsHour, Meet the Press, Good Morning America, and the Today show, among others. Bishop Budde earned her master’s in divinity and doctor of ministry from Virginia Theological Seminary.
In her new book, How We Learn to be Brave, Bishop Budde explores how key decisions in our lives, if navigated with faith and discernment, pave the way for us to become our most
courageous selves. Budde weaves stories from her own life, religious texts, the Civil Rights movement, literature, pop culture, and current events to illustrate what goes into "being brave." The decisive moments—some flashy, some subtle—that make up the arc of a lifetime include deciding to stay, deciding to go, deciding to start, accepting what we cannot change, and more.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/705987/how-we-learn-to-be-brave-by-mariann-edgar-budde/
Contact Kendra Rinaldi to be a guest on the podcast:
https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Heroic Life Arcs Unrecognized
00:00:01
Speaker
We need that repository of human experience, however it comes to us. And part of my goal was to say, look around, it's everywhere. You know, these, just be amazed, be amazed at what we can, we can, we can all have an arc of a life that is heroic. Even if on the outside, it doesn't seem to us that we are in any real, you know, we're not the,
00:00:30
Speaker
We're not the people who are going to have 7,000 obituaries when our life is over, but we will still have made our contribution and impact.
Coping with Life Changes and Grief
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast.
00:00:52
Speaker
This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:01:09
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
Introduction of Marion Edgar Buddy
00:01:30
Speaker
Welcome to today's episode. Today, I have Marion Edgar Buddy, who is the bishop and spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C. She is also the author of a book that's coming out very soon at the end of May, and it is called How We Learned to Be Brave.
00:01:53
Speaker
So, welcome, Bishop Buddy. And I just asked you, how do I refer to you? You know what? And actually, I'm so glad you told me how to pronounce your last name because that's usually where I struggle and I start recording. And then I'm like, wait, did I not?
00:02:12
Speaker
Did I say it right? Right. And I'm glad I actually don't have my dogs next to me today because one of them, their name, one of them was named Buddy. Oh, I know. Lots of dogs named Buddy. So Buddy would be like, what? What? Mom, again, you're talking to me? You're talking to me?
00:02:28
Speaker
So thank you so much for being on the podcast and for sharing your story. So let's start talking about you.
Bishop Buddy's Childhood and Family Turmoil
00:02:38
Speaker
I would like to know more about you, where you grew up and where you live now. And that usually helps me navigate the conversation. So where did you grow up? Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation to speak with you. It's a delight. So I am 63 years old.
00:02:57
Speaker
And I grew up in a divided household, so I spent a good portion of my life in New Jersey living with my mother, and then also a significant portion of my adolescence with my father and his family, his new family in Colorado. So a bit of, it wasn't bouncing back and forth, but significant, like the early formative years with my mom,
00:03:23
Speaker
equally formative adolescent years with my dad in Colorado and then eventually because of circumstances in the family returning to my mother when I was 17. So when people ask me, where did I grow up? It's always this interesting question of like, well, what was growing up and where did it happen? And it's, as most stories are, there's a bit of complexity and nuance to that.
00:03:49
Speaker
And a lot of in between, in that gray in between, a lot of gray in between. And a lot of gray in between, yeah. A lot. And I feel like even just from what you said of your parents and what I read even in the beginning of your book, the part of moving and the part of your parents going through divorce and then also your dad going through a divorce with your stepmom and all that in itself really presented grief in a very early
00:04:19
Speaker
timeline for you in just different ways right of these changes and transitions in life so how did you navigate those major moments then as a child when your parents divorced and then later on then when your dad as you were in high school junior high when he divorced from your stepmom
00:04:41
Speaker
Well, keep in mind, my parents divorced in the early 1960s. I was an infant. And so divorce in those years was scandalous, and at least in the world, the middle class world that my parents occupied. And rare.
00:05:01
Speaker
in those circles. And so, and my mother was, I didn't realize it at the time, but my mother was deeply traumatized by the divorce. She didn't see it coming. She was left to raise two small children on her own. She's an immigrant from Sweden. Her family, all of her support system was back in Sweden.
00:05:23
Speaker
And so while I wasn't verbal and conscious of the growing up, grief was the ambience of my childhood, grief and survival. And there was joy and there was love.
00:05:39
Speaker
and I was safe, but there was this pervasive sadness. And just to give you a couple of very poignant vignettes that I remember, and this goes way back in my childhood, I was three when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I have this memory of my mother in front of the television, just weeping, just weeping. And I knew that there was something momentous happening
00:06:08
Speaker
But I didn't know what it was. And she was just so, so sad. And that memory came back to me in an interesting way when Jackie Onassis died because my mother and I happened to be in a, we were touring a museum or something and she saw pictures of Jackie in those years and she just stopped and was completely glued. And I realized I was looking at her life through the prism of her young adulthood. She was in her early 30s when all this happened.
00:06:37
Speaker
and her identification with Jackie and the grief that she felt. So I would say that that was the background of my childhood. My father didn't really appear on the scene until I was older and then my sister and I would go to visit. And there was something about his new life that I hungered for because it seemed so normal. He had remarried, they had a baby,
00:07:04
Speaker
There was this life that just seemed like what everybody else's life had. Like the picket fence type of life. All of that. I mean, it was pure fantasy, but it was my fantasy and my sister's fantasy. My sister's a bit older. And so through a equally traumatic and divisive custody battle, we moved to Colorado. Again, traumatizing our mother. And this time I had a hand in the traumatizing, which I
00:07:32
Speaker
I've had to reconcile with, as an adult, looking back, I'm humbled by a child's capacity to do that. So I lived then with my father and his family, which was not a
00:07:48
Speaker
which was not a leave it to be for family at all. It was a house of some pretty significant dysfunction. Your dad struggled with depression and alcohol. Depression, alcohol. He really was trying to make it as an entrepreneur, businessman. He reminded, when I first saw the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, and I saw the character of Willie Loman, I thought, oh my gosh, that's my dad.
00:08:18
Speaker
always wanting the big sale that was going to what he was going to make it. And he put a lot of emotional energy around this idea of making it big one day and he never did. And he eventually declared bankruptcy and his drinking got worse. And my stepmother was desperate to try and
00:08:38
Speaker
hold things together, their marriage deteriorated, I got caught in the middle of it. And in the meantime, because I was a child, going to school, making friends, having a life that became my own, I began to realize that you can
00:08:54
Speaker
And I didn't have language for this at the time, Kendra, but it was human beings have this infinite capacity to compartmentalize. And so I kind of held all of that sadness and chaos over on one side of my psyche as I did my best to live my life on another side, right? And in the beginning, I was constantly navigating and anxious and worried and scared. And then at some point at 17, 16 or 17, I just stopped caring.
00:09:23
Speaker
You know, I was just going to live my life. And I found a life that I, friends in high school and music, theater, and then all of that came apart when my parents stepped mom and dad, dad and stepmom divorced. And I realized that the ground beneath me had completely collapsed.
Turning Point: Choosing a New Path
00:09:43
Speaker
And as I write in the book, that was the first time in a conscious way I knew that I had a decision to make.
00:09:52
Speaker
And it didn't feel like, in some ways it didn't feel like a choice, but I knew I was making it. That the one person who had been the anchor through it all from a distance was my mom. And she had claimed her life. She had put the pieces back together. She stayed in touch with me even when I was really pretty mean to her, you know, as a teenager. And when I needed, you know, when I needed
00:10:20
Speaker
Harbor, she just said, I don't even remember, I can't even remember how we decided it, but I just knew, okay. And nobody in my world in Colorado, the adults in my world thought it was a good idea. They all were pretty keen on me staying where I was for all sorts of reasons. I've had to do both with religion and high school and care for me, care for, I don't know. And so I felt like I was stepping out on a limb, not knowing
00:10:52
Speaker
knowing on some level this was the hardest thing I'd ever done to that point, but also trusting that it was the right thing to do. So it remains for me, even though a lot of years have passed. That's like a touchstone memory, those memories that mark a person that I come back to even when the circumstances are different. Oh, this is what it feels like.
00:11:15
Speaker
when life is really hard and you have to step out anyway and trust that whatever is prompting you is trustworthy and you go. And I can't tell you, it was like, again, it wasn't a happily ever after at all, but I am the person I am today in large measure because of what happened in those critical years as a teenager.
00:11:42
Speaker
Thank you for sharing all that. And the chapter, I believe the first one is when to know when to let go, right? Deciding to go, when you know it's time to go. Leave one, which is the hero's journey. It's the story of all literature. It's the story of any great coming of age. So it's entirely developmentally appropriate.
00:12:09
Speaker
But it also is spiritually, it's the story of every great spiritual tradition. But it is each time a person goes through it, it's the journey, right? And so when to leave, how to leave, how to trust when you don't know exactly what's up ahead.
00:12:31
Speaker
and to become the person as you become the person you're becoming, you're beckoned to or summoned to.
00:12:40
Speaker
by walking or moving physically or in other ways. Yeah, it definitely doesn't happen by sitting in your tushy. It doesn't happen by that. It takes work and it takes, yeah, stepping up to the plate. And I know there's an aspect of that too of what that means even to you. What would that mean to you of stepping up to the plate? Would that even just be that aspect of taking action? Because bravery is not doing it
00:13:10
Speaker
Ooh, I know exactly what I'm going to do, right? What does being brave then mean to you? Because right there you were being brave as a teenager and you had fear.
Grief as a Catalyst for Action
00:13:23
Speaker
You had all these other emotions within that bravery of you letting go of what you knew to go back to your mom.
00:13:35
Speaker
And to the title and the work that you do with this podcast, just overwhelming grief, just the undercurrent of grief. And perhaps more than anything, learning at whatever age and relearning that all of those emotions are the primal foundation upon which our lives are lived all the time.
00:14:04
Speaker
They aren't meant to, I don't know how to say this, because we can feel stuck in them, but there is a summons that arises from them. And I do believe it is the life force within us, the part of us inherently created to move toward life, even in the face of what is a death experience of any kind, which is unavoidable. And it comes in many forms, you know,
00:14:33
Speaker
But it rises out of that. And I love that Eleanor Roosevelt maxim. It is to do the thing you think you cannot do. To do what you think is impossible. Do it up until this moment you knew was impossible. But you do it anyway. Not because you're feeling so, like you said, so competent or so brave. Although sometimes people feel that way, which is great.
00:14:54
Speaker
I think I've had two experiences like that where I was like, I can do this. But most of the time it's coming up against that utter feeling of vulnerability and truth be told of great risk because there are no guarantees, no guarantees whatsoever. But feeling summoned anyway and taking either the first step or the hundredth on that path.
00:15:21
Speaker
or as I reflect on in another stage of my life, or at other times when the call isn't to go, but actually to stay where you are and to go deeper where you are, which is also another form of grief because you may be disappointed with your life or you wish for a different life or you want to change. And the call is, well, actually, no, this time the brave thing is to stay put, you know?
00:15:48
Speaker
So I think the bravery part is a learning. It's not a capacity. It's a learning to lean into that constellation and trust that that's where you're meant to be even when you fall flat on your face.
00:16:07
Speaker
That's perfect. Like leaning into the fear, leaning into that unknown to then be able to just move forward. Let me ask you before we move into then the part of times in your life in which you decided to stay, let me ask you what tools then that you said you compromised a lot that that was basically one of the tools, whether that be it
00:16:34
Speaker
a way that we would say is, that's the thing, we can't categorize what's an okay way of grieving or not because everybody has their own way. Everybody has their own way and what works for them. So what worked for you as a teenager to be able to move forward was complimentalizing your life a little bit, correct? That was one of the tools. Was spirituality already one of the tools you already had even as a teenager as you were
00:17:04
Speaker
Was religion already there in the foundation of your life as well? Did you lean into God at that moment in assistance in your grief as you were struggling? What were some of these other tools that you used as a teenager? Frankly, that it was the most profound spiritual experience of my life to that point. And in large measure, because yes, I was
00:17:31
Speaker
I had become a professed Christian. I had been raised in a nominal Christian context with my mother. My father wasn't a practicing religious person at all. And I had become part of a cadre of young people that had fallen in with a couple of religious groups that I would be considered now to use the language of today, fundamentalist, a very clear understanding of there is one path to salvation. Here is the path. Here is the prayer.
00:18:00
Speaker
Here's the community. If you accept, and this is a Christian conduct, if you accept Jesus as your savior and you are part of this path, you are among the saved. And your job now is to help other people find that right path. So I had become part of a community in that broadly speaking world view. And it had been a safe place for me. The people were kind. I did have an authentic spiritual longing. I never felt like I was as
00:18:31
Speaker
Like whatever was supposed to happen to me in those experiences never quite took. Like I never felt like I was as saved as everybody else. But it was my world and it was a point of reference for me. What was so transformative about that decision was that I felt that
00:18:51
Speaker
the inner voice of God was summoning me to go over against the external voices of authority, including my religious authorities that were encouraging me to stay. And it created an incredible internal conflict at first.
00:19:12
Speaker
And I didn't really, the interesting thing looking back is I never really felt like I had to argue with anybody. Like I wasn't trying, and I wasn't angry. In fact, I was kind of grateful that they loved me enough to care. But I also heard in their arguments or their reasons why things that I fundamentally inside myself did not believe to be true. That if I went back to my mother, I would,
00:19:39
Speaker
in their words fall back into sin because my mother wasn't on the saved path. And I just, you know, I just knew that wasn't right. You know, and I didn't, I didn't say that to anybody out loud. I was like, yeah, no, I don't, I don't, I've never believed that. So to go into, so when I, when I followed, I felt like I was being faithful to God in a way that I'd never experienced before. And it taught me at a very early age,
00:20:08
Speaker
that you just never know where God's going to show up and what God's going to say. And you may not always get it right. I mean, Lord knows I know I don't always get it right, but to listen and to learn what it, the constellation of, I use that word a lot, but that combination of
00:20:25
Speaker
emotion and thought and intuition that propels us forward and to trust that God is there in the midst of it. And even if it's wrong, like even if I, that God will correct if I follow that. Does that make sense to follow? Oh, no. Listen, I get chills because I fall, that's kind of my guiding, kind of course there's always been.
00:20:50
Speaker
that intuition, which it's like discerning what, you know, and I, you know, sometimes intuition, your soul, your, you know, your, your God within what, you know, your communication, whatever, everybody wants to kind of call that, but that inherent feeling, like you said, like, I just have to, like, it's this drive, like, you're like, it may not make sense, and I don't have words to make it make sense sometimes, but you just kind of know, and you just,
00:21:20
Speaker
Or risk. I've had enough experience in life not to know that I'm willing to risk being wrong, following that impulse. I feel better, even if it turns out not to be a life-giving thing, having trusted that, than I am when I don't act on it. I also listen heavily to the wisdom voices in my life.
00:21:51
Speaker
study the scriptures. It's not like just me and God. I mean, I'm embedded in a tradition. I take it seriously. I ask people to help me with my blind spots, all of those things. But in those pivotal moments, I feel most connected to God when I take all of those pieces and say, okay, this is what I'm thinking. This is what I'm hearing.
00:22:16
Speaker
And you've mentioned that following that, even when we're wrong, even if by chance following that was just not the right path, quote unquote, at the same time, the lessons we learned in that process were the right ones for us in that moment as well. Right. So even for example, or good will come of it. Yeah, good will come. I mean, I just don't know what else to say, because we, you know, obviously I'm a, I'm a, I'm a,
00:22:41
Speaker
imperfect human being I've got, I come from a culture, I've got all kinds of influences that I'm not even aware of. So I'm not in all a way assuming that it's always the most life-affirming path. That's what I'm trying to say. Or that I'm not going to hurt people along the way. I mean, all of those things are part of my story. But when I look back on those moments and why they're so, why they mark us in such a way, why they become the
00:23:09
Speaker
the turning points or the hooks that we can hang our life story on, right? And the narrative that becomes our story, that's one of the elements that I've come to cherish as a person of faith.
00:23:23
Speaker
And it deepens my love for God in the mystery of it all. Now, Bishop Marianne, let's talk about the part of then deciding to stay.
Interweaving Stories of Courage
00:23:37
Speaker
Which, by the way, I want to touch on this too, because this is important in terms of your book. As we're talking here, we're talking a lot about your own life, because that's what I do. I try to get more about people's lives. But your book has this beautiful way of intertwining
00:23:53
Speaker
history as well as biblical scripture in these stories of every one of these chapters of descriptions of, like you said, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt used her as an example of something. You use, you know, scripture showing people in the Bible, you know, that figures in the Bible that resemble these type of actions.
00:24:16
Speaker
Again, for the reader, just know you're going to be reading a little bit about you and a little bit about the history and a little bit about the Bible. Literature and literature, you know, I mean, because these are these themes that and other people in my life that have just been so inspiring to me. Right. So I find I think one of the ways we learn courage is to be inspired by other brave people. And sometimes we think and one of the reasons I love reading history and memoir and
00:24:43
Speaker
story is that we often put these people on pedestals or we see them only in their public persona or and then when we learn their stories we find that the path of courage in their life can give us can give us courage because of the
00:25:01
Speaker
vulnerabilities that we learn are really universal in some way. That's why I did that. If it were just Marianne's story, it would be very narrow compared to the breadth of life. That's the reason I have this podcast and why I interview people is because as people are listening, they can relate to someone's story or to an aspect of their journey in their own
00:25:25
Speaker
grief and their own experiences, you do learn a lot. And you can say, oh, wait, I'm not the only one that feels this way or I'm not the only one that struggled with X, Y, Z. Yeah. And not only that, Kendra, I think it also allows us to go deeper in our own experiences. Like we can trust if we have metaphor, if we have imagery, a line, an inspiration, it gives us
00:25:52
Speaker
Courage right? It's it's it's that So that's why we need that repository of human experience however, it comes to us and part of my goal was to say look around it's everywhere, you know these just be amazed be amazed at what we can we can we can all have an arc of a life that is heroic and
00:26:21
Speaker
Even if on the outside, it doesn't seem to us that we are in any real, you know, we're not the people who are going to have, you know.
00:26:30
Speaker
7,000 obituaries when our life is over, but we will still have made our contribution. And impact on even if it is on one person's life, it's still an impact. Okay, now the decision to stay. So within your now, and you're married, we can talk about a little bit too about your own family and your husband, Paul.
00:26:53
Speaker
where you live now and your own then career mission as a Bishop. Let's talk about that because then there were some, there's some grief in that aspect as well in your journey. So share with us that journey. So yes, I married, I became, I was ordained in the Episcopal tradition, which was the church that my mother, the church I came back to and I
00:27:22
Speaker
I went to live with my mom and found a- The one that you're not. Yeah, right. You can't go there. And it's interesting because in terms of its religious practice, it's very kind of conservative and structured, but its theology and its view of the world is incredibly generous and open, and I found that to be so freeing.
00:27:47
Speaker
So I ultimately was ordained. I was ordained relatively young, married at the same time, two children pretty quickly. So after a young adulthood of a lot of movement, a lot of drama, a lot of big decisions, thinking I was going to be kind of on the margins of society. I had become enamored with justice movements around the world and saw myself.
Balancing Priesthood, Motherhood, and Justice
00:28:15
Speaker
I felt my call was leading in that direction.
00:28:18
Speaker
And in my early 30s where I found myself was married with two children in a job as a priest in a congregation. And my husband and I were now parents of these two little kids and everything felt really confining. And I was supposed to love it all and on some level I did, but on another I felt like
00:28:46
Speaker
in that kind of classic, is this it? Is this my life? And I would have these fantasies about other lives. And one of the insights of that period, and I realized I didn't know very much about stability. I had never learned the gift of stability. And what I felt the call was, not so much for me in the early stages, but for my children, it's like,
00:29:15
Speaker
This is your time to stay where you are. This is the time to you embrace your life as it is. This is the time to look at the man you married and realize this is the man you married. And what does it look like to not run away? Not run away isn't quite the right word. It wasn't such running away, but like kind of striving for the next big thing.
00:29:44
Speaker
there wasn't any big thing. There was making sure that the kids had their lunches, you know, bend their backpacks when we went off to school and work in the morning and to make sure that they had their stories at night and to make sure then the church that the budget was balanced and that the roof didn't leak. You know, there was just all this stuff of life and learning and having a few moments when, again, the feeling of the crisis building was
00:30:11
Speaker
emotionally similar to that feeling when of going but the call was in the exact opposite direction in terms of movement it was like no this is your this is it this is this is your life Marianne and it's time for you to learn how to embrace it and to slow down because right now speed is not anyone's friend and at
00:30:36
Speaker
I had, I struggled with that so mightily at first. And it comes up, you know, it's a recurring thing. But I learned, I learned the gift of long stretches of time, steady faithfulness, and trusting that even if there are really cool things happening elsewhere that I should be a part of,
00:31:04
Speaker
my life and my work and my call is here. So you still, so this is Bishop Marianne still experiences FOMO yet. Oh my gosh, still, even still, you know, it's like, wait a minute, I should be doing that. I should be, I should be there. No, it's, it's a constant, it's a constant. And, and I think, you know, as it goes back to some pretty deep things in me, and I always used to look in the windows of other people's houses and think I want to live in that house, you know,
00:31:34
Speaker
I want that family. I want, so to learn a relatively old age, you know, no, no, no, no, this, that's not, you know, that's not your path. Trust that where you are now is where you're meant to be, whatever meant to be means, but this is your life. And I echo a story I tell of a novelist who has that very, that her character has that kind of crisis moment where
00:32:02
Speaker
he realizes, oh my gosh, I'm not wasting my life. This is my life. Lean into it. Lean into it. And then in that process of leaning in, you're able to really, when you're present then, in that life, by the way, when you're talking about your life as a mom, I can circle into that. I'm sure everybody listening to this would feel, because even now, my kids are teenagers.
00:32:31
Speaker
having conversations with like my sister and also with my husband's stuff. I'm like, I think that if you guys just had a driver and someone that came and cooked and clean, you wouldn't really even need me anymore. You know, that kind of thing of actually feeling now I'm like, well, it's like because all my advice, everything that I say, they just want to tune out.
00:32:52
Speaker
So it's like you go into these two different contrasts. When they were little, I could not have a moment in which I would be touched out, as they say. They're all a year apart. And I was like, oh, when am I going to have my space? And now I have some space. I'm just the driver and the cook.
00:33:10
Speaker
And there's grief in both of those, right? In both of them, and it's that acceptance of, okay, this is this moment, this is temporary, and I know it's part of this journey, but it's definitely hard to lean into it.
00:33:29
Speaker
Let's talk about then this activist woman that you are to some extent or the part of standing up and being brave. You are very much inspired by some of also the figures in history like Martin Luther King was his story and you stand up a lot for racial injustice. So would you talk into that and how
00:34:00
Speaker
That is how that has been so important for you to stand up for racial injustice. Right. It goes way back. I mean, it goes it's not like a new thing. It was always a part of my sense of call.
00:34:18
Speaker
I was, as I mentioned earlier, very inspired by people who put everything on the line in their lives for God, for other human beings. I didn't discover Martin Luther King until I was in college, even though
00:34:38
Speaker
I was eight years old when he died, in part because I just wasn't part of our worldview. So I discovered him at that very idealistic stage in my own life, right around the same time that
00:34:54
Speaker
religious leaders in Central America were being slaughtered for their solidarity with the people of their countries. And so that was deep in me. And it never went away. So in every phase of my life, what always surprised me, because I thought I would be on the margins of society and living this brave life of voluntary poverty and on the edge. And that was not to be. That's not the path that emerged for me.
00:35:22
Speaker
discerning in whatever role I was in, what am I called to do? How can I be of use to this larger movement toward life and justice that is also part of the human impulse, right? And so while I was a parish pastor for 25 years,
00:35:51
Speaker
most of my life focused on the communities that I pastored. But I also kept an eye on the wider community and did what I could. It never felt like enough. I never feel like I do enough. I take a lot of solace from this one story in the Gospels where Jesus asks his disciples to offer what they have. When a multitude of people are really hungry at the end of the day and all the disciples have are a few loaves of bread and some fish and they give it to him and he blesses it.
00:36:21
Speaker
multitudes are satisfied. I feel like on some level, my life is one example after another of my saying to God, I don't have enough. And God's saying, well, what do you got? And I offer it. And it's part of something, sometimes it's part of something bigger. So that's been, that's been a theme. And so I stay connected. I'm a bishop now, and I'm a bishop in Washington, DC. And
00:36:46
Speaker
I could be a full-time activist if I felt so. I could use my position that way. I don't see my position as a full-time activist because I'm also caring for 86 congregations and their leaders and their communities and all of the workings of spiritual community. But the gospel imperative to justice is non-negotiable and there are times when I feel
00:37:14
Speaker
I need to be there, not always just giving voice because that's sort of easy, but not easy, but speaking is easier than actually showing up and changing things and working for change. So that's a part of me. It's a relatively small part in terms of percentage of time. Every once in a while it takes over my life.
00:37:37
Speaker
And it's like a season that just like a wave that just, okay, this is the, and I'm in one right now, this is the gun violence prevention season, right? So I'm back in it and it'll be all consuming for a while and then pass best of a ton onto somebody else and go tend to the equivalent of my kids, but now they're congregations and care for them.
00:37:59
Speaker
Does that make sense? It's kind of an ebb and flow. Yes. 86 congregations, you said. 86 congregations and their leaders. And this is kind of a tough time for mainline Christianity. As institutions, we're not thriving. And so trying to discern what does it mean to thrive as spiritual institutions in this day and age. So we have a lot going on. And those issues of justice are internal as well as external. So there's lots of work to be done everywhere.
00:38:27
Speaker
But I've always felt, to answer your question, that being engaged for the good of the world is part of the call of every human being and for me as a leader when I can. There's a part of integrity and justice that is also something that you seek when something's just, at least that's how I felt. You with other religious leaders in,
00:38:55
Speaker
Washington DC got together to stand up for something you did not feel was in integrity and in alignment with the yeah with the sacredness of Religion and that's June to June 2020
00:39:13
Speaker
June 1st, yeah. June 1st of 2020, right?
Public Stance During George Floyd Protests
00:39:18
Speaker
June 1st of 2020. So tell us why it is that it came into the light, that you came into the limelight in that moment as well and that you touch on that as well in the book. It sort of widened the camera frame a bit just to remind everyone this was at the
00:39:37
Speaker
We were still in the throes of the worst of the pandemic in the sense we didn't have vaccines yet. We were very few vaccines. Everyone was economically, everything was shut down. There were increasing numbers of instances that were building over time of very public deaths at the hands of police or vigilante citizens. And that was kind of cresting around the country. And then George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis at the hands of a police officer.
00:40:06
Speaker
So that was the context and the communities I serve, lots of racial dynamics, lots of socioeconomic diversity, certainly embedded in the institutions of Washington DC and its surroundings, the legacy of all of the repercussions of slavery and Jim Crow and justice against people of color, black people and specifically. So all of that was swirling.
00:40:36
Speaker
And the protests that emerged really just kind of took over the country after George Floyd was murdered, came to Washington pretty quickly. You know, they would just sort of, they started in Minneapolis and there was just this sort of uprising around the country. And one of our churches is right across the street from the White House. And we were, we and that park had become a gathering place for a lot of nonviolent protests.
00:41:05
Speaker
and also some violence, you know, some arson, some destruction. And we had decided that that church would be a way station of hospitality, of prayer, and also maybe a bit of a buffer, you know, just to be present to kind of keep, try to keep an even keel about things, just kind of. So we had, we were beginning to organize people from around our churches to just show up every day and be there. It was usually pretty calm during the day.
00:41:36
Speaker
at night things got a little intense. And at the time, the former president, and I don't mean this in a partisan way, but his approach in that time wasn't to try and calm the country down. He was actively, in my opinion, he was actively inflaming the emotions. He threatened that day to call in the military
00:42:02
Speaker
to all of the cities around the country where there were peaceful protests, right? Just to shut them down militarily. It was just the first time I had ever heard a president threatened to use armed military against peaceful protesters. So that was pretty chilling. And that was happening in real time on that afternoon. And then as I was, I was sitting with my mother who was living with me because of COVID.
00:42:29
Speaker
And we were watching television. She was watching the news. And it was televising this Rose Garden press conference where the president was threatening to use violence. And then I started getting texts and messages on my phone that said to me that something was happening downtown and the president was getting ready to go to St. John's Church, our church across the street.
00:42:55
Speaker
And I didn't see it on whatever television station we were watching wasn't covering it, but I saw it afterwards. But in real time, people were calling me and texting me and saying, Bishop, you need to know that the park is being forcibly cleared with tear gas and police pressure. The park is being forcibly cleared.
00:43:18
Speaker
The president is walking with his military. All this was just being texted to me on my phone. And then the phone started ringing. And do you know, Bishop, that the president is making his way towards St. John's Church? Do you know, Bishop, you need to... And then the picture came and he stood in front of St. John's Church holding a Bible. And he stood there and he said, this is a great country. And they took a lot of pictures. And then he turned around and he left.
00:43:47
Speaker
And I was stunned. And what I felt in the moment was he had assumed a mantle of spiritual authority to justify this act of violence against non-violent protesters, for the most part. Again, there were a few people who were throwing rocks, but by and large, peaceful protest, very deeply grieving, angry people.
00:44:17
Speaker
And then he used religion and he used the church in my charge to create this message as if to say we were one. I was doing this with not only political authority, but with religious authority. And I, I called a few people that I know have more wisdom than I around communications. And I said, I, I need help. I need, I need, I can't let, I can't let this be the,
00:44:46
Speaker
I can't let this go on. And the minister of that particular congregation was out of town. And so it was I and one of the lay leaders of that community. And I just, and so a few people managed to connect me one to a CNN interview by phone. And then I called the religious editor of the Washington Post and I just said, this is, I just, I have to disassociate. We do not endorse this. It's all I said.
00:45:14
Speaker
And that this was contrary to everything that we stood for. And that, and I was really just saying whatever came into my head. And the thing that made it what it was, Kendra wasn't so much that I said it, it was, there was a collective reaction to that moment that reflected the polarization of the country. So some were cheering him on and others like me were stunned and horrified.
00:45:42
Speaker
And I became the voice for a couple of days for the stunned and the horrified. And to say, this is unacceptable. This is antithetical to what we believe in. This is not how we can resolve this tragedy. These protesters are expressing real grief and rage. And for whatever time,
00:46:10
Speaker
So that was the event, right? And it became larger than me simply because it was a moment where eyes of the country were on it and the media picked up on it, right? Those two things don't happen very often. I've spoken that a lot of times and nothing happened. No one's paying attention.
00:46:27
Speaker
No one's paying attention. So you just sort of say, this is unacceptable. People say, yeah, yawn and go on to their next thing. This just happened to be one of those moments where things and all I, and what I, what I, what I said was every once in a while, those things happen and they, they don't, they don't just fall out of the sky. There are certain things that have to, like, like what's happening in, I'm in, I'm in Nashville right now and I'm here in Nashville in part because of Justin Pearson and Justin Jones and what they just said.
00:46:57
Speaker
And how the, not just what they said, they've been saying it for years, but how the country has reacted to say, you know what, we actually have to do something about our children being killed. And we, and to say that there's nothing that we can do is we're participating in a greater evil. And so when that happens, it's just good to know that you're there for a particular purpose. Now to imagine that's, like that's going to live forever or that you, those are those, it's a very small moment.
00:47:27
Speaker
in a long arc of struggle, but in that moment, claim it and then live your life as if you really meant what you said. So that's how that happened. Yeah. And like I said, and people still think like people think that's like the most important thing I've ever done in my ministry. And if that's true, I'd be really sad because all, you know, it wasn't, but it happened to be a,
00:47:53
Speaker
the coming together of those things. And when you look back on, say, the Civil Rights Movement or other movements for justice, there are these things that we hang on to, right? King's I Have a Dream speech or, you know, the Emmett Till's mother. I mean, these moments, and they were important and people still talk about them. But they were one moment in a long arc of moments that brought about the change that we now consider normative. And every one of those moments matters.
00:48:23
Speaker
And so, it's all these little like stepping stones that really create, only that there's certain ones that end up being at a crossroads of something else that's happening in life, that particular stepping stone. And that's basically what happened in that moment, that speech for you that was right in that crossroads. It also, I think, it becomes an organizing moment for other things.
00:48:49
Speaker
that it just occurred. So a lot of times the things that people might think are the most poignant things in our life, they just happen to be in those kind of crossroads.
Justice and the Long Arc of Change
00:49:00
Speaker
Well, and they're super important, don't get me wrong. It's just that they're, what precedes them and what follows are just as important, just as important. And one of the things I write about, which I don't think we talk about enough is that when you're caught in a moment of great drama, whatever it is, deciding to go, deciding to stay, stepping up to the plate, accepting what, after the drama ends and the adrenaline fades, there's this emptiness that follows, right? There's like this let down.
00:49:28
Speaker
like I was so alive in that moment and now and I think that that's something we have to talk about too which is okay then you get up the next morning and it's time to take out the garbage and you go about your life and that's you know I mean that's life right and if you get addicted to those moments of like
00:49:49
Speaker
Adrenaline and microphones and the light you know and for some moments limelight But even doesn't have to be that just that sense of aliveness you can get you can get a really distorted view of what it means to be alive and What it means to be brave and that's where I think going back. That's what I think grief comes in because grief grounds us and It keeps us
00:50:10
Speaker
connected to the pain from which life emerges, right?
Bravery from Grief and Everyday Life
00:50:18
Speaker
The loss from which life emerges. And so to remember that and not to feel like it's a mistake when we get to those places, because they also tell us how alive we are, right? We are really alive then. Even if nobody sees it,
00:50:39
Speaker
even if the only person experiencing it besides you is God, or your puppy, or your companion in life, or your child, whatever it is, right? That's it too. So you have this sense of a wholeness of life.
00:50:55
Speaker
that you can give thanks for. Thank you, Bishop Marianne. It's just such a beautiful array of stories that you share, and something that comes, that I feel is that it's somebody that has had this spiritual journey, yet you're showing your vulnerability, not only here in this interview, but in your book as well, that we're still continuing to grow. We're always growing and learning.
00:51:21
Speaker
There's always room for improvement. Always. We're constantly growing. So thank you for showing that note. Share with us when this book comes out, how people will get it. So it is called How We Learn to Be Brave. Thank you. How We Learn to Be Brave, Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. Its release date is May 23rd. And you can purchase it where you can pre-order it now wherever you order books.
00:51:52
Speaker
be available for purchase immediately after that day. I hope people find it a value. I hope it is encouraging. It's meant to be an encouragement and a validation of the courage that lies within each person. And I'm really excited to be able to talk about it with you. Thank you.
00:52:10
Speaker
Well, I'm so grateful again that you chose this platform to share, not only about your book, but about your life. And again, thank you for giving us this time and your busy day today as you create some other little stepping stones. Hopefully. So thank you once again. And I'll put the show notes, how people can also
00:52:34
Speaker
Learn more about suicide. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you once again. Okay, thank you. Marianne, good buddy. Thank you. Okay, get the cleaners. Bye.
00:52:56
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
00:53:24
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.