No. 3 - On Touching the Truth - Nadia Bolz-Weber
Interviewed by Suleika Jaouad
This interview is excerpted from Studio Visits, a monthly offering to deepen your creative practice through intimate conversations with some of our favorite writers and artists.
We follow a community-sourced agenda and learn about the tools they use, their earliest creative impulses, how journaling figures into their work, and what keeps them inspired.
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I was thrilled to talk to the extraordinary Nadia Bolz-Weber in our last Studio Visit. Nadia is one of these amazing people who explode the notion of what it means to be a creative person. She's written three New York Times-bestselling books (Pastrix, Shameless, and Accidental Saints, all available in our Bookshop), but her creative acts are also on high display in her work as a public theologian. She's broken new ground with her conception of radically inclusive community and her creation of a progressive church called House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, where everyone is welcome: the depressed, the addicted, the marginalized, the sinners and the saints—because let’s be honest, aren’t we're all a little of both?
SULEIKA
Hi, Nadia! Welcome. So if I’m right, it's 11:00 AM in Denver. What's a pastor doing hanging out with us this Sunday morning?
NADIA
I don't have a congregation anymore! I left House for All Sinners and Saints over two years ago. In my denomination, you have a letter of call, and they usually come from a congregation for you to be a pastor. But my letter of call is from my bishop to be a public theologian.
So on Sundays, I write prayers. I check in with myself and with whatever my higher power is, and I ask, “What do I have to say?” I don't really think of it beforehand. It's not that, throughout the week, I think, “I'll write prayers about fear,” or “I’ll write prayers about gratitude.” It really is in the moment. I write them very honestly—they aren’t pious—and then I publish them in my newsletter, and I put them on Instagram.
But I've only been doing that since the pandemic. I never did that before.
SULEIKA
I noticed that you said “whatever my higher power is”—and after I first met you, I started thinking about my own relationship to spirituality and religion. My dad was raised Muslim, my mom was raised Catholic, and they raised my brother and me agnostic bordering on atheist. So my first encounter with any sort of a religious figure was actually in the hospital after I got diagnosed with leukemia at 22. When my health was in particularly dire straits, hospital chaplains would appear in my room. It got to where I thought of them as spiritual grim reapers. When they showed up, I’d immediately think, “Oh, my test results today must not have been good.”
When you're sick, especially when you're terminally sick, there is a kind of pressure to have a spiritual epiphany. This morning I was thinking about how, when I entered the transplant unit, that was probably the first time in my life that I prayed. My first night there, I got down on my knees with my IV pole, and I thought about how many other desperate patients in that room had made some kind of haggling prayer bargain with a higher power. Mine was, “If you let me live, I'll be less selfish. I won't be mean to my mom.” I even had my own kind of Pascal's wager—“If you let me live, I’ll believe in you.”
NADIA
How did each entity hold up their end of the deal?
SULEIKA
Definitely a work in progress, I would say. [Laughs] During your pastoral training, I know you worked as a hospital chaplain, and I imagine that since then, you've had countless experiences of guiding folks through moments of great suffering. I'm curious to know what it's like to be on the other side. And what you've learned?
NADIA
First of all, I think prayers of desperation are really beautiful. Some people would be like, “Well, why aren't you praying all the time?” I'm like, “Fuck that. You pray when you need it.” Some people need it every day, some people don't. But those prayers that come out of desperation, I think there's something really pure about them.
I was a hospital chaplain because, to be ordained in my denomination, you have to do what's called clinical pastoral education. Basically you fill out a form, and they give you a clipboard and a name badge, and suddenly you're the chaplain. It's almost like saying, “Oh, you want to drive a cab for a living? Here are the keys to an ambulance for the next three months.”
But I learned more in that experience than almost any class in seminary, to be honest. I found that I really wanted to be in the ER or in the ICU. I felt more comfortable—because in those really dire situations, in those holy moments, people try to open up a channel to their divine source, whatever language or image they have for that.
The first time I was in the trauma room, they were cutting the clothes off this man, opening up his chest, and it seemed like chaos. But if you paid attention, everybody knew what they were doing. Each person was very clear what their job was. Except me. At one point, there was a nurse who had a second, I asked her, “What am I supposed to be doing?” She said, “Your job is to be aware of God's presence in the room.” And I thought, “Who would want any other job?”
SULEIKA
Being the one in the hospital bed, I found it fascinating how different people responded. There were the people who spewed your typical platitudes about silver linings. They were well meaning, but the one that I personally found infuriating was God doesn't give you more than you can handle—because at that point, I felt like I had been given more than I could handle.
NADIA
People spew complete bullshit in those moments because they are so terrified of how easily it could be them in that bed. It's people's inability to deal with their own fear and their own finitude. So they turn it into some precious moments greeting card sentiment.
SULEIKA
For our Studio Visits, we source questions from the community, and we received one question from Carolyn in Florida. She writes, “I first learned about Nadia’s work through Rachel Held Evans’s writing. If it's not presumptuous, I’m wondering, in this time of universal grief, how Nadia is and where she is in her grief over Rachel's death.”
NADIA
The space that's left after Rachel’s death is a very particular space. As a public theologian, she would be saying such brilliant things right now, and a lot of us miss that. But personally, I do just miss her.
Grief is so disfiguring, and it morphs—but usually there's a turn-taking aspect. Usually in a group of friends or family, if you're grieving, it’s your turn and everyone can come alongside you, because they're not in it. But right now, there's no turn taking. Everybody on the planet is grieving some kind of loss. Loss of friends and family members to covid, loss of income, loss of graduations and anniversary parties and cruises and vacations and conferences and all of the things that punctuate our lives. Every day we're in our homes, and that's it. There's a loss to that. That show on HBO, The Leftovers, it's brilliant theologically, but the first few episodes were brutal. It’s this very stark look at what it’s like when everybody's grieving—when there's no turn taking.
If anything, the fact that Rachel died a year before this started, it meant that I had a very recent understanding of what grief feels like. That has helped me in my writing to touch the truth. That's what I try to do in my work. How do I touch the truth? Not platitudes, not cheerful optimism, not cynical pessimism, but the actual truth. Grieving Rachel has helped me tell the truth during this time.
SULEIKA
When I was in the hospital, I befriended this group of other young patients. There were ten of us—we called ourselves the cancer crew—but only three of us are still alive. And the grief is difficult, but I also think there's this unmasking effect, when you see someone you love die.
NADIA
What do you mean by unmasking?
SULEIKA
I feel it in all kinds of ways, but specifically in my writing, I have less of an ability to write bullshit. There's also a clarity and a vulnerability. Historically I hated feeling exposed or vulnerable, but at this point, I don’t have a choice. It’s like I've lost my imaginary exoskeleton.
NADIA
I relate to that so much. I spent much of my life trying to project as much strength as possible. I wanted everyone to know that I was strong as hell all the time. And that's gone. So much of my armor is gone.
I wanted to talk about that word you used—unmasking. When tragic, horrible stuff happens, people say, “It's apocalyptic.” And they have no idea how true that is. Because the word apocalypse actually means “a revealing.” It means to uncover and to see what's underneath. When we are grieving, all of a sudden, the truth—which has always been there—is revealed.
SULEIKA
How has this new vulnerability shaped your creative process?
NADIA
I don't exactly know how to put this. I have more compassion for people now than I wish I did. In my podcast The Confessional, people often tell me the worst thing they've ever done. They tell me a story that, if all you knew about them was this story, told only in 160 characters on Twitter, you'd be like, “Take them out. They’re trash.”
But we dig into that story—into what led to it, and what they learned from it. It has increased my capacity to stop judging people so immediately and completely on limited information.
SULEIKA
Why do you wish you had less compassion?
NADIA
Being judgmental is more comfortable—or I guess more familiar. It feels good to sort humanity into very distinct boxes.
SULEIKA
I also think there's also a kind of exhaustion that can come with compassion. A couple of years ago, I reported this story for New York Times Magazine about the first prison hospice in the country. The hospice is staffed in large part by inmates who’ve been trained in hospice work. Most are serving life sentences for murder, and they’re trying to find some sense of redemption by caring for fellow prisoners as they near the end of their lives.
NADIA
That's so beautiful.
SULEIKA
It is, and it was interesting to talk to them—not only about how the regret and the pain and the shame of the crimes they’d committed opened up this aperture of compassion, but also how exhausting it can be. I know most of the people in the world right now are likely feeling some degree of compassion fatigue.
NADIA
I think there are different types of compassion fatigue. I don’t think the human psyche was developed to be able to hold all the information that's available to us right now—in terms of every form of injustice and violence and human suffering that happens all across the planet. Our psyches were developed to be able to hold whatever suffering happened in our village. We can handle that, we can extend ourselves emotionally towards that. But how do we extend ourselves emotionally towards every single form of it across the planet? We can't.
And so we need trust that not everything is ours to care about. It doesn't mean it's not worthy to be cared about by someone, but I constantly ask myself, “What's mine to do? And what's somebody else’s?” It feels callous, but we can't hold it all.
That's different than saying, “Here's somebody who committed this crime, but here's this other part of their story.” This is why I love the podcast Ear Hustle. It's from inside San Quentin, and it's so beautiful. They won a Pulitzer—they're incredible. And the guy who wrote their theme music—he got out, maybe six months ago, and I immediately hired him to write the theme music for The Confessional. Antwan Banks Williams, he's a genius. But that's why I love it, because it problematizes our desire to think people are only one thing. Nobody is ever only just one thing.
SULEIKA
I want to talk about your podcast. I know one of the Lutheran church’s tenets is confession, and you're also public about being in AA, where confession has a starring role. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the purpose of confession, and how it factors into your own writing practice.
NADIA
I think the truth makes itself known eventually. It can either do that in a way that brings clarity and a new path forward, or it can set up an emotional refugee camp in my lumbar. To me confession is a form of empowerment. Jesus said, “You'll know the truth and the truth will set you free.” I believe that. But then David Foster Wallace said, “Yeah, sure, the truth will set you free—but not before it's done with you.”
I'm obsessed with freedom. I'm in all of this for the freedom. And I've found that freedom comes from taking the reins with the truths that I don't want to admit and letting them out. I think it makes you a free person, and I want more and more freedom in life.
SULEIKA
We have another community question about shame from Anonymous in Austin. (I feel like I'm like a radio host right now.) This person wrote, “I was raised Catholic in the Bible Belt in a pretty traditional family, so I have all the expected feelings of shame around sex. But I also carry shame associated with secular societal pressures, like body image and professional achievement. Intellectually I know that harboring shame around these things is counterproductive and inhibiting, yet I can't quite shake it. How do I unlearn these systems?”
NADIA
I don't know any tricks other than just speaking the truth. To say something painfully true about yourself to somebody, and to have them receive it without judgment—or even for them to go, “I feel the same thing”—it takes all the air out of it. It can't float anymore. The power is just gone.
A Glimpse into Nadia’s Studio
Recommended Listening & Reading:
Listen to Nadia Bolz-Weber’s podcast, The Confessional, and sign up for her weekly newsletter, The Corners
Check out Ear Hustle, a podcast about the daily realities of life inside prison, shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration.
Read Suleika Jaouad’s NYT Magazine story, “The Vigil: The Prisoners Who Care for the Dying and Get Another Chance at Life”