New Words, with Mary Rakow

“I think the best art always asks questions that it can’t actually answer.”

— Mary Rakow

About the Guest

Mary Rakow is author of the highly acclaimed novels This Is Why I Came and The Memory Room. She earned a master's degree in theological studies at Harvard University and a PhD in theology from Boston College. Learn more about her ongoing work at maryrakow.com.

Best Books

Mary recommended God’s Optimism by Yehoshua November.

Transcript

MARY RAKOW: I think the best art always asks questions that it can't actually answer.

BLAIR HODGES: Things were falling apart in Mary Rakow’s life. Professionally, she was an author, but her stories just weren’t coming together. Her marriage was unendurable, and she wanted out. She was also angry at God—another unhealthy relationship she didn’t want anything to do with anymore. So one afternoon she stepped inside an empty church, walked to the front, and had a frank conversation.  

MARY RAKOW: I was telling God silently, but yelling, like, “I am at the end of my rope here! And not only that, but I'm cutting the rope!” And so in my imagination, I was raising scissors up, you know, and I just cut the rope.

BLAIR HODGES: And then Mary set down the imaginary scissors and picked up a real pen and started to write. And she swears she wasn’t even aware of it at the time, but she ended up creating one of the most religiously rich books I’ve ever read in my life.

Welcome back to Fireside with Blair Hodges. Mary Rakow joins us to talk about her outstanding novel This Is Why I Came. It’s the Bible re-written by a woman grappling with so many of the doubts and fears believers have experienced down through the ages. Her faith won’t ever be the same—but she’s not defeated, she’s  invigorated. Mary says the power of scripture, like the power of all true art, isn’t that it provides all the answers. Its power is in raising questions that transcend generations. Questions that matter today.  

MARY RAKOW: And I wrote the Bible stories so I could relate to them where I was. My marriage was going to be ending, and that was a huge loss, and there were tragedies in my life that were, you know? So I just brought all that to scripture. I still do. Scripture can handle everything.

BLAIR HODGES: This is episode 3. New Words. Mary Rakow, welcome to Fireside.

MARY RAKOW: Thank you very much for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: It's a pleasure. It really is. We're talking about your book, This Is Why I Came. It's one of my most favorite books. I was so excited that you wanted to be on Fireside. Thank you so much for being here.

MARY RAKOW: My thrill. Really, it's an honor.

Entering into the Text to Re-Write the Bible - 2:07

BLAIR HODGES: What you've done here is rewrite sections of the Bible. The Bible is one of the most revered and beloved texts ever written, ever published. It takes a lot of guts to try to rewrite that! Talk about that.

MARY RAKOW: [laughs] It didn't take guts for me at all. I'm a Catholic now, but I grew up with an atheist father and a Protestant mother who was very much in the Evangelical tradition. And so I was starting to memorize scripture from before I was in kindergarten. And we moved frequently. But wherever we moved, she would seek out the same kind of church. And for Sunday school, the teacher—no matter if it was Palo Alto, Castro Valley, wherever—they would teach with a flannel board. A board covered with flannel with these figures on it. So it'd be Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, or whatever—Noah and the ark. And I always identified with those characters. Those stories were very salvific for me, because of a lot of violence also going on in the home.

So Shadrach Meshach, and Abednego, for example, was not a story that was hard for me to identify with. Unfortunately, it was very easy to identify with that. So that is my imagination. I have a really biblical imagination. At the same time I was very nervous about reading as a kid, and I'm still nervous about reading books. So the Bible came to me in a visual manner. And those were the companions of my childhood, in addition to playmates and stuff.

So it wasn't hard to do that. But how this book came about was from a different route. I don't know if you want me to talk about that [laughs].

BLAIR HODGES: Yes! Let's hear about where this book came from to begin with.

MARY RAKOW: Okay, so I was working—the first book had come out, and I was happy with it.

BLAIR HODGES: That book is called The Memory Room, by the way.

MARY RAKOW: Right. The Memory Room is also published by CounterPoint. It came out in 2002. And then I was working on the issues in my life. My marriage of thirty-four years was sort of coming to shreds, and that was very, very painful for both of us. And I had been away from the church for many, many, many years. So anyway, I was trying to write about, why does marriage between a lot of people fail, and if it fails, if love fails, then what is there to believe in? And stuff like that.

I was writing every year, basically, a new draft of this second novel, year after year after year after year. And it was just not working. I have very trusted writer friends—Janet Fitch, Garth Greenwell, Jodie Hallberg—and we are very loving but very rigorous with each other. And so when it wasn't working for them, it was not working.

And then I’d take twelve more months usually and come up with another draft. I think I probably did ten of those. So finally, in this last one, I had sent it to Garth and David Francis and Ilya Kaminsky, and Garth returned after a month, the comment—the kind you don't want to hear as a writer, "Well, you could do this, you could do that, but…", you know, basically, it was not flying off the shelf, you know? It was not wonderful. And I had nothing biblical in this draft, nothing. I wasn't going to church, there was nothing. But he said, “Those fourteen pages you wrote about Zacchaeus,” he said, “I think you could make a beautiful small book from those, you know.”

BLAIR HODGES: And that's a New Testament figure, right? So you had included something about a New Testament figure.

MARY RAKOW: Yeah. And I just slammed my computer, the email shut, [laughs]. I was so depressed after so many years that this wasn't flying. And so I went out onto the terrace of the man I was dating at that time, and I was just so unhappy. And then I remembered how when I wrote this Zacchaeus stuff, I felt so free. I was wondering, what did Zacchaeus do the rest of his life after he had this afternoon encounter with Jesus? Like many biblical stories, we don't have follow up. So I just imagined, what was it like to be him?

And I just never went back to my computer. I got a notebook that I liked. And I wrote my first story about someone who was equally frustrated—Adam. And I just made it that he's trying to create, and trying to create, and trying to create something. And he's failing. And I was just putting myself into Adam as a biblical character. And I wrote the whole book in about three months, and it got published, and it was great.

But it was this entrance into biblical characters who—I felt, since a child, the Bible is a thing I can enter from where I really am. And I still feel that way. So.

BLAIR HODGES: And I think that's not a very common way to approach the Bible. Speaking for myself, I would approach the Bible as, “These are the stories. This is what it says. This is the content. This is what's important.”

But you're coming at it a different way. It seems like you're looking for the empty parts of scripture, the question marks, the fissures in the text. Even asking, were there contradictions? And you're trying to make sense of those.

MARY RAKOW: Exactly. I think that's exactly right. I do hold the Bible as a sacred text. But I think it has this quality that all great art has. Which is—whether it's a symphony, whether it's Mozart, or a visual, a painting—great art is primarily emptiness. And so you can go into it. And when you go into it, you take yourself.  What else are you going to take? And you go into it. And that completes the art.

So for example, David Nash, who's a living sculptor now in England—and I love him very much—he talks very much about “viewer consummation.” As sculptor, he does his part, and then the viewer, whether the viewer likes his sculpture or not, that completes or consummates the work of art.

And so I think in scripture too, it is great literature. And so even as an unbeliever, you can read a story and go into it, and you will take yourself. Great art is hospitable to the other. Great art needs the other. And so the Bible is hospitable to us.

BLAIR HODGES: It sounds like you're saying that the Bible isn't “the Bible” until it's interacting with a reader in a sense.

MARY RAKOW: Yeah, I think that's true. And Bible stories are very, very minimal. The gospels are super short. The story of Exodus, which is told several ways in the in the Jewish scriptures, is still so minimal! So there's ample, ample room to go in. And the Bible is hospitable, like all great art.

And so we go in. We start from where we are and we go in, whether it's with our anger, or rage, or whatever. And there's room for us, you know? There's room for everyone in great art and in sacred texts. The Bible is a living text. It's living because you can enter it as a breathing person with all of your parts.

Adam the Maker - 8:23

BLAIR HODGES: And so the first place you enter into the scripture that we see in your book is with Adam. Your book takes us from the beginning of the Bible to the end. We start in Eden with Adam. I was hoping you could read this chapter and we can talk about it.

MARY RAKOW: Sure. I'd be happy to. I like Adam. I mean, like I say, I was so angry at the time. I just wrote this, you know, I wrote it all, the whole book, longhand. I didn't want anything to do with my computer that stored ten years of failure. So I just got a pen I liked. I got a notebook that I liked. And I just wrote. And when I was wondering about a Bible story—I did still own a Bible—I would look it up and stuff like that. But with Adam I didn’t look up anything.

So chapter one, “Adam the Maker.”

He fashions peacock, dove, and parakeet, all the species and subspecies, microscopic and immense, yet he is unable, no matter how hard he tries, to make the form he longs to see, the song he hears but cannot put outside himself, unable to compose the right sequence of notes, unable to make the form that will tell him who he is.

He traces his hand, his foot, in the sand. Lying on his back, reaches over his chest with a stick, traces his entire body there then stands, but it does not move, unable to make a form like himself that also breathes. The water erasing it like an encouraging teacher at first, saying try, try again, then mocking.

Destroying this drawing and that. All around the island, in the wet sand and dry, sketches and more sketches, pages and messy piles under the trees, floating on the lakes, clay models on the riverbanks, countless mud statues, all of them false. Fabricated then abandoned, revised, fabricated anew than abandoned again. Clumsy, or elegant, it doesn't matter. The debris is everywhere and the animals are multiplying faster than he can keep up, all of it not what he wants to see.

He cannot find a way to put out into the world the form he cannot not see. Bound by his need more visceral than if his legs were bound by leather straps tied on his body, digging in. If he walks to the left, it is there. If he walks to the right it is with him. This formless thing demanding a form and he cannot get it right. Draft after draft after draft.

“We had such high expectations for you!” he hears the waves say. Sometimes he thinks it is the chorus of animals, donkeys and macaws, jealous that he is not satisfied with them. “Why are you despondent?” the Robin asks, “Look at my wings!” and the ant, “Look at my diligence!” And he does look, trying to preserve what is left of hope, and does study his companions that are his successes and so near, but this does not solve the problem and brings no peace.

Out of respect he has given all of them their individual names, zebra, koi, antelope. But the real name for each, the name he keeps to himself, is “Not-me.” You are Not-me. You also are Not-me. It is endless, the diversity of what is Not-me a torment, so that finally at one sunset at the close of one particular day, the remnant of hope impossible to revive, he denies his desire, denies whatever it is that pushes him to transcend who he is, to exceed all the animals and the plants and the stars, and the sea and the dry land, all that he has already made, even though it is all, and he knows this, which is a mystery and confusing, that it is all undeniably good.

He imagines, instead, the pleasure of not being driven, and so formulates a different end to his loneliness and, taking the sharp blade, lies down thinking to end his life. It seems dignified. A gate to relief, perhaps even to happiness. But when he lifts the blade over his abdomen he fails again, unable to pierce himself, as if failure were endless, as if failure itself is what he is best at inventing, and finding that he lacks the necessary courage, falls asleep, hoping to never wake.

She comes to him in a dream so startling it wakes him and he sees that she is not a dream at all, but is as real as the field mouse, the ostrich, the hen and hawk. For a long time they stare at each other without speech, motion, and he compares her to the elegance of the serpent, and imagines her softness like the goose's down. Seeing that she is unlike the other creatures he has made, he thinks her name will not be Not-me but perhaps Not-Not-me, yet seeing that she is equal to himself, does not name her at all, but asks, “What is your name?” And she replies, “Eve.”

He wonders from where she comes. Wonders, since he has not made her, if there is a maker mightier than himself, one who, by implication, holds him in a deep understanding, his hunger clearly and intimately known by this other, as it has now been made visible in its answer, which causes him, as he stares at her, arm and leg and neck, to wonder if all the creatures in the sea and on the dry land and all the stars in the heavens that he thought he had made weren't made by him at all, but rather by this other. And he desires to know this one, and names the maker he cannot see. But his work he sees, “God.”

(This Is Why I Came, pp. 1–3.)

BLAIR HODGES: There are so many moments in this opening piece that I could spend so much time on. But I wonder as you read this, a few years removed from the book's publication, what calls to you now, what stands out to you in this piece?

MARY RAKOW: I almost start to cry at the end. [laughs] So maybe you heard that. But it's that Adam—the part where it says “and he desires to know this one,” you know, “and names the maker he cannot see, but whose work he sees, God.”

That's what chokes me up right now. Because since this book came out, I've come back to this relationship as the central relationship of my life now. And in these last years—

BLAIR HODGES: Your relationship with God?

MARY RAKOW: Right. And so I love that in Adam, because I recognize it in myself.

I think the whole book actually now can be held in a context that I wasn't aware of at the time, that it's really this conversation coming from both sides. So we have in the readings today—I do the Liturgy of the Hours now as a practice. And we have two readings that are brief. One is from Isaiah, and one is Psalm 83. And it's kind of this conversation, Isaiah quotes God saying, “I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a nation that did not call my name.” So it's God reaching out from one side and in Psalm 83 we said today, “My soul is longing and yearning for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out to the living God.” And I think for me, it's that relationship between two that are longing for each other and wanting each other. And that kind of holds all the stories in this book.

Arguing with God - 15:42

BLAIR HODGES: And to hear you say that—You had mentioned, when you first started writing this book that you weren't necessarily in a religious or spiritual place. You said you had been away from the church for a time. And now as you're reading this back, [laughter] you're in much closer communion with God than when you even wrote this. How do you account for that?

MARY RAKOW: Yeah, it's cool! I mean, what I love about it is, I love the people in this book. Because when I was writing it, and when I would read from it when it first came out—as I always say, the method for me has two parts to it. One, nobody knew the end of their story. You know, we know the end of the flood story. Noah didn't know that. So I tried to sort of put myself in the position of Noah or Noah's wife, or the kids that are riding up as the water gets higher and higher and none of their playmates are in the ark, you know? I mean, it's really complicated. And so first, I take the stories at face value, like I did when I was four years old. It's just my literary choice. I'm doing that. I'm not into historical criticism and so on like that. So I take them as stories at face value. I just work with them. Let's say they're true. Then what?

And to remember that each person in the story doesn't know the ending of the story when it's happening. It's unfolding. So what is the vast range of feelings? Why does Jonah really—why is he angry at God when Nineveh repents, and things like that. Or what happened to Zacchaeus? He has this one afternoon with this person who so saw him with such intimacy, and then he never sees him again, probably. And he changed his entire life.

So I like these characters because I identify with them. I mean, I just put myself into their story. And I wrote the Bible stories so I could relate to them where I was. My marriage was going to be ending, and that was a huge loss, and there were tragedies in my life that were, you know? So I just brought all that to the scripture. And I still do. Scripture can handle everything.

BLAIR HODGES: I think this is the power of what you've done here, this project, is that it can reach people who feel very close to the Bible and love the Bible and revere it as scripture. And it can also reach people who have an uncomfortable relationship with scripture—

MARY RAKOW: Exactly!

BLAIR HODGES: —because you're showing how people can bring their questions to the text and their imagination to the text.

MARY RAKOW: Yeah, that's all in it’s in the stories. I mean, I wrote the Jonah story, and I wanted a better God than the God I experienced there, you know? To question and to doubt is a way to worship the one that we're seeking.

BLAIR HODGES: I think that's a central theme of the book, because at the beginning of your book, we meet a woman who's returning to church after thirty years away. She's a Catholic woman, she's going to confession. And she's brought with her a homemade book, her own re-envisioning of the Bible that she says she has “stitched together.” And that's your framing story—we get to read what she wrote in that book, we get to read her new scripture.

MARY RAKOW: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: And her problem that she's facing when she's going back to confession is that she's been in an argument with God for decades, this is what she says, her words: “Because God let things happen that never should have happened.”

MARY RAKOW: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: So it seems her problem, then—she's returning to find God. But she's also had this argument with God for years.

MARY RAKOW: That's exactly right.

I mean, my friend Garth, who is a brilliant writer and so on, and is an atheist, he said—this is not about the writing so much it is about personal stuff—he said “Mary, you're not an unbeliever. You're not an atheist. You're in an argument with God. That's different!” [laughs]

And he's right! My writer friends know me really well. So do my kids. I try to understand myself and, you know, I'm really blind to myself. It's astonishing!

 She Wants Her Integrity and Her Faith - 19:26

BLAIR HODGES: Did you identify with this woman, then? Did you kind of feel like this character, or did she come from someplace else?

MARY RAKOW: Yes, the framing story is literally what happened. So Francis was elected Pope. It had been thirty years really, of not going into the church, although I had a room of prayer in the family house and things like that. But there was profound disillusionment. Anyway, that's a whole other story.

But anyway, so Francis, I had heard of this new pope. And I turned on—I guess my boyfriend had a TV, I haven't had a TV for a long time—and it showed Pope Francis, newly elected, and it's Good Friday, and he's going to hear confessions on Good Friday. This is the Friday that Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus, and then celebrate his resurrection on Sunday. So it's the holiest three days of year. But anyway, he's going to hear confessions. And his handler is walking right next to him. But instead, he makes this left turn, and goes to a confessional booth that is there, and kneels down and offers his own confession to some priest that is there. And he has his crappy black leather shoes. And you know, he's kneeling, and something about the really worn-out soles of the black shoes, and then this beautiful white vestment touching that—that kind of complexity of beauty and ordinariness and stuff. And just that he did that. I mean, he does things off script often. And I was very moved by that. And I thought, well, if the pope can go to confession, maybe I can, you know? So I went, I went to confession.

So what Bernadette says to the priest in the book, the whole thing, the beginning and the end, the framing device, is all just literally what happened to me that day. I took a cab, I felt, you know—

BLAIR HODGES: Wow. The words are remarkable. There's this quote where she says to the priest, “I don't feel I'm committing a sin that I can't believe in God anymore. I can't will it. But I really wish it could change. This is why I came.”

MARY RAKOW: And that's the title of the book. Yes, and that is literally what I said to the guy. And he was sitting on a low bench, and it was very humble. So he's looking up at me. And he did say—you know, he had to do the formulary. And so he did give me absolution and things like that. But he never debated that. I mean, it was a very legitimate thing. And I felt it was a profound experience to me.

BLAIR HODGES: Then you make this remarkable statement. That the woman—and now we know you're speaking for yourself—“wants her integrity and her faith, both at the same time.”

MARY RAKOW: Everyone does want that. A seven-year-old wants that. A ninety-year-old wants that. Who doesn't want that? We all want that.

I mean, who wants a fake god? Who wants a god that is too small? Who wants a god who does stuff we wouldn't even do in our humanity? I mean, we still have mercy! We want a god who is at least as good as we are at our best! We want something way, way, way beyond our imagining. And if we don't have experience of that, or we don't have teachings that lead us toward that, then it's the moral thing to say, “This is not a god I accept.” That's a very religious thing to do.

Redeeming the Scriptural Underdogs - 22:18

BLAIR HODGES: And we see that in the way that you're revisiting the scriptures. In fact, I sense a little bit of a contrarian streak in you, almost like you have a desire to redeem some of the figures who have been typically seen as villains in the Bible.

Like there's Cain, for example. Cain's a really sympathetic person here.

MARY RAKOW: Totally. I love Cain! Abel gets all the credit, Cain's the bad guy forever. Oh, it's horrible! I mean, I don't think of it that way. So I wrote it the different way. I love all the characters in this in the book that I wrote. Like I said, you can fill in the blanks, the stories are very minimal.

Let's take the story of Cain and Abel as if it were history. You know, there's the first family, Adam and Eve. Let's just take the frame of the story as it is, there's Adam and Eve, and they have Cain and Abel, later, Seth. And nobody's died yet. So Cain, he is given this bad rap since then, of the murder of Abel, but he had no concept—you know, he didn't know, he was agricultural. So he experienced crops dying, and coming back, dying and coming back. And no human had died, so—[laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: In fact, the first blood that was shed, as far as we know, was from the animals that were being killed.

MARY RAKOW: That’s exactly right. And so he has this repulsive reaction to Abel, the way I've written it, that it is the violence of—animals became meat, you know, and this whole vocabulary, this whole nomenclature was developed, like rump roast—I mean, those are not modern terms, but you know, rump roast and stuff like that. And so Cain is a person I deeply love. So I wrote quite a bit about him.

It's the violence of his brother Abel, and his jealousy, which he owns. And then he retreats to the life of a contemplative to try to understand, because he feels guilty, because he didn't know Abel wouldn't come back like the wheat.

Whatever this story, this origin story, this myth, story, whatever it's supposed to suggest, I think we have to always go into the characters, that they didn't know how their story ended. And so if he killed Abel out of jealousy, he did not know that he wouldn't come back like his plants did. And so he grieves that.

Noah the Doubter - 24:29

BLAIR HODGES: That's Mary Rakow. We're talking about her book, This is Why I Came.

So throughout the book over and over, we meet these biblical figures who start becoming disenchanted with God. For example, Noah is unsure if he's even supposed to be building an ark. You depict him as trying to hear God's voice, but he's not sure that he can. He does hear people throwing themselves against the side of the ark as the waters rise, which is a really dramatic image you bring to us. And your Noah comes to doubt God's ability to help here. What did you do with Noah?

MARY RAKOW: A lot of writing, like all creative forms, you do a lot of stuff unconsciously. So when you look at it five years later, you say, “Oh, in the Noah story I was doing blah, blah, blah,” you know?

So I realized in looking at the book again last week that the Noah story is, for me, primarily a story about love and the breakdown of the relationship between Noah and his wife. And also the relationship between Noah and God. That God repents.

If we take the story of the flood, we have God destroying all of the human race, all the animals, all of everything, flooding everything, except this small group of people pairs of animals so they can reproduce. That's a very violent act. And the very important thing to me in this story is that God says he will never do that again. By the way, I say “He” for God, that's just my convention. So God says he will never do that again. And a sign of that is the rainbow in the sky. So for God to do something that God regrets is very interesting! The way God is imaged in this story, God makes a mistake, and he regrets it.

I wanted to go into that. And in the story in the Bible they're on the ark for forty days, but I just made it that they're in there for years, and that Noah came to question the anger of God being so excessive, and withdrew, and stayed in this little food storage place, the food had run out and he just stays in there until the end, until the rain and all that stops, and the waters begin to recede. His wife has died. And his sons come and knock on the door and say, “Mom died last night and we're throwing her overboard.”

And so what Noah says that's so beautiful to me, and it's kind of my final position, I guess, in terms of why do marriages between loving people—you know—very many marriages don't survive the situations that are foisted upon them, like Noah and his wife. So Noah does finally come out of the ark after his kids and grandkids are all out there and stuff and he gathers them all. And he says that “love always exceeds the form in which it dwells.” And he has brought God back from this tunnel where God has retreated. And God comes running out of the tunnel and is himself again, and he is forgiven, and vows to never do that again.

So it's kind of about love between spouses and also love between Noah and God, whose anger was excessive.

Women in Scripture - 27:32

BLAIR HODGES: It seems like you're identifying even more here with Noah than with Noah's wife. Is that right?

MARY RAKOW: Yeah, I think so. Because he realizes, he regrets. His wife used to come to the door and knock and say, "Come out, come out, come back into our wedding bed, this little blue bed you made in the ark for us." And he refuses, he refuses, he refuses, he ties himself really tightly to the side of the ark. And that failure on his part, he regrets. So I do identify with that.

You may not be able to see, when you're going through something like the dissolution of your marriage, your part in it. It might take years for you to see that. So I do identify with Noah. I wish I identified with the wife, but I identify with Noah! [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: But you kind of go back and forth, then. You're not the type of reader that says “I need to find all the women in scripture, and that's my story.” I mean, I get the sense that you're very interested in the stories of women in scripture, perhaps even more than the scripture is. [laughs] But you're also not tied to that because you're a woman.

MARY RAKOW: Yeah. I think gender is fluid. And I think that gender is—

Most of the Bible stories were about men when I was growing up, and I always identified with them. I don't see any problem with that. And I don't now, either. I'm just fluid about it. I'm not binary in my thinking about gender especially. So with Bible stories and God—I use the male pronoun, but it's just comfortable to me. I like words for God that are without gender, like the Holy One, or the Holy Face, or the One Without End, or the Uncreated. These are names for God that I'm really wholeheartedly comfortable with. But “Father” is problematic for me because of my own father. So I like titles, names for God that are without gender. And so yes, I identify with any character in scripture.

BLAIR HODGES: It reminds me with how you ended the Adam section where Adam doesn't name Eve, but he does name God.

MARY RAKOW: Right, right.

Moses Breaks Up with God - 29:27

BLAIR HODGES: Another chapter that I wanted to hear from you directly is Chapter 10. “Moses and the Burning Bush.” This is Moses, and like most of the people in your book, he's trying to figure out his relationship to God. And it's not a straightforward story, where God just appears in this burning bush and talks to Moses and then they have this great relationship. Would you read that chapter for us?

MARY RAKOW: I would be happy to.

“Moses and the Burning Bush.”

He watched the bush burn without being consumed and was mesmerized because he saw motion and stillness held together as one thing. He rushed toward it, despite his age and sore legs, then heard a voice and, fearful, stopped and took off his shoes.

When, finally, he climbed down from the mountain, people pointed, pulled back, cheered, exclaimed that his face shone like the sun. Light radiated from his body with each step, the dull sand sparkled under his feet. Light came from his fingers, his toes. He told himself, at last, I'm aflame with love! At night, in his bed, under the sheets, he checked. It was true, his body glowed. "I bore you up on eagle's wings and brought you to myself," he heard God say.

Panting he returned the next day and then a third, but saw only roots and sand. He took off his sandals but heard no voice. Through each hour of daylight than evening than night than the moon, he waited and in the morning walked home. A week passed. It was always the same. Two weeks and three. No voice, no flame. Nothing. Eventually, he stopped climbing the mountain. His face felt cool again.

Looking in the mirror, he saw only his thinning hair, his slack shoulders, the glow gone. His family and friends jeered, resented his privilege, bitter that it hadn't produced anything new for them. Had produced nothing useful at all.

He knew if he let disappointment come, he would crumble, so he told himself, it's better this way. Perhaps the invisibility of God is a sign of mercy. Not only mercy but magnam misericordium. Great mercy. He tapped the smooth surface of the glass, as if for persuasion, and said, "The Almighty was perfect when he was invisible. Actually, I'm relieved. The Almighty was so..." he searched for the word. "So particular."

Daily, he demonstrated to himself that fire does, in fact, consume what it burns. He liked to strike the match, to set the wood aflame. He sat outside doing nothing else. Liked to watch until the twigs burned to ash.

Over time, he set many things on fire, pieces of furniture, wooden cups. He moved his bed outside, kept a fire burning day and night, constantly feeding it. This straw, this torn blanket, this chair, this picture frame.

They let him drift, alone, apart. His clothes smelled of smoke. He smeared ashes on his face, filled his mouth with ashes, coated his tongue, his ears, rubbed ashes on his eyelids, hoping to rub away the memory of what was too sweet to carry. And in this way delivered himself back to the world as he had known it. He told himself, there is no mountain, there is no God.

He felt the certainty of the world he had created, certain in all of its smallness. A flat diminished world but one that comforted him, no longer forced to see all of the ways he was not like the God. No longer forced to see all the ways he failed at love.

But at the same time, a voice inside called out,

Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.

Pity me, O God, according to Thy great mercy.

(This Is Why I Came, pp. 36–38.)

BLAIR HODGES: That's Mary Rakow.

Mary, it seems like this is a Moses who can't quite believe in God, but also can't not believe in God.

MARY RAKOW: I think that's right. I mean, since I wrote this book—like I say, my life has taken a really beautiful turn since then, and so I've read in the prayers that we do a lot of Exodus, and in the Psalms and stuff, so I have a great, great love for Moses, and would write it very, very differently now.

When we have something really beautiful and profound happen, it's a gift and we want to preserve it, we want to repeat it and stuff like that. But in my understanding of Moses at that time, it was not repeatable. So then he denies his desire for it. And I think that's what we do as a defense a lot of times, you know, we deny our desire for that happiness and that joy and that feeling of connection with God.

I think that's a kind of defense position. And it's understandable. Just like when I was away from—I hadn't prayed for thirty years, I didn't say, “I really miss it!” I didn't even admit I was in an argument with God.

So I had an experience that maybe pertains to this. Earlier, in the beginning of my argument with God, me and my family were driving, having a family vacation back east, and visiting a Trappist monastery in western Massachusetts when we were living in Boston and I was in grad school there at Harvard and I became a Catholic and all that. So I liked going. I went with a girlfriend, we would go to this monastery at Spencer, Massachusetts—and a friend of mine entered that monastery, a Jewish convert. But anyway, so we're on this family vacation and the kids and my husband and family stay in the car, and I go into the church there. There's a public portion of it so you could go and watch the monks sing the Liturgy of the Hours, but it was at a time between that, which I was glad for. So I had the church to myself. And I just felt like—[laughs]. I was telling God silently, but yelling, like, “I am at the end of my effing rope here! And not only that, but I'm cutting the rope!” you know?

So in my imagination, I was like raising scissors up, you know, and I just cut the rope. And I was crying and stuff like that. And I was also aware that I was keeping the family waiting, but you know, it was extremely important to me. It was of fundamental importance to me. And a weird thing, the weirdest thing happened—which probably feeds into this Moses story—because nothing happened.

And it was beautiful because I realized, we can turn our back on God—I realized at the time, and twenty years later I still was not in practice, okay—but I didn't forget this experience—I felt no change. Why? Because I'm not connected to God because of my own rope that I built, like I lassoed God, you know? I can cut it, but I'm still held by God. I felt exactly, exactly the same.

You know, it was a revelatory experience. It was like the burning bush experience. It was a very, very profound experience about the nature of God's love. That there's room for our hatred and our rebellion and our breaking up with God. God doesn't break up with us. It didn't change anything, because God was, and continues to hold me and every living creature, I think, in love, no matter what. No matter what. It's very beautiful how God agrees to appear before Moses and so on. That's a whole other beautiful Bible story. But anyway.

BLAIR HODGES: What would you do different with Moses now that you have a different relationship with Moses?

MARY RAKOW: Well, I like the chapter that I wrote about Moses at the time, where he wants to see God and God says, “Oh, just”—this is from Scripture, you know, “you'll die if you see me.” So he says, “Under this certain condition, I will pass by you, and you'll see me from the back.” And so this Anselm Kiefer painting really inspired me with this. It’s of a man lying on his back, I can't remember the title of the painting, it's a very popular Kiefer painting. And his eyes are open, and his arms are stretched out. He's just lying flat in this empty landscape. And it's nighttime and it's filled with stars. And so that's what Moses is allowed to see, the back of God, and he sees all these stars. And God is saying, “Come to me. The doors to come to me are infinite.”

Anselm Kiefer, “The Renowned Orders of the Night.”

BLAIR HODGES: And with “the doors” he was referring to the Law, he was saying—

MARY RAKOW: Yes, the law. That's right. God is giving the law to Moses. And you know, I read Leviticus, and I read the Bible beginning to end before I started—years before when I was still trying to write the original second novel. And there's just an enormous number of laws and stuff like that. And I came to see them, like, how did he stay awake? Well, he remembered this primary experience of himself as an infant in the basket floating on the river before he's discovered by the Pharaoh's daughter. And all that allows him to stay awake on the mountain.

But then I really felt like, if you read the law, the Mosaic Law, it's really beautiful. It's very detailed. How to butcher a cow in a humane manner. You know, the knife has to be like this to do it. I mean it's just on and on and on and on. But it's all forms of love. And it's all—the way I wrote it, the law is always like in the Anselm Kiefer piece, this man looking up at the infinite number of stars in the sky, so I have God saying “These are all doors.”

BLAIR HODGES: Right. You have Moses saying that Moses realized “what had seemed like the infinite neediness of God was its opposite. And he heard God saying, ‘Come to me. I've given you infinite doors. Pick one and come to me. Enter into the fullness of my mercy.’”

MARY RAKOW: That's right. Like we just need to go in one door. There's a door for each person, each thing that breathes, in my sense of things, that it’s infinite.

The Man Blind from Birth Teaches Jesus - 38:48

BLAIR HODGES: So you've taken us through the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament as Christians refer to it. And when we get to the New Testament, we see a Jesus who's learning. We see Jesus who's experiencing.

MARY RAKOW: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's go to your Chapter 25, “The Man Blind From Birth.”

MARY RAKOW: “The Man Blind from Birth.”

When Jesus passed by a man blind from birth, his disciples asked if the man's condition was because of his own sins or the sins of his parents, and Jesus, remembering the woman with the issue of blood, said solemnly, “Neither.”

He sat down next to the man, the two of them whispering to each other in the chamber of their bodies, shutting out all others, even the heat. “You can use this,” the man said, tapping the ground, because he often packed it on his cheeks and neck, letting the clay dry to a mask then peeling it off, which made him feel clean.

Jesus spat and made clay of his spittle and focused his intention, remembering the power he possessed, to use it wisely. He anointed the man's eyes with the clay and touched his face tenderly because of Legion, and felt the energy flow out to the blind man through his hands.

“Go wash in the pool of Siloam,” he instructed and the man went and washed in the pool and received sight.

Now the man was questioned by his neighbors how his eyes were opened, and he told them what Jesus had done. When asked where Jesus was, the man said he didn't know and he repeated the same to the Pharisees. They then called his parents who answered only that indeed, the man was their son and he was born blind. They added, “But we do not know how he sees,” distancing themselves from him. When he pressed further, they said, “He is of age, ask him,” and again, “He shall speak for himself,” never adding that their son was reliable or trustworthy or that he was not prone to exaggeration, which hurt him.

Being blind all of his life, he was a careful listener and careful in his speech so that when he was brought a second time before the Pharisees he was clear about what he knew and what he did not know. Asked whether Jesus was a sinner, he did not know and stated simply, “I was blind and now I see,” clinging to that certainty.

In the days that followed, he saw that his parents did not love him. He told himself, this is the price of healing, the price of sight. He saw that they did not love him as they loved themselves and remember that Jesus had asked him three times if he was sure he wanted to see, saying, “Blindness can be a blessing.”

In the hovel of his parents’ home, he saw what he had often smelled, that it was dirty, and disorganized, everything in disrepair. He saw that his father feared his mother, which he had sensed from a young age, but had not known, until seeing, the tension and fear that marked his father's face with rivulets where anger gathered and ran down.

Daily, he drew water from the well, helping his mother, cleaning the house, washing the clothes, the fresh water for drinking. The women and young girls and boys learned to hesitate, some even learned patience, as he waited for the water’s surface to settle into glass so that he could hold his face over it, staring a long time at his reflection, no matter how recently he had done it, seeing a stranger there.

He saw his thick black lashes and brows, the scar on his cheek. He saw that he was fair and to his own eyes beautiful, so that he changed his name from the One Blind from Birth to the Believer. And they call it the Believer’s Well, the Well of the Disciple.

The believer lived with his parents and cared for them into their old age. He also followed Jesus from a distance, doing small, practical things, helping secure the room for the last meal, finding the donkey.

“I came to bring division” is what Jesus had been preaching, the cutting in of the future and of judgment, the cost of doing the will of God, the closeness of the end times that he and his cousin John both felt, that urgency. But seeing that the man lives peaceably with his parents who did not really love him, Jesus learned that sometimes doing God's will was gentle and easy and that discipleship could lead to harmony instead of division. A low gate, he thought, not always a knife blade.

When the crowd of five thousand listening to Jesus grew hungry, it was The Believer who suggested a few loaves and a few fish could feed them all. “The loaves will multiply the way love does,” he told Jesus. “Exponentially.”

(This Is Why I Came, pp. 129–132.)

BLAIR HODGES: So again, this is a Jesus who's learning. And you introduce us to that earlier with the woman with the issue of blood, where she finds him in the crowd and touches the hem of his garment, and he feels virtue—I think the King James Version says he feels “virtue” leaving him, and she is healed. And then he's talking to her later in your story, and she says, “You have great power. Perhaps instead of feeling it leave, you could learn to release it intentionally. Maybe it can be gathered and aimed.”

This is a Jesus who's learning.

MARY RAKOW: Well, I mean, we believe—Christian orthodoxy, you know, the Orthodox do, Protestants, Catholics, you know, believe that he was fully human except without sin. So, you know, he had a learning curve. He was also fully divine, but that was sort of held in abeyance I guess we would say, so that he learned.

I like thinking about these miracles, because I think he did learn from Legion, and from the woman with an issue of blood, and from the man born blind, and from the man who had a withered hand. The gospels vary in terms of what miracles they each record and their order. But I like to think of them as—that he learned from them, you know? He did learn from them. And we learn from—I think we learn from, at least my experience, I mean I have learned probably the most profound things about God from the people that sleep on—I’m sorry I’m gonna cry, but you know—who sleep on cardboard in my city. So I think this is true. I think why wouldn't Jesus also learn from Legion? He never, he never after Legion had a violent aspect to his healing. But with Legion, all the swine ran over the cliff. And so he destroyed the livelihood of all the shepherds. And these were obviously not Jewish shepherds, because they ate swine, pig, you know? And so I liked writing about Legion and Jesus spending time together and about what Jesus learned from Legion.

BLAIR HODGES: And you're exploring these tensions. Another one I'm seeing in this story is, it seems like you're working through some anxiety you might feel about the text, where it says “Jesus saw the man lived peaceably with his parents who did not really love him. And Jesus learned that sometimes doing God's will was gentle and easy and that discipleship could lead to harmony instead of division.”

And that's sort of in reference to Jesus saying, “I came to bring a sword, I came to divide, and the people that can't leave their mother and father and family and come follow me,” you know? So it seems like you're dealing with some—you're almost correcting the New Testament there and saying—

MARY RAKOW: Well they're both in the New Testament. We have Jesus saying—like the ones you just quoted, those are very harsh or strong challenging ones. And then also we have, you know, “my burden is light,” let's see, what is it?

BLAIR HODGES: My yoke is easy, yeah?

MARY RAKOW: Yeah, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I don't think those need to be resolved. I think it's true of every relationship we're in, that there are times that are very harsh, and that we have to take a stand and so on, stand up, and we have losses for the relationship. And then there are times when the relationship is very easy. So I think these are both true. I think Jesus said both of these things, and we all kind of like one set more than the other set. [laughs]

But I like him to—you know, he was apocalyptic. I mean, he was really talking about the end of times, and so was his cousin. And he and his cousin, I imagine, were deeply close. His cousin baptized him. And from then he started his public ministry. And then you know, John the Baptist was, of course, killed, beheaded. So the sense of urgency is in both of them. So that makes sense. But I like thinking of him learning about gentleness from this man born blind from birth.

The Descent into Hell - 47:30

BLAIR HODGES: Another section that came to mind here is the descent into hell, this is Chapter 39.

MARY RAKOW: Oh, okay.

BLAIR HODGES: This stood out to me as also doing a kind of theological work, looking through tensions in the New Testament and exploring those and filling in the gaps, as we've talked about, using imagination and creativity, to think about what else is happening in scripture. I hoped that you could also read this section as well.

MARY RAKOW: Sure, yeah. So the descent into hell, we profess that in both creeds—the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed, so it's part of what we say we believe in.

BLAIR HODGES: This is after Jesus was crucified.

MARY RAKOW: Yes, that he died, was buried, descended into hell, and was raised on the third day. So we don't really have scripture telling us what happened during those three days, but we affirm that he descended into hell. That's not something that people preach a lot about, I don't think. It's problematic. But anyway, so I imagined it a certain way.

“The Descent into Hell.”

As they bury Jesus in the tomb, God imagined an earlier world, with just the land and sea and heavens and plants, the creatures that had no heart at all. He wondered if he should return things to that state, abandon his project entirely, that long hope.

But he still wanted what he'd always most wanted, which was to be loved not for his power or his omniscience but for his mercy. And for that he needed man. The ferns could never know his mercy or be grateful for it. The ferns could never love him or turn away from him as they could turn toward and away from the sun.

Then he thought, perhaps a revision is an order, and told himself, I should learn to do this to myself to not need man. Wouldn't that be almost as good? A paler pleasure, but not nothing.

As the soldiers arrived to guard the tomb in which Jesus lay, God opened the drawer of the past and then lifted the veil of the future so that he could see, in one glance, all of time, from its beginning to its end, from what existed before time to what would exist after it, and he held time and all that it contained on his lap, and touched it and turned it over the way a grandparent holds a grandchild and so holds also the parents of the child, past and future in an inspecting reverence. God held all of time together, and, seeing that he was alone, and would cause harm to no one, he let himself feel all of the anger he saw in time, all of his fury, his disappointment at the floundering of man, at the cruelty and arrogance and pride and greed of man.

God held all of it in his hands and then, from deep within himself, forgive all of it, both in advance and in retrospect, so that his anger and his mercy together poured out like an envelope cut open. And the earth quaked and some of the dead rose from the tombs and the veil of the Temple was torn in two and when his mercy had consumed all of his anger God cried out, “It is finished!”

When he opened his eyes, God saw a procession without end, Eve at the front, the mother of mankind, all of the prophets and holy men and women and children of all times and places, and people he did not know or could not remember. “Rescue us,” he heard them say, “we have been waiting for you.” And God saw Noah and then all those he'd slain. That each was waiting for him. That each had forgiven him. And because he had fashioned them in his own image, God saw that then he, too, must be merciful after all.

As he watched the long pageant, God saw not only the fact of his mercy, but the extent of it. That not one was left in Hell, not one refused to forgive him, even Judas, not one.

And God wept at the beauty of their mercy, which also was his. His great mercy, magnam misericordiam. That it was infinite.

(This Is Why I Came, pp. 153–155.)

BLAIR HODGES: I have to say, I'm stunned that you wrote something like this at a time when you wouldn't have characterized this as being a necessarily “religious” book. [laughs] That's astonishing to me.

MARY RAKOW: Well, I'm really blind to myself. [laughter] That's what I’ve noted! I didn’t think it was a religious book. I mean, I was still struggling, you know, but I wasn't giving to myself what I give my characters, the idea that struggling is religious, doubting his religious, anger at God is religious. I could give that to others. But my friends could give it to me, they’d say, “No, you're just arguing with God,” you know? It's really intimate, too! [laughs]

So the making up with God I have to say, has been just astonishing. It's like God is making up for lost time! You know, I'm old now. I mean, we don't have a lot of time left. And it's kind of like, the graces of God are just—it's just been an astounding relationship since this book came out. [laughs]

Mary’s Relationship Status with God - 52:36

BLAIR HODGES: Another thing you mentioned about this passage is that we don't have a lot of scripture, a lot of information about this descent into hell. And so this is how you imagined it. Do you feel any obligation now that you've returned to Catholicism, is there a sense in which you want to remain orthodox, or that things in this book—Do you feel like, “Oh, that that doesn't line up with Catholic doctrine in a way, and so maybe that's problematic”? Do you feel tension as a writer and as a creator between what your tradition officially teaches, orthodoxy, versus what you would say in a book? Or what you would say in an interview?

MARY RAKOW: No. I think that's part of being in any faith community is to—when you really love the thing and you know its resilience and its strength, you know that your questioning is part of it.

So when I became a Catholic, I was at graduate school at Harvard, not a Catholic school. But I entered the church—I had never even gone to an actual church. I came through studying the development of doctrine up to Nicaea primarily, and reading all these wonderful documents and stuff like that. Seeing how the church discerned what's orthodox and what's heresy and stuff. Really painful, really amazing, every word of the creed battled out.

But anyway. I think because of my Protestant upbringing, which is sort of Calvinist, I had a strong sense that all people are sinners. I mean, that was really important. And I think that's true. I didn't enter the Catholic Church because it was perfect. I didn't become a Christian because Christians were perfect or anything like that. It's like a billion people that are Catholic Christians? But also, I don't identify the Catholic Christian church as the entire body of Christ. So, you know, I feel very connected to the tradition. I didn't convert from my Protestant upbringing, I just brought it with me into being a Catholic. And there are certain things about that tradition that are absolutely so, so important. Like, you know, we have a personal relationship with God, and like the clergy are not in some different category and they're just like us, and women are as equal as men, and I knew women who were preachers, and you know. So there's a lot of stuff.

And mostly that it's an intimate and eternal relationship. And that you as a ten-year-old, God is waiting for your personal decision. And to feel that when you're eight, nine and ten, or four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—to feel that God who created all of reality is calling for a relationship with you, and that no one can decide it but you, it's extremely empowering. And it's a counterweight against whatever cruelty you've experienced or anything, you know? People are complicated, so your parents can expose you to all kinds of things at the same time.

But anyway, so I feel, I am sad when the Catholic Church does things that I don't agree with and I'm happy when it does, and I'm an activist in certain ways. Christians always have existed in these two worlds, you know? We have the existence of the world as it is and the church as it is, and the world to come and the church that wants to come to us from the future. And I long for that church. I long for the Catholic Church to become more the church that I see coming to us from the future.

BLAIR HODGES: It reminds me of Jesus's statement about how the kingdom of God is among you, but he also spoke of it as a future thing that was also coming.

MARY RAKOW: That’s right. It's been that way since the apostles, you know. It's both here, and to come. So we pray for that when we pray. We pray for the kingdom to come. I just didn't pay attention to the Catholic Church until Francis was elected. [laughter]

I mean, it was a very long time that I—I knew that the clerical abuse thing was happening. But I had my own firsthand experience that I was in therapy about that had happened earlier, so I didn't even get into that very much.

But, yeah, so we have grave sin. And it is not new to have grave sin in the structure of this institution. And I think the thing that bothers me the most is when we forget that the head of the body of Christ is Christ himself. He's not the head of whatever part of Christianity that we affiliate with.

The Stories That Went Un-Retold - 56:44

BLAIR HODGES: I think that gives us a good sense of where you're at right now with your belief and with your faith. I wondered, as I finished the book, there were so many Bible stories that you did not pick up—

MARY RAKOW: Oh! [laugh]

BLAIR HODGES: You didn't get into Joseph and his coat and his brothers, or the drama of Jacob and Esau. There are so many possibilities!

MARY RAKOW: Oh yes, yes.

BLAIR HODGES: How did you decide what to leave on the table? And was there anything you wanted to pick up and work with?

MARY RAKOW: No, I felt kind of finished with it at a certain point. I think that I picked stories that really spoke to where I was existentially at the time. I mean, there are so many Bible stories, but there's nothing in the selling of Joseph by his brothers into slavery that really resonated with a struggle that I was having.

I wasn't aware I was doing that. I'm aware of that now. But I wasn't aware of it at the time. I just went with pleasure. I think that when we create, we go with what feels alive to us, and we discipline ourselves to that. And it's always going to be not enough. You know? I think the best art always asks questions that it can't actually answer. I mean, something like Motherwell who did the “Elegy to the Spanish Republic,” how many canvases did he do? Two hundred of them? And he never got it right. But then he was interviewed when he was quite old. “Well, maybe I did get it right in one of them! I don't know!” [laughs]

Robert Motherwell, “Elegy to the Spanish Republic”

I like art that engages literary arts and theology and everything, you know, social justice issues. I like it when we engage in the largest, most important questions we can imagine. And we will fail those questions. And we will need each other to answer them.

But it's better than the small world like in my Moses story, you know? Yeah, he denies that this encounter happened to him and stuff. And so he has this really small boring world, and he's lighting mattresses on fire! I mean, that's a kind of hell to me, is when we don't trust that the basic situation we are in as human beings is held by another who is primarily love. And so when we give in to fear, then we make our world smaller so we can feel in control of it and we're not troubled and stuff like that, and if there's a hell, that's a hell for me! Hell for me would be if I'm the measure of reality! I mean, give me a break. I mean, that would be hell, you know? Mary Rakow? Her understanding is the measure of reality? I mean, that's hell, that is a very good definition of hell, not like lakes of fire or whatever that stuff is.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. But you're also part of the whole, though. Your perspective and your experience and what you've written, I think, contributes to this wonderful panorama of opportunities to engage with questing—

MARY RAKOW: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: —and to engage with truth. And I think that's why I was really surprised at the end to find out—as we rejoin the woman at confession at the end of your book—to find out that she doesn't actually end up giving the book or showing it to the priest or showing the book to anybody! Nobody sees it! We do.

MARY RAKOW: [laughs] Yeah, that's true. Actually, in The Memory Room the character makes a book too. I didn't realize even that until recently. But so she cuts out newspaper clippings and things like that where she's trying to make her own scripture. So that's kind of what writers do.

But no, I like that the book is in the world. Before it came out—the editor Jack had already bought it, CounterPoint had already bought it. It came out in December, so this was October 9, my birthday. And I didn't tell Jack until later, and he was really happy I didn’t because technically I didn't own it anymore—but I woke up on my birthday and I really wanted it in the world. I had printed it out. And I took it and put it all around San Francisco. On benches, you know, different pages of it in in dressing rooms at Neiman Marcus, but also at Payless Shoe Store. I just wanted it physically in the world. It could fall away, the wind could drift it, people could crumple it up and throw it away. I just wanted it physically in the world. It didn't have to be in people's hands, really. But I wanted it—So as a writer, yes, I want my work to be in the world.

BLAIR HODGES: But your character did not have that opportunity! [laughs]

God Can Handle Our Stuff - 60:54

MARY RAKOW: [laughs] Well, I just didn't—Let's see, how does it end? Well, she doesn't talk about it to the priest, and this is why. Her experience of acceptance was so powerful that she's experiencing exactly the answer to the questions of all the characters in the story. I think that's why.

And then I had “Jonah in the Twenty-first Century” as a final chapter. So Jonah comes into the twenty-first century, which is when she's living, it’s Jonah from Bible times, but now he's a priest. He's the one that heard her confession. And this idea of entering the body of the whale is something that is deep-seated for me, and I've actually explored actually living—like we had anchorites in the Middle Ages living in a body, or in the structure of a church. So that's something I’ve been recently exploring, and it appeals very much to me.

BLAIR HODGES: And the priest has an answer for her. It's a touching moment after she's talking about—she's confessing doubt, basically. She's saying that she doubts, but also that she doesn't feel like it's a sin that she can't believe in God, and that she wishes she could change it. And that's why she came. And his response to her is so wonderful.

As you write, he says, “‘It's not a sin to refuse to believe in a God who's too small,’ he replies. And his certainty touches her. ‘To doubt the God you believe in is to serve him. It's an offering. It's your gift.’”

MARY RAKOW: That's right. And that line, “to doubt the god you believe in is to serve him,” is the line, I have it in the notes in the back, it's not my own line, it's from an interview. A line by Joshua Farris, spoken in an interview with Christopher Bollen, when he's talking about the book To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. I read that one day when I was at Berkeley in the library while I was waiting for my then-boyfriend to finish some stuff. And I just came across this article, and I read it, and I thought “that line is really perfect.” So I gave it to my Jonah character, my priest.

But I deeply believe that. I mean, God doesn't want—We have free will for a reason, because, I mean, obviously I believe there's this other, this Holy One, and what this Holy One wants is relationship with us. And God could have made robots that just do whatever, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

MARY RAKOW: So we have freedom. And if we can't say no, then we can't say yes. So I think saying “no,” if that's what we're feeling, then that's our prayer. Like when I said to God “I'm done with you,” that doesn't hamper God's love for each of us. It doesn't make God pull back. It doesn't make God wince. I believe what God wants is what we want in all of our love relationships. Even if we have to hear painful things, we want the other person to speak truthfully to us. We want to be really intimate, and God's love is a perfect love. So it can hold everything. It can hold everything.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Mary Rakow. She's author of the book, This is Why I Came. She earned a master's degree in theological studies from Harvard University and a PhD in theology from Boston College. This is a fantastic book. I recommend it with all my heart. This is a book that rewards several readings. So thank you so much, Mary, for talking about it today.

MARY RAKOW: Oh, it was really fun. It's fun to see what another person responds to, you know? It does complete the work. It completes the work. Your interest is sort of sacred to me because it completes the work. So thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you have a way of writing that invites that especially, I would say, that made me as a reader feel like I was part of it even more. So thank you as well.

MARY RAKOW: Thank you so much, Blair.

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, we'll be right back after a quick break to talk about the best book recommendation from Mary Rakow.

[BREAK]

Best Books - 68:28

BLAIR HODGES: It's Fireside. We're talking with Mary Rakow. She's the author of the book, This is Why I Came.

Alright Mary, it is time for our segment best books. And here we go! This is where I ask you for a recommendation. I've recommended your book to listeners and now you get an opportunity to recommend a book, something that touched you recently or a book that changed your life, or whatever moves you. So what did you bring for us?

MARY RAKOW: Oh, great. I brought a book titled, God’s Optimism. It's a debut poetry collection by Yehoshua November. His last name is November just like the month. I love this work. I discovered it because one of his poems was in the Divinity School bulletin that I get as an alumnus from Harvard Divinity School.

BLAIR HODGES: You read the bulletins? That's where you found it?

MARY RAKOW: Yeah, I did!

BLAIR HODGES: Shout out to the bulletin creator. [laughter]

MARY RAKOW: Yeah, that's right. And this was a couple years ago, but I gave the copies away, they sold out really fast. Anyways. This is a beautiful piece and I don't think I need to explain anything about it. The title is called "How a Place Becomes Holy." He is a practicing Jew, I think an Orthodox Jew—married, has children.

Sometimes a man
will start crying in the middle of the street,
without knowing why, or for whom.
It is as though someone else is standing there,
holding his briefcase, wearing his coat.

And from beneath the rust of years,
come to his tongue, the words of his childhood:
”I'm sorry,” and “G-d,” and “Do not be far from me.”

And just as suddenly the tears are gone,
and the man walks back into his life,
and the place where he cried becomes holy.

BLAIR HODGES: That is beautiful.

MARY RAKOW: I'm very sympathetic with his understanding of reality—that the holy and the transcendent is always piercing through this veil, piercing into the ordinariness of our life, so that there is really no such thing as an ordinariness. Our life is always open to the holy. I would say all of his poems come at that—at least in this collection—hey all come at that from their own local ordinary quote unquote, “location.”

BLAIR HODGES: Right, it can happen at a bus stop, it can happen at a hospital waiting room, it can happen on a bike ride, right?

MARY RAKOW: That's exactly right. Yeah, So I think that these Bible stories for example—or you know, we're right now as we're taping this and we're entering into Holy Week and Passover for Jews, Holy Week, for Christians, they coincide this year, the calendars are the same. Everything lined up, the two calendars are lining up. And so we celebrate it as a historical event, both religions do, have their historical view. But it's also that—at least for Christians, I'm mostly aware of—that the passion has never stopped happening in our world. And death hasn’t, and resurrection hasn't. The passion, this death and resurrection that we celebrate, particularly in the triduum in the last three days of the week, is an ongoing thing.

So I like his work very much, because first of all, it is God's optimism. God loves this creation. So it isn't that he's describing a world that is horrible, horrible, horrible. I mean, there’s suffering in it, but the God that he loves and talks about in this these ways is an optimistic God, is a God who loves his creation and loves all of us in our brokenness. It's almost always been that way. So I think, yes, I think it's—like you say, can happen on a bike ride, it can happen—so…

BLAIR HODGES: And it feels like an invitation for me, not to escape the world, but to dig in even deeper and find ways to connect and ways to serve and ways to spread the mercy that you describe in this book as well, rather than going away from it. But to go deeper inside of it.

MARY RAKOW: Yeah, I think that's the joyful part. Joy is kind of the final word. And so like, how can we be more alert—like you say, doing work, like, say, this podcast and all the ways that you're active in the world. And also, just to notice. The contemplative life is a way of simplifying one's life so that you notice more. Or you notice the things that you really want to pay most attention to.

Writing from Silence - 73:06

BLAIR HODGES: And speaking of that, let's close with a word about—people might wonder if they can expect future books from your future work. Maybe say a word about what the future holds for you.

MARY RAKOW: I'm not opposed to writing in the future. But what I noticed is, as I was moving—or feeling invited into—a contemplative life and a prayerful life, that I looked at The Memory Room, my earlier novel, and I had tried to cultivate a kind of silence. I wasn't trying to be a writer. I've never wanted to be a writer.

BLAIR HODGES: It's not fair! You've written one of the best books I’ve ever read! [laughter]

MARY RAKOW: No, but I mean it ended up that I really love it, and it's how I organize my life and stuff, my internal life. But anyway, so I gardened like for ten years, it took that long for the internal noise to kind of subside. And then I began to write, and I wrote The Memory Room. And I think that's my stronger work. It's a much more ambitious work and I love it very much. And there are things in that book that are in This is Why I Came.

So I felt that if I produce something for the world, I hope it will come from—probably will come from comparable silence, which is a very full thing. It's not like emptiness. So I'm open to writing again, but for now, I sort of set it aside. I feel more like I'm a person who prays. It used to be I'm a writer who prays, and now it's that I'm a person who prays, who may also write. Because prayer is like division of labor, you know? Some people are building the city, and some people are exploring space, and some people—many, many people are raising the next generation and all of that.

So to pray on behalf of the world, to be devoted to that feels appropriate, if there is a God, that this worship or attention to God is an appropriate response for those who have time to do it. And then inside the praising of God is pleading for the world. It's very much an intercessory thing.

And there are certain temptations with that life that I'm learning, so I have a spiritual director and so on. Because it's all invisible. And one doesn't know, if I'm praying for the man that I met yesterday who has mental health issues and is living on the street and all that, we had a very nice contact, so you never know. First of all, you never see the person again, usually and, and you just don't know.

All the contemplative and cloistered orders can never say, "Oh, we know that we help this," but if you're called to that? You're like the heart in a thoroughbred horse. And you're helping pump out the blood to all the ministries and all the people that are doing active apostolates, active ministry, who are all pooped. All the people that I know—the Jesuits, the priests, the lay people, they're all pooped, right? Because it's just so much, there's so much that needs to be done.

So, you know, you sort of pray for all of those who are actively trying to shape the world into a more just society and more just world. When you do pray for those things, then you naturally also of course respond to them when they—you respond to them, it trains your own heart, you know.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm just grateful that I feel that your work is a part of my walk of faith. And I'm really grateful for that.

MARY RAKOW: That's really the best thing. You know, that's the best thing! That's why writing is kind of like a win-win, because the reader gives you something by completing the work and then maybe you give something to the reader and nobody loses. It’s really great. I love things that are like that, that are really an end in themselves in a way and nobody loses. Those are really good signs! [laughs] Those are the things I want to focus on.

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you so much, Mary. Thanks for joining us here at Fireside. I appreciate it.

MARY RAKOW: Oh, I really loved hearing you and learning from you.

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. Take care.

MARY RAKOW: Okay, you too!

BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. And also by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.

Alright, this episode is over but the discussion continues. I’m on Twitter and Instagram at @podfireside. I also enabled comments on the website, firesidepod.org, just click on one of the episodes and scroll down, you’ll see the comment section there. You can also email questions, comments, or even suggestions about future episodes to me. The address is blair@firesidepod.org.

This show is free to enjoy but it isn’t free to produce, and you can help me offset the cost by doing something as simple as writing a review in the Apple Podcasts app. You can pay your dues by posting a link online saying something you liked about it. I made it easy for you if you want to post something from the episode because complete transcripts are available at firesidepod.org. I really like hearing from you about what resonated, or even what didn’t.

Also at Firesidepod.org is a link to our merch store. Grab a Fireside tee-shirt or tote bag to carry to church or to keep all the new books you’re buying in. Also, there are links to the books we talk about there. Yet another way to support the show.

Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, right here in Salt Lake City. My production assistant Kate Davis created the transcript. Special thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, Caroline Kline, Faith Kershisnik, and Kristen Ullrich-Hodges.  Fireside’s theme music is by Faded Paper Figures.

I’ll see you in two weeks on the next Fireside—the place to fan the flames of your curiosity without getting too much smoke in your eyes. Unless you’re listening while jogging outside in California or Utah. It’s been a little bit rough out there.

[End]

NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.