seeJesus Blog: Because we all need help seeing Jesus

This is a fascinating interview from NPR of one of our cultural elites, Mary Karr, coming to faith. Mary Karr is a writer and poet. She currently teaches English at Syracuse University in New York.

I love this first piece because it captures the feel for someone completely captured by the Enlightenment mindset even thinking about prayer. It fits well Part 3 of A Praying Life.

Ms. KARR: Oh, I was just – I’m a big eye-roller. You know, I come from a family of eye-rollers, and I mean the degree to which I’m an unlikely religious person – first of all, let me say that talking about spiritual activity to a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio. You know, like, I’m saying look, whee, isn’t this great? And I know I’m going to sound slightly addled from time to time so – there – you know, the degree to which I was cynical about prayer – you know, I remember people giving me these one-day-at-a-time, these Boy Scout slogans, you know, that like they put on big felt banners like from the jamboree, and God, I just – I couldn’t imagine – I couldn’t imagine praying.
It was like – I think I say in the book, it was like pointing at a stump and saying fall in love with that or pointing at a mannequin and saying talk to that. It was insane to me. It was beyond crazy.
So I thought faith was a feeling. My intellect told me this was insane. The only way I was able to do it was through practice, and you know, I think I mentioned this before with my last book of poems, “Sinners Welcome” – someone challenged me to pray on my knees, morning and night, every day, and this was after I nearly drove into a piece of concrete and I’d been trying to get sober and not really listening to the ways you’re supposed to do it, and somebody said pray on your knees every day for 30 days and see if you stay sober, and in the morning say, you know, help me stay sober, and at night say thanks for helping me stay sober.
And I just saw it as, like, self-hypnosis or like talking to yourself, talking to some higher self or higher part of yourself.
 
 In this piece you can see God breaking into Mary’s life.

And I had been given by my spiritual director, who is this Franciscan nun, these two passages in the Bible, three passages in the Bible, and I open up my mother’s childhood Bible and the first one I find is marked. It’s Psalm 51, and it’s marked in blue chalk. This is her little – she had this since 1927, she had this thing. And the second one is also marked, and there are no other marks in the Bible.
But for me a coincidence like that would just be evidence that there is a force for grace, a force for good that is very specifically interested in me, and if I open myself, or I say to myself at each moment, you know, where is the good in this, where is the God in this – but it’s hard to do that. I would rather – I don’t know why it’s so hard to do.
 
I like this because Mary is so insightful into the doctrine of hell, total depravity, and what Luther called the curved nature of the human soul. Mary really understands her depravity. She doesn’t sugar coat it.
 
NPR: So this song is basically about needing a partner for self-destruction. It goes: This is hell, but I planned it, I sought it, I nailed it, and I will live in it until it kills me. I can nail my left palm to the left-hand crosspiece but I can’t do everything myself. I need a hand to nail the right, a help, a love, a you, a wife.
NPR: What’s the relevance of that poem to your life? Like, who are you in this poem?
Ms. KARR: You know what’s interesting? Well, I’m the speaker, of course, but you know what’s – well, I’d like to be God but I’m not. But I – and it’s, the poem’s called “I and Thou,” of course, after Martin Buber’s great, in which the thou is God, right, and so he’s speaking both to his wife and to God. But I can’t believe you think that’s bleak. It seems to me accurate. I mean what hell do we occupy that we don’t construct? You know, what idea about yourself have you ever had and pursued with a vengeance that was ill-fitting for you and that you’ve railed against? I mean for me, all – I mean, I didn’t want to stop drinking. I didn’t quit drinking because I wanted to stop drinking. I wanted to keep drinking and you know, doing other things.
I want to do all these things that aren’t particularly good for me. My hells are pretty much self-constructed, don’t you think? I mean don’t you think everybody’s are sort of? I mean the whole idea of hubris in Greek tragedy, thinking you’re as big as the gods, that’s the source of all tragedy and to me that’s the nature of needing help to crucify yourself.

Here’s the actual interview on NPR.
 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120020266&sc=emaf