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NPR's Book of the Day
A psychoanalyst and a priest share insights in 'Love's Labor' and 'Work in Progress'
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A
Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. There are people out there whose job is to be a container for other people, by which I mean they're there to listen as other people tell them their deepest fears, biggest dreams, wildest imaginations. It's a tough job. I think most of the time it involves keeping secrets, holding these people's stories inside, and you have to listen non judgmentally. Today on the pod, we've got two people who have these container jobs. One is a Catholic priest, the other is a psychoanalyst. Let's start with the psychoanalyst Steven Gross. His latest book is called Love's How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love. And it's lessons from years of listening to patients chip away at building a loving relationship. NPR's H.R. rascoe talks to Gross about what makes some relationships work and what is the hardest part of his job. That's ahead.
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Romantic love is the stuff of poetry and music, the plot of books and movies, the pursuit, the conflict, the resolution and the happily ever after. Except there's also this reality. Love is work.
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D
To me, we deceive ourselves about love. I think for psychoanalysts like myself, well, for most people, they know they've had experiences where they've not seen very clearly the who, what and why of who they love. They've come with great hopes or great fears. They get things wrong.
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C
That's Stephen Gross. Yes, a psychoanalyst and author of the new book Loves Labor.
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D
We have the ability to undo self deception and to see clearly. And what I think of as love's labor is the work we must do to see clearly ourselves and the people we love.
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C
Okay, we already done got really deep. You tell stories about some of your patients with their permission and with pseudonyms. How did you choose which stories to include?
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D
Well, the book is really a collection of hard won truths that I've arrived at with my patients over many years. I've been practicing for 40 years and to me, they're about the difficulty of finding love and keeping love. So I wanted to convey some of the things we discovered. There's a wonderful thing Kurt Vonnegut wrote about to writers, about trying to teach them how to write. He said, write from what matters to you in your heart, and you want to matter to people in their hearts. And these were the stories that really mattered to me. They got to me. These are the patients where I really felt, gosh, we learned something important here. And I wanted other people to learn those things too.
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C
I want to start with Sophie, and that's one of the first stories you tell. When she came to you, what did she need help figuring out?
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D
Sophie was a woman who came to me. She'd spent the weekend with her fiance, addressing their wedding invitations. And on Monday morning, he went to the mailbox and posted his 60 invitations. And she couldn't post hers. She just couldn't put them in the mailbox. And she put them in a bag under her desk at work. And by Wednesday, her friend said, you better ring somebody. Here's a therapist to ring. And she came and saw me. I saw her on that Saturday. She loved this man. She wanted to marry him but couldn't. And what we discovered was. And what she helped me to see is that love means loss. She was an only child. She was really involved with her parents. She loved them, and she found it difficult to let go, which is a major theme of the book, that all love involves letting go of something, to
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C
have the new thing that was interesting because she goes to you for, like, one session.
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D
Yes.
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C
Then she comes back to you years later, you find out she did go through with the marriage.
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D
Yes.
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C
And she's trying to figure out if she should divorce him now after all these years.
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D
Yes.
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C
What struck me from that was that Sophie thought she only had two choices, to stay or to go.
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D
She came to me, like a lot of people do. There will be a crisis in a marriage. And in my chair, sitting in the room where I'm sitting, I'm thinking, can we turn this breakdown into a breakthrough? Can we learn something from it? Not just should you stay or should you leave. Her husband was having an affair, it turns out. Actually, she sort of thinks of his affair as her get out of jail free card. She could leave now and no one would blame her. And slowly we begin to realize that the way she'd been in the marriage was distant, and she had never really properly married her husband.
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C
Yeah, I just pointed right there because I'm not a psychoanalyst But I do believe that so many people will focus on whether they stay in the marriage. Yes, but y' all not even together.
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D
Aisha, we know that. You'll know people who are more married to their work than they are to their husband or wife, and by which I mean they find their work soothing. It enlivens them. It gives them so many things. The question with Sophie was, can she now properly marry this man?
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C
Sophie's story seems to have a happier ending, but then in Ravi's story, it's kind of heartbreaking. He becomes your patient when he's convinced his wife is cheating on him, but it becomes clear that this is a delusion, this is something he has made
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D
up, and this happens. There are some sad stories in the book, too, where I'm not able to help people. That does happen. What that story's about, in a way, was there's a kind of envy in him of her capacity for love. And his belief that she was having an affair was actually a way of spoiling something wonderful that he was being given.
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C
It made her the villain.
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D
Yeah.
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C
Otherwise it felt bad to him to be loved in that way.
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D
I think it did. And it sat. I think one of the things which was important about that story was it's hard to give up a grievance. I call it the ecstasy of sanctimony. He was just always right. The way he looked down on her, it's hard to come down from that and to see yourself with your own faults and to see the other person clearly. That's why I call it love's labor. The idea is, if you really love someone, you're going to see things in yourself which aren't pleasant to see. And he wasn't prepared to do that work.
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C
So how hard is it to be in your shoes where you're like, just get some help, please.
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D
Yes, it is hard sometimes. Sometimes for various reasons, people are attached to their unhappiness. They grew up maybe in an unhappy family. It's more familiar to them than happiness or pleasure. And therefore, because it's more familiar, it's safer and more secure, paradoxically, than trusting and loving. So occasionally I have people who are quite stuck, and the difficulty is that they've known that so long that it's really difficult to let go of that. They can sometimes even see it intellectually. But to emotionally change is really, really.
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C
I want to ask because, I mean, I do think that the hardest thing for a lot of people, that work of letting go, that work of fully allowing someone else to see them. You know, it's like exposing your soft underbelly. They could stab you in it. Right? You know, it is for the people listening who are like, okay, that sounds great. Surrender. How do I do that? How do I let go?
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D
Well, first of all, I think it takes time. It happens by thinking about things, by, first of all, looking at yourself honestly, being thoughtful and honest to yourself about your own feelings about who you are. How does someone make you feel? I think one of the things to look at is pain. I remember a patient that I saw not that long ago who told me how much she loved someone. She loved them this, that, and the other thing. He had to go away abroad to work for three months, and I noticed she didn't miss him. Pain is maybe one of the best instruments we have for knowing our heart. Are we suffering because a person is putting us down or because we miss them? Because they're not there and they make us feel good when we speak to them in the morning, they make our heart jump. They put us back together when we're broken up or upset about something at work or in other parts of our life. It's watching all those things, looking internally at our feelings and seeing how someone makes us feel.
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C
That's Stephen Gross. His new book is Love's Labor. Thank you so much for speaking with us today, Aisha.
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D
It's a real pleasure talking to you.
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A
Being a priest is a calling, something you feel from a higher plane, but it's also a job. Father James Martin has had a lot of different jobs, and they all helped him in some way become the man he is today. His new book is called Work in progress. Here's NPR's Scott Detrow.
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When I was covering the conclave in Rome last year, one of the first people I wanted to track down and talk to was Father James Martin. He's a prominent Jesuit priest and writer in the US and he has also carved out a ministry for LGBTQ Catholics who have long felt ostracized by the Catholic Church. But before his decades long career in the church. He was a busboy, a golf caddy, a popcorn popper, a stockbroker, and an HR guy in corporate 80s America. He lays out this string of jobs and what he learned along the way and what ultimately led him to the church in a new book called Work in Progress. Father Martin, welcome back to npr.
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G
Thanks. My pleasure.
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F
I want to start with why you wanted to write this book. Why revisit all of these earlier parts of your life?
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G
Well, it's really a vocation book, and it's to show people how God is at work in everybody's life, whether you're a busboy, a dishwasher, a caddy, or, you know, even a priest. And also, I thought some of the stories were pretty funny, so I wanted to share them with people.
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F
You did something really brave here. You read your teenage diaries. You've been a writer all your life. Clearly you've, you know, put a lot of thought into your writing. What surprised you going back and reading through those pages?
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G
Well, just that I, first of all, that I kept the diary. My mom moved out of our house where we had lived for years and years in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, which is a suburb of Philly. And we were cleaning out my desk and I found these two journals that I kept when I was 15. I think what surprised me going back over them was kind of how shallow I was and really not particularly reflective, you know, mostly interested on. On whether or not people liked me and my grades and things like that. But it was a shock to kind of, you know, meet myself unmediated.
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F
Right.
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G
I mean, it's like talking to myself at age 15, which was, I think, would be a shock for everybody.
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F
You talked about a lot of different jobs here, and I want to focus in on one, because this is your job. I had the pleasure of doing myself one summer as well. And that is golf caddy.
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G
Lucky you.
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F
You. I mean, one thing that you said that I was like, oh, I learned that, too, was you learned when to stop talking and when to be quiet. Tell me about that.
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G
Yeah, well, pretty much all the time was when to not talk unless they talk to you. I was probably the worst caddy ever. I really had never golfed before. And so frankly, I didn't know what to say to the golfers. I just basically handed them their clubs. One of the things that surprised me the most was just how angry they would get, right. You know, when they missed a putt or, you know, hooked or sliced or whatever. And you really didn't want to talk then, right? Because they didn't want to hear from the caddy. I also talk about the different, as you say, social cast, because I did not grow up in a wealthy family, and a lot of these golfers were very wealthy. And sometimes the only words that would be exchanged would be, you know, like, nine iron or give me my putter or, you know, hurry up. And so I learned what it felt like to be invisible, right? Like a member of, you know, really someone who's just sort of doing manual labor. And I vowed to myself, you know, back then and in my other summer jobs, I'm never going to treat people like this. You know, I'm going to talk to them and treat them like human beings.
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F
You said a word before that a lot of Catholics are very familiar with and familiar with priests talking a lot about vocations, the idea that everyone has a calling. And for some people, the calling is to be a priest or another job. And I'm wondering, like, going through this book, which you said is partially in that spirit, did that make you rethink the idea of vocations at all? Like, maybe sometimes you just need to make $2.30 an hour to scoop ice cream, you know, and there's not a higher calling, or was it the opposite effect?
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G
Well, I think we all have a vocation. Vocation comes from the Latin vocari, which means to be called or to call. And it works on different levels. I think we all have a vocation to be the person that God is calling us to be. That's the deepest vocation. Then there's the vocation of what you want to do with your life, maybe a career. But, you know, all of us have to eat and all of us have to put bread on the table. And I think one of the things that I realized in the book is that some people, particularly those who are poor and up against it, don't have the luxury sometimes of fulfilling what they believe to be their vocation. And so I talk in the book about how to navigate that, right? Between what you feel like you're called to be and the things that sort of circumstances and life prevent you from becoming. You know, I worked on a. On an assembly line, and I don't think most of those people would say this is my vocation, but to understand work as dignified and as humane, right. Even if you can't fulfill what you think God is calling you to be.
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F
Later on in the book, you write about what was a pretty upsetting and tragic experience. A close friend of yours was killed in a car Crash along with others. And you write about how that led you to reject God for a while, to step away. I mean, you write that your experience with religion up to that point had been pretty surface level, but still you were angry at God. What were you thinking at the time? Why? Why did you think you responded that way?
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G
Well, I was in college and two friends were killed in an automobile accident. One, a very good friend of mine, my freshman year roommate, named Brad. And I remember sitting in the pew of the church during the funeral outside of Washington and just saying, I'm done. I'm done with God. I'm done with a God who kills my friends. And so I thought, I'm not going to church and I'm not believing anymore. And it wasn't until a friend of mine named Jackie, who was a evangelical Christian was talking to me one day and I told her what I had done. I said, I'm not, I'm not going to church anymore. I don't believe in God and I'm angry at God. And she said, really? Words that kind of changed my life. She said, well, I've been thanking God for Brad's life in these past few weeks and it was the first time I really understood that you could be in a relationship with God, a God that you didn't understand. Right. And really I can remember just standing outside the quadrangle at the University of Pennsylvania during the, in the snow while she was saying those things. And I felt a shift within me and I thought, okay, I'm going to go back to church, you know, give God another chance. Which I did.
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F
Do you think it's a straight line from there to eventually becoming a priest or still kind of a loopy line from there to where you ended up?
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G
Oh no, very loopy. I ended up working at GE in the 80s in New York and in Connecticut. And you know, I was kind of a lukewarm Catholic. I mean, I went back to church but I wasn't super, super religious. And that really continued until I found that I could no longer stay with ge. I found that life really difficult and I was looking for a way out and the Jesuits gave me a way out.
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F
The book is called Work in Progress and you're so clear eyed about your goofy failings as a 15 year old. Are there things you're still working on today that you're still failing at today that make you a work in progress that you can think about and have the separation to examine and think about?
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G
Oh sure. And I mean, I think that's one of the reasons. I called it Work in Progress. It's not just me as a teenager and a 20 year old, it's me now. You know, one of the central themes of the book is how motivated I was and how motivated a lot of people are by the desire to be liked, right? To be loved, liked, approved of. And I think that's still within me, you know, who, who doesn't like who, who wants to be disliked. And you know, as you say, I, I do a lot of work with LGBTQ Catholics and that means a lot of people hate me today. So it's still, you know, it's still something I'm working on. It's still, you know, again, still a work in progress.
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F
Father James Martin is a Jesuit priest and writer. His latest book is called Work in Progress. Thank you so much.
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G
My pleasure. Thank you.
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A
That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter@npr.org Newsletter Books. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and Ivy Buck and edited by Megan Sullivan and Sierra Crawford. Our founding editor is Petra Meyer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Leena Muhammad, Vinny Akovino, Emiko Tamagawa, Todd Mundt, Samantha Balaban, Melissa Gray, Ashley Brown, Lauren Hodges, Manuel Lopez Resterpo, Alejandro Marquez Hansa and Christopher Intagliata. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.
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