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The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.
Gregory Maguire’s spiritual journey–From a Catholic orphanage to ‘Wicked’-fame
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- [00:00]
A
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- [00:33]
B
I do have an impulse toward art. And the basis of art is pay attention. And that's the same basis as the basis of prayer, as far as I'm concerned. You have to pay attention to what you want to be grateful for. You have to pay attention to what you need. You have to pay attention to what wrong you've done. And you have to pay attention to. To the glory of the world so that you can be sufficiently grateful, I suppose.
- [01:01]
A
Welcome to the spiritual life. I'm Father Jim Martin. On this podcast, we reflect on how people experience God in their prayer and in their daily lives. And I am joined by my terrific producer, Maggie Van Dorn. Maggie, great to be with you.
- [01:15]
C
It's great to be here with you, Jim. And, you know, I've been reflecting on the fact that sometimes the spiritual life can be really challenging and can start to feel heavy. So I thought maybe with this episode, we could try Defying Gravity.
- [01:30]
A
Yes. Very good. And I actually have, or we actually have the perfect guest in mind. This time. We're speaking with Gregory Maguire. And, Maggie, can you tell us a little bit about this guy that many people, I'm sure, know already?
- [01:45]
C
Yeah. So if you haven't already gathered, Gregory Maguire is a writer of several dozen crossover books for adults and children. And his best known work is Wicked. He also helped found and for 25 years co directed Children's Literature New England, Inc. Which is a nonprofit that raises awareness of the significance of literature in the lives of children. And this is really a magical conversation.
- [02:11]
A
Yeah, it's an incredible conversation. And as a wordsmith and a writer, he's just so articulate, particularly in talking about his own faith and his spiritual journey.
- [02:19]
C
That's right. And one of the gifts of being a writer is the art of noticing, of paying attention, which he brings up in this conversation as part of his spiritual practice, that he assigns himself the task of paying attention to, like, specific things throughout the day, whether it be a color or certain faces. And I had never heard about that kind of very particular spiritual practice before.
- [02:46]
A
Me neither. I mean, I've been a Jesuit for almost 40 years. And of course, the examination of conscience is the end of the day prayer. That's a review where you pay attention to where God is. But as you'll hear in our conversation, he, as you say, assigns himself the task of paying attention to specific things, kind of picking them out. And I think it's a great technique. And I also think that anytime we can be introduced to a new practice to kind of, you know, shake up our prayer life a little bit, it's a good thing.
- [03:14]
C
Yeah. The other thing that stands out in this conversation is Gregory says that, you know, for him, his spirituality is about being authentically the person God made him. And that reminds me of a quote from Saint Irenaeus of the second century, that the glory of God is the human person fully alive. I know this is a theme that you have explored and written about in your book, My Life with the Saints.
- [03:40]
A
Yeah. You know, as Thomas Merton said, for me, to be a saint means to be myself. Right. And so there's a sense of authenticity. We're all differently made and uniquely made. John XXIII said, if I had been made like Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, I would have been holy in a different way. So it's about being authentically yourself, which Gregory talks about. It's about also accepting yourself as a beloved child of God. And then it's also realizing that your own way of being holy and being saintly. We're all called to be saints. Is gonna be different. I mean, Maggie Van Dorn is called to be saintly and holy in a different way than Jim Martin is, just because of their circumstances and our life choices and things like that. One of my favorite quotes about that, speaking of my life with the saints, is from Mother Teresa. And people would often go to her and say that they wanted to work in Calcutta. Right. So there's this idea of, you know, I need to be as holy or holy exactly like Mother Teresa. And I'm sure you know this quote, and she would often say to them, find your own Calcutta.
- [04:45]
C
Yeah, right.
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B
So bloom.
- [04:46]
A
We are planted. So, yeah, that's. That's something that really comes up in our conversation and in his. His own spiritual journey.
- [04:52]
C
Yeah. One of the things that we do on this podcast is take questions from you, our audience. And the question that both Father Jim and Gregory will answer comes from Stevie. And the question is, what advice would you give a young gay Catholic striving to live authentically? So stick around, because Father Jim and Gregory will take up that question together. And if you have a question that you'd like to Ask Father Jim. You can write to us@thespirituallifemericamedia.org well, thanks so much, Maggie.
- [05:24]
A
And now onto our conversation with Gregory Maguire. Gregory Maguire, welcome to the spiritual life.
- [05:36]
B
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
- [05:38]
A
We are really happy to have you here. I think most people know you, obviously, as the author of Wicked, but before we get to that, I'd really like to know about your upbringing, specifically your Catholic upbringing. Can you tell us a little bit about your early life, which began amidst some tragic circumstances?
- [05:55]
B
Yes, I will tell you about that. I was born in 54, so that's 71 years ago. And I was the fourth child of a rather poor couple. A Greek immigrant mother and an Irish second generation immigrant father father. And when I was born, my mother died. She died in childbirth, in fact, something that doesn't happen very often and everybody thinks went out in the 19th century, but it didn't. My father was unemployed and ill, so he gave up his four children, surrendered them to the four living sisters of his dead wife. I went for a few months to one of my aunts when I was a small infant, but she got pregnant and she told my father, either let me adopt him or you'll have to take him away because I can't take care of him for two years and then be asked to surrender him in the event you want him back. My father wasn't sure whether he would survive and whether he would have the wherewithal to pull the family back together, although that was his ambition. So he took me from my aunt's house and put me in a Catholic infant home or orphanage in Albany, New York, where I then spent the rest of my childhood and college years. It was not a situation about which I have any memories, but I don't know how long I was there. I suspect I was there a little longer than was absolutely necessary because my parents, who were archivists and historians, always got an interesting sort of foggy look on their faces when I said, so when did I come out of the orphanage? When did you get me? They can never quite remember, so I have a feeling they let me stay there until they got their life together. After all, my father had remarried. He remarried my birth mother's best friend from fourth grade. She knew me, she knew my brothers and sisters already. She knew all her best friend's family. She'd grown up with them, so she melded in very nicely. And she took care of us well. She was a devoted and a good Irish Catholic woman, and she raised us very well, but I also think to take on four pre made children and a husband who'd had two heart attacks and wasn't expected to live more than a year or two was a daunting experience. So probably I was parked in the orphanage for slightly longer than was absolutely clinically necessary. Which.
- [08:29]
A
How long would you say? I'm just curious.
- [08:31]
B
I really don't know, but I don't have any memories of it. So it couldn't have been more than two years. I think that's my guess.
- [08:37]
A
And then you end up. You were educated in Catholic schools, is that right?
- [08:41]
B
13 years of Catholic schools in Albany. In Albany, kindergarten through 12th grade. And I would have gone to Catholic college quite happily, but we were not in a position to be able to afford sending kids away to school. And the local state university, fine school was cheaper. And I could afford more of it with my scholarship money than I could afford Catholic schools, which didn't give me full scholarship.
- [09:07]
A
Now, given your age, were you taught by nuns in Albany?
- [09:12]
B
I was taught by nuns and I was taught by brothers. The nuns were, I think, St. Joseph nuns for the first four years. And then Mercy nuns, grade five through grade 12. And the brothers who came in in ninth grade, I think were Lasalle brothers.
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A
Makes sense.
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B
Is that a teaching order? La Salle?
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A
Yes, definitely.
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B
Yeah.
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A
What was the high school?
- [09:32]
B
It was called Vincentian Institute in Albany, New York. It was a very fine school with high academic credentials. And I always say I was very lucky to grow up in a neighborhood of immigrants. That about my station in life in terms of the date from which their families had emerged from Europe, or mostly from Europe, I think in that people really prized doing well academically. And you weren't punched in the face for being a nerd. In fact, kids wanted to do well. They wanted to be top of the class. It's a little bit like what I sometimes read about Jewish education in the 50s and 60s in Brooklyn. You know, academic success was really valued. And it was. So in Vincentian Institute, what was your.
- [10:21]
A
What did you take from that in terms of your spirituality, would you say? What was it like being a Catholic in those schools?
- [10:27]
B
I don't think of my Catholic education as having been indoctrination. But I will confess that because Albany was then and pretty much still is such an intensely Catholic city, it was a kind of total immersion experience in the Catholic life. So much so that I couldn't. I mean, I knew there were Protestants, I knew there were kids who went to public school. I didn't meet a person who was Jewish that I knew of until I was in grad school. And so the differentiations among people were which parish you belonged to, not what church you went to or didn't go to. That meant that I had a very blinkered opinion about how to be with God and how to recognize God. And I did not rebel against what I was taught. I wasn't particularly a conservative kid, but I loved the story of church. I loved the music of church. I loved the idea of sacraments, the holiness of the gesture, and I still do. I would far rather drive for hours to go to somebody's funeral and leave before the luncheon, then skip the funeral and just go straight to the luncheon. The actual event, the holy event in the church of saying goodbye to the soul in the presence of the church, in the presence of Christ is very moving to me still. And I'm kind of like a lot of people my age, I'm kind of a wishy washy, regretful, remorseful, curmudgeonly Catholic, but I'm still Catholic.
- [12:11]
A
I'm glad to hear that. So am I. So what was your image of God back then? And you talked about being okay with the image that was presented in the church, and what was that like for you?
- [12:19]
B
I am a rare person of my generation, Father Martin, who will say that I came up upon almost no malicious nuns in my education. The teaching orders were good orders, and the women who instructed us were, by and large, a couple of wobbly exceptions. But by and large, they were smart, intelligent, and caring people. They knew child psychology and. And they knew their faith. I'll give you an example. When I was in first grade, I think it was our teacher, whose name I don't remember, said, children, I'm going to hand out the paper and the crayons. I want everybody to draw a picture of God. So we all sat at our desks and we drew a picture of God in Sacred Heart School. And almost all the pictures look like a cross between Moses and Santa Claus. You know, long white beard and sandals and, you know, beaming expression and a halo. The nun put them all up with Sellotape around on the blackboard. And she walked around and looked at them and she said, these are all wonderful. They're just wonderful. And then she turned and she said to the class, every year of your life, you will be able to draw a different picture of God, and it will always be true. That's beautiful. Imagine saying that to somebody who's six.
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A
Well, I believed it, and you remembered
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B
it, and I remembered it. It hit Home to me. I said, okay, I've got to remember this because maybe God isn't Santa Claus and Moses. Moses. Maybe I have to keep looking and keep seeing who God is as I get smarter and older and my eyes work better.
- [14:02]
A
Well, again, amazing that you held onto that. I mean, that shows how true it was.
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B
It shows how true it was and I suppose it probably speaks to a certain kind of spiritual yearning. I if that kind of thing hit home, then it meant I was eager and thirsty to hear something like that.
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A
Well, also, you know the famous story about the kids who's drawing the picture of God? Do you know this joke?
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B
I don't think so.
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A
So this sister's in a Catholic school and they're in art class and she's going around and she says, what are you drawing, Billy? And he says, I'm drawing a picture of God. And the sister says, oh well, Billy, no one has ever seen the face of God. And he says they will in five min. So you're pretty. You're a religious kid, right? In high school and you liked Catholicism and you considered the seminary at one point?
- [14:52]
B
I did. I got involved in the church for several reasons. I'm aware enough of psychology to know that I was taught about the communion of saints. And my mother was dead. So to go to church and to pray for her and to be with her in the communion of saints even though she was dead was a comfort to me. Even as a kid. I couldn't have put it into words, but I'm sure that was part of the attraction. I recognized the solidarity of the faithful and I believed in it a little bit. Like going into a theater and sitting with everybody. You don't know, but you're together in one room. I think therefore it was natural for me, as I continued to go into middle school and high school, to recognize that there was a lot of nourishment to be taken by going to Mass even when you didn't need to. And I began to go to daily mass in 8th grade and in 9th grade when guitar masses started to come along, I bought my $27 guitar and began to play with the 85. Other people, of course.
- [16:00]
A
Yes. Singing sons of God.
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B
Singing sons of God. You know, the most dreadful music known to the devil. And that then meant it was inevitable that I would wonder whether I had a vocation. So even by the end of high school, I was starting to wonder when I graduated from high school. That very summer that I graduated from high school, the vicar general was offered the pastorate of my Local parish church, which was in the same neighborhood as the high school I went to, and in the neighborhood that I lived in. He came in in 1972 and made an appointment, came up to my house and asked me if I would join him in the parish and become a music minister and start a contemporary music group to be alternate to the choir playing, you know, skater, rink music, basically, is how it was at that point. And I said, I can't because I have a job at the hospital and I have to earn money for books and things at college. And he asked how much I was earning, told me, I'll give you $15 a week and more than that if you'll do this. So I said, a piece of cake. Sure, why not? So then I was a music minister for the next five years, and I began quickly to realize that I liked to write music, including music in four parts and music for instruments, as much as I liked to sing, play and lead the chorus, lead the choir, played the piano, played the guitar. The better the music got, the better musicians it attracted among the college kids, because there were three or four colleges in Albany. And so it was a. It was a heady, creative experience for me, Working as close as I did with the parish priests, having a key to the parish house. Wow, that was really. That was really hot stuff. And going there several days a week to read the readings and get instruction from one of the priests to teach me how to think about what music would be appropriate, was a training in not so much theology, but certainly liturgy of sort. And I began to feel more and more at home. So by the time I got to the end of college, I began to apply to seminaries, thinking, well, this is probably. This is probably me. And I applied to two seminaries in New York State, but I did not accept any offer when they came.
- [18:38]
A
Very interesting. So you applied, but they accepted you. What changed in terms of your.
- [18:43]
B
What changed is the advice of a priest who is now long dead. He died very young in a car accident. One of my best friends when I was in this period. And I told him what I was thinking, and he said, I must have been a senior in college because he died the year that I was a senior. He said, gregory, I think you have too big a gift and too great a need to make things to squash it by going into the seminary. The church will ask you to give up that which you are called to do in order to do its work. And your work is just as important. You will be asked to do many things that are valuable things. To do. But then you won't be able to do the things that you have special talent at. Making things, making stories. I mean, I was a ferocious creator. I painted, I wove. I wrote stories and plays and cycles of sonnets and masses. And, you know, I just. I couldn't stop making things. And he saw that and he said, this will make you very unhappy. And so my recommendation is, don't do it. And I trusted him and that's what turned my mind.
- [20:03]
A
Do you think that was the right decision?
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B
I do, yeah. Absolutely. I decided that, well, just like the nun saying, you'll be able to define God for yourself every year that you're alive and paying attention, you also can decide for yourself the shape of your own ministry. And I thought to myself, I'm never going to try to convince anybody to believe anything that they don't. I don't have that evangelical impulse, but I do have an impulse toward art. And the basis of art is pay attention. And that's the same basis as the basis of prayer, as far as I'm concerned. It's another way to do the same work, and it's a way that afforded me more liberty.
- [20:46]
A
What's the basis of prayer? Paying attention.
- [20:47]
B
Paying attention. You have to pay attention to what you want to be grateful for, you have to pay attention to what you need, you have to pay attention to what wrong you've done, and you have to pay attention to the glory of the world so that you can be sufficiently grateful.
- [21:01]
A
I suppose the line from Lady Bird comes to mind, the film with Saoirse Ronan. She's speaking to a nun played by Lois Smith. And Lois Smith said, you really love this town. And she said, no, I'm just kind of paying attention to it. And she said, isn't that the same thing? Yeah, so it's really beautiful. What strikes me, two things. Were you entering a religious order today, like the Jesuits or Franciscans or Dominicans? They would probably say, oh, we're going to use those gifts and let them flourish. But at the time, that man was giving you very free advice. That's a very free priest. Who can say to, obviously, a good vocation, this is not right for you. That takes a lot of freedom and generosity and charity on his part.
- [21:42]
B
Well, he was an extremely wise, wise man. I mean, a young. He wasn't that much older than I was. He was a baby priestess, we called him in the parish. But he had a magnetic capacity to look at you and see who you were. And everybody who ran across his path spoke about it. It wasn't just me.
- [22:03]
A
Now, at the time, because you were out as a gay man, did that influence your decision at all? Was there a sense of either I want to go into the priesthood because it would be, in a sense, safe because people wouldn't know about my sexuality, or I wasn't worthy, or was that in your mind or your consciousness then?
- [22:24]
B
It was never a case that I didn't think I was worthy, even though I didn't really much know who I was. I did think that this is probably one of the. I wouldn't say safe, but one of the legitimate ways that I could make contributions to the world without cutting myself down too far. But then I was also. We talk about baby priests. I was a baby gay, too. I mean, you know, I. I didn't really know. I didn't have any experience. I wasn't sure that my. The ways in which I was beginning to wonder if I could identify myself as gay were actually accurate. I just didn't know. And I thought this might be. This might be a phase. I might be in delayed adolescence because of various traumas in my childhood, and maybe in five years I'll grow out of it, or maybe it's. There's nothing to grow into and it's just. I'm curious about everything. So I didn't see it as. As running into a cloister. I saw it as running to do good and running to do social justice work. It was, of course, an era when the doors and the windows of the church were being thrown open, as the phrase is used, and we really believed it. We believed that the Catholic Mass and to some extent the Catholic Pentecostal movement, which came on the heels of Vatican ii, were liberating moments in which we could put aside some of the categorizations that had restricted previous generations and could be more embracing. But it would take work and it would take a phrase I don't use in any context except the Catholic one, discernment to figure out what was valuable and how to approach it.
- [24:14]
A
That's really interesting at that time, you know, for someone to say that and experience that, you know, that the Catholicism didn't sort of pose a barrier, in a sense, to accepting oneself. Do you think that. Is that from the way you were educated early on, do you think?
- [24:28]
B
I think it is. But I must be honest and say I can say all that and I can believe it, and I can believe that it's true what I'm reporting. At the same time, I admit I didn't push any buttons myself. I didn't raise the topic at dinner table. So in some ways I was self selecting and I was editorializing myself. So on some level, I knew that I was up against some restrictions that were. That were there. They just weren't spoken about.
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A
We're going to pause for a short break, but we will be right back. The Spiritual Life is sponsored by Give Us this Day from Liturgical Press.
- [25:11]
B
Our community works for a faith that fuels hope, justice and prayer with voices
- [25:19]
A
and perspectives you trust. Like a monthly feature from Father James Martin, Blessed among Us, and reflections that
- [25:27]
B
meet you where you are.
- [25:29]
A
Listeners of the spiritual life receive 10% off a new subscription at giveusthisday.org spirituallife. At the recent jubilee of Young People in Rome, Pope Leo called on participants to spread your enthusiasm and the witness of your faith. At Boston College Clow School of Theology and Ministry, you are invited to answer that call. Through graduate theological studies, 100% of master's students receive scholarships. Learn more at bc.educstm. So it sounds like it was a, pardon the expression, a straight line from your childhood faith to today. Was there any time where you sort of fell out of regular practice or.
- [26:14]
B
Yes, I'm always falling out of regular practice. But there's never been any time in my life where I have fallen out of awe. And to me, that's 90% of faith. I'm astounded to be alive today. I gave myself a task walking over here from the hotel. I said, you have maybe 12 or 15 minutes. You're going to walk along 6th Avenue, look at what you can see of yellow and gold. And I turned the lenses of my eyes so as to screen out other things and just admire, as if I were a painter, admire the recurring patterns of yellow and gold as I saw them on the pavement, on people's clothes, in the lights, in window shops and things in the windows. And to me, that's kind of prayer. It's kind of prayer of gratitude for yellow and gold. It's a prayer thanksgiving for being alive. It's awe. And on the way home, I might set myself a task. I might not. I might just think about what happened today. But I might say, notice who looks more stooped over than anybody else. You know, just kind of pay attention. Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. Can't always do very much with what you notice, but noticing it in itself is part of being engaged in God's world and part of being responsible and grateful for it.
- [27:45]
A
That's a beautiful. You know, I've been around for a while as a Jesuit I've never heard that way of paying attention, kind of being specific about something. I mean, people would say, well, just pay attention to what's going on around you and notice. But to focus on those things. So what, in addition to that, which is very beautiful, what are your kind of regular spiritual practices?
- [28:03]
B
I have several regular practices and they're almost daily. I do, I do write every day. Either it's in my journal or it's fiction or lately I've been writing a memoir or even emails or letters to people who are friends or shut ins or whoever I might think of. I have to write every day because if I don't use language every day, I worry I'll atrophy and then be without it one day when I need it. I also pray. I pray at night before I sleep. I don't sit in a dark room and light a candle, which I wish I did, but I don't. But I pray after I turn out the light. And it's. Maybe it's a sleep aid, but it's also another way of saying, I'm here, just checking in, everything's good. My husband and I have raised three children. We adopted three young children and we raised them from infancy. They're now in their mid-20s. And when I was a parent of active middle school and high school kids. Holy Mother of God, as we used to say, sometimes I'd be so tired that I could hardly concentrate my mind on prayer. And my prayers kept reducing in concentration and in speed so that I could finish it before I fell asleep. I finally boiled it down to four words. I'd put my head on the pillow, turn off the light, and I'd say all five still alive.
- [29:30]
A
That's a lovely prayer.
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B
I was just glad that I had not killed anybody. I had not lost anyone in the past 24 hours and I was grateful for that. And I would start again in the morning.
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A
I want to go back to your regular prayer now, but I want to share something that Anne Lamott said to us, which is she knew a guy who got up, who was in recovery, who woke up every morning and said whatever. That was his prayer.
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B
Wait.
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A
And at the end of the day when he would go to sleep, he would say, oh, well,
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B
that's great.
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A
Let me ask, so what's your. What's your. You said you pray at night. Now what is that like? What is your prayer like and what's going on?
- [30:09]
B
It's hard for me to put it into words. I find that actually it's very brave of me to Come in here and talk about spirituality. Because the older I get, the less verbal I can be about what a spiritual life is or what I mean by any word I use. The definitions even of faith are impossible for me to settle upon. I once wrote to an old pastor of mine that to me, faith and doubt were two sides of the same coin and you can't actually have one without the other. And it's like breathing in and breathing out. You just have to live with them both. But even at that, I never try to define it because I don't really know what it is. My prayer life, though I have noticed in the last few years has become more constant. I'm back to what I used to try to do when I was in my early 20s, when various friends of mine who were seminarians and priests were teaching me about certain spiritual practices of praying while walking and of repetitive prayer. And I find that in times when I'm alone, well, sometimes I'll say, look at the blue. Look at blue shadows today. Look at blue shadows. Oh my gosh, it's so bright, the snow is so crisp. The blues are going to slay me. I'm going to fall down and die from the blue. But sometimes it's not that. It's thank you. Thank you for my husband and keep him safe today in London. Thank you for my son in the army. Keep him safe today in Georgia. Thank you. And it's not all personal like, you know, paint my life with gold, but it is. It starts personal because that's where we start. We start in our human envelope and we can't help that.
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A
So beginning with gratitude, and where do you most feel a sense of God's presence in your life? Is it during prayer? Is it during your daily life?
- [32:04]
B
There are two places where I recognize that I'm being thrilled with a sense of religious connection. One of them is in looking at people's faces. I do some work with people in memory wards who don't know who I am but need to be looked at and don't remember that I was there three days ago, but need to be recognized and noticed. And I'd love to do that. That seems like a prayerful thing to me and it gives me a sense of connection and of mission and of mercy. Who doesn't want to be a dispenser of mercy if they can possibly do it? But the other thing is I have a sense of urgent gratitude and connection by being in touch with art, especially writing poetry and fiction and good, hard hitting political essays. People who have used Their tools to. To connect. To connect. To connect. I've been to several shows, art shows, while I've been here in New York for a couple of days. And it is, you know, I'm not a weepy person. I'm actually my father's Calvinist son. But I am so in awe of what an artist can do to connect us with ourselves, that if I'm in the presence of great art, whether it be music or theater or painting or whatever form it might take, I feel, I don't want to say I feel God in the room because why shouldn't God be in the bathroom at the Pizza Hut? You know, But I feel like I recognize the fact that there's something at the heart of communication that strengthens my understanding about God.
- [33:52]
A
That's really wonderful to hear now. So you feel God's presence when you're in the presence of art and creativity? How about when you are creating what's going on inside of you?
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B
Then I would be, you know, I would have to be taken out and hung. If I said I feel God's presence while I'm writing. I don't. I just feel like I'm searching. You know that poem by Seamus Haney about writing and digging with his thumb, his thumb being like his father's trowel. I feel when I'm writing, even if I'm writing a comic email to make somebody laugh, you know, 10 minutes from now, I feel like I'm doing some work to connect and that that's my job. My job is, is to connect.
- [34:34]
A
It's interesting. Do you enjoy it though? Is there a sense of enjoyment? Because I'll say as a. I'm not, as, I'm not as proficient a writer as you are, but I enjoy it. I mean, I kind of have fun with it.
- [34:44]
B
Oh yes, it's self serving because I do love it. I'm proud of my ability to use language and I don't think it's particularly refined, but it sure is practiced. That's what I've done my whole life. I have practiced turning language into communication since I was about 6.
- [35:04]
A
I'd like to go back to something you said earlier when you were talking about people who have issues with their memory. You talked about their faces. And I was thinking, you know, Jesus is the face of God, right? Of course. Where's Jesus in all this for you?
- [35:18]
B
In the ministry of being with older
- [35:20]
A
people, just in your spirituality?
- [35:23]
B
Always there. But I don't visualize him very much. That notion of somebody, anybody being Jesus on the street. Is enough. I'll tell you. I am writing my memoir. I think I mentioned that. And when I was in town about a year ago, I walked down past St. Patrick's and I was going south on 5th Avenue and about two blocks past St. Patrick's there was a panhandler on the curb on the street. He didn't look like he was missing any limbs, but he looked as if he might as well have been. He was missing something and he had a sign and he said, homeless, homeless vet, please help. If not me, someone else. That's what the sign said. That scrubby, alcoholic, reeking person was being Jesus on the street saying, help somebody else. You don't have to help me. If you don't like the way that I smell, just go and do it. And that's where I see Jesus.
- [36:37]
A
To prepare for this, I watched the two movies of Wicked again. And I'm curious, do you. I don't want to lead you too much, but are there Christ figures in that story, would you say?
- [36:50]
B
I would say that if there are Christ figures in that story, and I think there probably are, they are there merely because we are all Christ figures. That there are people who suffer and people who try to be merciful despite their own suffering. That is Christlike to me and. And that is what I try to put into any story that I write. I do not try to make people into saints. When Wicked first came out As a novel 30 years ago, 31 years ago, it had its reviews. They were almost all positive. You know, one nasty piece, but mostly positive. And then the play came out. The play is a lot more accessible than a 402 page novel printed in nine point type. And a lot of people treated the play as if I was rehabilitating the character of the witch. And that was not my intention. My intention wasn't to rehabilitate her. My intention was merely to make her human, not a monster. If she's human, she has the right, the privilege and the inevitability of making mistakes and of causing harm. But if she's human, she also deserves mercy.
- [38:10]
A
The other thing I was wondering about was Oz. I was thinking if someone were a critic of religion, they might think, oh, well, that's what God is in a sense. He's all this smoke and mirrors that people put up in front of us, right? But really there's nothing behind it. But that wasn't something you were.
- [38:28]
B
Oh, no, no. Anything but. There's a wonderful Bruce Coburn song. Do you know the work of Bruce Coburn, Canadian Folk singer. There's a wonderful song on one of his middle career albums called the Rose above the sky, and it really is about the glory behind the glory. And so if Oz, as played wonderfully by Jeff Goldblum, is the power, there's more power behind the throne than emptiness. The power is what Jeff Goldblum is trying to distract from.
- [39:04]
A
How about scapegoat? Jesus as scapegoat and Elphaba as scapegoat? Is that.
- [39:09]
B
That certainly is a significant analogy one can make, but I did not want to make her a martyr. She wasn't a martyr. She was a person with a great deal of determination, great deal of confusion, and she causes a lot of. Of harm. She tries. Her real impulse is to do as little harm as possible. Stephen Schwartz is not a Catholic, he's not a Christian. But one of the songs that he wrote, one of the lyrics that he wrote that means the most to me, was from Elphaba's second act number, no Good Deed Goes Unpunished, where she questions herself and says, was I really seeking good or merely seeking attention? And that is a question, you know, anyone called to the priesthood has to ask. Am I just seeking to be congratulated for my holiness and my sense of reverence and my sense of being willing to put the matters of the world aside in order to do good? And do I want a FIFA prize for that?
- [40:17]
A
You're doing it publicly too, right?
- [40:19]
B
Yes. Really? Exactly. But the only way to avoid marginalizing people and ostracizing them is to keep letting them unfold themselves. I don't mean that. I say we have to forgive everybody their trespasses. Maybe God will forgive them their trespasses, but we have to allow them to be human. We can't limit them to their trespasses. There are certain people on the other side of this broadcast who might wish harm upon public figures. I don't wish harm upon public figures. I do not admire certain trespasses. But I try to think of the whole person.
- [41:03]
A
It's really wonderful speaking to you. I have one more wicked question. Last night in my Jesuit community. I was saying that I was going to interview you, and I thought this was a really interesting question from a Jesuit who's a priest and a social worker. He said that he feels that much of the series is about going against the crowd or the mob. Does that ring true to you? He was talking about, you know, the animals and I mean, even at the beginning, you know, burning people in effigy.
- [41:28]
B
Yes.
- [41:29]
A
Is that a conscious theme?
- [41:31]
B
I think that is conscious. And now this laces into being gay and recognizing that one is gay and recognizing in myself the kind of moral panic that did eventually set in. What do I do with the fact that I feel impelled to love somebody of my own gender when this is definitely not on the list of acceptable behaviors in the church in the mid-1970s and mostly not today either? What do I do with that? So I felt marginalized, and I finally had to conclude that I'd been marginalized in life a number of ways, including, in a sense, by being rejected by the family for the earliest years until I was brought back in again. And that has to be a gift, too. That has to be something you can work with, because to stand on the edge rather than in the middle means you're a more efficient periscope. You can look around and see a great deal that might not be apparent to everybody facing forward.
- [42:42]
A
Well, I think I've always thought that LGBT people are. This is a gross generalization, but are more inclined to compassion because they themselves have been on the margins. And people who've been marginalized are more sensitive. You know, I really liked what you said about, and I love the word that for people to sort of deal with marginalization. It helps for people to unfold themselves. Do you mean kind of tell their stories? Is that the idea?
- [43:08]
B
Yes, I do mean tell their stories, but it doesn't actually have to mean tell their stories to somebody else. It means tell your story to yourself. Own yourself. Accept your limitations, clarify your hesitations, put into words, if you can, that wonderful tool, what it is that you don't understand and own your lack of understanding, own your mystery and your own confusions. That makes you more of yourself, too beautiful.
- [43:37]
A
This is a good segue to our audience question. We got this question, and I thought you were the perfect person to. It comes from Stevie. I'll take a crack at it first. And the question is, what advice would you give to a young gay Catholic striving to live authentically? So I get asked that question a lot as part of the outreach ministry. I think one of the most fundamental things is to recognize that you are a beloved creation of God. That's the first thing that Jesus always reached out to people in the margins, right? And so he's reaching out to you, and that you have as much a place in the church as anybody else. Sometimes people say to me, well, how can someone be an elder LGBTQ Catholic? And I say, well, they're baptized, right? And they're lgbtq. It also, I think involves finding a church or a parish that's welcoming a community that welcomes you and friends who value you for who you are. But it really, you know, I really place a lot of emphasis on baptism. You're baptized. You're part of the community. And at your baptism, I'm talking to you, but I'm talking to Stevie. The, you know, Jesus himself calls you into this community, calls you into the Catholic community. And so why would you go against that? And I think the other thing, Stevie, is that there are so many people, young gay Catholics, young LGBTQ Catholics, who are living authentically. And I think it's just a question of the church recognizing that and really seeing them for who they are and seeing their holiness. So, Stevie, keep doing it and just trust that God loves you. So what would Gregory Maguire say?
- [45:13]
B
Well, I'm glad you went first, because I was formulating a set of impressions based on the question you posed while you were beginning to speak. And before you got to the word baptism, I had arrived at the central image that blurted up in response to your question. I was remembering one time when I had been sort of attacked. I don't mean physically, but morally and psychologically attacked. And I remember getting home and crying and my then boyfriend meeting me at the front door and saying, what happened? And I. It was almost preverbal. I was so annoyed and felt so hurt. And he helped me take off all my clothes in the front hall, and I ran into the shower, and I took a shower to rinse off the vitriol. I didn't want to be the same person who had been the recipient of so much ugliness and inappropriate venom. I didn't want it on my skin. So when you said the word baptism, I thought, well, there's the connecting tissue. With what? My inchoate intuitive answer to that question was, you have one obligation that maybe you can take care of, Stevie, which is to reject anything vile that has been tossed in your direction. You have the right to shuck it off in the hall and go into the shower and make yourself new. Make yourself so that you can come back, you can exit the shower and live in the world yourself, Having refused to own the ugliness that has been heaped upon you, either by the church or by experience, by your family, by your own self doubt, you can reject it. And it is part of holiness to take up that task and perform it for yourself. Maybe that's baptism.
- [47:22]
A
Amen. That's beautiful. Thank you so much, Gregory Maguire. Thank you for joining us on the spiritual life. Thanks for especially I know people know you mostly for Wicked, but thanks especially for sharing your faith and your journey with us. We're very grateful. Thanks very much.
- [47:35]
B
It's been my pleasure and my honor.
- [47:45]
A
Also, I'd like to let you know that I have a new book out, a memoir called Work in Progress. It's the story of finding work through a variety of crazy summer jobs like busboy, dishwasher, caddy, factory worker, and many more, and eventually finding God. Basically, it's a light hearted spiritual memoir about growing up in the 60s, 70s and 80s and is available in print, ebook and audio anywhere. Books are sold. I really hope you enjoy Work in Progress. The Spiritual Life with Father James Martin is produced by Maggie Van Doren, Sebastian Gomes and myself. Production assistance from Kevin Christopher Roblez and Will Gualtieri. Adam Buckmuller engineered the show. The theme score is courtesy of Teddy Abrams and Nate Farrington. You can follow me across social media. Amesmartinsj thank you so much and God bless you.
- [48:41]
B
Foreign.
- [48:50]
A
It's Father Jim Martin. I want to take a moment to welcome all of you, especially new listeners, to the Spiritual Life. This is a podcast that we hope will nourish your spiritual practice through open and honest conversations about life, prayer, and even suffering. We're now in the season of Lent, as you know, and there's no better time for us to pause and pay attention to the deep longing for God that exists within all of us. And you're not alone in that. We'd like to accompany you on this journey of discovery. So our staff at America Magazine is writing short and inspiring Bible reflections every day during Lent. They are free for listeners of the Spiritual Life and you can sign up@amer America magazine.org thespirituallife Sam.