← The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.
The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.
Ross Douthat on miracles, suffering and how to talk to atheists about religion
01:06:24
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- [00:05]
Fr. Jim Martin
Welcome to the spiritual life. I'm Fr. 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 superlative producer, Maggie Van Doren. Maggie, good to be with you.
- [00:18]
Maggie Van Doren
It's great to be with you, Jim. And we have quite an interesting guest ahead of us. Coming straight from the New York Times is Ross Douthit.
- [00:28]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, I'm really excited. I. I've been dying to have him on the podcast, and we had a wonderful conversation.
- [00:33]
Maggie Van Doren
Yes. Ross is a distinguished author and cultural critic. He's an opinion columnist for the New York Times, where he writes on religion, culture, politics, and global affairs. He also hosts a podcast that you were on, Jim Interesting Times with Ross Douthit, and that is produced by the New York Times Opinion. Ross is raised in New Haven, Connecticut, and graduated from Harvard University, where he studied history and literature. His early career included writing for the Atlantic and contributing to a variety of leading publications. Ross is a practicing Catholic, which shapes his commentary, especially on questions of belief, spirituality, and moral responsibility in an increasingly secular age. Ross is the author of several influential books, including To Change the Church, Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, along with two books that we actually speak about on this podcast, Interview the Deep Places and Believe why Everyone Should Be Religious. And Jim, you've known Ross for quite some time now, right?
- [01:38]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, a while. I was trying to think where I first met him. I think I actually critiqued something that he wrote. And then we met over lunch, and then we had a public event that was sponsored by America Media on civility. I can't even remember when this was. Maybe seven or eight years ago, certainly pre pandemic. And then I obviously followed him and read his stuff, read his columns, and I was really interested in the book that he wrote, which we talk about the deep places, about his struggles with Lyme disease. And then a couple of weeks ago, I was on his podcast, Interesting Times. So I'm happy that he's reciprocating, which is great.
- [02:15]
Maggie Van Doren
Yeah, it's really great to have him on. Before we get to that conversation, we have a question from our audience, and this comes from Luis. The question is, how do I advance with my spiritual life when my church life feels so stagnant? Are they two halves of the same coin?
- [02:35]
Fr. Jim Martin
Well, that's a great question, Luis. They are two halves of the same coin. I think that, you know, part of being a believer is being in a believing community, which is the church. And sometimes the church can feel stagnant. Now, I'm not sure if you're talking about your parish. Right. Sometimes parishes can be places where we might feel unwelcome, or perhaps the homilies are not as interesting as we would hope. Or if you feel it's the church overall. In either case, I would say that, you know, your spiritual life with God is certainly something that you can develop even if you're in a parish that you might not like or if you're struggling with something that's going on in the church. And that's one of the reasons for this podcast, to help people understand spirituality. So what would I suggest? You know, I might suggest, you know, getting a spiritual director. I might suggest going on a retreat. I might suggest reading books on spirituality. We've had a number of authors on here whose books are excellent. I wrote a book called Learning to Pray, which might help. But I guess, you know, I would also say not to worry about that because I think at different points in our lives, people all feel, you know, a little disappointed in parish life or in the life of the church itself. You know, during the sex abuse crisis, for example, obviously people were rightfully upset, but that doesn't mean your spiritual life can't proceed. So, you know, in a sense, to distinguish between your relationship with God.
- [03:59]
Ross Douthit
Right.
- [04:00]
Fr. Jim Martin
And your relationship with the church, they are two halves of the same coin. But, you know, really, your relationship with God precedes. That precedes your relationship with the church. And it can still develop even if you're struggling with your parish or with the church overall. So thank you so much, Luis, for that great question, which Ross Doutha will answer as well.
- [04:21]
Maggie Van Doren
Yeah. Would like to ask Father Jim a question you can write to us at the spiritual lifemericamedia.org we do read these questions, and we do try to find ones that are especially fitting for the podcast and that some of our guests might be able to help us answer. So keep them coming.
- [04:40]
Fr. Jim Martin
And now a word from our sponsor. Looking for a simple way to deepen your own spiritual life? Give Us this Day is a superb resource that helps Catholics stay rooted in scripture and in prayer wherever you are, no matter how busy you are. It features reliable and relatable spiritual reflections, essays on the lives of the saints, and, of course, prayers to accompany you throughout the day. I'm honored to be an editorial advisor, and I've been writing a monthly essay called Teach Us to Pray from the very Beginning. And I'm a user, too. I use it every single day. I use it this morning. And here's a great offer right now listeners of the Spiritual Life can get 10% off their new print subscription. Just visit giveusthisday.org spiritual life and join our community of Catholics praying together again. That's giveusthisday.org spiritual life. And now onto our conversation with Ross Douthit. Ross Douthit, welcome to the Spiritual Life.
- [06:02]
Ross Douthit
Thank you, Father. It's a great pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me.
- [06:05]
Fr. Jim Martin
My pleasure. I'm really happy you're joining us. So let's just jump right in. In our conversation a couple of weeks ago on your podcast, Interesting Times, you spoke about your own religious upbringing and your family's spiritual journey. Can you trace for us that journey and how it brought you to where you are today?
- [06:23]
Ross Douthit
Sure. So I have the experience of having essentially been a kind of passenger on other people's religious journeys, specifically my parents as a child. So from the time I was about 6 years old until we became Roman Catholic when I was about 17, we covered a lot of ground within American Christianity. So we started out as Episcopalians. We were, you know, in Southern Connecticut, very, you know, a very Connecticut form of Christianity.
- [06:56]
Fr. Jim Martin
Sure.
- [06:57]
Ross Douthit
At least. At least in the past. And then for various reasons, we got pulled into a world of charismatic Christianity and charismatic healing services. And the reason we were pulled into them was that my mother was brought to one of them by a friend with no expectations whatsoever and ended up basically being slain in the spirit is the technical term that Pentecostalists use for this phenomenon, where you basically fall down on the floor of a high school auditorium and have a radical mystical experience for, you know, anywhere from two minutes to. To a couple of hours, depending on how long they'll let you lie there. So my mother was sort of pulled into this, and then we were all pulled into it, and we sort of went through a kind of journey through charismatic Christianity, through different forms of Pentecostalism. My parents were involved briefly in an attempt to start at Evangelical church at Yale University, which did not go well. And then for complicated reasons, we ended up becoming Catholic.
- [07:59]
When.
- [07:59]
When I was 17.
- [08:01]
Fr. Jim Martin
Well, I'd like to get to the. Those complicated reasons for your family becoming Catholic. But I'm curious, when you were going through all this as a. A young person, a teenager, I guess. What. What was your response to all these different traditions?
- [08:13]
Ross Douthit
So I. I was not and still am not, but maybe it's less true now. I don't know. I. I'm not a mystical personality. Whatever. Whatever that means. Right. Like, everybody has different kinds of religious experiences, different ways that they relate to the numinous and the transcendent. God has a different plan for everybody. I don't know, but I didn't, I didn't have the experiences that my parents were having or that lots and lots of people around them were having. We went all the way to Toronto. At one point there was a Pentecostalist revival at a Vineyard church. This was called the Toronto Blessing. This was in the early 1990s. And you would go into this sort of strip mall church near the Toronto airport and people would be praying for each other, they would be falling down, people would be roaring like lions, like it was, it was a wild revivalist scene and people would pray for me. And, you know, I don't know, maybe I felt a tingle or something, but the Holy Spirit did not carry me off.
- [09:18]
Right.
- [09:18]
So I was in a kind of observational role, interestingly, throughout all of these experiences. And, you know, I think you could imagine a world where that turned me into some kind of hardcore skeptic where I was like, well, if it didn't happen to me, it can't be real, it's gotta all be, you know, it's fake or it's the madness of crowds or what have you. But I, I had kind of the opposite experience. I was quite sure, just as an observer, that something very real was happening here. That whatever it was, whatever theological interpretation you gave it, it did not fit neatly into the kind of secular materialist paradigms that I was encountering elsewhere.
- [09:58]
Right.
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In my education, in school, where, wherever else.
- [10:01]
Right.
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And that's still how I feel today. I think that I witnessed real spiritual, supernatural, mystical activity throughout my childhood that for whatever reason I wasn't invited to participate in. But it, it gave me a kind of odd. Like it was almost like I was a 13 year old William James or something. Like I was like, ah, the varieties of religious experience are all around me. How, how fascinating.
- [10:26]
Right?
- [10:28]
But it, yeah, it gave me a lifelong interest in those kind of manifestations of religion and the extent to which a lot of religions resilience in a supposedly disenchanted age or, you know, whatever you want to call it, is connected to personal experience.
- [10:45]
Right.
- [10:45]
Like, I think a lot of people outside religion especially will have the idea that, you know, oh, religion survives because it fulfills a psychological need or because people have, you know, a desire to have a kind of political tribe and they give it a religious, a religious title. I mean, there's a lot of theories of religions persistence and I just had a lot of personal experience of a much more direct reason why religion persists, that you can be a sort of normal, secular person and wander into a world where crazy things seem to be happening and where the transcendence seems to be immediately available to a lot of people, even in suburban Connecticut or near the Toronto airport or wherever else.
- [11:30]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, I agree with you. I think that a lot of writing, particularly secular journalists, will see it as kind of a crutch, or people are religious in order that this might happen, that they might shore up their difficult lives, rather than looking at direct experience. I'm going to jump ahead a little bit since you brought it up. Would you say that since that time you would have had more direct religious experiences as an adult? Even mystical experiences?
- [11:55]
Ross Douthit
I wouldn't say strong mystical experiences. The more normal thing is, like, you find yourself unexpectedly. You're going to have a child, you know, in your mid-40s when you didn't expect it, right? And then you try and figure out what this child should be named. And, you know, you go on a trip to Rome and your wife has a strong reaction to the Caravaggios of St. Matthew and you're like, all right, well, maybe we should consider the name Matthew. And then a week before the child is born, you are still debating the name, and you walk into your daughter's pre K and the teacher says, you know, what would be a great name for this baby, Ross? Matthew. I had a dream last night that the baby. The baby was named Matthew. And then you're like, all right, I guess we'll name the baby Matthew. And then you look up, you know, what does the name Matthew mean? Oh, it means gift from God. Well, of course it does. Right. So, like, that's. Is that an. Is that a mystical experience? No, not. I mean, everything apart from the dream that the pre K teacher had, right. Everything is, in a way, happening in the mundane. But it's the kind of thing that, again, it's sort of hard to avoid interpreting as a kind of brushstroke of providence in your own life. But that's also distinct from. And probably you were, you know, going in this direction, too. I had a long experience of illness starting in my mid-30s that I wrote a book about. It was an experience of chronic Lyme disease that sort of was a particularly strong kind of redirection of life. And that experience as a whole, again, was not like there were no moments within it where the heavens opened and the Virgin descended and, you know, handed me a tilma. Right. I mean, there's, you know, but there were plenty of Moments inside that experience when strange, coincidental things seemed to happen in ways that felt like guideposts, helping hands, these. These kind of things. But again, all of it less direct than the transformative experience of the divine that is like the core of mystical experience. I'm not a mystic in that way, even now.
- [14:04]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, and I'm glad you're bringing that up, because for so many people, they feel sometimes if they hear of these experiences or read stories of the lives of the saints, and they think if I haven't had that kind of experience, I'm somehow a bad Catholic, or God doesn't love me, or I'm not open to God. But you're right. I think most of these things happen in the everyday world.
- [14:22]
Ross Douthit
Right.
- [14:22]
Fr. Jim Martin
And it is about noticing, you know, as you were saying, kind of ascribing it to God and really making that leap. Let me back up a little bit. I do want to talk about your book on Lyme disease, but you said that your family, I think you said, ended up as Catholic for complicated reasons. Can you walk us through that a little bit? How your family.
- [14:39]
Ross Douthit
Well, they weren't. I mean, they weren't that complicated.
- [14:41]
Right.
- [14:42]
We had been Episcopalian, so we had a kind of ecclesiastical experience somewhere in our past, in my mother's upbringing and so on. And I think for my mother especially, you know, and she has written about this some or her name is Patricia Snow. You can read some for essays, for first things. But for her, it was always very much like having had a set of mystical experiences. She wanted to find a kind of institutional grounding for those experiences, like a place where having, you know, become. I mean, she was already Christian, but having become Christian in some fuller sense, she could feel like this was the place where God wanted her to be. So we were always sort of looking for a place to rest. I think for her, there was a kind of bridge in. In mystical experience between charismatic Christianity and Catholicism, which, you know, in certain ways, obviously they're very, very far apart. You know, the spectrum of different expressions of. Of Christianity.
- [15:42]
Right.
- [15:42]
The, you know, the people having a revival meeting are in a pretty different place than people, you know, going to Sunday Mass at St. Patrick's or something. But there is, I think, some real continuity and overlap between how people write about the direct mystical experience of God in the Ca. Catholic mystical tradition and in these sort of forms of charismatic Protestantism. And I think that, plus her own direct experience was a very important contributor to her eventually deciding to become Catholic. For me, it was more because I wasn't a mystical character. It was in certain ways more conventional. Right. It was like, all right, you know, I'm. I'm a sort of nerdy teenager, and I'm reading C.S. lewis and I'm reading G.K. chesterton. And the Catholic Church has a lot of very strong intellectual firepower behind it. It has a lot of history and pedigree and all these kind of things. And also. Right. So I've said that I was very interested in watching mystical experience, but by the time you become a teenager, you also have a certain awkwardness and anxiety about a form of religious practice that focuses so heavily on the kind of personal and the expressive.
- [16:58]
Right.
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And, you know, you'll meet people. I've met people. I'm sure you have two lapsed Catholics who will say, oh, you know, the problem with Catholicism was that it was all like rote memorization. And, you know, everyone's. Everyone's sitting in the back at Mass and nobody's singing the hymns and so on. And, you know, when you're 16 or 17 years old, sometimes that can be really nice. It's like, you know, oh, great, I can just, you know, I can go to church and the prayers are there to be memorized.
- [17:25]
Right.
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And no one is going to come up to me midway through the service, at least at the Catholic churches we attended. You know, there are some variation here. And say, son, could you testify to how the Lord Jesus has changed your heart?
- [17:37]
Right.
- [17:37]
Like, I was perfectly happy to be given, you know, Our Fathers and Hail Mary's to pray instead of being asked for, for personal testimony. And there also is something. If you are someone who has watched other people have mystical experiences without having had them yourself, there's something attractive and comforting in what the Church says about the sacraments, Right. And how grace works in the sacraments, the idea that it is operational in a way that, you know, you can count on, even if you aren't hearing flights of angels singing to you at the moment of baptism or when. When you're in the confessional or anything like that.
- [18:14]
Right.
- [18:15]
The idea that, yes, as you said, you know, God. God gives sort of extreme gifts and extreme manifestations to some people, but for lots of people, it's good to be told. Look, you know, today you went to confession, your sins are forgiven. It's set. You can count on it, even if you aren't lying on the floor of the church, quivering in any kind of supernatural ecstasy afterward.
- [18:37]
Fr. Jim Martin
That's a great insight because I think it, you know, can calm us down to know that we don't have to be mystics.
- [18:43]
Ross Douthit
Right.
- [18:43]
Fr. Jim Martin
And we can rely on the sacraments. And, you know, your. Your point about, you know, you don't have to be a mystic to. To receive communion. They also, the priest doesn't have to be perfect to consecrate the Eucharist. What would you say as an adult now keeps you in the Catholic Church other than the promises you made?
- [18:58]
Ross Douthit
I mean, I think that I have never had any real doubt that God was strongly present inside Roman Catholicism. And initially that certainty was maybe primarily intellectual and a matter of reading history and theology and apologetics. And over time, it's more personal. It's not just sort of the kind of, you know, modest personal experiences that I've had myself. It's also just being embedded in a community and knowing lots and lots of different kinds of Catholics who all have their own story and their own dramas and so on. But in many of them, you encounter stories and personal experiences and all of these kind of things that I think just sort of testify persistently to God's action inside the church.
- [19:50]
Fr. Jim Martin
You know, I really like that connection you drew between the kind of Pentecostal experiences and being slain in the Spirit and the mystical tradition of the Catholic Church. There is, you know, obviously an overlap, and it's obviously the same spirit. Are there parts of that tradition and parts of the practices of Pentecostal churches and charismatic churches that you miss? You know, by. By being a Catholic?
- [20:13]
Ross Douthit
I mean, I think what people can miss is this kind of immediacy.
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Right.
- [20:18]
Of, again, that I. I myself did not experience. So I'm sort of the wrong person to describe this.
- [20:25]
Right.
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But, like, there are forms of liturgical Christianity that can just sort of feel rote or arid or empty.
- [20:34]
Right.
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And I think especially, you know, I'm. I don't attend the Latin Mass. I'm not like any kind of full traditionalist, but I think there is a kind of, you know, highly banalized, if that's the right word, form of, you know, post 1960s or 1970s Catholic practice that just. It feels like it's. It's sort of neither fish nor foul. It's neither the intense liturgical experience of the orthodox Divine Liturgy, but nor is it an immediate encounter with God of the kind that Pentecostalism seems to offer. I think a lot of people who drift from, like, suburban American Catholicism into Pentecostalist or charismatic Christianity, it's not about sort of theological principles. It's about the failure of certain kinds of Catholicism to deliver a sense that actually something mystical, something Divine is happening here. And when you're in a room with people who are, you know, lying on the floor or where, you know, where. Where you're watching a woman who has a healing ministry walk around the room and point to people and they just fall down, right? Like, that's immediate, that's powerful, and that is a real thing that draws people into those forms of Christianity. The sense that, like, you know, you read the New Testament, right? And it's like, you know, you read the Acts of the Apostles, you read, you read about the early church, and there's sort of this immediacy to the presence of the Holy Spirit where it's like, you know, every day has a kind of Pentecostal element that Christians understandably want. And a version of that, I think, is present in charismatic Christianity. The challenge that it didn't meet for us, right, the test, it failed in a way, is sort of continuity beyond that, that initial encounter, right? That sense of kind of direct connection and communion, right. It's like, well, what do you do, you know, what do you do when that is withdrawn? What do you do if you don't experience it all? What if you do, what do you do if you enter into a dark night of the soul? What do you do if the charismatic figure with the healing gift turns out to be scandal prone or turns out to be faking some of the healings or anything like that?
- [22:40]
Right.
- [22:41]
And those are the places where I think the advantages of traditional apostolic Christianity are. Are real and potent.
- [22:49]
Right.
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Again, the idea that, like, you aren't just trying to sustain a kind of permanent supernatural high. You're trying to live in the world which God wants us to do, right? To live in our bodies and the material. And you want to have churches that, you know, are sort of there for the long haul. That tends to be the great advantage of more traditional and institutional forms of Christian faith.
- [23:15]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, I agree. I do want to move on. You had brought it up, and I'm really interested in talking with you, and I think our listeners would be very interested in hearing about your bout with Lyme disease, which you talked about in your book the Deep Places, which I thought was beautiful. Can you explain the onset of that illness and especially how it affected your spiritual life?
- [23:33]
Ross Douthit
Sure. We lived in Washington, D.C. and my wife and I were both from New England. We had two little kids at that point. And we'd always had a kind of ambition to move back to the Northeast and be closer to our families. And I especially have had a kind of romantic idea of owning A house in the country with, you know, stone walls and fences and fields, and someone recklessly. We actually decided to. To do that. We bought a house in my wife's hometown in the western part of Connecticut. It's like Mr. Blanding's, exactly, from 1790, you know, three and a half acres, these sort of barns that were sinking into the fields that I was planning to refurbish. And I immediately became whole, horribly, horribly ill. And it took a little while to figure out what it was, because the constellation of symptoms was so strange. But it was, you know, pain all over my body, total insomnia, vibrations in my chest, just incredibly bizarre array of symptoms. And then when I figured out that what I had was this illness carried by deer ticks that lots and lots of people in the Northeast get, then I. It turned out that I was in the fun category of people who have this and don't respond immediately to antibiotic treatment and so enter this kind of zone. Or I did respond in the sense that I stabilized. I went from sleeping one hour a night to four and a half hours a night, right? And the, you know, I went from feeling like I was disintegrating to just being in, you know, a sort of low level of pain all the time. So there. There was some stabilization, but then I had to spend years, basically, in this sort of zone of medical uncertainty where the sort of official medicine doesn't have a theory of what chronic Lyme is, isn't sure it's real. You have to see specialized doctors who are extremely eccentric. And you, you know, you enter into a world of strange treatments, alternative medicine, all. All kinds of very, very weird stuff that you would never imagine yourself doing before you, you know, have this kind of experience, right? But once you are desperately, desperately sick and feel unable to function as a normal human being in the world, you will try anything. So that. That was the basic experience, I think that it. Its effect on my spiritual life, I guess, was there were a couple different levels, right? On the one hand, you know, there. There was the basic sense in which, you know, God didn't heal me. I pray, you know, you pray desperately for healing. I didn't sort of receive dramatic healing at any point. All of my progress was incremental and driven by sort of weird forms of exploration and experiment. But I did feel like there were sort of signposts and help. And it was like, you know, to the extent that there was a message from God, the message was, I'm afraid you have to go through this, right? And, you know, I'M I'm still here and I haven't abandoned, you know, but I'm not just going to deliver you from this in any kind of simple way. This is, for whatever reason, an experience that's, you know, part of what is necessary for your life, for your development, maybe to redirect you. We abandoned the farmhouse and sold it and gave up on the fantasy of the rural life. So it seemed like God was pretty explicitly saying that that was a mistake or a, an idol that I needed to let go of. And then at the basic level, like, you know, you mentioned earlier, the idea that religion sometimes gets portrayed as a crutch, and that's not really where a lot of religious impulses come from. But in the case of extreme suffering and illness, religion is absolutely a crutch. And I don't think there's anything in my experience that would, you know, convince an atheist to believe in God, because it would always be easy for the atheist to say, well, you were sick and you needed, you needed to feel like this was all for a reason. You needed to feel like if you sort of went through this and kept on trying to be a husband and a father and held your life together, that there would be a point to it. And that was true. I needed to believe that. And it was tremendously helpful that I went into the illness with an already existing form of faith.
- [27:48]
Fr. Jim Martin
Thank you for being so honest. I know a lot of our listeners will wonder and a lot of, I think we all go through different people, periods of suffering in our lives. When you say you came to the understanding that this was something you, in a sense, needed to go through or that God was asking you to go through? I think a lot of people will say, well, how did you come to that recognition? Was it something in prayer? Was it sort of just seeing it not go away and assuming that this is what God wanted? Like, what enabled you to make that conclusion?
- [28:17]
Ross Douthit
Part of it was just the fact that it didn't go away, right, That I did many religious things and asked for help in every way that a person could ask for help. And if you do that and, you know, don't experience some transformative healing, then if God exists, you have to assume, right, that, you know, God answers every prayer. And sometimes the answer is no or not yet. That's sort of the simplest way of putting it. But then beyond that, there was sort of a combination, right, of this sense of, like, I would get help. It felt like again, in the mode of sort of coincidence and serendipity and my Paths crossing with someone here and something working out over here. It did feel like I was getting some kind of help, but the help was always like a hand pulling you one step along the path. It was never, you know, was never the jeep pulling up and saying, good news, we're gonna. We're gonna get to the destination in five minutes.
- [29:19]
Right.
- [29:20]
So when that happens, and, and I wrote about a few of these things in, in the book, if people are interested, sort of moments where it felt like God was not altogether distant from me, but they weren't cures. So if God is with you and sort of helping you in, in small ways, but the help is mostly just for you to keep going and keep trying to get better. Like, I was certainly sure that I wasn't supposed to just suffer, right? That I, there, there was something I was supposed to learn about the world maybe, or about my own capacities or about the nature of medicine or something. You know, I'm still not sure exactly what it was, but I did learn a number of things just through the process of going to weird doctors and trying weird things and meeting people who were suffering in similar ways and sort of comparing our journeys to one another. And yeah, all of that added up to the sense that, like, you know, had God just healed me on day one, then whatever, you know, then it would have been worse for me in some way.
- [30:25]
Right.
- [30:26]
And, you know, that's easier to say because I did eventually get better. It's easier for me to say now by far, than it would have been for me to say, you know, six years ago when I was in the thick of it. I'm not completely better. I still have residual symptoms and problems, but I am much, much, much better than I was at my worst. And obviously there are plenty of people who experience suffering who don't get better on that kind of timescale. There are people who experience suffering and die. There are people who experience suffering through people who are close to them, who lose a child, all these kind of things.
- [31:01]
Right.
- [31:02]
And those experiences are going to be different. And I don't think, you know, I wouldn't say that, like, the experience I had of feeling like this suffering was being given to me for some reason is necessarily going to be the best way to react to any kind of suffering in your life. But, you know, you have to react to the experiences you have. This was an experience I had and this was what I felt like God was doing.
- [31:26]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah. And I think that step by step insight is very helpful because that really is. I mean, God gives us the grace to, you know, take that next step. You remind me. I had an operation a couple of years ago that was pretty difficult. And I was talking to a friend of mine who was a Jesuit priest and a doctor about the different things that I had learned. And I said, but I would have liked to have learned it without the operation and all this other stuff. And he said something very funny. He said, well, you wouldn't have learned it. You. You might not have been open to it. So I'm curious, when you talk about what you learned, even though it's, you know, you're still learning, what would you say you took from that experience?
- [32:05]
Ross Douthit
Well, again, you want to be careful, Right. And not claim too much for yourself.
- [32:11]
Fr. Jim Martin
Sure.
- [32:11]
Ross Douthit
I think, you know, the first thing, I mentioned this already, right. Like, I learned something about the difference between one's own plans and what God might have in mind for you. So prior to this experience, this, you know, started in my mid-30s. I had had a pretty nice run where the things I wanted and the things that God wanted seemed to be the same.
- [32:31]
Right.
- [32:31]
It's like, you know, you get married to the beautiful girl you met in college. You, you know, I got a job at the New York Times at a very young age. That was a dream job. You know, we had a couple of kids, and now we were going to get the house in the Connecticut country that I'd always fantasized about.
- [32:48]
Right.
- [32:49]
So I think at that point, in my mind, yes, in theory, I knew that I could have desires that were not the thing that God wanted for me. But in practice, it just seemed like, yeah, if I want something, that probably means God wants it, too.
- [33:03]
Right.
- [33:04]
So this was a. A pretty stern corrective to that assumption about your life.
- [33:09]
Right.
- [33:09]
That, you know, if. If you have some kind of personal ambition or personal dream, you can just assume that God must want you to fulfill it. Sometimes the answer is no, God does not want you to fulfill it. And in fact, the dream is a mistake, an idol, a folly, a sin, what have you. So that's. That's one level, I think that it, you know, I. I write obviously, about politics and religion and other issues for. For a living. And when I look back on the work I did when I was at my sickest, I wrote a lot of very angry columns. And some of them were columns about Donald Trump. I was a never Trump Republican. I was very angry that Donald Trump was taking over the Republican Party. Those were columns that I imagine you liked, and some of them were about Pope Francis, and I was a Conservative Catholic who didn't like some of the things that the Pope was doing, thought they were very dangerous and destructive for the church, and wrote about that. And those were columns that I know for a fact that you did not like.
- [34:11]
Right.
- [34:13]
And since then, as I gradually got better and got somewhat through the experience.
- [34:20]
Right.
- [34:21]
I feel like I developed just in both religion and politics, all the areas I wrote, write about, I developed a certain kind of detachment from, you know, things that are real and important issues. You know, what happens to the Catholic Church is an incredibly important issue. What happens to the United States under Donald Trump is incredibly important. And obviously, like, you can go too far in your detachment, but I think that most people who do what I do get very, very close to the issues and sort of struggle to separate their own emotional reaction to events from analysis of events. And I think in the course of my illness, I did. I, you know, I was very angry at first, and then I separated somewhat. And, yeah, that comes with problems, but I think there are advantages to that. As someone who's trying, whose vocation it is to write about the world and understand the world, I think detaching a little bit is important.
- [35:18]
Fr. Jim Martin
That's really interesting. So the detachment, I want to make sure I understand you. The detachment came from sort of a sense of humility in front of the illness or a sense of there are bigger things in life than. Than this kind of. This kind of.
- [35:31]
Ross Douthit
Not, not so much bigger, but just the sense that certain forms of suffering are inescapable.
- [35:36]
Right.
- [35:36]
There isn't a perfect political solution to human suffering. There also isn't a perfect theological solution to human suffering where it's like, oh, if only, you know, if only you had the perfect Pope and the perfect bishops and the perfect church, you know, sin and suffering and problems will disappear. Was probably some of that. It was also probably just a sense of gratitude. Like you. You do get a sense of gratitude when you come back to the ordinary after you've been sort of separated from it, where it's like, you know, when you're really sick, there's just all these basic things like eating a meal, you know, like that, that you lose. You lose the ability to enjoy in any way, shape or form. Right. Like there were long stretches in the illness when I took no enjoyment out of ordinary life. And so if you come back to the ordinary enjoyment of life, it helps, I think, have some perspective on the very real problems that you read about or in the newspaper or, in my case, write about in a newspaper.
- [36:38]
Right.
- [36:38]
That there is like you know, the. What's the. The odden poem, right. Where Icarus is falling into the sea. Right. And that's. He's talking about how the old masters, the painters would paint sort of ordinary life going on even while these really dramatic events were happening. And I think I gained. In losing ordinary life and coming back to it, I gained some perspective on that because so many people who are upset constantly by the news, again, I'm not saying there aren't plenty of things to be upset about, but so many of them end up living inside the news, right. You know, you live inside your phone. You. You live inside Twitter. You live in. And I do that. I still do that a lot. It's a big problem. It's a problem with, you know, with. With my profession. But I think. Yeah, I think sickness and recovery help see that the good things in ordinary life are there to be appreciated, even when the world seems like it's going to hell and politically or religiously or any other way.
- [37:36]
Fr. Jim Martin
So gratitude, basically, right?
- [37:38]
Ross Douthit
Gratitude, yeah. Again, not. Not in any complete way. You know, I. Tomorrow I will feel extremely ungrateful, I'm sure. But, yes, having ordinary, like a serious chronic illness in a way that's really hard to explain before you've had it. Yeah. It strips basic pleasure out of life. And so getting basic pleasure back teaches you something that you didn't know before anything.
- [38:04]
Fr. Jim Martin
You take a special pleasure in just ordinary life. I'm just curious.
- [38:09]
Ross Douthit
Well, I mean, I have a lot of kids, right. So there's a way in which, you know, one of my biggest psychological fears while this was going on was this sense of, like, I. I will. You know, we just had our third child, my first son, right. And so I'm, you know, holding a baby, wracked by pain, like driving my wife insane with my own, you know, my own problem. She's suffering along with me. And ju. Just this sense then, that, like, I was going to fail as a father, right. In some way was very, very powerful. And so in that sense, like, some of the ordinary things that I appreciate the most are, you know, packing the kids into the minivan for an afternoon of them complaining. Right. Bitterly, as you drive them to a picnic spot or something, right? Like, we've done a bunch of crazy trips across the country to Europe. We drove all over California and so on. And I'll know people who have fewer kids and will say, I can't imagine going around with all of your kids like this and so on. And to me, I'm like, no, this is. This Is great. It's fantastic. Yeah. You know that it has all these stresses, but they're ordinary stresses. It's like the stress of, you know, the baby needs a diaper change and the kids are hungry and, you know, your Airbnb is not what you'd hoped it would be. And like, those are all real and potent, but they're so ordinary.
- [39:30]
Right.
- [39:30]
And I think the ability to see them as ordinary then makes it possible to do crazy trips and have certain kinds of fun that maybe I would not have been able to do in the same way before I had been ruthlessly taught to appreciate the ordinary.
- [39:49]
Fr. Jim Martin
Well, you know, Ross, I'll speak more personally. I think we had lunch as you were just coming out of the Lyme disease. And I will say I'm glad that you're grateful. I'm glad that you learned these things. I'm also glad that you're feeling better.
- [40:00]
Ross Douthit
Yeah. And that. And that is really, really important.
- [40:02]
Right.
- [40:03]
Like, part of the reason that when I, you know, talk to people who have chronic illness and I try, you know, someone emails me who's. Who's sick, I'm really bad at getting back to email, but I do try to email people back who have had. Who are having experiences similar to mine. But with chronic illness.
- [40:19]
Right.
- [40:19]
Terminal illness is a different, different kind of thing.
- [40:21]
Right.
- [40:22]
But with, with chronic illness, it really is important to figure out a way to seek health.
- [40:27]
Right.
- [40:27]
Like, I just, I don't think that when God gives us these kind of trials that we're just called to endure them. Like, we are reasoning, capable people. We have, hopefully friends and family who can help us. And in that, you know, not. It's not going to be true in every case, but for most people in those kind of situations, there's going to be a path to some kind of improvement and seeking it. And having hope in that is as important as having cosmic hope as well.
- [40:57]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah. And I also think that, you know, when we are ill, we are more vulnerable and we're sometimes more open to letting God in. I sometimes, you know, say to people, it's not as if God gave Ross this illness and order that.
- [41:10]
Ross Douthit
Right.
- [41:10]
Fr. Jim Martin
It's not kind of this transactional thing, but that you're more vulnerable. You're open to things, you're open to learning, open to insights. And I think that's a lot of people's experience in illness. We're going to pause now for a short break and we'll be back in a minute. Body, mind and spirit. We believe if one needs help so do the others. It's part of Catholic Healthcare's holistic approach to treating the whole person. Here, people are not viewed as symptoms or insurance claims. And when we treat the body, mind and spirit, we believe the whole person will thrive. Catholic Health Care Learn more@we careyouflourish.org Sponsored by the Catholic Health Association.
- [42:02]
Zach
Hey, this is Zach from Jesuitical. When I am not hosting this podcast, I am America magazine's director of Digital strategy, which means I've spent the summer working on America's brand new website and mobile app. So if you haven't checked it out yet, please do. That would mean a lot to one me personally, but also it's a really great resource for all the Catholic news and analysis that you're missing out on. While Jesuitical is taking its summer break, just check out americamagazine.org and also we've got a new mobile app. Go ahead and search for the Jesuit Review wherever you get your apps.
- [42:33]
Ross Douthit
Thanks.
- [42:40]
Fr. Jim Martin
I really want to talk about your latest book, Believe why Everyone Should Be Religious. Obviously, as the title suggests.
- [42:46]
Ross Douthit
Everyone.
- [42:47]
Fr. Jim Martin
Everyone. Well, I agree.
- [42:49]
Ross Douthit
This is a good podcast for that message.
- [42:51]
Fr. Jim Martin
Yeah, I agree the book is very pro belief. I want to just jump right in. How do you reach out to agnostics and atheists? I mean, I know you do it in the book in different ways, but what do you find most effective? I'm sure you deal with people and, you know, as a New York Times columnist, you're working in the secular world, as it were. What's the best approach that you've found?
- [43:13]
Ross Douthit
Something that I found both in writing this book and in talking about it afterward, is that there's just tremendous variation in the place where people are likely to be most open to an argument for believing in God and becoming Christian, ultimately, since this is a general book. But I am a Christian.
- [43:34]
Right.
- [43:34]
And so part of the argument in the book.
- [43:37]
Right.
- [43:37]
Is that I'm not trying to present a single philosophical proof that will settle, you know, settle the existence of God question for all time. I don't have the philosophical equipment to do that. And I don't think, you know, I'm not saying, okay, Thomas Aquinas's third way is it. That's. It settles the debate.
- [43:55]
Fr. Jim Martin
That's right. Here it is.
- [43:56]
Ross Douthit
I the argument. And yet it is.
- [43:58]
Right.
- [43:58]
Yeah. The argument in the book is that there are sort of converging lines of evidence and reasons to believe in God. And some of these have to do with what we know from science about the structure of the universe, the sort of fine tuning of physical laws to make human life possible in the first place. Some of them have to do with the mystery of our own consciousness and how it relates to the world and its unusual capacities for understanding that higher order. And some of them have to do with some of the stuff we were talking earlier, the persistence of religious experience, the fact that mystical experiences happen even to convinced atheists. All of which suggests not just that there's a kind of order to the universe, but that whatever is responsible for the order is also interested in us.
- [44:43]
Right.
- [44:44]
And what I find is that, like, often one of those lines of argument will be kind of a way in to people who are very resistant to a different line of argument. So I will talk to some people for whom, you know, the, the evidence for fine tuning in the laws of the universe is really potent and they'll be really struck by that and they'll say, yeah, this is a really compelling, compelling argument. I don't think atheism has an answer for it.
- [45:10]
Right?
- [45:11]
But then if you pivot to the supernatural, they're like, oh, come on, man.
- [45:15]
Right?
- [45:15]
You know, I'm not, I can't, I can't buy that stuff. And then you have people who are. For whom it's quite, quite the reverse. I did a podcast with Andrew Sullivan, right. You know, a fellow Catholic with a complicated relationship to the church.
- [45:28]
Right.
- [45:29]
And so Andrew is a believer, but Andrew just, he, he would have nothing to do with the, you know, fine tuning laws of physics argument. He's like, no, come on, the universe is too big. You know, we can't, you know, Earth is too small. You can't say that God intended it, but he's all in for the personal, the direct encounter with, with God, this sort of personal experience as the, the primary form of evidence. So I think you just have, you have a lot of variation in sort of where people are open, people who are not. Andrew is a believer, but people who are not yet believers. And I think what you're trying to do, if you're arguing or having a friendly conversation or anything, is trying to basically take that point and sort of broaden it a bit, say, okay, you know, so this is interesting, and it's interesting that you find this compelling. And what if we bring in this piece as well and this, you know, this piece here, you know, you're trying to sort of add to the reasons that they in most cases are already have to some degree, right? And, and then to convince people that this is all, in the end, quite reasonable.
- [46:37]
Right?
- [46:38]
Like that. I Think there are a lot of secular people who are interested in religion, open to religion, but just take for granted that to become religious is to leave leave reason behind in some way. Like, wouldn't it be nice if it were true? Maybe it is even true. But we're certainly never going to reason our way there. And, you know, I agree, you're not going to reason your way into a relationship with God any more than you could reason your way, you know, into a love affair.
- [47:06]
Right.
- [47:06]
But can you use reason to say there probably is a God and it might be good to have a relationship with him in the same way you might re use reason to say, you know, it might be good to get on the dating market and see what happens? Right. I think there the answer is very clearly yes. I think having religious interest is extremely reasonable, and I'm trying to persuade more people that that is the case.
- [47:33]
Fr. Jim Martin
I think that's very helpful. I mean, the idea that you're, you know, you're meeting people where they are. St. Ignatius says, Go in their door.
- [47:40]
Ross Douthit
True. Yes. In the Ignatian spirit. That's right, yeah. Going to the margins. Yep. The peripheries of New York Times readers. That's right.
- [47:48]
Fr. Jim Martin
That's right. The extreme margins. No, Ignatius says, go in their door and come out your door, you know, so go in where they're comfortable. Let me ask you one more question on this topic. This is one of my favorite topics. The inability or the unwillingness of people to really believe in the supernatural. Or, you know, relatedly, we were talking about mystical experiences. I mean, so much of the Gospels is Jesus performing miracles. The resurrection is obviously a. The supernatural event par excellence. When I was in theology, I took a New Testament course with Dan Harrington, the New Testament professor, and we were talking about the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. And I'm sure you've heard the famous interpretation that was all about sharing.
- [48:29]
Ross Douthit
Yes, the miracle. The miracle.
- [48:31]
Fr. Jim Martin
The sharing. And Dan Harrington called this, which I love this. That's the nice thought interpretation. Like, oh, isn't that a nice thought that people are sharing? Whereas, you know, it's obviously, it's in all four gospels. It's in two of the gospels twice. So Jesus did miracles. What have you found helpful to move people to that? I mean, in terms of Jesus, they'll say, you know, he's a sage, I understand, you know, forgiveness. But walking on water, raising Lazarus from the dead. What do you find helpful, if anything?
- [49:03]
Ross Douthit
I think in the case of Jesus himself, the strongest arguments just rest in a weird Way on the biggest miracle, right. That actually I feel like more people have been convinced by the resurrection narratives than by, you know, any of the sort of more quote unquote, ordinary miracles. The Resurrection is so much at the center of the Gospels. It's such an extreme claim, but it's also the place with the strongest attestation in a weird way, like it's happening, you know, in this sort of broad political daylight and has these immediate world altering effects in sort of the foundation of the Christian church and so on and so, and not everyone is going to be convinced. But like, if you're talking about the New Testament itself, I think it is often a kind of like everything rests on how you react to the sheer strangeness of the Passion and the Resurrection narrative.
- [50:02]
Fr. Jim Martin
Totally agree.
- [50:04]
Ross Douthit
In ordinary life, it really ends up being about both what you yourself have experienced and other people that, that, you know.
- [50:12]
Right.
- [50:12]
Like, I think in a world where there is this kind of official knowledge that is totally disenchanted.
- [50:19]
Right.
- [50:20]
It's just hard for people without some kind of personal thing happening to get fully outside that frame. Lots of people are convinced that the supernatural exists because they have a supernatural experience. And then some people are convinced this is supernatural exists because people they trust and know well, tell them stories about crazy, crazy shit, if you'll pardon my language, that's happened to them that becomes, you know, that they then have to fold into their understanding of reality. The one thing I'll say in defense of the materialists is that, you know, when it comes to the supernatural, I, I think God gives way more than atheists and materialists believe. I think again, you can't be a Catholic without encountering lots and lots of weird stuff that is sort of part of the warp and woof of reality. But he does always, you know, he hides his cards to some degree.
- [51:13]
Right.
- [51:13]
Like, it's not like the atheist can walk out tomorrow and see a levitating saint now. You know, they can go read Carlos Ayer's book about levitating saints in the 16th century and maybe they'll be challenged by that.
- [51:27]
Right.
- [51:27]
But like, you could imagine a world where there was a little bit more soup of the supernatural. Yeah. And, and more and more people would be convinced.
- [51:35]
Right.
- [51:35]
So there, there is a way in which, you know, whatever God is doing with the supernatural, it's understandable that not everyone is convinced. I think that, I think you have to, you know, you have to be aware of that. Like how much people are convinced depends in part on, on how much God wants to show them.
- [51:52]
Fr. Jim Martin
I agree with you. I do think everything hinges on that. And I think that you're right about it being kind of the greatest, in a sense, proof. I always say to people, look, you had the disciples who were cowering behind closed doors on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and then you had them ready to give their lives and in some cases giving their lives, you know, and something must have happened, right? I mean, you have to kind of grapple with that. And I think just a kind of credible explanation is the resurrection, something dramatic, something real, something physical. So I agree with you. We're going to wrap up. This podcast is centered on how people find God in their daily lives and in their prayer. What would your daily spiritual practices be, Ross?
- [52:34]
Ross Douthit
Very bad.
- [52:35]
Fr. Jim Martin
Well, everybody says that, by the way.
- [52:37]
Ross Douthit
I know everybody says that, but I really mean it. I'm the exception where it's sincere. No, I mean, this is, is, this is also something I'll say that I appreciate about Catholicism, right? Catholicism, even in sort of non trad forms, imposes a bunch of basic obligations, right? You have to go to Mass on Sunday. You know, there are holy days of obligation. You should go to confession a couple times a year even, you know, obviously you should go to confession more often, but there's sort of minimums you're supposed to hit. And I really do rely on, on those things to keep me attached to spiritual practice. I have always, you know, without, without breaking the seal of the confessional. From my own end, my reliable confessions is, you know, I failed to have a disciplined prayer life of any kind, Father, you know, and I do most of my week's praying at Sunday Mass. And I, I find, I also find that Lent and Advent are tremendously helpful, a sort of a liturgical calendar that, you know, doesn't try and maintain the same pitch all the time that sort of accepts that, like in the summer months, you know, maybe you're going to be thinking about God a little bit less than, you know, in other times of the year, but then says, okay, but here are these moments for intensification, right, where, you know, you're, you're going to be in church a bit more often. You're, you know, if you haven't gone to confession, you're going to be reminded that you should go to confession. And they're going to be organized around, you know, the most powerful stories in the New Testament, right around the birth of Jesus, around the death and resurrection of Jesus. I really rely on those aspects of Catholicism to prevent my faith from becoming a kind of abstract and intellectual thing, which I think is always the temptation for people who, you know, write about religion and politics.
- [54:31]
Right.
- [54:32]
You know, write in public about the Catholic Church. There's always. There's always a temptation to regard that, in a weird way, as, like, how you're being Catholic. Well, of course I'm Catholic. I. I write about Catholicism for the New York Times. Right. And that is obviously, not only is that insufficient, that's, you know, often actively counterproductive. But, yes, in my. In my mediocrity and failure to maintain sort of certain disciplines, I rely heavily on the church's calendar and the things that it concretely expects me to do.
- [55:05]
Fr. Jim Martin
Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that, Ross. We take a question from the audience, and here's our question. It's from someone named Luis, and the question is, how do I advance with my spiritual life when my church life feels so stagnant? Are they two halves of the same coin?
- [55:24]
Ross Douthit
See, that, that. I mean, that's a really good question, but it seems, you know, slightly. Slightly above my pay grade. I think that you absolutely don't want to feel like there's some kind of separation between your spiritual life and your church life. Doesn't mean that they, you know, are going to perfectly overlap. But if your church life is not delivering some kind of spiritual nourishment, then you need to shake things up a little bit. And maybe that's as simple as, you know, attending a different mass of the masses that your church. I mean, if you're Catholic.
- [56:05]
Right.
- [56:05]
Let's assume. Assume you're Catholic and you're not, you know, church shopping widely.
- [56:08]
Right.
- [56:09]
But maybe, you know, maybe it's a sign. Yeah. That you need a new devotional life, that you should be reading a different set of books or, you know, there's a lot of diversity within Catholicism. Another thing that I. That I appreciate.
- [56:24]
Right.
- [56:25]
And, you know, maybe. Maybe the form of Catholicism that you're experiencing is not what God actually wants you to experience. I would also say one other thing. The saints are a very helpful aspect of. Of Catholic life.
- [56:41]
Right.
- [56:41]
The. The idea that there are essentially people you can talk to who have, you know, experienced what it is to be a human being.
- [56:51]
Right.
- [56:51]
I mean, Jesus experienced what it is to be a human being, obviously.
- [56:54]
But.
- [56:54]
But the saints do feel a little bit closer in some way. And one thing I definitely do when I'm hanging around different churches is find altars with saint statues. And you talk to them, ask them for help, and sometimes you don't get some because they're busy with other requests from people with tighter relationships to them. And sometimes you do get help. And so that, that's just sort of all purpose Catholic advice. I think when you're, when you feel like church, as church is not delivering what it should, it's okay to just sort of ask for help with that.
- [57:35]
Fr. Jim Martin
Well, Ross, thank you for answering Luis's question and thank you for answering all of our questions. It's been a delight to have you on our show. Thank you so much.
- [57:43]
Ross Douthit
Absolutely. Thank you, Father. It's been a pleasure.
- [57:45]
Sam Foreign.
- [58:18]
Fr. Jim Martin
If you enjoyed this conversation on the spiritual life, I encourage you to head over to America magazine.org where you'll find an article written by me and some of my spiritual takeaways from this podcast. Each conversation we have is so rich and complex that it's important to continue to reflect on these themes and how they apply to our daily lives. So head over to america magazine.org or click in the link in the description to get started. See you there. I would. I was so glad that he came on our show. I really was.
- [59:06]
Maggie Van Doren
Yeah, I was too. And I was really appreciative of the conversation that you had with him about his suffering with Lyme disease and, and really just suffering in general. It's such an evocative topic for so many people, myself included. And it, it left me, Jim, with this question, really, which is, you know, does God want our suffering or does God need for us to go through experiences of suffering like the one he described? And how do we reconcile that with the image of Jesus that we find in Scriptures of Jesus saying, I come that you might have life and have it to the full.
- [59:46]
Fr. Jim Martin
Exactly. Well, you know, I could have talked with him about that for another hour or two because it is, I mean, it is the question of the mystery of suffering, right? Why is there suffering? Why do we suffer? Why do others suffer? And, and, you know, I think the, the most honest answer for that is we don't know.
- [60:02]
Ross Douthit
Right?
- [60:03]
Fr. Jim Martin
I mean, this side of the grave, we really don't know. But I think there's certain perspectives. And one of the perspectives that, you know, he was talking about was that when we suffer, this is not a reason for suffering. But, you know, when we suffer, sometimes we are more vulnerable.
- [60:17]
Ross Douthit
Right.
- [60:18]
Fr. Jim Martin
And God can break in in a certain way. So again, as I said in the, the podcast, it's not as if God causes Ross Doutha to suffer in order that he might learn things. It's that suffering is part of everyone's life. It's part of was Part of Jesus life, obviously. And in those moments, sometimes we are open to that. I think some of the things I think that are the most helpful with people who suffer are first recognizing that Jesus suffered.
- [60:46]
Ross Douthit
Right.
- [60:46]
Fr. Jim Martin
That Jesus suffered not just on the cross, but that Jesus suffered in his day to day life. He got sick, he had friends who died. We can presume Joseph died during his young adulthood. So Jesus suffers and therefore we are with a God who understands our suffering. I think that's really important, that Jesus is accompanying us in our suffering. You know, we pray to Jesus. We know that Jesus is hearing us in our prayers and that also there is no cross without a resurrection.
- [61:15]
Ross Douthit
Right.
- [61:16]
Fr. Jim Martin
That ultimately God wants to bring us life. But, you know, it's a great question, Maggie. And I think really the answer, it's a mystery. I know you're not asking for this, but to give a quick answer I think would really sort of denude the question of its importance. And I think that's what Ross's book is really trying to get at. And that's one of the points of his book, what he got from that experience. Right. And I know you've dealt with this in your own life with other people, but a lot of times it's not what we can sort of impose on people as answers for suffering, but it's encouraging people to find meaning in their suffering. And this, I will say this is Ross's meaning, you know, that he gleaned from his suffering. So that's how I would answer that question.
- [62:01]
Maggie Van Doren
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I definitely did not intend to throw the big theological question at you, but I do feel like we're all asking it in different ways at different points in our life and finding new answers and different meaning depending on the individual and their circumstances. So I was just curious to hear what you gleaned from Ross's own encounter with suffering.
- [62:24]
Ross Douthit
Yeah.
- [62:25]
Fr. Jim Martin
And also at the end, you know, when he talked about, again, this is not the reason God does not, you know, give Lyme disease to this person for this reason. But, you know, at the end I found very touching. You know, he's more grateful for the ordinary things in his life.
- [62:37]
Ross Douthit
Right.
- [62:38]
Fr. Jim Martin
I mean, you know, driving his kids to a vacation. And so this was the meaning that he was able to gather from that. You know, it's funny, I took a pastoral counseling class. I took a couple when I was, you know, studying theology. And, you know, one of the things they told us was that, you know, we could go in and give people in a hospital or who are dying or who are suffering, you know, an answer or our answers. Right. But it's just as important to help people find their own meaning.
- [63:07]
Maggie Van Doren
Yes.
- [63:07]
Fr. Jim Martin
You know, in the suffering, because it's more personal and it's their meaning. And it's also, you don't want to get in between, you know, God's grace and them because what they glean and what they learn and what they understand from their suffering and about their suffering, I think really is more important than an answer you can give them.
- [63:25]
Ross Douthit
Right.
- [63:26]
Fr. Jim Martin
To kind of impose on them. So I was really grateful to hear his perspective on that.
- [63:30]
Maggie Van Doren
Yeah, absolutely.
- [63:32]
Fr. Jim Martin
Each week I write an article to accompany the podcast that'll be on America Media. And I'll talk more about this in that article.
- [63:39]
Maggie Van Doren
Great.
- [63:41]
Fr. Jim Martin
So I want to thank all of our listeners and viewers. Thanks to Maggie, of course. Thank you to Luis for his wonderful question. The Spiritual Life with Father James Martin is a production of America Media. It's produced by Maggie Van Dorn and our executive producer, Sebastian Gomes. We recorded in the William J. Lo Shirt studio in New York City with the production assistance of Kevin Christopher Robles. Our audio engineer is Noah Levinson. Adam Buckmuller edited the video of this episode which will be made available on America Media's YouTube channel. The theme score is courtesy of Teddy Abrams and Nate Farrington. You can follow me across social media amesmartinsj. Also, please help us grow the show by leaving a five star review on your favorite podcast platform. If you love the spiritual life, then we have even more to offer you on America magazine's website. Keep informed, even inspired, about our Catholic faith. Become a subscriber today@amer America magazine.org subscribe or click the link in the show notes. Thanks so much and God bless you.
- [64:56]
Ross Douthit
Sa.