Sunday To Sunday Attentive Heart

Welcome to the Attentive Heart Podcast where we explore how an integration of mind, body, and spirit makes us whole and enables us to become more compassionate to ourselves and to others. I'm your host, John Gribowich.

And today, my guest is Kaya. Kaya, why don't you just tell us a little bit more about your background and what occupies most of your time these days?

So my name is Kaya Oakes and I'm a writer and I teach writing at UC Berkeley.
I write about religion, primarily, about the Catholic Church and how it intersects with people in the margins. And I am currently at work on a book that is tentatively called Not So Sorry: The Limits of Forgiveness, which is an exploration of when forgiveness is and is not possible.

Yeah, there’s so much to say, just with that. So, you know, I first knew of you from your publications, primarily in Commonweal and in America, and it was really great to eventually meet you in person when I was studying at UC Berkeley. And, you know, I'm just so taken by your journey. Like how you are able to make the intersection between faith and I guess your own life experiences, your own struggles. So I mean, is there something that brought you into the place of knowing that your faith is important to those struggles, or is what's able to make sense of them? I mean, was there a moment in time when that started to connect that way? Or how did that evolve?

Well, I wrote a book about it. About 10, or 12 years ago, published a book called Radical Reinvention, which is a story about how in my soul I was raised Catholic, and like many GenXers, and millennials and Gen z's, I kind of checked out of the church in my teens, and then what brought me back and made me realize that I do have a very spiritual side that is fed by religion of and specifically Christianity. What made me realize that was, you know, just as with many people, I had a series of losses, people close to me who died, my own struggles with depression. And that absence revealed that at the bottom of the absence, there wasn't much there.

And so for some people, who are more secular, they can fill that in other ways, creatively, or with the natural world, and I love those things, but I needed something else. And so that brought me back to religious practice. And of it's complicated, messy, and sometimes inconvenient things that come out of that. But yeah, so the ark was basically that's the basics of the ark. Sure. And how did you make that entry back? I mean, that could be daunting in and of itself. Is it just simply like showing up at the closest church? I mean, like, how did you get that point of entry or reentry, I should say?

Like many people, I just went back to where I started. So I went back to my childhood church. I still live where I grew up. So that was easier for me than for many people. And I happen to hear a homily by this very old priest, who was in his 90s and I thought it was so kind and generous. I thought he would be a good person to talk to. And so I, you know, made an appointment with him. And his name is Father All Moser. He died. He was a Polish priest. He died about, oh my gosh, he died the year Donald Trump was elected. So like a lot of people died.

But he really just was like, he said something that I always remember which is, I was very concerned that I would not be able to come in. I would have to give up a lot of who I was to get back into the church. And he said that's not true, you know. Everything you're gonna bring with you is a gift, you know, including all of your, all of your politics, all of your, all of your work out with the students that you do. Your identity, everything is part of who you are as a believer, and that you don't check those things at the door.

Yeah, and that was really what I needed to hear. And from there it was, you know, I did RCA, I didn't have to, but I decided that I hadn't had a very good catechesis as a child and that I needed to sort of know more of the nuts and bolts stuff. And because I love doing research and learning. You know, of course, I went off in, you know, it's constantly asking people for book recommendations and things to read and then met a few people who taught at the graduate theological union and took some classes there once in a while. And yeah, so it's just, it was just a matter of like, knocking, you know. Knock on the door and see who answers it. And the right person answered it. I was very lucky in that regard.

Yeah, I was just gonna say, I mean, I guess the thing I was thinking of when you said that, was that, okay, it's great that this priest has the wisdom to say, “Bring who you are”, into this whole new experience, if you want to call it that. But I mean, has it always been that welcoming along the way? I mean, have you found out, I mean, like, how have you been able to negotiate that?

I mean, so part of as, you know, a part of my, what I realized sort of along the way is that, in my, in my pre-Catholic life, or my, you know, my 20s and 30s, I spent a lot of time doing activism and being involved in music in particular. And what those two things kind of have in common is that I met a lot of people who were not interested in religion, and I married somebody who's not religious and a lot of my siblings left the church and, so I was very much. I never, the people who care about me, never questioned my decision to go back to the, I mean, they were confused a little bit and sort of, like, what does this mean? And I didn’t really have a like, let's talk about it. I don't quite understand it. But they respected me enough to kind of come around to understanding it. And that's part of why I started writing about it. To make sense of it to people who aren't religious.

But they know that when I've gotten to know or from the church itself, it's often been things like, not getting invited to this place to speak or I've had speaking invitations rescinded, like they look a little deeper into things. So they've written this and decided not to invite me or somebody asked me recently, have you ever gone to the LA religious education Congress? Which is this giant, right? Yeah, I know. I've never been invited to that. But the no always is answered by a yes, somewhere else, right? So if I'm not invited to the Los Angeles religious education Congress, I am invited to be on a podcast like I recently was, for LGBTQ Christians. And I'm not in that group, but I write about them. And I have a lot of students who identify that way. And so that was like a real gift to be with their community.

So yeah. So I think that no, is usually a temporary thing. When the Church says no, it's usually no for now. And then something else is going to come along. Do you feel it just as if it's the church saying no, or you just felt like a group of people in the church saying no? I mean, I know that maybe it's splitting hairs. But I mean, do you feel as if somehow, you're somewhere on the, I don't know, the theological spectrum that you have your place and like, in relationship to the let's just say, what the church may be hierarchically kind of saying, or I mean like, what do you mean by the church? I guess I should say.

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that, because I do think that, as with politics and everything else, we tend to use a lot of institutional shorthand. Right, right. Like so the left the right of the church, the church is, of course, composed of individuals. But the Catholic Church is hierarchical as an institution. And so there are people at the top. And there are people who are not at the top. And the problem is that the people at the top sometimes aren't hearing what the people who aren't at the top are talking about, right? And that's where this Synod is trying to go. As I've not been following it in a lot of great detail. But I know some friends who've gone to like listening sessions. And so this is sort of like an attempt to hear, you know, from the people who aren't at the top. But when I talk about the church, I'm usually thinking about the institutional church, which does mean the hierarchical church.

So like, the no that Catholics often feel, when they knock at the door of something, what they hear from the church is the church as a group, of people of men, you know, mostly at the top, are just not hearing them knocking, right? They don't even hear the knock. So that's what I mean by that. So like the know is often coming from, you know, you're not like, me, personally, I don't grieve not being invited to things. Like, to me, that's just sort of like, that's the way it is. Like for some people, when they feel that they're getting that institutional no, like, they take that very hard, and they leave as we know, right? Right. So and that's, that's the tragedy, right there is that people feel like they're never they're gonna just keep knocking forever? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, does that just knowing that I mean, has that really been the impetus, a lot of the things that you have written about is just dealing with people who are disenfranchised?

I mean, that'd be a good way of looking at it. I think that you, from what I read of yours, you're definitely intrigued by that group. If you want to call it a group or by the person in that position. Does that motivate you to want to see, where is God in the midst of all that, so to speak? Or what the church could do there? I mean, what draws your passion and what you want to write and how do you arrive at that?

I think I realized some years ago, I was on a retreat. And this is when I was still pretty new, this is probably the last retreat I've gone on. This was quite a while ago, but I was still kind of new to being back into practice, and I was on a retreat with the Jesuits. And I talked to the spiritual director I had and I said, I was, you know, I was working on that my first book about Catholicism, and I was kind of in the weeds with it. And he said, you know, somebody needs to. There needs to be somebody who's listening for the people who can't speak up, you know. And I keep what he said, including himself, right. And I thought priests can say anything they want. You and I, you and I both know, it's not necessarily true.

And so it was really a shock for me to hear this gentlemanly, older priest say, there are things I wanted to say, but sometimes I can't say them. And so I need a writer or a journalist or a parishioner or somebody to be that person. I take that very seriously because I think the responsibility of journalism is to, you know, it's the Studs Terkel thing it's like, to question the powerful, but also to amplify the power of less. And as a Catholic journalist, like an essayist, and writer, I take that very seriously. So yeah, I've tried to do my best.

Yeah, I mean, I would say that sounds almost like you found a vocation within this, that you definitely are responding to a need, that others just may or not responding to these in such a poignant way. You know, I'm just thinking more about this reentry experience for you and it sounds as if it was very much connected to your own love for academics. The intellect, I mean, your mind definitely seems to be, it is very much stimulated by this whole delving back into your faith. But was there a practice that started to emerge as well? Like, what did your spiritual practice look like? Or what does it look like? Or how were you kind of show a different way to pray, let's say or where are you?

I was introduced to contemplation and through I was introduced to contemplative practices through Jesuit spirituality initially. So the Examine, for those who are listening and are familiar with it, is at the end of the day, you sort of just go backward through your day and think about where you were close to God and where God was distant. Now do I do that every night? No, but it was a good starting point for me.

And then as things have gone along, and over the course of COVID, and being separated physically, from a religious community over the course of COVID, I've become much more interested in solitary practices of contemplation, in the sense that I read and wrote a lot about
Christian mystics during the pandemic, particularly women who were solitaries. And like Julian of Norwich, came to be very important to my spirituality, because I was trapped in a monastic cell on Zoom for two years, just like everybody else.

But one thing about her spirituality is that it's very grounded in these really kind of startling, intimate encounters with Jesus that she doesn't expect to have. And then for the rest of her life, people come to her as a wisdom figure, but she's sealed off from the world in this cell. But one thing I learned in the process of writing about her is that one of those two windows in the cell that she lives in, one looks out into the village square and the other inside church. And I think that's such a metaphor for contemplative practices. That while we're kind of like spiritually, meditating, and being in silence, and being separate from the world in solitude, we're also facing the world and its problems and taking them into our hearts in prayer.

And I also read years ago, a book called An Infinity of Little Hours, which is about the Carthusians, and it's an account of these five men who joined the Carthusians. So they all read Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain in the 1950s. And they all are, maybe 60s, when did it come out? I think it actually came out in the 40s. Yeah. So that yeah, so they all read it, and they all rush off to become monks. And then it's about what happens in that solitude. And how frightening it is because Cathusians as you know, live in a very extreme form of solitude, where they only speak to other people once a week or something like that.

So, that book has really stuck with me because it's that, again, that interior life can be, we can romanticize solitude, we can romanticize monasticism. And the fact is that the solitary practice of prayer is harder in some ways than going to church and being in a community. So yeah, so these days, I'm very much interested in how do we take solitude and use it to be more present to our communities. You know, like, how can solitary prayer sharpen our empathy, and make it greater?

Wow, that's so great, because that's definitely something I'm very fascinated by. How well first of all, is there a time of the day that's best for you to be in this kind of solitary, contemplative space? I mean, do you have like a rhythm to this? Or is it just when you know you need to do it or what does that look like right now?

It's kind of a mess right now because I'm teaching and it’s the great disruptor and the great joy of my life is like being in a classroom with students. I love it. I feel very alive in that space, but it's very time-consuming and I'm also writing a book so I've lost my rhythm but in a good time when I'm more or less stressed out I love to be up early in the morning like which I used to hate. I used to be a night bird. And I've completely transformed into a morning person. So I like to get up early and have that quiet morning time, especially in the winter, which is when it's dark outside and still. I find that very spiritual.

I read, again, it might have been in that book about the current nations, and it might have been somewhere else that part of why people get up at 3 am, to pray mountains, in some monastic orders is because that's like when the world is most spiritually in danger. Because, yeah, I just thought that's so fascinating. But for those of us who have insomnia, it's like, that's when you wake up, right? It's 3 am on the dot. But that's a good time to sit there and be, you know, to you to think about being in gratitude for God and for life and for other people. And yeah, so that, and then I'm a big fan of prayer throughout the day, just kind of like making it part of the daily like, I don't stop and pray in the middle of the day, but just to be in prayer, like kind of constantly like in walking and talking and communication with people and just have moments of being thankful to God for like the encounters that I have the places the things that I see.

And leaving last night, somebody broke the window of my car, I had been at dinner with a friend and we were actually having this great conversation about spirituality and about religion, because that's what happens when you make friends with other people like this stuff, right? I came out and someone had broken my car window and I didn't get upset. I was just like, “Well, I live in Oakland, this is what happens.” You know, like, this sucks. But also, I'm so grateful that I had that time with my friend. That, you know, this is a little thing that just happened to happen. And I'm just gonna take care of it and get it fixed. But it just sort of felt like I wasn't mad at the person. I just had this I was just in such a state of like gratitude that it didn't faze me, though.

Plus is not the first. Right, right, right. So funny car windows had been repaired. I remember when I was living in Berkeley, and someone gave me a car to use, and then it got stolen. I was like, Oh my gosh, it's one thing to have your own car stolen, but then have someone else's car stolen. Or like, oh my god, like, but for some strange reason I was like, okay, you know, it's alright. And even my friend who gave me the car was like, it's okay. And then I told the police like, oh, yeah, I'll probably come back in like a week or so. Like, what do you mean, come back like sounds like a chat or something.

And lo and behold, it's like two weeks later, you know, it was like a joyride deal. Right and right, and I got the car back. And it's so interesting. Like, when you have those moments, where you're just being able to let go of what's happening whenever something does come back or something new presents itself it's like this. Your hearts are even more grateful for what's happening. It's like this, like an almost unexpected blessing.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Attentive Heart Podcast. We hope that you were able to find it helpful in your spiritual journey in practice. This podcast is produced in collaboration with Sunday to Sunday productions and the Witness podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, and you'd like to help support the podcast, please subscribe and share it with friends.