In the final episode of this series, Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to author and podcaster Vanessa Zoltan. 26/01/2022

Vanessa worked in education and nonprofits before attending Harvard Divinity School to become a non–denominational atheist chaplain. Whilst at Harvard she and Casper Ter Kuile who was also a guest on the podcast, launched a class and then a very successful podcast based around the idea of reading Harry Potter as a sacred text. She is now CEO and founder of Not Sorry Productions, which produces the podcasts ‘Harry Potter and the Sacred Text’, ‘Twilight in Quarantine’, and ‘Hot and Bothered’, which is about treating romance novels as sacred. Her first book is called ‘Praying with Jane Eyre.’

In this episode she speaks about her childhood raised in an atheist but practising Jewish home as the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, what she means by reading other texts as sacred and what we might all learn from it.

Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about what’s sacred to us, by which I mean the deep principles and values that guide us, or that we’d like to guide us consciously or unconsciously, in the adventures of life that we’re all on. It came out of my increasing dismay about growing tribalism and division, and the way we are letting ourselves be formed into increasingly angry groups who don’t understand each other. We disagree on a lot, yes, but I have a hunch that most people are more interesting than they seem, more conflicted than they express, and that when we get beyond the tweets and the headlines to a deeper form of attention, almost everyone is harder to dismiss and even dehumanize than we expect them to be. Asking someone to reflect on what they hold sacred is a shortcut to depth. All of that makes the podcast sound more complicated and grandiose than it is. Every episode, you’ll just hear a conversation, hopefully a deep conversation with people from a range of professions, political positions, religious and non–religious persuasions. 

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In this episode, you’ll hear a conversation I had with Vanessa Zoltan. Vanessa worked in education and nonprofits before attending Harvard Divinity School to become a non–denominational atheist chaplain. Whilst at Harvard she and Casper Ter Kuile who I’ve also interviewed on the podcast, launched a class and then a very successful podcast based around the idea of reading Harry Potter as a sacred text. She is now CEO and founder of Not Sorry Productions, which produces the podcasts ‘Harry Potter and the Sacred Text’, ‘Twilight in quarantine’, and ‘Hot and bothered’, which is about treating romance novels, including Jane Eyre, as sacred. Her first book is called ‘Praying with Jane Eyre.’
We spoke about her childhood raised in an atheist but practising Jewish home as the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, the kind of threads of her career seeking to, I think she used the phrase, just to think about the most interesting things – if you’re going to use your life well, why not think about the most interesting things around injustice and inclusion, and hospitality? She also explained a bit about what she means by reading other texts, Harry Potter and Jane Eyre and others, as sacred, and what we might all learn from it. I really enjoyed speaking to Vanessa, and I really hope you enjoy listening.

Elizabeth
Vanessa – I feel like there’s some sort of sisterhood of the sacred that we share in, you probably have thought about this word more than I have even because you’ve been wandering around it for longer. Before I ask you what’s sacred to you, what’s your relationship to the word? And do you have a working definition?

Vanessa
Yeah, I love the word sacred. I think that something is sacred if it gets you better at loving, I think something is sacred if it’s generative, and makes you think in an expansive way, if it is – essentially if it inspires you to keep thinking and I think something is sacred if it brings you closer to loving your neighbour, right? Like if it has material good in your life and in the world, then I think it’s sacred.

Elizabeth
You’ve had a bit of time to think what might be sacred to you, what might be your sacred value. And I’m really excited to hear because I have read and listened to you talking so much about the practice of treating something as sacred. So I’m wondering if it will be the things that you have chosen to treat as sacred or maybe a principle that came earlier than that kind of conscious choosing that happened to you later in life.

Vanessa
I think that the way to pick a sacred value is to try to figure out what your gift is, and then live into like that as your supreme value that you can offer the world right, as your like bottom line, what is my goal, value. And, and I – so for me, it’s hospitality. I like, really want to host not just physically but like in community spaces, I want to be as inclusive to as broad of a group of people as possible, I want to be thinking about who it is that doesn’t have structural power in any community that I’m in and try to rectify that, like all of that, to me is wrapped up in radical hospitality.

Elizabeth
Let’s wind back, because I want to hear some of your spiritual autobiography, something that divinity schools teach people to do. And so with you, it will be easier than with some guests to connect some of the dots about why the thing that is sacred to you is sacred. First, just paint me a bit of a word picture of your childhood. What were the big ideas around when little Vanessa was growing up in – California? That’s right?

Vanessa
Yeah. San Fernando Valley. So I come by my ‘likes’ and ‘totallys’ and ‘definitelys’ very authentically. And I grew up Jewish in a large Orthodox Jewish family, extended family. But my immediate family, there were three kids. So there are five of us. And we were atheist Jews who went to Shabbat dinner at my grandparents every Friday night, who went to Hebrew school three days a week, we behaved in a lot of ways as a conservative Jewish family, but very strict and devout atheist in my house, and that comes from the fact that all four of my grandparents were Auschwitz survivors. So both of my parents were raised by Auschwitz survivors. Both of my grandfathers came out as atheists. And there was just a profound belief, you know, that my dad would say, ‘If God exists, then he sure hates the wrong people.’ And so there’s just a real sense of like, trying to create a sense of justice on this earth.

Elizabeth
I’d love to drill down into that a bit more. I was joking with Abbie, who’s on our production team, just before you got on the call about – I think this podcast might lead me into ending up as a therapist because I find it’s such a privilege and such a gift to like, listen closely and read about someone and then have the complexity of a human being in front of me and with you, it’s been particularly joyful because you’ve really processed a lot of the way that part of your childhood has shaped you. And I’d love you to say a little bit more about kind of inherited or generational trauma and what we know about that with epigenetics and what does it mean for how it shaped your worldview and some of the commitments you’ve made of how you want to be in the world?

Vanessa
My father was born during what is called the Dutch famine, so that, um, and, as I’m sure most of your listeners know, I don’t think it’s as common in the US to know about it, right. It was just like, the depression after the war. And so he was born in 1942, to a body that had just survived Auschwitz. And so like, most likely have really high cortisol levels, and all sorts of malnutrition levels and my grandmother, like lived till 96, three of my grandparents lived till quite an old age, but my father has just had, like, unexplained – he had a brain tumour that he got really young in life and has had severe health issues that tend to trend with people exactly his age, my partner’s mother was exactly the same age and died of a similar auto immune thing. And she was born in Germany after the war. And so this is just like a generation of people who were born between 1945 and 1949, who tend to have a lot of health issues, just due to the stress of the bodies that they were sort of baked in, is the theory. Who knows.

Elizabeth
But there is some data, right, I was reading that even like grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, a group that you would fit into, have much higher rates of mental health challenges. There does seem to be some mechanism that is – whether it’s genetic or in the kind of way that people are raised that means these things don’t stop when the suffering, immediate suffering, stops.

Vanessa
Right. And, you know, there are stories about my grandmother that – Not surprisingly, right, she was one person before the war, one person after. And we think that most likely, she had undiagnosed bipolar disorder in her postwar years. And like, the things that she witnessed, you know, when you hear her stories, like if there’s like a genetic switch that we’re all born with, and some switches are sort of like more greased and easier to flip than others, like, I feel like, no matter how easy her switch was to flip, it makes sense to me that it was with all the trauma that she went through. But we were really raised that the Holocaust was like, entirely preventable. And that, you know, there are like fascist dictators who rise, but that neighbours can prevent these things. And so we were really raised that like, you know, very few Danish Jews died because Danes took in Jews, and very few Bulgarian Jews died, right? Because Bulgarians took in Jews, so there was sort of a ranking of which countries we, you know, valued more than others in a sort of sick way, but based on how they treated Jews. We were also raised, like that FDR could have bombed the railroads that were taking Jews to the concentration camps, and he didn’t, just essentially that, like, all of these were preventable things. And, and so therefore, it was like, our responsibility to be trying to prevent those things with other people. I want to live my life in a way that I would be the kind of person who would save me, who would save my grandparents. And part of that isn’t necessarily for me being like, you know, I don’t need to be like out there, you know, risking my life and saving people in massively creative ways. But just like connecting with neighbours and right like, people really turned a blind eye in a pretty significant way. I do think it’s really important to connect with neighbours and keep an eye on each other and if we all do that, we’ll fight climate change better. It’s so idealistic and silly, but like, we all worry about 20 people around us, regardless of their like, creed, race, you know, economic class, manners, then like we’ll sort of all be OK.

Elizabeth 
And tell me a bit about, um, tell me a bit about if you’re happy to talk about your depression because you write and you speak about being someone who deals with quite serious periods of depression, at what age did that begin to kick in for you?

Vanessa
My first memory of feeling depressed was at five. I’m sure that I was before that, but, um, and really started struggling with it at like, seven, I would miss school a lot. I had strep throat a lot when I was seven, but I also just would miss school because I was, I was sad. I was just like, too sad to go to school. Phases of being totally fine and then phases of being severely depressed. I got diagnosed when I was 23. And have had a, I’ve had a pretty good run with mental health since then. And I’ve had like, two really severe depression since then, where, you know, I was like, unable to function for a couple of months. I have I think a pretty unhealthy view of my depression, I think, because I’m a depressed person, which is like, I believe that depressed people see the world in a more realistic way. And Freud talked about this in his essay on melancholia, and you know, Freud gets a big asterix, but like, you know, his theory was that like, depressed people are better at predicting than non–depressed people. So it’s interesting, right? Like, I really remember in moments of depression, being like, I want this to end and yet, I can see something more clearly in the world right now than when I’m not depressed. When I’m not depressed all it is, is that I’m distracted from the truth of the world, which is like, life is painful and we are constantly hurting one another. But I prefer to be distracted. And of course, like that is a depressed person’s point of view, that depression is truer so I am completely aware of the fact that maybe that’s wrong.

Elizabeth
Has – I imagine it has because our cultures are so interdependent – numbers in the UK at least we’ve been through this real revolution in the last 10 years in terms of public conversation about mental health. Does that happen there? And has that affected you? Have you noticed it? Does it make it easier at all?

Vanessa
You know, it’s so hard because how can you separate like, I’m now in my 30s. So I’m more comfortable with myself. The big thing that made me feel comfortable talking about my mental health problems was becoming self employed. And I only worked for men prior to starting my own company. And I did not feel comfortable ever talking about my mental health. Essentially, once I was financially secure through podcasting, I was like, Okay, now I can talk about this. And then the other thing that happened is I was living with college students for eight years. And I was just really aware of like the young women. So throughout my 30s, I lived in freshman dorms as sort of a dorm mom. And, you know, the young women are like watching you, they’re watching you and your relationship to your body and to romance. And it was a really meaningful way to live, to try to live up to my values, because I knew that like these 18 year old eyes were watching me. And even if they weren’t, I still wanted to sort of live up something, right? It wasn’t as self–centred as I’m making it sound.

Elizabeth
Interesting. But let’s kind of fill in the blanks career wise, because you went and studied English. And you had this period in kind of education and nonprofits. And then at 30 went to divinity school to study to be a chaplain. What was the thread you’re pulling? And what were you following through those wavy, professional parts?

Vanessa 
Two things. One, the reason that I switched professional paths to a large extent was that the 2008/2009 financial crisis, I was like, I’m gonna have to work until the day that I die. And so I might as well really do something that I love to do. And I love to read, write and chat with people. Like those are the things that I most love to do. So I started thinking about careers where like, that is what you get to do and chaplaincy was sort of there. And then at the same time, I was just getting like, this is not news, but I was raised that education is sort of the difference between what my parents and grandparents had access to and what I had access to, right, like education was the value that I was raised with and so I always thought I would be a teacher and work in education. In the United States, our educational system is so bifurcated, and so messed up. And that is just because of racism. And I was like, it felt like every nonprofit and every professional development at the school when I was teaching, and everything was always like putting the onus on teachers and on kids and on parents. And I was like, No, this country just like, does not want to teach black and brown children. Like we don’t think that they deserve to be educated. And I was like, it just felt like I was spinning my wheels and pretending that that wasn’t true. I was like, we know how to fix education in this country, right, like you fund schools, irrespective of their tax base, and you pay teachers $120,000 a year and like, that’s it. That’s it. It’s hard, but it’s simple. And like, I was just, like, tired of pretending that wasn’t true. And not everyone who works in education pretends that isn’t true, right. Like, I just didn’t see a path for myself. And so that issue of, of this American idea, that misfortune is somehow karmically deserved, this like puritanical Calvinist idea that we have here seemed to me to be the conversation I wanted to have my whole life that like, debunking that idea, right. I don’t know if this is culturally true also in England, but if you find out someone has cancer, like it’s immediately Oh, did they smoke? Oh, do they not exercise? There’s just this desire to blame people for their bad luck. And it starts in kindergarten in this country of like black children get sent home suspended more in kindergarten. And so I just, I was like, that was the conversation I want to be having and sort of like demystifying the idea that people deserve – have done something to deserve their lot in life.

Elizabeth
Which is a real soul question, right? Is that why you were like, even as an atheist, maybe Divinity School?

Vanessa
Yeah. And that’s exactly the question. That’s exactly how I framed the question. I was like, that is the soul break. Right? Like that is something that on a soul level is broken in us. And I think it’s unconscious bias, right. Like, I don’t think that people are consciously having this thought, but it’s just troubling enough that – I don’t know, you only have one life, you might as well think about the interesting things.

Elizabeth
So you showed up at Harvard Divinity School with very strong Jewish practice in your background, but a very strong sense of the absence of God. What was the experience like? It’s still a pretty Christian place, Harvard Divinity School.

Vanessa
Yeah. Um, I think my experience in this for that first year and a half was sort of encapsulated by the fact that one of the things that you had to do in the master’s divinity programme was fill out all the classes you plan to take over your next three years, within your concentrated religion, and my concentrated religion was Judaism. And there were not enough classes to fulfil the requirements on the schedule. And I went up to the sort of head of the department, and did not know that I felt so emotional about it, but like burst into tears. And I was like, you don’t actually have enough classes for me to study Judaism. And like you said you would. And he was like, I will fix this. And so I just sort of had permission to ask professors to study with me, I wanted to study because there weren’t these classes, and I was really interested in treating secular things as sacred. And so I took regular classes for a year and a half in spiritual care and counselling and death and dying and, you know, studying the Hebrew Bible and, and then I was like, Okay, I’m ready to figure out what I want not just general chaplaincy to look like but my chaplaincy to look like. And I have one professor in particular, but three or four professors, who were really willing to work with me on independent projects, to figure out what it meant to treat secular things as sacred, in order to help us figure out what our values are, and how we can live in to our values.

Elizabeth
It sounds to me from what you’ve read and spoken about that you sort of hoped that you might reconnect to Judaism at a more belief level, on the way in, that God and the Torah itself might be the thing that you could treat a sacred – how, was that hard?

Vanessa
I think Judaism is waiting for me in some way that I haven’t figured out yet. But what I tried doing was start going to temple and you know, the prayers, you know, which I love, and every time I hear them, I’m just reminded of like, the shema was famously something that people would say as the gas was filling the gas chambers, which is how Eichmann learned it. And he said the shema when he got arrested in Argentina by the Mossad, like trying to be like, I know the shema too. Right. Like and he learned to…

Elizabeth
Vomit.

Vanessa
I know so like he hurt right? Like he learned it by listening to people say it as they were dying. And I just like – I can’t not hear that whenever I hear the shema and so I was – it just like always took me out of it. Like temple just became this huge, to use a very millennial word, a huge trigger for me of like, like this isn’t spiritual. This is just traumatic. Yeah. So it didn’t work. I am going to find a way because I love Judaism.

Elizabeth
Meanwhile, Jane Eyre – tell me about Jane and how it came to be something that you felt committed to treating as sacred.

Vanessa
So I think really just naiveté. I had tried going to temple and it wasn’t working. And so I asked, I was like, Okay, do you know what will work – something that doesn’t trigger me and something that isn’t traumatising in some big way. And I was like Jane Eyre my favourite book. That’ll be so easy. And so I brought it to Stephanie Purcell to teach me how to treat something as sacred

Elizabeth
Stephanie was one of your professors?

Vanessa
One of my professors. Thank you. She’s a professor of the practice of ministry. And, you know, I, like realise that it’s about, like, at the centre, it’s about a woman with mental health problems, right? I was like, Oh, this is about me in a lot of ways. And it’s like a deeply upsetting book, right? Like, I fell in love with it at 14. And like, it is really racist about Jamaicans and the West Indes in general. And it is like very pro colonialism and missionary work. And, you know, Rochester locks his crazy wife in the attic. And so I, it was, it was very earnest of me. And it taught me a lot of lessons, especially to separate the word sacred from perfect. It taught me a lot about what it meant to treat something as sacred, I might actually wonder if that will be the thing that can like get me to go back to the Torah.

Elizabeth
So talk me through in a very like, painting by numbers way, what do you do when you treat a text as sacred, because it’s become something that you now do in a range of text, and you make a living –various people are learning and, embarrassingly, I learned how to do Lectio Divina and a bunch of Christian sacred reading practices through listening to your podcast on sacred texts. So I learned this from you. And there’ll be many listeners who don’t have the understanding of what does it mean? What are the commitments that you’re making? What are the practices that you do to treat for example, Jane Eyre sacred?

Vanessa
Yeah, to be clear, almost everything I know about the world I know from pop culture and romance novels, so this is a safe space for knowing very important things for very stupid reasons. Not that listening to my podcast is stupid, of course. So the premise is, as I said, this idea of … of experimental certainty, you are going to behave, quote unquote, as if the text is sacred. And the way to pick a sacred text, what I would say is that you should pick the text you already love because it’s a big commitment to try to treat a text as sacred and so might as well already like the thing. And then the other is this thing that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation of like, does it inspire you? Does it generate ideas for you? Um, and like, that’s essentially a way to say like, Mein Kampf doesn’t make you think, it makes you act, right. Like, it doesn’t inspire you, it’s certainly not towards love, which is how I would define one of the words inspire. So those are the preconditions. And then in order to treat the text as sacred, we talk about faith, rigour and community. And faith is just the belief that the more time you spend with it, the more blessings the text will give you and that even when it’s frustrating you and disappointing you, and, you know, challenging you and in annoying ways, even that is a blessing. And then rigour is just some form of commitment. You know, I’m going to read Proust for five minutes every day is what one of my favourite authors Mary Gordon does. The way that we do rigour with these sacred reading practices that you were talking about, of, you know, and there are several Judeo Christian ones, and there are a bunch of non Christian ones that we don’t do as much for appropriation reasons, but they’re just, you know, ways that priests and monks and nuns and rabbis and people in Bible study have been reading these texts for years. And they’re what my former cohost Casper Ter Kuile would call spiritual technologies, right that like, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. So those are Lectio Divina practices, sacred imagination, which is based on St. Ignatius, says practice of sacred reading that are codified ways to sort of get really deep into a text. And then the third thing that we talked about is community, which is just that it’s better to do it with people than alone. And there’s the gym buddy effect, just like an accountability partner. And then there is also the fact that you won’t become a zealot or fall to despair or any number of other things if you were doing it with another person.

Elizabeth
So you develop this way of treating texts other than the things that we commonly call sacred texts, as sacred. And, you know, these principles of rigour and faith and community. And then Casper comes along and says, Yeah, Jane Eyre, very nice, but how about we try with a book people actually want to read? Reading group starts from Harry Potter, and then you started this podcast, which, because of a sort of, because very good and because of a quirk on iTunes front page, it seems suddenly you had a very large listenership, too, and were quasi responsible for quasi leading this kind of rapidly forming community of people hungry for the moral seriousness of treating text as sacred, doing Harry Potter sacred and the sense of community around it. What was that experience like emotionally?

Vanessa
We actually really denied having a community – people would be like, Oh, it’s such an honour to be part of this community. And we’d be like, This is not a community, you are listeners, you do not know each other. And so if one of you breaks your leg, nobody is bringing you soup. Like, No, you are not part of a community, this community is not taking care of you, that is how you define community. And so we were constantly like yelling at people that they were not a community.

Elizabeth
Bet that went down brilliantly

Vanessa
And we’re like, they’re not, you’re listeners. Right? Like, they were like, No, we’re not. We’re a community. And so it really, like we just kept responding to them, right? The podcast is based on a class the Casper and I led. And so people were like, Oh, how can we lead the classes ourselves. And so we just like made a little video and like, drew up a letter, like, this is how we did it. Good luck. Now we have almost 100 local groups all over the world that do it. And, you know, people wanted us to do a live show. And so we did a live show when we realised that it was like church, like we were sacred living together. And so we started touring and doing these events with people and people wanted to know how to do sacred reading practices. So we started making videos about how to do them at home, and, and then eventually just became a full time job. You know, people wanted more immersive experiences. So we launched a pilgrimage programme. And I, you know, it’s just been so fun. Like, we get to be creative with what it is. But I think that the community decided they were a community. And then we were like, Okay, I guess we’re facilitating a community.

Elizabeth
Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve gone back recently, but listening to some of those early episodes with the voicemails…Thinking about what happened, it feels to me like, for so many people, they were feeling a very strong void of the long withdrawing roar of – many of them raised in religious communities, this kind of big spike of religious nones that we’re seeing, who often get, I think, unfairly written off for not being morally serious or not being committed to things, but hungry for spaces. How do you think about what you’re trying to do now? Are you championing a group of people? Did you toy with like, Is this a new religious movement? Like, what is it? How do you think about it to yourself?

Vanessa
We’re not a new religious movement. Right? Like, people are atheists and practising like all sorts of different things who come to our local reading groups and who I do chaplaincy with and who you know…We have weekly classes, and it is in an incredibly, incredibly diverse group of people who all have like different spiritual identities. I mean, I just think of all of our work as chaplaincy. And the podcast, through modelling, you know, friendship and listening, through talking about morally serious things through, you know, we’re trying to sort of model a church community in the way that we talk. And, and, you know, I got a really lovely email this week from someone who said that she learned how to talk to her husband better listening to how Casper and I talked to each other on the podcast. And we’re really honest about that, like, right, we just love each other and take each other’s ideas seriously and say yes, and like, do all the things that, you know, good listeners do. And also I think ‘that’s a bad idea’ moments get edited out of the podcast, right? It’s highly curated. But I still, I think it’s important – we’re honest about that, which is why we have a blooper at the end of every episode to just remind people for a moment of humour, but also to remind people that it’s edited and that this is not how it actually sounds behind the curtain. For some people, it’s just hearing two people be kind to each other, and taking each other seriously that I think they listen to, and just like not being afraid to look for meaning right, one of my professors of Divinity School said that treating something as sacred is about learning from and not about it. And so I think that we’re just modelling for people that that’s okay. So I think of my life a lot as chaplaincy and as modelling, right. It’s why I talk about my mental health on the podcast, why I’m fairly honest about, you know, in a boundaried way, but I’m fairly honest about what’s going on in my life, just to encourage people to live. Without shame.

Elizabeth
One of the things I think is distinctive about your voice is this commitment to – And I can hear it so clearly in the kind of stuff about your childhood, in not distracting ourselves from hard stuff, and dark stuff. And you talk about in your book somewhere, even like deliberately holding on to brutal facts and brutal stories. And some of it might be kind of related to that depression thing that you talked about and your childhood, but as a kind of leader or a chaplain or a person. You – points when I was kind of thinking about this, I think about you as a sort of, almost like a prophet in the Hebrew Bible.

Vanessa
That’s me, talking about Armageddon.

Elizabeth
Well, but also someone who knows how to have fun and read romance novels. So not quite, you know, just that they’re sort of like, and I hear it sometimes in the tension between you and Casper, who’s the co–host, who’s much more optimistic. ‘Let’s look for what’s beautiful.’ And you’re like, ‘No, stay with the trauma, it’s important that we are witnesses to and we stand in solidarity with all who are suffering.’ At the point where you’re like, Okay, no, I can’t – like how do you draw the boundaries around that? Do you worry about that responsibility for the people that are listening because it’s so intimate?

Vanessa
My instinct – my father used to get really annoyed at me for this. My instinct is to like equalise things into a balance. And this is really just like, my Enneagram type, like this is just like, not a value I hold, it is just the way I function in the world. And so if someone else has been depressing, I am going to crack a joke and it is very annoying, right? And if someone else is having too much fun, I’ll be like, but people are suffering. This is like not an attractive quality that I have. And so I try to help it but I can’t always help it. At one point, I mean, one of my favourite outtakes of the podcast ever was Casper says something optimistic. And then he went, ‘I know, I know. But the Holocaust and there are girls in basements right now’ That’s what I was gonna say, like, it’s like a broken record that I can’t like, it’s just what pops in my head.

Elizabeth
That is so helpful. For me. It’s a really like key fact about your temperament, it’s made sense for a lot of things. I wanted to ask as we come into land about engaging across our differences. What have you learned about engaging across differences as a chaplain who sits with people from such a wide range of backgrounds, tribes, beliefs and just accompanies them?

Vanessa
I mean, you get trained in chaplaincy, like we’re all preoccupied with the same thing, right, of like, do I feel loved? Have I been wronged? Have I wronged others? Right? Like, the questions – I really oriented my chaplaincy study with end of life care and working in prisons. And right, like, Ira Byock would say like, there are four big questions, right? Like, do you love me? Do I love you? Do you forgive me? Can I forgive you? And like, those are the questions that we just like, all walk around with, and so, right like differences, just like, you know, if you think about it on that level, it like, doesn’t matter. Now as a deeply political person, I think all of it matters. Um, but when in chaplaincy mode, right? Like that is the only thing that matters. And what you’re pointing out to people is that they love each other, that they’re trying to love each other. And you’re just reminding them that they are loved by you showing up and that they’re worth that dignity of being paid attention to. And so I feel like as a chaplain, differences sort of matter less, and then as like an inadvertent spiritual leader of a community, right? Like, I think it’s my job to always point out the most marginalized group that I can imagine, right, and just constantly be trying to, you know, like, we all just have a spotlight and like, just constantly trying to expand it for myself, and for our listeners to have a wider and wider circle of care, you know, and just care about more and more people and more and more material ways towards justice.

Elizabeth
Do those two parts, have you come into conflict? Are there moments where the like, politically activist awareness of injustice part comes into contact with a tribe that you’re like, No, I cannot love you, no, I cannot forgive you, no, I cannot treat you with dignity because of this other thing or this thing we disagree on?

Vanessa
The moment where this really hit the road is in our recent election with Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. I was super naive and didn’t think Donald Trump had a chance at winning the 2016 election. And so we weren’t super political before that, because I was like Obama’s president and then Hillary Clinton will be president, everything will be fine and the world is just gonna keep existing, you know, whatever. I like cared about politics and social justice, obviously, with the rest of my career, but I wasn’t acutely worried on a political level. And then Trump was elected. And on election day, last year, I put a drop in into the feed, saying, don’t just vote, go vote Biden. And, and I didn’t think I was gonna change a single mind, I was just like, I’m on the record. And like, I would want to be on the record in 1933, for like, not having voted for Hitler, like, I just wanted to be on the frickin record. And we lost a lot of listeners. And, and people wrote to us that they always knew that we were political. But as a Trump supporter, they officially felt judged that day, or that they loved that, although we were always political, we never came down like straight and said it. And people told us that they were hurt by that. And I did, I was just like, I’m fine with that. And it was just a value that it was like more important to me, and maybe it was for like a legacy reasons and really gross reasons, but it was just more important to me to be on the record for what I cared about than taking care of those people on that level. Now, if a Trump supporter came to me and said, I need help, right? Like, help me figure out how to get married in a way that’s meaningful to me, help me, if they came up to me as a chaplain on another topic, I would not let the fact that they support someone who, in my reading of him, is a racist, rapist. Corrupt, racist rapist. But, you know, on election day, that wasn’t how I saw my role. I saw my role as a broadcaster in that day.

Elizabeth
Thanks for sharing it, that’s really helpful. I’m gonna finish with a final question if that’s okay, which is no one fits neatly into a tribe. And in some ways, reinforcing the tribal thing isn’t helpful, but also, it’s sort of how our minds work. So I’m going to sort of paint you as a member of, I was going to say a high priestess which might go too far, of a kind of tribe of millennial and younger Harry Potter listening generation, that are largely non religious. What would you say to someone who’s coming from a completely different tribe or polar opposite tribe that would help them better understand and build empathy with those within the Harry Potter/sacred texts community? What do they constantly mischaracterize or misunderstand that you could kindly say, this is something you should know, or this is something that you should hear from us?

Vanessa
The world is not going well. Like, it’s not great. And so a little bit of imagination and experimentation is probably the way to go. Because the old ways – I want to hold on to a lot of the old ways, like I obviously love traditional religion. And I like talking about Lectio Divina and right like, I have taught more people how to do religious reading than most, you know, rabbis and ministers. So I care a lot about religion and I want to hold on to the best things about the old ways. But like, let’s try some new things because this is a shit show. I think that that’s the other thing we would say. I would say like we are scared. We are scared about having children because of the climate changed world. We are scared about dictatorships rising. We are scared about the fact that we will not live as well as our parents did, that we will never be able to retire, that we will never have decent health care, that we will never get out of student loan debt, like we are scared and so we are trying to find a new way because these are new fears.

Elizabeth
Vanessa Zoltan, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.

Vanessa
Thank you so much.

Elizabeth
Well, thank you for listening to that. This is the section of the podcasts that we are playing with this series where I just reflect a little bit out loud on what I’ve heard listening back. We’d love to hear what you think about this section of the podcast. And I would love to hear if you have any further reflections, if you agree or disagree with me, or something else has stayed in your mind after the interview. 

The really clear thing for me is, of course, I think – I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say, the depth of trauma that the Holocaust left because it feels like we should all know that. But honestly, it’s only when I speak to Jewish people in particular that the incomparable historical shaping that happened in 1939–1945 is brought home to me, the way that I think if you’re Jewish, the Holocaust is never really that far from your mind. And particularly in a family like Vanessa’s with four people who had been actually in the same concentration camp, very present in her life. Just how much in some ways, that’s the starting point of how you see the world. And Vanessa spoke so eloquently about a childhood in which they spoke about the Holocaust, as preventable and what kind of people now would really stand up to that kind of tyranny, and rating different countries according to who were good at looking after us. And how that really must shape the world, their sense of would you keep us safe, with everyone that you meet. And it really comes through so clearly with Vanessa that wanting to be the kind of person who would have hidden her grandparents really explains a lot about her moral seriousness. And honestly, as I read about her in advance, and then spoke to her, she is one of the most morally serious people I think I’ve ever come across. This is embarrassing to admit, but I think we all are slightly judgmental, and do have expectations about people and I didn’t necessarily expect that from someone who is very big on romance novels, and the main thing that they’re known for is reading Harry Potter and, frankly, is a sort of young–ish female with a very California accent. We expect to find moral seriousness in different places, and it is beautiful and challenging to find it very powerfully in Vanessa. 

I loved her understanding of chaplaincy really as a form of hospitality and hospitality in that very capacious sense. And I do love, I always love talking to chaplains, I think, chaplaincy is this sort of almost hidden order of ninjas. I have had reason to be thinking about and coming across prison chaplains recently and prison chaplains I think are the most ethically extraordinary people amongst us because they sit so non judgmentally and are so present with people in extremis. I think chaplaincy seemed to me before I got to know it a bit as something quite mild and pale and dilute, I guess in contrast with other forms of ministry, which are more direct and word based and up the front and leader–y, but I’m increasingly drawn to and respectful of chaplaincy as this extraordinarily quiet, powerful ministry of presence. 

I love what Vanessa said –she quotes Simone Weil on experimental certainty, treating text as if it is sacred. And it’s made me think about reading the Bible actually, obviously a classically sacred text rather than a novel, sacred text. And I have lots of conversations with people who are interested in matters of faith and are drawn to Christian spirituality, but the Bible is a real stumbling block for them, because it is actually quite a hard book to pick up and get into. We’ve lost a sort of cultural knowledge of the shape of the wider story and where to start. And I know quite a few people have kind of picked it up and put it down and been quite put off, and that becomes a real vicious circle, because you can’t read it as sacred until you’re already convinced that it’s sacred, but you can’t be convinced that it’s sacred until you have some help with reading it. And so I wonder if Vanessa’s approach of treating it as if it’s sacred and seeing what happens, trying to come from a position of faith that the text can be a blessing to you, and rigour and commitment, and then reading it, and community, might be just a useful thing for people who are wondering whether the Bible or I suppose other sacred texts have treasures to offer for the life. 

I was really grateful for Vanessa being so honest about the tension between her quite political campaign as a progressive personality and her role as a chaplain, which is resolutely non–judgmental. And the way sometimes she just has to think about having different hats on. And I was glad to hear her say if a Trump supporter came to her as a chaplain, she would chaplain them to the best of her ability. Because I think that’s a really important commitment no matter how strongly we hold our views. Can we treat people with dignity? Can we see them as fully human? Can we remain open hearted towards people we disagree with or we’re troubled by? And that there’s a deep wisdom in that and a kind of character and virtue challenge for us all in our society now.

And the final thing that really stayed with me, the conversations about identity politics and the kind of war on woke. And the sense of groups really talking past each other and really dehumanising each other and really ossifying into more and more belligerent groups around some of these issues. I just thought it was a very powerful thing. For those who are concerned about the woke moment, all the language here is really tricky, but let’s call it that as a shorthand – to say we’re scared. A lot of the motivation and anger and the challenge of perhaps a younger generation coming through is because they’re scared and they don’t know what the world will look like and they’re deeply destabilised and having some compassion for that, for those who are, who disagree or who are on the other side of the table, might be a helpful thing. Those are some thoughts. I would love to hear from you. Until next time, I hope you enjoyed listening.

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