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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Coming up later this hour, we will end today's show with part two of our call-in on your biggest flops and fiascos, your epic fails that make good stories that hopefully you can laugh about now. We will have our guest from the theater group, The Civilians back with us, with the song they promised to write based on one of the callers from Tuesday's show. That's coming up in a little bit.

But first, many of you have heard the series we've been doing on the rare confluence of Easter, Ramadan, and Passover this month. Because Ramadan moves through the year, this confluence happens only a few times a century. We've taken calls from listeners on your personal relationships with all three religions, whichever you're from. We had a clergy round table. We talked about how there is all this war in the name of religion, in the Holy Land of all places, and that Eastern Orthodox, Christianity is playing a role on both sides of the war in Ukraine.

Here today, on April 27th, as the month nears its end, we have kind of an addendum, especially for those of you alienated from any of the religions because they seem stuck in old ways or irrelevant to the actual issues in your life or the world, or for whatever reason. The poet and historian, Jennifer Michael Hecht, happens to be out with a new book called The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives.

Part of the premise of the book, and of looking to poetry in our spiritual lives is that, as Jennifer puts it, religion doesn't ring bells for a lot of us anymore. The book also builds on an earlier book of hers, Doubt, A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson. Let's just take it from there and talk about The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives with poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht. Hi Jennifer. Thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Hi. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: You made up a word for some of the people you're addressing in this book, the interfaithless. Want to start with the word to describe the group?

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Sure. There are so many words for people who don't believe, but of course, they believe in a lot of things and so I was looking for something that wasn't negative, like an atheist, but I failed. I came up with the interfaithless and I couldn't get rid of it. It just worked for me, and I really care about the inter part.

I've met people, since I've made it up from many different religions who also felt that they didn't believe, but they joined in. If they're Hindu, they joined in the Puja ceremonies of their families, but the idea that I was doing my non-believing Jewish ceremonies in my place, and she's doing hers in her place, but that we are connected because we have a tremendous amount in common and that we're trying to make sense of life without the old, old religious ideas.

The interfaithless is a somewhat humorous idea of what joins all of us who have poetic lives and poetic inner lives, and want a way to connect that. I also call myself a poetic realist. I used to say poetic atheist, but why just disbelieve in one God? Atheism implies-- I'd rather just say I see life in poetic ways, but I'm a realist. I will always take science and rationality as the baseline.

Brian Lehrer: You tell a story of a couple at one of your events when your earlier book Doubt came out, the woman was pregnant and they were struggling with whether to do some new baby rituals that their parents wanted, but they didn't believe in so much. You wound up blurting out part of a Walt Whitman poem that galvanized the room and became an epiphany for you. Could you tell that story in some detail?

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Yes, sure. It was the first big Doubt reading. This sort of thing happened many times afterwards, but in this particular case, I was at Caltech and a very pregnant couple comes up to ask me a question. I thought it would be about Darwin or something of the sort because I'd given a relatively historical lecture, but no. They'd understood from my talk that I was a non-believer who loved rituals, who still saw that people were doing rituals in their lives. This book really is reading what people are doing a lot more than telling them what to do. It's more telling them it's okay to do these things.

This particular couple wanted to have a bris. Both of them didn't believe, so there was no conflict between them, but they liked the rituals of their families, and they clearly still felt very embedded in their families and felt a need to have a bris, but they really didn't want to and they expressed this clearly. They didn't want to either mock or be disrespectful to the religion that they'd come from, nor did they want to betray their actual beliefs and so they were in a quandary.

I said, “Mazel tov, have the bris if you want to.” I told them about some Hellenistic Jews who believed in God but didn't do the rite to fit in with the others and of course, modern Jews who don't believe in God and do perform the rite. Just as they were smiling and leaving and I'd answered as a historian, I realized that I've been to many events of the sort and the ones who have a poem to make the new parents feel strong and inspired and make the room feel contemplative and feel united, those really mattered for me and the audience.

You almost see poems at every wedding and every funeral, but you see them sometimes at baby welcoming ceremonies. As they were walking away, I said, “Wait, add some Whitman.” They turn again and I say that there's a poem in Leaves of Grass, I'm going to read a little bit for you right now.

Brian Lehrer: Great.

Jennifer Michael Hecht: It starts

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish and more faithless?)

Of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest of me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Then he just prints the word

Answer

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Brian Lehrer: That was great. What a treat to hear you read that? That helped the couple decide to have the bris?

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Look, I don't know the story of that particular couple. That's the trouble with the few stories where the person came up to me at a later event, or I knew the person so I can tell how it ended are the rarities here because these are the encounters I have with people. But whenever I share something with someone, it lights it up for me. It's different afterwards and boy did I remember that.

When I gave it to them, I gave it to them just because it came to mind. I only remembered the last two lines that you exist and yet it was moving. I felt the movement in the room, even. Afterwards, that notion that you may contribute a verse became much more important to me because I began telling people, why should your experience of the Judeo-Christian religion or whatever it is, why should it be less important than people in the past?

I can show almost any sort of belief in the past. I've studied religion for, what, 30 years now? What's important is to just realize whatever happened in the past, all sorts of changes, every religion has turned-- most religions come from other religions. That means people made some decisions that certain things no longer fit with their lives and they slowly made changes until a vast change happened.

When we see ourselves not fitting what our parents gave us, not fitting what we imagine our grandparents did, which if you do some research, your grandparents may not have believed what your parents said, and it goes back. Religion isn't just waning all the time. It comes and goes. Indeed, you can trust that if you let down a ritual, your children or somebody else's children may pick them up.

There's an awful lot of guilt and confusion in this country especially, but all over the world about what to do with the celebrations of life if you don't believe. Most of us just say, “Okay, all the holidays are about family, or they have nothing to do with me, or they're just office parties.” In religion, holidays are about something.

Very often, they're about something really fundamental like how to get rid of some shame. Many religions have a yearly ritual or more frequent that you can address your own shame and you're encouraged to apologize to the people you hurt and to change, but also to go swim in the Ganges, or, excuse me, to fast for a short period of time while thinking what you're doing.

Everything that people did in the past can be shortened because of who we are today. Meditation, you can change your mind from where you are now with really a five-minute meditation given how much information we usually are taking in. If you put your phone down and sit still for five minutes, that's going to be a long five minutes and you're going to get in touch with yourself.

I didn't know that when my book, The Wonder Paradox came out so many books about awe and wonder would come out in the same year or near. We're really finding that you can put yourself into some meditative states or some joyous states by purposefully invoking awe. It's fascinating.

Brian Lehrer: And through poetry in particular. The Wonder Paradox I see has like 20 chapters built around events in the life cycle and poems for each as examples, on weddings, on coming of age, on decisions, are some of the chapter titles. You want to take one or two of those and give our listeners a short example of how you describe it and what poem you link to it?

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Sure. I'm going to start with one that is very popular already because it's moving how many people use this at weddings, and at funerals, and how I often have to tell them it's not a cliché, it's cultural liturgy. It's deep and good that we use the same poem. I guess I'll read part of the beginning and the end of this very well used poem, I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart by E. Cummings. I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart

I am never without it

Anywhere I go, you go my dear

And whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling.

I’ll jump down.

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows

Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

And the sky of the sky of a tree called life,

Which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide

And this is the wonder that keeps the stars apart

I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart.

I think it’s so use--

Brian Lehrer: Beautiful.

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Is that one for a wedding?

Jennifer Michael Hecht: That one's for weddings, but I've heard it at funerals a lot too, which is a stirring notion that it can do both jobs. I think, for one thing, the repetition of the beginning and ending line, "I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart," it resonates for us because it's both the idea of a talisman, I carry your heart and it keeps me strong, but also I carry your heart, I've got it, hon, I've got you. That double duty, but also the fact that it does repeat.

One of the things I talk about in the poem is that we like to repeat the good line. If the poem doesn't do it for you and you're at an event. I tell people how to craft a little introduction or a little closing remark where you go ahead and repeat the line you like. I also make it clear that many poems will have something in it that irks a little bit. Sometimes people cut it. If you're cutting down the poem anyway, it doesn't matter much, but most of the time it's best to keep a little bite in the poem. If it makes you uncomfortable, you can always make an announcement and say, "We love this poem because it has some grit in it, but we most adore this line."

There's ways of enriching the experience. There's a New Yorker cartoon that says something about people honored to read this poem at your wedding that I chose off the internet this morning and it's true. Sometimes we don't know how to choose. Yet, there are ways to think it through without too much trouble too.

Brian Lehrer: Can you do one more for us?

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Sure. Well, I got to do two because one is going to be so tiny. This is by one of my favorite poets, Kobayashi Issa who died in 1828. Here it is.

New Year's Day

Everything is in blossom

I feel about average.

Now, I love this poem and many others by Issa because we forget both when we wish that the cherry tree had bloomed and stayed instead of a hail storm the next day and is gone, when we missed the holiday because we were ill or whatever. We like to remember that when it's all perfect, it still doesn't guarantee that we're going to feel good. Also, when we do get everything right, when the holiday goes off without a hitch and yet we feel melancholy. This little poem, just having read it, just knowing it exists can lighten the feel of that.

Brian Lehrer: You link that to New Year's and you have one more. You want to tell us which occasion you're linking the poem to?

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Sure. This one's an interesting one on the social contract blues. I was writing the book for the past seven, eight years and it crossed over some political disappointments so those were on my mind. I included the great Maya Angelou's poem, Still I Rise. I do think it's good for when we are in political despair that this poem can help all sorts of despair. It can be coupled with all sorts of rituals. I'll just read the first two stanzas and the last two stanzas maybe. Still I Rise by Maya Angelou.

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Brian Lehrer: Is that the one she read at Bill Clinton's inauguration?

Jennifer Michael Hecht: I'm not sure. It's one of her many great poems, but I would imagine that that would fit beautifully, the combination of just plain encouragement with these hidden little reminders because I think we all know it. We've all been on the side of winning and on the side of losing. When we lose, we're surprised that we find something inside us that hasn't lost, that simply thinks the next thing is theirs. That feels, certainly in this case, this buoyancy that we know. You keep a bubble of air, a balloon of air underwater, it doesn't matter how long you keep it under there. It doesn't matter what happens. Eventually, something's going to move and that thing's going up.

You look around at how human beings who have been really trodden down have found some of the most beautiful expressions of culture, have found a kind of integrity that is never the prerogative of the very privileged. It's an incredible thing that these poems, without saying these things straight out can through density and complication, let us have more than we think we're getting and also let us have spaces in which we insert our own experience.

That's the magic of all art. Poetry is special for this task because it would've been music- -but after the greatest music makes us transcend ourselves, we would need to talk about it. We would want to say what happened. A novel is a beautiful place, but it's not doing what poetry's doing, this quick moment we can get together and feel the wonder of the world and expand our hearts.

Brian: By the way, that was not the poem that Maya Angelou read at Bill Clinton's inauguration. I looked it up. That was On the Pulse of Mourning.

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Oh, that's right. Yes. I’d recognized that, yes.

Brian: Since just about nothing could follow Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, we're going to leave it there, except to say the poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht’s new book from which this whole conversation in those readings derive is called The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives. Thanks for being a wonderful last guest in what we've been calling our Abrahamic Holy Month Series.

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Oh, how beautiful. Nice.

Brian: The addendum for the interfaithless among us as it intersects with National Poetry Month. Thank you, Jennifer.

Jennifer Michael Hecht: Thank you so much.

 

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