Episode 96: Greg Garrett on being surprised at life

Find out more about the writer and professor Greg Garrett, and why he is passionate about racial justice. Spoiler: it has to do with church.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason: How do faith and literature come together in our lives to inspire us and to teach us more about being human beings? Greg Garrett teaches English literature at Baylor University, and we'll be exploring that with him, an author and teacher and a Christian. Stay tuned for Good God.

George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason, and I'm pleased to welcome back to the program Greg Garrett, the professor of English at Baylor University in Waco, and for the last 30 years, teaching there and writing books and preaching on the side as a lay Episcopal preacher and all of that. My goodness, what a life, Greg.

Greg Garrett: It's a much better life than I expected it to be.

George Mason: Well, as we will discover when we talk.

Greg Garrett: Yes.

George Mason: So we're going to talk a little bit in this episode about your writing, about literature and the intersection of faith and literature and all of that. But let's start with the faith part of it. You teach at Baylor University, which is a Baptist institution, and you actually did grow up Baptist.

Greg Garrett: I did indeed.

George Mason: So, what are those things that formed you as a Baptist that you both kept and let go of that led you eventually to the Episcopal church? Tell us about that story.

Greg Garrett: I mean, it has been an interesting journey. My family became Southern Baptist because my dad's family was Pentecostal, Assembly of God, and my mother's family were Methodists. And I think that they thought that Southern Baptists were a compromise between them. And it is strange how the decisions that shape your lives, your life gets made.

George Mason: Some of us would say that Southern Baptists have been compromising for a long time as a matter of fact, and still, but we all do, right?

Greg Garrett: Yeah. So I was raised in a very faithful household. We were in church every time the doors were open. My dad for some time was the music director of our church after we moved back to Oklahoma from the deep South. And so there was this very strong sense that who we were as Southern Baptists was a very big part of our identity. And there were many things in that tradition that I resonated with powerfully. I loved and still love the music. In fact, in my sermon tomorrow, I'm going to reference one of the invitation hymns that I grew up hearing. And there was a powerful importance placed on the Word. And I learned my Bible frontwards and backwards and it shaped me at that time and continues to shape me now. There's not going to be a biblical reference that gets past me. And I was also really drawn to the idea of preaching as a powerful sacramental moment. Although most of the sermons that I heard growing up made me feel bad about myself. And so, we did grow up in a sort of traditional fire and brimstone-

George Mason: Shame-based oriented.

Greg Garrett: Yeah, shame-based preaching environment. And that was the part of Southern Baptist life that was not good for me. As an artist and a thinker, I was a very sensitive soul in a place where I could be easily damaged. And I still struggle even to this day in my 50s to get over some of that sense of shame that was reinforced in me by my faith at that time. When I left the house, I went to college. Like many people, I left faith for a long time. And for me it was a very long time because I had felt that that was an unhealthy expression of faith for me. And since it was the only expression of faith I knew, I thought that's how God's people are. You can walk into a Baptist church and that's how you're going to feel. And now of course I know that that is absolutely untrue, but it was the only knowledge that I had to work with.

Greg Garrett: And so when I was hired at Baylor, I was not a church-going person. The questions that they asked me were very vague. They're much more detailed now as Baylor is much more intentional about retaining a Christian identity. But they asked me if I believed in God, which I did in some form, and if I supported the mission of the university, which I absolutely did, particularly if they hired me. I would support it very, very much. And the one thing that I will say about coming in at that time in the life of Baylor University is that although I would not have been hired now, even though it has turned out to be good for me and for the university and I hope for generations of students, Baylor did become a place which because of this Baptist influence on exploring your spirituality and finding out who you are as a Christian, I was able to find my way back to faith with the sense that Baylor was not going to throw me away for not being exactly what they would hope from a Christian faculty member.

Greg Garrett: The final piece about the relationship between my growing up and where I ended up, I come from a family that suffers from hereditary chronic depression. So I had some great uncles who drank themselves to death. I am fairly confident that my grandfather, who was one of the great heroes of my life, suffered from depression at a time when it was unspeakable. There was nothing that he could say about it or that anyone could say to him. My mother has suffered from it. My children, my boys have suffered from it. And for a stretch of years, right around the turn of the last millennium, I was almost killed by it. And so I had one of those sorts of moments one morning where it's like that scene in the movies where somebody falls in the forest and he says, "You all go on without me. I'm done for." Actually, I didn't say that out loud, but that was the sense. I was like, "This is as far as I can go. I can't take another step."

Greg Garrett: I had this very strange experience shortly after that feeling like I'm done for. I can't go on. I was reading Texas Monthly and I read about an African American Episcopal church on the east side of Austin. And for some reason I made note of the name of the church and then I looked it up in the phone book. We used to have phone books.

George Mason: Yes, we had phone books.

Greg Garrett: And then I drove by it one day to find out where it was. And then one Sunday I walked in the back door of that church, and I was scared to death because I was as sick as I have ever been. And as I said, I didn't have great memories of walking into church. And so I was just shivering. And the thing that I discovered about St. James was that it was the historically African-American Episcopal church, that it had been formed by people who had been rejected by white Episcopalians. And the particular charism, spiritual gift, of St. James was radical hospitality. And if I had walked into other churches in Austin on that morning, I would not be here today. But I was welcomed. I was loved. I was greeted. When they passed the peace, every member of that church passed me the peace. And so at a time when I didn't even really know what that meant, there was this powerful sacramental manifestation of it.

Greg Garrett: And then the last thing, and I still remember because I tell this story to this day, my priest, Greg Rickel, who is now the Episcopal Bishop of Olympia in Washington state, stood up behind the altar and it felt like he was looking directly at me, as pastors have that gift, as you know. And he said, "Wherever you are in your walk of faith, you are welcome at this table." And that welcome, that invitation changed my life. And there were things about the Episcopal church that I learned about the Episcopal church that were well suited to me, like the people at Wilshire Baptist, Episcopalians read.

George Mason: Yes, that's right.

Greg Garrett: So that's a fairly good thing for a writer. They pay attention to beauty and the idea that art and culture can be a secondary sacrament, that God can be speaking in those ways, which was not something that happened in my youth. But that had often been a part of my journey between those years between formal church and formal church where something in the culture spoke to me and gave me the strength to go on for another day or another month.

Greg Garrett: And then the other thing is that I just felt this very strong attachment, particularly to this church, but it's part of the Episcopal church's history as well, to issues of peace and justice. And so to have been at sort of ground zero for that in an African American Episcopal church where we had an icon of Martin Luther King on the wall. Well, it was miraculous.

George Mason: So I want to pick up on a few things you said that just fascinate me. One of them is that the ... I understand a little more, I think perhaps now, about your passion for racial justice in that you were maybe saved by Jesus, but you were saved through African American Christians.

Greg Garrett: I was saved by lovely women in beautiful church hats.

George Mason: Okay, there you go. Yes. And so, there's a beautiful sense there, I think, about how your sense of brokenness and neediness, you found a community that lived that every day, but had found the strength of salvation in Christ in this beautiful Episcopal setting, which tends to be worldwide dominated more by white experience, from the Anglican world. And so, you really have put yourself in a fascinating setting now. So, there's some of that. The other piece of it I find interesting is the Episcopal church has tended to do its theology from the incarnation as the central aspect of its theological orientation. That is, God came to be among us in Christ in the flesh, thereby sanctifying all of creation as a vehicle of grace. The Baptist church tends to start with the brokenness of sin and the need of the cross to correct it, but has a very weak doctrine of creation, which for an artist is not good, but also for a human being to forget that you were created in the image and likeness of God. And God said over you, "Very good." You know?

George Mason: And so, I think today what we're learning from each other's experience is where we have been weak and can be strengthened by these relationships. Baptists can learn from Episcopalians, Episcopalians can learn from Baptists, white Americans can learn from black Americans, et cetera, et cetera.

Greg Garrett: And I will tell just in a very practical sense, this will not surprise you, but my homiletics professor in seminary was Roger Paynter, a great Baptist preacher. And although there are great Episcopal preachers, it is not at the center of our worship. The communion is at the center of our worship and we de-centered the pulpit to put it in the middle of the service. And proclamation still matters. But I had that model, my remembrance of effective preaching from my youth and then this great teacher who believed fervently that the preaching moment is a sacrament every bit as powerful and important as what happens at the end.

George Mason: Absolutely. And as a writer, in the beginning was the Word. So there is both the proclamation of the Word, but there's also the Word as story. And here is your gift being played out as well as a writer, a teacher, but the Word comes to us not as an abstract proposition or a whisper from the heavens somewhere, but it comes in a life, the story of a human life.

Greg Garrett: Yes, exactly.

George Mason: So this ties together a lot of your religious experience as well as your professional experience. And I'd like to pursue that a little more after the break, but I think the fact that you continue to be welcome in Baptist settings, in African American settings, in Episcopal church settings, and you are a theologian in residence at the American Cathedral, which is an Episcopal or Anglican church in Paris, most every summer. This is Greg Garrett writ large. I mean all over the place.

Greg Garrett: Well, it's a stunning life. And 20 years ago I did not expect to be here. And I think one of the most amazing things is that every moment since then has been a gift. But because I learned early on to recognize it as a gift, I also learned how much of it I needed to give back. So there is this incredible gratitude that I have to God, to the church for giving me this life where I have purpose. And after years of unhappiness, I remarried. I have a family. I put girls to bed, I read them bedtime stories. It is all almost unbelievable to me. And yet I recognize it as this miraculous blessing. I mean that is the amazing thing is to say I was so close to not being here at all. And by the grace of God, here I am.

George Mason: Lovely. When we come back from the break, then I want to talk more about word and story and writing and literature. So, how all of that integrates together. So we'll be right back.

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George Mason: We're back with Greg Garrett. Greg, we were talking before the break about the word and story. You were talking about growing up knowing the Bible in the Baptist church and how important that is because there's references everywhere in literature, especially in American literature. Western literature generally I guess you would say. But I mean, you can't read Faulkner, you can't read Flannery O'Connor, you can't read the great American novelists, certainly Southern writers, without hearing echoes of or understanding them without knowing that there's a story behind the story always with them. Right? So, biblical literacy has been really important in understanding, whether it's Shakespeare or whether it's just any of these stories. And yet we find ourselves in a time of declining biblical literacy. What's lost in that, that you had the privilege of having and gaining and using, but where are we now with that lack of biblical literacy?

Greg Garrett: Well, I think the big thing that gets lost is an immediate recognition of what a story is or where it can take us. And so, in a good sermon, like I'm preaching tomorrow, I'm going to tell some stories. We've got a gospel story. Part of the job of the preacher is to help people to connect with that story, but when you walk in knowing something about the story or knowing the entire story, you have this level of connection already built in. So I'm going to tell a story tomorrow about something that happened in the throws of my depression where I heard a voice that told me I was supposed to go to Nineveh. And for, it feels like 80% of the American public now, that would be just lost. It would be, "What?"

George Mason: Isn't that something? Yeah.

Greg Garrett: And unfortunately I knew exactly what that voice was saying. My response to it can wait until the sermon, but I knew the context, I knew the actors, I knew the themes of that story. And so often when I'm teaching a literature or a film class now at Baylor, even though we are a determinedly Christian university, a lot of our students are not Christian. Some of them are from other faith traditions, some of them are from no faith tradition. And so, in some ways I miss the early days when I could have the sense that a bunch of my students had been to Sunday school. So, there is a lot more teaching that has to go into it. But a second thing is I do recognize that our culture is often telling our stories for us, and it's just our job to remind people that this is where that came from.

Greg Garrett: So, there are oftentimes where we'll be exposed to a Christ figure or a Moses figure or a Virgin Mary who has this ridiculous request made upon her and faithfully says, "I will do it." And then it just sort of becomes the job, as I've said over the years, to lay breadcrumbs back to the tradition.

George Mason: So is there one story really or, I mean we live in a postmodern world that says there's no such thing as a meta narrative, but there is a gospel story that we claim is really a true rendering of the world. And it does seem to have a consistent move that we find in all great stories, don't we? That is to say there's an idyllic period that conflict comes into it and then different ways we can't resolve it, and then finally a resolution. And this is the gospel story, isn't it?

Greg Garrett: Yeah. I respectfully disagree with the postmodernists. And as a storyteller and an analyst of stories, a preacher of stories, that's exactly the reaction I ought to have. If we don't have core narratives in common, then we've lost everything, because narrative is the way we make sense of our experience. If I'm going to tell you what happened to me today, I'm going to tell it in the form of a story. First this, then this, then this. And so I do believe that there are master narratives that are at the heart of our experience as human beings. And one of them is represented by our experience of God and human brokenness, God's continuous reaching out to us in our human brokenness. And the idea that the end of our journey is to find home in God and with a community of people who understand us and know us and love us. So, this movement from brokenness to wholeness is psychologically true, but I also believe it's cosmically true because it's at the heart of our faith.

George Mason: And even before the Christians' story, this story seems to be embedded in the longings of humanity. In Homer's Odyssey, there is this longing for home. The Odyssey, the Iliad, all of these Greek sagas that have this similar sense of life is a journey. It's a journey for home. We've been estranged in some way. It's a struggle to get back. We have to fight temptation to give up, and all of these sorts of things. In other words, it's not that the Christian story is the only story, but it is a story that helps us understand all of our stories, isn't it?

Greg Garrett: Well, that's the great conversation, the ongoing conversation between CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, and the sort of conversion story where Lewis begins to believe that these stories are all part of a larger story and they are all gathered together in this one sacred story. And I do firmly believe that. And I believe that that's one of the great gifts that we have as a faithful people, is that we can tell these stories in ways that are going to be powerful, and in some way, healing to people to say, "There is more than this brokenness that you feel. There is more than this loneliness. You can be known and loved. You are known and loved."

George Mason: Right. I mean, one of the things I admire though about the postmodern understanding is they recognize, or they point at, they give attention to the fact that there have been characters who had been left out of the story, whose voice needs to be heard. A recognition that sometimes those other characters have not been fully realized human beings, and so they want those stories to be told not simply as a scapegoat person to advance the story of the main character, but something more than that. And that I think too is helpful to us in our gospel work, isn't it?

Greg Garrett: No, it's a very powerful thing. And we have a long tradition of that. I mean we can go back to Jewish Midrash, which tries to rescue the forgotten people in the story.

George Mason: Beautiful. Yeah. I mean this is Hagar, Ishmael, and there's a sense in which maybe Islam is a Midrash on that story as a whole religion and culture. It's a remarkable idea of that kind of redemption.

Greg Garrett: My friend, the poet Scott Cairns has done a series of Midrashes, and my favorite, you may know is the poem about Lot's wife. And the beginning of that poem says, "First she had a name," and just that idea of reclaiming the humanity of all of these forgotten or pushed aside characters from the biblical story. There is that very powerful sense in postmodern life that yes, there are a bunch of stories that haven't been told and they need to be told. And that absolutely is something I can affirm.

George Mason: So, what animates you as a writer? When you try to talk about your vocation to people, say why did you become a writer? What is it that makes you more alive when you write?

Greg Garrett: Well, I write two kinds of things. So I write fiction, I write novels, and I write nonfiction, which is mostly about the intersection of a bunch of disciplines. I'm very interested in the ways we understand ourselves in the world. And how does religion help us do that? How does literature, how do movies and other kinds of culture, how do we understand ourselves in groups or in society? So when I'm writing fiction, and actually I think the animating thing around all of this is I want to know more.

George Mason: Ah, good.

Greg Garrett: The reason that I write is I want to know more. And with a particular character, it's because I want to understand my life more fully through his life, which is what we do in literature. CS Lewis said, "We read to know that we're not alone."

George Mason: That's good.

Greg Garrett: And so part of what's happening is as a writer, I am wrestling with life as this character experiences it. And it's not exactly my life, although there are often going to be elements of my life in it. There will be an autobiographical thing here, here and here. But in great art, we learn something about ourselves. I learned something about myself just watching BlacKkKlansman again for the umpteenth time today.

George Mason: And weeping, as a matter of fact, you said.

Greg Garrett: Yeah. And so, fiction comes out of that great desire to understand myself and where I fit. And nonfiction has a very similar kind of drive, but often it is a little more focused because I will ask myself, what does exploring this topic for the next three years teach me about the human endeavor, who we are, who we're called to be? And sometimes it's a very particular kind of question. The last time I was here, I had just finished, and my book that was out was a book for Oxford University Press about the zombie apocalypse, which is a very particular kind of narrative, very popular. But one of the things that I really wanted to understand was why is this story everywhere? And why does it seem to be so much more prevalent after 9/11? What kind of human needs does this story serve for people?

Greg Garrett: And so sometimes it's a very particular focus thing, and I learned about it and I don't have to go back to it. And sometimes it's a book like this book on race and film, which I have coming out later this year, and it is clear to me that I'm going to be learning and talking and teaching on this topic maybe for the rest of my life because it is so big and because unlike the zombie apocalypse, it has a daily application in our lives and in our culture.

George Mason: So, you mentioned that you write both fiction and nonfiction. People probably should read both fiction and nonfiction to be well balanced human beings. Now, Marilyn Robinson, who does so also-

Greg Garrett: Beautifully, yeah.

George Mason: ... says that she writes all of her nonfiction on a computer. She writes all of her fiction longhand because she somehow thinks that her fiction, there needs to be a kind of wondering her way along, that it's not as certain, I guess. Maybe it's coming from a different part of the brain or something like that. Do you have an experience of two different ways of approaching that in terms of how you write and what it means to you?

Greg Garrett: In one sense, everything I write, I have a similar routine. So just at a basic ground level, I have written fiction and nonfiction in the same places. I've written them in Paris. I've written them in New Mexico at Ghost Ranch, but there is I think a different kind of thing that happens. And just hearing her method, I actually do something very, very similar. I do a lot of my drafting nonfiction on the computer. Almost all of what I write for the novels is longhand in my journals.

George Mason: Fascinating.

Greg Garrett: And I do believe, and I think actually the people who studied our cognitive processes say that something different happens when you write something than when you type.

George Mason: Interesting.

Greg Garrett: I often tell my students that you will retain better if you write something longhand than if you type it. But I think there is also something that it is coming from a place that is maybe less analytical, which is not to say you don't do analysis and criticism as a part of your process. A good novel has to be shapely. It has to be well formed. The words have got to be the right words in the right places. But I think largely what I do with the nonfiction is more analytical. And while there is a creativity to it, my books tend to be long form personal essays where I'm going to say, "Here's what I want to talk about. Walk with me on this journey and let's see what we learn." There is a lot of data in, because they're very heavily sourced and heavily researched. And so I think that there is a lot more, I guess what we would say is that right brain. I forget left brain, right brain, but whichever is the more analytical side-

George Mason: Left brain.

Greg Garrett: ... seems to control that part of the process. And I think that probably the more creative ...

George Mason: So I think it's interesting just reflecting on my own vocation, how some churches and some preachers are more drawn toward the gospels, toward the narratives, and others toward more of the epistolary works of Paul and the like. And even you can think of this in the larger cannon where some are more given toward the covenant to laws and interpreting them for everyday life, and others are more oriented toward the narratives of the patriarchs and of the profits and things of that nature. And what makes for a healthy spiritual life and congregation? It would seem to me to have enough diversity there, enough of all of that coming together. Well Greg, I think we could just do this all day long, but I thank you so much for all that you do, for the writing, for the lecturing, for the being present in all of our places to help challenge us and hold up a mirror to us, to our soul. It's a great privilege to know you.

Greg Garrett: Thank you, George. Such a pleasure.

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