while driving home

Writer Mary Karr, being interviewed by Terry Gross:

Oh, I was just - I'm a big eye-roller. You know, I come from a family of eye-rollers, and I mean the degree to which I'm an unlikely religious person - first of all, let me say that talking about spiritual activity to a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio. You know, like, I'm saying look, whee, isn't this great? And I know I'm going to sound slightly addled from time to time so - there - you know, the degree to which I was cynical about prayer - you know, I remember people giving me these one-day-at-a-time, these Boy Scout slogans, you know, that like they put on big felt banners like from the jamboree, and God, I just - I couldn't imagine - I couldn't imagine praying.

It was like - I think I say in the book, it was like pointing at a stump and saying fall in love with that or pointing at a mannequin and saying talk to that. It was insane to me. It was beyond crazy.

So I thought faith was a feeling. My intellect told me this was insane. The only way I was able to do it was through practice, and you know, I think I mentioned this before with my last book of poems, "Sinners Welcome" - someone challenged me to pray on my knees, morning and night, every day, and this was after I nearly drove into a piece of concrete and I'd been trying to get sober and not really listening to the ways you're supposed to do it, and somebody said pray on your knees every day for 30 days and see if you stay sober, and in the morning say, you know, help me stay sober, and at night say thanks for helping me stay sober.

And I just saw it as, like, self-hypnosis or like talking to yourself, talking to some higher self or higher part of yourself.

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And I had been given by my spiritual director, who is this Franciscan nun, these two passages in the Bible, three passages in the Bible, and I open up my mother's childhood Bible and the first one I find is marked. It's Psalm 51, and it's marked in blue chalk. This is her little - she had this since 1927, she had this thing. And the second one is also marked, and there are no other marks in the Bible.

But for me a coincidence like that would just be evidence that there is a force for grace, a force for good that is very specifically interested in me, and if I open myself, or I say to myself at each moment, you know, where is the good in this, where is the God in this - but it's hard to do that. I would rather - I don't know why it's so hard to do.

Gross: Because it's hard to do?

Ms. Karr: I think because my big smart brain wants to think that it runs everything. I mean, honestly, that's what it - even though I know that when I pray, and I try to live in this kind of surrendered, more-present state, everything is better.