GOD GIRL AND NICA LALLI: THE INTERVIEW

Sometimes an 850-word column simply isn’t big enough to hold all the gems of a really wonderful conversation. Such was the case of God Girl’s interview with Nica Lalli, author of Nothing: Something to Believe In.

So we thought we’d share the transcript of the conversation between the two women. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

GGHQ

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GOD GIRL: This conversation comes at a really interesting time for me, having been inundated with hate mail from my brothers and sisters in Christ. … The intolerance and certainty, that arrogant certainty about faith I find repellent even though I guess I share the same faith as they do. I’ve been struggling with that in the past few weeks, and, frankly, for the past 20 years. It’s interesting to hear you talk about it, and it doesn’t sound like you’re talking about it in an angry way.

NICA: You know, yeah. I just got a lot of hate mail this week as well, because I was on “Fox and Friends” debating the Creation Museum’s director.

GOD GIRL: Ohhhh noooo.

NICA: I felt like I kind of had to go do it because when something is just so out there, you don’t sort of say this … I was given an opportunity to have a voice there and I said, ‘Let me take it.’
It is hard to get those hate mails, especially from those who profess to follow this person, Jesus, who, from my limited knowledge, is very much about love and unconditional forgiveness, and turn-the-other-cheek. I feel like so much of that faction of Christians today – and it is only a faction …

GOD GIRL: Thank you for recognizing that.

NICA: I really do. Many of my best friends are church-going people, of many different faiths, but many of them Christian people, and they are not anything at all like the sort of angry, polemic, polarizing – that’s the word – segment who I’m not really sure I understand where they’re really coming from or why they feel the need to be so nasty.

GOD GIRL: Me neither and I’m allegedly one of them.

NICA: That must make it harder to get that kind of hate mail. I mean, I can say, ‘I’m not one of you so I can understand why you hate me.’

GOD GIRL: I was called every name in the book. I’m pretty tough so that really doesn’t bother me. What does is when they say, ‘And I’m praying for you, you slut from hell.’

NICA: I got one that said, ‘I pity you, you poor wretched soul. When you meet our maker you’re going to be really sorry.’ And I was like, YOW! That’s not really Christian.

GOD GIRL: No. It’s really not. They’re more interested in being right.

NICA: What I would like to know is, what made these people that way? They had to have had some life experience that made them so insecure, so frightened, so caught up in having all the answers and in being so right, that there’s no wiggle room. There’s no gray area. There’s no mystery. It’s all right there. Why would you question it? Whereas, I live my life completely in the gray areas, livin’ on the edge.

GOD GIRL: Most of us do.

NICA: And I mean it when I say I don’t know the answers, and sometimes I don’t have the time to go and find out the answers.
People take issue with me on the Christian side, and science people take issue with me because I say I don’t know and I really don’t have the time to find out.
What I mean is, I’m not a scientist. I didn’t devote my life to finding out why this certain fly’s wing is the way it is. And when my kids ask me questions that I can’t answer, I say, ‘I don’t know.’ And then I smile at them because hopefully one day maybe they’ll know.
When my son asked me … where did all this stuff come from that was on the beach, I said, ‘Well, it comes from a lot of places but I don’t have a two-sentence answer for you. I don’t really know.’ I got some emails saying, ‘Well, of course you can find out where everything came from – the ocean movement and …’ But honestly, when my son grows up, he can go figure all that stuff out. He can become a marine biologist and find out.’

GOD GIRL: How old is your son?

NICA: He’s nine
And actually, you know, that’s the thing: When my children grow up they can teach me.

GOD GIRL: I think most of this vitriol comes from a deep, deep place of fear. And fear motivates people to lash out in anger, obviously, but also to search for something that gives them all the answers. And if anything or anybody threatens that, they just flip out.
It’s interesting – the opposite of faith isn’t doubt, it’s certainty.

NICA: Oh, who said that?

GOD GIRL: I wanna say Anne Lamott, but I don’t think it was her.

NICA: No, I’ve heard that, too. But it’s not Anne Lamott. I think it was Einstein or someone like that.

GOD GIRL: I’ll have to find out before I write the column.

Anyway … the opposite of love is not hate, it’s fear.

NICA: Yes. One of the things I got in my hate mail this week was that I believe in nothing. And that’s not true. That’s always a misunderstanding. I do not believe in nothing. The reason I wrote this book is because I’m tired of people thinking that just because you don’t believe in God means you believe in nothing.
An interesting thing along those lines is that my husband has a coworker – he’s Catholic, Polish, super-terrific guy, went to his wedding, love him, a very devout man – he said to my husband after my reading a couple of weeks ago here in New York, ‘What Nica calls ‘nothing,’ I call God.’ And that’s true. I
I do believe in like a core within us, and I think that that core that I call humanity is what other people label as a higher power kind of spirit.

GOD GIRL: In your book you talk about the connections people had — whether it was just a nod on the subway or whatever — in the days after 9/11 … In my life, the way I understand the way the world around me works — the tiny bit that I do understand — I read a book in college called The Go-between God. Those little connections and the big connections are all made with the help of the Spirit that makes them happen in instances where they wouldn’t otherwise happen, because we can’t get past our own egos, or biases or selves. That those connections are God’s doing. … When you were talking about those connections post 9/11, I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I totally know what’s she’s talking about. She just calls it something different than I do.’

NICA: That’s really the issue that I’m trying to get at. I don’t necessarily speak the same language that Christians – or let’s just say ‘religious’ people – speak, but it’s not that hard to translate.

GOD GIRL: No. It’s not.

NICA: One of the things that’s important to me about now being in the public, which, I don’t know about you but sometimes I really question what they heck I did, today is one of those days. And it has nothing to do with this interview. It’s been a week.
Between being on Fox, and I went to the Jewish Book Network last night. Although I am Jewish by blood and culture, I really felt different than everybody in the room. It’s not such a good feeling, and it is part of the reason why I wrote the book. I don’t fit in with Jews. You read it. I’ve been to services and I’m just like, No.
We spend so much time parsing out the differences and I think that one of the things that’s really important to me and the reason that name-calling is not going to get us anywhere, is that we need to sit down and figure out more about our similarities.
If you sat me down with one of these really fundamentalist Christians and took away the judgments and the name calling and the acrimony, which would be very difficult to do on both sides, I think we could find some things that we could talk about. … Being good people. We could be good people together.

GOD GIRL: My impression as I read about your experiences with your in-laws is that your in-laws – and I’m guessing that we probably know people in common … They’re completely acting from a place of fear.

NICA: That’s not something I initially understood.

GOD GIRL: They’re probably terrified of someone screwing up their relationship – with each other, with God, with their church, with their children – as if their faith and their relationship with Christ is that precarious. Whereas if they believe what the Gospel says, it’s not precarious at all. Once He’s in there He’s in there. It just seems like such a fearful thing and the way they react to you comes completely out of that.

NICA: I wish I could have understood that earlier in my relationship with them.

GOD GIRL: They can’t seem to allow you the grace of, ‘You have a right to believe what you believe,’ even if they think you’re wrong. …And Jesus didn’t go around telling many people they were wrong except for the arrogant bloviators with big, bellicose voices. But they don’t’ get that.

NICA: They get it more recently, but now I’ve written the book and set us all back.

GOD GIRL: I wondered.

NICA: I do too. …
I mean, the thing is, I’m a very optimistic person. When I go into relationships I’m usually like, ‘Hi I’m me, let’s have a piece of cake and figure it out.’
When I traced back that relationship, because that was a pinnacle thing in my religious experience, in my life, I’ve traced back where did the trouble begin? Why did we never connect? Why could they never be just like, ‘Oh my brother’s wacky girlfriend but she’s really cool.’ It was always like, no, noooooo, NO.

GOD GIRL: As if you were a threat.

NICA: And I still to this day crave a real conversation. I still really wish we could have genuine understanding, because I don’t believe there can be any genuine healing or forgiveness without real dialogue and it just doesn’t happen because they just won’t let it.

GOD GIRL: Well, I hope you get that because you certainly should be able to.

NICA: I’m doubtful. I sent them the book in April and I’ve heard not a word.
… I’m on a panel this weekend with Chris Hitchens. He goes obviously a lot further than I do, but to me, his point of view is really important right now because I fell that as nonbelievers we have been so closeted for so long, that we’re bustin’ out in a big way. It’s not necessarily productive at the moment, but I think in the long run we’ve got to get it out.
I had a friend say to me, ‘I just could never say the kinds of things that he [Hitchens] said.’
He does say at one point that the smartest people he knows are the people who say they don’t really know anything. And then of course he tells you everything he knows.
I don’t know nearly enough. I’m not an expert.
But my friend said, ‘You’ve probably spent the last 10 years with white hot rage inside of you as you’ve watched this country pulled toward the religious right.’ And I had to admit that I do get angry because I just feel like we don’t really have too much of a voice.
When I was on the Catholic channel on Sirius radio with this wonderful Catholic priest, Father Paul Keenan, he said to me, and I almost burst into tears, he said, ‘You are bringing a voice out that really needs to be heard.’ And it was so … I’m always kind of amazed, even though I have a lot of friends who are Christian, I’m always kind of amazed that Christian people are nice.

GOD GIRL: Oh. God. That makes me want to tear my hair out and sick to my stomach, but I so understand your surprise.

NICA: It’s an issue I’ve really had to deal with.

You get stabbed so many times and you get like beaten dog syndrome where you’re just ready for the next blow.

So when [the priest] said that, I couldn’t even believe it. It was a wonderful interview. He was so great. And he said, as a believer, this is really important to understand.

GOD GIRL: Absolutely.

NICA: I don’t necessarily think that the guys out there – the big science anti-God guys – are helping the ‘other side’ understand.

I did enjoy [Hitchens’] book. It was refreshing to hear that there are ideas about faith … and then ideas about non-faith that can be as strong.

GOD GIRL: What’s really interesting to me about you and your work – first of all the tenor of your book is really different from what I’m seeing in Hitchens and Dawkins and others – but you’re also a woman. And there seem to be few women in the public square saying, ‘I’m an atheist or I’m a nonbeliever or I believe in nothing without also having this sort of New Agey, squishy thing that makes those of us who are theists say, well they really are believers, they’re just not calling it that. Yours an entirely different female voice than any I’ve heard. What’s that experience been like for you? You’re sort of pioneering in that way at this moment in our culture’s history.

NICA: Well, that is interesting.
You know, Hemant Mehta — the ‘I sold my soul on eBay’ guy – he wrote on his blog that he went to an atheist convention and there were like three women in the room. And hundreds of guys or whatever.
I think you’re right. I think I am trying … again, back to part of the point of writing the book: I really wanted people to say, ‘OK, here she is. She seems nice enough, she’s involved in her community, she’s an educator and all of that is right. And she’s not telling me I’m wrong for believing what I believe in, OK. Maybe she’s not so bad.’
And that is really what I would ultimately like from my in-laws. Also I feel like the dialogue going forward absolutely needs to be more constructive.
And I don’t know how to do that other than to say, ‘Hey let me just tell you my story, because it’s an OK story and I’m a pretty good storyteller and you can come along for the ride and see that these were my experiences and this is how I got to be where I am and this is why I believe or don’t believe, but I’m really OK.

GOD GIRL: Which is, essentially, what Jesus did, by the way. So there’s that.
I’m in the process of writing another book … about grace. At the end of your book you say that words like ‘grace’ have come to have a significant meaning for you even if it’s not one based in any theology. … I’m asking everyone this question these days, so just for shits and giggles, what’s grace to you?

NICA: That’s a very good question.
My husband and I, he recently said something about another person involved in the PTA. He said, ‘She just has no grace.’
And I totally knew what he meant.
To me, grace is an ability to reach out of yourself. An ability to be generous, kind, to take into account something larger than yourself. And that really is what I think it is.
And when people don’t have it they’re kind of stiff and tight-wadded. That’s not grace.
And the other word that you could use is magnanimous. Also being comfortable in your own skin has something to do with grace, too.

GOD GIRL: All of that is true.

NICA: And from some people, all of what I just said comes from a belief in a higher power. For me, I think it comes more from within you. I have cousins – my husband’s family – very religious people who are nothing like my in-laws, and we are very good friends. And the one cousin said to me she thought I was arrogant for thinking that all the good things in my life had come from myself and not from God. … I thought to myself, well, isn’t it arrogant of you to think that all of the good things in your life came from God? In other words, God cares about the weather on your vacation.
I’m always amazed when people say they were ‘so blessed’ to have had good weather on their vacation. I always think to myself, ‘Please tell me that God has something else to worry about other than whether you get four days of sunshine or not.’ I think, well, aren’t you arrogant to think that God cares about your vacation?
But I think that also comes from my admitted lack of understanding about what this deity really means.

GOD GIRL: if the question were posed to me, my answer would be that God is big enough to care about everything at the same time, including their vacation, and that what they were really trying to express is that they were truly grateful that they had good weather.

NICA: My father and I talk about a lot of this stuff a lot. We’re very very close, my family. And we’re all pretty much the same as me. My mother identifies herself as a Jew more than I do, but she’s a Jew who has absolutely no relationship to religion. So .. and my parents can be hostile toward religion at times too, but that’s another issue altogether, I guess. But we were talking about the notion of how big this idea is, how big is God?
That’s something I learned when I studied Islamic art. I sort of have a theory and I’m not quite sure if it’s so right, but the idea that tessellation – the interlocking repeated pattern that can go on for infinity – represents the greatness of God because it never ends. A tessellation, you could start it on your living room floor and it could go all the way around the world and it could go everywhere. There’s no end to it.
And that concept of a deity is something I just don’t connect with but intellectually I go oh oh OK.