Special Edition: Sacred Reading with Stephanie Paulsell!

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 Casper, we are bringing everyone who we can together for a sacred practice Saturday as part of our

spk_0 saying goodbye to Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a day of food and fun.

spk_0 Fantasy, fabulousness, and Fred and George.

spk_0 Fred and George, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text is ending in February.

spk_0 We want to take an opportunity to gather one more time as a big group for a good amount of time.

spk_0 So we have a full day of doing what to do, divina together, doing parties together, singing together,

spk_0 doing some arts and crafts together, and having a fancy, you all ball inspired sacred dinner together.

spk_0 All of that is included in just one day. I'll be there. Casper will be there. Ariana, AJ, the whole team.

spk_0 And you can get your tickets now at notsorryworks.com.

spk_0 If you've loved listening to the show, if this community has been a meaningful forum for you,

spk_0 and if you can get to Boston for the live show on the 7th of November and this fabulous sacred Saturday on the 8th of November,

spk_0 we would love to have you there and to celebrate a decade of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. We hope to see you there.

spk_0 They bought Harry schoolbooks in a shop called Flourish and Blots, where the shelves were stacked to the ceiling with books as large as paving stones, bound in leather.

spk_0 Books the size of postage stamps in covers of silk, books full of peculiar symbols, and a few books with nothing in them at all.

spk_0 I'm Vanessa Zoltan, and I'm Stephanie Palsell.

spk_0 And this is a special episode of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.

spk_0 Stephanie Palsell, the patron saint of this podcast. Thank you for coming on and doing this special episode with us.

spk_0 It's wonderful to be here.

spk_0 So every once in a while, we like to take a step back, especially now that we're in our last season and talk about a theme of the books.

spk_0 And especially, you know, now that we're ending of this experience of making Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.

spk_0 So today is a special episode about reading and sacred reading in particular.

spk_0 And so obviously there's no one better to talk to about that than you.

spk_0 But before we jump into the episode, I have one announcement. And that is our bonus conversation.

spk_0 Our every flavored bean conversation is Stephanie.

spk_0 We're going to make you stick around and recommend a book to everyone.

spk_0 And that will be our bonus conversation.

spk_0 A book that you've read lately that you're like, this is sacred. I would treat this as sacred.

spk_0 Great.

spk_0 So Stephanie, I met you in 2012.

spk_0 And you were my first professor at Harvard Divinity School.

spk_0 You taught introduction to ministry studies. You were like the lecturer.

spk_0 And then I had to walk up to you after the first class and say, I didn't get assigned a section like a small group seminar.

spk_0 And you said, well, then when I said you should just be in my seminar.

spk_0 And so I mean, like from the second that I started Divinity School, you were my touchstone.

spk_0 And I think I took every class with you that you offered while I was there.

spk_0 And then of course, I asked you one day if you would teach me how to sacred read,

spk_0 but that I didn't want to do it with the Bible. I wanted to do it with Jane Eyre.

spk_0 And you said, yes. And here we are.

spk_0 And here we are. Well, I'm so glad I said you should be in my section.

spk_0 I feel like I'm not exaggerating when I say that you actually founded the company.

spk_0 Can you tell us what is your history with the idea of reading as a sacred practice?

spk_0 Well, my history with reading as a sacred practice goes all the way back to my childhood.

spk_0 And my mom, you know, learning to read from my mom snuggled up against her while she read to me and sitting outside with my dad while he read his songs.

spk_0 And I've told the story many times. I feel like on this podcast, but my dad's method of prayer was to read.

spk_0 I read six songs a day and to listen in each song for the verse that really shown out to him, spoke to him on that day.

spk_0 And then he would write it in a notebook, all the verses of these different verses from the songs, creating a new song, making a flora legion, a flower garden of verses.

spk_0 And I think as a child, the notebook really appealed to me, writing it down in the notebook and creating something new.

spk_0 And so I sort of grew up with parents who were doing sacred reading practices.

spk_0 I sort of think of my dad as teaching me how to do sacred reading with a sacred text and my mom teaching me that reading itself was a sacred practice.

spk_0 That there was something about reading itself, maybe the way it enlarges our world or maybe the way it illuminates our own depth and shows us parts of ourselves that we didn't know where they are.

spk_0 But there's something about reading itself that can feel sacred.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 So when I grew up to become a graduate student, what I was really interested in was the way in which reading and writing could be understood as sacred practices.

spk_0 And I studied writers who expressed that explicitly and I studied writers who didn't, but who for me were writing a kind of sacred text.

spk_0 When I was a kid, I always was looking for books about girls who were experimenting with their solitude or creating some sort of sacred space or using writing as a way to move through the world.

spk_0 So I think I've been looking for that feeling ever since.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 I love that looking for their solitude.

spk_0 I feel like one of the things that I learned from you that I just want a many reminder on is Saint Augustine and the way that he thought about writing and reading is prayer.

spk_0 Because I do think that actually you had us read Augustine and enter to ministry studies and I actually think it was your lecture on that that I was like this, this is my person, you are my person.

spk_0 Can you please tell us who Saint Augustine was and just how he impacts the way that you think about sacred reading and writing?

spk_0 Yeah, absolutely.

spk_0 I guess it was a great ancient theologian and bishop from Africa, from North Africa.

spk_0 And he was one of the great readers, I think, in history.

spk_0 He was a seeker as a young man and he tried out different religions and he joined various spiritual movements, all of which ended up being kind of unsatisfying to him.

spk_0 And he kept wanting to be interested in Christianity, but every time he read the Bible it just didn't seem very beautiful.

spk_0 It didn't seem as lovely as Cicero or you know, it just didn't speak to him in the way other texts did.

spk_0 And so his conversion to Christianity was sort of a movement from book to book to book.

spk_0 First he read this book that's a lost book now, I Cicero called the Hortensia, which is about the love of wisdom and about philosophy.

spk_0 And that converted him to the love of wisdom and then he began reading the neoplateness and they sort of converted him to the idea of the word, although not Christianity's word made flesh.

spk_0 But sort of the word as the foundation of the universe.

spk_0 And then finally he did find someone to help him read the Bible in his mentor, Ambrose of Milan, Milan, Italy, the bishop there.

spk_0 He said to Augustine, you're not reading right. You're just reading the literal meaning of the text and what you need to do is go deeper.

spk_0 He said, you're just skating along the surface and if you do that, you won't reach the depths of it.

spk_0 And that's how Augustine sort of came to love the Bible.

spk_0 And so he, you know, especially with the book of Genesis in the book that you read, his autobiography, the Confessions, he kind of braids together his words and Genesis words from the Bible and creates, you know, this amazing interpretation of that book.

spk_0 But he's, yeah, he's one of the great readers who had a lot of faith in the power of reading to move us along toward God.

spk_0 And I feel like all of our listeners can hear how I would listen to that lecture and be like, I'm struggling reading the Bible, but this person believes that I can work my way there.

spk_0 I'm trying to think if I thought that in reading Jane Ares sacred, it would lead me sort of back to the Torah or not, or if I was just like, I'm allowed to start anywhere, you know, but I love that invitation.

spk_0 And I feel like also so much of what you talked about was the way that he figured out his theology while writing about it.

spk_0 Yeah, he was sort of writing in between the lines of Genesis writing his own book in between the lines of it.

spk_0 He made the story of the creation of the world part of the story of his life and then braided them together.

spk_0 He has a great allegory of the days of creation of the seven days of creation in Genesis.

spk_0 And the fourth day of creation is the day when God stretches out the fernament or the sky between earth and heaven.

spk_0 And for him, the sky was the scripture. It was the Bible, a window that we could look through to see Trinity, but it was also a veil pulled across God's face that blocked our view.

spk_0 And that we were like the stars and the sky holding on to it with both of our hands trying to see through its veil.

spk_0 So he even made the story of the days of creation about reading in part.

spk_0 I feel like hopefully at its purest, most earnest hope this podcast has been an invitation for people to write the stories of their own lives in between your lines.

spk_0 Absolutely.

spk_0 Of Harry Potter books or whatever, you know, books that they read that was certainly like the intention of the podcast as we got started.

spk_0 And one of the things that we hear from people, I think this is truly the thing we hear from people most frequently is I started listening to you when I was in college.

spk_0 And now I've gone to grad school, started my career, gotten married, had a baby, you know, like all the things that they've sort of been part of this conversation with us for.

spk_0 And so I love the idea that like now this community has like right like we've all written our lives between the lines of all these conversations.

spk_0 That's right. That's right.

spk_0 There's a great novel by the Mexican novelist, the Larry Lewis, Ellie, called Lost Children Archives and I teach that book in my class at HD.

spk_0 Well, lucky students, it's a great novel and you're a great teacher.

spk_0 But she has a line in that book that I love, which one of the characters says, I don't keep journals.

spk_0 My journals are the things I underline in books.

spk_0 And I think there's a lot of that going on in your community.

spk_0 But if we went through the marginalia of all of our Harry Potter's, we would see the story of our lives.

spk_0 Like I think about my dad's, Florologia, all those notebooks full of all those songs.

spk_0 I have the last 20 ever made 13 days before he died and I feel like I learn as much from reading those verses that he picked out that he essentially underlined.

spk_0 As I would have he'd written a page of a journal, you know, I can see how he felt.

spk_0 I can see what he was worried about. I can see what he hoped for.

spk_0 I just reread portrait of a lady for the first time in years.

spk_0 And there is a paragraph in this book that I underlined and starred and put hearts and I for the life of me cannot figure out why this meant anything to me at the time.

spk_0 I read it like three or four times. I called Ariana and was like, why was I obsessed with this paragraph?

spk_0 And I remember reading it and reading it. It was like an ecstatic moment.

spk_0 You know, I was like, the key to the whole story.

spk_0 You know, this is a thousand page book and I felt like I'd found the key to the book and like somehow the key to the universe.

spk_0 And you know, I have no idea what I thought, but I'm excited. I'm like, in 10 years, I'll read this again. I'll see.

spk_0 Maybe I'll be like tapped back into that.

spk_0 That's right.

spk_0 But for the most part, you know, I lead these monthly lectodovinas with our patrons.

spk_0 And I use my old books in pick sentences that I underlined 10, 15 years ago as the lectios.

spk_0 And so like that past underlying does just like keep feeding these conversations.

spk_0 As we go down memory lane, is there anything from early Harry Potter and the Sacred Text that you remember that like you want to put in our yearbook?

spk_0 Oh no, you look too happy.

spk_0 You're about to say something embarrassing. What?

spk_0 I remember very well driving back from Cape Cod with my husband, Kevin, listening to the first episode of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.

spk_0 And we were just, we just thought you and Casper were so brilliant.

spk_0 And as teachers who are both medievalists and both interested in issues of interpretation and reading and writing, to have all of that expanded and brought into this new context and mirrored back to us in this fresh way.

spk_0 The most one of our happiest moments as teachers in the car, listening to you all, we were so moved by it.

spk_0 And I go back and listen to that episode. Sometimes it's such a great episode.

spk_0 I tell a story that you taught me. So it's perfect.

spk_0 We have not given Kevin Madigan his due on this podcast.

spk_0 He was also one of my professors. I took every class with him that I could.

spk_0 And he is among other things. He's a scholar of the Holocaust and was like the person who taught me Holocaust theology at HDS.

spk_0 So this is just a moment to shut up Kevin Madigan, everyone who I don't know why we've just left him in the desk.

spk_0 He's just up early and goes to bed at like three in the afternoon. So we never see him. That's right.

spk_0 That's why.

spk_0 Casper, we are bringing everyone who we can together for a sacred practice Saturday as part of our saying goodbye to Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.

spk_0 In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a day of food and fun.

spk_0 Fantasy, fabulousness and Fred and George.

spk_0 So we have a full day of doing what you're divina together, doing parties together, singing together, doing some arts and crafts together,

spk_0 and having a fancy you all ball inspired sacred dinner together.

spk_0 All of that is included in just one day. I'll be there. Casper will be there. Ariana, AJ, the whole team.

spk_0 If you've loved listening to the show, if this community has been a meaningful forum for you, and if you can get to Boston for the live show on the 7th of November and this fabulous sacred Saturday on the 8th of November,

spk_0 we would love to have you that and to celebrate a decade of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. We hope to see you there.

spk_0 I remember to the first live show.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 At the Middle East and Central Square in Cambridge in a kind of dank bar.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 And you had us all pair up and do Alexia together.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 And I sat next to this young woman I'd never met before.

spk_0 And she just was so brilliant in reading the text and imagining all the different meanings.

spk_0 And I tried to recruit her to Divinity School. And she said, no, thank you.

spk_0 Thanks for no thanks.

spk_0 I think one of my all time favorite photographs and will be until I die is a photo of you and Matt pots and Mike motier, who was my teacher on my thesis, all sitting there at our live show just so

spk_0 with so much love, just you guys were so proud.

spk_0 You're so supportive.

spk_0 It was just like nothing we did.

spk_0 We did without you guys.

spk_0 So I feel really good about us ending the show when and how we are, you know, we went through it once.

spk_0 We had already committed to going through it a second time when JK rolling really started being hateful and spreading misinformation about transness.

spk_0 And then we, you know, we put out a poll and heard from our listeners that 66% of our listeners were like, please keep making it.

spk_0 This is a place where I feel like I can still love Harry Potter.

spk_0 And so we were really excited to do that. We made a commitment to no longer promote the show, but to keep making the show for the community that already existed and ending it now, you know, I feel like we've gone through it twice.

spk_0 We've proven this Jewish thing that it's not just Jewish, but this thing that feels very Jewish to me, which is like you finish a sacred text and you just start it over again.

spk_0 That has new gifts to give you every time.

spk_0 And you know, you finished the Torah and you started again.

spk_0 And I feel like we proved that, which was really important to me.

spk_0 And I feel like now it's time to let it go.

spk_0 And I feel like we're saying a proper goodbye.

spk_0 And, you know, we're going to gather people in all sorts of ways.

spk_0 And I do feel sad. There are still 20,000 people who listen every week.

spk_0 And this is part of their sacred practice.

spk_0 And we're trying to come up with other ways to stay engaged with them and that.

spk_0 But do you have sort of a wish or a hope for the community that might feel like something is ending in a way that they might be losing something in this ending?

spk_0 Yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right.

spk_0 I think it's time to bring it to the close and you're doing other reading projects.

spk_0 And that's great.

spk_0 I guess my wish for the community is that they keep doing this.

spk_0 That we've all learned the way a book can be a kind of portable sacred space.

spk_0 And we've all learned the way a book can gather up a really diverse group of friends and readers and turn into something really real and substantial.

spk_0 I remember on the first literary pilgrimage you did, the Virginia Woolf pilgrimage.

spk_0 We were standing around in Tavastok Square where she thought up to the lighthouse.

spk_0 And we were talking about what kind of fresh ground we wanted to break this week because she said that that's what she did with to the lighthouse that she broke fresh ground in her mind with the new form that she was experimenting with.

spk_0 And somebody said, I don't have anybody to have these kinds of conversations with in my life.

spk_0 I have podcasts and that's the community that I look to and I I guess my hope is that we're all finding ways in real life to read together and to let ourselves be gathered by things that we love.

spk_0 Things that we hold as sacred and that we share those things with other people.

spk_0 You know, when I was going through graduate school, we all read the same books.

spk_0 But as a teacher, you know, in the generation that I taught, there weren't as many shared books and common people do their own thing and they study really wide ranging disparate subjects and religions and texts and it's a good thing.

spk_0 It's progress, but one of the things that we have lost is that sense of reading together and whether we all like the books, we, you know, what I was a student, we didn't all of these books and we argued about them, but we had something to argue about.

spk_0 And I hope that people when they love a book that they share with others and let that love and that feeling of sacredness gather a community or a man.

spk_0 Yeah, I've really realized, you know, I'm at work when I make this podcast and they're, you know, are all sorts of non sacred parts of or I think you would not would probably argue that they are also part of the sacred work, but you know, there's technology and making sure the dog is embarking and or commuting and right, which is like all this, the stuff with recording a podcast, but I have realized that almost every week for the last 11 years, I have done a sacred reading practice.

spk_0 And like that has rewired my brain and when this podcast ends, I will not have a standing appointment to treat a text of sacred with someone.

spk_0 And like I'm going to have to do stuff like that because I don't want to lose it, right? Like, even though I feel like once something is work, it can feel less sacred, but that part has never felt less sacred to me when we get into the sacred reading practice.

spk_0 Like, there's just been such discipline in doing it because it was for work and I, yeah, I just, I don't want to, I don't want to lose that just because we're not recording anymore.

spk_0 I think reading is maybe the most available contemplative practice that we have anymore. I have a friend who teaches creative writing and she's a young adult novelist and she assigned a book that you recommended to me once I capture the castle.

spk_0 It's one of my all time favorite books, everyone.

spk_0 She assigned it to a group of students and they loved it. They just loved it. And so she asked them, why this book and not other books? What do you love so much about this book? And they said, because when we're reading this book, we forget to check our phones for whole pages at a time.

spk_0 And she said, well, when you're usually when you're reading, how often do you check your phone? And they said after every sentence.

spk_0 And that is a rewiring of the brain and what Harry Potter and the Sacred Text has done is offer us a way to rewire our brain in a different direction or get our dopamine from somewhere else.

spk_0 I remember my colleague, Anmoneas, when she rests in peace, she was a great scholar of Hinduism and Buddhism. And I said to her, I think reading is the way I meditate.

spk_0 And she said, you obviously don't know very much your meditation.

spk_0 What she meant, of course, is that a lot of these traditions are not about adding more words into your mind, but clearing your mind.

spk_0 But I just meant that there's something about the absorption that reading offers that does kind of return us to ourselves. And you've given us a way to do that.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 Casper, we are bringing everyone who we can together for a sacred practice Saturday as part of our saying goodbye to Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.

spk_0 In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a day of food and fun.

spk_0 Fantasy, fabulousness, and Fred and George.

spk_0 So we have a full day of doing what you do, Divina together, doing parties together, singing together, doing some arts and crafts together.

spk_0 And having a fancy, you all ball inspired sacred dinner together.

spk_0 All that is included in just one day.

spk_0 I'll be there. Casper will be there. Ariana, AJ, the whole team.

spk_0 If you've loved listening to the show, if this community has been a meaningful one for you, and if you can get to Boston for the live show on the 7th of November and this fabulous sacred Saturday on the 8th of November, we would love to have you that and to celebrate.

spk_0 A decade of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. We hope to see you there.

spk_0 I really appreciate you centering reading because I feel like I really do want to go so far out of my way to be like, get your sacred experience wherever you can.

spk_0 And I believe that, right? Like I really do. I'm like, go to the baseball game, walk your dog, look up at tree canopies.

spk_0 I want to say all of that. And that reading is unique regardless of any sort of hierarchy. It is unique.

spk_0 And yeah, just invite people, I think, to lean into that. And I really love what you said about allowing yourself to gather around it.

spk_0 And even if you don't like the book that your book club is doing, that meant what a great thing to disagree about.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 One of the big lessons that I've learned from making this podcast, I think holds true for the people who I most think of is like co-creating this with us.

spk_0 And that's right, like you, Matt, Ariana and Casper. And that is like that there's something about physically showing up.

spk_0 Yeah. Like you showed up at the early class, you showed up at the live show.

spk_0 We had a retirement dinner for you and Casper came up from New York to Cambridge for the night just to make sure that he was there. Right?

spk_0 Like that there is just something about the act of physically showing up that transformed something into something sacred and meaningful.

spk_0 And that it's not something that we can always do. I feel like COVID taught us that and all sorts of things teach us that.

spk_0 But when we can to just sort of physically actually show up.

spk_0 I remember that was one of your worries about the podcast that we couldn't bring Casper rolls to each other when someone died.

spk_0 But people can, you know, they're these chains of connection around the world now of readers of Harry Potter who have been following along with this podcast.

spk_0 And you are the queen of showing up.

spk_0 Yes, well, we've been showing up for me for years. So I got it. I'm just trying my best.

spk_0 Okay. Stephanie, any final reflections for today?

spk_0 Well, I was just remembering that when you first came to HTS and you were in the MDF program, but you didn't want to be rabbi and you weren't a traditional MDF student in the way that MDF students were in those days.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 Aiming for religious particular religious institution.

spk_0 I would be so normal now.

spk_0 Well, you were part of the wave of chaplains, people who wanted to be chaplains, you were sort of the crest of that wave.

spk_0 But I remember asking you, what do you want to do with this degree? And you said, I'm going to help people read.

spk_0 And I just loved that you had such faith in the practice of reading that there was something sacred there for you and that you wanted to make it available to other people.

spk_0 And I'm really grateful to have been able to witness this coming to being.

spk_0 At your retirement dinner, we all went around and we had to share one thing that we wouldn't know if not for you.

spk_0 And it was Matt who pointed out that I wouldn't have known anyone at that table, if not for you.

spk_0 And like all the pots children were at the table. Amy, Casper, Terry, like there was a wide range of people at that table and Matt was like, uh, Vanessa, you wouldn't know anyone here.

spk_0 You wouldn't be here. That was like, that is humbling and true. So thank you. Stephanie, I love you. Thank you so much for coming on and doing this episode with us.

spk_0 I love you. And I love this podcast. And I'm going to keep listening to it over and over again. I'm sure for a very long time.

spk_0 I will say I sometimes go back and listen to old blooper reels. If I want to hear me and Casper laugh.

spk_0 So that's a reason to sign up for Patreon. Everyone, you can go back and listen to Casper and I make jerks of ourselves eight years ago. That's that stuff goes back.

spk_0 This was a not sorry production. We are a feminist production company. You can get ad free episodes on Apple podcasts or through our Patreon.

spk_0 We are sponsored by the Fetzer Institute. Ariana, Nettlement and I are the executive producers and we are edited and produced by AJ Oramas. Our music is by Ivan Pizzoa, Nick Bol and we are distributed by a cast.

spk_0 We love to thank our Minerva's book club level patrons, Avril, Amanda C Amanda S Amber, Amy Ashley, Danny, Emil, Esther Greg, Warr, Casey, Kelsey, Crete, Kyle, Marina, Nadia, and Ceta.

spk_0 And of course our team Ariana, and Julia, our Yeniki, Zoltan, Courtney Brown, Matt Pots, Casper, Terkail, and Nisa, Amma, Danny, Langley.

spk_0 And as we do at the end of every episode of every podcast we record and Stephanie, Paul, Sel.

spk_0 Thanks, Vanessa. Thanks, Stephanie.

spk_0 Stephanie, do we think these books with nothing in them at all are like journals or do we think it's a commentary on how certain books are useless?

spk_0 Oh, that's a great question. I imagine them as books that were empty.

spk_0 Okay, I could be either I could go either way.

spk_0 Yeah, that's not an answer to my question at all.

Special Edition: Sacred Reading with Stephanie Paulsell!

Interactive Transcript

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