Episode 7: Looking Back // Transcript

 

Sarah:

So we are here with John Masko talking about our latest LA Catholic’s project. And I like to say, John, that you are the ‘Father of Podcasting’ without even knowing that you were podcasting. Tell us a little bit about the project you did with the sisters up at the Abbey at Mount Saint Mary’s.

John Masko:

Well it took over a year to get the sisters to agree to have me come and interview 12 of their nuns. And to me, it was very important to have an audio version of this rather than just a print version. So we would meet — that was 12 sisters — for about an hour and a quarter, to an hour and a half each. And it was in a tiny space and looking at someone that tightly brings things with it. 

There’s an intimacy to it. And I have a lot of experience talking with people. And I know some of the vulnerabilities that we fall into — filling space, for example. And filling space causes us to lose meaning sometimes because we’re intervening in the discomfort that evokes. So, asking a question and waiting and watching and waiting and having someone go: “Ah.. that’s interesting, I haven’t quite thought about that…” And then not jumping in to say: “Well, what I meant was…” No. Pausing, waiting, and letting the person consolidate her thoughts. 

And these ladies, in general, were quite good at mental organization. So that they would be able to say, in essence, “there are five main points that I want to bring up,” — the flavor. So I think in some respects there’s an intimacy and a power to audio. Certainly because of the character of the voice, but also because it blocks out certain things. 

So I found the interviews very moving often. You know, sometimes afterwards, I would almost have to sit for a time and I wouldn’t call it ‘decompressing’ exactly, but digesting. And then as soon as I got home, I’d often listen to it again. And actually as a couple years went by after that, I’d refresh myself. It’s almost like a pick-me-up almost. Like people might have a drink, but then after a couple years, I set them aside when it was clear that they were going nowhere in terms of publishing. And I set them back on a shelf and really forgot all about them. 

So that was about 23-24 years ago. 

Sarah: 

One of the things I love talking with you, John, is the importance of living life fully and going deep and not being afraid to really go into the depth of what you’re exploring. And I think about the sisters and who, in the world’s eyes, might see them as ‘hidden women.’ And in their praying, their living their lives in community and just with each other, within their own grounds, within their own property. 

So I can imagine, 20 some years ago, you coming in and recording. Recording on this device and sitting there and asking them to go into the depths of very important questions. Do you think that you had to be able to develop a sense of trust with each other for you to be able to ask the sisters the questions and then for them to be able to be vulnerable enough for them to be able to share fully and freely with you?

John Masko:

Well I’d say, in part, the trust reflected the character of the community, which I’ll explain in a second. The sisters know each other and trust each other. And I know, from my discussions with the then Mother Superior, that all of our meetings were reviewed with the community. And there was a discussion about them. And when she had, I think, given her ‘okay,’ it was something that was taken seriously by the group: “He’s okay, and this is okay. And he really wants to know how we feel. He’s not leading us astray or goofing with us.”

So I just had the sense that, unlike in some circumstances in my field, where you have to sometimes take weeks, months to break down some barriers and have people trust you — that wasn’t necessary. I had been given permission and that was okay with the sisters. So, almost nothing was necessary. As soon as we started the discussion — within 5-10 minutes — it was deep and they were talking about very important elements of their life. 

Sarah:

What a gift it must be for you to hold that memory of being in that vulnerable space. I think the beautiful thing about sharing stories and having conversations and just capturing the depth of another person — is that that’s a cherished gift. Right? Like that is our deepest selves — what we ask, what we speak about, it reflects our interior self, the most special part of ourselves. What a gift for you to hold that and then want to share that with the world. What does it feel like to be able to hold their stories and then gift that back to the world so other people can cherish what they were teaching you?

John Masko:

It’s a blessing. It’s true that I regard such things, that is — encounters like that, as some of the greatest experiences of life. I sometimes will think back to a smile that maybe happened 35 years ago and it brings me joy. And things like that are so important — maybe you could say one of the most important things in life…

Sarah: 

You think about that, the beauty of a full life and how do you get to, at the end of your life, say, “I’ve lived a full, deep life.” And I think a lot of it comes down to intentionality — how aware are we of the people around us? How aware are we of the situations around us? And how do we intentionally look for those moments? Those small moments — you know, that glance, that smile that you mentioned. How do you learn to love deeply? I think it’s about being intentional, right?

And when I think about what you did with the podcasts and recordings was so intentional. Like I loved earlier when you talked about the slow nature of it. Waiting for the pause, not being afraid of the pause. That’s intentional. we’re in a soundbite culture right now. And I think sometimes in that soundbite culture we lose the intentionality. We lose that moment to sit, and to ponder, and to reflect, and to take that in. 

So tell us a little bit about why that was your approach? Why it was so important not to be afraid of those moments of silence, or not to be afraid to speed up the question if a sisters wasn’t ready to respond?

John Masko:

When you first start out working in a field where conversation is so fundamental, in terms of understanding and maybe change, you realize and through supervision in my field that you're intervening too much really to save yourself. 

I mean, it’s one of the general problems in a field like medicine — generally now I’m not talking about psychiatry — that we’re treating ourselves, okay? Some doctors will prescribe treatments that, if they look closely, they should realize are not indicated — not in this patient, not at this time. But it makes us feel better to do something, especially when someone is demanding it, saying: “You have to do something, doctor. Fix it now!” And if you think about it, there is no fix for it. But you’ll do something — you’ll spend some money, you might put the person through some distress — to save yourself, in part. You say “Well I’m saving the patient. The patient feels better. He or she went out and feels like there’s a treatment going on.” But you know it’s going to fail in a couple weeks. 

And the same is true in psychiatry — you jump in to save yourself. It’s uncomfortable sitting there and the person is staring at you. And I learned early on, like I said in part through supervision, you are taking care of yourself in these instances often — you’re getting yourself out of discomfort.

What I mean by that is, “no, the person knows what you mean.” You’re saving yourself there and that’s not the purpose of this, any of this, to save yourself. Put yourself in distress, doctor and help that person know him or herself and possibly take a step towards shifting. 

Sarah:

What, I can imagine, a gift for you in your daily life, being in the healing profession and holding people’s pain and their struggles and receiving that day in and day out. And then to be able to go to the sisters and have that moment — that time to talk with them — and see their profound joy despite their suffering. Because joy doesn’t mean that happiness comes easily. Isn’t there a difference between joy and happiness and what is that the sisters were able to show you in those conversations or to really show you about the depth of the human spirit.

John Masko:

It was a relief, I’d say, mostly for me. Because I talk all day and I talk with people all day and all night sometimes. Emergency rooms, offices, wards. And I almost never would say that I dealt with pure hearts — people who would just say: “Okay, here’s my heart.” What it was for me, mostly, was we’d talk for 3 years and then you’re maybe showing a quarter of your heart. And then maybe I’d say: “Hey, I see that.” And the person might say, “You got it. That’s right.”

But to walk into these rooms and have these people who are thinking about this stuff all the time — being pure of heart, watching their minds and bouncing their minds off other people’s minds and having the reflection come back to them and then thinking some more about themselves — every day, all year, gives a purity that was, to me, almost refreshing.

Sarah:

To me, the sisters give us courage, I mean, even just in my own personal life. I think all of us desire to live authentic lives, we want to be known. By our nature, we want to be known and being known as who we are — our feelings, our successes, all of us. And in that, no matter how dark, how bright lights, there is this desire to be known. And there’s so much freedom in that. 

So I think about the sisters and hear you talk about the conversations that you had and listening to the sisters, I think about the great courage that they have to be vulnerable and just to be free in that. And it’s almost as if — we say that they’re hidden from the world but within them there’s just like this hidden beauty. Because it’s no longer hidden. It’s fully present before God, before their community. And what a lesson that we can learn from that about taking the courage, and being courageous and finding that and saying: “you know, this is who I am and I’m going to not be afraid of that or to love others fully in that place.”

I don’t know, I guess in your career, do you think our world be a more kind place if we all tried to live and exist from that place of courage and perhaps vulnerability?

John Masko:

Yes, I think so. I think it would be a better place. I think long-term relationships, intimate relationships, have served that function forever — knowing the person and tolerating the other and the self. And somewhere in the culture, over the last 60 or 70 years, we became less invested, for some reason, in persisting in intimate relationships. They became maybe more expendable. And I think we lost the richness, not everybody, and you know you can’t — it’s an overgeneralization — but there’s something to it anyway. We have become, in some respects, more superficial. 

And the same is true, I’d say, in some aspects of education, from what I’ve observed my youngsters going through — they aren’t asked to deeply analyze things, to see the 3 possible meanings of those couple lines of poetry and what the implications of each of those are. The sorts of things that I was asked to do. You know something I was mentioning to one of my sons the other day was having been asked by a teacher to summarize a notable period of history in 10 pages and then in 2 pages and then in 2 paragraphs and then in 2 sentences — that is abstracting down. It’s complicated but deep and meaningful when we can do that. Because we can go the other way too — take 2 sentences, 2 paragraphs, 2 pages, 10 pages, a book — gives us the complications. 

And nowadays we’re too superficial. We say: “it’s obviously this. That’s the answer. Next question.”  No.

Sarah:

So, for our listeners out there who understand our desire to go deeper or maybe to not be afraid to go deeper, to find the joy that the sisters lived on a daily basis — how do we do that? How do we, you know again in the soundbite culture that we’re in and in an environment where people put everything online, you know they put their lives out their in the public sphere you know through their digital devices — how do we step back for a moment and pause? And how do we live a deep, intentional life that allows us to explore what it means to go deep?

John Masko:

One of the things I think is really necessary is courage and persistence and becoming intimate with people, with complex works of art. You’re going to need to be able to tolerate rejection, because at some point either you’re going to realize, or someone’s going to say to you: “You know, you’re not so good at this. That’s a mistake you made there and you’ve made it many times.” Or “you have some strengths, you have some weaknesses, here’s my perception of it.” And the immature stance is to say: “Get out. Oh you’re going to tell me about my weaknesses are you? Why don’t you shut up and just  get out of here.” As opposed to, “Okay, well, let’s discuss that,” or “I’m going to think about it and we’ll have a discussion about it.” And also not doing what we’re all inclined to do, which is: “Okay, well let me tell you about your weaknesses, okay? I’ll list them off here for you.” Attack, that is. And then you get into, “You’re is worse than mine.” “No, your’s is way worse.” and all this stuff. You need to be able to sit and tolerate yourself really, in the end, and the fact that none of us is perfect and that all of us is working towards being a better person. 

So, I would say that’s one thing — you’re going to have to tolerate pain and if you can’t, then you’re probably not going to grow and you’re probably not going to have a depth of joy that you might otherwise. 

There are some wonderful writers and read them and if you don’t understand, close the book maybe and come back tomorrow and read it over. And try to understand that the implication — the layers of meaning of things. A superficial culture, i think, cannot last. And I just believe that it’s better for all of us, the more complex and the deeper we can be. 

Sarah:

I loved in some of our past conversations you talk about the rhythm — the beautiful rhythm — that the sisters how they live. And such an important aspect or part of their rhythm is their prayer life and how they do it at the same time each day. It grounds their work, it grounds who they are. I think it gives them the ability to love deeply. Has their witness of really holding onto that special time — that sacred time of prayer affected you in your life or in your work even. 

John Masko:

I don’t know that that happened. I think, you’re reminding me but sort of distantly of a remark that one of the nuns made talking about the ‘sameness’ of the day for her, the regularity of it, as a comfort. And when I think of my own life, I think I was doing or I had regular rituals — most of us do — and they do free us. So, if my wife knows that 7:30 every morning a cappuccino will be on, in a way it frees her — she doesn’t have to be thinking about that — she’s thinking about other things as she comes cruising down and grabs her cappuccino. 

And I think prayer, which is a touchstone for the nuns, is helpful to all of us. I don’t think it’s ever a negative to pray, but that’s a belief. You know, maybe when we were younger — my prior times or people we’ve known — would say, “there’s no sense in praying. There’s nobody out there, no one’s listening to you. You want some God or something to intervene on your behalf? No, just go do something, take care of it.” But I believe that prayer is helpful, both as a human ritual and also as something that forms relationships with the divine. 

Sarah:

Yeah, it’s like a friend. When you love a friend, what do you want to do? You want to have a conversation; you want to get to know that other person. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things that sisters taught us in that, is that, you know, to become more like the divine, to become more capable of loving, we have to know the divine. We have to know God. We have to know Jesus. And the only way we can do that is to talk to him, to get to know him through prayer and then live it. 

Well thank you so much for bringing the sisters’ stories to life. I think my team and I have loved getting to know you, getting to know the sisters. It’s just remarkable that these were recorded some 23 years ago but still have so much truth today.  And we just hope that people listening will be able to sit with that and all the beautiful reflections that you’ve received and how it has really shaped your life. That maybe the sisters, you know, some who are living, some who are deceased — their voices still echo through the digital highways and just reach people’s hearts and just take people to discover, in a new way, who they are and be able to live fully and love deeply. 

John Masko:

Thank you for saying that and you know it was a beautiful experience for me and it had, you know, been set aside and talking with you brings it back to me and brings back some of the wonder of it. And I also have very much enjoyed meeting you and your team. 

Sarah:

And the wonder of life. God is in that wonder, in that awe. So, let’s promise each other that we’ll always look for that wonder and try to allow that wonder to move us to that deep love.