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Transcript:

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:00:00] Welcome to United Bodies, a podcast about the lived experience of health. I’m Kendall Ciesemier, your host. 

For many of us, spirituality is a facet of our health that we consider less, perhaps even give less weight to or spend less time cultivating. There are many reasons for this. Spirituality can feel elusive, confusing, scary, and unknown. It can bring up religious baggage, ostracization, and pain. 

Religion is one of the most notable constructs of how people find and express individual and communal spirituality, but it’s also been used as a tool to oppress and commit violence. At a time when it feels like there is pain, suffering, and oppression everywhere we look, spirituality can force us to grapple with a lot of messiness, in a way that can feel inaccessible at best, and offensive at worst. 

Today I’m speaking with Phillip Picardi, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, as well as an award-winning journalist and editor formerly of Out Magazine, Teen Vogue, and Them. Phillip was the host of Crooked Media’s podcast Unholier Than Thou, where he explored all things saintly and secular, and is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, where he received his master’s in religion and public life.

A few years ago, Phillip embarked on a spiritual journey centered on reclaiming Christianity and, in particular, Catholicism, the religious tradition that he was raised in and had given up on as a gay kid. Phillip knows firsthand that acknowledging and engaging in our individual spirituality, however you label that, or in whatever way that may look, can really serve us.

Spirituality can ground us, give us purpose, and guide us, even if it doesn’t come easy. 

With that, Phillip, welcome to United Bodies. I’m so excited to break all of this down with you. 

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:02:00] Oh, thank you. Thank you for that very fancy introduction. I sound so important and cool. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:02:07] You are important and cool. That’s why we’re talking to you. So I want to start by just grounding our conversation in your personal, working, spiritual worldview. Because the reality is that we all have one. We all have one and they’re all, it’s all different, right? No matter how formed it is. It’s informed by culture, and history, and tradition, and geography.

But to start, what is spirituality to you, right now in your life? 

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:02:39] You know, what a big question, frankly, Kendall, but I think that where I really land is that spirituality is my North Star. So spirituality is how I orient myself to the people around me, to my community, to my place in the world, and to my purpose in the world.

And when I kind of developed this deeper relationship to my spirituality through my studies at Harvard, I found it no coincidence that I called my old boss, Anna Wintour at Vogue, and I kind of asked her, I was like, “Hey, I’m thinking of not going back into media. I’m thinking of going into advocacy full time and just kind of like, committing my life now, in this next chapter of my life to, towards not just the nonprofit sector, but towards direct services.”

And when she gave me her own blessing, which for me, was better than the Pope’s blessing, that’s when I really felt confident that this next chapter of my life would be my most enriching yet. And so far, that has absolutely proven to be true. When I deepened my relationship to God, I deepened my relationship to my friendships, my, my intimate partnerships, and then that’s when I really kind of realized, like, this life is short, we are small in the face of the universe, we are here for such a short time, comparatively speaking, some of us are lucky if that time is less short than others, and we have to do our best to make this a spiritually whole and satisfying place to live.

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:04:15] Wow. What an argument for cultivating a spirituality. You speak so completely about the ways in which spirituality has really gifted you a lot and changed, it sounds like, a lot of the work and the kind of trajectory or the focus or the direction of your life, your relationships, what you’re doing in your day job, et cetera.

I want to talk about what all of this has meant for you, and I realize that this is all very personal and that for the purposes of our conversation, we’re going to be focusing on religion as a mechanism or venue for spiritual growth. It doesn’t always have to be religion, but I think we’re in a place. I feel we’re in a place in the United States where we’re, a lot of us are culturally afraid of religion, especially if we’re younger, especially if we’re more liberal or progressive.

Have you ever felt that way, being like culturally afraid yourself of religion? I wonder if you could take us back to pre-Harvard. Where was your spirituality before you kind of like readopted religion or re engaged with religion? And what made you want to reengage? 

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:05:33] I thought that my spirituality was nonexistent. I thought that I was that really cool atheist liberal who was above and beyond religion. And I looked down on religious people and I thought they were archaic and backwards and I thought they were all Jesus freaks. And I was that cool progressive kid working at Teen Vogue and I was going to stick it to the Catholic Church with my journalism skills.

And that’s what I was doing, right? And I end up backstage for International Muslim Women’s Day at Twitter’s headquarters, before Twitter was owned by a pseudo fascist named Elon Musk. And, um, I was invited to International Muslim Women’s Day as the only non-Muslim speaker, which was hilarious. This, like, gay white guy is there, but I was invited because at the time that I was editing Teen Vogue, there was a really sharp rise in anti-Muslim violence and hate crimes. So I, you know, I embarked on this series of work with Amani al-Khatahtbeh, who is the founder of Muslim Girl.

KENDALL CIESEMIER Yes, Amani is great. 

PHILLIP PICARDI Shout out to Amani. I believe she’s going to Oxford or something, so good for her, she’s headed to her own master’s program. And so we worked on a series of articles that was myth busting, you know, about the misconceptions of Islam, which I found really important because it was challenging Western exceptionalism, it was challenging white supremacy. And so I didn’t look at it as religious based journalism, I looked at it as social justice journalism. And I ended up backstage at International Muslim Women’s Day, and Linda Sarsour, one of the co-founders of the Women’s March, after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, kind of, like, walks up to me and she’s like, “You’re the guy at Teen Vogue, right?” And I said yes, and she thanked us for our work that we were doing at the time.

And she said, “So what’s your religious background?” And I was like, “Oh, I’m gay.” As though that was, like, a complete sentence. And she just kind of, like, I was laughing, but she was not laughing. She just kind of, like, like, kind of, like, furled her eyebrows at me. Like, what is, what is that supposed to mean? And in retrospect, what a stupid thing that was for me to say.

And anyways, I was like, “No, you know, I was raised Catholic. I’m obviously not Catholic anymore, because I’m gay.” And she just sort of paused, and there was an uncomfortable silence, and then she was like, “You know, what a shame that a religion that was founded in the name of a political rebel who spent his entire life advocating for the poor, advocating for people who couldn’t access health care, advocating for people on the margins. What a shame that that religion would turn away somebody like you, who basically is doing the same thing with their life.” 

And I was like, “That is so nice of you to say, but Linda, who the hell are you talking about?” And then Linda was like, uh, “I’m talking about Jesus Christ.” I didn’t realize that that was Jesus’s story.

I went to Catholic school. Most of my educational career that was never the Jesus that I was taught about in these kind of Catholic environments in Boston, right? I actually had a more vivid imagination about the devil and sin and hell than I did about Jesus or heaven. And so, when Linda referred me, I came to this really, like, ‘aha’ moment that I thought that I was living this so called secular life, only to realize that the values that were instilled in me about Catholicism, which were about helping the least favored, making sure you were using your life to advocate for people who were not in the same rooms you could access, seeking justice in the world –– those values were deeply Catholic values instilled in me as a kid that I brought all the way to the halls of Condé Nast.

So I was not the secular thinker that I thought I was. Spirituality was informing very much the life I was living. And so it was a complete reality check for me of like, why did I walk away? Why was I forced to walk away from a religion because of a bunch of small-minded virgin men. Right? Virgins who can’t drive, as I like to say, in the iconic words of Brittany Murphy in Clueless.

Why did I get robbed of my divinity and my divine right to look at myself as a child of God, as a child of the Creator? Right? How come they pushed me out? I didn’t make that decision for myself. They just pushed me out. And so I was like, “You know what, fuck these assholes, I’m going to go get God back for myself.” And, you know, that’s what I did. And I got into Harvard.

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:10:01] And I got into Harvard. You know, I know that you wrote a Substack during your, around your experience at Harvard Divinity School called “A Religiously Blonde,” kind of channeling Elle Woods and that, that moment that you just described sounded very Elle Woodsian to me. Yeah, I’m going to go get religion for myself and I’m going to go to Harvard to do it. It’s really interesting. And I’m so glad that Linda called you out in that moment, because I actually think that your story is super reflective of a lot of people’s stories that we really do disconnect a lot of justice work from religion or spirituality whatsoever. 

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:10:42] And, and that’s ahistorical, right? This is a new trend.

KENDALL CIESEMIER It is ahistorical. It’s also, it’s not serving us in a lot of ways, I think. But we’ll get to that. I want to spend a little bit more time on your personal story. You describe a moment when you were 14, [00:11:00] where you prayed, you say kind of last prayer before you decided to come out to your family. What was that moment like for you? And were you mourning, like, was it a, was it an internal strife moment where you were really mourning the loss of a religion? Did it feel very connected to who you were at the time? Or was it out of, like, kind of rebuke and anger and less, like, deeply personal? I wonder if you could just, like, trace the emotion of that experience.

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:11:33] You know, the thing about Catholicism that I feel like for a lot of non- Catholics, maybe it’s hard to understand, but Catholicism has such a rich cosmology. Which is to say, like, the iconography that we are raised with, the art history that we are raised with, the buildings that we enter that are literally designed to mimic the kingdom of God. The sacraments and the mysticism that surrounds the sacraments, whether that’s holy communion as a child or baptism and the [00:12:00] baptismal waters and the, and the white pure gowns, right? The tabernacle and the smoke and the idea of the Holy Spirit, right? The Virgin Mary, right? Like all of these things are so rich in their visual nature that it really like, especially when you are indoctrinated into it, and I’m using the word indoctrinated very intentionally. When you’re indoctrinated into this as a child in Catholic school, right, like it literally changes the way you see the world. And so, God for me was one of the most important relationships in my life.

At school we prayed, and then I would go home and pray before I went to bed. And that was every single day without fail. And then I had this father who had this kind of Catholic reawakening right before I was born. And he was basically like this fundamentalist Catholic who was nailing crosses above our beds and warning us about exorcisms and [00:13:00] showing us materials about, you know, stigmata and all of these like really graphic descriptions of Christian mysticism.

So as a child, I was scared shitless of God. I was scared shitless of the devil. You know, it was very, very vivid. And so it is hard for a lot of Protestant Christians, I think, to relate to that, unless maybe you’re like Pentecostal or whatever, or deeply fundamentalist like Southern Baptist. So, yes, it was very much alive for me.

And when I decided to say goodbye to God, the hardest part of that calculus is that I as a 14-year-old had come to the conclusion that I would rather go to hell than live my life inauthentically. So I, as a 14 year old kid, because of the way I was raised and because of the way I was educated, I had to come to the bargaining, the intellectual and spiritual bargaining to say to myself and to say to God during prayer, if you don’t love me for who I am, then I don’t love you and I’m willing to take that risk.

And that is what like, that was my first ever actual leap of faith because I was willing to say, I believe I deserve better than what I am being raised in. And, you know, to kind of ignite that bomb on my family who are –– my parents are children of Italian immigrants, right? Catholicism is a part of their bloodline, their ancestry, how they see the world, their political worldviews.

I mean, it was, that was the thing that really caused the biggest rift. That I was willing to rebuke authority in order to be myself and live my truth. And that gulf, you know, that specific gulf of me being willing to take the risk, even, even though it may come with a punishment or what I would see as a potential reward, is still like the biggest gulf that exists between me and a lot of my family. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:14:53] Wow. What a moment. There’s something in, in that story that I think relates to being of God or, you know, the idea that God has created all of us in God’s image –– the creation story that I want to, I want to get back to that I’ll put a pin in for right now.

But given this moment, given this like real rupture. You, you called also, “a leap of faith.” I agree. What do you think remained in you, in the midst of this rupture throughout this time period before you decided to pursue a master’s in divinity at Harvard that made you even open to the idea of reengaging?

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:15:39] I think that point of my life was the most significant point of my maturity. I still look back at it, not the coming out story. The coming out was in and of itself. That was, you know, it’s own thing, but the religion part of the coming out was the most significant part of my life story, because once I made this decision to walk away from religion because of how I felt my religion was treating LGBTQ people, and once I was willing to come out of a closet and therefore isolate myself from my family, my friend groups, you know, potential relationships at school, and also, just like the normal teenage experience in an upper middle class white suburb, I became the other. And there’s a version of my life where I don’t come out until college, and I assimilate my whole life, and I may feel in my heart that I’m other, but I’m not going to be treated as othered. But once I started to be treated as othered, once I started to choose to wear my gayness authentically, and stop trying to conform the way that I spoke, or the way I cut my hair, the way I wore my clothes, once all of that stuff kind of came into being…I understood what it felt like to feel marginalized to a degree, and that, and that, what that ended up doing is it deepened my relationship to other people who I don’t think I would have felt a kinship with. So all of a sudden this upper middle class white kid finds some semblance of like, we have to be all in this together, or I have to do better to understand where someone else is coming from.

Because I would want to be treated the same way. And so that ends up informing my politics. That ends up changing, you know, making me challenge everything I thought. Like, coming from a Reagan Republican dad, and being raised to, like, hate Obama, right, or whatever it was at the time. I now have this whole thing where I’m like, oh, I need to make these decisions for myself and I’m going to make them from the vantage point of how are people who, who I want to be community with, how are they going to be affected by these things and what do I need to learn better? And so, yeah, it was very, you know, it was very symbolic in that way for me, I think.

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:17:46] Was there a thread that existed, even in the midst of this kind of like, I am disavowing God, disavowing religion, that still stayed with you? Was there an underpinning of desire to engage in a spirituality? Did you feel like there was anything missing? Or it wasn’t until Linda was like, Hey, you actually don’t know the story of Jesus where you were like, “Oh, okay, maybe I, maybe you’re right. Maybe I should look into this.”

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:18:12] You know, I, I went to school with the mission, the declared mission statement of reclaiming God for myself, but I left school realizing that God never left. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER This is what I’m wondering. Yeah. 

PHILLIP PICARDI Yeah, there was never, I’m not going to say there was never a feeling like something was missing. There were moments in my life where I was terrified or really scared or I had lost a grandparent or lost a friend in high school to drunk driving, right? And, and you want to get down on your knees and pray because that’s the only… that felt like the only human response to some of these things, and I would have to stop myself from prayer. That was hard, because that, it, it deepens your feeling of isolation and loneliness. Especially when you don’t have, at that point in my life, I didn’t have a family I could chat with, or, or speak to, or share with, or a family that felt safe. And my friends weren’t gay, and, and, and, you know, as much as my girlfriends were amazing, and I love teenage girls, and my work at Teen Vogue is very much in service to the girls I was in high school with who saved my life many times.

There was this feeling of like an intense, endless loneliness that was really hard to cope with at first. But that loneliness, that feeling of loneliness ended up turning into a feeling of rage. And that rage is what sort of harnessed my like more career motivated ambitions later on in my life.

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:19:38] You mentioned that this moment, this rupture really made you feel othered. Stepping into your true authentic self, you then were treated as an other. Many people have a similar experience, gay people, trans people, disabled people, people of other religious traditions, women, survivors, etc. So many people have been hurt by other people in the name of religion, really, since the, the dawn of time, and, and now in America, it’s obviously particularly Christianity. You know, I think for me, I know I have always wanted my faith or my relationship with God or a higher power, my belief in a higher power, to be separate.

I’ve always tried to separate that from the people that felt like they were using God or religion to hurt people like me or people who I associated with or felt like because God had provided such a source of strength and clarity and purpose and safety in my life as I kind of walked through and navigated a lot of life threatening health issues or that moment between life and death, those kind of like, paper thin experiences.

And while that has always been scary and hard, those experiences have also really kept me feeling very close to God, a higher power, a spirituality, if you will. But I think it really has been a challenge in my experience to be wanting to be in an engaged relationship with God or with the religious community as it’s been so weaponized against so many people.

You know, I think so many of us have been told we’re abominations, it’s driven so many of us to disavow religion. And yet I think there’s still something in it that people really yearn for. I don’t know. I hear so many peers tell me that they hold on to some semblance of spirituality, some belief in a higher power because otherwise it feels just kind of like a lose-lose situation.

Like we’re all just losing spirituality because we’re all being hurt by people who are using it against us. I don’t know. I mean, so you, you go to Harvard and you, and you study the history of religion and how it’s been used. And one thing that you mentioned in an interview was that, a quote that I thought found really profound, which is, “when we throw our hands up in the air at religion and flatten its role in our lives, societies and institutions, we allow hegemonic power to go unchecked.”

That this distancing ourselves from religion allows a vacuum to happen where other people get to kind of take over religion and then we all, we all kind of lose. Can you talk more about that? Like what we all lose, both personally and collectively when we say we can’t go there? 

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:22:42] I mean, I think you said it even better than I said it. So I may steal that for my book, if that’s okay. One thing that’s hard, I think, to understand about religion, especially the history of religion. There’s a great book, I’m forgetting the author’s name, but it’s called The Myth of Religious Violence, and, um, it tracks how, you know, religion and the great religious wars have contributed to violence or the persecution of, you know, specific ethnic groups, or religion versus religion wars, like Christian versus Muslim wars, etc.,

or even inter-Christian wars. One thing that’s hard to understand about religion as a modern person is that religion in history was never divorced from politics. Religion was caught up in politics. Secularism is a modern invention. And by the way, as you may have seen from the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or the overturning of LGBTQ civil rights in our country, secularism is largely, you know, a concept that we’re attempting. And we’re not attempting it very well, especially in America. 

So when when you look back at history, and you’re like, religion has been the source of so much violence. It’s like, yes, and religion also was a tool of empire. Some religions, like Christianity, started out as anti-empire. And then, as does everything throughout the arc of time, whatever starts as anti becomes the ruling class, right? And that’s the ultimate story of Christianity. It’s the most powerful rule, that kind of story or lesson that Christianity has to offer modern activists today, right? Be careful about how you gain power, because once you hold the power, who’s going to check you boo, right? In the words of Sheree Whitfield from The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

So I think that’s my number one thing. We can’t just lay all of this at religion’s feet. You know, religion and politics are intertwined so closely and so I just don’t want us making these kind of like flat statements, because how are you going to say Christianity has been, you know, has contributed to nothing but violence to a Black Christian person in America. How does that make sense? Have you heard of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:24:47] I mean, it fueled the civil rights movement in so many ways. 

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:24:51] I’m in Los Angeles right now. The Catholic workers movement, are you telling me that they are part of the Catholic church’s systemic problems? Like, these are folks who have stayed within the religion because they have found meaning, layers, depth, knowledge, sanctity, in building community around their read of the text, around their read of the stories. Those folks and their reads of these stories, um, are the most compelling offerings that we have for Christianity.

They are the only path forward we have for Christianity today if we want to stop Christianity from being a destructive force, but when we stop participating in Christianity because just of how we were raised or what church we were raised in, we’re letting the dominant Christian narrative be white supremacist Christianity. You can be a white Christian and not go to a bullshit ass conservative ass church. You can be a white Christian and spend your time volunteering. You know, you can find ways to have spiritual outlets. You can change your life like I did, if you want. Right. So I just, the, the idea that we’re all just going to walk away from it.

And you can, I’m not saying you can’t, like, if you don’t believe in God, you don’t have to find God to find your meaning in life for sure. But I think so many people are kind of wondering what’s next. And it’s like, we can’t just all sit around and wonder what’s next. We have to be a part of the solution because there has not been, to my knowledge, a movement that is radical and revolutionary that does not have a spiritual grounding. People need something bigger to believe in. And right now I think the neoliberal trap that we’re all falling into is all we’re doing is fighting against something. But it’s harder for us to articulate what we believe in than it is what we want to be fighting against. And you can’t just always be fighting. You have to have something to believe in. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:26:47] I want to talk about being made in God’s image. You know, I think for so much of this, it feels like even in your origin story of your religious rupture, to me, where it all kind of breaks apart in –– in this, like, narrative that gay people aren’t of God or disabled people are broken and demon possessed is where all of this kind of religious bigotry really breaks apart is in the idea that God created, if we’re understanding the premise that God created the world, created us, and we are made perfect in God’s image, if that’s true, how can we find so much hate from religious people about how our bodies operate, or look, or the way we feel in them, or the way we love in them?

To me, that is I think a core disconnect and I’m wondering where in your kind of re adoption of spirituality or faith or religion did you start to kind of put together the piece of, like, did that play a role in putting the pieces together back for you about your own religious experience that you are actually made of God and God’s perfect image?

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:28:05] I think so, mostly in a sexual sense, um, I do explore, there’s a book by Virginia Burris called The Sex Lives of Saints that’s really fascinating. And I, I did a whole course on, on Saint Teresa of Avila and I read all of her, you know, books and writings for that class and, and you know, one of the things about Christian mysticism, especially, um, and particularly within the female mystics and, and the female mystic tradition is so interesting because they, a lot of our female mystics like Hildegard or Saint Teresa or Marguerite Perrette were being potentially, were very close or in the case of Perrette, up for political persecution. I think they burned Perrette alive actually. But they were it’s complicated because they were women who were reading and who were writing at a time when like that women were supposed to be doing that under this like kind of like monarchist kind of rule and they were interpreting scripture or they were having mystical visions that the Catholic church would be like, “oh wait, don’t persecute her because what if God is moving through her?” You know what I mean? So there’s this very clever, like, play that a lot of the female mystics are doing. I don’t know if they interpret it as clever, but in the case of Teresa, you kind of see these moments where they’re trying to censor her or hide her writings from the people because they could be deemed heretical under the Spanish Inquisition and then somehow, magically, the book gets out of the convent and distributed en masse around Spain, right? And so Teresa was about as dumb as a fox. Like, this is a very smart woman who really was using Christianity, I think, for a very different objective and it has a really interesting interventions towards feminism and Christian theology.

But I say all that to say a lot of these people like fetishize suffering, you know, so you see Teresa like the picture that she paints of herself is like this angel comes to visit her after deep moments of contemplative prayer. And she’s praying and praying and praying for God to send her a sign. So this angel, this seraphine shows up with a flaming arrow.

He impales her body with the flaming arrow and she describes it as this intense agony, but also this intense ecstasy. And some of her vision she had while in mass with her sisters at the convent. And she is like screaming or writhing in agony or like fainting or passing out. And you can kind of just envision, like, the nuns being, like, next to her in church being like, Oh God, hear this bitch goes again.

You know what I mean? Like, she’s having this very intense metaphysical experience. So, what ends up happening is there’s a fetishization of suffering that can occur in, in Christianity, especially because our lives are supposed to mirror that of Jesus, so we’re supposed to find meaning in suffering. And that has parlayed into this idea that disabled people were created disabled by God to teach them a lesson, or to teach the rest of us a lesson.

And that is a super damaging idea that is extremely pervasive today, that a lot of disability activists are constantly fighting against within church structures or religious structures. Some of the ideas about suffering and the rules about bodies, the litigation of bodies, at least in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament come from books, parts of these texts that have to do with law.

So just like I said, Christianity and Judaism were never intended to be secular. They were intended to be political and religious documents, right? So there are books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy that have all of these laws. You can’t give a blowjob, you know, you can’t wear polyester, which by the way, not a bad one.

You know, you can stone your daughter if she does something bad, right? So there’s all sorts of stuff that is written in these books. Many of these laws contradict each other because there’s old laws, then there’s new laws, then there’s more new laws, right? And there’s never like a correction of what is written because it’s all considered sacred. That has allowed for people in modern times to cherry pick verses to basically assert control or dominance over people. Rather than saying, okay, these books of laws were situated in a particular moment in time. And so we can actually now say that we know better than our ancestors knew. And we can change how we approach these things, right?

Rather than the creation myths and a lot of those other stories that are more parables. That are meant to inspire us to live a meaningful life, not always in a good way. A lot of these texts, especially, you know, within the, the New Testament, these are wartime documents, right? These, these texts are being written at a time when Christians are being persecuted or when Jewish people are at war with different nations, right? Or being chased out of Egypt, right? So we also have to read them in that context. There’s an element of time propaganda to these stories and that doesn’t make them any less sacred. It doesn’t make it any less sacred to say that. It just means we have to know what we’re reading and how to situate it before we apply it to a modern reader or a modern context.

[00:33:03] KENDALL CIESEMIER: Well, I think it’s actually, I really appreciate that you shared all that because I think it actually gives some light into, I think, some of our more problematic cultural interpretations that are not necessarily coming, you know, they’re not explicitly written in the Bible per se, but I think they’re really informed by a lot of these laws, if you will.

One being, everything happens for a reason, or another being, God saves his hardest fights for his strongest soldiers, or another being, hate the sin and not the sinner. You know, all of these, I think, deeply problematic, very common, um, cultural refrains within a religious community, in particular a Christian religious community, that seems like it has some resonance from Like, it stems from a lot of what you’re talking about.

I do think that the fact that you can hold both that we are a secular country and that there is a danger to all of us disavowing religion and letting a certain group of people co-opt and take over all of religious narratives and all of spirituality from us that you can hold both of those things as being true, I think is more nuanced than, than what I think a lot of people are currently, I don’t want to say capable of, interested in. Those things for some reason seem in conflict with one another to a lot of folks.

But I actually, I think that what you’re proposing is an alternate path, which could be really personally meaningful for a lot of folks who, I think, still find something compelling about a personal spirituality that includes, in a lot of ways, for many of us, a relationship to a faith that we were kind of exposed to as children, as young people.

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:34:57] Yeah, and I would also add that, like, I shouldn’t have had to go get a master’s degree from Harvard to understand the history of religion appropriately or how religion animates our modern society. Our educational institutions are often afraid of talking about religion because of these like nuts, right, who are extreme fundamentalists who attack anyone who asserts that like, yes, the Bible is a really geopolitical document and we should be talking about it as such. If we’re going to teach about it in a classroom setting, how do you teach American history without teaching about the history of religion, whether you’re in a public classroom or a private classroom, right?

And it’s like, by the way, I can’t even advocate for the public instruction about religious history in schools because look at what’s happening in Florida. I don’t want these modern school boards introducing a religious literacy class. So it’s like, but that’s part of the problem. If none of us are religiously literate or I have as a journalist in, like someone who can get into Harvard, have to go to Harvard to get to this point, it just shows you like, this is the problem with our lack of [00:36:00] engagement around religion. It breeds religious illiteracy, which like fosters and cultivates the soil for the people who are using religion as a tool of hatred to sharpen that tool and to, and to beat down the rest of us. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:36:16] I agree. I really agree.

Okay. So we’ve talked a little bit about your personal journey and touched broadly upon, you know, reconciling religious harm, obviously in brief. I want to talk a little bit about reclamation and give those listening perhaps some animating questions that they could ask themselves or that you’ve asked yourself throughout your journey of how to help us find our own spirituality.

What, what has that looked like for you and do you have any advice for other folks who, who might feel compelled by what you’ve shared? 

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:36:49] My number one piece of advice for anyone seeking spirituality is to volunteer. I do not know that I could wholeheartedly say that I could name a church for you to join if you are a recovering Catholic.

And you know, I know a lot of people listening aren’t even recovering Catholics, you know, so I don’t want to name any churches or say that that’s where to find God. It absolutely can be. But the closest thing, the closest I’ve ever come to the face of God is being a part of the direct services work that we do at the Los Angeles LGBT Center.

It is why I chose this work. My office sits on a campus where we have affordable housing for LGBTQ seniors. We have a kitchen that provides 150,000 meals to unhoused folks a year. We have our emergency shelter for LGBTQ youth. LGBTQ youth make up about 40 percent of America’s homeless population. And so we get to interact with the clients who need our services every day and do things for those clients, plan things for them, whether that’s feeding them, celebrating them, throwing a dance class, throwing a party, whatever it is. But those are the, the moments that I feel I’ve been closest to God because I, I think God really is about community and God is in community.

The second thing I would say is that reading is, is absolutely fundamental to deepening a relationship or an internal practice. So if prayer doesn’t work for you, like it still doesn’t work for me after all of these years. I really encourage you to build a reading practice and Casper ter Kuile is another Harvard Divinity School graduate who wrote a book about ritual.

Reading is just one of the ways in which your mind can go somewhere else. And so I love reading spiritual texts, whether that’s Ann Lamont, which is very, like, friendly to any reader, whether that’s The Song of Songs, which is the Marcia Falk translation is a beautiful translation for our Jewish feminists who are listening.

There’s so much gorgeous Muslim poetry, whether that’s the work of Rumi or Hafez. And then I read a lot of [00:39:00] Thomas Merton, who was a contemplative and a great Christian thinker who was fabulous, The New Seeds of Contemplation, I highly recommend. But yeah, reading is another place. If you light a candle, you read, you think about and reflect on the text, that’s another way.

I, I would just say that spirituality can feel like so esoteric, but it requires discipline. You know, the greatest wisdom that you will get from reading these ancient texts is that if you want to stay close to God and you want to stay close to your spiritual center, you have to work at it. It’s not something that you can just dip in and out of and expect like a miracle to occur.

You really do have to work. And so yeah, that’s the part that I think is the hardest for us to understand is that like spirituality is hard work. And it’s supposed to be because it’s the most rewarding work you’ll do and rewarding work doesn’t come easy, but it really feels good once you get into your groove.

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:39:58] It’s like eating vegetables or going for a walk or working out. It’s like these things aren’t necessarily always fun, you know, it’s not always fun to, to go do your workout or eat healthy or fuel your body in all, all sorts of ways. Therapy isn’t always fun, but we, we think that that’s good for us. Yes. It seems like just another extension of, of that, but really, really interesting and cool. And I think, you’ve given us all a lot to think about. My last question for you as we wrap up is, if you were to paint the modern church in a different way or you’re going to reform the modern church to make it more suitable for spiritual growth for people who have long been ostracized by a religious community, what would you do?

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:40:52] I do not feel equipped to answer this question because I still feel I’ve been to many churches since I graduated from div school and I still feel oppressed when I walk in. I don’t like listening to services. I often recoil when I’m listening to folks interpretations of scriptural texts and everything.

And I’ve tried so hard to imagine like, Okay, well what would you do if you could do something? But always the closest answer I get is like, I’ll go to the gay club. You know, have you ever read Jay Hulme’s poem “Jesus at the Gay Bar”? That’s church, right? Or I think a lot of, you know, Renaissance, the world tour just happened, Beyonce’s concert, but it’s inspired by the ball, the ballroom community and the ballroom community that like going to a ball, if you’re part of the community can be church. Don’t go as a tourist, please. You know, like, I think that we need to, especially when we’re so isolated digitally. I think we need to focus more on ways that we can gather and talk to each other and celebrate each other. That would just be my, that’s the, that’s as close as I can get.

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:42:00] Philip, I think that’s it though.

I mean, I don’t think that you have to, I don’t think that modern church has to be what church has been, like there are no constraints there, right? Like it can be exactly as you describe because I, I, I mean, I believe we find spirituality in other people and in the kind of like deepened lived experience of being around others and in community with them.

And there’s something, I mean, I find church at concerts all the time. That is a huge outlet of spirituality for myself for, for sure. And so I actually think you did answer it and I want you to think that you have an, a real meaningful answer to that question. It just isn’t, it doesn’t have to be in the same model or format that we think of when we think about how churches exist today.

And I think that’s kind of the point. 

PHILLIP PICARDI Amen. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER You did answer it. You did answer it. Thank you [00:43:00] so much for your time. This was really lovely to speak with you. And it’s just, it’s really cool to see someone like you straddling kind of all of these philosophies and theories and discussions and conversation and community. I think it’s really important, the work that you’re doing and how you’re doing it. So thank you. 

PHILLIP PICARDI [00:43:20] Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:43:23] Thank you so much for listening. You can subscribe to United Bodies wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be so helpful to us if you would rate and review the show that helps more people like you find us. We’ll be back next week with more. 

United Bodies is a Ms. Magazine and Ms. Studios production. The show is created and produced by me, Kendall Ciesemier. Michele Goodwin is our executive producer.