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The Confessional with Nadia Bolz-Weber

Darin Strauss, Writer

The Confessional with Nadia Bolz-Weber

The Confessional with Nadia Bolz-Weber

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.62.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

“And then all the emotions sort of flowed and I started crying in a way I don't think I have since or probably didn't before. I was just sort of heaving and then I thought, wow, this is going to ruin me. This is the end of my life. You know?”

Darin lives in New York City. His memoir Half a Life won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 2011, and his latest book is called The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story.

https://twitter.com/Darinstrauss

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I want to sat at the deathbed of a woman in her 70s to take her final confession.

0:15.7

And the thing that broke my heart wasn't her admitting that she'd had a secret affair

0:20.1

early in her marriage.

0:22.4

It was that a few years later, when she and her husband had a stillborn child, that

0:27.1

she blamed her earlier infidelity for it.

0:30.7

For 45 years, she carried the moral burden of something she actually had no control over.

0:38.6

But it's this thing we do as humans.

0:41.6

We assign blame to ourselves when the chaos and randomness of life is just too existentially

0:48.2

uncomfortable for us to handle, because it's better to fill in the blank than to face

0:54.4

the void.

0:56.7

It's terrifying to think that horrible things can happen for no reason whatsoever, but

1:02.3

sometimes life is unfairly random.

1:05.4

And it can be unfairly random in both beautiful and terrible ways.

1:10.8

Causal fallacies are how we make sense of life, blaming ourselves or others or God for

1:16.8

things that are too painful to think of as happening merely by chance.

1:22.5

But really, there's almost never a reason for a tragedy.

1:27.2

We can easily answer the who, the what, the when, and the where of it.

1:31.9

It's the why that's impossible to get right without painful self-incrimination or theological

1:38.5

hogwash.

1:40.8

But we are human beings, which means that while we might never find a satisfying reason

1:47.4

for the awful shit that happens in life, sometimes we can still find

1:52.4

meaning in it.

...

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