George Saunders

But that's the first thought is, oh, now I can jettison the whole thing.

But I'd had enough positive experiences with nuns but also with the religion that I wasn't so anxious to jettison it even as I was, you know, in a certain hipster level I already was.

But inside I was still kind of honoring it, you know.

Yes.

Well, one thing was I had a lot of deep experiences that I would say probably were meditative that I didn't know to call it that.

But in the church, we spent a lot of time in there.

And so as somebody with a busy neurotic mind, I had that experience of by hour 1.6, you

I'd have burned through all of my thoughts really and just be sitting there kind of quietly.

And it felt really good, you know, really peaceful.

And then also I think I had this idea.

I don't know whether I was taught this or I just came up with it.

But hearing a lot of the stories about Jesus and the way he would interact with people who were a little bit on the dark side, you know, like the woman at the well and the rich man in the tree or whatever.

I thought, oh, he's kind of a novelist.

Because what Jesus' superpower was, as I understood it, was that he, one, had something going on where he could see you very clearly, I would say now without a lot of projections about who you were.

So he was able to really look into the core of you with affection and not judge.

And that has come to seem to me like what a writer does really.

You make up some person, good or bad, and you hang out with them for a couple of years.

And in the process, you burn through the easy judgments that you would make if you met them in person probably.

And you start to go, okay, well, yeah, that's true.

You're a mansplainer.