James Talarico

I don't know, all of that kind of I started to doubt in a profound way the work I was doing.

And throughout my life, whenever I've felt that doubt, I've always fallen back on faith.

Faith is the thing that is kind of the foundation for me.

And so in that second term, I had thought about quitting altogether.

I thought about resigning my seat and just going off to do other things that maybe would be more fruitful.

But through a lot of praying and a lot of soul-searching and a lot of meditation, I made a slightly different choice, which was to go to seminary and go back to school and go through the process of becoming a minister.

My granddad was a Baptist minister in South Texas, and so it was a part of my upbringing.

And I had really not thought about doing it myself, but I think I had just—

Loving thy neighbor is really hard sometimes.

And the work I do in the legislature is my attempt to love my neighbor through the bills I pass, through the work that I do on prescription drugs, on child care, on public schools, on justice reform.

But I was losing faith on whether I was actually doing what I came here to do.

And so I made that decision to go to seminary to follow Jesus's first commandment, which is to love God.

Those are the two commandments he gave us, love God and love neighbor.

And as a seminarian and a lawmaker, I'm starting to figure out how these two commands, how they relate to each other, how they sustain each other.

You need that inner life, which I feel like I'm cultivating at seminary.

And then you also need this outer life of how does that impact your relationships and the work you do out in the world.

And you really can't have one without the other because if you do the second one, the workout in the world, you can burn out so easily, which I think I was about to burn out in that second term.

You can burn out if it's not sustained by that love of God.

And again, I don't mean God as that word is charged for a lot of people.

I don't mean like a sectarian religious orthodoxy definition.