美国国家公共电台 NPR A Memoir Of Taking Christianity 'To The Extreme'

 

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: 

Maggie Rowe has written a memoir¹ about faith, doubt and yocks. "Sin Bravely: A Memoir Of Spiritual Disobedience" recounts the months that she spent in an evangelical psychiatric center when she was 19, an abiding² Christian³ who worried that she just wasn't abiding enough. Maggie Rowe, who has produced and appeared in the Comedy Central stage show "Sit 'N' Spin" and is a screenwriter and satirist⁴, including for the highly acclaimed⁵ show "Arrested Development," joins us now from the studios of NPR West. Thanks so much for being with us.

MAGGIE ROWE: Thank you for having me.

SIMON: First, let me get some of the obvious things out of the way. Are - in the comedy writers' rooms, are you the only one who can quote scripture⁶?

ROWE: (Laughter) That's probably true, yes. And I still remember quite a bit of it. You know, there's a Bible verse that says if you etch the word of God onto a young child's mind, it will stay forever. And it's pretty true.

SIMON: You grew up in the Chicago suburbs.

ROWE: I did, yes.

SIMON: And what drew you to Christianity at such an early age? Because your parents were religious, but you really got religious.

ROWE: Right. My parents were wonderful Christians⁷. They were religious, but they were not fanatical in any way. I was the one who took it to the extreme. I was told in Sunday school that you had to accept Jesus into your heart if you didn't want to go to hell. So of course I did that a thousand times. But the catch was you had to mean it with all of your heart. And that's a difficult figure to determine (laughter). There was a verse that said if you are luke warm rather than hot or cold, God will spit you out of his mouth on Judgment⁸ Day. And I felt like, I mean, I don't know. I'm lukewarm. I just want to watch "The Brady Bunch" and eat Suzy Q's (laughter). I'm not on fire for the Lord, so I tried to make myself generate this fire for the Lord.

SIMON: Yeah. Parallel to that, in high school and then in college, how did theater fit into your spiritual life?

ROWE: Well, I worried about it. I only would do roles that I felt were pleasing or edifying⁹ to God because I felt that if I did something that, you know, reflected badly on God then it would reflect badly on me on Judgment Day.

SIMON: Yeah. But theater is often where the most irreverent students wind up.

ROWE: Yeah. So I was an oddball in that community, and, you know, my friends would go to parties and they would drink and they would swear. Like, even swearing, that seemed to me like it'd be so great if I could just say [expletive] like my friends. You know, I wanted to be a normal kid, but I had the pressure of my eternal destiny weighing down on me.

SIMON: You went off to Cornell and had - well, I'll refer to it as a spiritual crisis and maybe it was a personal crisis.

ROWE: Yeah, it was both. When I went to college, I was so focused on this new experience of my life that I really just pushed down all of my fears of hell and damnation. And then I went to see this film. It's Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams," this Japanese art flick¹⁰. And as I was watching it, it had these images of retribution. There's a young boy who disobeys his mother, and so his mother gives him a sword to drive into his stomach. And all of these images just served to bring all of this repressed material to the surface. And I heard this screaming in the theater, and then realized it was coming from my mouth (laughter). And three months later, I checked myself into an evangelical psychiatric facility. Their slogan was psychiatry¹¹ where the Bible comes first. So that creates a little bit of a conflict sometimes.

SIMON: You had some differences with Bethanie in particular.

ROWE: Yes, yes. So Bethanie was the first woman I met when I was there, and she was one of these Christians that supposedly really wanted to help, but what she was actually doing was far from it. I had told her that I would get so upset about my eternal destiny that I would vomit¹². I was just so nauseous. It was - I just felt terrible. And what she said to me was, oh, you look in the mirror and you see someone who you think is fat and I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not worried - the last thing I'm worried about is my weight. I'm not (laughter) like it would be - but she had determined¹³ that I had an eating disorder¹⁴. And no matter what evidence I gave her to the contrary, she held on tight to that diagnosis¹⁵.

SIMON: You were afraid of sin. I mean, you were afraid of burning.

ROWE: Yes, I was. And even if it wasn't a literal burn - because they would say that, they would say, oh, the fire is just a metaphor¹⁶ - but it was a metaphor for eternal suffering. But we're not crazy. We don't literally¹⁷ think it's burning (laughter).

SIMON: You learned a lot from the other people who were there, though, didn't you? I get that impression.

ROWE: I really did. I really did. And I mean, the one I learned the most from was I had a psychiatrist¹⁸ there who told me - it's the title of the book - but there's a doctrine¹⁹ called pecca fortiter, and it means brave sin. And Martin Luther coined the term, and basically the idea is that the most important thing is to understand God's forgiveness. And if you need to sin in order to do that, that's what you need to do. So my psychiatrist told me all these fears that you're having, it's drawing you further and further away from God. The best thing that you can do is to do exactly what you feel in your heart that you want to do. And, you know, first I objected. I was like, oh, I can't just sin. And he was like, well, what are you going to do? You're not going to - are you going to murder somebody, or are you going to put a gas bomb on a train? Like what - and his thing was follow what you intrinsically believe and then let the Bible follow, which was a pretty radical²⁰ idea...

SIMON: Yeah.

ROWE: ...For me at the time.

SIMON: For a lot of people in show business, can't comedy be a kind of faith?

ROWE: Yes. And the ability to find even just, like, the absurdity²¹ of my situation, the fact that I - that it was a film. And I later read Kurosawa - there was a, you know, where he was talking about what he wanted the movie to evoke²² was fear of the afterlife (laughter).

SIMON: Oh my.

ROWE: So mission accomplished²³.

SIMON: Yeah, sounds like you're doing pretty well now.

ROWE: I think so. I think so. I'm - meditation²⁴ was a big thing that really helped me out of this process, being able to sit with the fear and being able to say I don't know if I'm going to go to hell. That really was what I had to come to terms with. And it's a pretty horrible possibility, so it was a tough road to be able to accept that.

SIMON: Maggie Rowe - her book, "Sin Bravely." Thanks so much for being with us.

ROWE: Thank you for having me.

1 memoir   

n.[pl.]回忆录，自传；记事录

参考例句：

• He has just published a memoir in honour of his captain.他刚刚出了一本传记来纪念他的队长。
• In her memoir,the actress wrote about the bittersweet memories of her first love.在那个女演员的自传中，她写到了自己苦乐掺半的初恋。

2 abiding   

adj.永久的，持久的，不变的

参考例句：

• He had an abiding love of the English countryside.他永远热爱英国的乡村。
• He has a genuine and abiding love of the craft.他对这门手艺有着真挚持久的热爱。

3 Christian   

adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒

参考例句：

• They always addressed each other by their Christian name.他们总是以教名互相称呼。
• His mother is a sincere Christian.他母亲是个虔诚的基督教徒。

4 satirist   

n.讽刺诗作者，讽刺家，爱挖苦别人的人

参考例句：

• Voltaire was a famous French satirist.伏尔泰是法国一位著名的讽刺作家。
• Perhaps the first to chronicle this dream was the Greek satirist Lucian.也许第一个记述这一梦想的要算是希腊的讽刺作家露西安了。

5 acclaimed   

adj.受人欢迎的

参考例句：

• They acclaimed him as the best writer of the year. 他们称赞他为当年的最佳作者。
• Confuscius is acclaimed as a great thinker. 孔子被赞誉为伟大的思想家。

6 scripture   

n.经文，圣书，手稿；Scripture:(常用复数)《圣经》，《圣经》中的一段

参考例句：

• The scripture states that God did not want us to be alone.圣经指出上帝并不是想让我们独身一人生活。
• They invoked Hindu scripture to justify their position.他们援引印度教的经文为他们的立场辩护。

7 Christians   

n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Christians of all denominations attended the conference. 基督教所有教派的人都出席了这次会议。
• His novel about Jesus caused a furore among Christians. 他关于耶稣的小说激起了基督教徒的公愤。

8 judgment   

n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见

参考例句：

• The chairman flatters himself on his judgment of people.主席自认为他审视人比别人高明。
• He's a man of excellent judgment.他眼力过人。

9 edifying   

adj.有教训意味的，教训性的，有益的v.开导，启发( edify的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• Young students are advised to read edifying books to improve their mind. 建议青年学生们读一些陶冶性情的书籍，以提高自己的心智。 来自辞典例句
• This edifying spectacle was the final event of the Governor's ball. 这个有启发性的表演便是省长的舞会的最后一个节目了。 来自辞典例句

10 flick   

n.快速的轻打，轻打声，弹开；v.轻弹，轻轻拂去，忽然摇动

参考例句：

• He gave a flick of the whip.他轻抽一下鞭子。
• By a flick of his whip,he drove the fly from the horse's head.他用鞭子轻抽了一下，将马头上的苍蝇驱走。

11 psychiatry   

n.精神病学，精神病疗法

参考例句：

• The study appeared in the Amercian science Journal of Psychiatry.这个研究发表在美国精神病学的杂志上。
• A physician is someone who specializes in psychiatry.精神病专家是专门从事精神病治疗的人。

12 vomit   

v.呕吐，作呕；n.呕吐物，吐出物

参考例句：

• They gave her salty water to make her vomit.他们给她喝盐水好让她吐出来。
• She was stricken by pain and began to vomit.她感到一阵疼痛，开始呕吐起来。

13 determined   

adj.坚定的；有决心的

参考例句：

• I have determined on going to Tibet after graduation.我已决定毕业后去西藏。
• He determined to view the rooms behind the office.他决定查看一下办公室后面的房间。

14 disorder   

n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调

参考例句：

• When returning back,he discovered the room to be in disorder.回家后，他发现屋子里乱七八糟。
• It contained a vast number of letters in great disorder.里面七零八落地装着许多信件。

15 diagnosis   

n.诊断，诊断结果，调查分析，判断

参考例句：

• His symptoms gave no obvious pointer to a possible diagnosis.他的症状无法作出明确的诊断。
• The engineer made a complete diagnosis of the bridge's collapse.工程师对桥的倒塌做一次彻底的调查分析。

16 metaphor   

n.隐喻，暗喻

参考例句：

• Using metaphor,we say that computers have senses and a memory.打个比方，我们可以说计算机有感觉和记忆力。
• In poetry the rose is often a metaphor for love.玫瑰在诗中通常作为爱的象征。

17 literally   

adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实

参考例句：

• He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
• Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候，她不走到真正要昏厥了，决不肯坐下来。

18 psychiatrist   

n.精神病专家；精神病医师

参考例句：

• He went to a psychiatrist about his compulsive gambling.他去看精神科医生治疗不能自拔的赌瘾。
• The psychiatrist corrected him gently.精神病医师彬彬有礼地纠正他。

19 doctrine   

n.教义；主义；学说

参考例句：

• He was impelled to proclaim his doctrine.他不得不宣扬他的教义。
• The council met to consider changes to doctrine.宗教议会开会考虑更改教义。

20 radical   

n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的

参考例句：

• The patient got a radical cure in the hospital.病人在医院得到了根治。
• She is radical in her demands.她的要求十分偏激。

21 absurdity   

n.荒谬，愚蠢；谬论

参考例句：

• The proposal borders upon the absurdity.这提议近乎荒谬。
• The absurdity of the situation made everyone laugh.情况的荒谬可笑使每个人都笑了。

22 evoke   

vt.唤起，引起，使人想起

参考例句：

• These images are likely to evoke a strong response in the viewer.这些图像可能会在观众中产生强烈反响。
• Her only resource was the sympathy she could evoke.她以凭借的唯一力量就是她能从人们心底里激起的同情。

23 accomplished   

adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的

参考例句：

• Thanks to your help,we accomplished the task ahead of schedule.亏得你们帮忙,我们才提前完成了任务。
• Removal of excess heat is accomplished by means of a radiator.通过散热器完成多余热量的排出。

24 meditation   

n.熟虑，（尤指宗教的）默想，沉思，（pl.）冥想录

参考例句：

• This peaceful garden lends itself to meditation.这个恬静的花园适于冥想。
• I'm sorry to interrupt your meditation.很抱歉，我打断了你的沉思。