SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
When I was covering the conclave in Rome last year, one of the first people I wanted to track down and talk to was Father James Martin. He's a prominent Jesuit priest and writer in the U.S., and he has also carved out a ministry for LGBTQ Catholics who've long felt ostracized by the Catholic Church. But before his decades-long career in the church, he was a busboy, a golf caddy, a popcorn-popper, a stock broker and an HR guy in corporate '80s America. He lays out this string of jobs and what he learned along the way and what ultimately led him to the church in a new book called "Work In Progress." Father Martin, welcome back to NPR.
JAMES MARTIN: Thanks. My pleasure.
DETROW: I want to start with why you wanted to write this book. Why revisit all of these earlier parts of your life?
MARTIN: Well, it's really a vocation book, and it's to show people how God is at work in everybody's life, whether you're a busboy, a dishwasher, a caddy or, you know, even a priest. And also, I thought some of the stories were pretty funny, so I wanted to share them with people.
DETROW: You did something really brave here. You read your teenage diaries. You've been a writer all your life, clearly. You've, you know, put a lot of thought into your writing. What surprised you going back and reading through those pages?
MARTIN: Well, just that I - first of all, that I kept the diary. My mom moved out of our house where we had lived for years and years in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, which is a suburb of Philly. And we were cleaning out my desk, and I found these two journals that I had kept when I was 15. I think what surprised me going back over them was kind of how shallow I was and really not particularly reflective. You know, mostly interested on whether or not people liked me and my grades and things like that. But it was a shock to kind of, you know, meet myself unmediated, right?
DETROW: Yeah.
MARTIN: I mean, it's like talking to myself at age 15, which was - I think would be a shock for everybody.
DETROW: You talked about a lot of different jobs here, and I want to focus in on one because this is your job I had the pleasure of doing myself one summer as well, and that is golf caddy.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Lucky you.
DETROW: You - well, I mean, one thing that you said that I was like, oh, I learned that too, was you learned when to stop talking and when to be quiet. Tell me about that.
MARTIN: Yeah. Well, pretty much all the time was when to not talk, unless they talk to you. I was probably the worst caddy ever. I really had never golfed before. And so, frankly, I didn't know what to say to the golfers. I just basically handed them their clubs. One of the things that surprised me the most was just how angry they would get, right? - you know, when they missed a putt or, you know, hooked or sliced or whatever. And you really didn't want to talk then, right? - 'cause they didn't want to hear from the caddy. I also talk about the different, as you say, social castes because I did not grow up in a wealthy family, and a lot of these golfers were very wealthy. And sometimes the only words that would be exchanged would be, you know, like nine iron or give me my putter or, you know, hurry up. And so I learned what it felt like to be invisible, right? Like a member of, you know, really someone who's just sort of doing manual labor. And I vowed to myself, you know, back then in my other summer jobs, I'm never going to treat people like this. You know, I'm going to talk to them and treat them like human beings.
DETROW: You said a word before that a lot of Catholics are very familiar with and familiar with priests talking a lot about - vocations, the idea that everyone has a calling, and for some people, the calling is to be a priest or another job. And I'm wondering, like, going through this book, which you said is partially in that spirit, did that make you rethink the idea of vocations at all? Like, maybe sometimes you just need to make $2.30 an hour to scoop ice cream, you know, and there's not a higher calling. Or was it the opposite effect?
MARTIN: Well, I think we all have a vocation. Vocation comes from the Latin vocari, which means to be called or to call. And it works on different levels. I think we all have a vocation to be the person that God is calling us to be. That's the deepest vocation. Then there's the vocation of what you want to do with your life, maybe a career. But, you know, all of us have to eat, and all of us have to put bread on the table. And I think one of the things that I realized in the book is that some people, particularly those who are poor and up against it, don't have the luxury sometimes of fulfilling what they believe to be their vocation. And so I talk in the book about how to navigate that, right? - between what you feel like you're called to be and the things that sort of circumstances and life prevents you from becoming. You know, I worked on an assembly line, and I don't think most of those people would say, this is my vocation, right? But to understand work as dignified and as humane, right? - even if you can't fulfill what you think God is calling you to be.
DETROW: Later on in the book, you write about what was a pretty upsetting and tragic experience. A close friend of yours is killed in a car crash, along with others. And you write about how that led you to reject God for a while, to step away. I mean, you write that your experience with religion up to that point had been pretty surface level, but still you were angry at God. What were you thinking at the time? Why did you think you responded that way?
MARTIN: Well, I was in college and two friends were killed in an automobile accident, one a very good friend of mine, my freshman-year roommate named Brad (ph). And I remember sitting in the pew of the church during the funeral, outside of Washington, and just saying, I'm done. I'm done with God. I'm done with a God who kills my friends. And so I thought, I'm not going to church, and I'm not believing anymore. And it wasn't until a friend of mine named Jackie (ph), who was an evangelical Christian was talking to me one day, and I told her what I had done. I said, I'm not going to church anymore. I don't believe in God, and I'm angry at God. And she said, really, words that kind of changed my life. She said, well, I've been thanking God for Brad's life in these past few weeks. And it was the first time I really understood that you could be in a relationship with God, a God that you didn't understand, right? And really, I can remember just standing outside the quadrangle at the University of Pennsylvania during the - in the snow while she was saying those things, and I felt a shift within me. And I thought, OK, I'm going to go back to church, you know, give God another chance, which I did.
DETROW: Do you think it's a straight line from there to eventually becoming a priest or still kind of a loopy line from there to where you ended up?
MARTIN: Oh, no, very loopy - I ended up working at GE in the '80s in New York and in Connecticut. And, you know, I was kind of a lukewarm Catholic. I mean, I went back to church, but I wasn't super, super religious. And that really continued until I found that I could no longer stay with GE. I found that life really difficult. And, you know, I was looking for a way out, and the Jesuits gave me a way out.
DETROW: The book is called "Work In Progress," and you're so clear-eyed about, you know, your goofy failings as a 15-year-old. Are there things you're still working on today, that you're still failing at today that make you a work-in-progress that you can think about and have the separation to examine and think about?
MARTIN: Oh, sure. And I mean, I think that's one of the reasons I called it "Work In Progress." It's not just, you know, me as a teenager and a 20-year-old. It's me now. You know, one of the central themes of the book is how motivated I was and how motivated a lot of people are by the desire to be liked, right? - to be loved, liked, approved of. And I think that's still within me, you know? Who doesn't like - who wants to be disliked? And, you know, as you say, I do a lot of work with LGBTQ Catholics, and that means a lot of people hate me today. So it's still - you know, it's still something I'm working on. It's still, you know - again, still a work in progress.
DETROW: Father James Martin is a Jesuit priest and writer. His latest book is called "Work In Progress." Thank you so much.
MARTIN: My pleasure. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARC DE SOLEIL'S "GOT CAUGHT IN AMSTERDAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
