Transcript of Interview with Lorraine Murray about Confessions of an Ex-Feminist. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
Confessions of an Ex-Feminist is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004765/Confessions-Ex-Feminist/
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Chris: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the podcast where we talk about what is new, cool and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I am your host Chris Cash director of e-commerce for Catholiccompany.com your source for all your Catholic needs. Today in the spotlight we have Lorraine Murray author of Confessions of an Ex-Feminist. How are you doing Lorraine?
Lorraine: Just fine, how are you?
Chris: I am doing pretty good today, it is nice and sunny and I can’t ask for a better spring day right now I think.
Lorraine: Same here.
Chris: Well we have this excellent new confession book you have got and it is a little different from a lot of the confession books that are out on the market. We had Tarek Saab on recently about kind of the academic intellectual confession of returning to the church, but yours kind of focuses on your journey from atheist, feminist back to Catholicism. So can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey and what brought you to write this book?
Lorraine: Well my journey actually started out as I was very strict catholic girl growing up. You know my parents were Italian Americans, and you know we all went to confession on Saturday and always went to mass on Sunday and I had very good schooling from the nuns, but the only thing that we didn’t really explore was how to defend the faith. It was more or less assumed that you wouldn’t have to do that because you’d always be around Catholics and so they just didn’t you know have that as part of the curriculum. When I went away to college, University of Florida I just found that there were just a lot of people who did not, certainly were not catholic and more of them were just not anything. They just didn’t believe in God, they were happily atheist and I just became kind of overwhelmed by that secular mindset and decided that they were all these really intelligent thinkers who did not go to church and did not even believe in God, and little by little I stopped going to mass and then just became a pretty strong atheist and at the same time got very much involved in the feminist movement so they kind of both went hand and hand and I kind of jumped on a lot of the bandwagons of the sixties and seventies, you know kind of drugs, sex and rock and roll. This went on for really many, many years. I even became a philosophy teacher and would try to lead my students away from God.
In many ways I was really angry with God, it wasn’t just not believing but also an anger because my parents had both died while I was in graduate school and I kind of held a grudge for a long time. So do you want me to say how I came back to the church?
Chris: Absolutely, what was it that brought you back to your faith?
Lorraine: Well I got married when I was, I guess I was 35 and my husband and I we were not really practicing anything, we are just kind of you know interested a little bit in new age, a little bit in Buddhism, and you know didn’t go to church and this went for a few years and we didn’t really have any kind of spiritual centre, and then one day kind of out of the blue he went on a business trip up to New York city. When he came home he said he had stopped in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and had decided to light votive candles in memory of my parents who had been dead quite a while and his father who was deceased.
I was really really shocked by that comment. I mean I could understand him going into the cathedral maybe as a tourist but the notion that someone who knew little about Catholicism would light votive candles really struck me. At that moment the thought just shot into my mind I never pray for the repose of my parents souls, and that was kind of the first little inkling, really strong that something was going on in my life that I wasn’t in control off and it kind of snowballed from there.
I ended up reading Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain” and was really taken by his journey and I felt that it was similar to mine because he had led a very wild life in his youth and then had been brought to the Catholic Church. So I started wondering what was going on and at the same time that all this was happening. My husband and I would go on boating trips in the Gulf of Mexico down on the west coast of Florida, on a little island called Cedar Key and one day we were out on the boat and it was a real still beautiful day and all of a sudden kind of out of nowhere these huge creatures emerged from the deep and just stared into the boat and then they disappeared. We realized a few seconds later that we had had a face to face encounter with Manatees. I was so struck by the beauty and the innocence in their eyes that I turned to my husband and I just said it was like looking into the face of God. Not that I think that God would look like a Manatee but it was that innocence.
So and you know, so I started realizing that someone was calling me back and then it took me not too long to recognize that we lived a mile and half from a Catholic Church, St. Thomas Moore in Decatur, Georgia and so we went over there and stood in the back and didn’t even want to go and sit in the pew, but eventually went in and little by little my husband also got interested and he went into RCIA and was received into the church and I came back.
Chris: Now.
Lorraine: So this happened for both of us, which was really a blessing.
Chris: Absolutely, that is very, it makes it a lot easier when both of you come in at the same time. Now, having been a philosophy professor and used I would assume logical arguments to dissuade your students from belief in God. How did you reconcile the arguments that you used to use to pull people out of the church with your coming back into the church?
Lorraine: Well I started to recognize that there was more to life than reason and logic and there are things that happen in your heart or you know that really you have to be able to go with that. I mean I started to realize that I couldn’t measure or weigh say my love for my husband and so that, I had been a materialist you know if you can’t weigh it, measure it, touch it, taste it etc then it isn’t real, and that is how I had discounted God’s existence, but I began to see that there was something mysterious happening in my life. That little by little I recognized that had to be God and that there was something to a mystical experience, and in fact that it was happening to me.
It was mysterious, it was emotional and it was a lot like falling in love. It was not very easy to categorize or put into a little box or analyze in a laboratory but it was real and it wasn’t just happening one time but many times over and over and then when I actually did go into the church for the first time in so many years. My first prayer was very simple, I knelt down and said to God help me to believe in you, because my belief was so small at that time, and I was amazed at how quickly God answers that prayer with many other experiences and blessings.
Chris: So was there, aside from the Manatee story was that just the place where it just kind of felt like you were hit over the head or knocked off your horse in terms of I need to come back or were there other specific little instances that were just real “ah ah” moments for you.
Lorraine: Well, I think I decided to do something that I hadn’t done really since I was really young, was to go back and read the Gospels again. In fact I probably as a child never did sit down myself and read them. I probably just heard them being read, but when I read the Gospels I was just so struck by the figure of Jesus and I was just awed by, first of all by his wisdom because you know here I had been someone who was kind of worshiping at the altar of various atheist philosophers and I was struck by the incredible wisdom that Jesus showed in the Gospels, but in addition you know the love and the compassion. He seemed to really come to life for me as I read and I believe that that’s another way that he was calling me back, was by having me read the Gospels and then showing me what really Christianity was all about. The notion that he had come not to be served but to serve, and as a person who had lived very selfishly that really struck me and when I went to the church in our neighborhood and I saw all the people who were serving there for no reason, no money, you know not power, not fame, that really struck me. Here are all these people that are serving God so humbly and so beautifully and this message is a real message and you know Christ is at work here. I also my husband and I did met the Mother Theresa’s nuns the Missionaries of Charity and we saw how these women had given their whole lives to Christ.
I also saw that they were serving the AIDS patients and had started a house here in Atlanta and I watched the things that these nuns did everyday and it included washing the floors and making meals and changing the sheets and bathing the women and making sure the women had meals and reading to them and praying with them. I was still pretty much of a feminist at that time and I remember thinking well these are the things that housewives do and this is actually I had always thought that that kind of work was just terribly repetitive and just awful that no one would want to do it. Yet here I saw that, that was the work that was really keeping these patients alive and was giving them joy because these were very poor women who, some of them had never even had a birthday celebration and the nuns made sure they all had birthday parties and I sat there and I suddenly realized that you know, these sisters were taking care of women with immortal souls and what could be more important than that which is also what a housewife does. She takes care of children who have immortal souls.
Chris: You know one of the interesting things that I find is that no matter what somebody is still going to do that work of the housewife, whether it be the wife, the husband or someone they hire to bring in. Otherwise, it is just, there are very important things that have to be done and somebody has to do it at some point.
Lorraine: That is right.
Chris: Or else you have a dysfunctional home.
Lorraine: That is right chaos breaks out very quickly in a home. I can attest to that there are only two of us here but chaos will develop if both of us don’t put some effort in, but you know I put in more effort to keeping the house really clean and there is wonderful thing you know to having a hot meal on the table and to know that someone is there to do the things that make a home. It is not just a house and I think that is one of the things that feminists have overlooked. Is that, the work of making a home being a homemaker is very very important and you can’t, you can’t hire people to do that. It is never done with the love that you would put it into it. They can never be a meal from a restaurant that is served with as much love as one cooked at home and there can never be a house that is cleaned with as much care and love as if it’s your house, versus a paid person who is coming in and kind of resents having to do it. So I think we have lost a lot with the notion that homemaking is not a really important and scared calling.
Chris: I fully agree with you on that. Now I want to go back to the, what I think is a question that is probably on a lot of people’s minds with regard to when you go to college and you meet up with a professor like you were. If you had a son or a daughter going to college and you knew they were going to meet up with someone like you were, who was going to throw out those logical arguments and really work to get them to turn away from God. What would you personally do to prepare your children to meet you?
Lorraine: Well I would say first of all they really need to know how to defend their faith and that means they need to know, not just what they believe but why and so this kind of thing should be taking place all during their childhood and at certain point the children should be introduced to the catechism and to know that that is their book that they can look in and find out why we believe what we do. I think a Catholic education is essential but in addition I go back to something that Flannery O’Connor wrote in her letters. I very highly recommend for any Catholic and non Catholic actually that wants to know more about the faith to read “The Habit of Being” by Flannery O’Connor it is a collection of hundreds of her letters and many of these letters are advising young people about the faith and she is writing in some of the letters to a young man who was at Emery University which by the way is where I now work and this was in the fifties and he had been raised Christian and now feared that he was losing his faith and he had heard her come and speak at the college. So he wrote to her and told her about the fear, and she wrote back and said that for every book you read that is anti-Christian you must read one that is also very Christian. In other words you have to keep looking at the other side and you know she told that she had had times when her faith, she had doubted her faith in college as well but she had just reminded herself to keep what she called Christian skepticism alive. By that meaning we need to be as Christians, we need to be skeptical of the secular arguments. We don’t need to just, it is so easy to fall prey to the secular as she says. “You must be skeptical about Christianity”. In truth we have to realize that our faith is precious and that we have to nurture it and in college I think, I would say college students who can join a catholic youth group and have a priest available where they can go and ask questions as they came up in their college courses, I think that is really important.
Chris: That is a good starting point and of course I think another thing is to just make sure that we as parents demonstrate our own personal faithfulness as we go through our life because children understand whether or not we as parents really believe what we are saying and if we come out as being inauthentic in our Catholicism then certainly that is not going to bode well for them going out into a world where people are calling them away from that.
Lorraine: That is right I think it is very important to model your faithfulness to the church and also to recognize that if the child does stray from the fold, you know you continue to model your own faithfulness and you continue to pray for them. You know my book is an example of someone who was so far from the fold and yet was called back by the good shepherd and we can all be called back. It is just sometimes when parents have this happen where a child strays they become very frustrated and they think you know they have been praying for a year or two or even five and the child is still not back, and I always tell them you know keep on praying and recognize that at some point the good shepherd will come and bring the child back.
Chris: Okay, well we are going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor but when we come back we will speaking again with Lorraine Murray about Confessions of an Ex-Feminist, this is the Catholic Spotlight.
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Chris: We are back on the Catholic Spotlight with Lorraine Murray, author of Confessions of an Ex-Feminist. So Lorraine, I want to talk with you a little bit about your involvement in radical feminism and what were some of the lies that you feel like you were drawn into as part of that lifestyle.
Lorraine: Well I think a lot of the people, the radical feminists, the majority seem to believe that the world can be made into kind of a perfect place if we can just even the playing field you know between men and women, and there is a real belief that there are no God given differences between men and women. In other words, personality differences are not hard wired, instead they come from conditioning, the way that your parents raise you. So “the solution” to all of life’s ills whatever including inequality in the workplace and any unhappiness that someone might have in the home is that we have to get, let the change be conditioning of children so we have to raise boys and girls to be more “unisex” and we see a lot of this going on today. Where people will change the toys they give their children, and you know in truth any parents can say that the differences between little girls and little boys are definitely hard wired, you know the personality differences come out very young but that was one of the lies that I bought into and I didn’t have any real great experience with children at the time. So it just seemed to me that this was a possible goal.
There is also a belief that men and women should be represented 50-50 in all professions whether it is you know neuroscience, neurophysiology, math, physics whatever it might be, being a fire fighter, the police force everything should be fifty-fifty.
Chris: Which if you truly believe that nothing is hard wired that would happen.
Lorraine: That is right, yes indeed.
Chris: It would happen naturally, you wouldn’t have to force it.
Lorraine: That is right exactly women would be in all those fields and so because they are not represented there the feminists then say that it is the fault of the people who are not teaching girls science properly or they are not encouraging them to go into physics or they, etc. etc. but what the feminists have trouble, what they don’t want to admit is that in truth a lot of women don’t feel inclined to go into those professions and many women don’t want to go into any outside profession except what they want to do is stay home and devote themselves full time to their husband and family, but the more women who do that, the less chance there would ever be of a fifty-fifty representation in the professions.
So although feminists said and I believed at the time that feminism was about giving every woman their dream and having them all have their dreams fulfilled. It became clear over the years that the one dream that was not allowed was the dream of the woman who wanted to stay home and raise a family and make a home and teach them all the things that are so important in the home. I have often said about a woman who does stay home is that she needs to know ethics, and history and religion and science and a host of other fields in order to answer the myriad questions that come up from children all the time, and it is extremely important you now to have someone who can do that, and can guide them. So that was.
Chris: So it sounds like the feminist movement would be appalled by the home school movement.
Lorraine: Yeah, because that really does require a full time commitment on you know either one or both, at least one of the parents and it is often going to be the mother. That is right.
Chris: I do know a few home schooling dads but it really is a few.
Lorraine: Yes, it is largely, another wonderful outpouring of love and devotion from the mother who is full time in the home and why not teach her children as it used to be in the past that is right.
Chris: So were there other particular just outright lies that you found in the feminist movement.
Lorraine: Yes, I guess you know, probably the biggest lie of all. The one that I had to live through myself was this belief that children could actually be an obstacle in your life and that if you, that if you did have a pregnancy at a time that was inconvenient then there was a solution and that solution was abortion. Unfortunately, you know this has become part of the feminist agenda and so what I did at the time I was unmarried and I did become pregnant and I believed everything I had read. You know that abortion was a simple procedure that it would not be wrong to do this because I had read all the arguments pro and con and did not even think it was a human life and so I decided that that would be the solution and you know went to feminist clinic and from that point on, I think that was when I first started to see that there was something desperately wrong with feminism, although it took me years to really turn my back on it. Because you know the abortion was horrendous physically and then emotionally I was really devastated afterwards and had flashbacks for many years. Would get depressed, would see children and think about my own, and how old would my child have been and it was very lonely because it did not seem like there were other women who would ever talk about this and there are so many women walking around with this secret lurking in their heart and just breaking their hearts. So it really was just you know it was really a terrible burden and that I think is one of the biggest problems is when people say to me “oh but you know feminism has brought about educational opportunities and professional opportunities” and it is true I am pro woman in that sense. I think women should have these opportunities but the fact that we are, this movement in so many ways has left you know millions of children really dead. It is really a shame, so it really took me years to really find healing for what I had done.
Chris: Another thing that I personally see, as a result of the feminist movement and certainly I don’t regret the opportunities having become available to women, but there is a certain aspect of the loss of community when the majority of women now work outside the home and it is a determent to those who do want to stay home and be family, homemakers and providers in the house hold, there is not a community in the neighborhood anymore that will help watch after each other kids, or do all these sharing kind of things that used to around back when our grandparents were raising their children.
Lorraine: That is right, you know it was just kind of assumed then that there would be someone in the homes and no when I look up and down and street I can just tell you where there might be a person at home and that is extremely rare. Although, I do think that there are some young women who are starting to see the tide turn and are starting to see the value of being a homemaker and they may be the daughters of women who bought into the feminist dream and then found it very wanting. I think there are young women today who were raised where they were in child, daycare a lot and they don’t want that for their children or they are the children or divorce and they don’t want that for that children, but I do agree that we need to really work, to have a better sense of community and that part of the feminist movement has injured the family and in injuring the family the community is also very damaged.
Chris: Now, you were talking a little bit about your experience with the abortion and the fact that you felt really alone. Now, I would assume being in the feminist community that you were probably around quite a few other women who had had abortions, would that be correct.
Lorraine: Yeah, this would be correct but I can assure you that we never spoke about it. So I think it is just a secret. I have known some women for many many years and have been very close to them and it would take a really long time before that might come and it might only come out because I brought it up. So I think even among the people who claim it is just an easy procedure, you just got to the clinic and there is no problem with it, a lot of them are extremely hesitant to talk about it, because there is a lot of emotion associated with it. It really hasn’t been until coming into the Catholic Church that I have found other women who will admit that they did this and they were able to finally experience forgiveness for it.
Chris: Do you feel like after you had the experience, did you feel like you needed to do things. Since you couldn’t talk about it with your feminist friends did you experience a sense that you needed to come up with more ways to defend this?
Lorraine: Yeah, I think I never, I did not give up my belief in pro-choice, you know it is a very odd sort of thing that despite my own devastating experience I still you know continued with my feminist agenda, because at that time you know I still wasn’t really in the catholic fold and it really wasn’t until I came back to the church that I finally saw why what I had done was so wrong and I finally recognized that you just cannot have abortion as part of a pro-woman agenda it just doesn’t work and that life really is sacred from the moment of conception until natural death and it wasn’t until I understood that Catholic church’s teaching on life that I finally was able to give up this notion of being pro-choice. I still know catholic women, that is continued waving the banner of pro-choice and I just, I just don’t understand that, it is just totally contradictory to the Catholic teaching.
Chris: I fully understand that. I am often at a loss on that myself when I run into people who are ostensibly strong faithful Catholics but yet they say on this particular issue, and there are other issues that always come with it, like the birth control issue and women priesthood, but you know it is like how do we change that attitude and that is where I at least personally am somewhat at a loss.
Lorraine: When I came back to the church, I had this laundry list with me, I was the cafeteria catholic, yes I am Catholic but I believe you know women should be ordained and I was still using contraception and I was pro-choice and the list goes on and on and really for me, my conversion experience, my coming back, it took years before I really, the conversion deepened to the point that I accepted everything the church taught and it was really important that I had spiritual direction from a priest who explained why the church taught what it did gave me things to read and answered my questions. Because a lot of the cafeteria Catholics really are not well educated on why the church teaches what it does.
Chris: Now, kind of wrapping up here. Are there some specific, tools, guidelines, suggestions that you have for those of us out here in the battlefield wanting to confront the feminist agenda and to try to help bring our friends and family and even fellow church goers back into the fold.
Lorraine: I always say to go gently into that good night. What I mean by that is I am not really, I don’t that confronting people really ever does work I mean, I think you have to be gentle and you have to take each issue as it comes up with each individual person. I think that just modeling what you believe and being willing to answer when people ask you is important, but very few minds I think are changed by proclamations and confrontations and the attempt to kind of go out and convert people. My feeling about, I still have many people I know that are into the feminist movement and so forth and my feeling is that you know I pray for them and I model my own life and I am here if they have questions of if they read the book and want to ask me, but generally I know that back when I was really, really raging rabid feminist, anyone coming to me and trying to change my mind it just really wouldn’t have worked. It had to, things had to happen slowly and surely and unfold in God’s time in my heart.
Chris: Well thank you Lorraine it has been a real pleasure getting a chance to talk to you about this and for those of you who are interested in learning more about Lorraine’s journey check out Confessions of an Ex-feminist available at Catholiccompany.com and through Ignatius Press. Lorraine, thank you very much.
Lorraine: Thank you it was a great honor thank you very much.
Chris: God Bless.
Lorraine: Thank you.
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Transcript of Interview with Lorraine Murray about Confessions of an Ex-Feminist. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
Confessions of an Ex-Feminist is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004765/Confessions-Ex-Feminist/