Hope Podcast: Featuring Amy Brenneman, MRPL Candidate

HIATT O'CONNOR: Welcome to the Hope Podcast. I'm Hiatt O'Connor. 

JORDAN AHMED: And I'm Jordan Ahmed. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: This podcast is offered by the Harvard Divinity School Office of Religious and Spiritual Life-- 

JORDAN AHMED: --where we talk to HDS students about their spiritual lives, what hope means to them, and how they practice hope daily. Today, I sat down with Master of Religion and Public Life student Amy Brenneman to talk about her coming back to Harvard, about writing the unknowns in a creative life, and about hope as an action. 

Thank you so much for being here with me, Amy. It truly has been a pleasure to get to know you this semester and to connect about so many different things in relation to our creative life, our political life. And I really thought that you would be a perfect guest for the Hope Podcast. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: I am honored, and I would follow you anywhere. You told me to go to Noon Service, and I do, and I love it. And you really are such a bright light for me for this year. 

JORDAN AHMED: Thank you so much. That means, truly, so much to me. As we just dive in, I would love to hear where home is for you. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Well, I grew up in Central Connecticut, so I definitely have the bones of an east coaster. I have spent about 30 years in Los Angeles-- that's where I raised my children-- and still have a home there. But we also have a house on Martha's Vineyard, so for the past 30 years, I've absolutely gone back and forth. But now, I am an empty nester. So anytime you ask an empty nester where home is, you see our eyes glaze over a little bit. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So I would say this year, I'm obviously in Cambridge. My daughter lives on Cape Cod. My son is a junior at Berkeley in California. So I would say I toggle between those two places. 

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah. I mean, I feel like what's interesting is, so frequently, when you ask someone where home is, especially in today's age, there's at least two places, let alone if we start thinking about home metaphysically. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Yeah, exactly. I mean, HDS, home, that's a metaphor. 

[LAUGHTER] 

JORDAN AHMED: Well, speaking of Massachusetts, what brought you back to Cambridge and to HDS? 

AMY BRENNEMAN: So I went here as an undergrad decades ago, and I majored in comparative religion with Diana Eck, who it's been so beautiful to-- she is retired, but still very much around. And the study of religion just made sense to me. It was a way to connect to the divine, to art, to different cultures. 

I lived in Kathmandu for a semester, basically. And while I was there-- before I went, I had been studying aspects of Hinduism. I had taken one class in Buddhism here in Cambridge and on the page-- or maybe it was the teacher-- it was very dreary and depressing. I thought, well, that's not for me. 

And then when I got to Kathmandu, and I went to Boudhanath, which is one of the two big centers for Tibetan Buddhists where they live and worship in Kathmandu Valley, I started meeting Tibetan Buddhists. And I was like, oh, this is for me. So I changed my course of study. I ended up majoring in and writing on Buddhist text. 

But I think I tell that story because there's the classroom stuff, text study. And then a recurrent question or theme in my life is, what does it look like on its feet? What does it look like in the world? And those two things have a relationship to each other. But that was a good example of, I don't like Buddhism. 

And then I met Tibetan Buddhists. I was like, you're amazing. And so-- very experiential. So then now, at the same time, I was doing a ton of theater. One of the reasons I majored in religion is there was no theater department at Harvard at the time. But in a strange way, it really empowered my cohort to just do whatever we wanted to do. 

The American Repertory Theater was in residence then, so that was an incredible lab for us to see these world class professional art makers come through. So right after college, I started a theater company, and we traveled with that, and then I went to New York and LA and started all that. But in the back of my mind-- and honestly, as an actress going to Hollywood, they would see that on my resume, like, what the actual F? 

[LAUGHTER] 

But I knew that was my source. There's no other way to put it. And that's why I do everything I do in my life. But it's like, how am I being led? And I don't know. Five or six years ago, a friend of mine said, there's a new program at the Div School. Maggie Rogers, who's a singer we all love. 

And I said, oh, what is this? It's called Masters of Religion and Public Life, and it is a one year program for people that are in established in other vocations to come and get grounded and work on a project and be in conversation. So I applied, I think, right when I heard about it. 

And I was on a TV show at the time that didn't-- it's a wonderful show called The Old Man, but it was such a protracted production schedule. I never knew when I was going to be free, so I deferred. And then December 2024, I got the call. The show is not going forward. The next day, I put in an application. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So it had been on my mind. 

JORDAN AHMED: OK. Well, it's beautiful to see this long arc that you've had with Harvard, where previously, you were here studying religion with, really, no direct theater program to work through your art with, but being creative and finding ways to do so-- and I feel like that spirit is very much alive at HDS. 

The school is just full of artists. To me, that says something about the nature of the types of people who turn to religion or turn to studying what we don't understand or the unknown. Of course, it attracts artists. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: For sure. I like that. That's so beautifully put. And I'm still, essentially, untrained in my vocation. And I really would make a pitch for that. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Because I think there's that idea of zen mind, beginner's mind. Tom Cruise talks about this, that he still gets really nervous when he gets a script like, I don't know if I can do it. I think to keep ourselves nice and vulnerable when it comes to our creativity-- for me, the study of religion, being around other seekers who really want to use whatever they do, whatever their talents are, for the collective good, for the common good. 

So it's very different. It's very service-oriented. It's like, what can I do? Oh, I'm a poet, or I'm a cook, or I'm a great community organizer. I mean, the more I'm around activists who are really good at organizing or fundraising, I'm like, I don't do that. But I can put on a pageant. I can really help you make a song. I'm a goofy person. I'll put on a clown suit. 

There are definitely things I can contribute to this moment, but I'm really honest and humble about the things that other people do better. But I think that this-- I was just talking about this in therapy this morning. 

I think that not just for this political moment, but maybe for this human life that we have, for any of us who care and things lay heavy on our heart, it's like this idea of creative expression, both to get it up and out of our bodies so it doesn't become toxic, and then also to share it and show it. And then suddenly, we're in a community, and it's a beautiful way to live. 

JORDAN AHMED: I truly couldn't agree more. For me, coming to HDS, I expected a lot of spiritual growth, I expected to deepen my understanding of things like chaplaincy, but what I didn't anticipate is finding, really, a whole new creative community that's inspired me to reengage in so many of my practices that I'd thought maybe just didn't make sense in the world, or that-- maybe I couldn't be a poet in the ways that I imagined 15 years ago. 

But really, it's been beautiful to see just how amazing that community sense of-- we're not writing poetry to be famous poets. We're writing poetry because we feel like we must. There's something we must speak to and that we hope people can hear. 

I always think about it in the way that if I can change myself, that's really the only part of the world that I can control. And for me, engaging in these arts practices is such a part of my own self-development and how I learn to understand myself. And finding ways to share that art and to experience other people's art-- really, to bear witness to my friends creating beautiful things is such a huge part of where I see the world change. 

It's so hard, I think, especially now, to imagine change on these massive levels that we all really see need to change. And it's hard not to want to just solve those things, but I really feel like it's the classic, we have to turn in first before any of that really meaningfully changes. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Yeah. And I also think the spiritual and creative path are so intertwined. And even just to say to ourselves, wow, this is really hard, or to say to another person, how are you doing? is so-- what gets lost, I think, in terms of-- for me, anyway, if I jump to problem solving. Because I don't really what other people need, and I'm not an economist, and I'm at the Kennedy School. Can we save capitalism? Who the F knows? 

[LAUGHTER] 

But I do know through practice and through deep belief and through being an art maker and a collaborative art maker-- I know how to be present with people to the best of my ability. But I really do know that that's the first thing. If we don't do that, then it's just talking heads. 

JORDAN AHMED: You've touched on this a little bit in what you've shared so far. I'm curious if you could share a brief spiritual autobiography. What is the spiritual makeup of Amy? 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Yeah. Oh, it's such a great question. So my mom is Jewish. My dad is not. Neither one of them grew up with any religion. And in fact, my mother's father was anti-religious. I mean, my brother's like, he's an anti-Semite. I was like, he was anti-religion. He was of German Jewish extraction, came over to Ann Arbor, was a science writer. 

And my grandmother, who I knew came through Ellis Island from Lithuania, like a deeply devout person-- he said, there's going to be no religion in this family, which was really hard on her. And in fact, once he got senile, she started going to shul. My father grew up in Ohio, no religion as well. So they met at Harvard Law School. My mother was in the first class at Harvard Law School. They were the first married couple at Harvard, which is so sweet. 

JORDAN AHMED: Oh, my goodness. Wow. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Married their whole life after that. And they lived in a small community in northwestern Connecticut, which was a very important place to them. This was before my brothers and I were born. And they met this Episcopal priest who really, really enlightened them into this idea of a life of service. 

And so they were baptized together. I mean, again, it wasn't like Evangelical baptism. So I grew up in a Congregational Church in the '70s and '80s. And I think on a deeper level, I just always naturally had-- and I didn't talk to God all the time. I didn't talk to Jesus. 

But I was like-- I felt seen. I felt loved. I felt playful. I always say there were many things about the Congregational Church that were slightly lacking. The art could have been better. I didn't grow up with any female-- we didn't have Mary. However, it did not wound me. I did not have to live my adult life unwinding damage, which is no small thing. 

So I just was always really-- and this very deep sense of-- some people go into a house of worship and it's like, oh, I'm not dressed right, or-- I always felt at home, no matter what the tradition was. It was sort of like a theater. I was like, oh, this is cute. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if it was ego. But I'm like, I'm home. 

JORDAN AHMED: I really relate. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: You know what I mean? They're talking about God? Cool. I'm on a Native American reservation. I'm at [INAUDIBLE] cathedral. I'm interested. And I could intuitively make these archetypal connections. 

My friend Mirabai Starr, who's a wonderful theologian and writer, she gave me a word for it. She's like, oh, you're interspiritual. I was like, oh, it's like being nonbinary with gender. I was like, oh, yes. There's never been-- I'm the anti of Orthodox. I'm like, it's all great. And it's all terrible. 

[LAUGHTER] 

I mean, there's really bad stuff too. So then I came here, got really interested in Indian or Hindu and Tibetan stuff. My theater company, we traveled all around the United States for about seven years doing theater in these really small, usually geographically isolated places. 

Always went to church. I was like, oh-- because there was a lot to do. Went to a lot of Southern Black churches. Loved that. And I would say the big thing was, I got into Al-Anon when I was 23, and my dad got sober when I was 17. He was 51. And he'd always been a very spiritually grounded person. 

But the 12 step, he had to get his shit together and talk to God in a very different way, much more intimate way. Really, about survival. It's like, how do you stay sober? So he said, oh, there's this program. And I was like, oh, whatever. 

And then my first big relationship that started, actually, when I was an undergrad was with a man-- a lovely guy that was five years older than me. He was not an alcoholic. But he was-- six weeks after we met, his brother died of a drug overdose. His only brother. 

And basically, I always say that was the beginning of my Al-Anon-ism, because I spent years trying to cheer up this very sad person. Anyway, we were in Berkeley, California, very randomly-- so sweet. My son lives there now. And not totally unusual, but for a young person coming out of college-- but I felt like there was absolutely no structure. 

If I didn't have a degree to go after, if I didn't have an achievement, if I wasn't fulfilling what you wanted me to do, I couldn't tell you what food I liked, because it would be what you liked. I mean, it really was, like, whoa. So I got into Al-Anon, and I've really never left. 

And so for me, the 12 steps has been, really, my most constant spiritual practice. And it's really granular. It's like, I got to do a fourth step, because I messed up. Or God, tell me what to do. Or I got to talk to a fellow. So it is supported by all these other traditions, but I mean, I still go twice a week. You know what I mean? 

JORDAN AHMED: It's given you a connective tissue for this interspiritual understanding that you developed. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Yeah. And also, how do you live your life? How do you make-- I mean, when I met my-- I've been married for a long time, and my track record with men was not good. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So my sponsor, who is still my sponsor-- I was like, I really like this guy, and I could really F up. And so we worked so I didn't. And so it's real world choices. And sometimes, from that point of view-- I look at the madness that's going on in the world. Oh, they don't have somebody kicking their ass, or they don't have somebody loving them. They don't actually have a grounding to make better choices. 

JORDAN AHMED: Absolutely. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: So I would say that's-- I mean, that's the way some people meditate. I'm an OK meditator. But that's my practice for sure.

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah. Wow. I'm curious, thinking about the span of experience and the breadth of spiritual experience and practice that you've done, how hope figures into any of that. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Yeah. Well, it's really challenging. 

[LAUGHTER] 

JORDAN AHMED: Yes, it is. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: I think with the rest of conscious, kind-hearted humans, the way I try to be, it is a really challenging time. And I think that the way I myself am maturing-- and again, coming back to the 12 steps. The 12 steps have some really great, grounded ideas that really help me right about now. 

One is, we learn the facts about a situation. So we learn about if our loved one has alcoholism or if our loved one has mental illness, and we're just driving ourselves crazy trying to help them. It's like, let me learn about whatever the situation is, or we ourselves. 

So I feel like I'm learning the facts about late stage capitalism, about what happens when there's no guardrails, about rape culture. I'm learning some things that I would rather not learn about. But God wants me to learn about it. I mean, that's my language. 

And the other idea is that I do believe that things have to bottom out before different choices are made. And it's nice when the bottoms are high. This seems like a very low bottom. But I do believe that to my core. And I think the other thing that gives me hope is just keeping going, as in, I can wake up with a heavy heart, and oh my God. 

And then I walk out the door, and then there's a puppy, or I come here, and I see you. And it's like, oh, that's interesting. If you just keep going-- I have a friend who has long COVID, and she's actually doing a little better, but for five years, she was trapped in-- not trapped. I mean, she had to stay, for her health, in an apartment in New York. 

Poor thing. I mean, she's just reading terrible news and it's-- I mean, I'm the same way. It's like, somehow, we are embodied creatures. And if our bodies go out into the world, new things will keep happening. And I do believe hope is a practice. I don't think it's a feeling. There are many people who have had it much harder than me who I can learn from right now. 

But there's also this great quote by one of my all time faves, Rebecca Solnit. She writes, "Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes, you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. 

Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement. Pessimists take the opposite position. Both excuse themselves from acting." 

JORDAN AHMED: Wow. I really appreciate this. The framing of the unknown has been really valuable to me, especially since coming to HDS. And I feel like what you were sharing before that quote, too, this idea of, where do we turn our attention? To have an intention towards something, to see the puppy, to see the friend, to see-- today, I was walking to campus, and I saw some of the first buds. 

And I'm like, oh, something is thawing. Something is changing. And even if I'm carrying this heavy heart of all of the grief that's surrounding us-- and that, in many ways, has always surrounded us as an entity, as humans. I feel like it's almost just built into the human condition that we will grieve. We will experience suffering. We will lose things. 

And I find it really powerful that even in the midst of that loss, we can always turn our attention somewhere. There's always beauty to be seen. It is spiritual practice and faith for me that helps me cultivate that attention and cultivate that ability to witness others, to witness the world, to witness maybe God, to witness myself, too. 

For me, attention and the unknown are deeply bound, because I often think about God and the divine in the sense that the ultimate form of God is forever unknowable. But it's worth it to strive toward God in the same way maybe that God is striving toward ourselves. And in that intermediary space, so much magic happens, and maybe even in the ways that you framed it, that maybe hope lives there, too, hope as an action. It's that striving towards. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Yeah. I love all that. And I think, too, what gives me hope-- and I'm sure you can relate. I'm older than you. So I can look to things that were big problems. I look to friends that got sober. Or my friend had this really shitty marriage, and it was like, oh my God. And it's like, oh, now, she's out. 

And she really had never-- by her own admission, had never been in a healthy, fun, sexual relationship. She's 60, and she is. My daughter has a disability. There was a over a decade where that was-- I mean, I loved her, but it was so heavy on my heart. It's not. It's just not. It's like, oh. And I think what's-- I had a podcast myself called The Challengers, which you can find on-- no. 

[LAUGHTER] 

But it's this idea of talking to people. I mean, AA is a great example of this, that you don't want-- who wants challenges? People are people. But then you have them. And then what happens? And probably my least favorite idea in-- I wouldn't even say it's American, it's probably kind of Western capitalism-- is overcoming obstacles. I effing hate that. 

Because my father never was not an alcoholic. But he found his spiritual path. He found community. I mean, he always would say, do I want to be an alcoholic? No. Am I happy for whatever got me in the room? Yeah. And then disability and special needs are like that. I didn't know. I just assumed, my kid's going to be straight A's. And then you get what you get. 

And being Charlotte's mother has ushered me into a community where we push each other's wheelchairs, make sure the T-tube's in there, if a friend is non-verbal-- it's just this whole interdependent thing that-- I mean, I wrote a play about it because I was so fascinated. It's like, wow, what is this-- everybody's got to be on their own, and capitalism-- and it's like-- and I think to your eloquence, being human is a terminal situation. 

I mean, we're all to get sick and die. And I'm also at the age where I said to my husband, I was like, wow. When people are in their 30s or even into their 40s, and they get sick and die, it's so unusual and so terrible. It's like, it's it's not good. My mother lived till 94. 

So to somehow live alongside people getting sick, ourselves getting sick-- so it's this-- and I think that the grief stuff and the political stuff right now for me, just riffing off of what you just said, I think that the maturing for me is, oh, a couple of months of grieving my father's death, and now, I'm OK. 

Or yeah, we just have to get this person out of the office, out of-- president-- and then we'll get somebody-- and then I'll check back out. It's like, no, we're going to keep checking it. And it doesn't mean that we're not going to have super joyful days. But we're going to really-- I have a better understanding of the love and the care that goes into being in community. 

JORDAN AHMED: Absolutely. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: And it's not something you dash in and out of. 

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah. Well, I think that's what's really helpful about the framework you shared about the frustration with this idea that we can overcome obstacles, because then it makes it feel like, well, then we can reach a destination, and that destination is utter salvation, and everything's perfect, and we're living in utopia. And that's just not going to happen in the ways that we might want it to. 

And oftentimes, I think, I don't know if I would really want it to. Because as difficult as life has been and as difficult as life can be, so many of the hardest times in my life have led to some of the most beautiful periods in my life. I came to HDS off of one of my rock bottoms. And I think, had I not experienced that, I wouldn't have even thought to apply to Divinity School. It really clarified what I feel like my real calling and vocation is. 

And it's not that I can give you the title of a career that is associated with that calling, but I do feel what I am supposed to do. And I think what's important about it is that it's not about a destination, it's about an orientation to how I live, how I relate to people. And in that, it is active. It's not that I've achieved-- I've found the perfect thing, and now I am it, and now it is over. 

Yeah. 

I don't love that. 

Until we die. 

I don't want that. I'm enjoying this intermediary space of figuring it out. And I think that that's where so much beauty is created and connections. I'm so grateful that our lives have led these little idiosyncratic paths that led to us sitting down and talking about this for half an hour. That's a special place. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: I love it. I know. I will say, even though it's my vocation, I'm a freelancer. And so I think the interesting thing about freelancing-- a similar thing where whatever old idea I had or-- my mother worked for the state of Connecticut for 40 years, so she had one employer. 

She was like, I don't know how you do it. Because I'm auditioning. And then you'll have a really great gig, and it's great, and then it's over. And then you're back going, what the hell, God? What am I doing now? So we're constantly-- we never have the security of checking out. 

But I think the beauty of that is we get to-- I think people that have-- I don't even if this exists anymore. But in America, it's like, I worked for a bank for 40 years, and then I got fired and have no idea who I am, or I've never had a relationship with myself. I constantly have to have a relationship with myself because my exterior situation is changing all the time. 

It's changing. 

But there's a gift to that. 

JORDAN AHMED: I've never thought about it like that, and that gives me a lot of comfort, as somebody who kind of feels myself in a similar path in that way, that I have my feet in a lot of different pools, and I get pulled in different directions at different times. 

They all feel very deeply interrelated, and there is a sense of slight disorientation that can happen, but also a lot of possibility. And I've experienced things that I never would have even imagined because I've kept myself in that state of slight disorientation. 

I mean, that's one of the things I love about HDS. It can be a disorienting experience to dive into a study of the self, a study of religion, a study of meaning, a study of what it means to relate to another person, what it means to die, and also, that disorientation leads to so much growth. 

And I see it in my peers. I see it in mentors. I see it all around us. And it's not just that happens in a place like HDS, but I think it's like a microcosm of accelerated disorientation. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: For sure. And I think the other thing about that-- and I just came from Kelly Brown Douglas's class. I think that we are willing to be challenged. So not only are we disoriented just because of the nature of the inquiry, but we're really open to going, oh my God. 

The way I've literally looked at things for the last 40 years is not the whole story. It's really cool. It's like, wow, you're blowing my mind. You know what I mean? We've all had that feeling. 

JORDAN AHMED: Absolutely. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: But I also feel like we-- I'm ultimately a big believer in denial in terms of it being a protective function for the ego. I don't think the onion gets peeled until we're ready to handle it. 

I don't think we're going to see those hard truths about our folks until-- at least this is my experience-- there's been some sturdy structure internally or externally where it's like, oh, now, I can look at the fact that my mom was like this-- something really that when you're younger, it's like, I can't look at that. 

And I feel-- I mean, as much as I could frame Mr. Trump in a lot of different ways, one way that I think is really, for me, kind of grounding is like, he's the epitome of a certain kind of American businessman. Winner take all. I can use bodies the way I want to. 

There's no common good. So it's like, all right. Are we doing this capitalistic thing? Because this is what it looks like. He hooks up with people that don't want any constraints on what they do. 

Now, we're rolling back environmental protections, because that doesn't matter. So in a way, it's like, well, maybe-- again, with the hitting bottom. It's like, that's what it looks like, you guys. We're living it. But he's not an aberration to the system that we all agreed on, so what do you want to do? 

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah. I'm curious if you have a final word for our listeners. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Yeah. It wouldn't be that. That's not the final word. 

[LAUGHTER] 

I am a big proponent of regular practice, whatever that is. I'm a big-- you feel like it? You don't feel like it? You still go. Whether it's like a service every week or a yoga class or a group, I think that really communicates to the inner self, we have a structure, and there's going to be good days and bad days and you're going to keep doing the structure. 

I'm a big believer in that. And I think we don't what's going to happen, and to allow that to be either a neutral or even a positive. Being a creative, as you are, that path-- we live with uncertainty. I mean, how many rehearsal rooms have I been in, and I was like, wow, I don't what the heck's going on. 

The jello has not set. And to be somewhere in there, go, it's OK that things are not set. I mean, last spring-- and still, although things are changing all the time. But I remember last spring, my activist friends were like, where's the opposition? Where's the Democrats? There should be more. 

And I kind of intuitively knew, the leaders will emerge. The leaders that we had are not the leaders for this moment. Maybe some of them are. But can we be uncomfortable not knowing what's going on, not what the plan is, tolerate discomfort? And I think the more we can tolerate that, then we won't just react. 

And it's like the bardo state. I mean, in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it's like-- within the bardo period, if you get scared, frankly, then you're just going to go back and be incarnated again. But it's this idea of-- it's super uncomfortable, but I'm not the only one that's uncomfortable. And within that discomfort is possibility. 

JORDAN AHMED: Wow. Thank you, truly, so much, Amy. It has been not only a privilege to get to sit down and talk to you, but also just to be a friend, to be your friend, to have experienced your year here at HDS together. I know we have, for those who are listening, we have a play reading coming up, we're hoping, so look forward to that. 

And also, I really look up to you. And really, hearing the ways that you've navigated the creative life-- I take all that in as a sponge, and it's so assuring. If I can just take even just an ounce of the magic and light that I see in you and just get to share that in my own ways, then life will have been good, so thank you. 

AMY BRENNEMAN: Right back at you. We're family.