Hope Podcast: Featuring Michael Fuhrman, MDiv Candidate

In this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from Michael Fuhrman, a second-year MDiv student at HDS. This conversation includes his religious position of non-position, religious sympathy, and the importance of writing for its own sake.

RILEY BROWN: Welcome to the Hope Podcast, a show about Harvard Divinity School students and how they find hope in difficult times. My name is Riley Brown, and I am a second year masters of Divinity candidate, a chaplain intern in the Office of Religious and spiritual Life here at HDS. And I will be the host of today's conversation. 

I am joined by Michael Furman, a fellow second year MDiv candidate, a future chaplain intern, and I think one of the only other people at HDS who calls the Ozarks home. Is that right? 

MICHAEL FURMAN: That is true. Arkansas is home for me. 

RILEY BROWN: And mine is Southwest Missouri. Michael, welcome to the show. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Thank you so much for having me, Riley. I'm excited to be here. 

RILEY BROWN: Yeah. I want to begin by having you introduce yourself a little bit to our audience. So where are you from. Do you follow or belong to a religious or spiritual tradition that sort of vein. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Sure, definitely. So as we were just talking about, I grew up in Central Arkansas, near Little Rock. Families from there love it there. Arkansas is home in many, many ways. And it was also home to some of my earliest religious and spiritual selves in upbringing in that way. 

I grew up in a Christian household, pretty evenly split with my dad's side of the family being very Roman Catholic and my mom's side of the family being very Southern Baptist. And really the compromise my parents made when they got married was to have us do both, which sometimes worked and sometimes did not. It has its own funny stories and its own little ways that it found its way into my life. 

But at the end of the day, the older I got, the more I've learned to really appreciate and be sympathetic to both of those aspects of Christianity but currently identify under the category of what a lot of people at Divinity School say are nones, N-o-n-e-s or just unaffiliated in that way. 

So from a Christian background but at the end of the day, someone who does not fall under any specific religious category or spiritual practice. 

RILEY BROWN: That's interesting. As someone from that area like the Bible, would you consider where you're from the Bible belt? 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Certainly. 

RILEY BROWN: OK. So in my hometown, to be Catholic is like there's this aura around. There's so little diversity where I'm from, that even Catholics are like, you're Catholic. What was it like to be in a Catholic? Was that weird where other-- was there like a large Catholic population where you're from or was that something that made you spiritually other? 

MICHAEL FURMAN: It was really interesting. I think that Arkansas and a lot of places in the Southern United States have a history of discrimination against Catholicism. It just comes out in a lot of immigrant lifestyles moving to the region and then not being accepted in that way. There's a really interesting history that you can look at. 

The way that it really manifested for me as a child really was knowing that there were some people I went to school with or some people we were family friends with that just also so happened to go to Sunday school with me, did first communion with me, and I would recognize them at school and just in life soccer practice, all these kinds of things as other people who were like me in that way. 

But I think my parents also wanting to set us up well just in terms of having good friends and really feeling like we were connected with the people that we were going to school with, often sent us to Wednesday night youth group at the larger Baptist churches, or there were some churches that did like Friday night, lock in situations. 

And it only made sense for us to go because my mom has a Protestant background. So it wasn't anything that was alien to us as a family. And it's like the good kids from school were going to these things, my friends personally. And so I would go and feel like I was someone who was fitting in there just as well as in the Catholic spaces as well too. 

And it felt though very different the more I grew up and I think became more conscious of the ways that those faith traditions manifest differently or have different things that they ask of their practitioners, which was some of my earliest, all right, wait a minute, I was baptized as a baby. I've seen the pictures. What's this talk of me-- 

RILEY BROWN: Doing it again. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Doing it again or needing to accept Jesus in my heart and the Protestant evangelical language that comes out, especially when you're surrounded by a whole bunch of young people. 

And youth pastors are excited and eager to feed people's souls in that way, that there was some conflict for me to try to sparse out, OK, wait, what is the difference that's going on here? And why do I not necessarily know exactly what these differences are if we're talking about the same guy at the end of the day? So what's that shaping up to be? 

And so I think the Catholic aspect of my childhood never made me feel necessarily othered in my community. It also wasn't something that I think at that age I could speak on pretty well to know that it was that different from what other people were going through or experiencing. 

And it was so important to my family too, that it never felt like something that was like belittling my experience, but more so just really grounding me in my relationship with my grandparents, my relationships with my aunts and uncles. 

And I think that those conflicts and those differences and the cultural realities that emerge from seeing that and growing up in that is a lot of the reason that I find myself studying religion and being interested in religion. And people always have those questions all the time about how did you find yourself here? Or just assuming I'm going to be a priest. 

RILEY BROWN: That question is coming up. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Yeah. So it's definitely been informative in that way, too. Yeah. 

RILEY BROWN: Yeah, that's interesting. And given you're touching a little bit on what I wanted to ask you in this next question, which is to just give a brief spiritual autobiography and how the role of perhaps these two-- you don't want to say disparate traditions, but Baptists or at least like the evangelical camp is the most likely of Christians to see themselves as distinct from Catholics. So how that upbringing shaped you and how you would say got to the place you are now. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Yeah. And it's one of those things that I think hindsight reveals a lot of information that maybe I didn't have necessarily in the moment, like on the ground as a 14-year-old in that way. 

But generally speaking, based on what I've touched on, I just lived this dual life spiritually for a long time. And the more that I was growing up, the more that I was recognizing things about myself and how I identify in the world. 

The more I saw that though, these two things were very different, they politically and socially still hold a lot of sentiments in the same way that felt exclusionary to me. That felt in a way persecuting me as an individual, as well too, in a way that I realized, all right, let me just step back from this and completely. 

That's around mid-high school, early college, this age of I need to go find my own identity separate from these things, especially because what you're feeding me right now is that I need to change who I am fundamentally in order to fit in a way. 

And I think finding myself just a little disillusioned to the community that was supposed to be supporting me as well, finding that I grew out of some of those friendships. I grew out of some of those thought patterns that gave me I think an opportunity to move into a more just agnostic stage of my life. 

In some ways with some teenage angst, but in a lot of ways, just with some curiosity to see what else is out there and try to make sure that I didn't feel caught in something just because of the circumstances of my family or the circumstances of my upbringing, but that I felt like if I was going to move back into it, that I had a certain confidence moving back into it. 

So then in this quasi testimony, I go to college and I'm not going to church. I'm not doing those things. I have plenty of friends who are and plenty of friends who aren't this identity formation period of I don't know what's going to come out, what's going to jump at me. 

And I ended up working for a research project over the summer. I traveled to India with a Tibetan monastic Geshe Thupten Dorjee, and this research project was led by him because he was born in Tibet and moved to exile in India at the age of around six. 

Worked at the University of Arkansas where I went to school, and then now takes students to India to different formerly Tibetan refugee camps. Now just fully Tibetan communities in India, and doing video interviews with them, documenting their stories, whether it's before they moved from Tibet to India in exile, whether they were born in India in exile, and have just had to come to terms with their Tibetan identity. 

That project was a way that made me become really flooded with the spiritual lives of others and seeing how it came up for them in their protests, in their daily works, in their spiritual strivings. And I always say, because my introduction to Buddhism was so culturally specific in the mode that I was doing, I felt a real hesitancy towards moving into it as my own religious practice. 

But I think really what it did for me more so was just show me how important spiritual health can be for individuals and all the teenage angst that I held against Christianity was starting to dissolve away. Not because I saw myself as somebody who was needing to practice Buddhism in order to feel spiritually fulfilled, but just recognizing that spiritual fulfillment in any ways is something that can really add to a life rather than detract from it. 

And I came back to college after that summer happy to explore more so how is faith, how is spiritual life shaping the communities around me? Which is then when I later went on to do another project looking at Buddhist communities living in Arkansas, documenting some of their stories, because I heard some similar themes based on mostly, seeking refugees. 

Seeking refuge after the Vietnam war, there was a large population of Vietnamese refugees who came to Arkansas and working with some of them through their stories, trying to create a larger narrative about spiritual life in Arkansas. That's more than just Christian, that there are communities of all backgrounds living in the state. 

But also for me, showing that these faith groups all interact in civic life in their own way. And I would say that for me now when I think about how I am spiritually situated in the context of these projects, in the context of what I go to school to study. I think some of it was after all of that learning that I did and just engagement with different communities outside of just Christian and Buddhist. 

I really saw how much value there is in having that kind of spiritual life in a way that made me say, just religiously sympathetic. I genuinely think that it's not something that in any ways is a purely inhibitory practice that people have. I think for some people, it can be. 

But I find myself in a position today where I don't necessarily feel this call that I think some people feel to have to find myself in a specific community that maybe has a title or has a name that is legible to other people. 

And lately have just been finding more so how spiritual health and spiritual life come up in the daily parts of our lives rather than specifically working at it in a specific sector, which a lot of people may call religion. 

I really hesitate sometimes because I'm still figuring out what that language really means for me. Some people would use the language of humanism and it's something that I'm interested in but not necessarily a label that I feel super comfortable moving into. 

Some people would just use the term spiritual religious, but I also find there to be some baggage with terms like that as well too, because I never want to feel like someone who's appropriating or cherry picking from different traditions. 

So I've found myself today being comfortable in the non-answer to these kinds of questions and think that spiritual community and life in that way can come in ways that aren't necessarily under the capital R religion, but can seep up from the ground in our daily lives in different ways. And so that's my quasi testimony, I suppose, of where I'm at today. 

RILEY BROWN: Yeah. A very thorough and good testimony. I like what you say, religious sympathy, I think is very important because that's not-- I wouldn't say having also gone through any non-phase. Religious sympathy is not something that happens across the board with people that are spiritual but not religious or whatever. 

And I think that I would say personally, I guess that I think that's an important quality to remember or at least to be able to see the value that people get out of it rather than only being able to point the finger. While the pointing the finger is important sometimes, there is value. All right. Well, having talked about that, what brought you to HDS? 

MICHAEL FURMAN: In a mix of the different academic projects I'd been working on, the public history type things I'd been working on, I just so happened to have a mentor in undergrad who was a graduate of the Divinity School. 

And it's not something that I don't think I would have ever considered really, unless he had pointed it out to me as someone who had gone through the program and has a very similar background to me growing up in Arkansas, going to University in Arkansas, and then just taking this leap over to the Northeast. 

It felt like something that I could see myself doing and wanting to think through. And also an opportunity to not only continue the academic public history type work that I'd been doing, but also find some space for some personal education, personal growth as well, which I think a lot of people find Divinity School for. 

And because of just the nature of my interests and my own background, it felt like HDS was in particular the right place to be because of the nature of its pluralistic community, because of the nature of wanting to make sure that there wasn't necessarily one thing at the center. But maybe that thing is just this religious sympathy that we're talking about, that it shows up for everyone in different ways. 

But at the end of the day, there's just this commitment to the power that those social groups can have, whether wielded for good or for malpractice either way. And so I've really, really enjoyed my time here. 

I always tell people that the best part of grad school is all the other nerds that you meet when you're there. And it's been such a joy to learn with other people, even if our interests have nothing to do in common on paper. 

At the end of the day, there always seems to be something that I find in my peers that is informative of the things that I'm thinking about and also deeply personal at the same time too. Which I think I've enjoyed the most is seeing how other people see themselves in their work in a way that's honest and not always necessarily just trying to set themselves up for something else. 

But they find themselves with questions just like I have found myself with questions and come hoping not necessarily for answers, but just some clarity in the question, redefining those questions in a way that makes people feel confident in their ability to work them out in their own way. 

RILEY BROWN: Yeah, that's good. And I like also again, though religious sympathy is what allows the gears of HDS to work because if anyone-- that just would not be a good time in a plural, in a interfaith school. If someone was not willing to at least engage. Yeah. So I like that, seeing that as a central thing. 

And speaking of central things, the central theme of this podcast is hope. But before we talk explicitly about what gives you hope I was curious if you could talk about what I would call a vehicle for hope, or to put that maybe in a way that makes it a little more sense is, Kerry once described hope as a seed. 

And what tools do you use to cultivate the ground that you plant your seed in? So this could be anything from practices or things you read or insights that you've gained, things that just tilled the soil for hope to grow, I guess. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Totally. Yeah. I think that on the topic of hope relating to my spiritual life here at school, it's often that I get the question when I translate myself and say like, I'm not particularly religious, but I'm going to Divinity School. 

People sometimes give you this look that's like, wait, so what do you think happens when we die? Like, wait, what do you think happens when things go wrong and having to have answers that they need, but also answers for myself as well too at the same time? 

And I found that some of those vehicles or those tools that you've asked about for me have really come up in things like writing just as a spiritual practice itself. I find it's so important and something that's so life giving. 

In a society where we are so often told to consume media and by all means and it is important. I love music, I love reading, I love going to the movies. I love consuming content. But I do think it's important that we give ourselves space to also just be creators in that way. 

And I think for me, one of the biggest freedoms in my writing that I have found gives me hope or helps me find my way back to hope when I need it is genuinely writing without any audience in mind. 

You can read writers on writing all the time who talk about that they felt like they were suffocating when they weren't writing. They had to write. It was in some way like a muscle that if they weren't using, they knew it would just deteriorate and a huge aspect of their life would go away. 

And I've found myself at a young age, reading people writing like that and thinking to myself, how do you do that? How do you feel that way? What is this feeling that these people have that I don't have? 

And being anxious because I was starting to feel a lot of the same things that I felt as a young child, maybe in large church settings where you look around and see people captivated by these feelings but don't necessarily feel that yourself. So you get nervous when there's something you care about so much and you hear people talking about it with such enthusiasm that you're struggling to find yourself. 

And I've found that in my friendships and in my professional relationships, there is such a pressure on us via capitalism, whatever you want to call it these days, that the things that we do have to be marketable, have to be legible, have to be understood in a way have to be commodified, thank you, in order for them to have value by any means. 

And it was not an overnight process for me. And it is a continual process for me to not look at the things that I'm putting out of myself in that way. But I have found that the most hopeful I am is as at most times when I'm able to actually feel like what I'm doing is purely because I had to do it for myself rather than having to do it for some imaginary audience of others, for some imaginary audience of consumers. 

I think a lot of people these days are concerned about narratives and looking back at their lives and thinking like, well, what was I doing at this point? Or having fantasies of people finding their ephemeral one day and there being this collection of what was Michael and Riley? 

And I think that the most honest versions of ourselves are the ones that aren't worried about those narratives and are the ones that aren't worried about how will this be legible to somebody one day. Because I think a lot of thinking and a lot of processing is just putting things out there. And then over time, it's starting to make sense and we don't have to be creators of immediately understood products. 

And in some ways I think there's a need for writing that is intentionally not thematic, is intentionally not something that we can wrap a bow around and be like, isn't this perfect? Isn't this great? And so that's one of my vehicles I think, that comes up in many, many different ways that I could talk about for a long time that I think finds me when I need to find hope again. 

RILEY BROWN: Yeah, I like that. I think too, you were talking a little bit about hope coming in hindsight and I found that too, in my own writing is something will happen in my life that could be just like at the time I think whatever and then I start writing about it. 

And it turns it through the writing, through the spiritual practice, it becomes this thing that I realize that was a lot more meaningful than I might have originally anticipated. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. 

So having talked about your vehicle for hope using air quotes here, what would you say gives you hope? And that might be writing like you said, but is there anything to state it plainly that gives Michael hope? 

MICHAEL FURMAN: I think a lot of it has to do with certain feelings you get when things find their way in an order that just feels so good. This can be writing. Like you could whip something up and look at it and be like, man, I really knocked that one out of the park for myself. I really like this. That can be a way that things fall into order. 

I also think like a sunny afternoon on the back porch is a way where it's like, my gosh, how did all these things of serendipitously find their way into an order that is just perfect for me? But also learning. When things are maybe in a state of disarray that you can in a way put them in an order that makes sense to you. 

I'm thinking of the antithesis of a beautiful sunny day, maybe one that's pouring down rain and walking outside and not necessarily having to convince yourself that it's beautiful. But I think that a writer that does this really well is Ross Gay, who teaches us that joy is not something that comes to us but something that we have to be taught to see sometimes. 

And I think that is one of the cruxes of hope, not necessarily this labor of hope and joy that we have to excavate it out of things, but that it takes maybe just a trained eye in order to see it in a more affirming way or in a more consistent way. Because I think some people who are tired of the optimist want to say like, there's no way that every day you wake up and feel so sunny and happy, there are bad days. 

And I think the rebuttal to that in terms of how I see hope showing up in my life and what it is to me is this constant training of myself and hopefully encouragement of others around me to try to see things in a way where there is that subtle brightness to it, even when things are gloomy. That's not to say that, these other feelings can't be joyful in themselves as well too. 

RILEY BROWN: I think it's interesting you talked about how there's this idea of labored hope. I have to work myself up into a frenzy in order to find the hope that I-- I have to labor, I have to force myself into finding it. 

And I think that's an interesting connection with what you talk about writing and the church experiences. There's this feeling that other people have that I have to work myself up to get there. 

And then the alternative of that is just this innate. I just have hope or I just feel the spirit. The people in church that are just like, I feel the spirit or whatever. And then you're proposing this interesting middle way of it's not labor, it's not forcing something upon myself. 

But it's not as quite like simple as I am filled with hope right now. It's somewhere where training myself to see it. Just like a shift of perspective, which I think is a really nice way to put it because obviously there are times when we all feel hopeful without having to change our perspective. But there are also times where we feel like we really have to work to find the hope when perhaps like you say, a shift in perspective might be. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Yeah. I think to the no on labor that the labor of hope that some people feel like it certainly has to come from them and maybe that's certain people watching the other side of this category. We're talking about the people who are instantaneously fed by what is given to them in a very hopeful way. 

I think the opposite of that is what we're talking about, this labor of I have to derive it from myself. Like it is up to me to create this for myself, whether that's what's in front of me or what's within me. So the writing would be what's in me and the visual world around me. I have to find in some way this hope. 

And I think you're right in stating that what I'm talking about and what I think how it shows up in my life more so is this mix between where it's like, this is what I have before me, this is what I've been dealt, and I'm not going to be strenuous in the way that I force myself to come to terms with some optimistic viewpoint of what's happening before me. 

But that even at the end of the day, when you've gone through training doesn't feel like the right word, but just some inspiration that allows you to try to see the hope in those things that it starts to just have this little bit of shine to it. 

And I think that comes from just-- in a way one thing that I think I advocate for in my own life is not seeing spiritual life be something that is boxed in to only engaging certain parts of ourselves, but is really something that is bleeding into every single action that we do. Like actually seeing waking up this morning and putting on the clothes that we're wearing as a part of our spiritual lives and not just when we move into certain spaces. 

I think that can be-- I think that can make some people really nervous because then it starts to feel like my gosh, every action I do is dependent upon the sanctity of my spirit, is what the language that some people would use. And that's why I think that some of this is also less about looking for answers and more about releasing into the questions as well. 

So not forcing it in a way that you are putting yourself through labor and not just consuming it in a way that you lose part of who you are in the process of being hopeful, but that in some way you surrender to an aspect of both things. And in that find yourself more attuned to how it's going to show up naturally in a way that is legible to who you are already as a person, rather than changing yourself in order to try to see the hope in those things. 

RILEY BROWN: I think yeah, that's such a good way to put it. Thank you for putting that so eloquently. I think you did a good job. Yeah. I'm filled with hope by your explanation of that. Yeah. So thank you so much for sharing and coming on the podcast. 

But before I let you go, I wanted to ask if you had any parting wisdom by way of recommendation. Is there a practice, a podcast, a book, a movie or whatever else you might recommend to listeners who need a little hope. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Yeah, I'm going to talk about writing one last time. There's an anecdote that I love. There's a playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, one of the great American playwrights of our time, really. And there's this anecdote about her that I think is so wonderful. 

She used to challenge herself to write a play a day. And so just at some point in the day, actually sitting down and writing what you could call a micro drama, maybe it's five lines of dialogue between two characters named A and B, it's not fully thought out at all. 

But she would put herself in liminal situations, like on the subway where she would know all right, I'm between 14th and 31st. Like, I have X many stops before I have to be done with this play. And she would just push herself to get it done. 

And once it was finished, not judge it, not shame it, not necessarily praise it either, but just have it there and know that in some way, some part of how she was feeling that day, some part of what was around her that day was present in what she just wrote in two subway stops. 

And I think that really trying to carve out the time for us to just output in whatever way possible that can be writing plays for other people, that could be journaling, it could be a poem, not just seeing ourselves as consumers every single day, but also people who are outputting part of ourselves. 

I think is a quick way for you to start to feel confident in what you're writing, to feel curious about what you're writing, to be more excited for the next day because you get the opportunity to do that again. 

And I think that there's where that little bit of hope shines through because it's mostly about re-engaging yourself in new ways that I think really gets people excited about the person that they are. And not to be doomed by the curse of individuality all the time. But I think it's also a quick way for you to find community with others who are excited to be thinking, writing, and just acting in the same way that you are as well too. 

RILEY BROWN: Yeah. All right. Well, Michael Furman, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Riley. 

RILEY BROWN: That's it. We did it. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Cue the birds. 

RILEY BROWN: Cue the birds. Hopefully, the lights do not-- 

[CHIRPING OF BIRDS]