Hope Podcast: Featuring Ivy Wang, MDiv Candidate

In this episode of the Hope Podcast, we sit down with second year MDiv candidate Ivy Wang. Together we talk about her journey through different Harvard schools and what it may feel like to find a new home in beauty and mystery.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Welcome to The Hope Podcast, a podcast hosted by the Harvard Divinity School Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, where we talk to HDS students about their spiritual lives, what hope means to them, and how they work to cultivate it daily. My name is Michael Fuhrman, one of the HDS chaplain interns. Today, I sat down with second year MDiv candidate, Ivy Wang. 

All right, well, I'll just start by saying, thank you so much for joining me today, Ivy. I really appreciate it. I think that our listeners will be excited to have you on the podcast. And a way that we always start these conversations is just by giving you a chance to introduce yourself and maybe share with us a little bit about your spiritual autobiography. 

IVY WANG: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Michael. I'm so excited to be here. My spiritual autobiography, wow, the 6.5 minute version, as opposed to the one hour version. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Whatever you'd like to share, we're here to listen to. 

IVY WANG: So I grew up in a very non-religious, I would say, between atheist and agnostic environment. I'm Chinese-Canadian, so I was born in China. I grew up in Vancouver in Canada and very immigrant Chinese communities. In fact, my school was probably 80% Asian. I do not know how to use a knife or a fork until I was maybe a teenager. 

And so religion was really not part of my upbringing, except to have some sort of disdain for people who believed these, evidently, untrue things over science. And I think, I grew up very disdainful of religion and belief and belief in God. Sometimes, we went to church but in a very social way. 

And I think I developed a bit of fear for churches. Because looking back, they were fairly sort of fundamentalist churches, where the other children would be like, but you don't get communion because you're not baptized. And you don't know The Veggie Tales, how dare you? You're not one of us. 

So yeah, so I had neutral to slightly meh thoughts on religion. And I actually-- fast forward to around 25, I started at the Kennedy School and a joint degree with this. Most people don't know it. I try to keep this a secret, but I guess not, with the business school. 

And I think, I had a very well conceived idea of the things I wanted to do and the things that mattered. And a lot of it shaped by-- maybe in the absence of a God, then we make competition or materialism our gods. So it was very tied to achievement. 

And then I got to the Kennedy School, and my first semester, I realized, I don't care about any of these things. None of the clubs, none of the-- the stuff I thought mattered didn't matter to me. And so I sort of spiraled. And the days felt like they got shorter and shorter and darker and darker and colder. It's autumn turning into winter in Boston. And yeah, I really, really spiraled. 

And then I think in hindsight, what now I would call grace, a few things happened. So one is my friend, took me to Memorial Church. And I heard her favorite, Matt Potts, preach about love and justice and service. And I found the ways that he talked about them so compelling and so different from what I'd seen before. 

I also stumbled upon Regina Walton's class on devotional poetry. It was my backup. But again, I found these moments of peace and wonder and stillness that maybe I had felt once or twice in the past, but they were very unpredictable. You're hiking, you're on a mountain top, you have the mountaintop experience. And here, I'm like, OK, Tuesday afternoons, an hour before Regina's class, I will predictably be reading things fast, last minute and predictably, I will feel this wonder and peace. 

And so I found those things so compelling that, yeah, I decided to drop out of business school and come to HDS. I would say that at the time, I just felt a yearning for something like a yearning for divinity. I really hesitated to call it God. I was like, I don't believe in God. I want beauty. And I think beauty was the thing that drew me forward. 

And at HDS, in the first two months, I think I finally admitted to myself that I believed in God, mostly from seeing how my Hindu and Jewish friends related to God and their faith. And since then, I think, God is laughing at me sometimes because, as it turns out, it has been a swirl of, do I believe in Jesus? What do I believe about Jesus? What do I believe about God? Which denomination feels right to me? 

And feeling as a perpetual outsider, I would say, in spaces where people all seem to do things the right way and believe things the right way, but also feeling very drawn forward by this beauty and this mystery and this grace I see. And so to end, I am now a seminarian at an Episcopal cathedral. Which, even a year ago, would have been wild. And I want to be ordained in as an Episcopal priest. Which, also like even half a year ago, would have been wild to me. And yet, it feels right and true and good in a way that coming to HDS and following beauty has also felt right and true and good. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: And I love how you present us with so many different touchstones for when you found yourself in a position of, maybe, I don't care about these things as much as I thought I did, or as much as I think I should to occupy these spaces. And instead, you felt called to-- I mean, you say grace and beauty and wonder and peace, and also pulling from Matt Potts, that love and justice that's present as well, too. 

I love hearing you think back on how-- even in how comfortable so many of these categories can be, or how warm, I think, we feel about them, you still recognize that there's that air of mystery that is not only something that we have to think about in community and where do I fit in into this space and the Divinity School? But also, is something that you were internally processing as well, too. Which I find is a story that is so often the occurrence at HDS but is one of those lesser talked about feelings as well, too. That the sort of-- we think through the internal house building of our spiritual selves. 

But I appreciate you and your candor to say that even in the confidence step you got to take to leave one space and enter another, you did it still with this feeling of now, how am I going to find myself in community? Which, I think, takes that sense of bravery in something that, I think, you should be proud of as well, too. 

IVY WANG: Thank you. It still feels-- I think you're right. There are steps forward in community that feel right. When I left-- I'd actually started a semester at the business school and then dropped out. And that people are like, that must have been brave. I'm like, no, it was the easiest thing because something so much more compelling as drawing me forward. So I think there were like actions I took that weren't hard. 

But to your point, that constant daily inward grappling with your spiritual identity, especially for me as not having been formed in one growing up, that feels so tender and vulnerable and raw. I don't even want to tell people. I'm like, I don't want you to poke and look at it, no. Yeah. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Especially in such an intellectual place, that idea of the Pope can look at it feels. 

IVY WANG: Yeah, the scrutiny because all we do is scrutinize. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And I find that you connect your spiritual autobiography, or your own upbringing in a religious-- that teenage angst that, I think, many of us feel towards religion and then to find yourself and still an active grappling with that spiritual autobiography is what I hear. And tying it so acutely to your experience here as well, I think, is a narrative, again, that is one I don't think you should feel alone in your experience as a Divinity School student. 

So thank you for, really, I mean, tying those threads together for us. And I always tend to say that the container of this podcast is this idea of hope, which means so many different things to so many different people. And I find that just simply asking you, what is your definition of hope, sometimes enlightens how this space of this podcast can function, if you would want to share with us what hope might mean to you. 

IVY WANG: Yeah. Well, Michael, I have a confession. Which is I don't think that much about hope. And I said yes because I wanted to tell people how much I love HDS. But then I was like, OK, let me think a bit more about hope. And so maybe before-- in order to arrive at a definition, I actually want to share a story from my life. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Please. 

IVY WANG: And this is a moment when my mom was very sick. And I really struggled with hope. Because I was-- actually, the only thing I was confident in was that every day would be worse. And yet, I think from my experience, I found that even if, in totality, things would get worse, I found that there were moments of where this-- there were glimmers of, I guess, grace that broke through. 

And there were moments when we laughed and we watched a sunset together, and we took walks and saw a beautiful tree in the spring, or like when we joked. And so I think, for me, the hope wasn't a hope of restoration. I didn't think I could have everything I had back again. But it was this hope of, given that things won't turn out exactly as I want all the time. 

My hope was in these moments of light that would still break through. And so I think I developed a very strong, I want to say, faith that before things got worse again, they would get better even for an instant or a moment. And I found that I could dwell in the expansiveness of that moment longer than in the slope of darkness that came after and before. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: I love how you point to hope, not as a means of seeking restoration. I do think that many feel like, maybe, another word could be realignment is the goal of we can get back to a baseline. We can return to a norm that we're comfortable with. And optimism or hope at that point then is to seek to return back to that norm. 

And I like how you challenge us to think about it, not as that sense of restoration, but more so a sense of, to use your language, cultivating, or seeking that sense of beauty, even when the situation may not feel beautiful. And I think that there's something key to the way that you talk about, potentially, faith as that posture of hope almost, that searching that definitely is wrapped up with mystery and definitely is wrapped up with many of these other sort of touchstones that you've given us. 

And I appreciate the way that you're thinking through and, I mean, challenging me as an individual, too, to allow hope not to be necessarily a comfortable thing but something that, I think, is-- we use the words "cultivate" a lot around here, or thinking about bringing things about. But you almost talk about it as-- you talked about the ease of leaving a situation that you found was disaligned with your values. And I see here, almost another sense of ease and just looking, rather than necessarily having to cultivate back towards that norm. 

IVY WANG: Yeah, I think-- yeah, I really agree with that. I think for me, this sense of comfort or realignment, I think, sometimes-- well, I think, there's a difference between hope as an affect and hope as, in your language and the language around here, a posture of hope. I think the affect is something that I struggle with a lot. I feel like I've had a whirlwind week and I was like, what am I going to talk about? I can't muster up hope. I'm going to cry. 

But I think we don't necessarily need to have an affect of hope in order to have a posture. And I think of affect as this feeling. Sometimes, I want to induce feelings in myself. I want to induce a feeling of positivity, or of a cheerfulness that the future will be. Like, you're inducing comfort and positivity. And I think that can be hard to do in a broken world. 

Whereas, to your point, a posture of hope might look more to me, like willing the things I want and to being. And that has nothing to do with how I feel right now. I can feel hurt and fearful and sad, and I can still try to will the things I want to see and trust that those things will come about. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: I think trust is an important word there as well, too. And it's so connected, I think, in our social imagination to the word "faith," that idea of trust. But I sense that you're sort of pointing towards a trust, not only in that sense of faith to help you have that way of maintaining the-- or to use your language, the willing of the beautiful things, but also in a sense of trust of the self as well to maybe not always recognize the feeling of hope, or the feeling of optimism, but to recognize the ability to, even when the feeling is absent, still see, or locate that affect somewhere along that willfulness you maintain as well, too. 

IVY WANG: Yeah, I think it is trust in myself and it's trust in God. Walt Whitman has this beautiful line. He's kind of talking about God. But he ends it with like-- oh, maybe this part I can cut out because I don't remember. He says, "Failing to find me in one place, look again." Maybe I can just pull it up. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

IVY WANG: OK, so these are the final lines, I think, of his song of myself. And it goes, "Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you." And to me, the sense that God is coming towards us and looking for us and we can stop the search. I think, trust that there is this force of goodness and love in the universe and it is caring for us as individuals, I think, then gives me the ability to trust in myself and my ability to respond with a posture of hope. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: I appreciate that. And I think that ties really well together, those ideas of, where do I place my trust? And is it in myself and is it in god? And I find the balance of that is important to helping maintain, or prioritizing where that trust lies in certain days more than others for sure. And you've already shared with us-- I mean, that's a brilliant quote from Whitman. And we usually like to hear from you, if, in addition, there are any practices, other writings or readings, or things that you think help you maintain this sense of hope as you define it. 

IVY WANG: Poetry. But I also think, for me-- so I practice Vipassana meditation. And it's this Buddhist meditation that focuses on equanimity and on just accepting. I think, most Buddhist practices encourage you to accept. But to focus on awareness of bodily sensations and then acceptance of whatever arises. And it's strict. If you do it, you're supposed to sit for an hour and not move and accept anything that comes, including the pain in your knees at minute 39. 

But I think it helps me because, I think, sometimes in hope, we don't want to accept. There's for me, I feel like, a fierce resistance to things, and I call that hope. But lately, I've been thinking that if I can accept my feelings of hurt and fear and vulnerability, that makes it easier to integrate them into myself. 

And then from there, find a place to act and hope and in love. And that feels more real and also much more sustainable than this sort of-- I think, someone calls it-- she doesn't call it this, but a muscular effort. I think, the muscular effort of feeling hope, maintaining an affect of hope, is really hard and really unsustainable. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: And I love how you point towards earlier, when you were talking about that affect of hope in connection to the willing of hope, that through this meditative practice, it's allowing the feeling to be present, regardless of what you want. So maybe not feeling that affect of hope but still learning that without this muscular force, just the willfulness, or the-- almost sounds like a patience tied into that sense of trust. That even in the face of these other affects, that this one is still lingering, or present in some way. 

IVY WANG: Yeah, exactly. But I will say, I do think nourishing myself helps with the affect. I think it's much harder to feel hopeful if you're drained emotionally, physically, psychologically. And so any and all practices, especially like eating chocolate cake, that can nourish myself, I think, helps with the affect and so on. On some days, the affect of hope is a very pleasant feeling. But just knowing that even on days or weeks when the affect is hard, I can still ground myself in the posture of hope. 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Yeah, well, poetry, meditation, and chocolate cake sound like three great practices to find yourself with hope. Yeah, well, Ivy, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us today about this and getting to learn more about you. I know that we really appreciate it. And I'm excited to see the things that you continue to do here at HDS. 

IVY WANG: Aww, thank you so much. This has been so much fun.

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Wonderful! That is a wrap. 

IVY WANG: Wow! Whoa, the sound! 

MICHAEL FUHRMAN: Right. 

[LAUGHTER]