Hope Podcast: Featuring Audrey Zhou, MDiv Candidate

AUDREY ZHOU: Hey, Hiatt. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: How are you? 

AUDREY ZHOU: I'm well. I'm really excited to be here. I think it's a really wonderful opportunity. I listened to this podcast a few times before I got here myself, and we were talking about it before we started recording. But because I asked a question about if there's anything that I should hold in mind about what we both hope this podcast could be or would be for someone who is listening like you, and I expressed that. When I listen to these, it really helped humanize this place for me. Listen to just a couple of stories of people that I could relate to and see in myself before I came. 

And so yeah, it's such an honor to get the opportunity to perhaps be that for someone else. But I also wanted to just start off this session by noting, and this is very CPE style, how are you feeling for those who know. Yeah, the question I ask myself very often now since I've been here is how I'm feeling and just noticing my own nervousness about having this snapshot of my life captured, objectified outside of myself, existing nebulously, amorphously on the internet for anyone to just click and listen to and have my name attached to it forever and ever and ever. 

And there's a Buddhist joke in there about change and stuff. It's not going to be there forever, but yeah, that it will speak for itself when I'm no longer the same as soon as this recording stops. And so just holding for myself and hopefully for you that to see this episode and any episode as just a picture of a time and a place that just like that no longer exists. And it's beautiful, but has value too as a picture. [CHUCKLES] And that is the truth, yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Exactly. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Anyway. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah, thanks for saying that. I appreciate it. It's a good thing to keep in mind as we go, but also just as folks who listen, go back and listen through the catalog or continue listening to new episodes. And also to keep in mind in their own lives as they go forward. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah, yeah. And I've been talking a lot recently with my roommate, who keeps a really wonderful journaling practice about how that's something I've really struggled to do and have never done before, but starting to really see the value in having snapshots like this. So I'm going to say hello to myself in the future when I come back and listen to this as I'm sure I will. And yeah, to remember this very special time that is my second month at Divinity School. So much has happened already that I am excited and nervous and a million other things. Thinking about the rest of the time we'll have here. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: And before we get to that, can you tell me a little bit about yourself? So where is home for you? Where do you consider your homes to be? And maybe also just a little bit of a spiritual biography, as much or as little as you'd like to share. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Totally. I love the question or the language of a spiritual autobiography. It's completely new to me as someone who grew up without religion and for a long time felt that religions, spirituality, any of these words that we use because they're useful but complicated, that it was wholly other to me and untouchable. But now somehow, I've passed through something and I'll go back through and explain that a little bit more. 

But now I'm here at Divinity School and can speak from this perspective and this place of intimacy and in touchness with something other that is new. I don't know. But this question of where is home? What is home? For some reason, the first thing that pops into my mind is this really beautiful quote from activist Grace Lee Boggs that my friend shared with me last summer. 

Grace Lee Boggs is this wonderful Asian-American activist who recently passed from Detroit, who basically just worked really hard in this one community for 70 years. And the quote is, "The most radical thing I ever did was to stay put." And yeah, it's something—it's a line that comes up all the time for me now about, what does it mean to really stay in a place and witness and hold, and I think speaks a lot to ministry. 

And I feel this very strongly about America. I have a lot of friends who I feel like in our generation, we talk a lot about leaving, giving up on this place and this quote really helped me understand my own aversion to that and why I feel like it's really... In words I'm starting to use for the first time now, my theology around, my life of why I have to be on this path that I'm on, or do this work that I'm doing? 

And all of this is to say that when this question of home comes up, I have a hard time with it. Because when I think of this quote of to stay put, I think about where to stay put and how I don't really feel attached to any place. I grew up in Minnesota. I went to college in Chicago at Northwestern, and now I'm here in Boston. And all these places are very special and wonderful, but if I had to put a claim on where I'm going to stay put, what that means for me, I don't know if any of these places would hold hot water. 

And that feeling feels very similar to, like I was mentioning before, this feeling of being raised without religion and this grasping and emptiness I felt, or this FOMO is what I would say. I had FOMO about believing in God or believing in general that came with my notion that because I was raised out of religion, this whole thing would be unknowable to me, and then slowly turning the corner on that and seeing that as truly a gift of there is openness and there is possibility. 

And that's something that I'm reminding myself when I think of home and thinking of staying put and where and what that means. And yeah, to just embrace the fact for now, I guess, I think in this snapshot moment. Yeah, that home is an open question. And that's OK or good or generative or anything, yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: I agree. I agree on all points because I'm born and raised in Maryland, then moved South to Virginia for undergrad, and then moved here. That was a couple of years in between undergrad and here, but nevertheless. And when I was living in Maryland during COVID, I was thinking to myself that it would be a good thing to stay put. 

Because I ended up having a decent job where I was doing impactful work in the community. I was seeing my nieces and nephews and my brother and my sister a lot. And then [WHISTLES] here I went. So yeah, home being an open question and what it means to stay put and basically, drawing that, what boundary are we drawing when we say home? How narrow? How wide? 

AUDREY ZHOU: Right, exactly. And something that's been in my head recently, especially I graduated college just a few months ago, and all of a sudden, everyone who was in one place completely scattered across America, which I feel like is just very common now among, yeah. And what does it mean to be so it's so normal to be detached and that you can pick up and move and start a new chapter. 

And coming here to Boston, I felt like it was a gift to start new and to open it up. And it's like, again, I felt this when I first went to college. It's like, who do I want to be now? And, I can say this, I met a friend recently who told me that their name was this name, and I just like completely believed them, of course, and then later I found out that this was a name—they were trying out different names for themselves, and this was their current name. 

And I was like, wow! When you meet someone, if they tell you their name, you're going to believe it. So when I come to a new place, it's like, I can be who I want. And I know that people, for at least a little bit, will take that for what it is, and that's a gift. But also, something that I've been feeling a lot is my own difficulty with maintaining long-term friends and the gift of new friendship to there's a freedom there, but what am I losing if I give up on these old friends. 

There's real work in them that has value. And so just this idea of yeah, I can pick up and move wherever and people will take me for what it is. But like Grace Lee Boggs said, "The most radical thing I ever did was to stay put." And if you stay put and you really work through the karma of that place and those people, I think that's important. I think I haven't done it enough. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: I think you're right. Well, I agree with you. So of course I think you're right. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah anyways, that's a little bit of that question. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Thank you for sharing. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Spiritual autobiography. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah, please. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah. OK, I'll try to be briefer. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Oh, go ahead, speak as you want. 

AUDREY ZHOU: I grew up without religion. I took an intro to Buddhism class on a whim as a distribution requirement in college. So I came into this very academically. I mean, maybe there was something that pointed me there in the forces that be whatever. But yeah, it was a very logical project of I need a distribution requirement. Everyone says intro to Buddhism is super, duper easy. I want that. 

In my freshman year, I was undecided in my major. I went in as a journalism major and had just left and for a variety of reasons, and was feeling groundless. And just trying to fill the slots in my own courses and explore and all these things and didn't have. This was like freshman year. I didn't have anything lined up for the summer and felt like anxious about wanting to have something interesting to talk about when I came back for the school year. 

So that paired with undecidedness, paired with just really having an academic affinity for Buddhism. I decided that I wanted to do a monastery stay for the summer for three months or three weeks at Green Gulch in San Francisco, so I went there. Many people who, I think, are not raised with Buddhism, but find it and take it up for themselves, I heard there's a little bit of suffering in there, and that's what—my undecidedness in my major, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, was the suffering impetus for directing me there. 

Anyway, and so I just kept following. There was one person at one point who came to speak for our Class. Her name is Jan Willis. She wrote this book called Dreaming me, Black, Baptist, and Buddhist, and it was a memoir that was centered on spiritual autobiography as the line of trying to find-- And I was so taken with this because I was like everyone, all these other memoirs slash all my friends, we are all talking about our lives as professionally, where do we want to go? 

This idea of spiritual autobiography as your life, I don't know, it felt foreign but also interesting and wonderful. Anyway, she came to speak, and I asked her some questions about different things and advice about being undecided and what do I do. And she just said this quote that came from someone else, but I don't remember who it was. I just remember her saying it to me. So that's the way I'm going to tell this story is "Do what makes you come alive." 

And that was the first time someone had said something like that to me. Yeah, Buddhism was the first time I realized there were alternative ways to guide your life. Not just professional achievement and academic achievement, but other things. So I took that to heart and followed Buddhism to different places of practice, different classes, and then all the way here. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Well. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah, and now it feels somehow recently passed from just like an academic professional interest, "professional" quote unquote, to now, something I would really call a spiritual autobiography.

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah. So you got drawn into Buddhism in undergrad, and you said it took you through different classes and different places and different monasteries. Can you just say a little bit more about that? 

AUDREY ZHOU: Sure. I declared a religious studies minor, and that became a major, and then that religious studies major became-- besides two classes like the intro and the capstone was all Buddhism classes. I did a study abroad program in India the past fall. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Wow! 

AUDREY ZHOU: Buddhist studies, it was very impactful. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Incredible. 

AUDREY ZHOU: I could talk for hours about that, but I don't need to do that right now. And yeah, deeper into practice, trying to find community in Chicago, not really being able to do so. Trying to build community Chicago and then just like flowing in and out of different monastic containers has been really, truly like where the work or the learning has really come from. So last August, I was—I don't know, throughout the years, I went back to Green Gulch like three times or something, and then...

HIATT O'CONNOR: I have some friends who have been to the same place. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah, it's really wonderful. It's hard. Yeah, it's complicated, but it was—yeah. It was, yeah. Sometimes I reflect back on some things, and I'm like, how did I have the courage or the no to do something so random, and then all I can do is be grateful. And then when I feel fear about decisions I make, I try to remember that anyway. And then last August, spending a month at Zen Mountain Monastery, and I think truly doing my first sesshin really was something, a turning point that I'm trying to still articulate. But yeah. So hopefully future me. If I listen back to this, maybe I'll have better words for it. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah, I did a sesshin on monastery myself in 2023? No, 2022. And like you, it was a turning point for me. And I had done weekends there, and I had done retreats in other places, but going to that monastic community, specifically. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Totally. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: And they have sesshins there every month, which is really rare. And anyway, I don't want to spend the whole time gushing about Zen Mountain Monastery because I easily could. 

AUDREY ZHOU: [CHUCKLES] 

HIATT O'CONNOR: But yeah, it was a turning point for me as well, and I've been trying to get back there in a more sustained way ever since. 

AUDREY ZHOU: It's very special. Their emphasis on asking questions and study, I think, really spoke to the same mind that brought me to this place, yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Would you say that's the body mind, body [NON-ENGLISH]? 

AUDREY ZHOU: Maybe. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: That's a great answer. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Someone asked me to, I would say it. I don't know. [LAUGHS]. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Fair enough. 

AUDREY ZHOU: I have a lot left to learn, so I will be honest and say, I don't even really what that means. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: That's perfectly fine. 

AUDREY ZHOU: I think so. It sounds cool. A way-seeking mind is another. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah, OK. I like those words, too. Yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: That actually segues well into what specifically, or maybe, even not specifically brought you to HDS? 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Out of all of that? 

AUDREY ZHOU: I need to talk about that. I think a great, wonderful thing about HDS is that it's a place that really attracts seekers, people who are trying to figure out where they're going. And it's a really great place to have wonderful conversations that are super supportive of that. That being said, I somewhat feel like a fish out of water, because I really do what I want to do. And going back to my story of being undecided for a long time, it feels really good, but also slightly scary to have certainty all of a sudden, like foreign, maybe, foreign. And I also have a lot of skepticism about my own certainty about what I want to do. 

So all that to say is if things change and things change. But right now, I feel quite certain about the rest of my life, I guess. And I'm just going to make that claim boldly and move forward and start talking about what I want to do. So yeah, after Green Gulch, I wish I went there wanting clear: I had this idea in my mind. I was like, I'm going to go to the monastery. I'm going to spend all this time in meditation. I'm going to figure out my entire life, which now, I guess, over many years, I guess, I have maybe come to that a little bit, but that's not a good way to go into a monastery stay to really be, I have this goal, and then really doesn't do super well with that. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: You'll get corrected in the course of trying. 

AUDREY ZHOU: You will. Yeah, and it's beautiful. But coming out of there, I realized that what I found so appealing and attractive, or what I loved most about my time at Green Gulch, was the fact that it was this community convert Buddhists who had all sort of taken up Buddhism and practiced as a way towards healing the suffering. And so there's this transformative space and time and the wonderfulness of that. 

And so there's a longer story here about how my parents were stressed about me being undecided, and they organized this dinner party where they were like, we're going to invite our friends from all different careers and basically, sit them down at dinner and be like, Audrey doesn't what she wants to do, so everyone tell her about what you do and how you got there. And it was this very intense, like 4-hour long like situation immediately after I left the monastery. So it was quite like a shock to the nervous system. But I love my parents. They support me in their own ways, and they're wonderful. 

But of course, at the dinner table there was doctors and there were IT people and there were finance people, a select group of careers were represented. And anyway, so the pairing of the two, the way I tell the story usually is that it helped me decide on a whim, kind of but also whatever helped me choose medicine. So I became a pre-med student thinking that I wanted to be in on the ground where the healing is happening. And that's what brought me to religion. That's what I want to guide my life. But I wanted to pick something that, of course, was also legible to my family, and that was the easiest thing to pick at that time for me. 

Anyway. It felt like an arbitrary decision at the time. Now it feels very certain. And I don't when that happened, but I was a pre-med student, threw myself into my coursework, was supported by my interest in Buddhism for my own spiritual grounding. And then happened across chaplaincy through a memoir by Chenxing Han, who's a wonderful scholar of Buddhism, American Buddhism, and she and her memoir also talks about her experience working as a chaplain. 

And so I fell into that world. Felt like there was something that bridged medicine and religion and felt very, wow, there is something here. I want to explore it. So I talked to a few different people about that and ended up connecting with a CPE supervisor, Clinical Pastoral Education is the training unit you do to become a chaplain. And I did my first unit of CPE between my junior and senior year of college. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Wow! 

AUDREY ZHOU: Which is not super common. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: No it's not. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah, and in the frame of mind of I'm a pre-med student really wanting something unique to buff up my application, but also genuinely wanting this perspective of the patient experience of the hospital's inner workings to really also test if this is the work I want to do or if—there's a lot to be said there. But I felt so completely transformed and compelled by my experience working as a hospital chaplain intern at UChicago that I decided I have to come to Divinity School first. So I applied to Divinity School. I wrote my senior thesis about CPE and medical education, and why we really need to be teaching these pastoral skills to medical professionals. 

And in that process, that helped me clarify that this is the work of my life, I think. I want to come to Divinity School. I want to learn all the chaplaincy and ministry and pastoral skills I can from as many different traditions as I possibly can, and then go on into medical school and bring that with me and be the most annoying medical student there ever was, and ask all my friends and classmates all the time, how they're feeling and how they're doing, and eventually, perhaps, go into medical education to teach spiritual care. Yeah, it feels important. And also in line with what I think are my skills. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: It seems like a pretty, powerful and clarifying. I guess, there is a double meaning to the word resolution here to come to. Especially, that's-- you're right that it is unusual to have a CPE unit in between your junior and senior year of college. 

AUDREY ZHOU: I was very lucky that things lined up as possible. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: And you mentioned a memoir by Chenxing Han. Was it One Long Listening or? 

AUDREY ZHOU: It was One Long Listening. Yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: That's an incredible book. If you're listening and haven't read it yet, I would highly recommend. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Her other book, Be The Refuge, was the one that got me hooked into Buddhist studies as well, and eventually got me here. And she has an amazing retreat that she does over the summer at Barre-- 

HIATT O'CONNOR: I didn't know that. 

AUDREY ZHOU: the Center for Buddhist Studies. It's called Roots and Refuge, Asian-American Buddhist Writing Retreat. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Wow! 

JORDAN AHMED: So I went to that a few summers ago, and yeah, it was-- yeah, anyway. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Were you working on more spiritual autobiography there, if you don't mind me asking? 

AUDREY ZHOU: Not necessarily. It was just a few days. It was more about writing and there was sharing. But I was going-- the project I was trying to work on a little bit was the senior thesis project that I wanted to really write in a narrative format mirroring the way she wrote Be the Refuge. Because that is the type of work I find the most compelling when the author you see it in their work, but it's still informational. And so yeah, that project is probably one of the things I'm most proud of. Yeah, yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: And It's a great grounding, I think to have that form of writing where you feel very present in what you're writing, but also you can feel other people be present in what they're writing. Because all scholarship, in one way or another, is a radiation of the self or a reflection of the self. And I think if we deny that point, we might lose something important. 

AUDREY ZHOU: 100%. I think it's harmful that we're forgetting. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah. The title of my senior thesis was do not forget the spirit. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Wow! That's a good title too. 

AUDREY ZHOU: So it was a little like, nod to that. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah. Well, to pivot, and it's actually also a pretty good segue, Are there any insights or practices or realizations of any sort that you engage with on a daily basis that helps support you or give you hope? 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah. This was the question that I was most nervous about being asked because I wasn't sure. The first two questions, I feel like I'm so practiced in now because everyone keeps asking me these questions while I'm here, but I think the third one, this third question is very wonderful. And what I would like to share or, yeah, say to answer that is just listening. I think, listening and making the space to listen. 

Dean Melissa Bartholomew, Wood Bartholomew, came and spoke at intro to ministry studies a few weeks ago and said something about, and this is not language that I'm super familiar with, but I really do like, hearing the call of God. And I went and had an office hours with her and asked her more about that and what that really means. And I can't even articulate what we talked about. But my takeaway from that conversation, and from thinking about this question being asked again, is how the making of space or the doing less or being more open or the falling away of certain things can really, really be super generative. 

Attuning yourself this more posture of listening, and that's what I'm trying to do moving forward in my time here. Just remembering to stay open to listen, that there are teachers in everything and everyone around me here, and I'm so grateful of that. But that is also true when I leave here in my life before, like everywhere, all the time, there are teachers, and I'm just so lucky to be here where a lot of the teachers and my fellow students and classmates are really wonderful and working towards projects that fill me with a lot of hope. 

And so yeah, today we had my intro to ministry studies studio, and we were in a process of sharing all of our ministry projects. I forgot the name of it, but just getting to hear two of my classmates speak about their questions and their hopes and their dreams. I just felt so moved. I spent the whole morning just like crying a little bit all the time, and I'm not. I don't know. I Used to never cry as a kid. I used to really dislike-- I don't know. Yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: No, I think I understand what you mean. 

AUDREY ZHOU: I think, yeah, maybe a few people will resonate with that. But now something is happening. Something is happening to me here. I don't know what it is. And yeah, but it feels good and important and new and wonderful. Yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing. What you said when you mentioned that there are teachers everywhere and in everything. It reminded me of this line from a poem by Gary Snyder, I wish I remembered the title. The action of the poem is essentially he is out watering a tree, and an older woman who lives near him chides him a little bit for being overly ambitious in whatever he might be too focused on in his academics, where rather than making the radical choice of staying put, as it were. And the speaker of the poem, which is pretty obviously Gary has this realization in the last two lines are "And Bodhisattva's teach us everywhere." And I love that line. I love that poem. I love those lines, and I think the sentiment that it expresses is the same one that you were. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah, I think something I was surprised by in my time here is my own frustrations with how this place is, at its core, an academic institution, which it is, and that's totally fine. And I love, love, loved academia in college. I did three majors in undergrad. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Wow! No kidding. 

AUDREY ZHOU: I was so excited to be there. I also felt a lot of pressure to make the most of it. Because it's just so expensive. Anyway-- 

HIATT O'CONNOR: No, I understand. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah, somehow something has shifted, and now part of me is starting to see some of this headiness. Today, I asked the question to someone. I was like, and I don't know how to-- I don't want to be like anti-intellectual because it's good. But like this question of why-- 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Try to articulate. 

AUDREY ZHOU: --why is a question that has gotten us so far in as humanity. Why are curious minds? But I feel like I'm starting to see places in which why is a question that limits and constrains and it puts our focus elsewhere to the why instead of how or let's just do it. something like, I don't know. And that I think is this new ministry student in me trying to speak out a little bit that feels very different than maybe this academic student. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah I think it relates to what you were saying about listening. Is that the asking why in a certain way, I think you were thinking about is almost like a flashlight that has a very fine point, but it's a pretty small radius. Whereas, the new you as a ministry student, as you just said, maybe is more like lamplight where it's 360 in every direction. As much as we can do that, as much as we can try to listen that way. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Of course. And, I don't know, when you've lost your keys under your desk, maybe you really need a flashlight. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Exactly right. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Other places when you're out in the woods, I think both have value and I'm trying to hold my own self, critical self back and be like, there is value in lots. Everyone is my teacher. Why is a teaching word? There are just also other teaching words. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you. And before you go, before we wrap up, do you have any books or movies or poems or any other thing that you would want to recommend to our listeners who could use a little hope or just something that you're really liking right now? 

AUDREY ZHOU: I was also having a hard time with this question. [CHUCKLES] And I am just going to put this out there. It's not the whole answer. There's no whole answer to this question, but something that I turn to when I'm feeling down and really just wanting hope, I love to watch videos of Olympic athletes winning. Just like this, someone has worked so hard and finally achieved something and they switch the camera to all their friends and family back home by cheering them on. I don't know. And everyone is so happy for this one person who's not even them. 

In class today [INAUDIBLE] Buddhism and theory in practice, we were talking about empathy and how is it possible, so magical that when someone is in pain, that's not as we feel it. Anyway, these people, just these families and friends who have support, they have played their own role in helping this person get to where they're—and gleefully, joyfully, celebrating this achievement. And then I don't know, it just such so wonderful. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: It sounds like good medicine watching other people celebrate and be happy. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Yeah. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: Well, thank you very much for talking today.

AUDREY ZHOU: Of course, thank you for this. 

HIATT O'CONNOR: I appreciate it. All right, that's it. Toodles, everybody. 

AUDREY ZHOU: Goodbye. 

[BIRD COOING]