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• Ms. Falsani's blog
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Chicago Sun-Times' religion columnist discusses the intersection of politics and faith and how it played out in the recent presidential race. (1:49)
 

Full interview. (9:38)
 

Tavis: Cathleen Falsani writes about religion for the "Chicago Sun-Times" and is the award-winning author of the book, "The God Factor." Her latest book is called "Sin Boldly." You heard me right. "Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace." Cathleen, nice to have you back on the program.

Cathleen Falsani: Wonderful to be with you.

Tavis: So take one guess where I'm gonna start this conversation.

Falsani: Oh, I don't know. The title (laughter)?

Tavis: (Laughter) What are you doing telling me and all these viewers and readers to sin boldly?

Falsani: No, I'd like to take credit for that, but Martin Luther actually said it about 500 years ago. It was a way to get peoples' attention to talk about grace because the quote that it comes from, Luther's talking about grace to a friend of his named Phil who was really nervous about sinning and was almost paralyzed by fear of offending God.

Martin Luther said to him, "You know, come on. Don't you believe in this grace we're always talking about? If you do, then sin boldly, but believe in grace bolder still. We're all great sinners."

Tavis: But grace should not be taken as a license to sin.

Falsani: No. It's not a get out of jail free card. I mean, it is, but it's not like go crazy and don't honor God and don't strive for holiness. But there's nothing we can do to earn our way to heaven, as I understand it, and there's nothing we can do to make God love us any more or any less. So grace is the thing that we have to rest in, that that's the only way that we can be with God.

Tavis: Which is the part I was wrestling with when I read the text because, if I take grace to be, Cathleen, an unmerited favor -

Falsani: - right.

Tavis: If I take grace to be an unmerited favor, then what is the guarantee that, if I sin boldly, I'm gonna be a recipient of that grace after I sin boldly?

Falsani: Well, that's what Jesus said, wasn't it?

Tavis: Yeah.

Falsani: I mean, when He talked about all the different ways that we can sin, when He moved from the law to our thought life when he was talking about adultery and said that even somebody who thinks about a woman in that way is guilty of adultery and therefore should be put to death, He set the bar so high that the point was you can't get there through anything you can do yourself. You have to get there through the grace that I'm bringing you.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to our human minds. We believe in retribution and our idea of justice and occasionally maybe we'll travel into mercy. But grace just turns the world on its ear, you know. It exists outside of karma, as Bono said in his song called "Grace."

Tavis: Is it possible for us - somebody wrote me a note the other day and they were saying to me in a situation that I was in - a personal friend of mine knew of a situation that I found myself in and he wrote to me a two-word note and the note said, "Be grace." "Be grace" and I wrestled with that and marinated on that for a while and I still am, quite frankly. Is it possible for us to be grace?

Falsani: That's one of the questions that I asked in the book and that I asked myself. I think the best answer I got actually didn't come from me - go figure.

Tavis: Yeah.

Falsani: It came from a woman named Anne Lamott, another writer who writes about grace and she's my favorite writer. I asked her once, "Annie, do you think we can be grace for people?" She thought about it for a minute. She said, "I think we can hold space for people. I think that's what we can do. Either whether it's in faith or in love, we can hold a space for them until they're ready in the spirit to move into it." I think that's grace.

One of the hardest things for me, when I was working on this book and traveling and having intentional experiences to see where grace would show up and how was when somebody said that I was grace for them. I thought, "Oh, my goodness. I'm so profoundly broken, but I'm grace for you?" Thank God for that. I couldn't ever get there on my own. That's just the Holy Spirit.

Tavis: When one is writing as one Cathleen Falsani did and goes in search of the meaning of grace, where do you go? Where do you look?

Falsani: I started at home and then I literally moved into my back yard. There's a chapter in there about the mulberry tree named Henry in my back yard and what a sacred space that is for me and for my husband. Then I went down the block. And then I went to Montana and spent some time with the only Rabbi in Montana at the time to have an intentional experience with somebody from a different faith tradition and in a very different place for either one of us to be.

Then I went to Ireland which is where my family is from to my favorite place in the world. Then I wanted to really explore something different and so I went to Africa and I spent all of last October in East Africa and that changed everything.

Tavis: In what way?

Falsani: The people that I met there, the women in particular that I met there - the cover of the book is actually a picture from Asembo Bay, Kenya not far from where Barack Obama's grandmother lives in fact with the Luo tribe and the picture on the back is the women that I met there walking down the same path that's on the front.

These women are widows who've rejected the practice of being given as an inherited wife. They could have been killed for standing up and saying, "No, no. You can't give me to somebody else. No, you can't take my house. No, you can't take my cow."

They bound together and they're raising orphans, most of them AIDS orphans, and they're industrious. They have creative ideas. They're like the Proverbs women who get up early in the morning. You know, they even wear purple like the Proverbs women. They had such a fierce kind of grace that I had never experienced before.

And the way they mother the children, the way they mother each other, frankly the way they mothered me, this just stubborn faith in God and this unquenchable hope that life is just gonna get better whether it's through, you know, their little fishing business in smoked tilapia or the two cows that are their dairy farm or pooling their money together to buy a machine to grind ground nuts that are a great source of protein for people who can't really afford to get anything else. They were extraordinary.

Tavis: So you travel the world. You meet, to your earlier point, different people of different faiths. Do you find then that there are different meanings, different definitions, different incarnations of grace?

Falsani: Yes. I think every religious tradition, or philosophical tradition if you want to include Buddhism, has an idea of grace, but they all vary from the Christian understanding of grace.

Tavis: Give me the range, if you can, the range of grace.

Falsani: Grace is sort of a kindness in a humanistic way that we can be graceful with each other. That's sort of the Eastern idea of it. In Judaism, there is definitely an idea of grace in a divine way, but it doesn't cover things like, as my Rabbi told me, "If you sin against someone, you cannot ask God for grace until that person forgives you. And if they refuse to forgive you after you ask - I think it's five times - then the onus transfers to them between them and God." But you can't go straight to God. You have to go through the person that you offended first.

Our understanding of grace in the Christian tradition, as I understand it, doesn't depend on anything else. It's just this completely free, unmerited, audacious grace from God.

Tavis: As a religion writer, I note that you have said, by my count, four times in this conversation, "As I understand it."

Falsani: Yes.

Tavis: Why do you do that?

Falsani: I don't want to be arrogant and think that I have a corner on the truth. I believe deeply in Jesus Christ and that He was who He said He was and did the things that we're told He did in the Bible, but I don't want to be mistaken for somebody who thinks I've got it all figured out. I want to leave room for faith. I want to leave room for God to be God and me to just be human, so that's why I say that. I don't want anyone to ever think that I think I'm right and they're wrong.

Tavis: We talked about grace in this conversation, Cathleen, in - if I can put it this way - in an individual context, in a personal sort of way. Can countries receive grace?

Falsani: I certainly hope so (laughter) because we could use it.

Tavis: (Laughter) You see where I'm going with this, yeah.

Falsani: We can use it, yeah. I think grace covers all of creation from physical creation to animals to us, and I think the institutions that we build can be grace-infused if we let them, including our government hopefully.

Tavis: What do you make of - you're from Chicago, of course.

Falsani: I am.

Tavis: What do you make of the fact that the new president, of course, is from your hometown and there has been so much talk in this campaign about faith, about grace, about religion, from the Jeremiah Wright story to the Father Pfleger story to Barack Obama and the controversy of is he a Muslim, is he a Christian? I mean, the faith conversation has been such a part of this campaign. What do you make of all that as a religion writer?

Falsani: Well, you know, I always thought it was a valid question to ask a politician about his or her faith because I think the way that they express it and the way that they say it affects what they do or don't says something about a person's character. I had the great fortune of speaking to Barack a number of years ago at length about his faith and we talked about grace even, if I remember correctly, so I was glad for that question to be asked.

We took it - we, the media - to an entirely different level with him and I think it really crossed the boundaries and became a witch hunt. We chased the man out of his church. We wouldn't believe anything he had to say about himself and we still don't. People keep going back to the interview I did with him. I just released the transcript yesterday to beliefnet.com. People will sit there and read the words that he said to me and not believe them.

Tavis: Still picking it apart.

Falsani: Yep.

Tavis: Her new book is called "Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace" by the religion writer for the "Chicago Sun-Times," Cathleen Falsani. Cathleen, nice to have you and thank you for the text.

Falsani: Thank you very much.

Tavis: It's my pleasure.