E114: The Spiritual Domain of Risks

Kirtly: What is a Hail Mary pass? I admit I had to look it up after reading "Project Hail Mary," a great book, by the way, and watching the movie, a great movie, "Project Hail Mary." I am not a fan of sports analogies and I'm not a practicing Catholic, but the phrase Hail Mary pass came to be about a hundred years ago when the football team of Notre Dame, a Catholic university, was losing the game. Someone, maybe a team member, asked for a prayer, a Hail Mary, "Hail Mary, full of grace." The pass was made, and the touchdown was made and they won. The Hail Mary was asking for an intercession by the Virgin Mary to God to help in a very risky situation.

I'm Dr. Kirtly Jones from Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Utah. I practice no organized religion, but I do admit to a quiet prayer when a birth or an embryo transfer in an IVF patient wasn't going well. I've asked for an intercession by the gods to move the risk in favor of the woman, or the child, or the future child.

This is part 7 of our seven-part series on the 7 Domains of Risk. And seven is a lucky number, right?

Katie: Absolutely.

Kirtly: So we do risk with luck. We're talking about the spiritual domain of risk. And with me is Dr. Katie Ward. She has a doctorate in nursing practice and a PhD in anthropology.

Maybe she's never asked that the outcome of a risky thing be moved in her favor. And you should listen to our previous podcast on risk, because she's done some risky things. But I bet she knows that the practice is common among cultures around the world.

Katie: Yeah, I have asked for all kinds of things, but they never actually show up.

Kirtly: Oh, no.

Katie: I was raised in a very fundamentalist household. And in my upbringing, the risk was inviting the dark side in. So, as a child, I was not allowed to read my horoscope. I was not allowed to watch "I Dream of Jeannie" or "Bewitched," or play with a Ouija board. There were a lot of things my parents truly and utterly believed would invite demonic possession. This was also at the height of the Satanic panic. There was a lot of stuff going on, but they really believed that.

Of course, I snuck a look at the TV shows and I figured out that I was a Taurus, and I read the horoscope in the newspaper because it was near the cartoons. And so I did all that and nothing bad actually happened, at least as far as I know. But the fact that the risks I had been taught were out there didn't materialize also gave me the courage to question that faith I was raised in.

Kirtly: Oh, yeah. Well, I'm a Leo, which means, and all my family would agree, that I am a happy, bossy person. I usually believe that things will work out in the end, and if they're not working out, it isn't the end.

Katie: Goodness.

Kirtly: Don't you know that? Yeah, I do remember bargaining with a God with whom I had no relationship when I was being induced, having my labor started because I was three weeks overdue with a very large child. I think it was kind of like I told God . . .

Katie: Bossy.

Kirtly: . . . I guess it was the Leo in me, that I would take any difficult outcome that came my way as long as my child to be born was protected.

So asking for an intercession from God or the gods in a risky situation is common. Hoping for a sign for a path is even more common.

Paul McCartney wrote, "When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be." Now, he did not write that about the Virgin Mary. He was thinking of his own mother, Mary, who had died when he was 14. So calling into someone who's passed over to intercede or speak to them, that's pretty uncommon. And that's one of my favorite Beatles songs, by the way.

Politicians often end speeches with the demand . . . It sounds like a demand to me, a request that "God bless America." That sounds like a demand. It's not a request. So we have these demands for intercession for whatever the outcome that we're looking for, and it's pretty common.

Katie: Yeah, it is. As a world traveler, I'm kind of like, "God bless the whole world."

Kirtly: God bless the world, please. I start with please. I'm telling my 4-year-old, "Always start with please or end with please."

Katie: Yeah. Based on my upbringing, even before I was doing a PhD in anthropology, I was interested in the science of religion. And one of my favorite books I went back to getting ready for this episode is from an anthropologist named Pascal Boyer. He wrote a book about the evolutionary origins of religious thought.

And his idea, in short, is that humans don't believe in things despite being rational, which I think is one of the sort of justifications we give for spirituality. He really thinks that we believe because of how we were wired. And he presents a lot of evidence about various beliefs around the world. Not just the dominant religions, but lots of small ones that have disappeared.

But his thread through this, and it's always stuck with me, is that there are certain features that are part of any religion or spirituality. And he calls these minimally counterintuitive concepts, or MCIs for short.

The idea with these is that these are ideas that violate our everyday expectations just a little bit. So a tree that walks, or a person that knows everything you think, or your mother that can hear you when you ask for intercession. They're just weird enough to be memorable, but not so bizarre that they are completely incoherent.

And what Boyer found is that across cultures, these are exactly the kinds of concepts that stick and spread, especially in a prewritten . . . before we had written language and you were telling these stories. These stories really stay in people's minds because of that counterintuitive concept about the story that's being told. So it's not that they're true, but they're cognitively sticky.

What he found was that every culture he ever studied had these kinds of minimally counterintuitive, or MCI, concepts. So as Paul McCartney was saying or as we're asking, these are ancestors or spirits who intervene, or watch, or who care personally about football, or just that karma's coming back to get you. But his point is that we're wired for this.

Kirtly: Yeah, we are. Now, the biological evolutionists would say we are wired for God or these MCI practices because people who follow them live longer. So there must be something about them that eases our mind, that eases our stress, that allows us to live longer and reproduce more.

So any kind of practice that's practiced throughout humankind, there must be an evolutionary advantage. That's how the biological evolutionists would look at it.

The deists, of whom our early founding fathers were deists, would say, "No. God created us in a way that we needed or looked to him." So either God created us to look to . . . Whatever God, because all of us look to a different God or gods. So there is whatever this superpower out there that created us to need, or want, or speak to them, they, whatever.

Or the biologists said, "If you have this practice, you have less stress, you have lower blood pressure, you are more calm, you'll reproduce better, you'll take better care of your kids." Anyway, all that stuff.

Well, what happens if you don't have a faith or a faith in any higher power that can move the dial on risk? My father was a veteran of World War II in the South Pacific and he said he was an atheist. But then he talked about foxhole religion. When everything's falling apart and you are sure you're going to die, people often ask for an intercession.

There's a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. And so this saying has been around for a while, and the origins of this saying are uncertain, but people faced with extremely difficult situations with death around them, looking like a certainty for them, may call for an intercession from a God in whom they've never believed before.

It's not uncommon in hospitals. Even my own father asked for a religious ceremony after he died because he knew he was dying, and he was young. He was leaving a wife and four little kids, and he asked for a religious ceremony. And I blew my mind. I was 20 at the time. And I said, "But, Daddy, you said you're an atheist." And he just said, "There are no atheists in foxholes."

Katie: Yeah. It's actually a famous thought experiment. It's called Pascal's Wager. Given the choice between believing or not believing, the safe bet is to believe. Of course, the risk is if you pick the wrong God.

Kirtly: Well, if there's no God, then you haven't hurt yourself any and if . . .

Katie: Right. That's the wager.

Kirtly: Right.

Katie: But I think that the awareness of other faith traditions and the freedom to change, that's a pretty modern concept. So you were saying how has this helped us survive? I think for most of human history, belief wasn't a personal spiritual choice. You believed what your parents or your elders told you was true. And we still do.

So it's the reason if you're born in the west, you're most likely to hold Christian faiths. And if you're born in the Middle East, you're most likely to hold Muslim faiths. And if you're born in the Far East, you have Buddhist faiths. So parents pass those ideas on at a young age and it sticks because it's designed to. And we accept it as surely as we accept that the sky is blue and the grass is green.

But today, for me and for you, as long as you're a good citizen and you follow the laws and the general social rules, you can find a community that's different from the one that your parents taught you about and you were raised in. But I don't think that's been true throughout human history.

You might question, like I did, the things that you were praying to or being afraid of, and it doesn't happen. But the price in the past for saying out loud would be really high. So how quickly we forget the Spanish Inquisition.

Kirtly: Oh, yeah. Well, it's not that different. There are still places now. So what happens if you have left the faith of your upbringing, of your community? What are the social risks? Are you an outcast? Of course, it depends on the rules of the particular faith, and the flexibility of the community and the family.

It is risky when the entire community in which a person might live follows one path and there's no tolerance for someone who no longer believes. And that might be practiced in some insular communities, such as the Amish communities.

Although the Amish communities have Rumspringa, which is when the kids, during their deep adolescence, between 16 and 24, the rules are . . . they get to break the rules a little bit because they get a chance to stretch themselves and try some new things.

And of course, they're also courting at the same time. So the rules are stretched so that kids can try out a few things and then decide and be baptized when they come back. But if they change their mind after they've been baptized, then it's not good for them. They are shunned.

And we have, in our own area in the west, the Fundamentalist LDS communities, which are very rural. Everyone follows this faith, and if you don't follow, it means you're exiled.

So in contemporary times, being an outcast is not a physical danger, as there are a number of communities to move into. But in the past, it was physically risky, as someone may not survive in the wilderness without the support of the tribe.

It certainly is very risky socially for people who are leaving their faith and searching. The good news is that you're not alone. This is common. Many people leave the religion of their upbringing.

And there are some church communities even in our town, Salt Lake, and in every town I've ever visited that welcome all people, regardless of faith. So if you've left and you're feeling a little adrift, there are places which will welcome you.

Katie: Yeah, for sure. But yeah, I think all of those things . . . it goes by many names, being excommunicated or being shunned, as you mentioned, or being cut off, but the impact is the same for people. They're in a metaphorical exile.

A lot of those practices are designed to be reversible. So if you come back and conform, then you're welcomed back in, or you're welcomed into another community.

But again, sort of thinking about the space that our ancestors evolved in, actually being exiled would have been a death sentence. So if you're part of a group and it had a spiritual framework, and every group did, going against that was fatal for people.

So I think, as you were talking about, our brains really learn to suppress doubt and reward belief. We have to be trained to be skeptical, but we evolve to belong.

And we've talked about this throughout this series, I think. In the emotional domain, we talked about how rejection and social exclusion activate the same neural pathways as physical pain.

In the environment our ancestors evolved in, small bands that didn't travel far and were spent mostly concentrating on not dying, staying connected to your group meant everything. So it was your food and your protection and your children's future. And not being part of a group was really dangerous.

So, yeah, I think that's part of our heritage, is just to not question that and not be skeptical and not step away.

Kirtly: Yeah. Well, what if you have no God or gods to call on? Or what I think is risky is what if you fear that the God that you have left might abandon you? Or asking for intercession from a God or gods or help from a higher power is risky.

What happens if the outcome for which you are hoping, that you've hung your hopes on, doesn't come, and you were praying strongly, fiercely with your whole self, and things don't come your way or don't come the way of your child? And what happens if there is even a worse outcome and you've trusted in your faith and your hopes for an intercession? Does that mean that the God to whom you've prayed didn't hear or didn't care, or there's no God for whom to ask help?

This is not an uncommon way for people to lose their faith. For people with a charismatic and personal God, that might be enough to shatter their beliefs, to see something so horrible.

Men who have seen the horror of war, medical teams that have tried to save children in the face of famine and disease often describe their loss of faith in a caring God.

Katie: Yeah. And it didn't even take those kinds of horrors for me. But I think there are two things happening simultaneously. One is that you're losing your faith in that because the things that you expected to happen . . . In my case, the . . .

Kirtly: The bad things.

Katie: . . . demonic possession of reading my horoscope. But also, again, growing up in a very evangelical environment, I was trying to pray in tongues or do all the things that I was told happened when you prayed, and they didn't come true. And you do have a crisis of . . . you start pulling on the threads and the whole cloth unravels.

I think Boyer, my anthropologist person that I'm citing here, would say that we still find some other minimally counterintuitive concept to keep us company. I keep thinking about Wilson in "Cast Away" that . . .

Kirtly: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Katie: You create something. And I do see that a lot, that you leave one faith, but you kind of lean on something else that still fits that MCI concept.

I'm kind of a fan of another author, Laurence Gonzales. He wrote one of my favorite books on survival. It's called "Deep Survival," if anybody's interested. So people like me, who take risks, we need to know how to survive a catastrophe.

Kirtly: Oh my god. I read serious books about deep water sailing where people often die, and it's very scary. Real, true books of polar exploration. Why do I read them? And I only read them in the desert where I know this couldn't possibly happen to me.

Katie: Well, this book's great. He talks about the things that people need to survive. And of course, one of them is this making meaning, like making friends with Wilson. There's more to it. Finding beauty. And as we've talked about, my bungee jumping. That is sort of how I do the bungee jumping, is to say, "This is a really cool experience, and I'm just going to pay attention to it and enjoy the experience." But there are also things like creating small tasks and making a schedule.

But really making meaning is one of those ways that we survive. And in your shipwreck books, look for it. People get a structure and a schedule, and they find the beauty in the weird place that they are. But they're also finding meaning because it is what our brains do. And if we don't, we don't survive.

Kirtly: I think about Viktor Frankl, who's one of my favorite authors, who wrote "Man's Search for Meaning." He wrote about his experience as a Jew in a concentration camp where his wife died and his family died, and he watched everyone around him dying. He had formerly practiced as a psychiatrist, and he tried to set up a little mini practice. As a Jewish person scheduled to die if he didn't work hard enough, he was curious about where people found meaning.

In the end, he said, and I've talked about this in this podcast before, "Helping others, accomplishing small tasks, and maintaining dignity in the face of suffering." So those aren't winning the football game and it's not . . . I mean, those are asking for big and small things. And that's what people who survived these terrible times found a way to still feel like they had a path, had meaning.

Shifting gears, kind of thinking about Viktor Frankl, but what if clinging to your religion is risky? There are many examples of this historically and even today, maybe especially today.

The story of people who started the young religion of the LDS Church were that they were burned out of the city that they built, and their leader, Joseph Smith, was killed. And they were forced to flee in the winter to encamp in a very inhospitable place, and then head overland into a barren and risky place that we now call Salt Lake City.

The Jews have been persecuted throughout Europe for a thousand years and suffered the horrors of the Holocaust. And even now, synagogues around the world are experiencing violence.

And it's the Protestants versus the Catholics in Ireland, and the Muslims versus the Hindus in India during the partition of Pakistan.

Holding onto your faith in the face of cultural violence around you can be very, very risky. I mean, you have the social cohesion of staying with your faith, but you can be killed for that.

Katie: Yeah. And on a more personal and less violent nature, as someone who left the faith I grew up in, I think that was a choice. There are real costs to staying in a faith you don't believe in anymore. There's the tangible stuff, 10% of your income, and Sundays are not your own, and there are rules about who you can associate with, or what you can eat and drink.

But beyond those practical things, there's a psychological cost to living in a sustained contradiction between what you privately think and what you publicly enact. That is a low-grade stress that erodes your well-being.

So I feel very lucky to live in a time when I can find another community, in my case a scientific community, because I have the knowledge that that exists, and because I could still bridge the gap with my family when I did that. In another era, I might not have been able to do that.

So I'm really grateful to have the time to spend pondering why we believe what we do. And it means I can't help but thinking about the next minimally counterintuitive thing coming along, the thing that's just weird enough to be unforgettable and violates our expectations in the right way.

I kind of think we're faced with one right now with artificial intelligence, which is something that knows things and it responds to you and seems to understand you. But it has no body, no mortality, no loyalty to any group. So it's kind of another classic minimally counterintuitive agent.

And I think we're doing exactly what Boyer would have predicted, which is we're riveted by the question about its intentions, and what does it want, and can it be trusted, and will it turn on us. But I don't think it has intentions, and I think the risk is getting wrapped up in those and not thinking about the electricity, and the water, and the carbon it's consuming to run it. We're so focused on the thing's will that we're not paying attention to what it costs.

So I think that's sort of the deep lesson of the spiritual domain of risk and maybe all of the domains we've explored, that we're exquisitely tuned to worry about the wrong things. We feel loneliness and rejection in our bodies like it's physical pain. We can't read a probability table, but we trust a story. We fear the intentions of things we can't control, the gods, the spirits, the algorithm. And the risks that are shaping our lives are the electric bill, the air we breathe, the balance sheet, the warming planet, and those numbers buried on Page 9 of our studies.

So I enjoyed spending these episodes together doing something about those risks and kind of thinking about them and putting them out there to think about and talk about. Yeah, I think understanding how we're wired is an important thing.

Kirtly: Absolutely. I think it's good for me, and I think about it a lot, about what is it about me in this world as an older person now and facing my own mortality, and watching my granddaughter grow and what kinds of options will be open to her, and where will she find her peace.

I believe, and I'm using "I believe," that spirituality offers a buffer in the face of difficult times. And Katie, you've talked about how we are wired to listen for that quiet inner voice that will guide us. We might use it to help us through risky times, to help us through dark times.

Some of us may ask for a specific outcome in a risky situation, a successful Hail Mary pass in a Game 1. But many of us will ask for resilience and peace in the face of whatever outcome there might be. In the asking, we realize that we do have the strength in ourselves, in our family, and community to face what comes. It isn't risky to ask for peace.

So I want to thank you all for listening to the spiritual domain of risk, the last of our 7 Domains of Risk. And if you haven't listened to the other domains, you can find them and all of our "7 Domains of Women's Health" wherever you get your podcasts, look for "7 Domains of Women's Health," or at womens7.com.

So to finish up, here's my 7 Domains of Risk haiku.

What are the chances
That I might find the right path?
I will ask for peace.