Podcast Episode: Students Find Creative Self-Exploration Through 'Say the Thing'
In this episode, we hear from the head of the Say the Thing initiative, the Chapel's Rev. Leah Torrey—along with two students in the program—about how they use art, poetry, and great writers to help students better understand themselves and their place in the world.
College is a place for studying, forming friendships, cheering for sports teams—and for some students it’s also a time of exploration into meaning, identity, and belief. That is where “Say the Thing” comes in. It is an initiative from Duke Chapel and Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics to creatively engage students—about 40% of whom don’t identify with a traditional religion—with life's enduring questions.
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Transcript
James Todd: Welcome to Sounds of Faith, a podcast exploring traditions of faith, sacred music, and spoken word. Here at Duke University Chapel. College is a place for studying, forming friendships, cheering on sports teams, and for some students it's also a time of exploration into meaning, identity, and belief. That's where Say the Thing comes in. It's an initiative from Duke Chapel and Duke's Kenan Institute for ethics to creatively engage students about 40% of whom don't identify with the traditional religion, with life's enduring questions. I am James Todd, director of Communications here at Duke Chapel, and I am here with Reverend Leah Torrey who heads up Say the Thing, and is Director of Special Initiatives at Duke Chapel. Leah, welcome to Sounds of Faith.
Leah Torrey: Thanks James.
James: Also with us is Aaron Ng, a Duke Junior majoring in Political Science and International comparative studies, who is active in Say the Thing and has become a student intern with the initiative. Welcome Aaron.
Aaron Ng: Thank you.
James: And Lalie Marie is a graduate student in Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and a student intern with Say the Thing.
Lalie Marie: Hi.
James: Hey Lalie. Aaron and Lalie I want to start with you all as students and I'm wondering if there was like a single burning question about the meaning of life that brought you to Say the Thing or kind of a more general sense of seeking or something else that brought you to the initiative. Lalie you want to start?
Lalie: Sure. I joined Say The thing about a year and a half ago during my first month at Duke and I joined Leah through the Green Devil Fellowship and it was really the only position that I was truly interested in. I think I've always been one to seek answers and it was a great combination of my interests in circularity and finding trash and reusing and repurposing it, but also the sense of community building, identity development, moral development. At that time, and still now, I feel like I was really seeking community with others, with myself, and I just felt like it was a great opportunity to combine those two things.
James: You said circularity. So what is circularity?
Lalie: Circularity is the idea of moving away from a linear system of producing goods, using goods, and throwing them away in landfill and bringing them back into use. So how can we think of repurposing this throwaway item and finding a new use for it?
James: Got it. And Aaron, what about you? What was the draw, was there a particular question or something else that drew you to Say the Thing?
Aaron: I came to Say the Thing through the Kenan Institute actually where Leah kind of came onto my radar as someone who was really interested in Eastern Europe and democracy building in that part of the world. As an ICS major, that's where my kind of specialty is situated and so we kind of started our correspondence really with just kind of geeking out about what a really cool part of the world.
Leah: That's right.
Aaron: Eastern Europe is.
James: Yes.
Aaron: And through that I was exposed to a lot of Say the Things programs like the Civic Studio which really catalyzed this trajectory into civic engagement and community building and what that looks like in different parts of the world.
James: Yes. We will be talking about the trip with the Civic studio to Romania that you all took. So, Reverend Leah, what about you? What types of questions do you find students asking when they come to Say the Thing?
Leah: I think one of the things about Say the Thing that we've tried to do in terms of like how we designed it is thinking that students probably have a lot of lingering sort of existential questions, but probably not the time to even really engage them. They're so busy. Like when you go out to the BC Plaza here at Duke, you will see them rush from class to lunch to class to problem set to club and activity like there doesn't really seem to be a culture of feeling like you're able to take breaks here at Duke because it's such a elite and robust institution. A lot of the way of design state of things is just with this assumption that students have questions about what does it mean to be good? What is the purpose of life and my life? Where do I fit into the bigger picture of the world? How can I be of service but don't really feel like they have time in their calendar to engage those questions. We want to help them engage those questions in ways that are profound and beautiful and exciting and maybe have a fresh take so it doesn't feel like a burden or an arduous task, but it feels like a kind of opportunity to be buoyant and thoughtful at the same time.
James: Can you talk about the different programs because Say the Thing in a sense it's kind of a suite of programs that developed along those lines.
Leah: Sure. We do have a number of programs. The first one that we developed is called The Booth, which are these storytelling booths that we have stationed around campus where students can pop in and in two minutes engage a question like where are you most at home? Where can you be your fullest self? Or what's the two minute version of your life story? And they record an audio and video sort of postcard of them answering and it gets sent directly to them. So they have this opportunity to do this really, like fast deep reflection that's private. So it's perfect for a busy student, it's perfect for an introspective student, it's perfect for students of sort of any discipline.
James: Yes.
Leah: We also have this studio, which is a six week workshop series where you can take this question of the fullest self deeper. We engage a kind of different genius every week to help us retack that question. We do it in community, so usually it's anywhere from sort of three to 20 students who meet. We never ask students to disclose their answers, but it's more like how are you thinking about your thinking on this question? It's quite meta, but really profound I think. A lot of students who come out of that program ask like, how can I do more? Like there's a voracious appetite that gets filled for those six weeks, then they want that kind of like discipline to continue. That's why we created this civic studio. So if the studio is really focused on how do we formulate a robust but dynamic sense of selfhood. I have a background in community organizing and so for me it's never enough to ask like, what is the self, but what is the self as it is beholden to society. So how do we create a society where all selves are recognized as dignified in what is our participatory obligation towards that. And so the Civic Studio really asked that sort of second set of questions. Now that we know who we are, who are we in society and how do we formulate society as grassroots leaders?
Particularly in democracies like our own or the ones in Eastern Europe where I have some experience. Then we have something called the hamster, and that comes out in two different formats. But essentially that comes a bit from my background in organizing as well. In organizing, we think about how important it is for everyone to have a really accurate and precise understanding of their own worldview so that we understand what power we have in the world and how to operate it in a way that's ethical. So how do we recognize our own agency? And then how do we make sure that when we're exercising our agency it's ethical? And so it's a practice of having students sort of think through a lot of really deep, profound questions very quickly and to build an artifact out of that, that then reflects back to them who they are, but beyond the kind of simple demographic identities they have.
James: The product is a series of like Polaroid pictures that are significant markers or symbols in the person's life.
Leah: Polaroids. Then we've been doing more and more doing it in a zine format as well. Some students take a longer time and do it in the Polaroid format and some students will come together in a workshop in an hour and a half and produce zine. So little like autobiographies of who they are. Then we have larks. Larks are these like great popup moments where we interrupt people in the middle of their day and help them. We love a little bit of cheek, so like take a bird's eye view of their life. Think about the broader story of who they are beyond their discipline or their major or their problem set so that they're not just compilation of their accomplishments, but they are this more enigmatic, enlivened person. And so we do that and we use a lot of trash is the source material for that to create these beautiful small artifacts.
James: What would be an example of like a particular materials and prompt that you're giving people through alert?
Leah: The two that stand out are every fall we cut up book covers into these slips of paper that are probably about like one and a half inch by like six inches. We ask people to blaze in the name of someone dead who has shaped them on the inside, and then we round them into a chain link and we have a chain link now that's thousands of names long. It's a profound activity and they are not just re enlivening a person who is dead, but they're also re enlivening a material that was meant to be dead, but has a new life. The trash at the center of that only further underscores that message of transformation and kind of like the everlasting impact that we have on one another. Then another that lolly just did the other day is we build talismans out of bottle caps and discarded paper from the library where people stamp a symbol on them and turn it into this little small relic that they will carry with them in their pocket or on jewelry or on key chains. Each symbol represents a different virtue that they hope to hold for themselves and people they just get so a flutter when they're making them, like they almost never make one. They almost always make like one for themselves and then for their best friend, and then for a family member or a professor and I think it gets addictive because they realize they really just want to share these really rich
virtues with others through this like form of transcendent beauty.
James: Picking up on that I want to play an example of a product coming outta Say the Thing studio. There's a poem written by a Duke Senior Zev van Zanten and it's voiced by another student praise Olerite[?]. So I want to listen to that poem and get your reactions about how this is emblematic is Say the Thing.
Female host: My home is so many things, so many places. Late night conversations and alcops[?] with friends that cover everything and nothing at the same time. Holiday meals and dishes tables spilling with food and conversation and song and stories and wisdom divine and human. Services full of a song and prayer. Silly little conversations and serious ones drives with loved ones where we chat about everything and nothing. Family game nights and meals, all sorts of things. Home is at once fleeting and all around trapped away in my memory yet never far away.
James: That was an excerpt from the poem. Home is an Arrow Bridge by Zev Van Zanten voiced by praised Olerite[?]. Reverend Leah, can you talk about how this poem came to be, like, what's the context? What's the prompt that produced the poem?
Leah: We meet together for six weeks in a row over lunch and every single week we ask the questions.
James: This is the studio.
Leah: Sorry. This is in the studio. We ask the same questions over and over, which are, where are you most at home? Where can you be your fullest self? Sometimes the students answer that question in free writing, sometimes they are asked to compose a playlist that answers that question, sometimes they're meant to sort of sketch out in their senses how they're reacting to that and then we also have different sort of geniuses or philosophical guides that help us think through that. Everyone from Malcolm X to Mary Oliver to Robin Wall Kimmerer to Rabbi Heschel. So they all have a kind of like a different take on how we come to know ourselves well and we use their philosophy to kind of tease that apart. So Zev did this and this was his final product after working through this for weeks. One of the things I'm hearing in it is what he has done so well and when thing that we stress is that often answers to questions as big as where are you most at home? Where can you be your fullest self? Is that the answer's going to be dynamic? It's probably going to change every day, if not every moment and how can we allow ourselves to kind of exhale into how multitudinous we all are. Then there's also an opportunity in the studio, I think, to press the students to unlearn some of the classroom behaviors and relearn behaviors that help you in life. I hear is of doing that in his poem. Like one example I always say in the studio, you can't fail the studio and you also can't get an A in the studio. So don't try and answer in a way that you think I want you to answer. It's about answering for yourself. I really hear him doing that. Like you can hear what a unique voice he has or a specific voice as an author he has. But you also hear the universality in the poem, and that's why we have other students voice them, is to press into that point of like, you're deeply specific but also we're expansive and universal. So I hear Zev doing that so expertly in his piece.
James: Yes. Love it. Aaron, I'm wondering about your reactions to this poem and if there's any kind of product poem or otherwise that you've produced through Say the Thing that sort of representative of the program.
Aaron: I think it's always such a pleasure to hear these stories. Like every time they pop up the Instagram, I always like have to like drop everything just to like hear it through on the Spotify because they're just, I don't know. It's so cool to see how everyone takes the prompt in such a completely different direction that's so unique to them, but still so like powerful. As Leah said, you're able to like resonate with something in someone else's story. Like there is this kind of universal element to it while also just kind of being in awe of like this lived experience and you're almost getting just like a very brief window into it. I really, really like Zevs work and how that all came together. As for me, my studio piece was, as much as it was a creative process, it was like a meditative and reflective process all the same because you're really forced to kind of see what your instinct is and answering the question because it is kind of an ostensibly simple question of where are you most at home? Where can you be your fullest self? But there's so much richness and depth to that that you might not even realize or are cognizant of in the moment of writing it. But it's not until you read back and reflect on what you've written and how your body chose to respond to that prompt. What are the kind of parts that you teased out in this iteration that reveal that deeper truth? I found that just as much in my own poem as I'm hearing it in Zevs and my own poem or reflection is a really important piece of writing for me, just because I feel like I learned so much about my own self and my own way of understanding who I am through that writing process.
James: Yes.
Leah: It's really good. Is it? Lalie is really excellent too. You pick two people who have really good pieces.
James: Aaron, so you also wrote a poem through the studio reflecting on home. Are you willing to share some of that?
Aaron: Well, actually since in the spirit of the studio, how about we have a Lalie read my version and Lalie if you want to share yours I'd be happy to read it as well.
Lalie: Sure. That sounds great.
Aaron: Great.
James: We're going from the personal to the university. All right, Lalie. Yes.
Lalie: These are the memories. These are the memories a flutter in your chest. You wake from a dream through a sepia tone filter, yet is it clouding your vision, is what you see reality or rather a fiction of what was. The soft coo of a morning dove a gentle breeze rocking the swinging bench. Kids laugh on their bikes, they fly past, but you make no effort to keep up. This memory is it real? Were the skies ever so gray? That house it was a tin can, a pile of scrap metal. Never again can you occupy that same spatial positioning lest you were suspended on a dream. The thought rattles in your mind as your eyes trace the passing streetlights, casting down upon you a gentle, brilliant amber glow. The night is empty, yet you don't fear the cold. Electricity runs through you, a construct of humankind yet it supplies the same warmth of a fire. Light. Light. The light isn't a memory. Is it true the photon dust inhabits such a place within you, a realm for which you imagine flickers of places that do not exist? At least not anymore.
James: Wonderful. And Aaron, without sort of stealing the art through commentary, maybe something about the process of writing that poem.
Aaron: What I discovered kinda alluding to earlier in my writing process and how I kind of envision home is that I envision home a lot through memory and specific kind of moments or images that stick in my mind. One that I was really drawn to and I kept coming back to as we kept toying with the prompt throughout the six weeks was, the trailer that my grandparents used to have at the beach. We would grow up, we'd go to it every summer and it was this kind of rundown like tin can that became such a pivotal and important kind of place. And so a lot of the details, a lot of the sensory images that I try to pull from in that poem, the sound of children flying down the street on their bikes. The Morning dove and the Gentle Breeze. Those are all things that grounded me in those moments of reflection sitting on the porch of my grandparents' trailer and that trailer no longer exists. It's been long since demolished and the real house is now in its place. But I was really interested in questioning about this positionality of like I can never sit in that exact latitude and longitude of that plane, but it's still exists because of my memory that I attach to it. That was kind of my thought process when coming up with this poem and it really made me kind of realize how important those foundational memories were in shaping who I am today.
James: Absolutely. Now, can we trade here.
Aaron: Yes.
James: And then you read Lalies poem from the studio.
Aaron: Yes. This is I am Glue by Lalie Marie.
James: Sorry. This is so good. I'm so happy to be hearing this.
Aaron: I am glue cementing my home shut sticking to open wounds and shielding against the oncoming assaults of pain of sadness. I like being glued for others but sometimes it gets dried up or becomes unstable. I can't stick over problems forever. But turns out life has led to the disintegration of my gluey-est parts. Finally, my life has best lived when I let the river of feelings into my home. Yes, pain come on in. It's a comfy chair for you. Right over here next to joy and awe and sadness and love and anger and comfort and confusion and peace. Who knew this disintegration actually led to liberation in movement and identity in mood. I feel therefore, I am. I am unglued.
James: Lalie will say things that we're not going to explain away the poem, but there is a theme of glue here and something those. What was your experience of [crosstalk]
Lalie: Aaron that was beautifully read.
James: I know. [crosstalk]
Lalie: Thank you. I'm so honored to have you read that. I think for me my truest self is when I feel everything. I'm not closed off, I'm open, I'm receiving, I'm listening, I'm hearing, and I'm really in tune with what's going on inside. I think maybe in the past I have attached myself to other people's feelings too many times, or I have tried to fix their problems. And so this studio and the exercises that we did really helped me dig through these feelings and reflect on my dad saying that I am the glue of the family, for example. That's kind of the inspiration of this story. Spinning that around and saying, okay, maybe I can be unglued to really be my truest self.
James: I want to pick up something you were saying, Reverend Leah, that part of the studio is having geniuses in the room. So we're talking about thinkers, authors. I want to play a clip for one of those geniuses and then have you talk about that. So this is going to be a poem from the poet Joy Harjo, who'll be speaking at Duke Chapel, March 3. He's entitled This Morning I Pray For My Enemies.
Joy: This morning I pray for my enemies. And whom do I call my enemy? An enemy must be worthy of engagement. I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking. It's the heart that acts the question, not my furious mind. The heart is the smaller cousin of the son. It sees and knows everything. It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing. The door to the mind should open only from the heart. An enemy who gets in risk the danger of becoming a friend.
James: That is the poem This Morning I Pray For My Enemies by Joy Harjo, and it is voiced by Barbara Ofosu-Somuah and it's actually part of a kinda artistic meditative video people can find on the Say the Thing Instagram channel. So Reverend Leah can you talk about this poem as an example of a sort of genius in the room and who are some of these other thinkers that are invited in?
Leah: This poem is amazing. I feel like I'm hesitant to even comment on it because it's like just too perfect. But I think some of the elements of the poem that we hold fast to in Say the Thing is, I think one of the things that Joy Harjo is pointing to is the inherent dignity of all living things. She starts by saying, like, an enemy is someone that has to be worthy. In that you're meanin there's a respect. We believe that I'd Say the Thing, I think everybody's story is worth exploring. Every Duke student is invited to participate. Then she also talks about how the heart is the smaller cousin of the sun. That's my favorite line. It's this remarkable way I think of understanding it of like she recognizes the sort of horizontality of living things. Like no one is better or worse than any other living thing that was or is or will be. But she also recognizes this power that the sun has and that we all have to be generative, to be creative, to unfurl a new kind of life to have the power and agency to do that, to be creative to be a source for something. I think she's reminding us to not be passive about that. We do that in, and I'll Say the Thing, like, so much of what we say, whether when a student comes to a lark often they'll seek guidance from me and Lalie and Torrey and Eugene who helped us in that past. They'll be like, well, which stamp should I pick? Or which piece of washy tape should I use? Or which sticker should I snag?
We always say like, you will make the best choice for yourself. Really it's helping to remind them that they have it within them to make really good and wise choices to know themselves well and to generate what's best for themselves. We do all need help at some point in our lives, but we want people to ret trusts themselves and we want them to be restored to themselves and understand that they're worthy. I think Joy does that so beautifully and the poem by connecting the sun and the heart so intimately. Then the other geniuses do that as well. So Malcolm X is one that we use frequently. He's so dear to me. He's someone that I studied in undergraduate and graduate school, and one of the reasons I hold him up in the studio and he's become a part of the lives of the students as well, is he's someone who had this very circuitous life but every time a new sort of truth or observation was revealed to him, he changed because of it. He didn't just sit on it or decide to be in denial about it or mask it.
He took action and changed, and changed himself and was never afraid to change. As we're thinking and rethinking through who we are as people, I want our students to be unafraid of being ready for change. Another person that we point to pretty frequently is Howard Thurman. He gave life to this project. He was the inspiration from Dean Powery to initiate this program and he often ask the same questions of us. He asks like what is it that you treasure most in the world? And he ask that this is very live question. Like, it's worth interrogating now because maybe it was different this morning, maybe it's going to be different tonight, maybe it was different when you were five, maybe it'll be different when you're 85, and if it's always the same, that's fine, but we need to consider those things. It is the treasure that really animates us into a kind of well-lived and ethical life. So these are a few of the geniuses that kind of help us kind of come back into ourselves and ask our hardest questions.
James: Yes. Lalie, I'm wondering from being part of Say the Thing, are there thinkers that you've gotten introduced to or gotten more familiar with?
Lalie: That's a great question. Leah has introduced me to a lot of new thinkers which I'm very grateful for. I'll say one that I was probably reintroduced to was Mary Oliver.
James: The poet.
Lalie: The poet, she is just super incredible and last year we did a t-shirt screen printing activity, and we used one of her lines, which is you do not have to be good and we have wild geese flying in the background of this image. That line right there just means so much to me. We do not have to be perfect. We are worthy just because we are human. Mary Oliver means a lot to me. We did a lot of work with Ocean Vuong with Malcolm X. Robin Wall Kimmerer is another one of my favorites. So there are countless.
James: Environmental connection there.
Lalie: Exactly. Those are the ones I definitely connect to the most.
James: What about you, Aaron?
Aaron: I, through Say the Thing was introduced to Pádraig Ó Tuama, who was a Irish poet who actually came to campus last year.
James: That's right.
Aaron: I actually got to attend his poetry workshop, which was a really cool opportunity experience. He really challenged us with this question of beginnings and how do we begin a story, how do we begin a poem, but also how do we begin our own stories and how do we determine where that starting point is. That was a really lucrative exercise because as someone who grew up writing and, and the drafts I have from a kid are often like, I woke up and I looked outside my window and brushed my teeth. Like it was the very kind of monotonous things. Your instinct might be well that's like the start of the day, the start of this journey, but the real question might be whether it's somewhere in a deeper place and really trying to examine where that starting point would be. That was a really kind of eye-opening exercise for me and has really shaped kind of how I'm viewing the overarching trajectory of my own story.
James: Yes. Wonderful. So I want to take us from Durham to Romania. We kind of touched on this early on. That's through Say the Thing civic studio a group of people, including you all went to Romania spring break last year. Leah, can you set this up and make the connection between the Say the Thing kind of focus on the self and then the self in society.
Leah: There is no self without society and there's no society without the self. One of the things we think about are that all people are leaders we don't all get called leaders by society, but we actually all lead society. If you live in a democracy we're all participants in it. Sometimes we give that up, which is not a good thing. It's unhealthy. But we all have a responsibility to lead and leadership can look like a variety of different things. It can be making coffee at a community meeting, it could be setting up chairs, it could be per the person with the microphone, it could be quiet conversations you have with neighbors. Those are all forms of leadership. The self and society are so tightly entangled with one another. We wanted to be able to once the studio had been running for a couple of years, think about, well, what's the next natural progression? It's once you know the self, how is the self beholden to the kind of society that we actively build every day together? How do we participate in way that calls upon our talents, our gifts, our positionality, our resources, our desires, our biggest dreams for ourselves and the people that we love. We built the civic studio and that really draws a lot on my background as a community organizer, how again we think about grassroots leadership, the different ways that gets enacted, and in particular what does that look like in a fragile democracy? I want to say something here about the term fragile democracy. Because I think some people might chaff at this term especially if applied to the United States. But I would say that all democracies are fragile because it requires everyone to participate in it. When not everybody participates in it, it can be swayed in directions that are not allowing the thriving of all of its people.
James: Romania being a much younger democracy than the United States.
Leah: We wanted to ask these questions that are very live questions here in the United States, but then travel to Romania a place that has been a democracy for, they just celebrated in December their 35th year of being a democratic nation. These questions I think sometimes we take them for granted in the United States, in Romania they can't because they are still so intimately bound to the building of their nation as it exists now. And so the young people that we met, the people who are a little bit, maybe a generation above us, they remember living in their same country but not as a democracy. They are the ones who are building it into a participatory community and so we felt like we had a lot to learn from them about how the self and how selfhood in society are so tightly wound together. I've been traveling to Eastern and central Europe for over a decade now, and every chance that I've gotten to go it has helped me become much clearer about what it is I need to do as an American. I learned so much from gaining some distance and some perspective and some time to reflect, that I think I come back a much better leader and citizen and community member. I wanted to see if I could find a way to kind of share that experience with some really incredible Duke students.
James: Great. Aaron, you're the international comparative studies major. What was your experience of the trip? Either, like a particular moment that stands out or more an impression since you've been back?
Aaron: I could talk about this trip for years on end probably. But I think in many ways for me that trip was like my first time leaving the country in a meaningful way. I think one of the biggest things that really stuck out to me was just kind of seeing the landscape of Bucharest, Romania itself. One of the coolest things was like even like the architecture and like going down the streets and just kind of when we were there we were really interested in this question of like, what is the story of Romania? What is the story that we are told as Americans about Romania? What are Romanians told about Romania? And then what are Romanians telling Americans about Romanian? Those are some of the questions that we kept circling around throughout the trip. Just kind of walking through the streets you get a pretty interesting sense of what that answer might be. Because you would see like these 14th century orthodox churches right next to these like post World War II Parisian style buildings and next to the brutalist communist architecture. You're like, this is such a storied place. There's so much richness and there's so much history. There's a lot of conflict here. Yet it still persists in spite of all of it. Scars and all. We would walk down. On one side of our street we had our hotel and the other side of the street was a building that had bullet holes from the revolution. These are places and histories that all exist at the same time in the same moment. I think that's something that when we think about what American democracy looks like and we reflect on our own history and what that means, those are lessons that are really important to keep in mind. Even when we're looking at ourselves and at the international community as a whole.
James: What about you, Lalie. What was your experience or reflections on that trip?
Lalie: Aaron just said it so beautifully. The visual aspects of it were truly remarkable. This dichotomy of old and new and religious and not religious. I think one of the things that stood out to me, I think it was the last group that we met with, they were these young Gen Z journalists. They were so incredible, so lively, so motivated and inspiring. They saw this gap where they felt like maybe Romanian news was not meant for young people of their generation. They built this company essentially, where they are making news for young Romanian people. It was such a positive way to end the trip meeting these young people doing really great, incredible work.
Leah: We asked them too, like, what's at stake? We were like, what you're doing is like such hard work. You're under so much pressure. Like how do you find hope? And we were with like maybe 10 of them and they just could be like, it's these people who I'm sitting with I'm doing it for them. Because I love them so much that I want them to live in a good world. We're going to create news that is open and free and contributes to a free society. They just kept pointing at each other. It was at the end of a long day long, I think all of us were like schlepping to this last meeting. Like, my God, Leah, why did you plan one more meeting? But we got there and I think we all left like feeling really high on their hope, their energy, their dedication. They were so solid. They're amazing.
James: Yes. And speaking of hope and optimism, I want to talk about kind of where Say the Thing is heading and some of the relationships and the partnerships that you've made. Reverend Leah can you talk about how these partnerships both here on campus and with other schools are shaping Say the Thing.
Leah: We collaborate like constantly. We're constantly collaborating whether it's like the library, please give us your trash or Duke Arts teach us this technique. We have such ready companions on campus. It's been just an utter blessing to work with so many great resources here. We're furthering that outside of Duke, so we're piloting the studio at several new universities. So I trained a number of people in other universities to facilitate their own studio. So that's happening at Lewis and Clark and SMU and Young Harris and then we have a couple new people at Duke who are teaching it as well, facilitating it as well. And so we're testing like is this something that can be spread? Is this something that people want to add to their lives outside of the Duke environment? And so it's a great year to find out if that's true. So far it's going well so we're optimistic. Then we've done a lark and begun to build some relationships at NC State. Lalie and I did a lark there at this kind of festival they had in September and we're beginning to have conversations with the folks over there to see if that's something they want to pickup. Then Lalie and Torrey, our other Green Devil intern and I are doing a lot of writing about sort of like what's the best practice of how to do these larks. Because they're not just random popups, they have a lot of sort of spiritual design and sort of engineering embedded in them. Then I kind of think of them as these like gorilla formation moments. So how do you facilitate a formation moment in a way that's, I think at the heart of Say the Thing is like it's just a big invitation for people to go deeper. So like how do you facilitate that with like a real welcome grace? So we're spreading, which is exciting.
James: Yes. Great. Kinda speaking of going deeper, and we've been talking about geniuses. I'm wondering if we could wrap up with favorite or most challenging or most surprising quote that's been connected for Say the Thing for you all. Lalie do you have one that's a favorite or most interesting for you?
Lalie: I spoke about this a bit earlier, but the one that has just stuck with me for a while is you do not have to be good by Mary Oliver. So again, it's this idea of you are worthy, you do not have to be perfect. You are here because you are human and that is your right. I just think it's a beautiful reminder of living your life wild and free and imperfectly.
James: Yes. And so what about you, Reverend Leah what is a favorite for you?
Leah: Emerson is my favorite. Emerson has been a guide for me for a long, long time. In 1838, he wrote the Harvard Divinity School address where he spoke at people graduating and that's where I graduated from. He says, "you newborn, bards of the Holy Ghost cast behind you all conformity and quaint man firsthand with deity." For me, that is like the mission of what we're up to, which is that cast behind you all conformity. I think sometimes we or often, I know I felt this way growing up. We feel pressured to conform into kind of like what Lalie was saying, like what does it mean to be good into someone else's idea of what it means to be good? Or pressured by a tradition to perform righteousness in a particular way. I think what Emerson is calling us towards is that we're all unique and dignified, we don't need to conform. That is actually the charge of those of us who have graduated into doing work to help people understand themselves is to be renewed in helping people do that. Tradition works for some people it doesn't work for all people.
James: There's a sort of a tension there of individualism. But although Emerson is part of a tradition and is a sort of respected figure through the time that we're looking to.
Leah: That it's much more complex than just go to church on Sunday or just do your prayers on Friday. We need to be creative in helping people understand themselves. We need to be gracious in helping people understand themselves. Again, I think I said this earlier but at the heart of Say the Thing is an invitation. That these programs are for all, they're additive to whatever framework you're already working with. We're just here to provide you one more opportunity to understand yourself better. With the hope that when you understand yourself better, you will help create a world where everybody is afforded the dignity that they have just by being alive.
James: Aaron what about you? A favorite poem quote saying book author Aphorism.
Aaron: It's just so hard to pick because there's so many profound and awe inspiring geniuses that we encounter in Say the Thing. But one of Howard Thurman's quotes always sticks with me. The desire to be one's true self is ever persistent. I think when I reflect on my own experience and my own life, especially in the past couple years, like college is such a kind of transformative and dynamic time. That's been a really kind of guiding force and thought about this drive to be my fullest self and to understand what that means. I think that's one of the kind of main goals in college, at least it is for me and I think Say the Thing has been a really amazing opportunity to explore that.
James: That seems like just the place to end on. So Aaron Ng is a Duke Junior and is an intern with Say the Thing, Lalie Marie is a graduate student in Duke's Nicholas School for the environment also a student intern with Say the Thing and the Reverend Leah Torrey is head to Say the Thing and director of special Initiatives at Duke Chapel. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and insights.
Lalie: Thank you.
Aaron: Thank you.
Leah: Thanks James.
James: Follow Say the Thing on Instagram, say.the.thing. This has been sounds of faith from Duke University Chapel. Learn more about the Chapel's mission ministry events and programs at chapel.duke.edu.
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