Editor’s note: “The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.,” is a new podcast from America Media that focuses on how people experience God in their prayer and their daily lives. Launched on June 17, 2025, the show combines practical wisdom with deep reflections from spiritual masters like Joyce Rupp and Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, and well-known seekers such as Stephen Colbert and Whoopi Goldberg—all tracing the mystery of God’s activity in their own lives. To accompany each episode, Father Martin will reflect on the experience and offer practical advice on a few spiritual themes. You can listen to all episodes of “The Spiritual Life” here.
One of the things I find most appealing about the award-winning writer and poet Mary Karr is her forthright, almost brutal, honesty, which shows up whether writing about her complicated family history, recounting her own struggles with addiction or admitting her past as a “black belt” sinner. (Full disclosure: I’m also her spiritual director and will not break any confidences here and share anything she’s said in spiritual direction.)
So I was delighted when she agreed to be a guest on “The Spiritual Life.” And I was not surprised that the same kind of honesty that she brings to her writing, she brought to our conversation. (Also, the same freewheeling and sometimes biting sense of humor.)
As her legions of readers know, her conversion started in earnest with a desire to confront her alcoholism and her willingness to speak about that to others—and to God. It is a reminder that, despite what one sometimes hears in Christian circles, it’s O.K. to ask for good things from God, and it’s O.K. to be honest with God. One of my spiritual mentors, William A. Barry, S.J., in his book God and You, compared a relationship with God to a friendship with another person. When we stop being honest and open with a friend, the relationship cools and sometimes ends completely. Likewise with our relationship with God. Mary shows the value of honesty in prayer, which leads to a growing intimacy with God.
Mary also describes how imaginative prayer (or “Ignatian contemplation”) softens her heart and even changes her feelings toward people she struggles with. In her prayer, she asks to see others “as a child” (meaning, when they were children) or “the way God sees them,” an imaginative practice that leads to empathy: “I pray for them. I mean, I try to imagine their face, and I try to soften my heart, and I pray for them. And interestingly, how I feel about the person changes.”
Given her experiences with addiction, she also reflects on the crippling nature of shame. She acknowledges her struggles with self-judgment and anger, noticing how those feelings can radiate outward: “If you’re hard on yourself, you’re hard on everybody else.”
Our conversation reminded me, as I say on the podcast, of a helpful distinction between guilt and shame: Guilt says, “I did a bad thing.” Shame says, “I am a bad person.” Guilt can be helpful, leading us to conversion. Shame usually does not.
One thing that may surprise listeners is the number of times Mary speaks about what can only be called mystical experiences. In my mind, everyone has the capacity for mystical experiences—those rare times when you feel overwhelmed with God’s presence in ways that are sometimes hard to describe. (Ruth Burrows’s famous book Guidelines for Mystical Prayer assumes that everyone can, at some point, experience these moments with God.) Mary recounts a surprising experience in Rome, when physically touching the place where St. Francis is supposed to have slept overwhelmed her with a sense of God’s love and presence.
“It was just a spirit, a profound sense of the love of God, of gratitude for the life of Francis…. It was like a wind blew through me or something. It was so big that I couldn’t talk…. It scared me. “ She describes the experience as being almost “outside the edges of my body.” In other words, “ecstasy,” from the Greek ek-stasis, a “standing outside.”
Perhaps those who have suffered are more open, broken open perhaps, to receive God’s graces in these unexpected ways. I think you’ll find Mary’s open, honest, funny, fascinating journey a compelling listen, a moving testimony of faith and great help to your own spiritual life, no matter what color your “sinner belt” is.
