Last year I had a big idea. It was going to combine everything I love — God, culture, conversation, gossip, people who are really living — into one thing. A podcast. I was so excited I couldn’t see straight. And then it didn’t go anywhere and I couldn’t look at it.
Here’s the thing about me: I’ve tried everything. Every acupuncture needle in California has jabbed me. I’ve worshipped every crystal. At some point I was paying a woman to clear my energy over WhatsApp. I come by it honestly, I’m a daughter of Los Angeles after all! But somehow, after all of it, the only thing I kept coming back to was God. Not religion exactly. Not a denomination. Just God. The through-line underneath everything I was already chasing.
So I made a podcast about it. I called it God Girl and yes, I mean God, not G-d. I grew up being told you can’t use God’s name in vain, so I defaulted to the hyphen out of habit. Then a wise friend said: “I don’t think God needs us to do that.” She was right. So it became God Girl. I filmed it at The Free Press studios. The plan was simple: interview people whose relationship with a higher power is the center of their life. Celebrities, religious figures, real people, unexpected people. Me, but useful.
And then I didn’t finish it. Until now. Sort of.
One of my first interviews was with Father Jonah Teller, a Dominican friar at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village. This past weekend, he went viral and not in a way I could have predicted. A TikToker named Anthony Gross has been making a series ranking NYC Catholic churches, and when he gave St. Joseph’s the number one spot, something cracked open. Mass attendance increased by 15 to 20 percent. The young adult program Father Jonah runs after the 6pm Sunday Mass, a cheese-and-wine discussion group called In Vino Veritas, grew to more than 200 people, filling the church’s compact lower-level space. “The past few Sundays, we’ve had people standing literally on the front steps of the church trying to get to Mass because there’s just not room,” Father Jonah said. He was also featured in Feed Me this week, if you want the full story.
This is not an isolated moment. The number enrolled in St. Joseph’s Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, the process by which adults convert to Catholicism, had tripled since last yea. Eighty percent of the congregation’s members are in their 20s and 30s. “Materially, we have everything at our fingertips, and it’s not reaching our hearts,” Father Jonah said.
So why is being Catholic cool right now?
I have thoughts, and I want more of yours. I think it’s the aesthetic, the robes, the architecture, the candles, the whole visual grammar of it that Instagram was essentially built to photograph. I think it’s the gathering, the radical act of showing up somewhere in person, with your body, on purpose, every week. I think it’s the wisdom, centuries of it, just sitting there, waiting, while we were all doom-scrolling. I think it’s the community at a moment when everyone is desperately, almost embarrassingly, lonely. I think it’s the ritual. I think it’s the mystery. I think it’s that young people are watching things fall apart and deciding that maybe organized religion isn’t that bad. And I think it’s probably ten other things I haven’t thought of yet, which is exactly why I want to hear from you.
I saw it all blow up this weekend and thought: I talked to that guy. I have an hour of footage. I haven’t watched it since we filmed it because I’m too scared to. Not because I don’t think I did a good job. I’m sure I did fine. I’m scared to watch it because when I made it, I was really excited. It felt like my destiny. And then when it didn’t go anywhere, I thought: well. Maybe it’s not my destiny.
And now I’m thinking maybe destiny is just discipline. Maybe those are the same thing and I’ve been waiting for a feeling that was actually just a next step.
But what I kept finding, making that podcast, , talking to my best friends Lydia and Veronica (they are my original and inspiration for God Girl,) talking to anyone willing to discuss their interior life, is that it almost never comes down to the religion. It comes down to the faith. The desire for connection to something larger. The hunger for meaning that apparently not even New York City can fully suppress.
Here’s the thing though. I am a person who cares deeply about your interior life and what everyone is feeling and who said what to whom and WHY! And I couldn’t figure out how to hold all of that at once. So the podcast started to feel a little earnest. A little Jay Shetty. And I am not Jay Shetty. I have nothing against Jay Shetty. I am simply not him.
The dream guest list, if I’m being honest with myself: Justin and Hailey Bieber. Kim Kardashian. Katy Perry. Nick Cave. Bob Dylan. Dolly Parton. Regina Spektor. Stephen Colbert. Kris Jenner. The Dalai Lama. Matisyahu. Athletes whose talents feel so God-given you can’t explain them any other way. Singers who clearly have a direct line to something. CEOs who are quietly funding the thing everyone is privately hungry for. Real people too, because Theo Von interviewing the lunch lady is often more illuminating than Theo Von interviewing anyone famous, and that energy is what I was after.
The through-line isn’t religion. It’s the question. How does a modern person find God while still staying themselves? I don’t have the answer. That’s the whole point.
Here’s what I do know: to start something, you need someone to see it in you. You just do. Outside validation, yes, I know, bad, dependent, co-dependent, not the goal. But it’s also information. It’s direction. So here I am. Trying to have some discipline. Trying not to give up on a thing I loved just because it got quiet
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I’m going to ask you to watch it first. I’m not ready yet. But I want it to exist. If this connects to you, let me know. If it doesn’t, please don’t. I’m still tender
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