![]() ![]() “People in general are too busy to stop and get philosophy degrees, and then wonder about the meaning of life,” said Sweeney. ![]() Spiritual journeys are often impossible, or muffled by the demands of modernity, she said. So she wrote “Letting Go of God,” out just this month as a CD. ![]() “I wished people didn’t have to wait that long,” said Sweeney. Her final insight came suddenly, while she was doing what even stars do: scrubbing out the tub at home. “I looked for God and it took me on this huge journey, and it led me to no God,” said Sweeney. But she continued the search for spiritual answers, reading deeply, arguing with Jesuits, and becoming estranged from her staunchly Catholic parents. “I still believed in God then,” said Sweeney of writing the earlier play. The screen version was named Best Film at the Seattle Film Festival. The audio version of “God Said Ha!” got a Grammy nomination for best comedy album. (One riff begins with her good-girl idea of a reward: “I was going to smoke myself a cigarette,” she said, “and buy the new book by the Pope.”) She wonders funnily aloud about illness, grief, family, lovers, and growing up Catholic. In the play, Sweeney is alone onstage with a couch and a candle. Her first creative answer was “God Said Ha!,” a monologue play that was produced theatrically, then released as a CD, and was finally filmed for DVD release in 1997. Grief and shock led Sweeney to a deliberate search for God. In 1994 came the biggest crisis of all: a cancer scare, and her brother’s lingering fatal illness. “I dipped into my beliefs during crisis,” said Sweeney. In adulthood, her faith tapered off into a fondness for Catholic culture, and only reappeared in bursts. In her teens, Sweeney briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a nun. “I would have been a scientist” and not a comedian, she said. Without his dramatic reaction, her life would have changed, Sweeney said in a recent interview from her Los Angeles home. It was enough to send a guilty Sweeney back to church. Sitting in a pew at church, she suddenly thought, “This is a bunch of crap.” She told the parish priest about her doubts, expecting an argument. Sweeney had her first moment of spiritual bravery at age 10. “It’s the sugar that goes with the bitter,” she said of comedy. “We can just be brave and think and feel.” Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein said comedy is an excellent – not an odd – medium for delivering the humanist message. “Letting Go of God” was described by the Los Angeles Times as “brave and hilarious.” It’s a tour of Sweeney’s humorous grappling with the Big Questions: the meaning of life, the fact of death, and the sweet unreality of heaven.Įarlier this month, Sweeney played nine shows of “Letting Go of God” at the Ars Nova Theater in Manhattan.Īt Sanders, her performance is sponsored by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, and by the Harvard Secular Society. 26), it will be onstage at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre – a one-night New England premiere for the show, which played in Los Angeles throughout 2005. There’s more good news: Sweeney made her decade-long search for a spiritual path into a monologue play, “Letting Go of God.” Sweeney described her Roman Catholic upbringing as “85 to 95 percent wonderful.” But she said embracing real life instead of an afterlife would be good news for the human race. Julia Sweeney, Grammy-nominated former star of “Saturday Night Live,” went looking for God – and found out there was no God.
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