You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand. Welcome to the Doctor Wendy Waalh' show. Oh my goodness, here we are kf I AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. And it's Christmas Eve. Are you with me? Yeah? Christmas Eve? I know. So I'm going to assume that a few of you are listening at home because you're either alone or your family's busy, and you're getting ready for the big day tomorrow, and maybe Christmas Eve is not the big day to you, or you're listening to this
show later on the app. I always find that time between Christmas and New Year's is where I catch up on my books, my media, my year end accounting. There seems to be so many, so fewer phone calls and interruptions and emails that it's my time to just kind of relax and get things done. So maybe you're doing that. Maybe you're just listening to the show
if you are alone on this Christmas Eve. I have some suggestions coming up in the show of things that you can do over the holiday season, and also at the very end of the show, I want to talk about ways to cope if you are alone on Christmas. Some things that you can do to really honor yourself and the beauty within you. I'll be honest. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I didn't even realize my parents were as religious
as they were until I started meeting Catholic lights. I didn't know that every single person did not go to church every single Sunday morning, and if you were going to miss it, that you would go Saturday night instead, and that everybody went to Catechism classes and everybody did first Communion and Confirmation. I thought everyone just did that. I didn't know that was only for the deeply religious. I look back on it, and although I don't identify as Catholic
now because I think they would kick me out because I was divorced. Producer, Kayla, why did you roll your offe? They have rules? Well yeah, well you made it seem like you know you you quit them. I think it was a mutual break. I quit them. I just don't know. Like I like the rituals like you sense, I like the robes, I like the lighting, I like the songs. I like getting on your knees and then standing and then sitting and down again. You shake hands,
are you being sarcast No. Part way through you actually have to shake hands with everybody around you. You make new friends to Baptist Church, you do, okay, So I miss all of that. You know, Julio and I are getting married in twenty twenty four. Is it going to be a big Catholic white wedding. No, No, it's gonna be at a vineyard some wow. But I reached out to a quaint, little historic Catholic church in the town near where I am, and then I went on their
website to find out like how to get married in the Catholic Church. And can you believe in this day and eight, I'm not bashing you Catholics or the Catholic Church. You're welcome to have your rules. That's why I think you kick me out. That's what I think. In this day and age, you still have to take a Catholic marriage preparatory course for a few months. Can you imagine at our age we could teach it, and then if you were married before, which both of us were, you have to go
track down your ex spouse, get their signature and get it annulled. Come on in almost twenty twenty four. Yeah, wow, it's crazy. So that's why I think they pretty much kicked me out. But let's talk about why I'm really bringing this up. We had the best Christmases. I don't think anybody can beat the Catholics. Okay, New Christmas Eve. So here's what we do. We'd sit around the fireplace when we were little kids in our jammi's all warm from the hot bath, and they would my parents would
light a fire. My dad, of all weird traditions, would make milkshakes a cold thing. But we never got homemade, real milkshakes with real ice cream, and so that was a new a Christmas Eve tradition. And then he would open the Bible and he would read the passage from who is it? Is it Genesis or something where he says and then the Lord came under, heth the baby, and there's a star in the day to bed. I don't know the whole thing. And so he would read the whole little
passage to us and we would sip our milkshakes. But what we were really waiting for is we were allowed to open one gift before Christmas morning, and we spent weeks as the little gifts were piling up under the trees because I meant Santa hadn't come yet, but the parents had put a few things there and we would shake them and rattle them, and we would try to guess which one we were going to open for Christmas Eve. And let me tell
you, there were some years that that was a big ass disappointment. I remember my brother Chris one time he saw what was clearly wrapped a record album and my little brother and I are looking at him as he's grabbing it, and he's like, oh, I want to do the album because he was into like heavy metal and rock or something at that point. And our eyes were so buggy, like, don't do it because we knew it was Elvis Christmas Carols. What was my mother thinking? Maybe she thought because it was
Elvis he would put up with it. Elvis Christmas Carols. Anyway, that was a disappoint Christma see for him. Sorry. How do you guys celebrate Christmas when you were growing up? Kayla, Oh, Christmas was the best time ever. We did get to We went to actually midnight Mass, so we went, oh, yeah, we used to do that once we got older. Yeah, midnight Mass and then have breakfast after Mass in like the middle of the night. And then too, yeah, and the Baptist do
that as well as a Catholic. No I had. I had Catholic family members, so we celebrated Church Christmas the Catholic way. And then me and my siblings would all sleep together in the room and we wake up together and run downstairs and to wrap our gifts. But my mom was always still rapping gifts at that time. She would send us back to bed, so she was done rapping gifts because she said Santa dropped him of afully, I'm still rapping. So yeah, oh, I know. We watched the movie were
little. It was so hard to stay up late and do all the work you had to do after and then the kids wake up super early because they're so excited, much earlier than they usually. The parents are so sorry. You know. My brother does now. Uh. He has a tradition that he adopted somewhere along the way in his life. Breakfast on Christmas morning is Bailey's Irish cream and coffee, so he starts drinking like seven am. Perfect
Christmas anyway, Lots of families have different ways of celebrating this holiday. When we come back, I have a very special guest who is going to share with us. She's a professor of religious studies and history at Loyola marra Mount. She's going to share with us the various ways that people have found meaning in the season through holiday celebrations. You're listening to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're
listening to KFI AM six forty on demand. Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. On this very special Christmas Eve, my guest doctor Darnise Martin. She's a professor at Loyola Marramount University specializing in all the Abrahamic religions and history, and specifically African American religions. Doctor Darnise, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you, Wendy for having me. I'm happy to be
here with you on the holiday. My question is does every religion celebrate some kind of holiday during the darkest days of the year. Ah. Well, when you say every religion, pretty much every tradition, I think I can I feel confident in saying that every tradition at least notices the seasonal changes. So broadly speaking, every you know, folk religion, every spirituality, they're
at least going to have some celebration or sacrilezing of this time. If we talk about specifically the Ibrahamic religions, then yes, we can see, you know, that this is a time where time becomes sacred, and we can see among the religions how they do it. And what do you think is this associated with the seasons and the darkness and the weather or is there something else in the doctrine of these religions And we're talking specifically about Jewish, Christian
and Muslim that makes this time of year a time to be celebrated. M hmm. Well, again, we're talking about people of a certain kind of faith, so there's always going to be the larger like, yes, there's something holy about it. You know, we we acknowledge that there's a divine presence behind the things that we see. So the mundane world isn't quite so mundane after all. And you know, religions, one of the questions that
religion seems to answer is what is the meaning of it all? And so when you have this time where yeah, there's a drastic change in the length of the days, and we spend so much more time in the dark, and it can be very scary, especially to you know, previd our people. It's very scary to be in the dark. And so you start contemplating, right like what's out there and what is the meaning of it all?
And contemplating the stars and you know, seeing you know, now some people are experiencing, you know, a lack because you know the food sources have dried up, and so what do you do? Well, let's get sort of you know, you could say projected out right or you're internalized from the divine. When people are trying to make sense of the world, what does all of this mean? What do I do with our deepest existential fears?
And so then we sort of call upon the divinities that call upon the stars, call upon something that's bigger than us, to say, what do I make of this? Right like, I'm sitting in the dark and I'm terrified of what's over there? Exactly make of this? And comfort and answers exactly. I always teach that, you know, there are certain questions that religions help humans with. What is the meaning of life? What is my place
here, what happens when I die? They are these huge questions and we don't really have answers to them as humans, and so we've looks for answers. And one of the ways where we look for answers is we contemplate what else is there? And so in the contemplation of what else is there, we connect to this divine right, the ground of all being behind what I can see, right, if I can see the cycles of nature doing what they do, and in the spring life comes back. You mean there's a
resurrection that happened. Yeah's life resurrect right? And then in the winter, Oh, things die, right, they kind of go underground and there's a hibernation period. And so when I say there's a sacrilezing of the of the cycle of the seasons, you know, you can look at it secularly and as that, or you can recognize, like, but there's something behind this when we really contemplate, because where did we come from? Where do we go? What's the meaning of it all? You know? I was raised,
as I said earlier, I was raised Catholic. And the Catholic version or the Christian version of Christmas, is that there is this hope of new birth coming. This baby, this the light, the star in the sky. It's you know, it's like hit you over the head metaphor that don't worry in this dark days, there is some brightness up ahead. We just
got to get this newborn baby growth a little bit. You're right, and so exactly we're thinking about the return of new life and even the idea of having an evergreen tree, like bringing an evergreen tree into your home and putting bulbs on it. That's about the continuity of life and fertility. And a
lot of people don't realize that. Who are you know, maybe a lot of Christians don't realize it either pagan or at least pre Christian rituals that were seeing as people maintained the hope through the darkest days that yes, there will be life again. What are the biggest ways we're saved? What are the biggest similarities between how the Jewish, the Muslim and the Christians celebrate these holidays? Do you us, of course have Hanakkah? What do Muslims have this
time of year? Well, they have various festivities or feasts, and one is around the recognition of the prophets. The prophet Muhammad's birthday. And so you know, Muslims and Jews are they don't have the notion of a savior right coming into the world to save us. So their festivals are more about
honoring ongoing life without attributing it to a savior figure. Right. So we have in Judaism and Islam festival season, right, and for Christians it's like, okay, we're going to have a festival around the birth of our savior. So what we see across the board and all of them, as we might say, is this, I wanted to hold on to the continuity of life. Like we're going to go through this dark time, the skies are
dark, whatever, but we're recognizing that we're not alone. We're recognizing that we can still come together and like hold on to each other and hold on to hope in these dark days. And hey, let's celebrate and get together and then share bread and like we've probably have back our ancestors probably sat around those campfires. What do you say, do you have a message for people who have You know, religiosity is declining in this country as mental health problems
are increasing. There actually is a high correlation. I mean, I teach health psychology, and I'm a scientist, but religiosity is highly correlated with better health and better mental health. So what do you say to people who want to celebrate these traditions but may not actually believe the doctrine any longer. Well,
there's lots of ways to do it. I mean, there are people who are secular Jews, so so well, yeah, I celebrate Hanakah because you know, Hankakah is really this festival about survival for one thing, and it's a coming together that it's the desire for humans to come together and celebrate something into as you said, share bread. So there's should I say, health and wellness in coming together. And so we don't feel that we're alone.
We don't feel like we're isolated, and that's so important for humans is to not feel isolated. And in terms of our health and wellness, our mental health, we need to feel like we're accepted someplace that we are and we have a home that we're seen and heard and embraced and welcomed. And we know what happens to humans who are isolated, not good for us. We went through exactly, it's not you know exactly exactly, and so what ends up happening. You know, as you were saying, like I'm sitting
around the fire, what do humans do? We're going to tell stories, right, We're going to lean into these stories and you know, have a little children ask as the adults and the elders what's the meaning of that star over there? Or how do we come to live here? And then there's going to be this great mythologizing, right, I want to use the word mythologizing and myth making. Some people will say, oh, well, then it's not real. It's realer than real, it's truer than true, because
it gets that these existential truths. So different cultures, different religions will have different ways of talking about life and new life and death and rebirth and celebration. But in fact we're still getting to the same existential issues that humans have and some answers. Our brains just don't do well if we don't have some kind of way to make sense of life, Doctor Dennie Smartin, we have
to go to a break. I do want to say that if someone's listening and they are alone on this Christmas Eve, stay tuned, because at the end of the show, I've got some coping strategies for you in ways, how you can have the joy of the the season in other ways. But when we come back, you wrote a very interesting blog about, of all people, Beyonce and how she's freeing many young women sexually through her song Church Girls. Let's talk about this when we come back. You're listening to the
Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand. Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. On this wonderful Christmas Eve, my guest, Doctor Dearnise Martin, is a professor at Loyola Marra Mount University and she specializes in African American religions and Doctor darnis you know I talk on the show about relationships.
I usually don't talk about sexuality unless it's in terms of relationships, cultural pressures on sexuality, relationship dynamics and its impact on sexuality. I'm not a plumbing expert. However, you wrote a very interesting article that I read online about Beyonce and her song Church Girls, which we just heard a little bit as we were coming into this. How is she freeing young women up?
Well, you know, miss Fiance is doing all the things. And one of the things she's doing in her message her music is she's centering women, not She says to me, women as being empowered, autonomous, making our own choices and resisting a lot of the cultural baggage. That's been a sign to us. As we know, girls and women are sexualized from a very young age by the society itself, by the patriarchy itself. But heaven forbid, when a girl or woman decides for herself who she's going to be,
and in her song Church Girl, she really is. It's just upsetting a lot of Christians terribly because she really is giving permission to women to dress the way they want to say. I can move my body, I can go out to a club, I can do things that I that's in which I celebrate my body and that and God is not mad, right, So it's this, it's this double edged thing because when you're a good Christian girl, you're expected to behave in a certain kind of way and be a godly woman.
Girl up to be a godly woman, and yeah, we should actually talk about that. I remember when I had you on as a guest on my podcast Mating Matters, and we were talking about how religions often control female sexuality as a way to control their membership. In other words, they tell you you should only have sex with somebody of your religion. You probably shouldn't masturbate because that's a waste of sperm. You probably shouldn't be gay because you're
not going to procreate that way, and we need to just so. They make all these rules traditionally around sexuality, and female Christian girls carry the brunt of the pressure. Talk about that pressure. Yes, yeah, so black girls are. I'm in a lot of traditional or conservative Christian churches there. They're police right, like how you sit, what you wear. If you are a girl or young woman and you're in church and your skirt is too
short, meaning when you sit down your knees are showing. Well, you might have an older woman from the church come and give you a lap cloth to cover you, and she may say something to you or not. She may just put that lap cloth over you. And even if she is whef she says it or not, it's she's saying your skirt is too short, and you are a distraction to the men. So if it's somehow our fault,
they are our fault that men get erections. Yeah, exactly. And so someone is the men are preaching, or the beacons are up on the and then there you are. They can see your knees. So you're being policed. You're being told, you know, don't show this, don't show that, or maybe your skirt is too tight, your dress is too yea. Our culture at large is sending the message that women should, you know, be beautiful and show it all on Instagram. And so they're living in
this state dual economy if they will. But what has Beyonce done with her song? What is the message she's saying to these girls. She's saying, I can be a well one, I can have autonomy over how I look, what I wear, where I go, and God still loves me.
And she's resisting the institutional church is sort of hyper policing of a girl and a woman's body to say, you are not the Bossamie, right, Medie, you can't exclude me from having a relationship with God because I choose to wear this dress or have sex outside of wedlock, right, I just have sex more pleasure, right exactly. So she's giving women a voice to say,
yes, this is actually okay. You can you can have autonomy over yourself because you know, as we were just saying, otherwise, you're heavily policed, and you don't think you have a right right. You don't think you have a right have rights to your own body. You don't think that you have that you can speak up for yourself, like if someone is, you know, crossing a boundary towards you, somehow, it's your own fault.
And in the song, Beyonce is saying no, I am in charge of me, And just that alone is enough to make a lot of conservative Christians mad. But I think it's also freeing up a lot of young women in America and giving them some sense of relief and restoring their self esteem. Doctor Darnise Martin, always a pleasure to have you on our show, professor at Loyola Marramount University, specialist in African American religions and histories. Have a
wonderful, one wonderful holiday season. Thanks, thank you, and thank you you, thank you. When we come back, I have another very special guest, the executive producer of the new Van Go Immersive Experience. How going through an immersive experience might actually reduce our stress when we come back. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You know, I am obsessed with immersive experience and virtual reality and anything that makes my eyes and ears and sometimes
even smells get activated. We love to have our senses stimulated. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't love to go to traditional art galleries where I can be calm, I can breathe, I can read the nice little plaque beside the painting, and I can have a moment where I can go back for you know, three hundred years and imagine this artist's life. But if you haven't been there yet, you need to go check out the new Van
Go Immersive Experience in Montebello. It's about ten minutes drive from downtown and I'm thrilled to tell you that we have the executive producer of the exhibition right here, John Saylor. How are you fine, Doctor Wennie, Thank you so much for having me on. And I think that we will fall into the previous category of immersive experiences in br but we do have a wonderful subject matter in Vincent Bango. I'm sure. Now make sure I said your last name
correctly. Is it zaloralor Salar John Zalor? There we go, So just so you understand, he's not only the executive producer, and he's a curator, a distributor of world renowned immersive experiences that include you might have seen Titanic, the Artifact Exhibition, Gires World Exhibition, Bodies the exhibition I love that One Star Trek the exhibition. You have been around the world creating these kinds
of experiences for us. But let's talk about why Van Go of all the great artists, Well, Van Go is the rock star of the art world.
And when you create an immersive experience, or when we created our first immersive experience, we really wanted it to be focused on digital art, and we wanted there to be a clear storyline, and we wanted to have a great body of work, and mitzen Bango's work progressed incredibly through his really short period of pain ten years to a finale that was bold, brilliant colors with
thick brushstrokes that had all this implied motion in them. So with the immersive elements, the digital animation that we can overlay onto his paintings, we're able to actually bring those paintings to life in a way that I think van Go
would have done had he been able to. So he was just a natural choice from that regard from the art itself, but also his story is well known by all of us, so many of us, and it's a story that also is really relatable to us of not only a struggling artist, but a person trying to find themselves, which he really does through his art. Near the end of his life. Yeah, it's no secret that van Go suffered from all kinds of mental health issues. I mean, you know,
I don't know what diagnosis he would have been given today. I would suspect it might be something like bipolar mood disorder or borderline personality disorder, you know, yeah, depressive episodes. But a lot of his struggles actually made him a better artist. Would you agree with that. It's really it really is true, and you really hit on a lot of those diagnoses. He had postmoredom as well as epilepsy and alcoholism and insomnia. Wow, so he strugged
with a lot. But he wrote over seven hundred letters to his brother Theo, and in those letters he really talks about his struggles, but he also talks about how he takes those struggles and he channels them into his artwork. So what you find is a lot of times the more pain he's in or the more stripe he's going through, the more perfectly beautiful in this new way
his paintings are. And then you also see him expressing himself on the canvas in the like in the version of Starry Night where the stars in the sky are very turbulent. There's incredible turbulence in the sky, which is a reflection of what's going on within him. So he really was able to channel those works, that those feelings into his artworks. Yeah, you know, it's I think when we have uncomfortable feelings as humans, we do what we can
to try to discharge it from our bodies. You know, like if you have a bad meal, you go on to yelp, and you put a bad review, right, we want to get rid of negative feelings by getting it out. He obviously had this talent. I'll say, I'm certainly no artist. Words are what I work in and the only time I write poetry is when I'm sad and crying, So that must be a thing that we do. We certainly know that journaling, for instance, for the average person
can be very cathartic for them. But van Go, he had this brilliant
visual visual intelligence, uh work, His craft of course was inspiring. What would you say is your favorite van Go in relation to knowing about his struggles, Well, you know, for me, one of my favorite Bengo paintings is his iris Is painting, which he painted near the end of the time when he was he had committed himself to you know, essentially a monastery or a mental health you know, asylum or sanitarium that was in a monastery and he was in the south of France, and as he started to find peace
within himself through this this time that he was he was recovering come really what was a psychotic break, he painted these incredible flower paintings, and the Irises is one of those paintings that has these brilliant blue colors and also has these wonderful sharp brushstrokes in the foreground that show his in the influence of Japanese art on his work. Japanese arts used a lot of wood cut techniques and then
Go really included those to create more depth in his work. And then really, the more I get to know him, the more I like these these quieter paintings that are just these beautiful paintings of nature because he was so he found his solace in mere walking in fields or enjoying a bouquet of flowers or a garden of flowers. So really it's a kind of a It's one of my favorites because it really connects me to him as an artist. And the good news is that you are bringing his work in a new way to a
new generation. John, can you hang with me when we come back. I want to talk about the Van Go immersive experience and what people can expect. I'm hoping I can improve my mental health by going there. So we'll be back after this world. We'll be back after this. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app KFI AM six forty on demand