Staying Fit
Photo Collage: MOA Staff; (Source: Courtesy NBC)
Today show coanchor Savannah Guthrie, 52, hopes to inspire readers to lean into their faith with her new book of personal essays, Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere. While acknowledging her own Christian perspective, Guthrie hopes the book is also “universally appealing, in that there are reflections and lessons that can be compelling to people of different faiths — or no faith at all.” She shares how she talks to her kids about God, why she finds Taylor Swift inspiring and how she’s rearranging her priorities in her 50s.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What prompted you to write a book about your faith?
In her new book, Guthrie explores how her faith has affected her everyday life experiences.
Someone said, “Would you ever want to write something about faith?” And before I immediately said, “No, I don’t want to write anything about anything,” which is my usual response — I’m a mom. I’ve got a job. I’m not looking for extra credit. I don’t want to write a memoir. I don’t even remember my whole career. Plus, it’s boring. Who wants to hear about me? — [But] I was like, I could actually get excited and interested in that. It’s a passion. It’s because I find it endlessly interesting and intellectually challenging, and emotionally thrilling. I felt like I might be able to try that. I really just started with an essay, and then I started to have kind of a vision of different subjects and how things might fit in, and I just kind of followed it.
How do you talk to your kids [son Charley, 7, and daughter Vale, 9] about God?
Well, we talk about God all the time. I try to carry on what my sister so memorably said. … There were five Guthries, so she would say, “God was the sixth member of our family.” Both my husband and I try to keep God really present in our everyday lives. Obviously, we say our prayers at night, [and] if the kids are having a problem or something’s going on, or they mess up, I say, “It’s OK. Let’s tell the truth to God, tell the truth to yourself and it’s gone.” I just try to keep it current with them. The older they get, the harder their questions will be. My view is, my job as a mom is to share the faith that I know that has meant so much to me, especially because I know as their mom that I won’t always be able to be with them, protecting them. I know for myself that certainly as I became a young adult … I never felt alone, because I always felt God with me. I’m trying to share that God that I know with my kids, so that God is with them, too. So long after I’m gone, they will have that faith. But the part that I also know very clearly and accept is that faith is between any individual human and God. And I’m going to tell them what I know, and then it’s up to them to choose for themselves whether or not they believe, and I leave space for that.
It sounds like you and your daughter, Vale, had a different kind of spiritual experience not too long ago … at a Taylor Swift concert?
I knew that’s where you were going! I’m trying to get some boondoggle with our show [to go again in October]. I don’t want to be overly glib, so I won’t call it a spiritual experience, but I will call it a cultural and formative growing experience. I loved it probably more than my daughter did. It was amazing.
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