Episode 139 - What Now?

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our world is built with stories [Music] sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other the liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart [Music] so i was thinking earlier today about the nature of story and how story has a beginning and an ending and where you begin a story matters where you end the story matters and anything outside of like those walls outside of that framework you know it doesn't really matter much to us when we're consuming a story we don't usually you know go home worrying about what became of sleeping beauty in her prince after the wedding or whatever you know like we don't think too much about how they die or what happens after the credits roll usually how the star quarterback's career ended you know after everybody hoisted him up on their shoulders and as consumers of story we just sort of stop where where it ends and we move on and i was kind of thinking of that in relationship to religion and belief and deconstruction and reconstruction and one of the things that we get asked to talk about a lot at the liturgists and we get a lot of questions around this is uh what what now right okay you've we've gone through this whole story of like i pulled apart the hermeneutics of of this issue about hell or about why why god doesn't actually hate gay people or you know like what did the issue we've gone through this whole journey of moving past this really harmful story oh the dragon has been slain you know the hero has returned home and when you finally get to this moment and you and then here you are right it's like this story okay that's that's done i'm past that now what do we do now exactly we're still here i'm still me there's still all this shit in my life so what am i supposed to do now and am i supposed to reconstruct some new thing am i supposed to find some other system or orthodoxy to belong to um and that's that's what we're going to talk about today and i'm joined here on the call by dr hillary mcbride william matthews and kevin garcia and kevin yeah maybe welcome first of all kevin love when you get to be on the show um i'm so sorry no don't ever apologize for meowing i just wanted to make sure i heard him meow yeah you're not going crazy it's not that you've been alone for too long you heard that is that indeed is that one of those cardi b things you know like she has her little signature sounds that's your signature sound it could be i'd like to make it my signature sound now that's good all right before i go on the track you're just gonna hear yeah somewhere and that's how you know kevin's on the show yeah yeah it's like when little when lil wayne's on the track you can hear him lighting up right before his well maybe because people uh i mean some people are familiar with your work but kevin could you just start the ball rolling a bit with this conversation by kind of yeah sharing i'd love to hear a little bit of your story in in regards to you know your relationship to beliefs and religion and how wrestling through all these big questions have impacted you and your journey right uh that we're going to start two years ago because i think that's where this call like that experience is most relevant i started seminary two years ago and i started getting a masters of divinity because i was convinced that uh well no at the time i really wanted to be a pastor in the classical sense and it was both like i saw it as like my duty to my community of hurt queer former evangelicals to like go in and reform the church because that's what we got to do the church needs to be saved the church needs to change and i have to be the one to change it that was a big focus of my initial foray both into justice work was in reforming policies that affected people on church level both local and then policy wise and then it kind of evolved from there into recognizing like huh this is this is a by and large a system um these questions happen because of seminary i started to study how we got the old testament how we got the new testament how do we get the bible in this form and then in the form we have it and then what is the history of translation and also what is the history of this text within the context of the cultures around it and what does that mean anthropologically for the development of religion and you know first comes is hell real next comes is heaven real then did jesus die for nothing and then it's like ah now there's a good question that's right now but at the time it was terrifying it was almost as if if i dropped this belief if i like you know if i move away from this thing who am i who am i without the church was really the big question underneath it's like who am i without this institution um and so i started to explore well who would i be i'm just like well who would you be if you stayed that's another question you can ask at least for me and i kind of came to this conclusion of honestly it i kind of came to the severe like eh whatever that's what i that this is where i label like my feeling about the church it's like i hope it does good i hope it reforms itself but i'm not i'm not going after the big c church to try and reform it i've got a cute little black baptist queer church i go to in atlanta we do good by our people and by our community and that's good enough for me um and i'm just not interested in trying to reform an institution that does not want to be reformed which is why i think that what i've learned especially since covett began is that an individual practice that connects you to the greater whole is can be just as powerful if not more effective in getting you to a place of peace than going to church every sunday ever did um and so that's what i'm kind of exploring right now is like what does it look like to keep some sort of practice that i make or that i can help others create how can i borrow the from the traditions that i've grew up in the traditions of you know from around the world how do i listen to contemporary voices that are still alive who are teaching us about what it is to be present um so i'm right now i'm in the middle of a huge experiment spiritual experimental phase in my life and it's fucking fascinating i'm super curious about what has supported you to be okay being in an experimental phase like what are the inner and social resources that make the experimental phase exciting and adventuresome without it being threatening right i think i definitely had an advantage with my graduate program i switched my program in the middle of it to a masters of practical theology which for folks who don't know practical theology is actually a study within the field of like seminary studies so like a lot of people do mdivs or like will get a master's in systematic theology and they'll work through that stuff or history and practical theology has kind of become an academic practice within the past 20 years but it's still kind of the black sheep of the seminary world because what practical theology asks is what is this doing here and now what does this practice what does this theology have to do how does it impact the bodies in the room also who created it which bodies created it how is time placed culture informing this it's like it's like be it's hyper critical spirituality and then saying take what works leave behind what doesn't and i think i having the support of my seminary who still graduated me even though i fully admitted like in one of our yeah i practiced witchcraft on our campus i was like yeah like they weren't weirded out by it at all they're like yeah it's like you know presbyterians like the really academic ones they can they can take anything truly um but i think having that initial support from some mentor figures to say you've got it you've got something special keep going um i think my preaching professors like were the most supportive for me and then i think also the other part that i have a big advantage of is uh most of my friends are queer just um i think it just comes from my social location a lot of my friends are queer and understand that spirituality is fluid because a lot of us are either gender fluid or sexually fluid so it just it kind of just expands out from that that i've got this really cool community of people who are experiencing very similar things a feeling of multiple religious belonging is the term within my field and for me it feels natural now because i now kind of i really understand that god is not in a building and god is not in a denomination god is not in a certain particular theology god is the thought that the thought behind the theology and i think because i've like it's it's very interesting it's like i hold two things that are true all of it matters deeply because like having a positive experience on this plane i would like to have one and then the other part of it is like at the end of it all it kind of doesn't cause like what comes next i don't know so you can hold it loosely and you've been supported to trust yourself yeah in the direction and your community in the direction that you're heading yeah and i'll say i'm very lucky it's a huge privilege to have the kind of people in my life that i do because i know not everybody does i'm so glad that you're saying that because i think when we talk about this question even when you're posing at michael like what what now i think about how so many people have been trapped within belief systems because it's been their key to social connection and the idea of being spirit spiritually curious requires actually a fragmenting of the community that supports them as a person and to know that you don't have to have those things in conflict for you specifically kevin that actually you have found another community that really that you felt feel really well situated within and share so much congruence with what an opportunity to then lean into the adventure and the adventure and the curiosity but i think what i'm hearing is that that's been central for allowing you to expand in that way i would agree so this this process that you're describing of your journey your story in terms of you know leaving one thing joining another or spending some time in the wilderness so to speak alone um what was i know the feeling of what you're talking about mainly how when you just move on it's sometimes the moving on thing is really hard but then you do ultimately get to a place where it's just free where you're like not plagued by a lot of the same frustrations or theological quandaries or um or whatever and sometimes that process takes years but what would you say to somebody that is still in that process because i feel like a lot of people are still very much in that space mainly in the way of maybe they've left maybe they're trying to figure it out but they still feel plagued and dogged by those conversations they had that left them broken by the the things the pastor said that um really disrupted their spirit or their their consciousness um what was like a few tools that um you were able to kind of war with so to speak as you were wrestling um into this new place that you're in i think i had to re-understand forgiveness i hate saying that word sometimes because i know it can be like you're asking me to forgive somebody who um yeah that's that's my voice that is nobody else's voice that's my inner exasperation [Laughter] um because that's what it there is a uh the text i have been working with for the past kind of a year of my life is a course in miracles and one of the things i was reading in it today is like you seek to understand conflict um you know you seek to understand the conflict within yourself and so the more that you understand it and acknowledge it the more that you actually love it um rather than understanding that you don't need to understand the conflict you just need to be rid of it it's just because like it really is like it's so complicated some things like we hear the voice of the pastor in our head we hear the voice of our non-affirming parent we hear the voice of that youth pastor from when we were young telling us about our sexuality and what was good or bad about it we hear the voice of abusive partners or parents rather and then the question then becomes is just like are those the voice of god question mark and so for me i had to i think i mean honestly i've been in therapy for the past two years every other week with my with the same therapist which is like longest relationship of my life um but she's really helped me forgive myself for the time that i think that i wasted um i think the reason we like we kind of have like these interesting like holds in or like hold outs not even really hot it's this attachment to our old life where it's almost just like well i had this this and this they treated me terribly but i also had home and it's almost it's hard to it's like even though it's painful it's hard to let it go because we in some ways are afraid we're never going to find another one like even though we're not even attached to it anymore we still hold on to the painful memories because at least it's home and i think it's like it's just like the way is very clear just let it go just like yes you did some things you said some things you thought some things because you grew up in a specific environment and they and a lot of us we have to realize many of us were manipulated many of us were lied to and it's not our fault that we ended up like so for so many of us we want to blame ourselves for all of our weird neuroses and for all of our perceived problems and the way that we act but it's like no like i am behaving exactly as i was programmed to exactly as i was conditioned to so what would it be like for me instead to just love that scared part of me that is reacting in a way that i'd rather it not how do i love myself and forgive that you know the scared you know for me it's like scared nine ten-year-old uh wow i find myself having emotions come up even now uh you know it's this it's this thing i'm just like i'm so sick of being alone it's like the thing that comes up over and over again so i have to remind myself just like look around you're not and so that's what i have to do for me is every single time there's a conflict that comes up every single time there's something that disturbs my peace i i try to bring radical self-compassion to it in a way that feels like over the top for most people but i've never been more happy and never been more just at peace than when i started treating my my sadness with compassion and then as you do that you find it it comes back to you it reintegrates it's not this thing that's separate over here it's this thing to bring in so that's what i don't know if that answered the question at all now in hindsight i'm sorry no that was beautiful thank you i have a friend who told me this dream that she had that i thought was so powerful she's going through like a really hard time and a lot of the people that she was depending on in her life have fallen away in the last several months or a year and especially during quarantine she just feels really alone and she had this dream where she was she had she dived off of this really tall diving board that was really scary and she just went too deep and she realized she had to get to the surface like she was it was too deep she had she was gonna run out of breath and so she's doing like this frog like real powerhouse with her legs and her arms to try to get to the surface like oh that was real visceral and all of a sudden like right when she was about to run out of breath she hit her head on the bottom of the pool and she realized she was all of her effort was bringing her the wrong way and and so then she was just like ugh and she just had to like let go and like oh no [Music] i'm gonna die and she let go as soon as she started letting go she felt herself itself start drifting towards the surface and eventually fell in the air and i just thought that was such a powerful dream and so much like so much in that and she she's been she was using an example of like these people have fallen away but she's found that she's been like pushed out of the nest if you will like the baby bird but yeah the universe is still supporting her like she's seeing now that those systems of support were never actually the support in themselves they were like god's fingers right like these people were like god's fingers and now there's other things there's little little synchronicities within the universe there's little unforeseen relationships unforeseen little moments of support and love that are all around if you just like see it just let go and like pay attention and that support that not aloneness i just reminded me of what you just said like look around you're not alone if you if you open your eyes it's it's there it reminded me of that story about jesus finding the coin in the fish's mouth it's like you you think your support's gonna come from somewhere but it's that's just the end of the branch of the universe that you're you're being sustained and taken care of by what is not just by that specific little thing that you think is supporting you and so finding that wherever you can with your eyes open can be such a profound experience i think today's episode of the liturgist podcast is brought to you by the great courses plus which is a streaming service that is an excellent resource to expand your knowledge on a variety of subjects it's a great place to become more informed creative inspired and relaxed there are thousands of lectures about almost any topic imaginable new courses are added all the time and you can watch or listen from your phone or tv with the great courses plus app it makes learning so easy and accessible jesus and his jewish influences is just one of the many videos available to watch or listen to from the great courses plus dive into the ancient world that jesus was born into and understand the influences that shaped him such as how the israelite monarchy under david and solomon eventually fell apart over the proper worship of the god of israel now is the perfect time to sign up for the great courses plus and our listeners can check out a course or lecture for free today that's free access to their entire library don't wait any longer sign up today using our special url start your free trial at dot com thegreatcoursesplus.com liturgists that's thegreatcoursesplus.com liturgists this episode of the liturgist podcast is brought to you by better help it can be really difficult to find a good counselor or therapist and a lot of us need one these days there's just a lot of pain a lot of things preventing people from being able to have a sense of well-being or achieve their goals and better help is a place where you can find therapy you can find and connect with a counselor a licensed counselor in a safe and private online environment it's extremely convenient and affordable you can start communicating in under 24 hours in fact so many people have been using better help that they are recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you'll get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again that's betterhelp help.com liturgists [Music] i'm curious for y'all what has been because all of us obviously have had some like interesting and lovely faith transitions in the past few years because lulz it's the world what's been the thing that has allowed you to helpfully move through the big like existential questions that come up or if there's been a practice that has been sustaining for you for me i think the two things are probably a framework that my parents gave me for human development and studying neuroscience and the first one some both my parents are therapists and my dad's also a scholar and academic and and has um kind of written extensively on healing family of origin wounds and i remember a a a particular linguistic turn of phrase that we would say constantly around the dinner table was human growth and development human growth and development i remember hearing from a very early age that it was actually good and right to change how we see the world that that was actually inherently part of our whole person and i could break it down say bio psycho social spiritual but really like our whole person development we we are wired to change and develop and grow and that that is actually an expression of our flourishing and in fact if we inhibit that in some way we could look at that and say where is the pathology why why is the system stuck why why is it looking the same as it did before and when that is the paradigm that's been given to you about being human that holds the ability for you to change and see that that is good and for your change to even surprise you and surprise other people and that it isn't a dangerous thing but it is actually a mark of health so i think that particular thing [Music] uh has allowed me to feel so curious and to allow myself to be different without it feeling threatening and then the second piece is is although the model of psychology has been oriented typically around the pathology of a person like when we actually look at the origins of the field of study it was around what what is problematic here and how do we get it back to some sort of like typical functioning and even the origins of therapy looking at dysfunction psychopathology and then providing environments that correct but only recently have we seen kind of recently in the wave of this field more research into an exploration kind of empirically into what is it what is a non-pathology like pathologized perspective of the human and and what's going on there and we actually see that it's our disposition as humans to flourish and be well that's actually how our system wants to be and our system doesn't necessarily want to stay stuck but if we don't have the right conditions then that's how we exist and a simple analogy that i think about constantly my practice is how if you have a a paper cut you don't have to think about it healing for it to heal right your your body actually wants to repair itself that there is this this drive in us that is pushing us always always towards uh goodness thriving connection interdependence reparation and that is actually a fundamental condition of our existence and it's all of these stories that told us otherwise that we have ourselves like kind of tripped up in yeah so that i think those two things have really been supportive for me to feel like my exploration is both good and will take me towards good and that those two things that i can i can always trust right and i understand it's kind of backwards because i'm going in through like hyper cerebral empiricism trusting spirituality and personal growth but that's what works for me so that's so interesting because you're uh you're like such a heart person that like joining the head in that way seems to be powerful for you i'm kind of the opposite like i am more naturally use my head to try to find center and try to and like that's where i tend to be based so for me practices that involve the heart more bring me into a more just i thought that was interesting which i think is i mean when i'm thinking about what actually is spiritual growth like if i could cut across like trans religious trans theological positions i think it is anything that takes us outside of what we know and the story that we've been telling about what is anything that stretches us just beyond that seems to be kind of a universal condition for our spiritual growth and development so if you think come on god is what did you say we were just preaching preach preaching okay but not church too long [Laughter] but if we have this idea that god is here then actually what we need for our growth is to believe oh god was not not here god was there or god is you oh maybe god is me oh god is not this well that's exactly where god is and this is the box that i've been told that god is in and for me to actually have healthy spirituality healthy growth is to somehow stretch and expand and step outside of that whatever it is so i think about the spiritual growth and development that comes from men within patriarch patriarchal context learning to listen or people who are in consumeristic and capitalistic context learning to be without kind of a dependence on on product and money and achievement in certain ways or for women who are experiencing the kind of self-silencing that comes with being in a particular context to practice using voice or for the queer community who has been dismissed and devalued to say no no we're we're good and actually we know we know god in an intimate way you thought god wasn't in us um actually we're closer why am i yeah hillary that's one of the i'm giving that a top five hillary rants of all time that was really yeah and i think i wanna i wanna add to that list i think just like those those of us who are experienced with having certainty all the time being able to sit in the uncertain there you i think my my evolution was kind of embedded in the very thing that felt oppressive and i feel like that's been my experience with god with spiritual evolution is the very thing that is meant for my oppression oftentimes gives me tools to liberate myself and growing up in the black church one of the kind of core tenets of a lot of our uh theology or or orthopraxy really is this idea of progressive revelation that god is constantly giving us progressive revelation taking the children of israel you know out of egypt and into the promised land or um and you know and moses receiving the ten commandments which is a type of progressive revelation from where they had come from um and then obviously seeing the ark through the prophets all the way into jesus um you know you heard it said unto you eye for an eye but i say love your brother as yourself progressive revelation um and so growing up in church it's like you know those the moralisms and the the purity culture and the you know all the oppressive things that we can all rant about evangelicalism uh was funny because it carried part of this liberation because it it was giving us language to learn how to see god outside of that box um and to to bring us to kind of pop us out of the uh the the closed experience that religious communities often create for us right they they're often these ecosystems or these greenhouses to kind of like grill the plants and you know but at some point your plant grows beyond the if it grows it's going to grow beyond the greenhouse it's going to reach taller and it's going to want to go wider and the greenhouse no longer works so where do you get rooted and i feel like i know that's been my experience i know that's been my um feeling of like this house is too small this house is too the spiritual house is too small the this this some of us even feel like our this physical house is too small like my body feels i feel limited but i know that there's more um and so it's scary though to go how do i plant myself now in in a new soil outside of the greenhouse because i was with the other plants and i was safe right and i was contained and i was in formation and the funny thing is you think the greenhouse is the forest and then you open your eyes and you realize there's a whole whole world come on william in a whole terrain that is so much wider and bigger and more expansive than any of us could ever have imagined and the field is just open we have been so contained to to picture ourselves in each other in these small containers and yet yet there's still something that has always called my soul to a higher plane to a there's a reach there and i feel like again the people who who often times whether intentionally or unintentionally oppressed me gave me the tools for that liberation whether they meant to or not because god hashem is way bigger than their ability to use god to keep me in the box oh yeah come on somebody there it is oh everybody's preaching everybody's preaching i'm you guys you guys have um you and the community that was where some of the people in the zoo here were talking before um this started and you've changed my mind about some things in regards to tell us yeah um so one of the ways this conversation started behind the scenes was hillary recommended talking about reconstruction and that resonated with kevin and then i pushed to like can we frame it a little different way because reconstruction i have some thoughts about why i don't like about that idea and as i'm hearing all of you and and the zoom people and the three of you um i love i can just tell my that five thing that coming from the head first reconstruction has always immediately sounded like reconstructing a belief system to me because that's what was deconstructed was primarily a belief system and hearing that that's really not how everybody experiences their spirituality primarily through that lens and not what they rebuild is just another cerebral construct but those planters or the forests or practices or ways of being together ways of connecting reconstructing not just beliefs because i think beliefs are rigidities in being yeah um but faith is dynamic and living and connected and life and reconstructing structures that are not they're not they don't have to be rigid belief structures they can be patterns of behavior patterns of connection patterns of um new ways of being that that are helpful and so i've lost my uh bone to pick with reconstruction that's kevin that looks like you got a nit oh my goodness no i was just writing some things you were saying down later because i'm like that's good um see i need to come to conversations like this with like a pen and paper like i did back in the day like ready to annotate good thing is everything like being recorded oh my god you're right thank you but i like what you're saying about that michael because i think we exist in a and this is particularly a dynamic of settler colony colonialism which is like the supremacy of belief as an idea as a cognitive construct that we forget about the lived elements the lived experience of what it means to be human and have moved out of the lived experience into our evaluation or cognition and so like i remember having a huge i think pivot in terms of how i understood not only faith and spirituality but existence when i learned about the origins of the word belief as actually coming from the words by life that we think about belief as through the lens of i think cognitive supremacy and we forget that beliefs are meant to actually point us or point from or be bidirectionally influenced or in influence with life how we live that actually we're supposed to be able to tell our beliefs by how we live not just the things that we dictate to each other verbally who do you say that i am exactly who do you say that i am that is like the thing i come back to all the time is and i think this is like the one thing that my mom like she can still think i'm a christian if she wants to and that's okay but like i wouldn't i don't know if i don't think i would no i don't think i'd call myself a christian other people would look at my life and they're like oh you talk about jesus a whole lot oh you referenced the bible you reference and for me it's like yeah because that's the language i was given but i am so like i i use that because it's almost like that's the road by which i got out of uh imperial christianity so to speak um and so i talk about it in those terms because hey it's helpful for me to like have be able to explain how i believe and also to everyone else there are a zillion people out there who understand that language and so when i think about my work as uh as a spiritual director or a teacher i you um something marketing 101 says say it in the way that your audience needs to hear not necessarily the way that you want to say it and so not that i want to like market my faith to anybody but when i'm thinking about how do i connect a message of uh love and transformation and endless connection um if people don't understand what the fuck i'm talking about you know theology is only as useful as it is helpful and if you have all this high theology i've been like you know in our school like i spent i've spent an entire two semesters discussing systematic theology and i had an issue in every single one of my essays because i said i truly don't see why this question is relevant i would end all of my s i would go through it i would do it at the end of every essay i would say that because i just because like it's only how does it play out in my real life how's it playing out in the life of my friends is it moving me my black friends further towards liberation or further away from it that's really all i care about and if you can look at your beliefs and say why do i believe what i do it's because like it pushes me in this direction towards love justice equanimity and also i feel better on top of everything else and i think that shouldn't be discounted either the fact that of feeling good yes um yeah i had a patient come into therapy a couple years ago this ago really really stands out to me when i think about this conversation and this person said how come does my good theology make me feel so bad bye-bye and i think that that means that we need to do something different right that the impact it has on our lived experience gets to count too and i think that's also a reason why when we're working on creating new communities or we're separating ourselves from like former religious communities or fundamentalist communities it gets hard because we have all these people who tell us i'm telling you this because i love you i'm telling you you're going to hell because you're gay because i love you i'm telling you that you having premarital sex is gross and disgusting because i love you and so it's like how could like everyone's like well how can they say these things and just like it's very simple just like that because they think it's loving and so it's um a matter of like whose perception am i trusting my own like you know like you said just like if you have a paper cut it's data if you're hurting if your beliefs are leading you towards a painful experience of the world that's data respond to it like it's actually valid because it is [Music] so i want to go back to this conversation of deconstruction reconstruction um well even the way we frame this conversation as uh you know you first construct then you deconstruct then you reconstruct uh i don't think is really truthful to the natural messy rhythms of life right like hillary knows as a therapist the five stages of grief are not like systematic stages of like now you do this and now you do this and once you do this you never go back to that right you know how cyclical they can be and i think there's something inherent within deconstruction that automatically creates a reconstruction so a lot of people say the title of this episode so what what now right like what do we do now as if the deconstruction didn't already illuminate for us uh what is who we are and what we actually do believe now whether you can articulate it or not whether you've actually written it out uh thought through it or not but the very act of deconstruction in and of itself to me is inherently you you're not just tearing down you are reconstructing something too and so i think sometimes people get lost because they're like oh well i need to reconstruct now i've deconstructed so now i need to reconstruct and i'm like no you if this is this is an abstract idea you are if this is real for you you're embodying it which means that the thing that's been torn down has actually there has a new thing has actually been erected in in your life nothing can ever just be torn inside of you now they could ever just be torn down without some like ability internally whether you can acknowledge it or not to know what it what that now is like i know it's not that which means intuitively i must know that it does look like something over here again whether i i articulate it or not or consciously bring that in my awareness or not is one thing and i think sitting with ourselves even those of us that feel like we've been in deconstruction whatever i think if you really sit with yourself and really listen to yourself you have the reconstruction you have the new thing that that's being erected in your life the new house that's being built in which you're standing firm on um and a lot of people feel like well i just threw it all away so i don't know what i believe i'm like actually you do know what you believe you're just afraid to admit it that's right you're afraid to own it yeah and do you can it go the other way too where in what we think about is reconstruction yep it that we are also holding okay in our emerging we are letting go and tearing down certain things yeah like is it i'm right am i hearing you say that they're they're not these binary categories but they're always in like dialectical yeah they're they're dialectical they're cyclical um because the new thing that gets reconstructed will eventually you realize it's not enough room for you right yeah and and this is why this is honestly i mean i think the bible uses the analogy of of the spirit man so to speak as a house as an internal house or a temple right like that the you are the new temple right you are the container of the holy spirit but it's a house and in my father's house has many rooms right like and and what we're doing is we're we're constantly in a construction of this house in a tearing down of things a stripping of things and a building up of things and then to serve the purpose for the season of time we're in and then ultimately we realized now that doesn't fully work for the new season we're in or the new the new uh uh thing we're putting our hand to so we have to maybe tear down this wing of the house and actually reconstruct it differently um oh wait i actually didn't build that right or it it left out some things so maybe you got to go back in and so yeah it is a constant flow and energy of construction deconstruction reconstruction that never lets up it's a it's a dance between um performance and critique yeah it's where like we have the practice whatever it is try it out how did it feel how does it make the room feel i mean i think about like uh my church that i go to here in atlanta when you when we realized we could not meet on sunday anymore what do we do we pivot we figure out the next thing we yes we figure out oh this is a non-essential service what is the essential service of our spiritual community we check in with one another we still pray with one another where uh you know still meeting on zuma on sundays which is still weird but like for people like your practice can pivot and that's how i know that i came from evangelicalism because i love that feels like a five-point sermon series but this is like we are we are adapting right this is the thing with the paper cut is it's actually wired into us and it is our goodness and the expression of the holy in us that we can adapt and it's the fragmenting or the inhibiting of that that feels to me like anti-hypothetical yeah but that we are wired to change we are wired to pivot it's good yeah and i was thinking about like for so many of us the way that it starts out is that our brains get trained you know maybe in our old old world to like you know our brains are already where i like move towards pleasure and move away from pain and so i think for me it's when you live in an abusive system like that kind of gets a little cloudy because your fear will tell you or just like your experience will tell you if you thought this was bad it's even worse out there there's weeping and gnashing of teeth out there it's like it's a it's an automatic fearfulness of being an other again um and i think when we start dropping or changing beliefs like it uh there is a little bit of at least uh in my in my experience and i think other people maybe it's just like i don't want to like if i leave this behind am i leaving god behind am i going to be out and i think it kind of comes back to this fear of what if i get punished for doing something bad um and this belief that god is punitive um that still holds on for so many it's like the idea of what if i'm wrong and that's a really great question like what if we're wrong i mean we should probably repent sooner than later um but the better question that always turns me on a little bit is what if we're right rather than like like tiptoeing around these ideas like matt william you were saying i'm gonna get what william you were saying that as you are deconstructing you are already putting something new in its place because it was them it was the more uh delicious idea that replaced the other one if you will like the more appealing thing the thing that made more sense came in and replaced this thing at least on the conscious level the subconscious body level that's still wired for self-preservation that's where we have to meet ourselves with love love and kindness and compassion as we like learn what it is to trust ourselves again learn what it is to say no i'm right i know that i'm right and how i know that i'm right is the data i feel better i am more connected to my body uh i am having less days that are you know consistently blue um you know i'm learning how to love like what would it be like for us to believe that we might be right i um i loved what you i think it was before we started recording kevin but you were talking about the course in miracles uh and basically the two ideas that it comes down to which is um can you say the two ideas again yeah course says a course in miracles can be summed up in two statements one nothing real can be threatened and two nothing unreal exists so when you when you bring that into this idea about deconstruction reconstruction anything that you can deconstruct or reconstruct is not real so that question of like what but what if i go too far you cannot you can't deconstruct what actually is because by the time you arrive what actually is it is not parsable into thought it is not dissectible it is not speakable it is the ineffable it is the infinite it is this it is that which you cannot put boxes around anymore so you can't d you can't go too far you can't there's nothing to fear there's nothing to worry about in this process yeah and that's why good religion is always trying to push us forward because it out it intrinsically understands that it understands like once you name it it can't really like it it loses that thing so therefore you know it it's constantly begging us through parables jesus saying things like you can't put new wine into old wineskins right like and and so what do we care about the wine skin or the wine and i would imagine the wine being the the metaphor for you know uh uh ultimate reality and the thing that's ineffable that we can't quite name and it's like we're always trying to you know um and we need these at best we need flexible wine skins that are that are new that aren't old containers that we could at least begin to have this experience and name it but know that real quick it becomes old it goes there instantly um proverbs tells us that my lord's house is a house of new and old treasures and whenever i think about that this is you were talking about earlier in life how how like our old pastors sometimes armed us with the things that dc instructed yup and this was something from my old pastor and that the way he talked about it was like within our own tradition like we need to like look at our house like there are certain things that are for a time and a season there's certain beliefs that help us in the moment and then there are certain things that will pass into you know the storehouse you know there are certain things that are going to be put away or just saying hey do you remember when we used to think that that was weird and it's so it feel now for me it feels natural i think at first being able to just name [Music] the mistakes or the errors in belief i had before that seemed like a scary thing for a while because it's like if i admit that i was wrong then i'm bad if i'm bad i'm not good it was like no no that's not up for negotiation yeah yeah you're naming something super important which is that inherent worth gets to be different and distinct from an untouchable by by not only the beliefs but even the the life the by life parts of this too that we like i'm thinking back to that question i asked you right off the bat kevin about how what has allowed you to be spiritually curious and adventurous and and your it sounds to me like that safety within your community and that knowing that you're seen and loved and how how you have been able to through all of the practices that you've engaged in hold that within yourself and when that feels the most true then everything gets to be an extension of that not a way to find our way back into loving ourselves and being good [Music] i'm curious like i have particular thoughts about this from a developmental psychology perspective in terms of what our brains actually need to to exist in a world but i'm curious about uh the construction piece of this too um here we are talking about the what now but that inherently points to there was something before and what do we do about the something before and and is it possible to give ourselves an each other and perhaps the next generation a more well rounded uh loving [Music] version of the what so that so that may be and here's here's another part of the question so that maybe they don't have to do the what now or is the what now actually inherently good and part of our evolution and we will constantly be needing it and so why do we do we even need to carry the burden of giving a better what as if we need to protect them from that that evolution process i don't the image the image i got is i don't i don't know if we can ever spare people the journey i don't think we can ever spare them the journey like we can't say don't do that but i think what we can do is give them tools in their knapsack to say this will here's a here's a compass to help you find your way back home you're going to have to go on this journey because your soul desires it your soul needs to this will be part of your your growth in your evolution but hey at least maybe i can give you uh here's a tent for the journey here's a compass here's a book here's uh you know here's some boot here's a slide here's a slight map here's uh here here's some boots so when you tread water you know you don't you know you don't get too wet right like i think we're able as as models as leaders um you know to a new generation i think that's at best we're all we're only able to give is that type of um encouragement and tools for the journey but ultimately these kids got to go on their journeys in the same way i had to go on my journey and the same way you had to go on your journey um and i don't like i grew up with parents that constantly tried to like spare me and they were always like i went through that so you don't have to like my parents were always like uh you know my dad was like i used to smoke weed and drink so therefore you don't have to and it's like now wait a second wait a second that sounds like a raw deal in my voice you got to have the fun in the 70s no that's the same thing it's all it's the same thing with those pastors to say like i had sex before i was married but none of you kids get to do it i've learned i've gone through it i've learned i used to have sex with so many women all the time and it's like can i learn [Laughter] and that's what they're saying that's what these kids are saying they're like i gotta go through it like people said don't go to white evangelical churches and i was like guess what i'm gonna do i'm gonna go like sometimes you gotta go on a journey like the same thing happened to me my friend said don't go to that you know evangelical sexy church in midtown because they're gonna break your heart two years later [Music] my auntie said she was like be careful with those white people who are all about abortion she goes they are they don't really care about you they don't really care about black people they don't really like shit and i was like no you just don't get it you know at the time i mean i was like young 20s but i was like auntie that's just you know that's at the time it was like that's reverse racism you know like you're just judging white people right like and she's like she's like just judging that shit exactly and now i actually i've told her in the last couple of years several times i'm like you told you warned me you warned me and you were right she was like i know but you had to go through that you had to go through that that was part of your soul journey and what are the tools for the journey then like what's the tent what are the boots like is it is it you knowing your auntie is gonna be there that's that no matter what that's a lot of it is it what my parents told me about how like it's good to grow and change and so you don't have to be afraid of that yes like whatever and and what else like what are the tools yes i think for me the tools i have picked up is um it's gonna sound cheesy but my com uh what i would say is like um uh they say like bhakti like bhakti yoga which is like a devotional yoga practice i have a devotion um i have a devotional practice um come on now come on somebody we're excited about devotional practices now what it's just something [Laughter] listen you know listen everyone revival has broken out on the literature's podcast no yes no it's because it's not just bhakti it's karma yoga and it's yana yoga and it's all so there's different types of yoga it's all these different ways of coming to union and their their tools their technologies so i'm so glad that i learned the technologies from my pentecostal upbringing there were some technologies that have transferred the metaphors have changed the yes the myths have changed um but there's some technologies of uh our past our past that you can that you can bring along with you so the embodiment yeah the piece like hillary's being asking being specific right like so so you know yoga or um even switching back old school like praise and worship and the type of like radical expression of of of dance through uh um as a dance as a form of worship as a way to come back into yourself and feel embodied i think that's a tool uh for the journey like you said no matter what the metaphor is or the or the the religion there's so many spiritual technologies um what would be what would be some others um i uh i'm a big fan of i mean like daily practice of reading a workbook and of course like the workbook for students and of course in miracles one idea a day five minutes has changed my life i um having a practice of um uh this is a good song with the practice of my the self-care did i take my meds am i drinking enough water am i getting enough sleep am i eating uh enough that feels good am i moving my body in a way that feels good those are my five questions and that's so that for me i'm committed to that as a practice so that i can always i want so i can experience the world positively because so i can feel good um i think my personal practice i have learned to read tarot and work with oracle cards um which for me has been a tool of deep self-reflection and also like a way of connecting with what i would call holy spirit and when i think many people would like that feeling of all this you know the connection between everyone like uh the tool of um breathing yeah it's just like a concentrated breath practice um my last thing i would say is like i try to i try to do a little confession with people like whenever like i know that i've got something that i need help with it's not even so much like confession as much as like i need to ask for help and not feeling shame about needing to ask for help so i think that's how i've reframed it about less around like confession because that feels like i'm about to get punished and more like i am sharing a part of my story with someone so i can ask for help and so for me like i've had some weird uh food-related compulsive behaviors come up since the quarantine started and so i've had to ask for help and at first it felt really i didn't realize it's gonna feel shameful but it did and then i got i got the help i needed so i think like creating practices of normalizing asking for help if that's yes and that can work in all those things can work in different seasons of your life and again and then they're not oppressive in that way right like those are tools you're giving people for the journey that no matter where you are ideologically on a spectrum religiously on a spectrum sexually illness whatever spectrum you you are on um you know like i would add to that um always read outside your depth you know that wow um find a find a book that if you're super into this philosophy or that's really rocking the world find one thing that's kind of the polar opposite um as a way to challenge your your frameworks because i know for me that's what helped lead me out of a lot of things were i was very much in this one philosophy of thought whether it was you know pentecostalism or some supernatural prophetic world right and but i was also like oh but here's a walter brugerman book you know here's a rachel held evans book you know um and always just throwing one or two of those in the mix um uh to to get me out of either or thinking even with things that i was primarily agreeing with and thought were you know everything but teaching but my family taught me that because my parents in the denomination that we grew up in you know there was very strong holiness orthodoxy right but i would watch my parents and my aunts uh start reading like books outside of the denomination right oh oh this guy's actually saying some things that kind of differ here and a little and so i grew up feel like watching my parents and my that whole generation and my aunties and uncles kind of do spiritual exploration within the confines but still like hey i'm gonna dip over here and actually like entertain some thoughts and it would cause them and i would hear their conversations and i i feel like that was a tool that i learned early on um was to never just be over here always you know and i feel like that saved me throughout my into all my spiritual phases and evolutions was and it always helped me find that was a compass for me it helped me find my way back to myself i have something i know that we can all probably talk about um for a lot of people like who come from our world worship music especially christian worship music was a really powerful tool for many of our connection especially in many of our early spiritual experiences um and i'm wondering because like everyone's asking just like what is progressive christian worship music or like what is inclusive worship music or what and i wonder for y'all do you all have some kind of what is music a part of your i mean like two of you i know for sure music is a part of your expression um but i'm wondering like yeah what is like what role does music or what how is worship different now if there is like a worship practice for you michael do you want to jump in yeah sure for me it was funny because i i would always on the stage as a worship leader like i would always like not always i would occasionally try to exhort the congregation like this is just more opportunity like your life is an opportunity to be worship just bring these songs and this music and the singing into that as well and you can worship you can practice the presence of god washing dishes like brother lawrence did you can you can you know watch your kids as a form of worship and i would tell people that um and then finally it kind of actually clicked for me at some point because it was for me i needed the music at first that was my primary mode yeah and but that i think that technology um the actual technology there wasn't i mean music is involved in it but i think the actual thing that's happening is like a hard opening is a is a a letting go to the moment that in music you're you're in the moment right you have to be in the moment when you're in music or you're late you're rushing you're one you're not in it you're not in the groove you're not playing music music by definition as being in the moment so it was very helpful for me and it still is but like bringing that inner thing that was happening to the rest of my life now there's a music there's a it's all kind of like combined in strange ways where it's like there is a music to ev everything when you're in rhythm with your life when you're in the moment of your life when you're in flow um and that's sorry to go back to the yoga thing one more time i just why i danced when you started saying that it's just something clicked for me about um and just to be clear i think most westerners when you hear yoga you think of like yoga studios where you go and like exercise um and that's not that's not yoga means union and uh there's different different people say there's different like number of kinds of yoga but i like sad guru is a teacher that i really like and he talks about four different types of yoga and a lot of these things that we've all been saying in here the different types of like reading outside of your depth and all this stuff um fit i think fit into these four types of yoga um but i'm i'm a sucker for like meta constructs you know um but like you were saying kevin bhakti that's like the emotional um devotional heart centered uh it's a path of devotion and um karma is activity so like i think about justice work i think about um even like our earliest forms of activity and like being involved in the community and my evangelical upbringing were a bit more uh destructive they were a little bit more like let's go out and proselytize um but there was a a show up element that i'm glad i experienced even though overall it was pretty messed up um there was an element of like putting boots on the ground going back to that boots analogy of like actually showing up in the world um with some sort of activism some sort of like activity that that action that brings you into union um yana yoga is the is the yoga of knowledge it is the the yoga like that's that reading would fall into like learning how to think learning how to tell the truth learning how to align your what hillary some of what hillary was talking about before with like using using your head to connect your heart um that's the path of yana kriya is the um is like energy basically it's like um so maybe some of the breathing stuff you were talking about kevin um using your energy different ways of practicing with energy that bring you into union and when you have these technologies and sometimes it's most of us have one or two that are kind of primary but when you can start combining them and letting all of them inform you then you can move through all sorts of deconstructing and reconstructing and you've got tools in your hands to be able to move back towards the center move back to integrate life into in this moment in a way that you stay conscious of what's happening and that you don't get lost on these little rabbit trails of your idols um but that the things that the beliefs can become tools rather than rigid uh prisons for you the things that you're doing can be like launching pads into life rather than uh graveyards of dead um there's a there's a popular work we had a contrast there's a popular worship song out right now about graveyards is that uh is there really perfect how he turns god turns graveyards into gardens oh it's alliteration yeah it works um to answer your question about worship music i i think there are two different types of i'm gonna break it into two different types of worship when when we talk about this are we talking about people in a congregational setting or an individual setting singing songs that are creedal in nature that are um songs that affirm like christian theology and god's interaction with humanity um in our local church but as well as individually i would put that as like one category i'd probably call that like uh you know congregational singing or uh like corporate worship or creedal singing but i think what a lot of people actually miss when they say they miss worship music i don't know if that's actually what they miss there's this other element of worship music that is propaganda meaning a lot a lot of the and i don't actually mean that with crazy negative connotations i'm really not even putting that on that what i'm saying is when when we would be in certain settings and seeing certain songs they weren't simply just worship songs of adoration and to the beauty and majesty of god they were songs meant to affirm that we're all on the same page and also songs meant to call other people into it there was a propaganda and a movement piece like when you listen to hill's song hillsong isn't just singing songs for their local church hillsong is try is trying to indoctrinate you with their value systems um and and they use catchy rhymes and and lyrics and melodies and and there's something about it that feels global and feels like i'm a part of something i don't you know like very few people are just talking about their local church or their like individual prayer time and saying i really miss that what they're talking about is i miss feeling like we were like in this worship movement this prayer movement this like sense and so when you brought up the thing about progressive christianity wanting that i actually think what progressive christianity is wanting is they want a unified message that they can proclaim to the world because that's what the christian the worship movement has done that they you know the the all the major worship movements that we've seen over the last 20 30 years in in north american history um didn't just do it for their churches they did it for the world um and they wanted the world to know their value system and so i think the question has to be for people that are considered quote unquote progressive christians or or affirming christians or whatever is you can't just it's not just about singing songs for yourself you actually have to sing songs for the world um and songs that reinforce your value system and it does need to be a type of propaganda and actually i think part of you part of people miss that they miss feeling that connection to a global movement uh that felt charismatic or it felt like supernatural and so um i think first people have to identify what they're actually missing um are you just missing that personal connection to to god in an adoration beauty worship that's just creedal and and and affirms your personal devotion to god or are you looking to be a part of a catalytic prophetic movement that that rep that sings your value systems to the rest of the church and the world um and i think that to me is the first question and then you can figure out what we what you know yeah because i think that's really what many people are saying is i miss the feeling of being connected to something bigger than myself and music i think is a type of magic that's serious yeah yeah and i think music when you're right when you're done oh god yeah i was gonna say like all music does is like it gets past the conscious mind and gets into the subconscious and like touches that part of our soul that has a deep desire to say i love you you're special you belong and i think like spirit kind of speaks to those things but then also unfortunately it has some not so great things attached to it um so when i think of worship music now just it's my uh you know what let me not go that way hillary you go okay so i want to hear whatever wherever you weren't gonna go i will i will go there afterwards okay yeah i'm thinking about what you'd said before kevin about like what is the impact it has on my life and does it make me feel good and when i think about singing and worship music and the role it has in my life i think less about um maybe theology or the felt sense on a on a cosmic level and more about the fact that vibration in our voice box activates the larynx branch of our vagus nerve which signals that it's okay for trauma to move through our body and that humming humming is a self-care practice because it signals to your nervous system it's okay you can move it through you can talk about it you're safe you can connect you can ask for help you can reach out this is like one of the clinical applications of polyvagal theory is to say hum when you're distressed sing when you're distressed name something that's going on for you and if you're feeling fragmented and like you can't activate that hum swallow but say what's the difference between between doing that with you could do that with beyonce right like absolutely what i'm saying is funny enough this is where i was going to go yeah that we get to start to break down what worship music means and what it does if it brings us into wholeness and brings us into more expression and integration is it not god is it not the spirit moving through us and why couldn't we do that with like freya jacques and actually isn't that kind of a racist song maybe probably i think that there's like a nefarious origin of that song so something i was actually going to go there which is why it didn't go there but you went there so apparently the spirit has confirmed um but i actually have a playlist on my on my uh spotify that is called from me to me and how i have how i've moved my worship is less about me singing to god and i think about my body singing to me and like i start getting teary thinking about it because it's like um the song i love i go running now i'm a runner i know one time i said that like i would only run up zombies chase me but now i love it because you know pandemic has taught me so much but the song i listen to is i have nothing away me houston god why am i so teary about this but it's like when you think about when i think about my relationship to love and to spirit and to my body like what would it be like for us to hear like the words just like don't make me close one more door because i don't want to hurt me or stay in my arms your body's asking you stay in my arms don't walk away from me like your body is like crying like i have nothing if i don't have you god is saying i i i have nothing if i don't have you that's a beautiful powerful image of like wanting to be wanted when i felt like i was not wanted in the church so worship for me is whitney houston worship for me can be uh anything that i need it to be and so finding those moments of authentic connection where i can hear spirit singing over to me whether it is like through um wap or whether it is through whitney houston i um that's what i look for in in my worship music now is like what does it make me feel in my body hey kevin i believe in you and me believe that we will be how dare you love eternally well as far as i can see you will always be the one for me oh and like the river finds the sea i [Music] okay end of episode [Music] you