Episode 125 - Is Pleasure Sinful?

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[Music] 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 today's story pleasure is sinful pleasure is sinful pleasure pleasure okay i don't know the right delivery for that line so i'm just gonna leave all those on there [Music] although i was never outright told that pleasure is inherently sinful i was definitely taught that denying myself of pleasure is the only way to live a holy life and the only way to grow as a person in the particular intersection of korean-american identity as well as uh in a very conservative presbyterian church pleasure being sinful was definitely the dominant world view for most of my life i was raised under the belief that suffering is an inherent part of the christian life not that pleasure was i was never led to believe that pleasure was a sin but i was led to believe that pleasure is unnecessary i wasn't allowed to be comfortable with the things i felt and wanted and instead had to continuously battle and suppress those things to reach for the higher path i suppose i don't believe that experiencing pleasure is inherently sinful but i was definitely brought up in a theological context that considers most avenues of obtaining pleasure to be sinful i think the word pleasure itself had like a stigma around it something pleasurable was wrong not only did i believe that pleasure was wrong i internalized the message that pain and suffering were the markers of faithfulness to god because i believed the heart is deceitful and the body is not to be trusted i had to die to the sinful desires of the flesh from my professional goals to my relationship with food to my queerness anything i desired or took pleasure in was inherently wrong and must be stripped away to please god you know we learned so much about hating your body hating your flesh and it wasn't until i was close to getting married that my therapist told me you know pleasure is actually something that you're supposed to experience and it's actually good for your body to experience pleasure hi everybody my name is hilary mcbride and i'm michael gunger and i'm linda k klein you know i i was one of those people who fell in love with the murder stories you know the people who died for their faith like they were like they were like the ultimate christians right the colosseum and stuff yes yes yeah and it was like they were given the opportunity to prove that they were good you know whereas i hungered for an opportunity to prove that i was good nobody thought i was good it felt like right because of this hypersexualization that i was experiencing and and i really wanted to suffer in a very weird way in order to be able to prove to people that i would do this for god right and so i used to there was a prayer that i used to say used to say dear god give me the meat and not only the milk and it's you know based on that bible verse about you know you were given milk because you couldn't you know you couldn't handle the meat right so for me meat was you know the suffering right and if i was just given milk i was a i was a child in christ but if i was given meat if i was given real suffering and if i suffered with joy right and with faith then i would be a mature christian and i would really be good and then i ended up getting really sick and started losing a lot of blood um and having a lot of pain um blood out of my anus specifically there you go um how have you ever had anyone say anus on your you know probably if not it's a shame that it's taken this long so you know i i you know took it seriously but i also you know took it as an opportunity to prove how what a strong person and what a strong christian i was and to suffer in silence and so i did go to doctors but when the doctors pooh-poohed it i let them and a number of people in my life told me that i was being manipulative and you know performing pain because i wanted attention when on the contrary the thing that i was performing was i was performing health and i was performing joy when actually what i was experiencing was debilitating pain it's almost like growing up in evangelicalism for me was almost like being taught that to be good you had to be a ball of suffering and pain that was candy-coated in a fake colorful brightly lit picture of performed happiness damn linda right yes and that and so that's what i was trying to be i was trying to like show them how good i was by being in the midst of this like horrific pain and showing them my candy coating and they looked at the candy coating and said there's no way you're in pain and by the time i actually got taken seriously by anyone because doctors aren't used to people doing this kind of like hyper performance i don't think so even doctors weren't believing me um you know i it was life-threatening and i was rushed into surgery and i was told if we don't do surgery tomorrow on a weekend we are not convinced you're going to make it till monday had my whole large intestines removed you know as much of my small intestines as they could get out and i realized like i had literally almost died to prove that i could suffer well you know and that i was good and that i could deny my body so much and have my mind and my spirit control my body so much you know that that i was not the bad person that people thought i was and and i think that that was the first moment that i realized that i was performing and that i realized that i was living a false version of of self and that i wasn't in even relationship with self i didn't even know what pleasure was i didn't even know what what sadness really felt like sometimes you know because i was so busy candy coating everything and so when i was sick i had this year and a half of surgeries i did i had four major surgeries and over the course of that year and a half for the first time i started to tell the truth about my actual feelings to myself and i remember i started to tell the truth to others and people were really weirded out by it you know i i had a friend's mother be like what happened to the shiny happy linda you know i was like she's telling you the truth she gone she gone right yeah she was never there right yeah and and in a weird way i think that that was the first step to really being able to um embrace pleasure you know and stop seeing pleasure as selfish and sinful like i had to i had to embrace truth and reality i had to embrace the sadness i had to embrace the anger i had to embrace the you know the i am-ness to go back to our previous conversation right and and in the soup of all that mess was also pleasure you know like pleasure that i could touch and that i could feel and that was real wow thank you for all that that was amazing i uh feel like if i knew you back then i would have tried to court you as you see [Laughter] well here's a person who's has all my exact values in life [Laughter] look at how well she's suffering yeah what makes a good human is so evident in that story the distortion around values and and kind of the morality of suffering and suffering in silence and finding pride in that even i mean it's i certainly saw that in my own life and i've seen that in so many people and it it just makes me feel so sad that that treating ourselves so inhumanely we we would believe and we've been told in some way that that makes us better and more lovable like to be to be again it's this kind of conditional value conditional love that you have to be something other than who you are you have to tell a different story you have to cover it up you have to put the candy coating on in order to be valuable there's also something gendered about this you have the christian teaching and then you also have you know as a good woman you know you will suffer for others you will give everything for your kids you will give everything for your partner you know to be good you will disappear you know to a certain extent and and suffer well so that others can be happy and that that is certainly the christian narrative to this idea of a construction of femininity which implies like silence and submission the irony is i think for a lot of people who leave the evangelical church and think that there's going to be freedom outside of it then they encounter encounter other kinds of gender scripting that affects even the the construction of masculinity so even people who aren't in the church are encountering these narratives which in reinforce the kind of silencing of the self that one of the main issues that i encounter around the construction of masculinity even outside the church is men who can't access emotion even to the point that we would give them a diagnosis of alexithymia the inability to feel and name and notice emotion that restricts their fullness their sense of vitality and also their ability to do relationship so there's a a praise of stoicism among men which impairs their ability to access vulnerability without there being huge social consequences so i would say that exactly yeah there are all of these ways that the stories about what it means to be good impact all of us regardless of kind of the gender binary and then of course for like our non-binary friends if you can't perform either of those binaries then how do we what's the yardstick that we measure your goodness with so there's all sorts of challenges across the spectrum about how when we disconnect from our body and when we're told to to silence what we know either kind of in a voice way in an intellectual way or in a sensation way that creates problems for us in our ability to to be present and to connect with the people that we love when i think about this this phrase pleasure is sinful or selfish i think about pleasure um and how it's gotten this again this kind of it's gotten wrapped up in the story of sexuality and and like we were talking about in our last episode if sexuality is bad and pleasure is associated with sexuality then pleasure therefore is bad but i don't i don't know if people who expose this idea would also say that enjoying a piece of chocolate right or or enjoying the beauty of a sunset and feeling the the movement in our body when we go oh whoa that's beautiful if that if that would also be decided as something bad and so i'm curious about for people who have been in this narrative where pleasure is sinful if if there's only some kinds of pleasure that are sinful but other kinds are okay and and kind of how if we could look at the cultural discourse around who shaped which kinds of pleasure are okay or not okay because i i think of pleasure as this um physiological sensation signature response that's part of our survival system that as human beings we've evolved and we're wired to be motivated towards things that feel good and away from things that are threatening or dangerous or kind of impair our survival or functioning and pleasure in the same way that hunger is part of our survival pleasure is written into our body it's written into our dna it's written into our expression of being human that's actually part of i would say our goodness and maybe maybe people would argue with with that in terms of like how we respond to pleasure then but pleasure itself and enjoying and being in an experience of feeling uh present and delighted in and um saturated with the kind of like the yummy good goodness and the juiciness of of our sensuality i can't imagine why that would ever ever be bad or to use the language sinful it's funny though but i hear i do hear people struggling with even that level of pleasure right a lot of my interviewees and people who i work with talk about um food regulation right they are extreme um with counting calories um you know this this regulation of the you know if i have if i enjoy that piece of chocolate you know it is it is part of this weak nature that is the same nature that will have me enjoy sexual experience right so there is this sort of hyper attention to pleasure in general right and that and you can see that with during the rise of the purity culture we also had a rise in diet culture and evangelicalism right that's right and and interestingly you know a lot of my interviewees talk about you know one i'll just give you a couple of examples one one um person said to me you know i just went to my therapist and i was telling my therapist how great everything is going in my life and it was like the first time i'd ever told my therapist that you know and then i left and i thought i feel so guilty i can't believe i just talked about everything being great what a horrible person i am right or another woman you know talking about how um she things between her and her husband are going well for the first time they have a fraught relationship in part because of their experience in purity culture but for the first time they're really getting along and she feels something in the back of her mind saying that must mean you're not dealing with something horrible you can't really be experiencing pleasure because a pleasure is a sign of sin pleasure is a sign of selfishness so when you come to associate those things so closely right even that i mean not for everyone you know to be sure but you know for some people even that even that like sunset or that um or that you know bite of chocolate can come with guilt or um if not guilt uh this feeling that the sky is about to fall right like this pleasure means my guard is down my christian armor is off you know whatever it is something horrible is about to befall me um and therefore i must get my armor back up yeah i should be clear i i don't think that there's any reason we need to shame ourselves for having guilt from being within a system that said that our guilt was actually a condition of our eternal life that our guilt was somehow something we needed to create more value for us i think my problem is for the people at the top who are constructing these ideas that that filter down particularly to women particularly to people who have been on the bottom of the hierarchy in some way and don't understand the complexities or the or the discrepancies in their theory because i'm sure that there's a lot of people at the top who are like you know pleasure is bad the people who hold power the people who hold the keys to theology and you know the close connection with god the people in leadership and faith communities those are the people i'm not sure if necessarily they're they're wondering about the chocolate or if they're wondering about the sunset in fact those things might even be articulated as a kind of worship look i'm taking delight in creation and yet you and what you do with your body is bad so i see people all the time in therapy who are struggling with the pain of the kind of the pathologization of the self and i don't think we need to add any more shame to that really my concern is like the the discrepancy in the idea in the ideas that are proliferated by people who have power who aren't understanding the consequences that it has on the people who kind of take in their ideas in order to be good wow that's really interesting to hear that because in my experience i've spent a lot of times a lot of time with the powerful in these sort of circles there's a an enjoyment of kind of pushing the line even in the in my experience of like really conservative places like we grew up and we didn't have we didn't drink beer alcohol and stuff but the elders i remember in the kind of leadership the men in the church they would drink non-alcoholic beer and it was kind of like on the edge and they're like kind of they wouldn't they wouldn't tell that from the stage because we don't we don't need everybody else doing this so it was kind of like they kind of pushed the edge and kind of got to enjoy that and then as it as i went through different circles maybe it would be wine they'd have wine or uh they'd smoke cigars you know they get in there they'd smoke cigars they would never say from the stage shouldn't smoke cigars but but there's like this in the club you could kind of push the boundaries a little bit and yeah it could even i if you were really in touch with the lord it could even be like worship or like spiritual and there was like an acceptability but how that filtered down through the teaching of their authority into other i've never heard it put like that or even uh thought of that really but um it was interesting to that i experienced a lot of that from the from the rooms of power for sure and what what you're saying too is the inconsistency in what you teach versus what you do which really messes up communities right because people are held to a standard that you're not even holding and it creates guilt and shame in people who who then are part of those communities feeling like they have to adhere to those standards in order to be loved and to belong there's also something about i don't think that people who created these rather simplistic rules frankly and these rather simplistic ways of looking at the world really maybe expected anybody to take it as seriously as people do right because when you play it forward if you take the concept of sexlessness you know if if you really think someone's going to take that seriously like just play that forward in your mind and you can see the the problems that that's going to cause and similarly you know this association of like you know um you know because we're protecting ourselves from from sexual sin we must see pleasure as a as a warning sign right like play that forward and imagine someone will actually take that seriously and you can see how it will play out but i almost i sometimes i i think i think that there was just this assumption you know to go back to the purity message you know as i may be a clearer way to look at it there was this assumption that you know sexuality and i would say similarly with pleasure maybe you know is inherently a part a human reality and therefore if we tell people to quash it down to zero like people won't really quash it down to zero they'll quash it down to fifty percent right and you know and then they'll be fine and the reality is is that you know maybe the leaders weren't quashing it down to zero but i certainly tried to you know and almost died as a result and and many many other people you know as well so yeah sometimes i wonder sometimes i wonder if if there was just this belief that things like sexuality and pleasure were not the vulnerable vulnerable things that they are right you know that that you could somehow not shut those things off [Music] michael i don't know if you remember i was in la when this whole thing happened but john piper wrote an article why about in response to someone who who wrote into him who had an eating disorder who who was like i don't know what to do with this eating disorder and he responded by saying you're hating your body but not for the right reason it's good to hate your body it's good to hate your body because your body is sinful and i wrote an article in response that got quite a bit of attention i actually got a phone call from my parents or like someone at our bible study today told us he wrote an article in response to john piper and they were thrilled with what i wrote but it was just really funny that it i got a phone call from my parents that had obviously gotten around but my the title of the article is why you shouldn't hate your body even if john piper tells you to and it makes me think about exactly what you're saying linda like is he really thinking are these people really thinking through the impact of their actions and the problem is that maybe they're not they're not thinking about what is the real life application of this message to someone who has a mental health issue what what happens to them if you tell them no no it's good to hate your body do you not understand that you were feeding the anorexia beast like do you not understand that you could wipe out an entire civilization if you tell people never to have sex like there is no thought about what this does to people and the quality of their lives i have a client who i've been seeing for a little while who keeps getting stuck on this and she'll say but shouldn't good theology make us have good lives and why is it that these things that were are touted as good theology why why are they having such detrimental impacts on on my life why am i more mentally ill when i align myself with this good theology and the when something and this is the whole point i think of feminist spirituality and feminist critiques and feminist theology is that when when theology is extracted from the body when we take these ideas and we move them into abstractions which is an androcentric way of approaching life and thought we miss the hurt and the pain that it causes people to to realize we miss the hurt and consequences that it are kind of that people live with when they actually try to engage with these ideas so i think we have to we have to move theology and move our theories as well into practical and real world applications to say what is the cost of believing that pleasure is sinful or selfish and and maybe that helps us deconstruct that narrative just a little bit [Music] this toxic story spreads out its influence into ways that i think we don't even notice i was here's a way far out way that this tributary has made itself known i was on a psychedelic trip with some friends and it was this beautiful connected spiritual lovely experience at some point it turned into kind of a dance party i was dancing had this transcendent amazing experience and at the end one of my friends um she's like what did what what did you learn and there was like this i just kind of saw in that state of being like how often we have to move towards okay there was some sort of great experience some sort of pleasure some sort of um amazing life moment and then we've got to make something of it like how did you what's the lesson where's the work where's the suffering that we can find in this that we can make this not about what just happened and not just enjoying and savoring what is right now but how was that useful for something else and it was like the most subtle thing but i was like wow how often are we doing this where we can't just enjoy the sunset it has to i have to figure out even if i'm enjoying the sunset okay this is good work this is good self work so that i can whatever you know it's just like we can't just enjoy it and let it go and let it burn and go away as the moment that it was um but we have to find some sort of like story some sort of narrative that i've got to find some sort of work that i got to pull apart something in myself that i got to break apart something i yeah i experienced it so that i could worship the lord so that i could uh you know something else rather than just being and experiencing that reminds me of what you're saying linda at the beginning about your story like that there's something moral about suffering that there's something um where we feel a sense of even maybe pleasure itself about the suffering about the doing the hard work about feeling like there's some sort of grind or ache to something like the i mean perhaps a less triggering anecdote around that is like after a good workout like yeah psychedelics is not the way to go for the no i'm sorry i meant then then my statement about okay uh kind of that's true pleasure and the grind and like something that may feel more applicable to each of us is how it feels good the day after a workout when we're like oh it feels so good that it's sore like there's something written into our cultural discourse which i think is the kind of maybe a white anglo-saxon protestant thing of like it feels good to hurt that there's even the irony being that there's even pleasure in the suffering in the denying of our pleasure we suffer but we feel some pleasure about that and somehow we can't get away from pleasure it's part of existence and yet there have been these constructed ideals that imply that some kind of pleasure is that well that pleasure itself is sinful wow yeah that kind of shows the the silliness of the myth that like why are you if you think pleasure is sinful and selfish and so you're going to whatever actively resist the pleasure or whatever what are you what's driving you to do that but more pleasure in a different way maybe it's more sado max masochist or maybe it's more uh it's a level remover now i'm unconscious of the pleasure that i'm seeking from feeling superior or feeling holy or whatever but you're still just seeking pleasure you're still just seeking what you want you're going with your desire there's no getting away from [Music] [Music] it do you know that there are actually other people like you i mean not exactly like you unless you count multiverse versions of yourself [Music] but there are people who have similar questions to you and are going through similar experiences to you and probably a lot of them are part of this community the literature podcast is not just a podcast this podcast is coming out of a community of people and every sunday some of us in the community get together to talk about the issue at hand what we were talking about that week on the podcast usually there's like 50 to 100 of us and we meet on zoom and we talk about these issues deeper and we've got people from all sorts of different ways of life and beliefs and non-beliefs and uh it's a it's a non-judgmental space we're not trying to fix each other there but we're trying to create a space that that allows for people to be who they are seen and accepted just as they are and we're learning together we're growing together it's really fun so if you are interested in that check out the sunday thing that's what we call it and you can do that by joining us joining the community so just go to the liturgists.com click that join us button and uh dive deeper into all of this there's a lot of really cool people waiting to meet you hope to see you sunday [Music] what's our what's our verdict is is pleasure sinful similar to the conversation we were having previously with the last podcast around the reason that purity culture worked is because it was built upon a foundation that was already established in our society and in our world i feel like there's something similar with this pleasure conversation so the word sinful works within a religious context but you know there's there are other versions of bad in a non-religious context like that word selfish that we were using and one of the things that i've really observed is even after leaving my religious culture that idea of you know i shouldn't be experiencing pleasure um because it's just not valuable right it's just not a good use of time it's something that's really really still a very present part of my life and i'm sort of in constant relationship with pleasure in that way in particular because i i find myself in a social change context and in the social change world the experience of pleasure and of joy you know is one that people are often talking about because they're striving to pull it out right um but you know but there's this whole martyrdom that happens in that space as well where we suffer for the cause right we aren't paid enough we you know work too hard we put in too many hours um you know that i think this is true in society at large not just in the social change space but there certainly is something um something even more intensified in the social change space like there is in the religious space but you know that's something that i find that a lot of these same notions of if i if i do something just for the sake of pleasure's sake i'm just being selfish is a is a constant thing that i'm constantly struggling with so one of the things that i've observed is that i experience the deepest pleasure when i'm in my body which is probably one of the reasons why i was such a threat you know growing up because there i feel like there's always been this embodied i've always felt embodied right and and loved the feel of um you know of the wind you know in my hair and you know even even you know non-sexualized ways of experiencing you know the world that you know one might categorize a sexuality in a broader definition of the word like i tend to use but but anyway you know so for me i have expectations or goals that i set myself around pleasure that are related to that so right now i have a goal to dance three times a day to like dance to one song three times a day and you know and and i actually have to i actually have a sign on my mirror that says dance you know i'm like like i have to i have to work hard to get myself to put in what is probably like 10 minutes of dancing right um because i because i know that it matters and i know that experiencing pleasure or sometimes i dance through pain right you know it is important but but i have to i still have this um conflicted relationship with it which i think is related to this conversation about you know um so much of our pleasure experiences our body experiences and so all of this stuff gets mixed up together i think this story is this particular story is such a an apt example for how power uses stories because if you need to control people like if you're in the position of power if you're a if you're a factory owner and you need your workers to sit at that conveyor belt and do that same thing over and over and over and over and make the factory work you need them to be a good cog you're not going to incur like you're not gonna go down and give inspiring speeches on the hour being like everybody just get in your body and just find um what do you want what do you you know like what what is your heart saying for you to do with this hour of your life that's not helpful for you as the factory owner you need them to shut down their body in a way and just become a cog and so like if if you're a religious leader or you don't you don't necessarily need for what you're trying to accomplish a bunch of free thinking people that are in touch with their bodies and their hearts you really don't yeah you're so right and so so you being in touch with your body and dancing like it's threatening to power systems and yet actually you know much like the limited work week makes people more efficient i would argue that certainly for me pleasure makes me more efficient like i am a better worker and we know what people are doing things that are pleasurable pleasurable that their rates of mental health issues decrease that the reliance on the medical system to kind of cope with uh physiological pain dysfunction of the body that that decreases for people who are engaging in pleasuring activities their their sense of reporting of pain like the numbers of pain reports go down including the intensity of pain so it's actually better for our medical systems when people are engaging in pleasure but i mean michael you really sound like uh foucault right now right in discipline and discipline and punish in his literature that this is the most effective way to control society to get people involved in some sort of capitalistic disembodied system is to say don't don't listen to yourself and in fact it's going to cost you opportunity belonging like some sort of morality to be connected to your body but you know this idea that pleasure is selfish i i struggle with the word selfish so much again there's i don't think a word itself is necessarily bad it's them like those are there's it's symbols it's um it's the meaning that we give to those symbols that make it harmful or not and and selfish i i would rather say that pleasure isn't selfish or maybe it is selfish and selfish is okay that there needs to be some sort of like language shift or the meaning around the word the discourse of selfish that has to change because not paying to our paying attention to ourselves is also not something that's helpful like we we want people to go to the doctor we want people to notice their language and and use language in ways that aren't hurtful to others we want people to be aware of the reactions so they're not violent to others and that means paying attention to self knowing who you are knowing what activates you knowing what your triggers are and doing your own work so i would say that for most of us who feel like there's something selfish about it we can really deconstruct the word selfish as a bad thing by seeing all the ways that paying attention to yourself is good is beneficial for you for the people around you i think that that the way that it's been used often in faith context is is that selfishness some is somehow antithetical to the message of jesus that if you are serving others that that you have to disappear that you can't exist and there are so many examples in right in the biblical stories and the in the stories of jesus life that made me kind of push back on that but i think if we're going to be well people if we're going to be people who are actually engaged in social change engaged in in the love loving of and kind of building up of other people we have to be aware of when we get activated we have to be aware of the things that make us angry we have to have enough rest and enough pleasure in our lives that we have something to offer those around us so i just fundamentally disagree with either the idea that selfishness is bad or that pleasure is selfish in a negative way yeah that concept of selfish is a it's a really interesting one because on the surface like just on the surface level we can all understand that like if you're selfish meaning like if i if i'm only concerned about my immediate feelings about whatever and i'm running over people and i'm treating people as things and doing whatever i'm not concerned about the effect the impact of my actions and words in the world that's a selfish thing that has a bad you know that we understand why that's a bad connotation but what i what i think is great about what you're drawing attention to the concept of selfishness the word of selfishness and how we think about it is that the desire to not run over people is still something that i have to find in myself like the compassion and the empathy and the desire to not just make decisions that only benefit me but also benefit others is something that i'm only wanting because it benefits me like that there is no getting away from selfishness because it's coming desire is desire this desire is rising in a body and a mind and uh it has there's i can be unconscious of it i can be unconscious of how i like feeling empathy i can i can be unconscious of my pleasure at seeing others thrive or i can be conscious of it and actually seek it and actually like move towards wow i love operating in the world in a way that lets others thrive as well and i'm gonna live for that pleasure and there's a in a way like becoming more selfish i think that's something ellen watts talks about maybe we haven't gone far enough with our selfishness at times because we're not consciousness we're not conscious about the true joys of of living connected to in love of everything and everyone else um that we don't have to cut ourselves off from them and make it this this either or but we when we're fully selfish like fully into our own hearts and our own bodies and in touch with our own desires and our own love then the boundaries between me and my world kind of start dissipating there's something about all of these words that what we're really doing i feel like in our conversation is breaking them all out of binaries right this this whole notion that selfishness or that self-focus is maybe a better way to put it is one thing when in reality it's many things and it's dependent on the situation and it's dependent on that person's norm if they need to go closer to self-focus or away from self-focus right you know same with pride you know for some people pride is something that they need to back away from and for other people it's want something they need to amp up right or you know anger something that can be can be destructive but can be justice you know building right you know all of these concepts that we have fit into binaries of good and bad are actually remarkably complex you know and situational right and and so i feel like there's also just like something to be said for um embracing a a way of looking at the world um you know that is individualized it's so funny because i grew up you know in a culture where individualized was like the worst sin right you know you know the idea that there wasn't an absolute but that it was individualized i remember them talking about in churches like what a horrible sinful idea that there's not just one single truth but the reality is is when we look at the one single truth that was defined you know for us it was a single truth for a particular population those who had power who had education who were writing the theology for their situation right you know and not for the multiplicity of experience so there's something about saying you know this very thing that i was taught not to say growing up which is no we do need to take into account context we do need to take into account the individual reality and in fact that is that is spiritual experience as opposed to human experience you know this idea of binary that is built to support the sum is deeply human whereas if we're trying to do something spiritual you know we have to take into account the full complexity of of you know that that comes with that we'd like to thank linda k klein for being a guest on the program again what a wonderful person she is you can check out her stuff at lyndaklein.com your hosts have been hilary mcbride and me michael gunger we'd like to thank the patrons who make this show possible thank you so much and we'll see you all next week all the love thanks for listening [Music] everybody