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Join me, Jess VanderWier, a registered psychotherapist, mom of three, and founder of Nurtured First, along with my husband Scott, as we dive deep into the stories of our friends, favourite celebrities, and influential figures.
In each episode, we skip the small talk and dive into vulnerable and honest conversations about topics like cycle breaking, trauma, race, mental health, parenting, sex, religion, postpartum, healing, and loss.
We are glad you are here.
PS: The name Robot Unicorn comes from our daughter. When we asked her what we should name the podcast, she confidently came up with this name because she loves robots, and she loves unicorns, so why not? There was something about the playfulness of the name, the confidence in her voice, and the fact that it represents that you can love two things at once that just felt right.
Welcome to Robot Unicorn, hosted by my parents, Jess and Scott.
I hope you enjoyed the episode.
Hey everyone, welcome back to Robot Unicorn.
Jess here today.
Today we are talking with someone who I look up to and truly, truly enjoy talking to.
I cannot wait for you to hear this conversation.
She is someone who thinks very deeply about things and she's lived through a lot of difficult things as well.
Her name is Kate Bowler and she's kind of a force.
I met her last year at a conference and immediately just loved her
I could see her passion for people and for loving others and for helping people think deeply as she spoke at this conference and ever since that
I started consuming all of her material.
I read her books.
I listened to her podcasts.
And I'm really excited for you to listen to her as well
So a little background on Kate.
She's a four-time New York Times bestselling author.
She's an award-winning podcast host of her podcast, Everything Happens.
She's a professor of religious history at Duke University.
She has two honorary doctorates, an award from Yale for service to theological education.
She has seven books to her credit, and she's also a wife and mother.
She is
like I mentioned, a force.
What really shifted Kate's world and her work actually was being diagnosed with stage four cancer at the age of 35 in the middle of what she felt was a pretty predictable life.
Now we don't get too much into her cancer diagnosis today.
We actually cover a bit of a different topic.
So we cover a lot of what Kate does for her work.
where she's a professor of religious history at Duke University.
So she's a historian.
And I specifically wanted Kate on, not only because I had questions for her, but also because so many of you have questions that I thought Kate could answer.
A lot of you have grown up with religion of some kind.
And we try and be pretty broad in this episode because we know you come from a variety of different religious backgrounds.
And what I hear from parents all the time in my practice and also from you who listen to this podcast is that you've had to kind of rethink what faith looks like for you.
and decide what faith is or isn't in your own life now that you've become a parent and you're older and you're reflecting on the faith of your child.
And for a lot of people, this feels really messy.
It's hard to know what you want to teach your kids when it comes to religion or faith.
And a lot of people who I talk to have been hurt by the church in some way, shape, or form and struggle to know if they even want to have faith in their life.
And so this is a topic that maybe won't resonate with absolutely everyone in our audience.
But I do know that it is something that so many of you are going through.
And I wanted to make sure to have a true expert on who could talk about these things with me.
So Kate and I get into topics like deconstruction.
We get into topics like faith and religion and religious trauma and hurt.
I ask her big questions like, do you think the church teaches that we should spank our children or that children need to be obedient to their parents?
And are children innately sinful?
I ask her the questions that I've been wondering and been wanting to talk to a professional who has deeply dove into the Bible, understands history, and understands theology much more than I probably ever will.
So for those
reasons I brought Kate on and I'm really really excited for you to listen to our conversation today.
Before we dive into this topic, I would love for you to just introduce yourself.
and tell us a little bit about you.
Well, I am so glad to be with you.
I am, of course, a massive fan of you and your like tender approach to love and to parenting and
trying to be maybe the parent so many of us wish that we had.
It's like such a joy to see you.
My name is Kate Bowler and I'm a historian at Duke University.
And really my specialty is
I talk about the cultural stories that we sometimes spin up that tell us things like everything happens for a reason or that every part of our lives have
to be best life now.
And then I do my very best to lovingly take apart the parts of those stories that are not useful anymore and just try to offer maybe a gentler, more loving, more realistic
approach.
I love that.
And everything that you teach, I I think we're aligned on just the nuance that you bring to these really complicated subjects.
Again, maybe you can speak to this, but religion in general, I think, is often a very black and white and not very nuanced.
And I love that you bring these approaches in to help people
kind of understand it in a deeper way.
And I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit.
Sure.
Well I part of my day job is
I get to teach at a divinity school, which means that almost all my students will either become a pastor or a community leader or a social worker, but really they're holding faith questions
for other people as a leader.
And it's really given me about 20 years of insight into how religion can do a lot of damage.
Or it can do a lot of good, depending on whose hands it is.
And what really worries me, I think, most of all about how religion itself is framed is so often we feel like it's a set of certainties
that we have to have and we have to never question and that we have to hold and then frequently weaponize against other people.
So I really encourage my own students and really just feel encouraged by
this fresh crop of leaders I get to see out in the community all the time is what happens when we move these questions of faith and love and belief and belonging
away from a story about being hyper certain and back into the place it should be, which is that tender place of love.
I love that.
Yeah.
I think it would be helpful to learn a little bit more about you and and your experiences
So what did faith look like for you when you were a child?
I had, I would say, like both a very religious and a very spiritual home, but I was really glad that my parents were frankly sort of
spiritual weirdos.
They had both become Christians later on in their life.
And one of the things I really appreciated about that is I knew exactly why they had become religious.
My dad found most religion frustrating, boring, or mostly stupid.
I think that was really his strongest objection.
And then he read a couple of really good books
And then he ended up reading like St.
Augustine's biography.
And he really landed on that as being like, you know what?
I feel convinced.
And that attitude, that belief is not just something that
we get put upon us, but we have to find ourselves agreeing to for our own reasons.
I really admired that about my dad's own journey.
And I came to really take that on as being like a challenge that in my whole life
I wanted to make sure that religion and spirituality wasn't just something that was given to me, but something that I was thinking alongside.
So yeah, my dad was like Mr.
Read a Book.
That's it, I'm convinced.
And my mom was always looking for belonging.
Both my parents had had rough childhoods, and she was really hoping for faith as a community.
And I saw how
her tender heart was just like looking, looking, looking for like, are you the place that's gonna be safe and loving for me?
And she's just been like the most heart
forward person like she's so wonderful and annoying because you'll wake up in the morning and she'll just be like sitting out having just had her prayer time which meant that she was very kind and you could ask her for anything at the beginning of the day
She was exhausted in a nightmare by 8 p.
m.
I stand by that assessment.
But in both stories, what I really took to
was that whatever my faith was going to end up being, it would have to have head and it would have to have heart.
And some combination of that was going to have to make its way into my own life.
But
I really appreciated that it was never forced on me.
And I didn't have most of the, like I would say as a historian, like religious subculture, you know, the sort of like
We can't just have a magazine.
It's a Christian magazine.
We can't just have music.
It's Christian music.
I wasn't introduced to all of that subculture until my teens.
and growing up without it cured me of a lot of the feeling that I was supposed to wear my faith as a badge of belonging.
Instead I just knew religion is something unusual.
It might even make you very unpopular and if you pick it, it better be for your own reasons.
Yeah, what an empowering way to grow up, to know that you could choose that for your own reasons versus feeling like it was forced on you or feeling like you had to choose it or else you didn't have that sense of belonging in your family.
I really picked up on how you were using the word belonging because that's kind of like my word that I'm obsessed with right now.
As a writer, I'm sure you get that.
Like I get certain words and I'm like, okay, I'm so stuck on this word, I'm gonna try and use it in everything.
And belonging is
This word that I've been just really sitting with right now.
And I think it really does come into play in this discussion because we all want belonging.
We all seek belonging.
I think belonging in a religious community can be a really beautiful thing, but I think for a lot of my followers, belonging has also been their biggest struggle when it comes to religion because they feel like
If I choose to do things different at all than my family, I've lost it.
I wonder if you can speak to how you've seen that as a historian and in your work as teaching as well.
Yeah, I mean you've really touched on it directly.
It's so often our faith can be a place that creates a thick boundary around us and defines a group of insiders and outsiders.
And then when you're in, it feels so unbelievably
good, like that you are good, and also that you're living inside of a world that you fully understand, like you can almost touch all the edges of it.
And that's why I think the language of subculture is really helpful because a lot of us grew up inside of something that we only later realized was a bubble.
And a bubble is just another way of saying subculture where you felt like you lived in a whole world
that was made for your beliefs.
And I mean every religious community has a bubble, has a subculture, but I'll speak specifically about the American evangelical
bubble because that represents about forty percent of North Americans' religious experiences.
It's less common in Canada where, as you know, growing up religious is sometimes like, oh good for you which I always sort of
came to appreciate later on.
But a subculture can really make you feel, especially if your family lives inside of it fully with you.
that there are insiders and outsiders, there are good people and there are bad people and you want to stay one of the good people.
I was introduced to the evangelical subculture when I was 14.
I found a focus on the family bathroom of bathroom magazine in my friend Carolyn's home and I was like, what is this?
And then there is an advice column where a woman named Susie was ready to tell me what to do
It was my first feeling like, oh my gosh, there are so many rules and I need to learn all of them or else I won't be good.
And oh wait.
And now all my friends' families follow all these rules.
The second I knew what that was, that subculture was, I was desperate to be a part of it.
And yet because
my family wasn't.
I always think of those as restaurant families, families where no one has to go sit in the car because of an argument before the check comes.
Like I did not belong to a restaurant family.
I was not.
I couldn't even pretend to be one of the good families
And I saw how quickly a subculture could create a whole seamless world of belonging, and I knew I couldn't quite get there.
And that created like a deep loneliness that started the second I knew what good
according to them was.
And so now as a historian who studies those subcultures, I just feel tremendous compassion for how much black and white, insider, outsider, good and bad that it creates
for all of us.
Yeah, absolutely.
And and I've seen this just in my personal life, but also professionally.
A lot of the work that I've done has been with people who've grown up in religion specifically
The Christian religion that's very strong in the community that I live in and grew up in.
And I've seen this a lot, like the heart that comes
out like growing up out of those subcultures and even the way that that impacts parenting.
So for example, and you can give me your take on this, I think people would love to hear it.
But a lot of the culture around here would be if
if your child is misbehaving or they're having a hard time, you know, the answer would be harsh discipline.
The way the Bible would be interpreted would be that our child needs to be spanked, they need to submit to their elders, they need to obey
And many folks grew up with that.
And many, many of my followers grew up with that.
And now they're parents and they're starting to recognize for the first time like
Maybe that doesn't actually align with my faith in the way that I want to parent my kids.
And they have their parents telling them, Well, you have to
Otherwise you're not raising your child in a Christian home if you don't spank them or you don't hurt them.
And so a parent feels like they have to have two choices.
Either
continue to be in the family of origin and and spank or hurt their kids even though they don't want to, or lose that and feel like they're not being a good Christian anymore.
And I just see this this struggle and it's so hard.
And I would love for you to speak to those parents and and just
Share your opinion on that.
Oh, well, and I mean the spanking question is just such a perfect one because I mean I'm a historian, so like all I immediately just want to do and especially say to parents who struggle with specifically that issue, like
Oh, love.
It is so tempting and so awful to feel like if you're not continuing to
play by a certain set of rules that you're not being fundamentally good in the way that you were taught.
But I will just say there is a really easy explanation about how we got
specifically that story about pa about spanking.
It was a man named Dr.
James Dobson, and he wrote a book called Dare to Discipline.
And in it there was a whole set of very specific instructions about how you were to spank your child, especially using an object like a wooden spoon.
I have met hundreds of people who were
Struck with a spoon because of this one book.
Because I also study bestsellers, I can always tell you where something comes from and I can tell you quite confidently.
particular approach to parenting.
And we just also remember that back then, and this is something older people tell me all the time, like, Kate, you don't understand.
We just had one book.
Like we were just given a book and told this was the way to do it.
So there's a generation of people who followed the focus on the family curriculum.
And they took a a very harsh approach to physical discipline that I don't agree with.
But I think one of the things that should just give us a freaking break here is that let's just think about why Focus on the Family did that
the first place.
It wasn't because Dr.
James Dobson had done an extensive set of research that told him discipline children in a particular way would create a certain sort of person.
He didn't have a research set.
He had a theory and a bestseller.
But focus on the family, it was a way to tell a story about families.
What had happened was conservative evangelicals began to feel like they were frustrated.
that most of mainstream culture was moving too liberal in their opinion.
And so they decided to double down on a set of beliefs about the family.
So it went from being, and I will like
Not get up on my high horse about this, but it's something I lecture about a lot to my students.
There was a time which we didn't do this to families
We didn't say everything about our kids has to tell a story about God.
After World War II, most good families, like the best families, were missionaries.
And they were like, our kids are amazing, but we're not trying to put them on a pedestal to wage a culture war.
But starting in the seventies with the beginning of these
foundations like focus on the family, Christian parents started to feel so much pressure to force into parenting all their stories about whether they were good.
And it created these very strange legacies, people who were struck with a wooden spoon.
And so I just think that every one of these
rules has a history.
And some of these histories are just telling us that we have put way too much pressure on kids to tell a story about God.
And we need to like lighten up on that and realize that there are so many ways to express and to feel, for instance, God's love
But that kind of like intense pressure was really just because they felt like they were losing a culture war.
So I just think we just need to like keep culture wars out of our parenting decisions because the primary victim is gonna be our kids
That is really fascinating.
That's something I've never thought about, that this is somewhat new.
Like it's not that old that we're trying to make our kids into
You know, you have to be a Christian kid, you have to be a good kid, our discipline has to be Christian.
I think you were talking at the beginning, right?
Like every book you read has to be Christian, like all of these things.
Why do you think that took off in the way it did?
Because that's still very prevalent today.
I think one of the things that really worries me
About what took off is starting in the 70s, so now we we really have like 50 years of this.
We've done a real disservice to families because we started making families into show and tell.
Oh look
How good the Lord has been to me, my kid is on the soccer team.
Like it has become and we have like not religious versions, but we have very religious versions of that one.
And
That is a really very new development.
It's not just that the way we do hobbies is different, which it is, but there wasn't nearly this amount of cultural focus on proving you were a good Christian
by making everyone stare at your kids in the pew.
There really wasn't.
Like in earlier days, the model of the best kind of person was
Personal sacrifice.
It was like, how much are you giving?
How much are you volunteering?
How much are you serving your community?
People were pretty harshly judged for that, but the focus was not children.
And it's because we're trying to find easier and cheaper ways, cheaper isn't like morally cheaper, to prove that we're better than other people.
And I I just think it's so destructive, but it is a huge cultural force that's hard to undo.
But I do wish we could give people like if I just showed you book covers of like bestsellers in the sixties and bestsellers in the 70s
It would go from being like a picture of someone serving somewhere to like one where it was like a perfect family and a dad with a heavy hand on the shoulder of their children.
It was like a pretty dramatic turn
I'm definitely gonna be looking into that because I'm fascinated by that too.
And that's been something that I've just thought so much about in the clients I work with in my own life.
is like why do we get so stuck on needing to create this family that feels perfect?
And why is it that so many parents feel like they have to make a choice?
Let's say they even still want to have their faith
But they feel like they can't.
I hear from parents all the time we'll get DMs.
Like, how can I reconcile the parenting that I teach with the Bible
And they're just they're so stuck on like because the Bible says that I have to spank my kids.
They have to be obedient to me.
And outside of
The pieces we were just talking about.
Can you c clarify that for parents who are really struggling?
Sure.
Well, I think some of the language, especially in the Bible around obedience
has been way too strictly applied.
And here's the image it's it's trying to conjure up.
It's trying to conjure up the image of a hierarchy that God is God.
And then parents are parents and then children are under them like a big triangle.
And if you imagine your family as a triangle in that way, then all power has to go down, all obedience
goes from top to bottom.
We are obedient to God, you are obedient to me, problem solved.
The problem is, of course, is that first of all, it's a misreading of scripture to imagine that what God primarily wants from us is obedience.
Like fundamentally, the story about God.
I'm just putting on my like divinity school hat right now, not just my historian's hat, but like fundamentally the story about God is a story about love.
And we can see that the story of the Trinity is like Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
It's meant to be a circle.
It's not supposed to be a triangle.
The reason why that's so important is because so often what we've done is we've tried to make families duplicate a power structure with God.
And that is fundamentally not a good reading of the tradition.
I will just say
Divinity School professor says that is bad.
Like because it takes us away from the story about love.
Faith is a bazillion things, but at its core, it's a story about
knowing that we are deeply loved and invited into belonging.
If we don't feel that as our primary thing, if we treat power like it's that
first and most important barrier, we're never gonna know the real story.
And what's so terrible about that is we'll misunderstand God and we'll misunderstand our own families.
And so I just think obedience language has been really, really overused for the last 50 years.
And I think people are scared that if they get into a story about love, that they have to permit everything, they don't
Families are about warmth and structure, but they don't have to be at heart about a power play.
It's not scriptural.
It's not necessary.
I'm so glad you shared that.
I think it's really important for people to know that, right?
And I think those are the hesitations I've heard from a lot of of folks too.
It's right.
So if we don't have obedience, we'll
Is it just a free-for-all?
Like then what's happening?
And I think I find the parallels between the science, let's say, on parenting and what the Bible says very fascinating to me because like what you're saying, warmth and structure, that's
What research also tells us is the most effective way to discipline our kids, right?
It's to have that unconditional warmth, but also to have structure in the home in a way that's looking out for the child's best interests, which sounds like exactly what you're trying to say.
Yeah, I just worry too, like sometimes we also accidentally take on language of obedience because we're also really worried about how things look from the outside in
Like, will it look like my kids are bad and therefore I am failing as a, you know, church member, a community member?
I think our reputations should not be more important to us than our children's understanding of us
as being like a warm and reliable and consistent person.
And I I worry that discipline language creates a kind of rule where you're like, once you're over it, all bets are off
Like we don't we need as few cliffs as possible in any of our relationships.
Yeah, I love that.
And as a clinician, I've seen that so many times, right?
So I've worked with a lot of the adults who are like, yeah
As a kid, my family was the picture perfect family.
We all sat in the you know, we sat in the church pew and everyone looked perfect.
But what you don't know is that my dad was screaming at me the entire way to church that I better behave this Sunday or else, you know, I'd get a spanking with a wooden spoon.
when I get home.
So sure we looked perfect and everyone thought we were this great family, but yeah, that was not the case.
Yeah.
And the more that we force people into that like what everyone sees and what's really going on, dichotomy, the more like
We open ourselves up to feeling the conflict inside of us between feeling like we have a a sense of who God is
And we have that experience of belonging that you were talking about.
And I think this has been like one of the worst casualties of having subcultures in the first place
Is we made a big boundary, we being every subculture makes a big boundary between the world outside and this like
insider bubble and the problem for everyone is it creates so much pressure to stay in the bubble altogether and I've just seen how many
Like there's been a whole generation of people who feel like they have to openly deconstruct their faith in order to recover a feeling of consistency and wholeness and integrity inside of themselves.
And they wouldn't have had to deconstruct.
if we hadn't forced them into that hypocrisy in the first place.
Hmm.
That is a fascinating subject to me.
Hey friends, so at pickup last week, our daughter asked Scott a truly
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Let's talk tonight when we've got privacy.
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So maybe let's talk a little bit about deconstruction because a lot of
folks ask me about this all the time.
It's a journey that, you know, so many people have been on, including myself, trying to figure out what does faith look like for me.
What is deconstruction?
Do you like that word?
I know a lot of people are like, ugh, I don't really like I don't even really like that word.
What what does that mean to you?
Sure.
Well
Deconstruction has been a word that was popularized by American evangelicals who were trying to maintain some kind of
faith story when they felt like they were no longer part of this subculture, no longer part of a world that they understood to be Christian anymore.
And they didn't want to say post-Christian.
They wanted to be a part of the story, so they use the language of deconstruction.
I think deconstruction is is like a helpful image because if you've if about thinking about that insider-outsider boundary we were talking about is
they were living inside of walls that were built really high.
And so often those were walls built by the rules around their families, like we're talking about, but all but sometimes and mostly institutions
So any subculture has a whole bunch of institutions involved.
It often has like Christian schools, it might have Bible summer camps.
you know, magazines, music, concerts, like everywhere you look, it had like a a faith story attached to it.
So when someone's deconstructing, all of a sudden they're like, gosh, I now I don't even know what music I like or now all my memories are in this camp and I really liked the
fire part, but actually I'm like really upset about some of the things they taught me about what it means to be a girl.
So it can be really overwhelming for people who didn't just have a faith.
They lived inside of a whole story
and they're not sure which parts they now want to keep.
I really struggled with this in my own life when I was trying to process the evangelicalism that I learned as a teenager.
I wanted to belong so badly.
And I had a Bible camp that I went to where I like met my boyfriend.
turned husband you can see how like much of like the young bride young evangelical super winner in the game of trying to be a good evangelical
I was the vice president of my Inner School Christian Fellowship.
Like man, I was in it to win it.
You're like if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do it all the way.
I did.
And I I learned a lot about
I mean the parts that I wanted to keep in the end were that I learned so much about a heartfelt faith.
I learned so much about feeling like I could talk directly to God in a way that was authentic.
And also, I learned some truly terrible things that has taken me a long time to undo.
I was taught that a woman's role is to be a compliment to her husband, but not a leader
I was openly told I would never be able to be a pastor.
Now I teach pastors.
You can see that one
I think by the time I graduated college, I realized how much damage had also been done as being part of this seamless world in which I was either good or bad.
But my very first act in trying to reconstruct my faith
is that I contacted the old Bible camp where I had been taught that I could never be a leader and I offered to rewrite all of their Bible curriculum for all the summer camp kids every year
Not just out of the goodness of my heart, but because I realized I would never be allowed to preach there.
But I could speak to all of the kids every single day directly.
if I wrote it down, which is one of the great hypocrisies.
Like we're not okay with group female pastors, but we're fine with female writers.
So but it was my first go at being like how do I keep the parts
that are meaningful while start to acknowledge just how much harm it's done.
Mm-hmm.
And when when you think about the harm, like you talked a little bit about your journey to kind of
processing that harm, a lot of folks were talking to me about their own religious trauma.
And I I love this also this process of reconstructing.
And I think a lot of people, a lot of people that listen to this podcast are kind of in that point.
And for a time, I think for a lot of people, it might feel like the only option is to leave everything behind.
Yeah
Right, because it's like, well, I was hurt so much.
Especially a lot of people who've maybe experienced abuse by leaders in the church, right?
They've
They've witnessed abusive things happen.
Like we know the church has a history of a lot of really tricky things.
What do you say to people who are kind of
in that position right now where they're just like, you know what, I don't want my kids to have any part in this because it was just so painful for me.
Well, I think the first step is specifically that kind of deep acknowledgement is look what this cost.
Like I think pain demands a witness.
And so the very first thing that you can do for yourself and that you can invite other people into is to be able to count the cost.
I should have been able to be more trusting by now.
But look at what's happened to me.
I I think like a nice, I love math.
And I think just letting it all add up into something, even if it feels really awful
is a really important step that can't be skipped over.
Cause if you just pretend and you try to get to the next stage where actually you're fine already, I do find that we end up stumbling back into some of the same forms of even just like religious seeking.
that we might actually have some reservations about.
So for example, let's say we had an abusive, overly strict
deeply problematic pastoral figure in our life who told us things that caused us to believe things about ourselves and our relationships that's taken a long time to undo
Well man, if we don't actually look at that carefully, we might actually find we've just found a yoga instructor who has almost identical features, but it's just in a form that we didn't recognize as also having a religious structure
So I think step one is always like let's be real about what it cost.
I think the second thing is I don't know if this is just because I'm a historian, but I love to just try to look at the model itself and be like which parts of this were really hard
Like one thing I think a lot of us realize we have a problem with is the all-seeing, all-knowing pastoral figure.
I think that was really problematic.
And this all came out of that same cultural movement we talked about with focus on the family, where we tried to lift up certain men above everyone else to prove that we were winning a culture war
Now that I get to teach pastors, I love seeing that different model, like the humble leader, the one who doesn't mind being questioned, the one who will sit down with you for the extra beat to say like
where do you think this passage is going?
So like I would just say like one of the things that helps in reconstructing is trying to identify not just the specificity of your experience, but which forms did it take and how can you find a healthier version with like
f uh for example of the category of a pastor or of a bible study or of a camp.
What are there healthier alternatives to the same model?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and I think what you said at the very beginning is so important to it.
Like allow yourself to have all the feelings that you're having.
I think a
you know, a lot of adults, let's say in their 30s, that's the first time because their kids are now developing a faith.
And I always say to parents, the age where you were hurt the most is typically the age where you're the most triggered by your kids
So let's say your child is school age, they're nine, and now you're remembering being nine and hearing all these lessons at church for the first time and being like
Oh, I always thought God was loving and this incredible being who just cared for me, but now I'm learning I'm inherently a bad, sinful, horrible person.
And
And your view shifted of yourself at nine, right?
And now your child's nine and you see that they're full of love and full of light, and you're like, I who couldn't have a little bit of you.
Who could say that to you?
Yeah, who could say that to you?
Who could say that you're inherently bad and full of sin, right?
And and I notice then parents are like, like I have to let everything go and then it it brings up again this authenticity versus belonging, like
Well, do I have to lie to my parents and pretend like I'm okay with this when really I'm not?
And like, who am I?
And the parents just get really overwhelmed.
And I think the first thing is to be able to acknowledge Yeah, I'm picking on the age nine, but to acknowledge the hurt and pain you felt at age nine.
That's so
Good.
Man, that's so insightful.
I can completely see how that full circle feeling comes back, especially when it comes to church hurt.
I think too that there are certain seasons where it pops up too.
It pops up right when babies are born, because often you have to decide, wait.
Do I believe in infant baptism?
Yeah, you start right away.
And then and then they're like, and a lot of people just think, okay, well, I'll do it even if it's just part of a tradition.
But
frequently what they're doing is they're just deferring a difficult conversation they're having with themselves where they're just not sure, well then when am I going to have that conversation with my kid about which parts of my faith might I really truly want to pass along to them.
And this often really comes up around age twelve when a lot of traditions have some kind of like confirmation where the kids start to starting to develop their own faith story.
For a moment like that, I guess I would just
Follow along with your advice thinking about what you were like at that particular age.
And I guess I would really encourage people if their kid is in a
in of like of some kind of Sunday school class or some kind of religious experience, don't feel embarrassed reading the curriculum and trying like reading whatever messaging they're getting and just try to imagine yourself at that age and how it's affecting them.
Because
very often we think that we know the story that they're getting.
And typically actually right now, it's a like right now my kids in Catholic school.
It is a very different Catholic school experience than the one I got growing up.
Like it is so often much gentler
much more focused on love.
So it might be worth pumping the brakes and then looking back and seeing like, is this a story I could think about telling my 12-year-old self?
Would I feel loved?
Would I feel held?
Would I feel like I know something true about God if I read it like this?
Yeah, I love that.
And the pausing to be like, wait.
they're not me.
And I'm doing something in a different way for them.
Yeah, and I do have power and control.
I can read the lessons.
I can decide what kind of messages that they get.
And I think it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
No.
Um it really wasn't.
It r and it really doesn't.
And you don't even have to, let's say your kid didn't follow the same religious track that you did.
You had to go to Sunday school every week and actually you hated it and then you never made your kid do it
Well, at some point, I just find it really useful to say over and over again, like, your faith is your story about who God is to you.
And at any time we get to be a part of that together in a community or we'll just do it in our family.
But I'm part of a Mennonite tradition, which has a really nice tradition.
in my opinion.
Where you don't tell your faith story until you're an adult.
And I'm I'm the reason why I find that helpful is I'm picturing my own kid at 18, 19, 20
being able to tell a story that he's decided on that I hope that I have informed well, but I like knowing that I can nurture it.
But at some point I'll be able to fully pass the baton and be like, this one's on you, dude.
Hmm.
And so you do have a son.
And how how old is he now?
He's eleven.
He's in the stage where he just digs holes in my yard and reduces my property value.
I love it.
So when you're talking to him about your faith, about your upbringing, what kind of stories do you tell him?
How do you give him that autonomy while also
Teaching him your values, how do you balance that?
I guess one kind of religious approach, which I don't tend to agree with, is
I think a lot of people feel like at some point their kid will just sort of experience religion like a buffet and be like, oh, I want carrots.
Like I don't know any other virtue, any other good habit
that we try to introduce later on in life.
Be like, hey, by the way, we use forks.
Like, I think we have to do it.
Whatever we believe in, I think we have to do it slowly along the way.
knowing that of course they might at a later date choose to opt out.
But the way that I do that means that I pray with my son every night and I try to model the sort of prayer that I would have wanted, which is very like
Hey God, really have some objections about the problem of evil right now.
Just like open, kind about the day, hits all the major high points, praise not just for ourselves but others
So I guess that that part feels important to me because I one of the things I'm really hoping to model is feeling loved and also feeling like he has his own way to God without me.
But I'm also living in a country that is not the one I grew up in and doesn't actually at all have the same religious traditions that I grew up with.
I find that very stressful because I can't actually even duplicate the stuff I like
So instead, I just try to say every time, Zach, this is the tradition we're following right now.
Every tradition has pluses and minuses.
Oh boy, do I want to tell you about them.
But I want him to know a lot of different kinds of faithful people so that he has far more examples than just me.
So like my best friend is a Presbyterian pastor.
All my students are people with spiritual stories.
And I really try to encourage them just to tell him about what faith means to them so that it's not just like
Follow your mom.
It's like learn to tell the story about a God who interrupts us.
And let's just see where this goes.
And isn't that how it should be too?
I think community is a piece that
has hurt many people, right?
We've talked about that, but also can be a really beautiful gift to our children as well when we can wrap them in
people of all sorts of different beliefs and different ways of showing their spirituality or faith or whatever it is.
I think that can be really beautiful for our children and we don't really talk about
that a lot.
And even if it's really, really not perfect
but it has some good qualities you like.
I do think consistently going to a faith community is a good habit.
You know, you might be very uninspired one week, but
As it goes along, what I do think it introduces to children is that our family is not an island.
There are all kinds of people here who love you
and who can reach out to you or to just be an example.
Like right now my son's really into military history, even though we're pacifists, so it drives me crazy.
But like actually the church we go to, he was like, do you think I could meet somebody
who's been through a war.
Actually the church is a perfect way to like indulge your weird hobbies, but really teach him how to encounter other people as being different but similar to him.
Mm-hmm.
So let's say someone they're on this process or trying to deconstruct their faith.
They're not really sure where they are, but they're missing community.
Like I I do find a lot of people I talk to, they're like
I've left the church and I'm okay with that, but I miss community or I miss my rituals or my tradition.
How do they
go about finding a place and maybe identifying some red flags that like okay this might not be the community for me.
Like do you have any kind of tips for even just like finding a community?
Well I guess I would just say first on the ritual piece like
If you find you're missing things, you're missing that feeling of intimacy, you're missing that feeling of connection, like those bits are really things that you can put into your life.
And I find it helpful just to add one little bonus thing to help remind me, like anchor it to a time of day or just lighting a very smelly candle.
But just giving yourself a moment of warmth
It's just a weird bit of the human condition is we feel an ache
And we need a moment to feel that ache and to feel like there's something beyond ourselves that answers.
And so that is something that no matter how we've been hurt, we can still find that kind of soulless by ourselves.
Now, communities.
Communities are you know there's like fifty-two registered kinds of Baptists?
Like there's literally so many kinds of people that it's so stressful.
For anyone like I'm a professional church interpreter, so I just wish I could make create like a choose your own adventure for everyone to be like, if you want, you know
No weird comments about this and uh adult baptism.
You could try.
You live in Albuquerque, you should try.
I do think though looking for humility in leadership is a really good start
I also find that you can read the church's website and that's a really fast way.
It'll usually have a belief statement.
If that belief statement is too specific,
Move on.
Okay.
A church that has like really tried to nail down too many specifics is not usually the church for you if you're trying to reintroduce like a broader sense of God's love
I also find that that's a really fast way of figuring out what people think about gender.
Are they inclusive of women?
Are they inclusive of same-sex relationships?
Like a church website is gonna spare you a lot of
pain and the inconvenience going there on Sunday morning.
Yeah.
I think that that's helpful advice.
Just just read and maybe trial and just
to see if it fits for you.
But even sometimes too like a evening service or something that's called like vespers or contemplative like
I find that if you're trying to reintroduce that bright Sunday morning, oh my gosh, we have to dress up, this is so much work, is like not a nice way in.
I find like a gentler, a simple spiritual practice and lots of churches offer them is kind of a
I find an easier way to find a personal experience with God without necessarily having to feel like you're suddenly part of this big show and tell moment.
Yeah, that's really helpful, I think.
I love that some of my followers were able to name that.
Like I miss the community.
I miss that ritual of what I had growing up, but I just know the church I was going to just wasn't healthy.
It was hurtful or whatever it was.
Yeah
Okay, this is a huge question.
The role of sin, you know, and thinking we're inherently bad.
I know a lot of parents struggle with that because
let's say their children are getting messages like, you know, you're sinful or they don't know how to deal like how to incorporate that, how to talk about that.
It's in the Bible like what do you make of that?
Oh my gosh.
That is so tricky and that's such a big imp
Important question, especially if you have a memory or of a sense of your own worth that's been altered by that language.
Like
I think that's like one of the best questions you can ask is how much do I want to introduce to my child the idea that they need to be different than who they are?
And I think for that reason, instead of the language of sin, I find the word, which is still a very Christian word, and it does the same work
I find the word formation and malformation to be more helpful.
That's right up your alley, Jess, with the like nurturing.
It's nurturing language.
And I think
There's a classically liberal view that says that everything about us inside of us is good.
I do not hold that view.
I think that many things inside of me is song lyrics.
and mistakes I've made in the past.
So like I don't know that I love my anxiety and think that that's super good.
So yeah, I I
feel you.
Inside of me is like projections I have, but whether people are mad at me.
So like so we don't want an either or.
We don't want to say every single thing you find inside your heart and mind is good and trustworthy and I hope you find I hope you follow it.
We don't want that.
And we certainly don't want to, hey, just so you know, you're actually evil and malformed and every part of you needs to change.
Aren't you so glad God exists?
Neither of those are good and I would just say neither of those are fundamentally good Christian arguments either.
They're really not.
So I really like nurture language.
I like and I think that is
it inside of formation language.
What it says is, what is inside of us is a grab bag.
What I would say to my own son is, oh my gosh, you are made out of pure love
God only makes things God is delighted with.
And we need to continue to grow toward what is good, or else we're going to accidentally, and sometimes on purpose, be formed by what is
bad.
And examples, sharing, caring about the unpopular person in class.
I mean there's so many early examples in which we could nurture a malformation and say, do it's
Do what's best for you.
So I think that sin language is helpful when it tells us, my sweet lovely child, it is part of our job is to grow toward the light.
This is a language of growing.
It's not a language where we are left where we are.
I think a liberal, I mean classically liberal, like in a philosophical way liberal, can often sometimes overestimate
language of how good kids are and that's also confusing too.
Kids know that sometimes they're not good.
So let's not overprioritize one or the other.
We're just saying we're in a process of becoming
Let's become yeah, I really love that.
And I I feel that with my own kids.
And I think there's so much we can learn from children too.
I think, you know, it really does make me sad when I hear people talk about kids like, you know, you're full of sin, you just need God.
Because I'm like
Oh my goodness, like kids are full of wisdom and we need to learn from them.
Like I just feel like kids have Yes.
I'll give you an example.
Uh my daughter has this stuffed animal.
Its name is Cucumber.
Amazing.
And she knows how to take care of it.
She knows how to put cucumber in an outfit.
She knows how to put cucumber down for a nap.
She knows how to give cucumber, you know, food when he needs it
And like she has this like innate desire to care and so love and to give back and give literally like
her own things to this stuffy.
And it saddens me to imagine a child just so full of wisdom, full of love, so much we can learn from them, being told like you're inherently bad.
Yes
It's such a perfect example.
Their instinct to like, oh bum, that's okay.
Like the actually quick to forgive
the strange, amazing low-ego-ness of a child in a healthy relationship, I mean, they really blow our minds and teach us so much about virtues that we're supposed to have.
But I really like
I think one of the bits that that sin language is overprioritizing is our language of creation tells us that we are already baked into us.
Is that exactly that wisdom you're describing is our desire and need for love?
Is our like willingness to forgive other people because we know what wholeness feels like.
We know that from the moment we
get to stare into somebody else's eyes and feel like we are human velcro.
I mean having a stronger account of how creation works, that the very first thing God says
is that we're made good, I think helps put the language of sin in context.
Sin is not an incorrect category, but it has to be right-sized.
It can be so big that we forget how much we already know and are participating in what God wants for us.
That's so beautiful.
Something that I think a lot about is how like this language of sin, we've talked about spanking, kind of, you know, how our faith has maybe been used against us in those early years.
And I think a lot about how parents just honestly feel really stuck and feel really overwhelmed.
And so when someone like you said focused on the family, Dr.
James Dobson, like I'm pretty sure my parents had that book in their house
And they're good parents.
Like my parents are amazing parents.
And I've talked about this with my mom before.
She's like, we didn't have anything else.
Like this is what we had.
And we believed like this is what we have to use because this is the resource, right?
And I think there is this desire for us, and you can correct me if I'm wrong.
This is just my own thoughts.
There's this desire in us as humans to have rules, because rules are like, if I can follow them, then at least I feel kind of safe.
Okay, if the rule is my kid misbehaves, I have to break their strong will, I have to do this by spanking them.
Well at least they know what to do, I know what the plan is, and I'm like, I'm right, I'm like following this right trajectory.
Because when we have rules, we don't have to really think super hard about other things.
And I think nuance is so much more difficult than rules.
Because I've asked myself the question a million times, like why are we so attracted to these
religious communities that actually are hurting us and telling us we're awful and hurting our kids.
Like, why are we attracted to it?
But I think that there's something about rules that just
feels easier or makes us feel safe.
I don't I would love your thoughts on that.
Well I'm just thinking too about because there is a really there's a surprisingly high correlation sometimes between churches that have really strict rules and
the degree to which people want to follow them and then that church is successful.
I've always found that very strange, but I I studied mega churches for a long time, and often the more strict ones were the ones that were on the surface more successful
And I think that really gets to your point about what is it about these high walls inside our families, inside the way that we make decisions, inside our churches, that somehow calm us
even if they sometimes override our ability to make a more thoughtful choice.
And sometimes, especially and I'm just thinking especially of church communities, having very, very specific rules
fully duplicates parenting that people never had.
They find that the pastor in their family become a surrogate family, just tell me what to do, tell me how to be good.
And and sometimes, and I've seen this a lot in the mega churches that I studied
Sometimes it's offer also offering like emotional skills that they were not taught, which is just like regulation, a place to go when you do feel angry.
They've got recovery groups, they've got effectively like free therapy in the form of these
you know, endless like Bible studies and church groups and like so much belonging that you don't have to feel alone in your problem.
The idea that we go to these full service churches and they solve all our problems usually has a honeymoon period
And then life happens, right?
Like there's a divorce, a kid with special needs who actually can't possibly respond to that form of discipline.
Like these tricky things pop up.
The problem with high rules and these high walls in these situations is that when it comes to moments that require nuance, these communities and families fail us right at the moment where we needed them the most
And I think a lot of people who are deconstructing have a moment like that in their mind where they were like, actually, I needed you to see me as a person and you failed me in my complicated, real, messy life
So sometimes the things that attracted us end up being the thing that specifically breaks us.
Yeah
I think that makes so much sense.
And I think if we bring it back to belonging, like there's kind of inauthentic belonging where I'm a part of this community, I'm loved, I feel seen, I feel heard
But then if we can't be truly authentic inside of that and we notice that we have to start hiding parts of ourselves and we're not seen and heard, we realize it's not true belonging.
And I think that's where our own walls start coming up.
And
We we can't stay in a battle between authenticity and belonging for our entire life.
I think that becomes incredibly difficult.
Yeah.
I totally agree.
And I will say just as like a pitch for pastors lately is I mean there was a lot of training that was frankly missing from that conversation before.
Like the average pastor did not get mental health training.
30 years ago.
I mean some did.
P mental health training has been the norm in some churches for as long as like a hundred years.
But for the most part, a lot of pastors have
been confused about what should have rightfully been handed over to a therapist or psychologist.
As someone who gets to teach pastors now, I will say they are very well trained.
They also spend a lot of time in hospitals with like other mental health professionals learning about like the limits of their own training.
So I do feel like people know their lanes.
Way more now than they did before.
I'm like very grateful for that.
But there was like I think if you feel too, like just as a red flag
If you feel like the person spiritually in charge of you seems to sort of feel like the whole swimming pool is theirs, you know, that there's no topic in which they're not the expert, that should worry anyone.
Like
Yeah.
One of the best parts about being an adult is you should go to the right person who has the right tool for the right thing.
You should be able to trust your pastor for certain spiritual questions and for certain moral questions.
And you should be able to trust your therapist for other ones.
And I would just really want to encourage everyone to have like multiple tools in their toolkit
Instead of just one super super tool.
Yeah, definitely.
And and as a therapist, I can attest to that on the other side where I feel like I've been called into churches now like more often to be like, Hey, can you talk about anxiety?
Can you talk about mental health?
Which I love to hear because
Because I want to be able to provide what I'm good at, but also there's a reason I pull you into this discussion because also I'm not the expert in everything, right?
And I think there's something really beautiful about people in positions of power like yourself or myself who are able to say
I don't actually know it.
I only know this part.
I only know this part.
Yeah, exactly.
So let me talk and bring in other people who are really
Experts.
Exact.
So just to wrap up, I I think it might be really cool for us both to kind of talk about what does this look like
for you now.
So you've kind of gone through your journey of this great start.
And as you're talking, maybe you can touch on something you said at the very beginning, which is the difference between spirituality and religion.
Like you kind of talked about those as if they were two separate things
And what does this look like for you now?
And if there's anything that you can kind of offer to someone who's just still on that journey.
Yeah.
Man, yeah, because when I look back at like the young version of what I wanted, sometimes we talk about religion and spirituality as separate things because
religion often involves institutions and a set of practices.
Spirituality we often imagine to be like beliefs and individuals.
And the truth is over the course of our lives we're gonna need a bit of both
Almost nobody can live a whole life and not need the shelter of an institution at some point.
That's why they're there.
That's why they should be there.
is they should be there to protect us when we are fragile and weak and in transition and need a second and actually we also want free childcare for a second once a week.
There's
tender moments.
And in my life, I've been a very lucky and a very, very unlucky person.
When I was in my thirties, I was diagnosed with stage four cancer and my life completely came apart.
And in those moments, this is the part where I just like, when I think back, this is the the bit about church that makes me very emotional is those were the people who volunteered.
to do things for me that no normal set of people would do.
They like donated airline points to me so that I could fly to the hospital that I needed out of state.
They like did a meal train and kept me and my family fed for two years when I was on endless chemo.
I
have a really awkward situation where my workplace is actually attached to the hospital.
So like my university, you can like walk down a couple hallways and then like ta-da.
I'm wearing an outfit
I don't want to be seen in at work.
But one of the like very sweetest things is that because so many of the professors I work with are also ordained pastors.
They completely abused the uh visiting privileges of pastors where they were like where they could pop in at any hour to be like, oh no, no, I'm her pastor.
So like one time I went to sleep for a surgery and then came up and was wearing entirely woke up and was wearing entirely different socks because like someone
Someone had knit them for me and it just like came hitched up by and like carefully put them on me, which made me laugh so hard.
But it was one of the things I've
experienced in times in which I was really lucky and unlucky when I needed no one and I needed everyone is that having taken the time
to think about what faith meant to me meant that when I really did need something, I was ready to have a certain kind of person in my life, a certain kind of person who could help carry me.
And those people can speak comfort
to me without saying awful things that I don't want to hear are not true.
You know, and it's it's become like a big part of my life's mission is to help people use
especially faith language in a way that brings comfort and doesn't double down on pain in people's most tender moments.
And so
I've just experienced the deep need for other people and then also the limits when people come into your life at a tenor moment and they absolutely say the wrong thing.
And then you wish they would fall into a well.
Yeah.
And we need to acknowledge that those moments will happen.
And yeah
Yeah, that that's so beautiful.
And I think it speaks to something that a lot of us are missing, which is the community piece, right?
The people in our life that can lift us up and be there for us.
And I you mentioned this before and I've heard you talk about this on your podcast with the ache.
Yeah.
That ache, right?
That feeling of I need someone to take care of me and I don't want to be in this world alone
And I think that there's something really profound about being able to acknowledge that all of us carry that inside of us in some way, shape, or form.
form.
No matter if you were raised religious, if you are religious, we all kind of feel that way.
Is that fair to say?
It is.
It is one of the deepest
truths about us is we we ache for the moorness of it.
And that doesn't mean that because we feel incomplete, that we are broken.
A human life is like an arrow, like we are just always pointing outside of ourselves, and it creates all of the hungers and needs that are really good.
for relationship and it also creates all the hungers and needs that help us learn to be of service to other people.
So if you feel like you're by yourself
And you feel achy inside and you wonder if that means that maybe you're broken, you're definitely not.
You are just a person.
This is not faulty wiring.
the ache is like a feature not a bug.
Yeah, I I think it's important.
Nobody talks about this.
Like at least in my world.
You probably talk about this all the time, but in my world, you know, like I feel like sometimes I'm out here like
Talking to my husband's gone, I'm like, oh, like, don't you just feel an ache?
And he's like, Jess, like not everyone has to have like such a profound view on life as you.
Um you played two sad songs
So he'd be right in it.
Oh, I know.
I know.
Even my kids are like, can you say the word profound a little less to us?
I'm like, no, I can't.
They can't.
I'm feeling it right now.
I can't.
But something so for
For me, it uh I've really had to think about what like I have three kids, right?
What do I want to teach them?
What's been really important to me about religion that
I want to pass down to them, what don't I?
And I mean I could do a whole other episode just on that.
But there's certain things that have kind of stuck with me through the years.
And if I look back at my childhood, I think you were talking about this in your reconstruction piece of like
what was meaningful to you that you want to pass on.
And for me, some of the pieces that I really love are just even the rituals.
Like growing up every Sunday after church.
We would go with my entire family.
We'd go to my grandma's house and at my grandma's house with my all my aunts and uncles, she would make cake.
It would be the same chocolate cake every single week.
And every week we'd eat this cake, we'd talk about
We talk about things we'd spend together like togetherness, you know, this sense of belonging, this sense of being part of something that's greater than just you.
And when I think about what I want.
for my kids, like I want them to grow up with a feeling of togetherness, of community, of belonging.
And that was really important to me when I was kind of reflecting on
what do I want for them?
I think there's also like beautiful rituals like let's say prayer, you know, whether for you, depending on whatever your religion is or not, maybe some people call it mindfulness or a meditation, right?
Or
like a prayer and I think to start a meal with just like being grateful for the things in our life and taking a moment to think about the people in our life who are suffering or who are hurting
is a really profound ritual that we can give to our children.
So there's certain things like that that I have found, um, even this visualization that there's something out there like
Whether for you it's God or it's something else who just loves you and just cares for you, like that's really, really beautiful too.
And like so for the question, I I had this question from a lot of people, like
How do you incorporate faith rituals to into your life, even if you're not at a point in your religious journey where you're like, I'm ready to go back to church or whatever?
I think that there are those pieces that you can incorporate
That can give you like something greater than yourself.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Okay, I wanna say three quick things then
One, I think there's a moment where you wake up and you want to feel like your eyes are fully open.
Like, oh my gosh, it's today.
I think that is a moment
I was sick for a long time and I just have found that part of being so deeply grateful for living is that I'm not just
saying I'm glad to be alive.
I'm saying thank you.
Like I'm grateful.
I'm grateful to God.
I'm grateful to a force outside of myself for the ability to have the day.
So I just think
Even if you don't feel it, a very quick thank you when your eyeballs are seeing the world at some point in the morning is a good idea
It doesn't have to translate into exhausting gratitude journals.
You can just take one single second in the morning and be like, ugh
today.
The other bit I think is around food.
We live in a world now with tremendous food scarcity and I think it's a really lovely thing.
We always do like a song
But I think it's a lovely thing to gather together and to feel the force of like a gratitude.
Gratitude is in in that way, not to make us feel bad, but to make us
get that more than enoughness that makes us want to spill out into other people.
That's like such a key thing if you want to do it around food, but just take a minute and even if it's dumb song, like sing the song.
Like take it as a family, do it with a friend.
I don't care
And then the last thing, and this is just a thing that I have needed in my own life, but I've started a tradition of this is a historic tradition, this is not Cape Bull or invented it
But I do it all the time now and I just I like to bless things.
And instead of we live in very hashtag blessed, don't I look so good on a beach.
Doesn't the summer light make me look less fat?
Like it's just awful how much hashtag blast we feel like we're supposed to live into.
So this is not that
But there's this absolutely lovely Judeo-Christian tradition that just says my friend uh Stephen Chapman who wrote a book on historic blessing, he said it's kind of the word is emplacement, but I think of it kind of like interior spiritual design.
Like you take your whole life and you think like
Okay, this lamp should go over here on this table.
This like try to imagine your life is a room and you gotta move things around in it, the good and the bad.
And you just start practicing blessing what it is.
So for this I would say
in my ridiculous too much not enough summer, I'll be like God, this is or inverse this
In the too muchness of this, I feel like I'm supposed to experience freedom, but the truth is I have 200 errands and most things I'm never going to finish.
Help me feel
my own goodness when I am doing nothing at all.
And then I want to like bless this kid that's going to summer camp, bless this kind of ugliness that's going on in my family right now that I'm not sure what to do this.
Like it's just kind of a bless it all, take it all.
And I can do it like writing it down.
I can do it when I'm just talking to a friend.
I'm just listing things.
But being able to say like good and bad, you are here, bless it all, has been really transformative for me instead of feeling like I've got to tidy up.
before I have a faith practice.
I really love that.
I learned something similar to that years ago when my babies were little.
And one of my friends would do something like that when her baby was crying.
Like you know, a blessing for like that she didn't actually label as a blessing.
She said, what a what a gift that my baby's able to cry
so much and needs me.
Um and so she would try and kind of reframe it just a little bit and like, yes, this moment's so hard and also, you know, thank you for the gift that my baby's able to cry and able to need me and that I'm in this moment right now.
That is so hard.
Like it it's an acknowledgement of the heart and an acknowledgement of the blessing that's in those hard moments.
And that's been really helpful for me.
As a parent to three little ones where there are some like even last night I'm like, thank you that my child's doing yoga on my face while they're trying to sleep.
Like I'm so glad they can move their body and at the same time like the like
And for the exhaustion that I'm and for the thing I'm worried I can never get back.
Like I think so the my only worry about gratitude is that in the reframing, sometimes we won't acknowledge what we lost and then it creates that secondary suffering effect
So as long as you're just like for the awfulness of this and also the gray and then just hit the low notes.
Yeah, verball high note, right?
As long as you hit the low notes too.
Yeah, you have to.
And I think that's so much of people's pain too, right?
With the church is like, oh, it it only can be positive.
No, it's terrible.
Like what you said about your friends caring for you when you're in the hospital, right?
And I've seen that in my own life.
Like I couldn't believe we moved into a new community.
We had our third baby.
And there was people who just dropped off meals and I had never met them before and they were just dropping meals off at my front door like
Here you go.
And I could not believe that that was happening because that had never happened to me before.
So there is beauty in joining each other in the suffering.
I think that can be really lovely as well.
Thank you so much, Kate.
There was like I could talk to you for probably ever, but this is probably a really beautiful place to wrap up.
Is there anything final that you want to share with the listener who's been listening to us for this hour?
No, just that they're doing great, and I'm really sorry that the church is frequently the worst.
And and also the truth is gonna guide you as much as the anger.
It's gonna take you into a better place.
I really do think that deconstruction is not
It's truly not the worst thing in the world.
It's it means you're still engaged.
You're still on a journey.
It's and it will it will lead somewhere better
Yeah, to give yourself so much grace in this journey and to know that.
Like just to bring it back to belonging, which seems to be a theme of this discussion, right?
That it makes sense that you're looking for somewhere to belong.
It makes sense that it really hurt
When the place you thought you belonged to was actually not a place you could be authentic, and don't stop.
Don't just assume that no one's gonna love you for you because you are lovable just as you are.
It's perfect.
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