Theology Kills | Blame as External Violence:  Cain, Abel, and the Temptation to Make Someone Else the Problem 

What if blame isn’t a path to justice, but a catharsis for pain we don’t know how to process? January Jaxon and Andrew McRae continue their reading of Genesis, interpreting the story of Cain and Abel as an attempt to solve inner conflict by exporting it. Charting a connection from Eve’s self-betrayal to the brother-betrayal of her children, Jaxon and McRae draw on René Girard and Internal Family Systems to suggest that violence begins long before physical harm is done — in the moment we decide someone is an obstacle to overcome instead of a person to love.

You’ll hear:

How internal shame becomes external blame
Why disgust — not just desire — drives the scapegoat mechanism
Why eliminating the “problem person” never creates lasting peace
The important distinction between naming harm and needing a villain

PLUS practices of confession and forgiveness that interrupt self-righteousness and help us recognize ourselves in the person we blame.

“This is for anyone tired of facile answers to deep questions about relating to ourselves and relating to God. You’ll appreciate how January and Andrew articulate complex ideas with humor and grace. You're going to want to listen more than once! (I did!)”
—Rev. Kari Reiten

Ideal for listeners interested in Girardian mimetic theory, Internal Family Systems as a spiritual practice, and breaking cycles of relational violence.

Chapters:

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:21) - Presentation: Cain, Abel, and Blame as External Violence
(23:40) - Is the Satanic accusation a moment of mimetic disgust?
(30:15) - Can we protect against mimetic blame by healing disgust?
(36:49) - Shame and blame in the parable of the Prodigal Son
(41:51) - Avoiding our pain versus tormenting ourselves with it
(46:29) - The Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat (Matthew 13:24-30)
(57:02) - Jesus doesn't see hungry people as obstacles to his grieving
(58:19) - Mark chapter 2 shows the escalation of blame
(01:00:31) - Andrew shares a story of blaming
(01:14:22) - Introducing "Eucontamination" by Paul Hoard and Billie Hoard
(01:17:08) - Cultivating joy as an antidote to disgust
(01:20:39) - The Hebrew etymology of Cain's name
(01:24:34) - God cursed the serpent — but NOT the humans
(01:30:53) - The practice of confession & forgiveness
(01:41:06) - Unpacking what forgiveness is and isn't
(01:49:13) - "Reality is only knowable through forgiveness"
(01:52:15) - End credits

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Note: This podcast is a personal exploration of theology, creativity, and human experience. January Jaxon and Andrew McRae are not medical or mental health professionals, and nothing in this podcast should be understood as medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Our discussions are general and are not a substitute for personalized care. If you need medical or mental health support, we encourage you to seek care from a qualified professional.

Creators and Guests

Host

Andrew McRae

Co-host

Host

January Jaxon

Co-host

What is Theology Kills?

Toxic theologies have been weaponized to wound, but the gospel was always meant to be medicine. January Jaxon and Andrew McRae blend Internal Family Systems theory with the mimetic anthropology of René Girard to uncover a Christ-centered theology of integrity that heals shame, fosters embodiment, and creates contagious peace in the midst of a world at war. Balancing scriptural insight with personal reflections and simple everyday practices, each episode explores the ways that violence warps our creativity, our relationships, and our sense of self — and how divine love sets us free.

[00:00:00] Andrew: Okay. I just Googled it. Blessed is the lion, which is eaten by a human and then becomes human, but how awful for the human who’s eaten by a lion and the lion becomes human.

[00:00:11] January: Yes, exactly. I think that’s a line about violent desire! Right? We can consume the violence and become fully human, like Christ does,

[00:00:21] Andrew: Oh!

[00:00:23] January: or the violence can consume us and take over and become human, right? Tell me I’m crazy.

[00:00:29] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Oh man, that’s so awesome. We can metabolize the violence and remain human, that’s a blessing. But how awful if the humanity is eaten by a lion and then the lion — that violence — becomes the way to be human now.

[00:00:52] January: If you’ve ever wondered why religion that proclaims unconditional love can feel so full of hatred, shame, and violence, you’re not alone — and you’re not wrong to want something more from Christian faith.

I’m January Jaxon,

[00:01:06] Andrew: and I’m Andrew McRae,

[00:01:08] January: and this is Theology Kills, a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive.

I have a morning habit of driving to the local beach for some sunrise meditation time to start my day. Now when I say beach, understand that I live on Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. We are not talking sand, sunshine, and palm trees. We are talking forbidding craggy bluffs, storm gnarled pines and madronas, rocks instead of sand, and a windchill factor that in early March had me bundled up in three layers of clothing plus a lap blanket.

On this particular morning, it was also a solid bank of impenetrable gray fog. I couldn’t see more than a few dozen feet as I walked to my favorite spot. I could only hear the chorus of gulls, crows and sparrows spinning around me and echoing off the cliffs. It was eerie as fuck, and for my inner goth girl, it was soul food.

Freezing temperatures had kept me from getting there for a few weeks, so I was hungry for an hour of quiet contemplation in nature. I was eager for the sensory deprivation of the fog to help me relax out of my anxious monkey mind. I couldn’t wait to still my breathing and to that birdsong. At 7:00 AM on a cold, foggy Saturday, I fully expected to have the place to myself, but no sooner had I settled on my bench than I heard a voice. Some young woman, up early for a hike along the walking trail at the top of the bluff, was rocking out to the music in her earbuds with unabashed abandoned.

As she drew closer, I recognized the song she was singing at the top of her lungs: “For Good” from the musical Wicked. There are many days when I would’ve been delighted by this, when it would’ve warmed my soul to hear her enthusiasm, and I would’ve gone on my way with a heart that had been filled with joy by her obvious joy.

This morning, though.

This morning I had an agenda. I was here for some quiet time, dammit. I had a plan. I’d done everything right to make sure I’d have silence, and here she was fucking up my one shot at the quiet I’d been craving. Like, it’s seven in the goddamn morning, girl. Could you not have waited one more hour to start this shit?!

Thankfully just moments after she’d disappeared out of earshot, I started to repent of my crappy attitude. I love the musical Wicked. That song “For Good”? It’s a duet. I know every word of both parts by heart. How cool would it have been to sing with her instead of resenting her? We couldn’t even see each other through the fog. How wild would it have been to remain anonymous to one another, but still create this moment of music together? How magical could that have been?

I could have instigated a moment of profound connection by joining her in her enthusiasm, an enthusiasm I legitimately share! Instead, I rejected her as an impediment to my goal. She wasn’t a person; she was a problem. And because I couldn’t see past my frustrated desire for silence, my bad attitude cost me a never to be repeated opportunity to create magic. This temptation to see someone as an obstacle instead of as an invitation? This is how our inner violence seeps into our outer world.

This is how Eve’s exile of her own vulnerability becomes Cain’s murder of his brother.

In our last episode, we talked about how Eve’s creativity gets disoriented by the serpent. God said Eve was very good, but the serpent makes her believe she’s incomplete, insufficiently wise. And Eve, under this toxic influence, goes, “I know how to fix that!” and grabs at the fruit that the snake says is the solution to her problem.

Then Adam imitates Eve and he eats of the fruit, too. So now they’re both out of integrity. Shame, the illusion of badness, has entered the human experience, and the more their protectors try to fix the problem, covering themselves with fig leaves hiding themselves from God behind the trees, the worse the problem gets until finally it takes them out of the peaceful Garden entirely and launches them into a wilderness rife with unpredictable dangers.

And that’s when Eve gets pregnant.

She has two children at first, which suggests to us right off the bat that her boys have inherited their parents’ new fragmentation. Cain is the first born, the strong one, the doer. He’s born into a world already fractured. He has never known the unity his parents remember. He grows up in a landscape of exile, believing that survival must be earned. That worth must be proven. Cain doesn’t just work the land, he fights it. Adam taught his son about their loss of the abundance of the garden. Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil, you will eat food from it all the days of your life. Genesis 3:17b. The Earth itself resists him.

Well, Cain, he’s gonna fight right back and he’s gonna win. Just like his mother, he believes that what God said was freely given must now be achieved through effort. Eve exiled herself from her own belovedness and now Cain’s about to do the same.

Abel’s different. He doesn’t fight the land. He’s content to simply be. He shepherds his herd, tends to their needs. He doesn’t strive to control his world. He trusts that where there’s life, there will be enough.

And the day comes when both brothers prepare an offering to the Lord. Cain gathers the fruit of his labor, the best of his crops, the proof of his effort. He sweated for this, fought for it, earned it. He lays it on his altar, expecting God to acknowledge the work of his hands.

Abel offers the firstborn of his flock. Not because it’s a test, not because he is trying to earn anything. Like Hannah dedicating Samuel to the priesthood, Abel is simply giving back what God has already given to him. He trusts what he’s received enough to let it go.

Abel’s offering is celebrated by God. Cain’s isn’t. And Cain is furious.

Cain doesn’t pause to ask himself why his offering was rejected. He doesn’t ask God either. It never occurs to him that maybe God is inviting him into something deeper, calling him away from the exhausting grind of constantly trying to prove his own worth. That seems so unfair when he worked so hard to bring this offering before God. Surely he deserves something!

Like his mother with the serpent, Cain’s imagination invents a lie that all his effort just wasn’t enough. And like his mother grasping after the fruit to become wise, Cain thinks, I need that blessing in order to be okay.

The conflict that began in the garden didn’t end there. It got passed on to the next generation, and it found a new target. Just like his mother saw God as the obstacle to her wisdom, Cain now sees Abel as the obstacle to his blessing.

René Girard had a term for this. He called it rivalry.

We talked in our last episode about Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, the idea that humans develop desires based on what we see other people desiring. And when this function is healthy, mimesis is a good thing. When we’re imitating a loving model who has our best interests at heart, mimesis empowers us to learn and grow at a tremendous rate.

But we live in what Christian theology calls a fallen world. Not all the desires that influence us are kind and loving ones. If we imitate a desire that is acquisitive rather than creative, for example, at some point, you and I become rivals to acquire.

I can imagine that that young woman singing at the beach had wanted a quiet space as much as I did. She wanted quiet so that she could fill it with her voice. I wanted quiet so I could meditate. In my imagination, I saw her as competition for the thing I wanted. Either she could have what she wanted, or I could have what I wanted, but we couldn’t both have what we wanted.

You know how this goes, don’t you? We’ve all been there. Someone else got the grade we wanted, someone else got the promotion we wanted. Someone else got the girlfriend we wanted. And instead of feeling happy for their success, we feel resentful that we weren’t favored. We feel inadequate or we feel cheated. We start stewing in comparison and blame, it becomes your fault I didn’t get that thing I wanted, and suddenly, every time I see that person, it’s a knife in the gut reminding me of what I lack.

If we let this blame fester, it starts to leak out into our actions. We might give this person condescending looks. We might start making snide little comments. We might start talking shit about them when they aren’t in the room. We begin to look for ways to take them down a peg. For most of us, fortunately, this doesn’t get as far as outright murder, but what does Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount?

You have heard that it was said to the ancients, you must not murder, and whoever murders will be subjected to judgment. But I tell you that everyone who is enraged with their sibling will be subjected to judgment. Whoever calls their sibling, you good for nothing, will be in danger of the council. Whoever says you fool will be in danger of the fire of hell. Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your sibling has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar. First go and be reconciled to your sibling and then come and offer your gift. Matthew chapter 5, verses 21 to 24.

Jesus says that even nursing a private blame toward our fellow human is a form of violence that will inevitably burn us.

I was guilty as hell of this that morning at the beach. Blame, I strongly believe, is the flip side of shame. Where his mother Eve turns the violence of her distorted desire inward against herself, Cain turns it outward against his brother. He stews in his shame and resentment of his brother’s blessing until he’s driven to eliminate what he sees as the source of his pain.

God tries to warn Cain. He says, Hey, why are you so angry? This road you’re on, it’s dangerous. Sin is crouching at the door. You have a choice here. Be reconciled to your brother and then come make your offering. But Cain won’t hear it. Cain is a doer. He’s decided he knows what the problem is, and just like his mother with the fruit, he’s decided what he can do to fix it.

The solution to his shame is to get rid of its cause, and its cause, he’s decided, is his brother. He invites Abel out into his fields, the fields he’s worked so hard for so long to control, fields that now feel like they’ve betrayed him by failing to earn him favor, and in the place where life should grow, Cain takes a life instead.

Now, is Abel responsible in any way for Cain’s lack of favor with God? No. Abel is innocent. He has nothing to do with whatever’s going on between Cain and the Lord. Cain’s story of blame is another lie. Just like his mother believed the lie that she wasn’t enough without wisdom, Cain is afraid that he isn’t enough without God’s blessing. But that fear of not-enoughness is too painful, so he projects his hurt onto his brother instead. “If Abel wasn’t around to be so great, I wouldn’t look inadequate.”

Violence needs a target.

For Eve that target was herself. She turned exile inward because God was unaffected by her rivalry. But Cain can affect Abel with his rivalry. Eve turned her violence inward in the form of shame; Cain turns his outward in the form of blame.

Christian conversion, René Girard says, is the discovery that we have been persecutors without realizing it. It is the revelation of the violence we have been participating in without seeing what we were doing.

In Jesus’s crucifixion, Girard saw the once and for all exposure of blame for the lie that it is. Christ is completely innocent, and yet the crowd turns against him. Unlike the ancient gods who demanded the sacrifice of human lives to appease their divine wrath, God in Jesus Christ sacrifices God’s life to appease human wrath.

There is an angry god in the Bible, y’all. And it’s us.

Jesus reveals the truth that human violence, not divine punishment, is behind the crucifixion. Jesus’s revelation didn’t come outta nowhere. It started thousands of years before Christ at the very beginning of Genesis. God has been trying to make our violence plain to us ever since Cain killed his brother.

Because here’s the thing: with Abel’s death, it’s Cain, with his disoriented desire, who creates the world’s first civilization. It’s Cain in Genesis 4 who builds a city. It’s Cain who marries and has children of his own. It’s Cain whose children and grandchildren prosper and multiply. And like Cain inheriting his mother’s disoriented desire to cease to be something, all of Cain’s descendants are now inheriting Eve’s internal violence and Cain’s external violence. This is where the story of Cain and Abel stops being about two brothers and starts being about two cultures.

Abel embodies that Being-first way of life, born from imitating God’s divine love. Cain reflects the Doing-first striving of failing to imitate God. Abel’s desire is directed toward relationship with God. Cain desires the gift, not the giver.

And this is where I wanna bring us back to a line from Genesis 3. This is verse 16.

To the woman, God said, I will greatly increase your pain in childbirth. In pain, you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your man. Yet he will rule over you.

That last line, your desire will be for your man, yet he will rule over you. That’s the essence of what’s happening here. As I’ve said before, it’s nothing to do with God punishing us or with gender, or the submissive role of women in straight marriages.

Rather, just as Eve’s desire was disoriented by the serpent so that what she brought into the world was violence instead of love, so Cain has inherited or imitated his mother’s disoriented desire. What the Bible is telling us in this one succinct line is that when human desire is disoriented toward creation instead of toward Creator, the result will always be domination.

The result will always be violence.

Cain murders his brother. But God, even though he’s grieving the murder of one of his children, God refuses to enact vengeance against Cain. Yes, just as with Adam and Eve, there are consequences for Cain’s violent action. He’s cut off from the land he has stained with his brother’s blood. But when he cries out to God, my punishment is more than I can bear. I will be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me. God answers: not so. Anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.

And then, just like God clothed Adam and Eve with skins after they felt ashamed of their nakedness, God puts a mark on Cain to protect him from violent retaliation. This is the opposite of what you’d expect from a god, right? I mean, if you’re a god and someone kills one of your followers, the obvious thing to do is smite them with thunderbolts, right?

Not our God. Our God interrupts the cycle of vengeance. In Genesis 4, verses 23 and 24, we hear from Lamech, who is Cain’s great-great-great grandson. Lamech shows us how Cain’s violence has already begun to multiply through the generations. Lamech said to his wives, Adah and Zillah, listen to me. Wives of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech 77 times.

Now the purpose of God promising vengeance is to prevent any more violence from happening. He’s trying to interrupt the cycle of vengeance and protect Cain from being killed for what he’s done. The idea is that God’s infinite divine wrath is supposed to be a deterrent from anybody damaging Cain.

But Lamech, inheriting his forefather’s disoriented desire and his life of striving to fix the perceived injustices of the world, has completely misunderstood. Instead of interrupting the cycle of violent vengeance, Lamech wants to magnify it. Let’s not have seven murders if someone retaliates against me, let’s have 77 murders.

Cain doesn’t just kill his brother. He builds a world on that killing. A world of striving, of proving of exiling our shame and projecting our blame. A world where violence is foundational. You don’t need me to tell you this is the world we live in. I don’t doubt you see it every day. But it’s not the only world possible.

Because even here, friends, God is already at work to get us out of this trap.

At the end of this painful chapter in Genesis 4, verse 25, we read this line. Adam made love to his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, God has granted me another child in place of Abel since Cain killed him.

Now to my contemporary ears, of course, that sounds ridiculous. You cannot replace a human being. That’s not a thing. We all know that one child is not just as good as another. This verse isn’t saying that Abel was replaceable.

Where Cain imitated his parents in their disoriented doing, Abel imitated God in simply being. If Abel had grown old, I imagine his wife would’ve given birth to a divine culture of pacific receiving instead of the worldly culture of violent striving that is born through Cain. What’s happening when Eve says, God has granted me another child in place of Abel, is not that a human being is being replaced, but that a model of peaceful living is being replaced.

God has given us Seth to make sure that we still have someone to imitate who’s living from that place of Being, instead of from Doing. Only when Seth has a son of his own does Genesis tell us: at that time, people began to call on the name of the Lord.

If I’m doing the math right, Cain has seven generations of descendants by the end of Genesis 4. None of Cain’s descendants have called on the Lord. They were busy doing it themselves. We don’t need no stinking God. That guy can’t be trusted. But when Seth has a child, that practice of divine relationship is restored. God refuses to doom us to the world’s violence.

In Seth, God plants the seed of a divine culture that will eventually produce Hannah, that will eventually produce Mary, that will eventually produce Christ. Seth’s family tree doesn’t multiply as fast as Cain’s does, but it’s there from the very beginning showing us that a different way is possible.

We like to think of Cain and Abel as an old story, an increasingly irrelevant moment in ancient history. But it’s not ancient history. It’s now. Every day we stand at those two altars. Every day we feel the influence of Cain, the desire to prove ourselves, to grasp, to fight back in self-defense, to eliminate whatever threatens our sense of security, whatever stands in the way of our goals.

And every day, Christ stands in Abel’s place, inviting us to desire something more, to step out of the world’s culture and into the Kingdom of Heaven. Every act of welcoming home and exiled part of ourselves is a small mirror of Christ’s reconciliation. Every moment of self-compassion is a glimpse of a world healed from the inside out.

Divine culture does not demand violent sacrifice. It asks for trusting surrender. Surrender to the truth that we are already loved, that our place is eternally secure, that God’s kingdom is radically inclusive, that we do not need to kill to live. We need only to receive the life that is given and give back what’s already been given to us.

Cain’s way leads us deeper into exile. Christ’s way leads us home.

[00:23:40] Andrew: You were starting to put something together with, I mean, Girard uses the word Satan when he talks about this finger that everybody latches onto and follows that accusation.

[00:23:49] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:49] Andrew: And so, instead of just mimicking the acquisitive, I gotta grab it before anybody else does

[00:23:54] January: Yeah.

[00:23:55] Andrew: kind of mimesis, there’s a wave of mimicry where it’s all accusation.

[00:23:59] January: mm-hmm.

[00:24:00] Andrew: Tell me more about that.

[00:24:01] January: In the last episode, you had made that observation that when the mimetic rivalry is getting out of hand and it’s just escalating and it’s turning into everybody against everybody, at some point someone makes an accusatory gesture and instead of everybody else mimicking the acquisitive desire, they all mimic the accusatory gesture.

And for some reason, when I was listening to that while editing the episode, it just lit up in my brain, and I was like, oh. That’s mimetic disgust instead of a mimetic desire. It’s the flip side

[00:24:32] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:24:32] January: of the desire dynamic showing up right there. Like that is the thing that turns it into the scapegoat mechanism.

One of the things that I keep circling around is there’s some way in which desire and disgust are flip sides of the same thing.

[00:24:46] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:24:46] January: I haven’t read any Girard stuff that talked about disgust in any way. And I feel like that’s, that’s adding a really important dimension to things here for me.

[00:24:56] Andrew: As soon as you said that, with the idea of that the accusatory finger that gets mimicked by the crowd such that a scapegoat is created,

[00:25:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:06] Andrew: that what is being communicated there is disgust — I was just like, yeah,

[00:25:10] January: Okay.

[00:25:10] Andrew: of course that’s it. There’s no, there’s nothing there to get, there’s nothing there to want, there’s just something there to be repulsed by.

[00:25:17] January: Yeah.

[00:25:17] Andrew: And, and that’s,

[00:25:18] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:18] Andrew: that’s what’s spreading. It’s disgust.

I mean, that’s a mental image that’s been in my head ever since I was introduced to Girard. I didn’t attach that language to it, but I think you’re absolutely correct. It — there’s something about Eve — it seems like disgust verging on outrage perhaps, in some sense. “GASP! He doesn’t have my best interests at heart?!” in reference to God. Right? The person I thought was giving me stuff, is keeping something from me. Like, what?

Like, this is, this — it’s this big twist and so far we’ve discussed that as a lack of trust on Eve’s part. She did not trust God as someone she could actually stop and talk to, about this

[00:25:57] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:57] Andrew: new story she heard from the serpent. She just immediately fell into a lack of trust there and followed that to disastrous consequences. But did you feel that in reaching for the fruit that there was a revulsion of herself of some sense? Or disgust at who she was?

[00:26:13] January: Yeah. What I’m seeing is the serpent saying a thing to her such that a new part of herself, a new mediation is brought into being and that whether the serpent actually has disgust toward her or not, she picks up on disgust toward herself.

[00:26:32] Andrew: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:26:33] January: That’s when that’s born. It’s that accusation toward herself that leads her to go and eat from the apple.

And then the apple does a different thing than the moment of disgust, which is, yeah, their eyes are opened and they have the capacity to judge good and bad. But then that, on top of the new capacity for disgust, not only are you bad, but you’re disgusted by your badness. And so that’s the shame, right?

[00:27:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:27:02] January: And then I think that that too is then what I see in the Cain and Abel story, right? That he’s disgusted that he didn’t get the blessing, and it’s less painful to point the disgust at his brother than it is to point it at himself. So he projects it and makes that accusatory gesture and points the finger and says it’s your fault. And then feels fully justified in eliminating what is disgusting.

Did I miss anything there? Am I…

[00:27:29] Andrew: No, I’m tracking with you.

[00:27:31] January: Okay. So, yeah. The broken trust in God seems like sort of an accidental consequence of the disgust rather than necessarily the driving force I think.

[00:27:41] Andrew: Yeah, no. Yeah. ‘Cause like why would you: oh, I don’t trust God anymore, therefore I must be disgusting? No, it’s the other way around: I’m disgusting and

[00:27:49] January: Yeah.

[00:27:49] Andrew: I can’t trust God.

Because God’s presented the Divine Self as someone who’s caring and providing, right? And why would

[00:27:55] January: Yeah.

[00:27:56] Andrew: someone holy care and provide for someone disgusting? It does seem to me the disgust would come first and could lead to distrust.

[00:28:04] January: Yeah. And leads to the distortion of our mimetic desire. That’s how that distorted desire gets born, not to be like someone but to cease to be like someone.

[00:28:15] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:28:15] January: It’s that disgust.

[00:28:17] Andrew: It’s not the snake that’s Satan so much as the gesture.

[00:28:21] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:21] Andrew: But this gesture, what’s it gesturing at? The fruit? Eh. It’s gesturing at you’re-not-enough,

[00:28:30] January: Yeah.

[00:28:30] Andrew: do-something-about-it.

[00:28:32] January: Yeah.

[00:28:32] Andrew: That’s the accusation that’s happening. Right?

It is about the fruit, it is about desiring a thing and grabbing a thing and being a Doer, but it’s also about you not Being enough. I mean, it’s not the setting for a scapegoating episode in the sense that there isn’t a mob present, there isn’t a group for her to be expelled from. So it’s — I haven’t thought about this — it’s telling the story from the victim’s perspective first.

[00:28:54] January: Mm.

[00:28:55] Andrew: Before we tell the scapegoating episode from the perspective of the persecutors, we’re gonna tell the story from the victim’s perspective first.

Her story gets told first and then, yeah, with Cain, and definitely, by the time you get to Joseph and his brothers, it’s obvious that there’s a group around the one. But, yeah, there’s something really neat about that, I think. We’re gonna tell the exile story first. Even though when it happens, it happens because the group was able to stumble into a consensus. It doesn’t actually

[00:29:25] January: mm-hmm.

[00:29:26] Andrew: say anything about the victim, and yet the victim’s story is gonna be given prominence in the biblical narrative. I think that that seems to be a consistent thing. Yeah.

[00:29:36] January: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it seems that, well, I’ll say one of the places where everything went off the rails then is that interpreters looked at that passage and assumed that God was the Accuser in that situation after she eats the apple. God is the one pointing a finger at her. God is the one casting her out.

[00:29:55] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:29:56] January: And yeah. I mean, if that’s our story, why the fuck would you trust that guy? Bye. No, thank you.

[00:30:04] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:30:07] January: But I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think God is just saying these are the consequences of disgust and shame.

[00:30:15] Andrew: Well, I mean it comes in one of your points later that you make about the overlap of multiple people’s disgust toward the same characteristic is what allows it to become contagious.

[00:30:27] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:28] Andrew: And the flip side, by healing our disgust, we can fireproof ourselves against the contagion of mimetic blame. That line—

[00:30:38] January: Can we fireproof ourselves? It’s a question.

[00:30:41] Andrew: I mean, I’m already on board. Yeah! Like it just like, of course…

The whole like—rather than running around like: humans! they always wanna scapegoat, it’s how we became human, we’re always doing this, so we gotta stop the scape —

It’s that sort of zeroing in on the problem so much that you’re just thinking about the problem. So we can’t scapegoat so

[00:31:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:00] Andrew: we always gotta be looking out for scapegoating — and it’s like, if we’re gonna do that, if we’re gonna find a prophylactic that, that is it. It’s not: be on guard for scapegoats. It’s: check your disgust at the door. What’s that doing for you?

[00:31:15] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:15] Andrew: That’s something I can start on now. That’s something I can do every single day. Anytime I’m ready to do something worthwhile I can be like, all right, let’s do a disgust inventory. What does that say about me today?

[00:31:27] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:27] Andrew: Like there’s all sorts of starting places here.

Now, what I was wanting to say earlier and cut myself off, ‘cause I’m trying to complete my sentences now that I’m realizing, oh crap, we’re four episodes in and people might actually listen to this. So maybe I should finish my sentences… is that I really do think that that is a Christian discipline practice.

[00:31:51] January: Yes.

[00:31:51] Andrew: I think that’s what Jesus is telling us to do when he’s talking about the Second Coming.

[00:31:55] January: Yep.

[00:31:55] Andrew: This will happen again. This is going to happen and next time, instead of killing the guy, be ready to receive him.

[00:32:01] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:02] Andrew: I guess maybe that’s the corollary to actually firefighting like you should firefight.

[00:32:07] January: Yeah.

[00:32:07] Andrew: You know, and then actually managing, like you should manage is managing your disgust. That’s the day-to-day thing.

[00:32:14] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:16] Andrew: So anyway, can we fireproof ourselves against the contagion of mimetic blame by healing our disgust? I just find so much hope in that question. It feels like it makes it possible, or it seems like there’s a — you can imagine a blueprint for healing disgust.

[00:32:36] January: Yeah. Christ.

[00:32:41] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:32:41] January: What is Jesus doing in the Eucharist? Right? This is my body; this is my blood.

[00:32:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:32:45] January: I’m sorry, we’re supposed to eat your flesh and drink your blood?!

Ew!

Right? That’s the reaction that that’s supposed to get from his audience that he’s talking to. He knows that that’s gonna be the reaction to that, and he’s still inviting them into it, because that’s a way of reality checking our disgust and transforming it into communion instead.

That ends up connecting back to divine holiness, not looking like purity, but it actually looks like catholicity.

[00:33:15] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:33:17] January: Anyway, staying on the subject of the disgust and the way that that is tied so inextricably, as far as I can tell, to the scapegoat mechanism, that the in acquisitive desire is only half of the mimetic phenomenon. The mimetic disgust is the other half where it suddenly turns into all against one.

[00:33:33] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:33:34] January: That’s what’s happening there, I think. And that’s where we can most profoundly interrupt it. And that’s where Jesus goes in directly to interrupt it. He’s touching lepers. He is hanging out with the sinners. He’s eating with the tax collectors. He’s doing all of the things that everybody around him thinks are disgusting and not allowed.

[00:33:54] Andrew: I mean, you’ve already made point in your presentations that the externalized disgust, there’s an internal version of that.

[00:34:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:01] Andrew: And that as you describe Eve, you mentioned how it’s not that she’s wanting to be someone, it’s that she’s wanting to cease being someone.

[00:34:08] January: Yeah.

[00:34:08] Andrew: Right? She’s disgusted at who she understands herself to be

[00:34:13] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:13] Andrew: and wants to be somebody else. And so, disgusted at this, I can’t be this, is the internal. And disgusted at that, we can’t be that,

[00:34:25] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:26] Andrew: and chasing it off — it maps on, I think, pretty clearly to the, dual, like there’s two goats. There is a scapegoat that gets chased off, but there’s another goat

[00:34:36] January: Yeah.

[00:34:36] Andrew: that’s taken on in the inside and is killed. And so the interior sacred, that place is where the death happens.

[00:34:43] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:44] Andrew: You’d rather kill yourself than be this disgusting thing. You have to be somewhere else. That’s the death making that happens in the interior and it’s on the outside that it’s more like, well, whether they get chased off or die, it doesn’t matter as long as they don’t come back.

This is repetitive, but the idea that fireproofing ourselves against contagion by healing our disgust... manageable is the word I was looking for. The way Mr. Rogers says if it’s mentionable, it’s manageable. So you can talk about it. And the audacity of humans getting together and scapegoating, and when they’re doing it, none of them know that they’re doing it. That’s the whole point.

[00:35:21] January: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:22] Andrew: So how are you gonna stop that? How do you mention the thing that nobody can say out loud, because that would ruin its effectiveness. If the whole point is misconstruing the event, how do you talk about that enough to stop it? Well, you recognize the presence of God in your midst, yeah, it’s gonna be an intense, shocking encounter, but there is a time when you can mention it.

Well, I say that: mention your disgust. It’s funny. In Moroccan Arabic, there’s a word that you always say no matter what it is, if it’s kind of like distasteful or scandalous, you say hashak! Hashak!

I think it’s… it’s probably like a bless you or God save you kind of, I don’t know what hash means, but yeah, it is mentionable. Even if you have to say hashak all the time, we can talk about our disgusts.

[00:36:13] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:14] Andrew: I don’t know, maybe that’s one of the points that Paul and Billie make I forget what they said. Like, you know you’re not supposed to say you’re disgusted at someone.

[00:36:21] January: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That disgust frequently gets mislabeled as fear,

[00:36:26] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:36:26] January: because it’s acceptable to say that you’re afraid of somebody. It’s not acceptable to say you’re disgusted by somebody.

[00:36:33] Andrew: Yeah. That’s why. That’s what it was.

[00:36:34] January: Yeah, yeah.

[00:36:36] Andrew: Yeah. So in some way, it isn’t mentionable, not readily mentionable, But for people that are willing to do something a little bit daring or uncomfortable…

[00:36:45] January: Willing to break the taboos.

[00:36:47] Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

I’ve sort of fallen into the teacher role of Sunday morning adult class, before the main service. And we were doing the parable of the Prodigal Son, which is a title that I just detest, for reasons that may become evident. But before I tell you what I really think — um, oh man. Was that disgust there? Was that, was that disgust? Oh, man!

Let’s take a look. In Luke 15, you’ll read that Jesus said,

A certain man had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me a share of the estate that will come to me.” So he divided his livelihood between them.

Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country. There, he squandered his estate with wild living. When he’d spent all of it, a strong famine arose in that country. He began to be in need, so he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country who sent him into the fields to feed pigs.

He longed to fill his body with the pods the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses, he said, how many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough to spare? And I’m here lost with hunger. I’ll get up, I’ll go to my father and say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”

So he got up and he went to his father, but while he was still a far way off, his father saw him and felt gut wrenching sympathy, and ran, threw his arms around his neck and kissed him.

The son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven in your sight. I’m no longer worthy to be called your so—”

But the father said to his servants, “Quick, y’all! Bring the best robe and put it on him, and y’all put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. Y’all bring the fatted calf, kill it. Let’s eat and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.” Then they began to celebrate.

Now, his elder son was in the field. As he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he summoned one of the servants and asked him what was happening.

“Your brother has returned,” he told him, “and your father has killed the fatted calf because he has received him back safe and healthy.”

But the older son was enraged, refused to go in, so his father came out and pleaded with him, but he answered his father, “Look, all these years I have served you. And I never disobeyed a command of yours, but you never gave me a goat so that I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who’s devoured your livelihood with prostitutes comes, you kill the fatted calf for him?!”

The father said to him, “Son, you are always with me. Everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.”

So I have been stumbling through parables in random order, on Sunday mornings. And telling that story and just getting people to pause at the right moments to think about what it would be like for each character in each of these situations and stuff was all I was doing. But yeah, it was in carrying that out where I was like: oh, hold up! This is, this is the internal violence of shame and the external violence of blame. It’s right here; it’s in one story.

And the father’s response, when he shows up, the son shows up, he’s been practicing what he’s gonna say, and the father doesn’t even let him finish saying it, right? He interrupts him basically, like he, he has no time for whatever shame was concocting.

[00:41:21] January: The self-castigation.

[00:41:22] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:41:23] January: Yeah.

[00:41:23] Andrew: It’s just like he’s totally, he doesn’t even say, “Stop it. Cut it out. What? Are you kidding me?” He’s just completely: yeah, bring, bring him something! You know, and, and he embraces him, right?

[00:41:33] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:34] Andrew: If someone is ashamed, their presence, they’re convinced, does not belong, it’s just an embrace. A genuine embrace. It’s hard. you can’t, you can’t argue with a hug, you know, like that’s, it can’t, I mean, you can reject it, I guess. You can be uncomfortable with it, but,

I was pointing out like, this is a story. It didn’t happen. Jesus is telling us a story. He made this story up, so he’s gonna teach us a lesson and we don’t know what happens next.

The older son’s outside, the father’s outside. It’s like, is he gonna go inside? We don’t know. But I found myself, like, I had not planned to say this at all, but I did. I was like: but I think it’s pretty clear that the father is not going inside without the older son.

[00:42:15] January: Mm.

[00:42:15] Andrew: I don’t think there’s any chance of that happening, given what we know of these characters.

And so it was later, I was like: oh, that was an interesting thing to say. I put the complete zero seconds he had for the shame generated monologue, and yet the potentially infinite amount of time he had for the older son.

[00:42:34] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[00:42:35] Andrew: And so there’s certainly a consistency with the father all the way through, but I was curious if that distinction, would that map onto responses to internal violence and external violence?

And I’m not even sure what to make of it, but I was curious if you had any thoughts on that story and the father’s response to each of those two different things.

[00:42:55] January: That is fascinating. Yeah.

So my immediate reaction, and I might need your help teasing this out ‘cause I don’t know where I’m going with it yet, is that something about my physical response to both of those responses to the sons says that they’re the same thing?

[00:43:11] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:43:12] January: And I don’t know how that works.

[00:43:14] Andrew: Okay.

[00:43:14] January: I don’t know how to articulate this. But interrupting the shame monologue and being physically demonstrative with one son, and sitting with the other son, it reads to me like an invitation to monologue. Please tell me all of what you’ve been holding inside for all of these years.

[00:43:30] Andrew: Mm.

[00:43:30] January: We can take as long as you need

[00:43:32] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:43:32] January: to go into that party with a free heart.

[00:43:35] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:43:35] January: Tell me all about it.

So there’s the people who really stew in the story that they’re telling themselves, right? They just rehearse it and rehash it and really cement those neural pathways in their brain so that they have a hard time telling any other story, even if it’s not true. And they spend a lot of time feeling that pain, they’ve over identified with it. And that to me sounds like the younger son.

Whereas the Doers. They’re so terrified of all the pain that’s inside and they will do anything to not have to feel it. So they just constantly do, do, do, do, do to stay distracted. They don’t wanna go into that inner pain ever.

And so that seems to be what’s happening with these two brothers is that the elder son has not wanted to feel all that pain, so he’s been doing, doing, doing, to try to stay correct, and then just getting more and more and more resentful that he hasn’t gotten whatever recognition he was expecting to have earned from his father.

And the father stands back and invites him to check that story and to go into all of that pain and talk it through and hold it.

But that’s not what you wanna do with somebody who’s constantly rehashing their story, like giving them space to talk about the story again, that’s giving them space to engage in self-harm.

Like, don’t do that.

[00:44:51] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:44:52] January: Get them to do something with their body. And that, the running to hug him and put new clothes on him and get him to do something and come join the party and see, like experience that there’s something different happening. That is fascinating.

[00:45:07] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s it. Yeah, it is very

[00:45:12] January: Interesting.

[00:45:13] Andrew: bodily, what he’s doing there. And he’s not engaging at all with, but no… I hadn’t thought about the how with the older son… I had always thought of it as an invitation to the party — it is — but via an invitation to monologuing, like, okay, let’s tease this out.

And I guess in a way it does start some, he does tell him a few thoughts that he has about his brother and his dad.

[00:45:33] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:34] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:45:37] January: Yeah. That’s fascinating. Huh.

Yeah. That restoration of relationship is really gonna require some feelings to be able to be present, which means slowing down and allowing that story to be held.

And then with the younger son, just taking him bodily out of that story and being like, here is an entirely different experience.

[00:45:59] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, that’s neat.

[00:46:01] January: Oh, I’m gonna be thinking about that for a while. Thank you.

[00:46:04] Andrew: Yeah, no, well, no, thank you. ‘Cause I didn’t have a lot of confidence going into that Sunday school lesson, but I did have some, ‘cause I was like, ah, I got something to say about this.

I felt like the concepts were gonna be there and yeah, being able to talk about shame, yeah. I, I don’t think we talk about it enough with respect to like how present it is in

[00:46:24] January: yeah.

[00:46:25] Andrew: a lot of us, in a lot of places. So that was cool. That was helpful.

[00:46:30] January: So, you had asked me a question about the parable of the weeds and the wheat, and that’s in Matthew 13 verses 24 to 30.

So I’m gonna read it here real quick and then we’ll bounce it off and see where it goes.

Jesus presented another parable saying, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed excellent seed in his field, but while the men were sleeping, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. But when the wheat sprang up and produced grain, then the weeds also appeared. The servants of the householder came and said, “Master, didn’t you sow excellent seed in your field? Where did these weeds come from?” He replied, “An enemy has done this.”

The servants asked, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” But he said, “No, because while you are gathering up the weeds, you could uproot the wheat with them. You are to let both grow together until the harvest. At the harvest time, I will tell the reapers first you are to collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to burn them. Then you are to gather the wheat for my barn.”

So I wanna know where did your mind go with this?

[00:47:41] Andrew: This was the one we were talking about in our Sunday school this week, and it wasn’t even till I got in the middle of it, and I got myself worked up and I was on a roll and talking about what’s going on and it occurred to me that, yeah, because of the work we’re doing here on this podcast, shame and blame are just right there for me now when I’m reading about characters and they’re doing stuff and I’m sorting out motivation.

And it occurred to me here that the slaves are actually being accusatory before there’s even any mention of an enemy.

[00:48:12] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:48:13] Andrew: The blame is preceding the enemy and they know that somebody needs to be blamed and they don’t want it to be themselves, so they, actually turn on their boss, which I don’t know if that’s a safe thing to do, but I guess if, maybe you’re thinking, oh, we better get out in front of this ‘cause we’re gonna be in trouble.

So like, yeah, let’s put the big shot on a back foot here. And yeah, it occurred to me that this is a story about people who were ready to blame someone, needed to blame someone, even if it was their boss. And then there’s a mention of, well, it was an enemy has done this, and their response. They can’t let it stand they’re very much driven by prestige in a way.

[00:48:54] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:54] Andrew: And maybe it’s their own or maybe it’s the householder, right? This is our boss and like, oh, somebody’s out messing with his crops. This isn’t, this is — we can’t let the enemy get the best of us.

[00:49:04] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:05] Andrew: We can’t let them win.

[00:49:06] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:06] Andrew: And what they’ve completely sight of is the whole point of their job, the crop that they’re raising.

[00:49:07] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:07] Andrew: There’s, there’s gonna be a harvest and you don’t wanna mess that up. And they’ve completely lost sight of it.

The deviousness of this enemy is still very present, even after the enemy’s been identified. What would be even worse than sowing bad seed in somebody else’s field. Well, getting their own workers to destroy the good while they’re at it, you know what I mean?

[00:49:34] Janaury Jaxon: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:34] Andrew: The creation of infighting is a more insidious attack and so anyway, the, the householder sees that, that even though there is an enemy, the identification of the enemy isn’t enough to like escape the danger. In fact, the attack is still more problematic, as problematic as it ever was until you get your enthusiastic workers to calm down.

I felt like also there could have been some shame preceding the blame with regards to like, uh, what’s happened, like, what’s going on in these fields? Once it became visible that, again, we saw a progression from shame to blame and then the parable is about how to transcend both of those things and not allow the blame to become fuel that’s going to harm things further.

[00:50:22] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:22] Andrew: I don’t know. What did you think when you reread this?

[00:50:29] January: So my brain instantly went to that tension between desire and disgust and how they’re kind of flip sides of the same thing, and that one of them produces this fruitful becoming and the other one produces this shame and blame response of, nope, not that. Nope, not that. Nope, not that. Get it away. That’s not allowed to be part of me.

I won’t presume to speak to the brain science of desire and disgust because I’m not a neuroscientist, but I do know that, and we’ll talk about this in a later episode, but that the same chemical in our brains that produces feelings of love and affection for us is the exact same chemical that’s responsible for feelings of aggression when we perceive somebody to be part of another group and not our group. And so you literally can’t make us more loving by adding more of this love chemical

[00:51:24] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:25] January: precisely because the story that we’re telling about that person dictates whether that chemical produces love or aggression.

And so that was coming up for me as I was reading this through the lens of don’t try to get rid of what you find disgusting, because if you do that, you’re going to ruin what was the whole point of this crop in the first place. You risk damaging the beautiful thing that has been planted if you try to exorcise anything. They have to grow together.

And then the connection that came to my mind, with the, the line here is collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to burn them. And that connected for me with a different verse, and I don’t remember the reference off the top of my head, but the wheat and the chaff, and the chaff will be burned up with unquenchable fire. Which I’m pretty sure is still somewhere in Matthew.

But this image of the weeds or the chaff getting burned, and again, that probably wasn’t getting talked about explicitly a whole lot in my churches. Nobody ever wanted to talk about hell in my churches. We just sort of pretend that doesn’t exist. But this was one of the passages that made progressive Christians really, really uncomfortable because it sounds like it’s dividing good people from bad people and throwing the bad people away.

[00:52:42] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:52:42] January: And what landed for me, reading this, was very much no, you need both the disgust and the desire in order to grow up into the person you’re gonna be, and then the fire of the Holy Spirit will take care of the disgust. And that’s exactly what we see happening in the Book of Acts.

[00:53:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:53:00] January: Is that everybody’s disgust is being dismantled by the flame of the Spirit as it moves through people and moves through communities. And suddenly there’s no more outsider. Everybody’s in. I don’t know, that just completely changed how I read this passage, so thank you for that.

[00:53:18] Andrew: No, that that wasn’t what I was thinking, but no, I’m totally with you. There is a visceral disgust amongst the slaves when they’re like,

[00:53:25] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:25] Andrew: What? An enemy did this?! Oh, we gotta get in there now and tear this stuff out! And yeah, they completely lose sight of the whole farming project.

[00:53:35] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:35] Andrew: And are only thinking about… yeah, and it is, it’s a form of disgust. Thanks to Inside Out, I’d never put disgust the way they so effortlessly attached physical disgust and social disgust.

[00:53:49] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:53:50] Andrew: Keeps you from toxins, both physical and social. Like, I forget, there’s a really simple line in the introduction to that first movie when they are telling everybody about each of the characters. And I found that to be eye-opening that like, yeah, there’s a lot of parallels there.

[00:54:04] January: And it seems similar to me to the way that Girard talks about desire and its dangers, right? That physical desires are pretty safe, but we get into the metaphysical desire of desiring someone else’s being, and then we’re in trouble.

[00:54:16] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:16] January: Well, same with disgust. Physical disgust has a really important purpose. It keeps us alive. It keeps us from eating poisonous things. But you get into metaphysical disgust where we’re disgusted by someone else’s being, or our own being, right? And whoa, shit goes all kinds of wrong.

[00:54:32] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:54:34] January: No good.

[00:54:35] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:54:37] January: So, yeah, that was really fascinating to me. And then yeah, I wasn’t thinking with this quite as explicitly about the shame and blame angles that you were talking about so thank you for drawing that out. I was just seeing the dynamics underneath that, and I’m seeing a lot of parallels there in terms of God set up the Garden of Eden and created this beautiful project and everything was designed to go really well, and then the serpent came in and distorted something that was otherwise intended to be good.

And it produced these weeds that are poisonous and are painful and prickly and, at the same time, we can’t remove them without removing the good project.

And I think too, when I was looking at the collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to burn them, even that to me, thanks to our last few discussions, didn’t land as we must excise this and get away from us.

It landed as what you were talking about with the Molly LaCroix quote, the last time, of no, this is an image of a child being embraced by a parent they trust. That’s what’s casting out the fear. That’s what’s casting out the weeds, not that the weeds are being destroyed by the fire, but that there’s just no more room for them because the love has come to fruition.

The love has come to harvest.

[00:55:55] Andrew: Yeah, I don’t know if anybody ever actually said it or not, but it seemed like the implied sort of way this would get read, as I recall as a kid was like, yeah, we’re the wheat, there’s evil people out there, they’re the weeds and we just gotta put up with ‘em until finally they get burned up and everything’s great ‘cause we’re in the barn.

[00:56:13] January: Mm-hmm. Yep.

[00:56:13] Andrew: What if this is not about us being wheat, this is about us serving in a household

[00:56:19] January: mm-hmm.

[00:56:20] Andrew: I think that much is painfully clear now, that—I wish had been obvious all those decades ago. But now I’m like, what if this is about our internal family, right? And like

[00:56:30] January: mm-hmm.

[00:56:31] Andrew: the householder

[00:56:31] January: Exactly.

[00:56:31] Andrew: is the capital-S Self. And the slaves are like, what is this? We gotta, we gotta, and either they’re gonna have the capacity to listen to, to the Self calm down, or they’re gonna complicate the destruction and try to uproot all these things that mustn’t be there.

And then, yeah, turn it into a Pixar movie. I’m pretty sure that is, uh, Inside Out 2. I think that is what that movie is.

[00:57:01] January: Yeah.

[00:57:02] Andrew: I had two other scriptures that came to mind as I was listening to your presentation. The idea of not allowing people to become obstacles, right after hearing the news of John the Baptist’s death, Jesus gets on a boat, the assumption is not explicit in the text, but you would think fellas gotta be alone now. This is… his cousin’s dead.

[00:57:24] January: Yeah.

[00:57:24] Andrew: And a giant crowd of people follow the boat around somehow get there before he does and are waiting,

[00:57:31] January: Yeah.

[00:57:32] Andrew: He does not see the crowd of hungry people as an obstacle to his grieving.

[00:57:38] January: Yeah.

[00:57:38] Andrew: He sees

[00:57:40] January: yeah.

[00:57:40] Andrew: the crowd of hungry people as a crowd of hungry people and performs a miracle.

[00:57:45] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:57:47] Andrew: Then he sends his disciples on their way, and he goes up to be alone.

[00:57:52] January: Yeah.

[00:57:53] Andrew: The sequencing of those events, you see that Jesus is not about to let a person or a crowd even — see that, that’s even easier, I think, to objectify a crowd.

[00:58:04] January: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:58:05] Andrew: Road rage much? Right? Like traffic much? Like, like that, that’s what that is. It’s so much easier ‘cause they’re, they’re not people that are just, “Aagh! What!”

[00:58:13] January: Yeah. There’s no one face to have to relate to.

[00:58:19] Andrew: But yeah, the escalation of blame to violence such that somebody’s being killed. I think we can see that played out in Mark chapter two. There’s four occasions in chapter two.

Where at first it starts with him telling the man that his sins are forgiven and no one says anything out loud, but Jesus knows that in their hearts they’re thinking like, “Who is [this guy think he is] ?” And he’s like, “Well, what’s easier to say? ‘You’re forgiven’? Or ‘Get up your mat and take’?

So, like at that point, the — no one’s saying anything, but in their head they’re thinking the thoughts, right? The blame is formulating.

And then, the next one, he’s hanging out with a tax collector, and people are questioning his disciples — not Jesus, but his disciples, right? ‘Why is he hanging out with them?’ Right? Again, it’s a step forward in the sense of there’s talking out loud now it’s not in their head.

Then they go to Jesus, in the next story, and they’re talking to him about ‘John’s disciples fast, why aren’t yours?’ So they’re not accusing Jesus of doing anything wrong, but they’re like, yeah, look at your disciples.

So you see with each circle, first it’s in their heads, then they’re talking to the people that are around Jesus about Jesus. Then they’re talking to Jesus about the people around him.

[00:59:39] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:40] Andrew: And then, the next one is, they’re picking grain on the Sabbath, and, it’s not an act of omission. It’s an act of committing,

[00:59:48] January: Commission, yeah.

[00:59:48] Andrew: like they’re breaking the sabbath — exactly. And so it is just like four steps through chapter two.

[00:59:53] January: Interesting.

[00:59:54] Andrew: And then chapter three begins with him in the synagogue, and there’s a man with a withered hand, and everybody’s waiting to see what happens. Jesus gets angry, says, stretch out your hand. And the Pharisees went out immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

[01:00:12] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:00:12] Andrew: So it seems like this progression of blaming, who are you to say you can forgive sin?

[01:00:16] January: Yeah.

[01:00:17] Andrew: Just, it’s told narratively. Yeah, we see that in scripture: this escalation toward, toward making sense of murder.

[01:00:25] January: Yeah, no, good call. That’s definitely there. Yeah.

I mean, it is a personal question, but are there any moments of blame that you feel like owning up to on a public podcast?

[01:00:38] Andrew: Hmm. Yeah.

The story, you begin the presentation with, I resonate very well with, I mean, not that I could sing any song from Wicked, let alone that I take the time to go outside every day. There’s so many beautiful things that are the foundation of that story. Let’s just point out that’s great.

But, yeah, no, I, I resonate very much with just like, ‘Oh, can you believe!” The feeling of just like, this person does not need to be here right now because I got an agenda, was the word that you used, yeah,

[01:01:14] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:01:14] Andrew: that felt immediately relatable. Although I haven’t had a specific story come to mind.

I think for myself, when I’m passing blame, I’m probably inclined to look at, at people who consider themselves to be leaders.

[01:01:28] January: Hmm.

[01:01:29] Andrew: Because even if the thing that’s got my goat is everywhere in all of us, myself included, you can still point to the leader. And instead of seeing people in positions of leadership as people that are trying to get things done, I can see them as obstacles.

[01:01:45] January: Yeah, an impediment to the way the world should be.

[01:01:48] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:01:49] January: One thing that comes up for me with leaders specifically is a sense that they should be more aware of their power for influence, their mimetic capacity, and therefore they have more responsibility to be better behaved than the rest of us. Do you get that vibe at all, or is that…

[01:02:07] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it in James? Yeah, James 3. Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will face stricter judgment.

And one way to read this is to like: yeah, so you see stricter judgment, you can expect more of the people that are in a position of teaching or instructing.

But I remember this passage coming up in a Sunday school one time, and points were being made, but there was people there with years of experience teaching school, and there’s just a matter-of-factness: when there are 25 pairs of eyeballs looking at you, like any mistake you make is gonna be seen. You know?

[01:02:55] January: Yep.

[01:02:56] Andrew: It’s not this like: Oh, you’re gonna be far stricter, more judged.”

Like it is just more of a matter-of-factness of like, that’s what’s gonna happen.

[01:03:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:07] Andrew: And yeah. And, and so I can take that lesson and console myself when I’m in a teaching position, but can, I take that lesson when I’m not

[01:03:15] January: Mmm.

[01:03:16] Andrew: and recognize that okay, if I’m focusing in on this person, it’s just ‘cause that’s what’s going on here. They’re the leader. They’re the one in the center of the circle. Of course, we’re gonna see their faults first. Obviously, that’s what’s gonna happen.

[01:03:29] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:30] Andrew: This is not a story I talk about or think about much, so I’m not sure how it’s gonna come out. I made considerable efforts to become a missionary right outta college and was told by the group I applied to that, yeah, thanks, but no thanks.

[01:03:45] January: Hmm.

[01:03:45] Andrew: The assessment process, and that’s what they called it, for new people that might join the group involved, team building activities and stuff for three, four days. And so they had veteran missionaries, people that spent decades overseas doing stuff that is missions related and they were observing. You had three people observing you, you didn’t know who they were until afterwards.

There was a role-playing exercise where I was supposed to like, lead somebody to Christ and convert them or something. And I, I totally did not—I wasn’t thinking of it like a job interview. This guy… he was trying to play the part of like, ‘Oh, I go to the city and become a banker? Or should I stay in the little village?’

And I said something like, ‘Oh, maybe God doesn’t care, you know?’

[01:04:32] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:32] Andrew: And, uh, that was not what you should say.

And so when the no came through, and I was processing that, I did fixate on the three people that were observing me.

[01:04:43] January: Hmm.

[01:04:44] Andrew: One of them had been on the field, where I wanted to go. I had done an internship for a summer, and I didn’t stay with her family for very long. I think I stayed at their house one night as we were traveling in to where we were going and one night as we were coming out.

But I guess what I’m actually getting at with regards to blame is that for me, right? This was something that I wanted to do and couldn’t. I could say things like, ‘Well, yeah, I don’t know how to do a job interview very well,’ but like, they’re a missions organization. Who cares if I don’t know how to do a job interview, right? They should be able to see through that.

Was it my fault? That’s just a way to blame them.

[01:05:23] January: Mm mm-hmm.

[01:05:24] Andrew: We had this list, it’s like six or seven reasons of why you would go to a different country to try and support churches, and one of them was calling, you have a calling. And I put that one last because God never came to me and said, ‘I want you to go to Ethiopia.’ That conversation never happened.

At the time I, was probably more confident than I am now that foreigners can be helpful in church formation. But I found very specific ways to resent each of those people.

[01:06:01] January: Hmm.

[01:06:01] Andrew: I hadn’t thought about it as me blaming them. If you’d said I was disgusted with them. Yeah. That was like, okay, that sounds about right. I knew that was going on.

You know how you do those conversations in your head? It occurred to me that my junior and senior year at college, this was all I was thinking about doing upon graduation.

I changed my major, ‘cause I knew that I was gonna be a missionary. And when things were difficult, with just whatever, life is difficult, sometimes you feel down, I’d go to the second floor of the library where they had the big atlas, you know, 200-page atlas that’s four feet by three feet.

And I could go straight to the page where you’d have Ethiopia and there was this small town Yasow, which is where I’d spent the summer. And it was just so relaxing. Whatever was going on, I knew that’s where I was going. things sort of just took shape, things that seemed big weren’t quite so big. I don’t know. It was a very comforting exercise I practiced for two years.

[01:07:12] January: Mm.

[01:07:13] Andrew: The woman that I had met in Ethiopia that happened to be there that week and was part of the assessment team, she got a bit teary-eyed when they were saying no. And she said, if you don’t have a calling, it won’t work. It’s hard to live in another country. If you don’t have a calling… if you don’t feel called to be there, you’re gonna collapse.

[01:07:33] January: Hmm.

[01:07:35] Andrew: I had rather vicious thoughts in my head. I’m pretty sure while she was saying it, it’s been too many years to know for sure. Definitely afterwards of like, ‘Oh, she’s got issues. Having a hard time doing her job.’

[01:07:48] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:49] Andrew: And afterwards, when I’d think about like, well, what if I had, told her the story of the atlas, maybe we could clarify this “calling” thing.

[01:07:59] January: Yeah.

[01:07:59] Andrew: and what I was putting last on the list and what had been first.

[01:08:02] January: Yeah.

[01:08:03] Andrew: But when I did that mental conversation in my head after the fact, it wasn’t a regret. I had no regret whatsoever. It was, ‘I bet she’d feel like shit if she heard that.’

[01:08:14] January: Mm.

[01:08:14] Andrew: She’s telling me that I don’t have a calling—I don’t feel called. She doesn’t know what brought me through the last two years. Like, you know what I mean? It was that vindictive, angry

[01:08:23] January: yeah.

[01:08:23] Andrew: stuff.

[01:08:24] January: Weaponized.

[01:08:25] Andrew: That’s, I, I think that’s, that was me blaming her. I’ve never used that word to describe it, but yeah.

[01:08:32] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:33] Andrew: Blaming her for something when she knew way more about what was going on both that week in the assessment and just generally, like life overseas.

I did not have any regrets with regards to my actions or decisions or whatever, like how I could have expressed myself better. I just, as you so rightly put it, I had ammo. I had stuff that wasn’t ammo, but I could turn it into that. I could,

[01:08:58] January: Yeah.

[01:08:59] Andrew: I could weaponize it. I think that’s something that blame does; takes things that are not offensive and turns them into tools for aggression.

[01:09:09] January: Yeah, absolutely. I can still hear a lot of hurt in your voice talking about that. Tell me where I’m wrong?

[01:09:17] Andrew: Oh yeah. Yeah, it was kind of a big deal.

[01:09:21] January: Yeah.

[01:09:22] Andrew: Because it wasn’t just the last two years of college, you know, orienting my education for this. Christian faith had been the prominent component of my identity for as long as I had the wherewithal to decide that kind of stuff. So, the ‘no’ was not easy for me to take.

[01:09:41] January: Yeah. Questions that get at our identity are always the hardest. I wanna make a parallel with Cain, but I also don’t want to just move on from that ‘cause there’s a lot there.

[01:09:52] Andrew: No, go ahead. I, I’d be interested to hear the parallel.

[01:09:56] January: Oh. Just in terms of what I saw of Cain, with that identity as a Doer. I’ve done all the things, I have earned this, I’ve done everything right. Just like I was doing with the girl at the beach, I was like, I’ve done everything right to have this space to myself. Like it’s a park. It’s open to the public. I didn’t do shit to earn that, right.

What the heck do I think I’m entitled to here?!

And yeah, Cain had this identity of I have done enough. I am, I am enough. But the, the identity of Enoughness was based on Doing and not Being.

[01:10:40] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:41] January: And the minute that the doing was called into question, the identity collapsed. And he had to find somebody to blame for the pain.

[01:10:50] Andrew: Yeah. I think, yeah, I think it is very much in terms with Cain and how it got externalized and his aggression toward Abel.

[01:10:58] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:59] Andrew: For me, I wasn’t, I mean, maybe I was and didn’t realize it, but it wasn’t the devastation of I can’t do the thing that I’ve been working for. I mean, that is what was going on, but that was too much to think about.

[01:11:11] January: Yeah.

[01:11:12] Andrew: And it wasn’t their fault that I didn’t get a yes to go through the next step of the process. And in fact, there was another, door opened. There wasn’t actually a no. And yet I felt, I think I’m having a hard time thinking through how to say it, because it’s so nonsensical.

[01:11:31] January: Mm.

[01:11:32] Andrew: Why, why do you lash out at somebody? For me, thankfully, I was just imagining saying awful things to these people. I didn’t ever say awful things to them.

[01:11:43] January: Yeah, but what was that doing to your heart?

[01:11:45] Andrew: Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Very much destructive for me.

But it’s just so nonsensical, I’m trying to put in the frame of like, so these are my feelings. And then for this reason, it turns into aggression, but there’s no cause and effect there. You can’t correlate the two, it just turns into aggression for no reason.

[01:12:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:06] Andrew: Not, not that it has to, like you said before, it can be internalized and can turn into shame for no reason. But yeah, that’s, that’s what was happening to me: a nonsensical lashing out.

Now I remember. I was living with a good friend after that, and I was explaining these internal monologues that I would have with these people. And he invited me. He’s like, ‘Oh, this sounds juicy. Tell me all about it! What do you, how does it go?’

Right? He wanted me

[01:12:33] January: Oh boy.

[01:12:33] Andrew: to replay the thing, and I remember rather quickly being like, that could be a lot of fun, and no.

[01:12:42] January: Mm,

[01:12:42] Andrew: I’m not gonna do that.

[01:12:43] January: Mm.

[01:12:45] Andrew: That may have been the Holy Spirit, ‘cause I don’t know why I would say no to that normally.

[01:12:51] January: Mm. One moment of holy interruption.

[01:12:56] Andrew: Yeah. I haven’t tried to think through this. I mean, so much of that was just like, well, it happened. I haven’t tried to make sense of it, but I think I’m very grateful that this is happening because, it’s like you put it, whether or not I was calm and respectful with, and, and I was, to my recollection, I was, that was destructive to me.

The blaming can be awful when it spills into real life. Like, Abel’s dead. His blood is crying out from the ground. There is real pain and trauma that results from blaming. But I think there’s also, an internal destruction that comes from weaponizing your… yourself, I guess, or your,

[01:13:39] January: Yeah.

[01:13:40] Andrew: your way of recounting events. If your way of recounting what’s happened to you is just a means to, to become angry. Yeah, that’s, that, that’s a problem.

So I think probably I’ve spent a lot of time not thinking about this ‘cause I intuited enough that like this ain’t good

[01:13:59] January: Yeah.

[01:14:00] Andrew: to put myself in this state.

But it never occurred to me that well maybe, maybe you can unpack this without it leading to the bad. Just because it’s leading to the aggression, doesn’t mean stop it, don’t think about it.

It means maybe think about it with a mind that is penitent that can imagine a different outcome than aggression and anger.

[01:14:21] January: Hmm.

The word you used a minute ago was disgust. I don’t know that we’ve introduced this book, actually. But you, you had gone to

[01:14:31] Andrew: Wild Goose.

[01:14:32] January: the Wild Goose Festival this summer. Yes. And had heard Paul Hoard and Billie Hoard talk about their book, Eucontamination: — E U as in Eucharist, so, good contamination — Disgust Theology and the Christian Life, which I just think is the best subtitle ever. I’m immediately like, oh God, I shouldn’t read that book. And oh my God, I wanna read that book at the same time, which is exactly what that’s supposed to do, right?

But one of the things that they talk about is how completely irrational disgust is. And that’s what I heard you describing of that, I don’t even understand how I got from here to here. It, it just, like... went, and even now I can’t pick apart what happened. Because disgust isn’t rational. And that’s why we have such trouble, I don’t wanna say uprooting it because obviously we’ve just talked about that, the Matthew 13 passage. Maybe uprooting it is not what we’re trying to do here!

[01:15:27] Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

[01:15:32] January: But that like

[01:15:33] Andrew: That’s right.

[01:15:33] January: you can’t argue with it. One of the things that they talk about, you can explain to fear that a bear in your living room is not the same thing as a bear in a zoo, right? You can be five feet from a bear in a zoo and not freak out ‘cause your fear can be reasoned with,

[01:15:48] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:15:48] January: but disgust can’t be reasoned with

[01:15:50] Andrew: No, no.

[01:15:52] January: It does make me think a great deal about what Emily Nagoski talks about in Come as You Are, where she talks about how our sexual responses are learned. That we’re not born with them. They’re not inherent to us. They’re just like, what did our brain learn to associate with sexy times?

And that disgust is the same. What have we learned to associate with something gross?

[01:16:14] Andrew: Mm.

[01:16:15] January: And one of the things that I think I see happening in the New Testament generally, but especially in Acts when this is all working itself through the apostles and the early church, is that they’re getting lived visceral experiences that contradict the disgust narrative.

They’re learning, viscerally, that this thing actually isn’t gross. Here’s this other way to relate to this.

[01:16:43] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:16:44] January: And so that makes me really curious, how do we cultivate that? How do we work on that when we have such visceral reactions to things that just shut our brains down in a way, or at least our critical thinking brains? Like how can we facilitate letting go of that response in ourselves and in the people around us? And how can mimesis help us do that too?

[01:17:09] Andrew: Yeah. I need to finish the book, too, but I did have the advantage of listening to them do a presentation on their book and I think they’re gonna suggest an answer

[01:17:18] January: Mmm.

[01:17:18] Andrew: that will have to do with joy.

[01:17:21] January: Ah, excellent. My kind of people.

[01:17:24] Andrew: So how did you put it? How do you give yourself, visceral experiences that overcome disgust, or—

[01:17:31] January: Yeah, that contradict the disgust narrative.

[01:17:33] Andrew: contradict. How do you contradict disgust? And in a way that’s mimetic?

[01:17:39] January: mm-hmm.

[01:17:39] Andrew: Joy. I’m not saying that’s the one way to do it, but that’s, a likely way to do that. And so, yeah. The title of the talk that I heard was Queer Joy as Holy Subversion.

[01:17:49] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:17:51] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:52] January: Love that. Yes, absolutely.

[01:17:56] Andrew: But it does seem, it seems like it has to come from the margins, right? Joy is holy subversion. Like, can’t just be feeling disgust and be like, oh, okay, I’m gonna turn this into joy. But if you’re in the presence of something that would normally disgust you and you witness joy, actual joy. It could knock you off your disgust game just long enough to pick up a little bit of the joy, too,

[01:18:24] Janaury Jaxon: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:24] Andrew: and be like, wait a second, uh, this is fun.

[01:18:28] January: Yeah.

[01:18:29] Andrew: It seems like the vector — and I do think they talked about this — it’s always starting at the margins moving in.

[01:18:37] January: Hmm.

[01:18:38] Andrew: And so I guess perhaps the questions we could ask ourselves is, ‘Am I disgusted right now?’

Okay. If yes, ‘Am I in danger? Like bodily danger? Is there a sanitary issue that could

[01:18:52] January: meaningfully threaten me? Yeah.

[01:18:54] Andrew: Yeah. ‘Am I meaningfully threatened right now?’ No.

Then, okay, then this is a disgust that can be interrogated, right?

[01:19:02] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:19:03] Andrew: And, ‘Is there room for joy?’

And if not, then, ‘Am I the hangup? Am I, am I the impediment to joy right now?’

[01:19:12] January: Hmm mm-hmm.

[01:19:15] Andrew: I think I would’ve been able to see it pretty quickly. I mean, I told one friend about it a little bit, but he was, he was more like, ‘Ooh, ooh, drewman’s upset about something. Let’s, let’s hear what drewman sounds like when he’s angry. That sounds like fun!

Uh, that…

But if I had had somebody just to point out some of the basics of like, really fixated on these people and the mental exercise of making them feel stupid or bad about themselves. Is that how you normally think about people

[01:19:46] January: Yeah.

[01:19:46] Andrew: in your life? Do you fantasize about that stuff?

And I’d be like, no, that’s not what I normally do. Then why, why do you suppose that these three people, every time they enter your head, what do you think those three people have in common? What might that have to say about you and your feelings?

[01:20:04] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:20:04] Andrew: I think I could have picked up on that pretty quickly with a little help, but I don’t think I did. Well, I did pick up on it. It was with the help of someone, it just didn’t happen very quickly. I think it took about 25 years.

23 years.

Yeah, 22, it’s not too long.

[01:20:22] January: We get there eventually, right?

[01:20:25] Andrew: No shortcuts.

[01:20:26] January: Yeah. Seriously. Ughhhh. Yeah, this whole God’s timing thing. It’s kind of bullshit. I want a refund.

[01:20:39] Andrew: I didn’t know if you were just being subtle ‘cause we don’t need to be heavy handed with the Hebrew stuff, especially when neither one of us really, really know the language. But you did pick up on the etymology of Cain, right?

[01:20:50] January: You had mentioned it and I was hoping you were gonna bring that up.

[01:20:52] Andrew: Okay. I thought maybe we were just being tastefully, like we don’t have to Hebrew drop every time we have something to say about Hebrew.

Yeah, in chapter four, verse two of Genesis, she conceived and bore Cain saying, I’ve gained a male child with the help of the Lord. And so the, the word, uh, for gained, is similar. sounding to the word Cain.

[01:21:19] January: Mm.

[01:21:19] Andrew: And it is common in, in the Bible when you get names that oftentimes it’s, it’s the exact word, you know, but, uh, this one, it’s, it’s a word that sounds, uh, similar. And the word for I have gained, as this translation put it, can mean to acquire or to own.

[01:21:44] January: Ah.

[01:21:48] Andrew: And I mean, we, we have already heard that the birth process is gonna be painful and uh, I know that, um, I know that, like, I, I really appreciated the way that you found a reading for that, uh, to be very meaningful for those of us that, uh, will never go through a liter-literal, like, birthing episode.

But, um, yeah, she just went through one and I’m sure it was exhausting and, and that was like, yeah, I don’t know.

Do you feel like you’ve done something when your body’s been through the ringer like that? That’s certainly exactly what she said. That’s where he gets his name.

And also there, I’m not sure what to make of this, but when she says, I have gained a male child with the help of the Lord. There’s two parts of that, right? With the help of the Lord and I’ve gained. And he gets named after the gaining, the producing part, not the help.

[01:22:54] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:22:56] Andrew: But the word here for male child is not a word that normally is used for children or newborns at all.

In chapter 4, when Eve says, I’ve obtained a male child with the help of the Lord, the word there, it’s, I’ve obtained a male, and we just assume child because she just gave birth, right? It’s a baby. But this word is never used to refer to infants or newborns. It’s just the word for male or man.

And so it’s

[01:23:26] January: Oh, fascinating.

[01:23:27] Andrew: so that takes us back to chapter 2 with Adam’s exaltation, right after the rib has been formed and he says, this is bone in my bones, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. So,

[01:23:46] January: Ohhh!

[01:23:47] Andrew: Chapter 4 is the only time in the Bible that this word actually gets used to refer to a child cause it’s not the right word. And so she’s sort of like, okay, I came out of man, but I’ve produced man.

[01:23:58] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:23:58] Andrew: And I couldn’t help but notice today thinking about it, it hadn’t occurred to me is that that’s kind of gender-swapped, right?

[01:24:04] January: Uhhuh.

[01:24:04] Andrew: Because Adam’s like, because she was taken out of me, right? I’ll call her woman. because she was taken out of man, that sounds like a birthing thing. And the whole ‘I’ve acquired’ and ‘I’ve made,’ like I’ve, I’ve done the deed and

[01:24:17] January: Uh-huh, uh-huh!

[01:24:17] Andrew: but like

[01:24:18] January: we’re, we’re right back at Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey and the co-opting of the feminine by the masculine.

[01:24:26] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:24:30] January: Yeah. Fascinating. Wow. Thank you for bringing that

out.

[01:24:34] Andrew: There’s interesting parallel here that I wanted to put on your radar. ‘cause, we’re working through chapter 4 in this presentation, and you because of your comments are led to go back to, you’ll desire your man and he will rule over you, right? That—

[01:24:52] January: mm-hmm.

[01:24:53] Andrew: Sarna again pointed out, which I don’t know if this is relevant or not, God calls out for Adam, where are you? Right. Hiding. We know the story, right? But there was an Adam-Eve-serpent sort of progression of when he’s talking like, why did you do this? The woman?

[01:25:10] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:25:10] Andrew: Oh, why did you do it? And then the curses start with the serpent and work back toward Adam.

[01:25:16] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:25:17] Andrew: I say ‘the curses,’ but the word curse is only explicit for the serpent. If you read what’s said to Eve, she is not explicitly cursed. And so your comment about this is just the natural outgoing of what’s going to happen here, has some textual validity here

[01:25:36] January: Interesting!

[01:25:37] Andrew: in that the Lord God doesn’t find it — may, maybe he’s, maybe he’s a good southern gentleman, the Lord God Maker of Heaven Earth, and doesn’t wanna curse a lady? Or maybe—

[01:25:49] January: Trying so hard not to make a joke right now.

[01:25:55] Andrew: So you’re working through chapter four, and you saw, and, and, and I, it’s not fresh in my head, but you saw, I need to go back to that phrase, which is, we’re gonna have to put it in scare quotes ‘cause is it actually a curse? But like this, in chapter four verse seven, when Cain’s getting distressed about how the Lord did not heed his offering, but did heed his brother’s. And the Lord could see this happening, right? And he says, ‘Why are you distressed? And why has your face fallen? Surely if you do right there is uplift. But if you do not do right, sin crouches at the door. Its urge — this translation, ‘its desire’ — is for you, yet you can be its master.’

Its desire is for you, but you can rule over it.

[01:26:43] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:26:44] Andrew: What’s said to Eve, ‘your desire is for him and he will rule over you.’ There’s, there’s a parallel here.

[01:26:52] January: Mmmmmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:26:55] Andrew: Sin’s desire is for you, Cain. You will rule over it.

Your desire, Eve, is for your husband. He will rule over you.

Those are not the best translations. But what trying to get at is, that’s something going on here. And I remember noticing this years ago when I was going through the Genesis with this Sunday night group. I was like, ‘Oh, this is—’ but I had no idea what to make of it.

I’m like, what is going on? What is this parallel doing? But

[01:27:29] January: Yeah.

[01:27:30] Andrew: I don’t know. I but in, in your comment, you brought out that exact verse while running through chapter 4.

[01:27:37] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:27:37] Andrew: And so I was gonna challenge you to be like, can, can you make sense of this? Do you see something there?

[01:27:45] January: Oh, I definitely see something there. And thank you for making that connection.

[01:27:49] Andrew: Okay. Yeah.

[01:27:50] January: Okay, this is really random, but it’s connecting with something from the Gospel of Thomas for me, and I’m gonna get it wrong if I try to quote it, but there’s something in there about, ‘blessed is the man who eats a lion and becomes human, but cursed is the lion who eats a man and becomes human’—?

[01:28:05] Andrew: Okay. I just Googled it. ‘Blessed is the lion which is eaten by a human and then becomes human, but how awful for the human who’s eaten by a lion and the lion becomes human.’

[01:28:17] January: Yeah. Yes, exactly. Yes.

[01:28:25] Andrew: ? ? ?

I think that’s a line about violent desire! Right? We can consume the violence and become fully human, like Christ does,

Ohhhhh!

[01:28:36] January: or the violence can consume us, and take over and become human, right? Tell me I’m crazy.

[01:28:42] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Oh man, that’s so awesome. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I see it.

No, I love that. Yeah. It’s so bonkers. ‘cause I was, I was like, oh, these are parallelisms. But I was like, wait, so wait. All the, the, the humans supposed to become lions…? But no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That we can internalize — or not internalize, that’s too weighted — but we can take in the violence,

[01:29:09] January: Metabolize.

[01:29:10] Andrew: we can metabolize the violence and remain human. And that’s a blessing. And that’s the workers slowing their roll and letting the harvest come.

[01:29:20] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:29:20] Andrew: Right? Not traipsing through the wheat and tearing stuff out. That’s them remaining human, even though the lion has been introduced into the system.

[01:29:30] January: Yeah.

[01:29:30] Andrew: But how awful if the humanity is eaten by a lion and then the lion, that violence, becomes the way to be human now.

[01:29:38] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:29:39] Andrew: And so, ‘sin’s desire is for you, Cain, but you can rule over it’?

[01:29:45] January: Yeah, I, I think how I would put it is that I think it’s a statement about the colonizing power of desire. That which we desire rules us. It creates us. It forms us. And so if sin desires Cain, he can rule over it. But if Eve desires Adam, he will rule over her. Right? He’s going to dominate over her personality in her own head.

But if on the other hand we desire God, desire Christ, there’s no colonization because God is the only one who takes shape in us without displacing us. And so becoming more like Christ makes us more who we are, not less. Right?

What you’re experiencing is real. It’s there in your system. This is a thing. But you don’t have to let it cost you your humanity.

[01:30:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:38] January: Whereas if your desire is for creation instead of creator, like it, it’s going to cost you your humanity.

[01:30:46] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:46] January: I get very excited about these things. Thank you.

[01:30:53] Andrew: I think you wanted to touch on forgiveness and confession as a practice.

[01:30:58] January: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah!

I was trying to draw not only from the neuroscience and creative practices, but also from Church tradition, because I do think that Church tradition has a lot of these good things already baked into it. So, yeah, the practice that I want to attach to our episode Blame As Violence is confession and forgiveness, precisely because I think that this is one of the places where we most need to heal that blame dynamic.

And because it’s so critically tied to shame, shame is really kind of the root of it, confession and forgiveness is the way to start healing that.

I mean, we’ve already talked about the Letters from Love practice. That’s the beginning step, is learning to talk to ourselves with love. But at some point if we don’t also hear other people talk to us with love, there’s only so much that our own work can do if we’re still getting a different signal from the rest of humanity.

So, the super big picture, general overarching tradition of confession in the Christian Church as a whole. The earliest Church, it really was a practice of public truth telling. It was a communal act. It was tied to baptism

[01:32:10] Andrew: Mm.

[01:32:10] January: and it was reconciliation of the community and bringing everybody together after some serious kind of public sin. You know, if somebody betrayed the community under persecution or caused harm to someone in some way. Confession happened in front of the Church, because sin was understood as rupture in the social fabric and not just private moral lapse.

So it was this truth-telling that repaired the fabric of belonging in the community. So that’s the early church. That’s how it starts out.

And then we get the monastic traditions, the Desert Fathers, the fourth and fifth centuries, and that’s where confession starts to kind of turn inward a little bit. And about confessing thoughts and not just actions. It’s really about the analysis of our inner landscape

[01:32:57] Andrew: Mm.

[01:32:57] January: and recognizing that our inner life is tied to our actions and our outer life. It gets tied to healing and discernment and forming a stable personality and not just repairing rupture in the community, but also repairing it inside ourselves and in our relationship with God. And so that’s also beautiful.

[01:33:17] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:33:19] January: Sixth to ninth centuries approximately, the Celtic monastics kind of turned it into this repeatable, private confession. And this is where you start to get the penitential manuals, the lists of specific sins, and the matching penances that go with them. And so when the missionaries spread through Europe, it just kind of gradually turned confession into this private doctor’s office model of like it happens in this tiny little bubble with one other person, instead of out in front of the whole community.

And then the medieval period is where it really gets formalized. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the Western Church mandated annual private confession to a priest.But by that point, it was increasingly moralized and categorized and individualized, and turned priests into the gatekeepers of grace.

[01:34:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:34:08] January: And it became almost exactly what Jesus tells you not to do, which is, you know, just say a bunch of prayers over and over again, just like the pagans do, because you think that if you say it enough, God will hear you. Like, that’s not how this works!

And I, I, I’m saying that sarcastically. I don’t mean any shade to Catholics when I say that I am not Catholic. I don’t know the nuances of the tradition. I’m sure there are a million things that’re beautiful and good that are happening there that I don’t know anything about. So yeah.

[01:34:36] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:34:36] January: By all means, correct my wild generalizations here.

[01:34:41] Andrew: I, yeah, I, I can’t step in and pretend like I know, but yeah, with you. I’m sure there’s a lot more than I’m aware of. I have no experience in the Catholic church either.

[01:34:50] January: Yeah. And then so we ended up with the Reformation.

And Luther kept confession, as a sacrament, but stripped away the compulsory system. Huge emphasis on absolution as pure gift, not something you earn by saying the right prayers or doing the right penances. And then Calvin stressed communal discipline and accountability but rejected it as a sacramental confession.

And so a lot of the Protestant churches just sort of lapsed when it came to confession. There are evangelical strains of Protestantism that have more of an emphasis on it. And that is a good thing. But the organization that I would say is practicing confession the way I think, and this is purely my opinion, but the way I think that it was supposed to be, really is 12-step groups and AA meetings.

[01:35:38] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:35:39] January: And that practice of taking the things that we have done really, really wrong and we know we’ve done them wrong and holding them out for our community to witness and hold gently — but also hold us accountable to. Not just tell us, oh, well it wasn’t really that bad that you did that thing.

Because if you know that what you did was that bad and someone who’s deeply caring and trying to do right by you, tells you, you know, it, it wasn’t really that bad, here’s all the reasons why it was maybe not that big of a deal? That’s actually a rupture of trust.

[01:36:15] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:36:15] January: You don’t trust them as much because you can’t trust them to tell you the truth about something being not okay.

[01:36:22] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:36:23] January: And you know, you might still feel connected to them and part of you might really want to hear them say it wasn’t that big of a deal, because part of you wants to feel like you’re off the hook, but there’s a place in you that knows that you don’t feel good about it.

[01:36:36] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:36:36] January: And if they’re telling you that it’s okay to feel good about it, that’s actually a breach of relationship. It’s not ideal.

And full confession here, I’ve only been to a handful of 12-step meetings. but my church is particularly full of people who have struggled with addiction and alcoholism, and so it’s a very familiar format, I would say.

[01:36:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:36:56] January: Even though I haven’t personally had extensive experience with it, it’s still very immediate and very frequently talked about and certainly has shaped the culture of my church and is one of the reasons that I find my church as compelling as I do. Because they are very big on truth telling and holding each other accountable, but also being gentle about it.

[01:37:17] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:37:18] January: And because it really is that forgiveness that creates us anew, you know?

[01:37:23] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:37:24] January: That the Samaritan adulterers at the well, he told me everything I ever did.

[01:37:28] Andrew: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:37:30] January: And now I am free to go do something new. Life can change from here. Life can be different from here.

[01:37:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:37:38] January: I’m not stuck in this story anymore. So, yeah, who are the people in your life that you can tell the truth to, even when it’s incredibly painful? Who are the people in your life that will get you to tell the truth when you’re bullshitting yourself.

[01:37:55] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:37:56] January: No joke, Andrew, I like writing cards to people, like mailing handwritten cards, I have a stack of cards with this like fancy ass calligraphed lettering on the front that says, thanks for calling me on my shit. That’s my measure of do I seriously consider this person a friend?

Could I imagine sending them that card?

[01:38:16] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:38:19] January: I don’t think I actually have sent any of them yet but that’s my mental bar of like, is this a person who will call me on my shit

[01:38:30] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:38:31] January: when I’m bullshitting myself? Because that is something that I highly value.

You know, after all the ways that my life went wrong, the only thing that I am truly scared of anymore is being out of relationship with reality. That’s it. There are things that’ll trip me up still. I’ll get hooked by fear here and there, but that’s the only thing that’s genuinely terrifying to me.

And so people who will bring me back into relationship with reality, or remind me that reality is there

[01:39:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:39:00] January: and always offering me a relationship, those people are really precious to me.

So, yeah, the role of confession and truth telling and being witnessed and allowing ourselves to be held even when we’re terribly vulnerable, even when we have not done the thing that we know we were supposed to do, even when we have behaved in a way that we know is not consistent with who we wanna be, but clearly is who we are ‘cause we did it and that’s part of our story now...

There’s a lot of pain there. There’s a lot of complicated feelings, and that’s absolutely the birthplace of shame and someone who can hold that gently and tell us that we are forgiven. And it can be complicated too, right? Like we have to actually believe that we’re forgiven, or we have to trust that we’re forgiven.

[01:39:48] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:39:49] January: And that was another huge part of my life falling apart. I had people in my life who were trying to forgive me. They wanted to forgive me. They were telling me that. And I just had this voice in the back of my head saying, yeah, but if they really knew, they wouldn’t say that.

If they really knew everything I’ve done, they wouldn’t be able to forgive me for this. And that is my definition of hell. There’s no way out of that for humans. No human can get past that voice. That’s just it. ‘Cause no human can read my mind.

[01:40:18] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:40:18] January: Christ was the only person who could get past that because Christ did know everything I’d ever done.

[01:40:25] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:40:26] January: And could say, yeah, I see all of it and I see that you fucked up and I love you anyway.

[01:40:32] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:40:33] January: Can I help you do better tomorrow? Will you let me help you?

And I was like, oh, shit. That’s it? That’s all I gotta do? Fuck yeah. Where do I sign up?

[01:40:44] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:40:46] January: Is this going to ask a lot of me? Yes.

Did I have any idea how much it was gonna ask of me when I signed up? No, I did not. Learning all kinds of things every day.

But is this better than hell? Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. So much better. So much better.

[01:41:06] Andrew: Yeah, no, I really appreciated the idea of confession as a practice just ‘cause of the church tradition I grew up in, it’s just like, yeah, we, we don’t do that. We don’t bother. We know that’s a thing, but…

[01:41:16] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:41:17] Andrew: And so not something I had stopped to pause and think about. And when you paired it with forgiveness, I found it intriguing and it just started to make more and more sense cause I kind of have a hangup on how forgiveness is presented, sometimes — most of the times — in the churches that I’ve frequented.

And anyway, my response here is ‘cause like I, I thought of something I wanted to tell you, but basically everything I’m about to say, I think you’ve already just said, so, like, but I did finish Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir from last year, All The Way To The River.

It’s an amazing book and I’ve heard her doing publicity for the book and everything I say she says in this interview. So I don’t think it’s considered spoiler if she’s using it to publicize the thing.

But there’s a chapter in there Running Out of Road. The love of her life is dying of cancer and was a recovered addict and has a horrendous relapse. And there’s all sorts of awful, painful things that happen.

Gilbert’s wanting to be there, you know, for, Rayya is her name, for Rayya’s death, but like she realized she can’t be, and then Rayya is able to get some help. Elizabeth is with her and, of course, Rayya didn’t realize how bad it had been because she was out of her head.

[01:42:31] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:42:32] Andrew: And Elizabeth is explaining just how bad it was and she’s like, yeah, I’m gonna have to say some stuff that, I don’t wanna make you feel shame. I don’t. But it’s pretty awful. And she says, tell me, tell me everything I did.

[01:42:46] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:42:46] Andrew: And she does. And Rayya’s response is, if we had more time, there’d be a lot of work to do.

[01:42:54] January: Yeah.

[01:42:54] Andrew: I’d need to start a step program from the very beginning. I’d need a sponsor. I’d have to do it all over again. And, you and I, we’d need therapy and we could fix what we could fix. And that could take so much time, but we don’t have that time.

[01:43:09] January: Yeah.

[01:43:09] Andrew: Meaning she has terminal cancer. She’s about to die in a very short time. And so she says, can you just forgive me?

And Elizabeth Gilbert’s response is, she stops and she uses the definition of forgiveness that always rubs me the wrong way. And funny ‘cause she’s totally nailed the definition of faith, but I think for her forgiveness is close to pardoning or exonerating.

Just as a general rule, if your rendition of the gospel starts with sin, if you start with wrongdoing and shame and you lay all that stuff out as a foundation on which to situate forgiveness and make sense of forgiveness, I don’t care how beautifully you try and detail that understanding of forgiveness.

It’s, it’s got a lousy foundation and it’s gonna crumble.

[01:43:58] January: Hmm.

[01:43:59] Andrew: And Jesus is Savior. That doesn’t mean he’s the solution to a problem. It means he’s inaugurating a new age, a new way of being human. That’s what the savior title means, and if we turn him into a hero who saves today, then we need to be in trouble first before we can appreciate his greatness.

[01:44:21] January: Yeah.

[01:44:22] Andrew: And I think that’s a problem if that’s how we construe Christianity. And forgiveness gets pulled into this hero understanding of savior and as I was thinking through it, I felt like forgiveness… to allow forgiveness to go first. And I mean, James Alison will say that it’s forgiveness that gives us the ability to see sin for what it is.

[01:44:45] January: Yep.

[01:44:46] Andrew: That’s what comes. It’s not sin, that leads to forgiveness. It’s the exact opposite.

[01:44:50] January: Yep.

[01:44:50] Andrew: It’s certainly not a consistent part of any faith tradition I’ve been around.

[01:44:55] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:44:56] Andrew: There’s like the revival preacher or the youth event preacher, like, there’s these one-time events where it’s all about getting people to come forward and have some encounter.

[01:45:08] January: Cathartic experience. Yeah.

[01:45:09] Andrew: Yes. And it’s usually called a dedication, a rededication, or a conversion or… anyway. It’s like you export the job of confessing to the preacher and they talk about all this and you hold onto the guilt though, that’s yours.

[01:45:24] January: Mm.

[01:45:24] Andrew: And you’ve got the guilt.

[01:45:25] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:45:25] Andrew: But you let them tell you all the awful things that — I don’t know. It seems like the frustration with my religious tradition has to do with, I think I’m zeroing in on what the big hangup has been for me, or is now, whether it’s always been the case, but it’s the primacy that is given to sin.

[01:45:45] January: Mm mm-hmm.

[01:45:47] Andrew: The gospel starts with sin. That’s the motivator. That’s what caused God to do something. Like, oh crap, the world’s gone to hell. I’m gonna have to do something. Okay. Oh yeah. Alright, alright. I’ll send Jesus. That’ll take care of this.

[01:46:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:46:00] Andrew: It’s just so backwards. It should be it starts with Jesus. Like, this is,

[01:46:04] January: Yeah.

[01:46:05] Andrew: this is the message.

And so that gets played out in these big events where they’re trying to create a cathartic experience for people to rededicate their lives. Yeah, it’s all about drumming up this sin and awareness of guilt so that Jesus can come do something like that.

And you’ve robbed — that that framework has robbed the participants from allowing the Spirit to come and convict us of sin and righteousness

[01:46:30] January: Yeah.

[01:46:30] Andrew: It’s like the preachers are supposed to do it.

I don’t know. They would say it was the Spirit that’s doing it, but if it’s external, right, if it’s something that’s pushing you around or pulling you forward like we say, that’s not the one who moves you without displacing you, right?

[01:46:43] January: Yeah.

[01:46:43] Andrew: So I imagine the sentiment of forgiveness being stated something like this.

[overacted throat clearing]

Okay. Uh, I’m starting to get a real clear picture of impending tedium with you. Frankly, it looks exhausting, but whatever the “it” may end up being, so be it. I’m ready. Let’s go. Let’s take a next step.

Now, I, I’m not going to just follow you wherever you go because I know a thing or two and there are places I won’t go back to. There are places I won’t even step the first foot in, but I’m ready to believe there’s a next step we can take together.

[01:47:29] January: Mm.

[01:47:30] Andrew: And that’s what Rayya was asking for from Elizabeth. She wasn’t asking for her to ascend to some place of exoneration and say, you were absolved of all sins you committed while you were high on crack and whatever, that’s wasn’t what she was looking for.

She was saying we’ve only got so much time left. Will you be a part of it?

[01:47:52] January: Yeah.

[01:47:52] Andrew: Can you be a part of it? Will you forgive me? Is there a next step that we can take together?

[01:47:58] January: Yeah.

[01:47:58] Andrew: And notice that when she says, I forgive you…

Rayya says some amazing things, like some mind blowing. It is a great book. Anybody could enjoy this thing. Especially what you were saying about step programs and, and how it relates to confession and truth telling, but I think knowledge is important, with forgiveness. Otherwise it’s just naivete, right? If you don’t know any better.

[01:48:22] January: Mm.

[01:48:22] Andrew: And that’s not forgiveness. It’s important because if forgiveness is a belief that there’s a next step we can take together; confession, I think, would sound a little more like this.

[overacted throat clearing]

Confessor here. I don’t care how convenient, how commodious, how easy-breezy it all feels right now, I’m not gonna take one step further into this absolute fiction I’ve been telling everybody, including myself, and letting everybody believe, including myself. Not one step further into that lie.

[01:49:01] January: Hmm.

[01:49:02] Andrew: Now maybe there’s some guilt that could be mixed in with there, and that’s okay.

But that’s not what makes it a confession. It’s truth telling that makes it

[01:49:12] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:49:12] Andrew: genuine. Confession rests on the affirmation that there’s a reality that’s distinct from fiction. And that part seems intuitive, but I want to go a step further and say that that reality is only perceptible, is only knowable, through forgiveness.

And here people, if you’re still caught up in the sin first, wrongdoing first, and then forgiveness comes along, you’re like, wait, wait, wait a second. So if you forgive somebody, it’s true. And if you don’t forgive somebody, it’s like, what do you, that’s a…

What I’m trying to say is. It doesn’t count as truth. For human beings, and as far as creation goes, we seem to be the ones most concerned about truth and truth telling. It does not count as truth if there’s any one of us who’s left out.

[01:50:00] January: Yup.

[01:50:01] Andrew: That willingness to make the next step together is essential for truth.

[01:50:06] January: Yeah.

[01:50:07] Andrew: It’s not just an objectivity of the reality that stands apart from fiction and error. It’s also a unity. There’s a togetherness that everyone is there. If somebody’s been left out so that everybody else can find a truth that is convenient, commodious, and easy-breezy, that’s the scapegoating that Girard talks about.

[01:50:30] January: Yep.

[01:50:31] Andrew: I feel like forgiveness and confession are both entirely about truth telling.

[01:50:36] January: Mm-hmm. Ever since that sermon that you helped me out with last year, I still think of forgiveness as a release from bondage.

[01:50:46] Andrew: Mm.

[01:50:47] January: And you can’t help someone get out of their trap if you’re not acknowledging that they’re in a trap. If you haven’t told the truth about what that trap is, if you’re not seeing the situation clearly, and collectively, like you’re seeing it and they’re seeing it, that’s the only hope of release from that.

And yeah, it’s the forgiveness and the restoration of relationship. That’s the only thing that makes us safe enough to be able to look at reality honestly. That’s the only thing that frees us to tell the truth about everything that we’ve done, and then it turns confession, it turns sin not into something that I have to beat myself over the head with for the rest of my life because look what a terrible person I was. It’s exactly the opposite of that. It is letting go of all of that

[01:51:32] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:51:33] January: and being able to take that next step.

[01:51:35] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:51:35] January: together.

[01:51:38] Andrew: That seems like the perfect place to wrap up this episode. So, uh, January, what do our listeners have to look forward to next time?

[01:51:47] January: Yeah, next episode is a really exciting one. We’ve spent a couple episodes now talking about how creativity goes wrong, how it gets hijacked by shame and blame to create rivalry and violence in the world. But next time we’re finally gonna get to look at Mary’s role in the Creative Journey, and we’re gonna talk about what it looks like when creativity’s going right, and the trust and curiosity that are required for that adventure.

So I’m incredibly stoked. Don’t miss it. We’ll see you there.

[01:52:21] Andrew: You’ve been listening to Theology Kills, a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive. Your hosts are January Jaxon and Andrew McRae, and Season One was written and produced by January Jaxon.

[01:52:38] January: Our theme music is Things To Do In a Day by Simon Lepine.

[01:52:42] Andrew: Theology Kills is exclusively listener funded. If you’d like to support our work or go deeper with practices, bonus content, and community conversations, join our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash Theology Kills Podcast. You can find everything we’re making at www.theologykills.com.

[01:53:02] January: That’s everything we have for you today. Thanks for listening, take care of yourselves and each other,

[01:53:07] Andrew: and we'll see you next time.