Welcome to Within, the contemplative segment of the Leader’s Way podcast. And I am so profoundly thankful to have with us today Sarah Bessey, whose book Field Notes for the Wilderness explores this idea of what do we do, and what is it like, when we’re in moments of profound destabilization. When we’re lost. When we’re in a season, in a space where we do not feel the presence of God, all the usual coping mechanisms fail us; maybe the reliable prayer life, the things that we’ve built our foundation/foundations upon have just crumbled.
And what often happens in these spaces is we tend to blame ourselves. We tend to see the wilderness as a kind of lack of faith, as if we are to blame for the experience of wilderness. But of course, wilderness is an experience deeply embedded within the Christian biblical tradition. It’s to be expected in the spiritual life. And her wonderful book is … well, it’s what it promises to be. It’s a kind of guide for those who find themselves in the really heart-stretching, confusing, disoriented place of wilderness, whatever that looks like. You know, is this a divorce? Is this a move, a career change, the loss of a loved one, an empty nest, as I’m … as I’m going through in my own world, right? So that the wilderness can look different for all of us. And yet, Sarah’s guidance is really, really wise.
And I think what I took away from this book more than anything else is that wilderness, while profoundly uncomfortable, while it offers very little in the way of, of certainty–and this is often what we try and do; we try and fix the certainty by rushing to things that are certain, but they’re also not what we need, they’re also not wise. Um, she invites us into some practices that are really profoundly helpful and orients us to the wilderness as a place of divine encounter. The wilderness is not just a place to be lost. It’s a place to be found. It’s a place to discover what’s sacred. So let me welcome Sarah Bessey.
As many of you know, she’s an author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed books Jesus Feminist, Out of Sorts, Making Peace with an Evolving Faith, Miracles and other Reasonable Things, A Rhythm of Prayer: a Collection of Meditations for Renewal. And of course her latest book Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith. It was a USA Today, the Globe and Mail, Indie Book, McNally Robinson, bookshop.org and Publishers Weekly bestsellers. And she writes a weekly bestselling newsletter called Field Notes with essays, devotional series, conversations, and more. You can sign up for Field Notes at the link that we’ll provide in the show notes. And with her friends, uh, the late Rachel Held Evans and Jim Chaffee, she co-founded Evolving Faith. And then she was also the co-host of the Evolving Faith podcast with her friend Jeff Chu, which has been downloaded by millions of listeners worldwide.
So we have in our midst a wise prophet for our time, a kind and deeply empathetic guide of souls. We’re so thankful for Sarah’s presence.
Welcome to Within, a contemplative segment within the Leader’s Way podcast that explores the convergence of mental health, art, and spirituality through authentic conversations across wisdom traditions about personal and collective transformation. We welcome artists, musicians, spiritual teachers, and healers to reflect on the sacred wisdom needed to heal the world’s deepest wounds. Within examines the inner path to wholeness, not through quick fixes or spiritual bypassing, but through courageous engagement with life’s profound challenges.
I’m so thankful, Sarah, for this sort of biblical symbol of wilderness. And we’ve all been in those moments of life where we’re destabilized, disoriented. We want to get out of the moment. And yet, the wilderness becomes a kind of incubator, you know, for a sacred encounter, a sacred healing, a sacred change. Jesus goes into the wilderness right before his public ministry. Israel wanders in the desert, a kind of wilderness for 40 years before going into the promised land. But sometimes you don’t realize the kind of healing and preparation that you’re receiving in the wilderness until afterward. It’s just like, terrible, it feels terrifying.
Sarah: Yeah.
B: And I wonder you know, for you, how were you different when you emerged from, from your wilderness? And what were those lessons that you learned that you maybe couldn’t learn any other way?
S: That’s a, that’s a great way of putting it. I think because I came up in a faith tradition that’s so highly valued certainty and saw it … an unquestioning, non-doubting form of faith is somehow the most real. And so I think one of the things that ended up surprising me the most is the realization that first of all, this is an incredibly normal and healthy developmental stage of faith. You’re not broken and you’re not bad, right? That this is something that is actually super normative within the Christian tradition and that there is this long lineage of wrestling with God in the wilderness and that in fact, far from this being something that has happened because you are faithless, it is actually usually an indication of great faithfulness because you, you were the true believer kid, right? Or you were the one who was all in. And so it turns out that rather than being finding yourself in the wilderness, whether it was because you landed there because of doubt and questions, whether they’re about scripture or about, you know, theological ideas that maybe your, your church of origin or your religion kind of had established as like, this is the small box we have for God. Or if you were, you know, body and soul chucked over the threshold by kind of these institutions, which can happen, or you were never welcome in the first place, which is definitely true for a lot of people based on their identity. There’s this sense of, well, what’s wrong with me? And instead what I have kind of learned, um, sometimes the hard way is that this is usually an altar to encounter God. And that far from being something that is a problem to solve, it is an invitation from the spirit. And it is a thing you can trust.
It’s not an absence of God’s love, but oftentimes kind of like the next experience within that love.
B: Oh, thank you for so much for that reframe and normalizing that experience. I think for many of us, we felt so alone, so shameful. And so, that moment is an altar. I love, I love that image. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how, how your prayer life shifted. One of the pieces of the book comes toward the end that I really appreciated– just your candor. And in narrating how your prayer life shifted, and of course the book isn’t built around spiritual practices that can help you navigate the wilderness, but I wonder if you could maybe lay out what that was like to watch your own prayer life shift. Because of course, as you so beautifully say in the Christian tradition, we sort of, we’ve worshiped at the altar of sameness and certainty, and to notice your own prayer life shifting. I wonder, gosh, was, was, was that destabilizing at first?
S: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely it was. And so, you know, it’s kind of an interesting thing because you and I come from very different, you know, uh, faith traditions and even understandings of prayer, because I grew up in small third-wave charismatic communities here in Western Canada, um, where there was this sense of like newness to what God was doing. And because I came within a context where most of us were first generation Christians, because here, at least in the area or in the, the larger cultural context I was growing up in, nobody went to church. There was not this historic kind of connection with this story. It had … it wasn’t my parents. It wasn’t even my grandparents. Like it was my great grandparents were the last generation who were really in church. And so when we came to faith, we were like, well, we are discovering everything for, for the very first time. This is brand new information.
And so, and there was this distrust that was kind of sown in us, around tradition and around even religiosity. And so my first introductions to prayer were like spontaneous and, and emotive and deeply personal, whether they were communal or together– praying in tongues was a huge part of my coming of age. So on the fringes of that, those movements, we found ourselves in the word of faith movement, which is a kind of an off- branch of prosperity gospel. If that helps kind of, you know, people have some context for what I’m about to say, we prayed with such authority and we prayed like God owed us, like there was a demand. We were … we were reciting God’s promises back to him. We were confessing and we were big into healing and we were big into like victory narratives.
And so then when I found myself in adulthood being like, wait a minute, this … this does not quite add up. And in fact, I have done everything right. According to what I know about what these things are. And yet my answers have not come. The healing has not been here. Reality is, is being reality. And– and again, this is one of those things, but should not be a shock. But it’s almost like we had this idea that because we loved God and because we knew how to pray this way, that somehow we were going to be immune from humanity and immune from these deeply human experiences, like loss and grief and suffering, and that’s not true. And so then you find yourself as part of that company of people with unanswered prayers and you find yourself looking around and being like, well, now what? And the vast majority of people who find themselves there find themselves in a wilderness.
And so one of the very first things that actually ended up being restored to me about prayer was when I had no certainty, no victory, no answers, and I could not pray the way that I had been taught. I could rest in the prayers of others. And that’s when I discovered things like liturgy. That’s when I discovered things like the traditional prayers of the church. That’s when I discovered that you could … you could rest in these prayers when your own mouth felt empty and your soul felt so incredibly dry. And I lived there for a really long time and it was beautiful. And so now, you know, 20 years after that, probably longer actually, but you know, all these years after that, it’s funny to me how much of a hodgepodge mishmash prayer has become for me. And that’s what I ended up wanting to write about in the book is just saying that there can be this evolution where not only do you have these traditional, beautiful, very resonant, deeply meaningful prayers that have been in the mouths of saints for generations, you know, and so has this depth and this authority and this goodness to it. And also you get to bring your whole self to God in prayer, that there is no part of you that has to be edited out of your communication and your rest in your connection and communion with God.
I’m amazed by how many things I have gathered back up and reintegrated, even if maybe I don’t approach them quite the same way. And I talk a little bit about that in that chapter. I mean, for heaven’s sake, I still pray in tongues, Brandon. Like it is–just there is nothing that … the what’s that saying, that the economy of God will let loose, right? That all these things will matter in the end. And so I think even having that openness to like set some things down, bring new things in, expand our ideas of prayer to have room for different practices and different ways of encountering God, but also to have some openness for reimagining pathways that maybe you thought were closed to you forever.
B: That’s really beautiful. I think what I’m noticing in myself as I hear you is that this sort of fiction, I don’t know exactly where it comes from, that there ought to be one right way of doing it and that it ought to never change. And what I hear you inviting is a plurality of forms, which of course I allow in many other parts of my life. I like many kinds of music. I like many kinds of food, right? I like hiking and I like to play volleyball, right? So I love how sort of spacious you’re describing the landscape of prayer. And so I wonder if we can sort of dive into some of these forms of prayer, which folks might not even realize they already do and are actually really beautiful forms of prayer, like wonder and curiosity are two of my favorites that you talk about. Can you say a little bit about the invitation you’re making here?
S: Yeah, I think that’s maybe one of the biggest things, the underlying thing under the thing that the wilderness has kind of taught me, or maybe rather it’s that the spirit that I’ve encountered in the wilderness is that God is so much bigger and better and more loving and more inclusive and more welcoming and good than I ever could have imagined. And so that truth ends up coming to how I read scripture. It comes to how I encounter community. It comes to prayer, right? And so something like wonder and curiosity and understanding that that ongoing conversation that we have in our soul with love, with God, is a thing that we can kind of be guided by. And so that’s where wonder and curiosity came in for me was more the sense of like, when there’s that part of you that beholds something beautiful or strong or remarkable or just even small and precious, that part of you that is whispering “thank you” is probably praying.
And even the questions that arise are invitations, right? So as opposed to seeing all of these moments as something that is somehow taking us out of communion with God, we get a chance to say, this is all part of that conversation that has never ended. I often say like that the same part of you that worries is the part of you that’s praying constantly. So if you can worry constantly, you can probably pray constantly. And so it’s that, that river within us, right, that we are kind of connected to is less where the wonder and the curiosity has kind of come in for me, is even blessing that as a place of encounter and conversation.
B: Yeah, I’m reminded, as I hear you describe this, of that wonderful line by Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic who said, “If the only prayer you ever said was thank you, it would be enough.”
S: Yes.
B: And you also make some space for the dimensions of human experience that are a little bit rougher around the edges, which I really appreciated, like lament, like righteous rage. Help us understand that those things can be sacred too. For those of us who maybe have a feeling like those need to be edited out, who maybe think that Christianity really is about a kind of polite niceness or about a kind of performative goodness, like behaving.
S: Piety.
B: So you take that wherever you want.
S: Right. That’s one of the things that I look back on almost with some amusement because, I mean, if there’s one thing that, you know, I am preconditioned to value, it is politeness and niceness as a Canadian, right? Right. Well, and then you pile on those other aspects, like the Word of Faith prosperity gospel, which so deeply valued, like your words and how you speak. And, you know, you were never sick, you were coming down with a healing, right? And so there’s these, you know–and then there’s this other level of how you are or how I was, you know, socially conditioned as a woman within the church to really highly value, you know … pliability, kindness, niceness, you know, cooperativeness, softness.
And so you layer all these things on, then of course, life is happening and you realize like, oh, there’s some reality here that needs to be named. And so being able to make space for that, not only in my own life, but in the, you know, then in sort of these practices around lament, around anger, around learning to tell the truth, right? Which is really what the underlying thing is in the midst of all of it, is stepping back from the falseness, stepping back from the mask, stepping back from, you know, the cooperativeness that just kind of is almost like, you know … I talk a little bit in the book in a section on justice and peacemaking, that all of this is even deeply connected to how much we value like peacekeeping instead of peacemaking, right? Which is by its very nature going to be disruptive, right? Making peace is going to be disruptive, just like turning on a light is disruptive to darkness, right?
And so all of these things are also deeply connected. Learning to bring that into prayer, learning to bring that into our spirituality, learning to bless the fact that your calling is usually hiding somewhere at that intersection of not only what brings you joy, but what makes you angry, right? Learning how to tell the truth, learning how to let yourself be sad, and to say when things are hard instead of rushing to fix them or spiritually bypass them or pretend that they’re fine.
The encounters that I have had not only with God, but with other people have been the most real and the most sacred when they are the most honest. And if there’s one place where you need to be able to take off your mask and tell the truth, it’s got to be there.
B: You know, Jesus said, “The truth will set you free,” but he left a big part out, which is that the truth will blow up your life and will be disruptive, as you said.
S: That’s right. I think it was Gloria Steinem who said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
B: And I wonder, since you brought it up, if we could just spend a moment on spiritual bypass, which might be a phrase or a term that’s new to some folks, and I wonder if you could just unpack that, because it’s something that only within the last maybe 10 years did I discover. I’ve been at this 25 years, and it’s been a really helpful framework to think about, because we can often use our faith and our piety and gosh, at a seminary and at a university like this, we can use our theology as a really convenient place to hide. And again, we start performing theology. We say wise things, we quote folks as potentially a substitution for doing the real work ourselves. And I wonder, maybe you could just say a word about that and how, maybe in your own life, the bypassing sort of has shown up. And then how do you bring that to God and bring that to prayer? Because I think it’s part of all of us, right?
S: So spiritually bypassing is a phrase that a friend of mine, Kate Bowler, talks about a lot in her work and in her books. And it’s this idea that using spiritual language or even practices at times, even if you genuinely sincerely believe them, is a way of skipping over
what’s hard and real, what is actually happening. So it’s someone’s being diagnosed with cancer, and it’s saying, “Well, everything happens for a reason.” And so it’s something that kind of ends up making you feel better because you feel like you’re saying something, but it actually is not helpful and it’s hurtful even at times, if not outright dangerous to sometimes to people.
Problem is, is most of us have been kind of discipled in like aggressive silver-lining-finding. Aggressive silver lining finding, yes. Right? Like there’s this sense of like, I always think in my head that like, any time a phrase starts off or I want to start with the phrase, “Well, at least x, y, z,” that’s usually spiritual bypassing in my world. And so watching for that and being aware by how quickly I’m wanting to kind of separate from something that’s uncomfortable and something that hurts, whether it’s me or it’s someone I love or someone I’ve encountered, instead of just being able to say, “I’m so sorry, hon. This is really, really hard.”
One of the places where I encountered that a lot was actually in motherhood because I have four kids and it amazed me how often just naming the difficult thing that they were navigating and sitting with them in it and not rushing to a solution. Solutions will come, and we’ll figure things out and we will navigate and learn how to be a person in this impossible world. Like for sure, those days are coming. But there was one particular instance that happened when my youngest was a toddler. She was probably about two. And I used to call my kids a poor wee lamb when they were little. And she was with her babysitter for the day. She had had a little bit of a fall while they were at the playground running around. She’d kind of skinned the bottom of her hands and her knees or whatever. She was fine, you know, and had come home, had her lunch, had her nap, had been playing nicely. But when I walked in the door, she immediately turned around to me and held up her little palms of her hand and she goes, “Mommy, I really need you to call me a poor wee lamb.”
There was something that she was kind of needing around like, “I need you to acknowledge that I got hurt. I need you to acknowledge that this didn’t feel good.” And it kind of did, you know, twinge something in me around, there is something that we need about that acknowledgement and naming that is so inherent and spiritually by- spiritual bypassing steals from us, right? It can kind of take that away from us. And so I think that that’s kind of where it first started to be even articulated to me was instead of rushing to, “Well, we’re going to pray in this particular way,” or, “We’re going to have all the platitudes and I’m going to talk about how God needed another angel,” or, “I’m going to silver-lining-find the “’But at least, you know, x, y, z happened.’” Any of those things crowd out what is actual real comfort and real hope and real presence and real grace. They just take up all the air and all the space so there’s no room for what’s actually real to happen.
B: Yeah, I’m thinking of the moment in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus is just, right? He’s asking his disciples to stay awake. Of course, they all fall asleep and he just wants to be seen in that moment. There’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing to do. Just be with me and acknowledge that this is really hard and happening. And, you know, for most of us who are teachers or healers or in ministry, it’s hard not to jump in and start fixing, right?
S: It is. It is really hard. And the other thing too that I’m aware of now is how often, I mean, not always, but it often is motivated by care, right? It’s an imperfect form of care. And it’s maybe a bit under-realized, but it is, if you’re generous, you can see that people are trying.
B: I love your story of being with your daughter and it brought up, for me, I’m noticing here in my notes, this circled part of the book around mothering ourselves and meeting ourselves with compassion and empathy. Of course, the commandment is love your neighbor as yourself. And I think for most of us in Christian communities, we skipped over what sort of healthy loving ourselves could even look like. And so many of us sort of in adulthood are sort of trying to figure out, God, what might it mean if my life could be not motivated by that inner voice of hatred, which I thought I needed to accomplish things and be productive, but that there could actually be a re-parenting with a tender voice, with a more compassionate voice. And I wonder how you came to this realization yourself, and maybe you could also share what that practically can look like in one’s spiritual life.
S: The thing that is kind of a secret behind kind of a lot of what has happened in my work and in a lot of the writing and ministry I’ve done over the last number of years is how concurrent it has been with motherhood. I do wonder now how differently my own experiences in the wilderness and deconstruction would have gone if they hadn’t happened at a simultaneous season of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, miscarriages, loss, pregnancy, birth, over and over, and then being in those very intensive years.
So we have four kids. And now, they’re young adults and teenagers. And that idea that has undergirded, I would say, 99.9% of what I am usually trying to say in a lot of words that are very imperfect or iterated is how deeply God loves us. And a lot of that revelation is so deeply tied to motherhood for me. Because I remember these moments of being like, “I’m going to crawl out of my skin with how much I love these children.” And just watching them sleep or watching them navigate their lives, even in the most difficult moments, right? How would I have ever understood … This is me, this is not true for everybody, and it certainly is not like a rule of life or anything. But my personal experiences within motherhood helped me deeply understand, “Well, this is my body given for you.” Right? Up at night, three o’clock in the morning with a baby who’s nursing, who’s got a head cold, like, “This is my body given for you.” Right?
And so having these moments over and over again at a simultaneous time when I was trying to rebuild and reimagine faith meant that that was the cornerstone. It meant that the love of God and knowing and experiencing the love of God was so deeply embedded in that.
Then, of course, it is deeply connected with understanding the mothering language within Scripture and within God, and throughout, not just Scripture as we understand it, but even the church tradition and all of these different connections within it. And so for me, a lot of spiritual formation is actually like, “Well, what does it look like to love yourself like a really good mother would?” And I think that that’s often how the Spirit loves us.
And I know that that can be a difficult thing, especially people have a very painful relationship with the notions of mothering. And so perhaps there’s even like altars and unlocked doors of healing. Sometimes it’s, you know, not picturing your own experiences with mothering as a recipient or as someone who was providing mothering as a verb. But there is this sense to me that runs through the book almost as like kind of an underground spring of … what does it look like to let yourself be loved by God? And even to understand that love, not as an indulgent and precious and, you know, papyrus font kind of love, but like this deeply rooted and grounded, real sort of love that also wants to see everything good for you, that is willing to offer discipline, that is willing to offer, you know, “Okay, you need to get off the internet and you need to drink your water, and you got to go outside and you got to touch grass. And we’re going to talk about how you’re caring for yourself. And we’re going to talk about how you are talking to yourself. And we’re going to talk about how you see yourself instead of seeing yourself through the eyes of love and goodness.
And so, yeah, so that’s, I think, part of what ends up showing up in the book. It is definitely kind of this undercurrent that runs through, I would say, most of everything that I’ve written. And I think that there is something really beautiful and healing about that, both as a metaphor, but also as an actual lived experience within our life, to your point.
B: Oh, thank you. I mean, a big part of my own ministry over the years has been as a spiritual director. And it’s the great honor of my life to work with folks one-on-one and so much of this work is about learning to be tender with ourselves.
S: And the voice of God is never one of shame. So I mean, that is such good work you’re doing.
B: Well, and I wonder what your invitation is to someone. I’m thinking of a few of my clients who say like, “Yeah, no, I just can’t do that for myself.” Like, no, those neuro pathways of self-critique, that harshness are just so well-worn that it’s almost unfathomable. And they would say like, “I just don’t feel that toward myself.” And I wonder, do you have an encouragement for that soul who’s so steeped in that bitter, harsh inner voice to break through to something much gentler?
S: No, I think you’re right. I mean, and that’s one of those things where it is such deep work that you’re almost having to re-heal these very primal aspects of ourselves.
B: Primal, yeah.
S: And I think that that’s one of the things that maybe even is kind of the permission that we need is things like you don’t have to try harder at this. And there’s not like a magic word that’s going to solve it for you. It often is a thing you live into over time. And then someday you’re kind of almost surprised by how much has shifted. And it’s through things like spiritual direction. It’s through things like some of those practices that we’ve talked about. I mean, for heaven’s sake, it can be through medication and therapy and like proper spirit and soul care that’s happening for your mind as well, right? Of learning how to, you know, how you speak to yourself and how you see the world. So I mean, there’s no path that God’s love will not travel to meet you there. Right? And I think that that’s where things like … some of the practices that have helped me kind of re-establish those pathways have been, you know, things that look a lot more like cultivation instead of fixing, if that makes sense.
B: What a beautiful distinction. Yeah. Can you talk about cultivation?
S: Well, I think that that’s kind of what you’re doing in spiritual direction, right? It’s what you’re doing even through the podcast. It’s what you’re doing, you know, in a lot of different aspects of our lives. We understand, I think at this point in our lives, and you live longer than a hot second, you understand that very few things are like a, you know, kapow, everything changed, you know, like, sure, that might happen. And I hope it does. And good for you if it does. But the vast majority of us live into the questions we’re asking. We live into the new reality that we are becoming. And that happens through that process of like, you’re cultivating hope on purpose. You are cultivating the life that you envision and that you believe God has for you on purpose. You are cultivating this vision of God. You are cultivating even love in and around yourself, but also with people around you, right? Cultivating generosity.
I mean, there’s just a lot of different aspects where you’re just like, okay, well, if I approach this not as a fight, but as a farm, what would it look like?
B: Oh, that’s so moving. And, you know, one of my preaching students is preaching their senior sermon this week and gave me their sermon to look at. And they had this stunning line that you don’t always have to feel God to know God. And I think it’s the same around self-compassion. You don’t always need to necessarily feel really compassionate about yourself to begin to cultivate the self-compassion. It can feel awkward at first. It can feel almost artificial being gentle to yourself, if in fact you’ve spent a lifetime being harsh. And you don’t have to “feel it” at first. And then over time, as you’re describing slowly, you wake up one day and it feels much more authentic and organic. And for me, fatherhood absolutely did this. I so resonate what you’re saying about motherhood, because when you’re given this tender, vulnerable being to care for, and it didn’t even come from my body, right? So it’s different difference about fatherhood. Gosh, to think that we are held with such love and compassion by God. And why would I want to denigrate my own self with that sort of inner harshness when I’m, as my last confessor said, “Brandon, you’re infinitely lovable.” That was my penance at my last confession. This father said, “Go and sit in the chapel and contemplate for the next hour how infinitely lovable you are.” And that’s right. Can you trust that?
S: And boy, isn’t that a message that like the vast majority of people have not received in faith spaces? Right? Because a lot of times we’re kind of given this vision of God as angry and judgmental and profoundly disappointed with you. I remember Dallas Willard being asked one time how he would describe Jesus and he used the word “relaxed.” And I was like, well, that’s not how a lot of people think about Jesus. And so I think that those sorts of shifts that you make to your point quite purposefully, I think that sometimes that’s a bit of a generational overcorrection. I look back a couple of generations– big generalities, but I look back a couple generations and there was almost this idea of like, you make your choices and you live into the feeling. And then that had its pitfalls, and it had a lot of dangers to it. And so then we now were, I think maybe living in this overcorrection of like, well, if I don’t feel it, then it’s not real. And if I don’t feel– like the feelings lead instead of the choice. And there’s got to be, I think that there is a pathway that kind of charts between those two poles that most of us are trying to discern right now of just like, well, sometimes our choices and our cultivations and our, the postures that we choose or the practices we engage in or the truth that we choose to believe is going to lead. And I’m going to trust that my feelings and my spirit will come along with that. But then you have this flip side of saying, and also your feelings matter. And also what you believe about yourself is a thing that you are carrying. So I think that there is something there that you’ve really kind of hit on about that, that needle that we’re trying to thread right now, even within our spirituality that acknowledges both of those truths.
B: Wouldn’t Richard Rohr be so excited that we’ve stumbled on a paradox? It must be true.
S: It didn’t take us long.
B: We found a paradox. We had 10 minutes without talking about paradox.
S: Yeah, exactly.
B: Your book embraces questioning and doubt, which I know for folks coming from, for many sections of the Christian family feels fresh and new and, gosh, how could that even be? Can you offer us this invitation that the doubt itself can be a kind of sacred encounter?
S: Yeah. I think that that was one of the things that ended up maybe surprising some people, is the idea that doubt can be a really sacred place of encounter, and that it does open you up to things like wonder and curiosity and possibilities of not having answers. And so I think that that’s one of those things where we’ve maybe pathologized doubt and treated it as like this boogeyman that has to be kind of denied or pretended, instead of seeing it as a friend and an invitation. And so I think that that small shift of our posture towards doubt, I think it was Pete Anz who called them, no, I think it was Richard Rohr, called doubt– being the ants in the pants of faith. Like it does kind of wake you up and keep you moving. And I think there’s something really beautiful and welcoming about that. Pretending you don’t have doubt certainly isn’t a way to befriend it. It just, in a lot of ways, that gives it a lot more power. And instead of just being like, no, this is also part of the story and this is also part of me. And I also see this as something that’s really sacred and worth holding onto. It’s not the opposite of faith. I think the opposite of faith is usually certainty.
And so it’s not the opposite of faith to embrace a name and even acknowledge your doubt.
B: So finally, if there’s someone who is kind of standing on the precipice of a new chapter of their faith and they’re sort of contemplating letting go of something that’s really not serving them, it’s not working for them, it might be really dysfunctional, a form of faith,
and they’re feeling both some excitement, some eagerness to write a new chapter, to know God in a new way. But also some really intense fear, feeling maybe some guilt and shame around, is this a betrayal? What might it mean to leave? What brought me thus far? This is a question for a lot of our folks when they come to Yale Divinity School and Berkeley Divinity School, it often means leaving something behind and that can feel really destabilizing. I wonder if you have a word of encouragement for this really tender moment of faith.
B: Hmm. That’s a really beautiful and generous framing, I think, for folks, Brandon. Just
because … you are afraid. And I think that that’s one of the aspects that maybe people often forget, especially if they are pathologizing an evolving faith or deconstruction or whatever you want to call it and almost trying to scare people off of crossing that threshold. “Well, you’re going to backslide, you’re never going to return to church if you stop going for a while.” One of the kindest things I think you can offer people is permission to just open your hands. Oftentimes when it comes to faith, it’s almost like you picked up a couple of handfuls of sand and you think that by squeezing harder, you’re going to be able to hold on to them and instead that just makes it all run out of your hands even faster and you’re left empty-handed. That’s a little bit how that moment feels, because you’re scared and you’re trying to cling to something that simply will not be clung to. That’s just not the story that’s going to happen right now.
There’s a clinging to a thing that happens when you are scared and you end up losing it faster. Whereas if you open your hands, and you allow it to rest and you give yourself some room to breathe in it, I think even one of the things I really want to caution people against is feeling this need to rush to new answers. Just because you’ve released one answer doesn’t mean you’ve got to automatically fill the gap with a new certainty. In a lot of ways, that’s the very thing that’s being rooted out of us, is this need for this kind of certainty that ends up just being another new set of certainties and answers.
So even giving yourself that room, one of the nicest things anyone told me, I remember for a long time when I just simply couldn’t go to church or couldn’t read the Bible in the way that I had, You get to take a break. You do. God is not afraid for you or of you. And any question you have is not too much all of a sudden.
And so I think even having that release or that permission to say, “You don’t have to squeeze your hands so tight, neither do you have to rush to pick up something else and run to a new certainty or a new opinion or a new theological stance,” or whether it’s on atonement and why Jesus died or the origins of evil or whatever else, you don’t have to rush it. You’re allowed to sit in this, “I don’t know,” sort of space for as long as you need to and let it become. And let yourself become and live into some of those answers a little bit more. So that would usually be my hope, I think, at this stage, and it is a thing that I think more of us maybe need to hear as we feel the absence of our answers as the loss of stability and belonging, because it can mean that you do lose your belonging. But having that posture of just openness, welcome, not rushing to new certainties, and giving yourself just a hot second to catch your breath, I think a lot of those things will end up serving you better than rushing.
B: Well, Sarah Bessey, thank you for joining us on the Leader’s Way podcast, and thank you for making the wilderness a little less lonely.
S: Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for such insightful and wise questions. (Music)
B: Thank you for listening to Within, the contemplative segment of the Leader’s Way podcast. We trust this conversation has provided nourishment for your own growing and healing. Until next time, may you find deep peace and courage in all you do.