Brandon: Welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast. I’m so excited about this conversation with Reverend Elizabeth Riley, Episcopal priest, TikToker, creator. As some of you know, I’ve been online creating, especially on Instagram, on Facebook a bit too, for the last six months. You can find me at brandon.nappi. Sharing about life, teaching what I understand to be true about the spiritual life, and social media for all its shadow side. And there’s plenty of shadow side around the way in which it’s destroying our attention, oh, sort of capitalism at its worst as we’re trying to simply amass followers and the way in which our own attention is being monetized. I mean, this is the most insidious part, right? That our own attention spans are being monetized for the profit of someone else. And so all of that shadow is real. The connections that I’ve been able to experience, the support, the affirmation, the learning, the discovery has been overwhelming and has been a real gift. It’s been so sweet.
And one of the connections that I’ve made on social media is with Elizabeth Riley, who I’ve come to know in real life. It’s one of these stories of digital connection to real life connection. And Elizabeth Riley is an Episcopal priest, creator, is a Leaders Way fellow right now and sort of midway through her journey in the Leaders Way, which of course is our program for innovative ministry here at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, where fellows come from around the world. They spend a week at Yale in June studying innovations, studying sacred texts, praying together, partying together, just being together and sharing the challenges of life, the joys of being of service in the world. And Elizabeth Riley is one of our star Leader’s Way fellows. They’re all stars. They’re all brilliant. They’re all creative, doing incredible work and ministry in the world. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Elizabeth as we talk about her wonderful book, Rage Prayers, as we talk about what digital ministry is like. Hopefully we convince some of you to do some work online.
And she tells her call story, which is just delicious. Hearing people’s vocation stories, no matter what walk of life they come from, no matter what work they’re doing now is just so energizing to me. So if you don’t know her, Reverend Elizabeth Riley began her ministry in the Diocese of Alaska, where she was raised and ordained. She received her bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s College of California, her MDiv from Church Divinity School of the Pacific. She served in the Diocese of California as an associate at Trinity Church, Menlo Park. She’s currently a fellow with the Episcopal Church Foundation, exploring ministry and digital evangelism. She has a social media presence, particularly on TikTok. She loves quilting, crafting, writing, and a good Netflix binge. She’s just so down to earth. We love Elizabeth.
She and her three children live outside of Seattle and she enjoys exploring the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world. I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, lecturer at Yale Divinity School and executive director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.
Reverend Elizabeth Riley, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast.
Elizabeth: Thank you so much, Brandon. It’s so good to be here.
B: It’s been such a blessing to get to know you over the past year. For our listeners, you are a Leader’s Way fellow, which means we’ve gotten to be in the same room together for a week at Yale and pray together and think about innovation and see each other online once a month. Of course, before then, I only knew you through your social media presence, which is amazing. We’ll get to talk about that a little bit. But for folks who haven’t been able to hear you speak for longer than, you know, 30 second or three minute chunks, this is a great opportunity for you to tell your story. We know that that priests weren’t brought in by the stork and hatched from some mysterious place. Can you can you bless us with your story to ordination? I would love to hear it.
E: I didn’t just appear on TikTok one day and come out of the nothing online. You know, it’s funny because people on TikTok get these little tiny chunks of me and then my congregation is used to sitting and listening to me for an hour plus at a time. So very different ends of the spectrum for people who encounter me in these different spaces.
So my call story, it’s something I tell bits and pieces of in my book and online. The video that went viral that made me realize I could talk about church on social media was me telling my call story. I did the 45 second elevators pitch because as I like to tell people clergy get really good at telling that version. Right. We have to tell it so many times. You work with seminarians. So you help them learn how to tell that story. So trying to figure out how to tell it in more than 45 seconds without taking five hours. I was born and raised in Alaska. I have a deep love for that state and that place. And we were originally living in Wasilla, Alaska, and we were not being raised in religion. I know you all know Wasilla, which I have to admit is the weirdest thing in the world.
So we weren’t being raised in religion. My parents had both sort of walked away from their childhood faiths. My dad was raised mostly in the church, though his father was Jewish. He was raised as an Air Force kid. And so I think mostly going to Methodist churches on base. And my mom had been raised in the Catholic church and both of them had walked away from church and religion and spirituality by the time we were born. And eventually my parents started going through their divorce and they each were going through their own life process. They encountered the 12 step programs and really dedicated time towards the higher power.
And I love, you know, the 12 step program has a history and intersection with the Episcopal Church. And we have places where clergy from the church have influenced that program. But as they sought out their higher powers, they turned to their five and eight year old, what were we, four, four and seven and said, you know, you really should have places to explore your spirituality. They said it in a child appropriate way, but we were invited into spirituality for the first time. My mom started going back to the Catholic church and my dad started exploring his Jewish heritage. So, you know, there we are at four or five, six years old going to Catholic church with our mom and synagogue with our dad and having this really amazing interfaith experience. All of this in Alaska, keep in mind, which has its own flavor of ways of being.
And what’s sort of extraordinary is my sister and I had completely opposite experiences. I deeply fell in love with the church. I wanted to be baptized when I was seven in the Catholic church. We were going to Holy Family Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska. And my sister said she felt like she was Jewish. She did not like church. It did not resonate for her. And my parents in the midst of their divorce and their own spiritual journeys were able to deeply embrace that. And it didn’t matter if we followed in their path, it mattered that we were able to connect with God, which as a parent, now I realize how brave that was of them to let go of their own need for their children to align with their spiritual beliefs and just to say, we’re giving it over to God and letting you find that spirituality. So that started our paths.
And my mom and I left the Catholic church, obviously. And, you know, I do sometimes wish we did better for communion formation for our young kids in the Episcopal church because I grew up in the Catholic church. So we went through first communion prep and through that, doing first communion prep with the Catholic church. I learned about the importance of the sacrament and I really internalized that story. And I learned that because of my mom’s divorce and remarriage, she was not being allowed to take communion anymore. And I’ve asked her about this recently. Like they talked to like canonical lawyers and everything. Like it was actually a whole thing. It was … And so my response was that we needed to leave to find a church where she could take communion.
B: Wow. How old would you have been at that time?
E: I was like seven or eight.
B: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And still young.
E: I mean, still young. Whoever did my catechism class, they’re amazing, right? Like they so deeply got the story of the sacrament into me. They didn’t get the story of and that sacrament can only be found through the Catholic church. But I I deeply believed we had to go somewhere where she could fully participate. And so we church shopped for a long time. And finally in middle school, ended up on a sleepover, of all things, at a friend’s house. And her family asked if I could go to church with them and I did; stumbled in to this Episcopal church in Anchorage. Where we were preparing for Lent and there was a youth group and I just fell in love. Asked if we could go back. We did. In a long story discovered one of the clergy women, there, first female clergy I ever met, was my stepdad’s cousin. They hadn’t seen each other in 15 years. And so suddenly I’m in this church with women leaders in with a very progressive views. And I have this family connection and just fell deeply in love and we kept going. And I ultimately expressed my calling when I was 15.
B: If you’re enjoying the Leader’s Way podcast, you might like to join us in person as a Leaders Way Fellow. The Leader’s Way at Yale is a certificate program exploring spiritual innovation for faith leaders. The Leader’s Way at Yale combines the best of divinity school, retreat and pilgrimage. Fellows meet in person at Yale for a week over the summer, then continue their learnings and mentor groups online. You can also take an online course or workshop with us here at Yale. Our learning space for faith leaders is hopeful, practical and imaginative. Learn more on our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Clergy and leaders from every country denomination and seminary background are warmly welcome to join us for all of our programs. Now back to the show.
E: So not only did I have that, I had a sister following her Jewish faith in my Jewish background. So it was clear to me that the thing my parents taught me was the God that loved me loved my sister. And that’s not necessarily what’s taught in every church, that God loves Christians and Jews equally. So that has held so central to my faith, and I carried with me to as we church shopped and we never found something that worked until I went– I slept over to friends house and she invited me to church with her and I discovered this incredibly special place. We were preparing for Lent and I met this youth group and women clergy for the first time and asked my family to go back. Okay, listeners, a middle school student asked her parents to take her back to church. Like it’s just wow, I must– my parents were just so lovely and generous to this quirky child asking questions about faith. We ended up at this Episcopal Church and in a weird twist of fate, this woman clergy I met there, Rev. Catherine, was my stepdad’s cousin. Hadn’t seen each other in years. So all of a sudden I have this family connection, this amazing, progressive, lovely community, a worship service that included mandolins and violas and bluegrass music and just not a chasable in sight. So it was a low church in a lot of ways, but just so high on the spirit. And I fell in love with it.
Then, the Episcopal Church, so this is right early 2000s. We started going through a very public discourse about queer inclusion. We didn’t call it queer inclusion at the time, right? It was about if gay and lesbian clergy could be ordained. And this is when Gene Robinson was put forward to run for bishop. So Gene Robinson is the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. I believe he was consecrated in 2003, consecrated while wearing a bulletproof vest because that was the state of the world then, and frankly can still be the state of the world. And I was a little firecracker in a lot of ways. I was raised by folks in the legal world, so I loved a good debate.
And so we started debating this in the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska about where we were on the inclusion of queer people. And I ended up being a delegate to diocesan convention. We’re out in Kotzebue, Alaska, friends. So Kotzebue is above the Arctic Circle, north of Nome, a tiny little town that we all flew in for diocesan convention. If you’re complaining about driving two hours to the cathedral, try this out. It was just extraordinary. And I was on a committee where we were debating these issues and these topics. And I really saw the division and the discourse happening. And it felt like a good debate, but it felt really divisive. And then we had Compline that evening and Compline was not something I had a lot of experience with yet. Shoved into this tiny little chapel. Lord knows how they fit us all in there. And we came together at the end of the day and we prayed.
It wasn’t that the division was gone, right? It wasn’t that we were sweeping any of our differences under the rug, but it was that our connection in Christ was big enough that we could hold those differences and still be siblings and pray together. And I wanted that for the rest of my life. There’s no other way to say it. I went to my priest the next morning and said, I felt this call. And he said, Great. 15 years old. Keep in mind, he said, great. Let’s talk to the bishop.
I ended up becoming an aspirant at 17, ordained a deacon at 24 and a priest at 26.
B: Oh my goodness. So I know that we have a lot of seminarians who listen to the podcast, a lot of potential seminarians. If you’re one of the one of the folks out there who might be listening and pondering a seminary for me and how do I know and what are the next steps and what should I do? And there’s a lot of uncertainty and maybe even fear around this. This was very clear to you, but for some folks, this kind of discernment is really fraught with uncertainty and doubt. What kind of encouragement might you give to them?
E: I was really blessed to be surrounded by people who supported me, who had my back. And I really leaned on those trusted people. I believe it’s Brené Brown who has the advice about writing down the names of the people who you trust the opinion of on a very small piece of paper. So there were times in my discernment where things felt like they went sideways. My first discernment committee felt like we didn’t click and it wasn’t working, wasn’t meeting my need. And so I leaned on talking to those trusted people, the names on that small piece of paper to change how we did it. We actually reformed as an all-female discernment group. And we had to do so much in a different way because I was long distance. I was young. I was going to college.
So know whose opinions matter the most and find those mentors who have your back. Not just the people you idolize or you think hold all the cards, but finding those people that have your back to be a place of conversation, to be a place of encouragement, a place to root yourself. Because there’s so much in discernment that isn’t about your individual discernment. That’s about … what diocese are doing and how they feel about it and about quotas or numbers or bishop transitions. So there’s going to be a lot of noise in discernment. And to find out what you actually want to listen to and pay attention to.
I think right now in the church, I mean, there’s so many more alternatives–alternative is maybe the wrong word. But when I was going through some, I mean, I say this like I’m, you know, an old retiree now back in my day. But seminary was still hybrid was just getting introduced as an option. Right. I went to a church divinity school, the Pacific, and we were just experimenting with hybrid communities at that time. And so now there’s just so many other ways to do it. And so many different paths that have been carved out. I hope people take advantage of there is no one right way to do this, despite what many clergy will tell you is the right way to do it. There’s the way God’s calling you to do it and find those people who will help you discern that.
B: That’s really beautifully said and so wise because there’s there’s no one single approach to seminary preparation that can support everyone. Right? All of our realities are different. All of our life situations, our challenges are different. Our needs are different. So so thank you for naming that so clearly. So you get ordained and then … and then what happens? Tell us about like the first couple of years of ministry and some of the lessons you learned there.
E: Well, my all of my … my ordinations were very wrapped up in everything happening in my life. Just before my diaconal ordination, my father was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer, which was devastating and changed everything in my life. I spent the next15 months being a primary caretaker for him in the midst of a whole lot of life. So he flew to Alaska for my diaconal ordination after his second round of chemo. I was ordained to the diaconate on his 60th birthday. So we had birthday cake for him there. He passed away 10 days, 12 days before my priestly ordination.
So that season of my life was wrapped up in an enormous amount of grief, of graduating seminary, I got married, my sister got married. It was just the enormity of life happening. And my father’s presence and the knowledge that he would pass and the huge gift of I mean, 15 months with stage four pancreatic cancer was an incredible gift. I give so much thanks to places like the Pancreatic Cancer Foundation. And but my ministry was really wrapped up in that grief and processing the enormity of change in my life. And that’s shaped–I mean, I ended up writing a book called Rage Prayers. Right. So it my ministry ended up being a big part of of that grief and the grief, a big part of my ministry. I served as an associate rector at Trinity in Menlo Park. So I was in the Bay Area and kind of dabbling in everything, helping out in youth ministry, doing pastoral care, connecting with colleagues and making sense of the church and having so much hope for the church.
Ultimately ended up being called as a rector in the Diocese of Olympia, moved up to outside of Seattle. And then, of course, the pandemic. And all of that and all the ways that’s changed the church. And it’s interesting looking back on that time because something I was really interested in, I don’t know if I had the words for, was digital evangelism. It’s been such a passion of mine.
So when I graduated a book, Tweet If You Love Jesus, was particularly popular. I think it’s by Meredith Gould. And this whole social media church thing was starting. I was trying to talk churches into having Facebook profiles at the time. Right. Like the fight, the fight over whether churches should have Facebook pages. We didn’t have pages at the time. And that became even more apparent during the pandemic. And I really found my passion for sharing the good news in the mediums I’m most comfortable with. And being a millennial, that’s our digital space.
B: Yeah. And you do it with such authenticity and integrity and humor. It’s like a bright spot in my day when I see your face and hear you preach or just hear you reflecting on life. And tell us about how the book came to be. Social media was first and then the book?
E: Social media was first and then Rage Prayers.
B: And then Rage Prayers.
E: So TikTok, I was so hesitant about TikTok. I thought I was too old for TikTok. And I hear that from so many people around me. I downloaded it just to scroll videos and not think about church for a minute during the pandemic and the lockdown. Ended up having a few videos of my kids go insanely viral in ways I’ve never done before. My daughter has a video with 6.3 million views, which is just ridiculous. But she is a charismatic little person. But a storytelling trend happened. And I did my 45 second elevator speech of how I became a priest and did it while I was putting in my investments. And it took off.
And what I loved that I think we don’t get enough of is the chance to encounter a whole lot of people we don’t ever talk to. So before TikTok, our social media connected us with people we chose to be connected with. I saw what my friends posted. All of a sudden, TikTok’s like, “Great, we’re going to show this to everyone who has no idea who you are.” Which meant I started getting comments from people outside my bubble. And those comments were things like, “What church is this? Is this a Christian thing? I’ve never heard Episcopal.”
And Episcopalians laugh when I say that people said they had never heard of the Episcopal Church. Because Episcopalians think that someone’s being funny. It’s like, “Well, no, you have. You’re just being ridiculous.” And it’s like, “No, actually, there are so many people who have no idea what we are or who we are.” They don’t know how to pronounce the word “Episcopal.” Frankly, Apple Maps didn’t know until very recently. Episcopal Church is usually where it’s giving me directions to. So the reality that we’re not as popular as we think we are, we’re not as well-known as we think we are. People commenting that they have never seen a female clergy before. They’ve never heard a message of love for the LGBTQ community from a priest before. That they’ve never heard a priest say anything positive about Jewish people.
I mean, it’s heartbreaking to read the comments because you realize how much hate and harm is out there in the name of Jesus. And the breath of fresh air that so many people experience through my content and through all the others. I mean, I am in the company of just extraordinary creators on TikTok of all these theologians and clergy and lay people who are sharing the good news of Jesus without the hate. And we have been too quiet.
So I realize that there was just this desperate need and hunger for us to get a whole lot louder, to share our stories, to stop assuming everyone knows what the red doors are. You know, I mean, and to take our message out of the pews and into the world. So it’s been a wild ride. I’ve loved it. I’ve hated parts of it. It has come with a whole lot of trolls and all these other things. But over and over, I have the experience of people saying, I came to an Episcopal church for the first time because I saw Episcopal clergy on social media. And I realized that it was safe, or I realized I wanted to try that.
The moment that made me realize that there was really something we were missing.
I did a video where folks are commenting and asking about coming to my church online, right? And my ego loved it. Ego is a big fan of people wanting to come to my online church. But church is incarnational, right? My goal is not for everyone to have an online church that they’re going to. My goal is for people to be as deeply connected to a church and a faith community as they can. And so I responded to those requests with, I know you all think I am a magic unicorn of clergy, but I’m really not. Like there’s a whole lot of folks out there like me. And if you share in the comments generally what city you are in, the progressive clergy of TikTok will come and give you recommendations. There were over 500 requests for church recommendations on that video. 500 requests.
B: There’s such hunger.
E: And the beautiful thing was progressive clergy of all denominations showing up and recommending safe faith places not based on what was going to fill their pews, raise their average Sunday attendance, get a pledge into their plate, or even getting people to their own denomination. But they recommended the church that would best feed the need in that area. And it was just this beautiful, I mean, what I want being a priest to feel like, which is about helping people connect with God and not have anything to do with my own bottom line.
B: I want to talk about Rage Prayers in a second. Let me ask you this last question about social media. And then I want to shift to the book. You and I have had some conversation about how many clergy are still so resistant to doing digital ministry or just scared of it. And they think, in fact, you need to be some kind of digital unicorn to do this. And they think, I feel good about my ministry skills in person, but digital ministry is not for me. I can’t show up on camera. I don’t want to be an influencer. And I’m actually surprised by this being kind of the predominant view of most clergy that I know. And I think if we were to say this about, I don’t know, managing the budget, it would be untenable. Right? Like, no, the budget’s for some special person. It’s not my thing. I don’t do budgets. I think we would see that as irresponsible and absurd. But we allow that to be the general response to digital ministry.
And look, I understand not everyone is called to this. Not everyone is called to doing this as the majority of their work. But how can you maybe speak to the fear of clergy around this, or maybe even more, a particular leader who thinks, Hmm, maybe I could do this or maybe I’m called to it. But I’m absolutely terrified. I know for me, it took me over a year to go from, I think I’d like to go online and show up in digital space to actually recording my first video. And I’m a person who speaks in front of people for a living, and there was something about this task that seemed almost insurmountable. So speak to that kind of clergy.
E: Well, and it’s interesting because you have the name of this institution behind you too, right? Indeed. You get to go up online and be connected with the implied power that comes with that, and even then feeling like, Oh…
B: Even then.
E: So I think the analogy to the budget is great. It’s also like saying, oh, I’m not a preacher. And that’s true. There are clergy who say like preaching is not my primary gift, but it doesn’t mean I get to not do it. And so we have a lot of assumptions about what showing up online looks like, and it can look very cringy and we can be very judgy of it because we have a lot of assumptions about why people are doing it and what they’re doing it for. And frankly, we actually do this outside of digital ministry too, like the infighting that can happen of like, oh, you’re doing that for your Lenten program or Oh, you’re not doing an 8 a.m. service. So there’s a lot of letting that go. There are so many different ways to be church. There are so many different ways to show up authentically. And the context of how we do that is so important.
I just want us to give each other more grace for that. So I think people are worried about embarrassing themselves, about no one watching, right? Falling flat on your face. There is a cringe mountain, I call it. I’ve heard other content creators talk about this, right? Every single content creator out there has had to be the most awkward and embarrassing version of themselves to post something online that’s going to get 15 views. You’re going to say something wrong. You’re going to have someone correct you or whatever. And every video out there that you see has had someone do that. Most of the people who are making fun of that are sitting in what Brene Brown so aptly calls the cheap seats, right? They’re not in the arena. The people in the arena, the people who are doing this are going to cheer you on.
And so again, it’s going back to that advice I had at the beginning. Find the people who will cheer you on, who will commit to liking every single post when there’s only five views. And I like to remind people, you know, social media, the numbers are just so insane. We look at a video with 300 views on Instagram and go, “Oh, it didn’t do very well.” When was the last time you had 300 people in your views? I mean, we’re just completely jaded with where we think what is enough for it to matter. Enough should be one person having a transformational experience of Jesus or God.
But we have sort of … we’ve lost the plot with social media. And I think I invite people to take it a little less seriously, right? And to find the thing that you are uniquely called to talk about and are good at. And it’s not going to mean that your videos are the most professionally made. It’s not going to mean that you are an expert on everything theological or liturgical, but there is something. Something that God has called you to do. And I have seen every type and flavor of clergy resonate with people from bubbly, charismatic personalities to, I mean, we have Sister Monica Clare, who is an episcopal nun who is just being a nun on video and has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers.
You do not have to be this internet superstar. You just have to be you. And people resonate with when authentic people show up online. And you’re doing it. And I love that for you too.
B: Oh, it’s been a blast. I’ve gotten to connect in a real heart-based way with folks around the world. It’s been really, really sweet. And one of the things that has been sweet is to hear your teaching around Rage Prayers. And you talked before about grace. You have given me and lots of people around the world the kind of grace to allow their rage to be sacred or to recognize that it is sacred, right? How did this book come about? I’d love to hear the story.
E: Oh, Holy Spirit, right? It’s amazing when God shows up. I jumped on a trend on TikTok. There was this great song that went really viral on TikTok called “Numb Little Bug” with lyrics like, “If you ever get a little bit tired of life, you’re not quite happy but you don’t want to die.” This is like bright poppy music with these heavy lyrics. And I made a little video saying something to the extent of challenging, “If you’ve been told you, you just have to pray because everything happens for a reason. It’s all part of God’s plan, that’s crap. That’s not it. But instead, what if we rage and scream at God?” And I sort of did this offhand, like, “Let’s just rage at God” thing. And I said, “Welcome to rage praying.”
And I remember texting my sister afterwards and going, “I think there’s something with this.” A week later, my life fell apart in so many ways. My marriage ended. And so rage prayers really was born out of my divorce and this life-changing moment and this recognition that so many of us are just needing to get this out of our bodies. We need to stop feeling like God has a plan because that’s never been my theology, that there’s a master plan of God that we’re following along with. And I was naming something that’s always been inherently true for me, that my prayers get to be open, honest, authentic. I have felt that for a very long time. I have felt that through especially my dad’s illness. My grandmother and I got in a fight because she kept telling us we just had to pray for our dad to get better. And it’s like, “Grandma, that’s not how prayer works. God is not going to heal stage four pancreatic cancer. We’re going to do chemo.”
And I’ve never thought that God has needed us to be mild and meek and placating, but there is so much of our theology and prayers that treat God as though they are this fragile person we’re in a relationship with. So, you know, let’s just praise and please and be reverent and submissive. And that’s never resonated with the God I know or the God I talk to. The God I talk to has heard every cry and anger. And going back to being raised in the Catholic Church, I had to go through my first confession before I could do my first communion, right? It taught me this idea that maybe we compartmentalize parts of ourselves to God. I think that shows up in a lot of prayer, right? Like, “Oh, I shouldn’t say it that way, so I’ll say it this way.” You start to do this little mental math, which is just silly if we think God is just all-powerful, all-knowing. Like, who are we hiding things from?
B: Yeah, especially from more formal liturgical traditions like the Roman Catholic tradition, like the Episcopal tradition, and they’re incredibly beautiful, and I’m certainly a product of them and love them. There is this unspoken pressure to perform a kind of politeness in the presence of God.
E: Well, our Anglican roots, right?
B: So what is it that happens when some of this guard is let down, when some of this politeness is surrendered? What is it that we get in the process of that?
E: Well, first, I think people are really scared of it because they’re scared of breaking a relationship with God, they’re scared of being rejected by God. I think people are scared of whatever it is that is holding up their image of God falling apart. And so when we challenge those things, we make the ground we stand on very shaky. And so I see people responding to a lot of that fear.
My personal experience has been when we get to bring all of ourselves to God, all of ourselves to faith, our relationship is deepened. It’s made fuller and more true. It is not an invitation to live in the anger, right? Like we don’t want to make a home in the rage. But if we’re just repressing it rather than moving through it, I think it becomes incredibly corrosive. So what we find when we can be honest with God, I mean, when we get to connect with this beautiful biblical tradition, which includes so many examples of raging at God. Jesus on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I mean, the entire book of Job. There are so many places, the Psalms, where we have yelled at God and pleaded and shown our anger at others and anger at the divine and anger at ourselves.
And a place where we can be honest and still fully loved on the other side of it. That is healing. That is cathartic. Our relationship with God isn’t meant to be this performative thing, right?
And we definitely, I mean, I love, obviously, love the Anglican Episcopal tradition. But even our prayer book has such … the language is so beautiful and so precise that people feel pressured to pray in such beautiful and precise ways that there is rarely the permission to have messy prayers. And I think the Episcopalians can sometimes be judgmental of how other people pray extemporaneously, right? I like to say, I almost wish this wasn’t printed in such beautiful, precise ways. Like, rage prayer should be crossed out and spelled and have bad grammar, you know, as Anglicans clutch their pearls.
Prayer can be messy and God isn’t going to judge us when we use bad grammar or the wrong tense of a word. And so I think that there is just a more authentic faith that we can develop. And it’s risky, right? We risk letting go of things that we’ve held on to and that have propped us up. But my experience of sharing little bits of this, you know, through social media was there were so many people who wanted to have that same permission to bring their whole selves to God and to prayer and to their faith. And frankly, we’re living in the midst of a world where we have to be honest about how difficult and awful things are.
I don’t know how else we survive, but this is part of it– by being honest and truthful.
B: This comes up so much in spiritual direction, you know, my work with folks, I was just sitting with someone a few weeks ago who was really struggling because in his estimation, he was really bad at praying. And so when we explored that a little bit, what became clear is he was actually quite good at praying, prayed often, prayed sincerely. But he thought that his prayer needed to be somehow poetic, like the beautiful prayers he was hearing in church. And so we had to, you know, I had your voice in my head, you know, our prayer needs to be honest and true. It doesn’t need to conform to some kind of aesthetic that we’ve labeled as good or better, you know, than our own simple language. And I wonder for folks who are intrigued by this idea, can you share one of your own rage prayers from the book? With the caveat that you’ve written this and rewritten it and it’s been edited and it’s in perfect prose, right?
E: I mean, that’s part of the problem here. Let’s see. I’ll do this one. So here is a rage prayer for questioning.
Almighty God, how can others be so certain when there are so many questions? In the midst of your professed truth that so many others proclaim, we find a multitude of questions itching at our souls wondering. Doubting, seeking and challenging. Anoint that which is unknown. Release us from the duality that gives us a singular right. And instead find you in the multiplicity of nuance, the unknown, that you may be found not in the answer but in the asking.
B: Oh, amen to that. I mean, in a world that so craves certainty and binary thinking and wants to rush to answers. What a beautiful, beautiful prayer. Can you say something about nuance? I’m often finding myself kind of raging about the lack of nuance. So speak to this part of me that wants nuance, but also the part that really understands like, Gosh, just give me the answer. I want it simple. Does it always have to be so complicated? Yeah, unpack this word nuance for us.
E: You know, it’s almost that I’m participating in the thing that is damaging our ability to do nuance, which is, you know, a one minute hot take on social media doesn’t have space for nuance. And we really need to give ourselves more permission for these explorations of what’s good and what’s bad and what makes it difficult, and where there is people holding both their own injury and their own blame for injuring others. We are such a complex people, and our faith are so complex, and our theology is so complex. So, you know, going back to the nuance of the Episcopal Church, we don’t even know how to practice the nuance about our own tradition.
I – so many clergy are like, well, all Episcopal churches do this. And I giggle because there’s nothing we all do. We are all so different. And it’s part of what makes us beautiful. There are threads that tie us together, but there’s also so many contextual realities. And so I think our practice of nuance really probably starts at home of giving ourselves a little bit more breathing room. I think also, I wonder if this is some of sort of this scholarly academic preference that we see in our tradition, but authority and rightness. I think one of the big gifts Rage Prayers has given me in my ministry online is an ability to show up and say, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t always know. I don’t need to be the priest that always knows. And I think the humanity and humility that I can show up with is an invitation for people into their own faith because my ordination doesn’t make me holier. It doesn’t make me a better Christian.
Frankly, I see plenty of lay people who I think, you know, I’m like, teach me your ways because they’re such deep, mature practitioners of faith. So there’s a lot of places I think for nuance to be practiced. And it’s something I try to talk about with rage prayers too, is rage prayers is not meant to be all about anger, right? Like, talk about nuance. It’s about praying the full breadth of our feelings. If that is joy, if that is sadness, if that is grief, if that is those mixed together. If you think of the end of “Inside Out” where the memories are finally able to hold multiple colors, right? Like we can be many things, but we need more practice at doing that with God because look at the nuance and complexity of the ministry of so many of our characters in Scripture–even Jesus, right? We have these great messages of peace and the sort of docile teacher and then moments where “I came not to bring peace but a sword.” We have him rebuking Peter and then, you know, comforting those who grieve. Like there’s just this huge range of emotions and experiences. We can’t paint Jesus with one brush. So why do we do it for ourselves or our faith or our church?
B: Yeah, it’s strange, isn’t it? That we feel most at home in our relationships where we can be our full selves, where we’re not excising or excluding dimensions of our self, right? We’d say like, that’s a good friend, right? They accept all of me. And yet when it comes to our relationship with God, right, we want to start quickly editing out pieces, right? And so what I love about your book is it just invites a kind of wholeheartedness that, gosh, that’s just, that’s the promise. That’s the promise of all of this, right? That the promise was never rainbows and unicorns. It was never only happiness. It was also never only suffering. It was like the whole enchilada, right? Do you have another maybe favorite rage prayer that we can maybe angle with?
B: Well, and I’ll say a little bit about, I borrowed from our Anglican tradition as I did this and really looked at how we do our prayers for the people, right? We pray for these different categories when we do our prayers for the people. And so in Rage Prayers, I have these categories of raging through the human condition, raging at mortality, raging with faith, raging for justice. So these ways in which rage is part of the transformation. I think that’s a really key part. Like we open ourselves to being changed through prayer, through faith. And so by getting this out of ourselves, we’re also learning where we’re being called to show up in the world. All right, so let’s see another rage prayer. We’ll do a rage prayer for grief.
Almighty Spirit, this is a pain I could not have known before a loss like this. And the weight of it feels unbearable. I cannot shed its burden and sadness suffocates anger. Give breath to that which cannot be squashed, but only moved through. Grief, undiminishable yet torturously survivable. And we clamber laboriously forward, surrounded by the saints who share the losses of love, bearing witness to the grief, companions in pain, and beacons of futures forever changed by loss, but themselves not entirely dimmed.
B: Such a powerful reminder that we don’t walk through this human experience alone. That others have gone before us.
E: And who have raged.
B: And who have raged.
E: One of, so I’m teaching, I’m working with the congregation right now, and we’re talking through Rage Prayers. And we started looking at some of the saints and the leaders in Christianity whose lives have been rage prayers, who have made no peace with oppression. And if you look at, especially those who have walked the path of fighting for social justice, the civil rights movement, the number of people who have been loud because their faith demands it. And there are so many people in our modern living world doing that. And those who have come before us and you look at, you know, Dr. King, you look at Dorothy Day. We in our class we talked about Sister Helen Prejean, people who are fighting for the wellness of the world. And one of the big “ahas” I’ve had of that is that in all of our anger, in all of our rage, in all of our big feelings, as I might say with my kids, there is a shadow side of love. There is someone who we are showing deep love and compassion for in our anger. So if we’re angry at choices of an administration or politics or whatever, there’s also someone that we deeply love and care for. The oppressed, the hungry, the immigrants. And so tapping into where our anger is also a symbol of our love and our care for the world can help us see where we’re being called to steps of transformation, places where we can show up differently.
B: Elizabeth Riley, thank you for being with us on the Leader’s Way podcast. We’re so thankful for your ministry, for rage prayers, for the ways you show up online. I wonder if you might offer us your blessing.
E: I would love that. Let us pray.
Holy and gracious God, spirit of wisdom and love, bless the people who you have created. Fill them with your wisdom, your peace, your grace. Give them hearts that can rage with love, that can care for one another, and that can know your love and your presence in all that they encounter. May the blessing of your peace, the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Mother of all, be with you now and always. Amen.
B: Thank you for joining us today on the Leader’s Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world.
For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at BerkeleyDivinity.Yale.edu. Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events. Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom, and compassion.