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Lyndsey: Hi, welcome back to Crumbling Empires, a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I’m here today with Liz Charlotte Grant, who is the author of a Webby-nominated, really interesting and fun and edifying Substack and a new book coming out in 2024.

Her Substack is called The Empathy List. Thank you so much for writing that and thank you for being here today, Liz.

Liz:  I am so delighted, Lyndsey. 

Lyndsey: I was just telling you, your book is far enough out that we don’t have the advanced copies or anything. And so this is my first interview that’s just like, honestly, I’ll be honest. I pretended to be like Terry Gross and Krista Tippett and I’ve always been jealous that they get to just go on these deep dives of people’s work and sort of investigate people and then talk to them. 

Liz: We’re all jealous of them, Lindsay. We’re all jealous. 

Lyndsey: So I tried it and it was really fun. I recommend it to everyone with a podcast, I guess, or even if you don’t have a podcast. You could do that with a family member or something.

Um, so, um, that just has, that’s where we’re going with this conversation is everywhere. 

Liz: And that’s perfect. 

Lyndsey: It was really, really fun to read through all your old work and stuff. 

Liz: Oh, wow. You’ve got all my old work. Some of it’s not good. 

Lyndsey: I was really glad you had like a big, fairly extensive portfolio on your website. And then I read through some of your Substacks and stuff. So and then when I when you we were talking about where this conversation was going to go earlier, you had said you wanted to like noticing and attention and wonder have been really present for you lately. And that that would be a really generative space to talk through.

I’ve been seeing a lot of people in my spheres, friends, writer friends, gravitating towards this practice and this way of looking at the world. And I am curious what you think, what do you think is drawing so many of us towards this similar space and a similar practice around just being present to what’s around us and really curious and committed to that noticing. 

Liz: I love that. I think it’s part of the artistic calling for one. I think it’s a natural reason that we get into what we get into. We start as children noticing things. And then we, as writers and artists, we notice that other people are not noticing the way we are. People start to call us strange or if not that maybe intense. I probably got that a lot as a teen. I was mature to adults and then I was kind of intense and ambitious to my peers. 

Lyndsey: Yes.

Liz: And really it was this hunger for understanding and for beauty that was hard to explain and was not easily satisfied. And I think that is a very common experience for artists to come to this place of recognizing that they are different in how they see the world. And that that can be actually generative, that it can create something new out of old things or out of tired things. And all of a sudden, then you can, you can have something unique and interesting that wasn’t there before, you know, and I think it becomes really contagious. Like as you notice things uniquely, you want to create unique things as well. So that other people can be the experience that kind of generative cycle. 

I also think, you know, this season of living as a human is very disembodied. And I know that that’s a big theme in your work, Lyndsey, kind of attuning to our bodies again. And I think that is that is very true. I you know, I think the role of the artist in some ways is to remember that you’re an embodied person and to attend to what that means. So, you know, I think especially with social media being so central to our lives, I think it can feel like everything we’re doing is just in our mind. You know, a lot of us work on our computers. And so we kind of are just big brains walking around most of the time. 

And so to be able to actually get small and notice tangible, real things. You know, to use our eyes to get slower. You know, Mischa Boyett does stuff around the slow way, which I love. You know, what does it mean to get small, to get low, to attend to the ground? You know, I find myself drawn toward smaller and smaller things. You know, cities are less interesting, but you know what’s really interesting? A butterfly. Yeah, something about attending to something specific is is healing. It’s a balm, I think.

Lyndsey: Yes, I think this attention, noticing, wonder, and curiosity have also—I have just found them to be at the convergence of— as a creative person, having been doing this in a public fashion for a while, I found myself in a similar space to my spiritual space. It’s like, okay, this is part of who I am. It used to be really exciting. And how do we maintain this thing? How do we keep going? This and this and this are how I’m disillusioned with it. You know? All of these things— of any sphere of your life that is really exciting when you’re young or when it’s new and then it becomes a practice and a discipline. 

I’ve found art, creativity, very broadly defined, and spirituality to be just found myself in the same place with both of those things. So I wonder how, what this looks like as a spiritual practice for you as well. 

Liz: Hmm. Well, do you mind telling me more about like, what did it look like to find yourself in that same place? What was the place you found yourself? 

Lyndsey: Oh, the place of like, okay. I used to really love that. Like I used to be so enamored of this and now it’s a part of who I am. Like it’s definitely not going away. But it’s also just that much more complicated. It’s that much, you know, my old ways of doing it are tired and there’s- 

Liz: Yeah, so there’s like a rote kind of boredom. 

Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Liz: there’s a question like, what’s next? Where’s this headed? 

Lyndsey: Yeah. Yes, I. So you write about art and you do lots of creative stuff. And I am curious, like talk more about how that interacts with spirituality for you, like embodiment, of course, is very spiritual; being present and aware is very spiritual; but in your practice of spirituality and religion and relationship with spirit, with God, can we be more explicit about that?

Liz: Yeah, absolutely. I would say, you know, as I, so I grew up in evangelicalism, was a very devout and enthusiastic teen in youth group. And, you know, I did the American white evangelical thing to a tee, including went to an evangelical university, you know, I married young, I had babies young, that was just, you know, the way it happened for me.

Um, and then, you know, things got complicated because of some pain, you know, because of some spiritual abuse, because of family trauma that I dealt with, um, in mostly in my twenties. Um, I’m in my mid thirties now. Um, so still a young baby as far as that’s concerned, but, um, as like a 20 something, I was very—I felt like everything shifted underneath me and all of a sudden I was having to grapple with these big questions. 

I think that’s a very common experience in your 20s and 30s. You know, this, sometimes they call it a third individuation where it’s like, all of a sudden you’re figuring out, you know, who are you as an adult, apart from family, apart from maybe even institutional design for you. You know, some people go through that earlier or later.

I was like, raring to go in my early twenties and disillusioned early too. So I was always trying to run ahead. I was an overachiever. So even in that. 

I think that my experience of spirituality and art are so tied together because, you know, in some sense, what you’re asking is like, how do you make both sustainable? Like how do you continue to be a religious person who loves Jesus, and how do you keep making art, and how do those interact together? And what you know, like, what does that actually look like day to day? And I think that’s a really hard thing for most artists. 

But, you know, my husband, so my husband is actually a visual artist. So I’ve learned a lot from him and the way that he practices. And one of his main sort of mantras that he comes back to you and has told me, you know, if I’ve ever come to him, you know, whiny and, and sad and depressive, which is common for me, he will kind of just tell me: “Make the work.” That’s it. You know, like, the whole thing is to keep returning. 

I think that’s that’s very true of a religious experience as well, where there’s a sense of, you know, You go through a middle phase, you go through a phase in all of these things where you kind of find yourself, maybe a little bit stuck, or maybe a little bored. You know, and I think that space of boredom actually has potential to be very generative as well, because it’s forcing us to reckon with the way that we’ve been doing it. And now that it’s not working anymore. The question is, is there a new way forward? What does it look like to reengage? 

So, you know, when I, when I got married in my young 20s, I was like, I’m such a baby. I had babies when I was a baby. Basically, I was like 25 when I had my daughter, 27 when I had my son. And I just felt like I needed, I needed a new way to do writing after they came into the world.

And so all of a sudden I discovered this kind of new discipline and desire in myself and this new strength that kind of emerged in part from those experiences, but really just from growing up, you know, getting older. And I found myself much more focused in my writing times and would initially write during nap times. And that was only 30 minutes at a time sometimes. 30 minutes to two hours, you know, is what I would have. I would like say, I’m not doing dishes. Yeah. I’m not cleaning the house. I’m gonna sit on my butt and sit in front of my computer. And even if something’s not coming, I’m gonna try, you know, I’m gonna read something interesting, or I’m gonna free write for a bit, or I’m going to just reread something that I had written before and see if it sparks something.

And so sometimes I feel like those new practices have been very important in both faith and writing for me to say, you know, I was in evangelicalism and then I moved into Anglicanism. And that was really meaningful because all of a sudden I had this new language and this new way to use my body. I had daily prayers I could pray. I could, I started to draw on the contemplatives more. So I, you know, read about St. Ignatius and I started reaching into the Catholic saints more and, and found that some of those stories felt very artistic.

They felt very, um, much closer to my experience of art and religion than some of the evangelical language around those things, which tends to be very, you know, within evangelicalism art, see the purpose of art seems to be, what is it? What are the three they talk about? Do you know what I’m talking about? 

Lyndsey: Oh, that sounds like a Reformed type of thing that I am not as familiar with. 

Liz: Oh, truth, beauty, goodness. I think that might be it. 

Lyndsey: Which sounds fine? 

Liz: I mean, what’s so interesting about it is I think there is this sense that…Actually, let me pull you up first. I’ll be right back. 

Lyndsey: Like a narrow sense of what define what constitutes those?

Liz:  So what they’ll say is like, beauty is whatever is true and good. And, and I don’t think that’s true. Actually, I think that beauty is its own distinctive and that beauty itself is this kind of abundant expression of God. And so, you know, in some sense, some of the desert fathers and mothers, the contemplatives had a finger on this in the way that we don’t or we didn’t in evangelicalism. 

There was this sense of actually just being with God, being loved by God, being present to God, making space to be present with God. That itself is beautiful and it is this relationship. You know, you don’t have to bring all your learning to it necessarily. You don’t have to bring, you know, like every, every theologian who’s ever been born on your back doesn’t sit in the room with you. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, like it doesn’t have to live up to a definition of truth or even like, you are you producing goodness, but you can just be beautiful. 

Liz: Yeah. Yeah, right. And I think being more contented with showing up in whatever state, you know, and that includes, you know, in the writing too, being able to show up without a plan sometimes or being able to, you know, but just continuing to make the space anyway.

Lyndsey:  But that is so unnerving. If beauty can just be out there by itself, you know, not contained by truth and goodness, if like if God and our artistic practice and our prayer practices just happen and not be sort of—we don’t have these rubrics, where they’re going to go, or what’s going to make them correct? What are you saying, Liz? 

Liz: Yeah, no, I think I think that’s a very common. That’s a very common criticism of this kind of thinking. But I also think it’s a reason—and I’ve often seen this tie between this kind of expressive, emotive experience of God and misogyny because often what we see as unbound is actually just a different mode of engaging divinity. 

And in fact, the Holy Spirit, which, you know, the Reformed theobros are very, I think, pretty uncomfortable with, pretty cessationist. I think the Holy Spirit, who was so essential to the desert fathers and mothers in helping them day to day live their lives and to experience Christ and God, I think the Holy Spirit feels like a threat. Because what if the Spirit speaks something new?

You know, what if, what about progressive theology? What about how we treat women? What about LGBTQ folks? You know what I mean? 

And I think I think art is like that, too. There’s this like intuitive, inner self that you sort of need to connect to, you know, they talk about neurologists and also artists, I’ve heard talk about flow state. And that is very much when you get into this work state in which you lose track of time. So it’s this sort of timeless, entirely engrossed experience. And I, you know, as you become more proficient in your work, whatever that is, but in the arts, you know, as you write your million words or whatever, you know, you have to write a million words before you write a single good word.

So you write your million words, and then all of a sudden you find yourself more and more able to get into that flow state. And it itself can, you know, there’s all the dopamine and all the things that come from that. But I think for myself, what has been, excuse me, I think for myself, what has been so fascinating about finding that state in my practice from time to time has been the sense of surprise that emerges.

There’s this sense of, you know, this intuitive part of me that is leading a certain direction that my conscious mind did not always recognize. And you know, if I’m writing an essay and all of a sudden I realize what it’s about, you know, all of a sudden it’s about my mom and I didn’t know before, but I get to the end and I go, oh, now I need to revise the whole thing with that specific thing in mind because that’s what I was writing about.

Lyndsey: This sounds like I really wanted to hear more about the evolution of your book that’s coming out in 2024. I have read your Substack post about it several times because there’s just so much in there and I’m so fascinated with people’s processes and you talked for a really long time about money in there. And also because I knew you had, for a while you’d been working on a book about losing vision in one of your eyes. And so just tell me the story and then tell me what drew you to writing about Genesis and how has the book evolved since then?

Liz: So Yeah, so the book I was, the book I have written is a memoir about a surprise illness, which came up out of the blue. It’s like a one in a million disease. And a lesion grew in the center of my macula, which is the central vision in the eye, in the retina, and just started destroying retinal cells, which do not grow back and are not in any way retrievable or operable, they just go away. So I started, I’m legally blind in my right eye from this experience and for quite a while was getting shots in my eye because the symptoms looked like macular degeneration and they have a really miraculous drug that helps people whose macula is degenerating. So. That actually helped for a long time. And lately it’s been stable, which praise the Lord for that. 

But I wrote a memoir about that. And I was probably working on it for four years. I started it, I was working on something else and then this disease intruded and all of a sudden that’s all I could think about. And so I was bringing, you know, journals, notebooks into appointments, writing down all the details. I mean, I like got on medical websites to research the different tools that they were using on me, you know, because I was like, what is that thing? You know, what is that weird camera? Yes. And so I’m I’m like asking every single question I can think of. I’m doing all this research. And it was really because I was so obsessive and anxious about what this meant for my life and, you know, where it was headed, because, of course, I didn’t know.

So initially the book was about healing. Can we find healing? Is that even a reasonable request of God? You know, and and is it okay to ask for that? And then what if it doesn’t come and then why are so many other people obsessed with my healing? Which I know is an experience you’ve had. So that initially was what it was about. And then I was really honored to go to a Collegeville Institute workshop where folks read it and gave me feedback on the memoir and uh Lauren Winner was leading that workshop and she’s one of my favorite memoirists. She kind of inspired me to get into it when I was a younger woman, a younger writer and a lot of people haven’t heard of her but she wrote Girl Meets God. She wrote my favorite of hers is called Still which I highly recommend. It’s it’s wonderful, very concise and very much about faith in this middle space. Anyway, enough about Lauren, but she’s a delight. 

Lyndsey: I went to that I went to that workshop in 2022 while I was revising my book and it was incredible. 

Liz: And what a gift is. Yes, you get it. Yeah, so she read my book, which was like a dream come true and also utterly terrifying. And the thing that she told me was that I hadn’t found my story yet. And I’m telling you, I had the whole book written. And she said, this is a situation. So this is the strange situation you found yourself in. But it is not the story and the reason behind why this matters. It’s not why you wrote this book. 

And as soon as she said that, I knew that my book was about family dysfunction, my family of origin dysfunction. I was both furious and I knew she was right. I just had this sinking feeling and I was like, I have to write about them. So I ended up rewriting the book like two more times, going back and adding in stories of family dysfunction because really it was about going through an illness without family support. Okay. Which is an unusual experience for many people, but not so unusual that other people haven’t gone through it. 

So anyway, that was that book and I had an agent for that and we pitched it around. We pitched for about two years and no one bought it. And that was heart rending and just, you know, it had its own ups and downs and ebbs and flows. And I felt, I felt a little bit—It was actually the second book that I had written that hadn’t been bought. I’d written a book of short stories when I was much younger. And I think I felt like maybe that’s just a shut door. I don’t know. Yeah.

And then somehow I had applied sort of at random again to another Collegeville thing, they’re the best, by the way, the Collegeville Institute, any writers listening, you should look them up immediately. 

And I started writing about the voice of God. You know, I was thinking about the prophets and I was like, what is the thing about the prophets that’s most important? It’s the voice, you know, it’s the message, even more so than the messenger. Like, what do we make of this voice? And as I started exploring that question, Michael McGregor is the one who leads that workshop. He’s a fabulous writer in his own right. He kind of freaked out and loved it. I was like, I guess I shouldn’t ignore this. 

And I started going back to Genesis because I was like, that’s the first time the voice appears. You know, it seems reasonable to begin there. And so I began with the creation story thinking that that would kind of be it. And I just got sucked into the story and it just, I found that it ended up being a means of coming to terms with the Bible itself, you know, like what is this book that we’ve inherited? How do we make sense of it now, you know, amid faith transitionou k? Ynow, is inerrancy—do I even believe in inerrancy anymore? You know, the truly infallible word of God that has never been touched or sullied by the human hand. You know what I mean? That’s kind of the idea I had about the Bible. Like God is, you know, as a ghost is sort of haunting people and kind of what’s the word I’ve been using.

Lyndsey: Like they’re transcribing. 

Liz: Oh, yeah. Like God is like possessing these humans like some demon. Yeah. And like making them write whatever he wants, you know, taking over their bodily functions to write God’s story. Is that what I really believe? You know, I think that’s what I thought as an evangelical. I got that sense. What is divine inspiration? It’s literally the human disappears from the process.

And I think I was sort of reckoning with that question of what role does humanity play in this creative process of creating the book we call the Holy Bible? Yeah. You know, and what does that collaboration mean? And how do we participate? And what does God want us to do and take from this? You know what I mean? So all of a sudden it became all these questions about the Bible as well and how it came to be and what we do with it. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, and then you said you started to layer in journalism. You started to keep, as these questions unfolded, you were like, oh, I need to find out this thing about archeology, which also sounds similar to your process in writing about your vision, that that  kind of prepared you for that. Because you were researching everything and trying to pull all these pieces together. 

Liz: Yeah, I think I think the the journalism, you know, that actually felt even more natural than writing about inerrancy to me. I did not really want to write about, like, inerrancy has always sounded really boring to me. So that ended up really being this question of like, who gets to decide what God says and how God says it.

But what I found was that my natural inclination was to bring all these other stories in to try to understand. So I bring in Whale Song, for example, to talk about the voice of God. This alien expression of life, this life form on our planet, we don’t understand it really. And it’s powerful. And it’s unpredictable. And it’s beautiful, but it’s alien. You know, and so being able to kind of find the connections between some of those sorts of things to say, what is what is kind of putting these two stories, you know, back to back close together? What does that actually teach me uniquely about the biblical story? And that just tends to be how I think anyway. So the associative kind of bringing in different stories was just was always going to end up like that, I think.

Lyndsey: Yeah, and I’m really excited about reading, following you on those journeys. And I didn’t know Whale Song was involved, but now I’m super stoked.

To further associate across expanses and boundaries, I wanted to ask you what your experience of attending the Here for the Kids action was in Denver. Tell us what that was and what you took away from it. Have you been in activism around anything or around gun control much before?

Liz: I think generally my activism has looked very local. So it’s looked like volunteering in my kids’ elementary school and getting to know families there. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, that’s awesome. 

Liz: I garden. Yeah, I garden at my kids’ school. But I think, you know, I attended a rally for Elijah McLane, who was a young black man killed by police about a mile from my house. Um, and so we, my husband and I attended a rally for that. 

And Here for the Kids was a protest, basically a week long protest at the Capitol, the Denver Capitol, um, demanding basically the abolition of guns in Colorado, just no guns whatsoever. Um, I think sometimes I, you know, I tend to be a person, I don’t actually love crowds. So I struggle with some of the protest stuff. But these movements, in particular the Here for the Kids movement is a very gentle and kind of mother centric movement. 

So any activism before has been more focused around kind of the stories that I’m telling about it and the ways I’m talking about it with people in my life. However, this felt serious to me. So I think, you know, having two kids in elementary school who are doing gun drills, you know, where they gun safety drills, where they practice what happens if there’s an active shooter, that’s a really unacceptable situation for my children. So, and to put teachers in that position, you know, for me, it’s just mind boggling and unacceptable. So that was really meaningful to be able to kind of sit with other mothers and, and talk about those experiences and talk about what it looks like to make real change. 

Lyndsey: It’s really lovely to hear that your experience of that action was gentle and thoughtful. Even, I mean, the idea of a week-long protest could sound really exhausting or it could sound like—Actually, we have time, you know? Actually, we’re here to to be gathered for more than just to be like—You can’t you literally can’t scream for a week straight. So what else can we do here? 

And I I do think when people hear “protest” it sounds like there is one right way to be here. And a lot of them are set up that way. The way to be here is angry and loud and certain and mad at your enemies and we could go on—and somehow energized by crowds. And I also am hearing about more and more actions, I think even especially as… a lot of intersecting issues are feeling more dire and the sort of what we were starting to call the Trump era, if we’re realizing it’s not going, is not ending soon. That people, a lot of these spaces are getting more creative and more diverse and more interesting because they’re more set up for the long haul.

Also because this way of screaming, like, at your enemies, “you’re a bad person,” is not working. 

Liz: I also I mean, I love the idea of taking inspiration from these peaceful marches, you know, that civil rights leaders initiated this way of protesting. And I feel so inspired by their example of what that looks like.

Lyndsey: 

Yeah. And there’s a new, like so many of the, like the Movement for Black Lives and Here for the Kids are led by women, they’re led by Black women, is also different from that. And I think really, really necessary for this time. And I’m really excited about it. 

I’m also thinking, when you say, “My kids go to school and do these drills and it is just not right.” There is something about noticing there. Where like, if we are not attuned to this practice of just being present to what is going on around us, we’re not going to notice when the most obvious glaring things are not right.

Liz: I think the chance to like pay heed to what the actual experiences of teachers and students is really meaningful. And that’s very much this kind of empathic experience, which we’re called to as believers. One of the things that I’ve seen, which is pretty painful, is that a lot of Christian mothers I know are actually pulling their children out of public school settings, doing homeschooling, which then allows them to shut their eyes, it seems, to violence that is happening in our schools. 

And for those of us who have remained, I think it feels, it’s very confusing to have so little care happen in those spaces. Actually, no place is safe. Do your children go to the movies? Do they go to the mall? Do they play sports? Do they go to public school? You know, there’s this kind of sense of, we can keep them safe. You know, it’s just crazy people with their guns. And really, that’s not true. All of us suffer because these weapons are available. And even if you personally have not suffered, someone you know has. And I think it’s essential for us to pay attention to their stories.

Lyndsey: 

There’s just there’s so much here about the illusions we will trade for actually getting in into the muck and trying to solve the problem. 

So in the midst of maybe in the midst of an empire that encourages us towards obliviousness and not towards noticing, How do you define hope and where are you finding it right now?

Liz:  I see hope as this returning, like continuing to return and to keep trying. I think that’s like this picture of repentance too, right? Where we keep turning around and keep turning back toward God. I think that for me has been the most meaningful picture of hope over time. You know, the sustained effort of continuing to turn back toward what’s good, toward what’s right, toward a picture of what should be, that is sustaining. 

Lyndsey: Yeah. That’s so beautiful. Often we think of hope as to be this shiny beacon off in the distance. And what you’re saying is actually this is a daily practice and this is a very ordinary thing.

Liz: Yeah, it’s an action performed with our body to keep returning and turning around. Yeah.

I think I feel hope that there are so many hard questions being asked, you know, that that process has not ended and that we continue to, you know, I think it can be really disheartening to see all the ways that theology, the Bible, Christianity is being used to harm people. And yet there are those voices who continue to say this is not right. This is not true to what this is.

And that feels so hopeful to me to say, listen, what is true has not died. It still is here. It still exists and we can access it. And the spirit of God continues to reveal what is true. And so I think for me, I’ve been taking a lot of comfort in the liberation theologians. James H. Cone has been huge, but also Delores Williams wrote about Hagar and this resiliency that was developed in the black communities in the same way that Hagar has offered resiliency from God to return and also to be sustained in the desert. And I think that is such a beautiful example for us who are fighting for justice and freedom in this world, to be continually reminded, there are voices here. There is always this voice of truth leading us forward. 

Lyndsey: Yes, I’m super grateful that you are a voice and you’re asking these questions. We get to ask them together today. Liz Grant, does your book have a title yet?

Liz:  I am gunning for Knock at the Sky. 

Lyndsey: Oh, nice. So we’re looking out for that in 2024 and your Substack is The Empathy List. And of course we will have the links attached to this podcast wherever you are listening to it. And if you’re listening on Substack, you can get to Liz’s Substack super easy. Thank you so much for joining us today, Liz. 

Liz: Thanks for having me, Lyndsey.

Click here to listen to the audio version of this interview.

Hi, I’m Lyndsey Medford. This is Crumbling Empires, a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I am the author of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World That is Sick, and I produce this podcast as part of my Substack newsletter. So if you’re enjoying the interviews, and you want to keep up with me or my guests or my work. If you want to get more interviews or audio versions of my essays in your inbox, go ahead and sign up for that at lyndseymedford.substack.com. 

I screwed up this introduction when I was originally interviewing this week’s guest, who is Heather Caliri, the author of Ordinary Creativity. Let’s get to it. 

Lyndsey: Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for writing this book. We’re really excited to have you.

Heather: 

I’m so pleased to be here, Lyndsey. 

Lyndsey: And I definitely wanted to start our conversation with that title. It feels very, it crosses neatly with the idea of crumbling empires. When you decided on this, like, perhaps rather dramatic title, what were you envisioning and who is your reader and who are you when you’re talking about surviving with joy?

Heather: 

Yeah, you know, I think part of my struggle when I was writing this book is I feel like we shoehorn creativity, the idea of creativity, into this very narrow definition. And it means that you are a successful artist. It means that you are a Grammy winner. It means that, or it means that you produce work that is somehow artistic and other people see it and they like it. 

And like, that hasn’t been my experience of creativity for a lot of my life. Like in my family, I was not the most creative member of my family and under those terms, but I sort of just was desperate to make stuff. And the other thing is like most of the times that I’ve been creative, it hasn’t led to commercial success, but it has turned my life inside out. It has led to healing. It has led to me feeling more whole and more myself.

And like, honestly, when I think about like, like our culture trains us that the commercial success is what we’re supposed to be aiming for or sort of the artistic recognition or the name recognition. 

And in my experience, I have friends who have reached those heights and it is awesome to see them succeeding on those, at those, in those kinds of ways. But for myself, like the memoir I wrote for myself, that I thought was going to get published has never been published, but it led me to all kinds of healing to remaking my life from the inside out in a way that freed me and made me more me and and I’m like, okay the fact that that memoir never got published. Does that mean it was a failure? Like what is that? What like that doesn’t even make any sense. That book helped me survive, right? 

And I think yeah what I wanted to get out in this book is, Why is it that writing a memoir or like, you know, when I was in the middle of COVID crocheting every night, like a, like a dervish, it was like, I probably could have carpeted my entire house in the things that I crocheted during COVID. Like that helped me survive, right? 

And there’s also this really great quote by disability activist, Neal Marcus. He says, disability is not a brave struggle. It is a work of art. It is ingenuity. And I just thought like, people who are surviving with disabilities, they have to be so freaking ingenious every single day just to get themselves places or to take in an educational environment or whatever to do their jobs with support. Those things require huge amounts of creativity, but we say it doesn’t count as like creative, we ignore that. 

So I wanted to dig down into why making stuff and solving problems in new ways, why that makes us human and how being fully human in that ways helps us to actually live our lives wholeheartedly. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s really helpful to hear that there’s the two sides of like, creativity is how we survive and how we survive is creative, right? 

I definitely was super excited to read the epigraph from Neil Marcus, disability is an art. And I totally flagged to talk to you about that because that is how I see it. It’s funny, like I, I use the word disabled for myself more and more. Um, yeah. And I, I, I kind of almost forget that when people think of disabled, they think of like sad people, people who can’t do things; because my experience of disability and the disabled community over the course of years has, has become this like, no, y’all like we are figuring things out. We are doing things you never thought of. We are making it work and we are learning what our priorities are and you know, hell or high water, doing, you know, making our lives something that we want to be a part of and that we’re proud of. 

What does, can you talk more about that quote and the significance of it to you and your experience with disability?

Heather: Yeah, so I didn’t know that I really dealt with a disability until this year. I was just diagnosed with autism recently, but I kind of came into it sideways because I have dealt with mental illness before and have family members that deal with mental illness and also friends. And we talk about mental illnesses if people are fragile, kind of the same thing. I mean, it’s a kind of—but like that people are so fragile and like not trustworthy. And you know, we like use words, throw words, like crazy around like it’s, you know, just not a, I don’t know, it’s just sort of dismissive and condescending. 

But my experience of people who are say trauma survivors or who have been through depression is of their resilience, I mean, sometimes people who deal with mental illness do not find a place of thriving. But those people who, who have been through deep mental illness who come through the other side and learn how to deal with it—They are some of the most resilient wise people I know.

So there’s sort of this dichotomy of like well we think the mentally ill or people to be pitied and who are absolutely not wise; but if you’ve learned how to deal with a mental illness and you’ve learned how to restructure your life so that you can actually be mentally well, even if you continue to have the same diagnosis, like you have become just a kick-ass person, right? Like they, I mean, I see people who don’t deal with mental illness being absolutely foolish all the time. 

So this sort of paradigm of like, what does, who is the healthiest person? I’m like, like, I don’t think not having ever had a mental health diagnosis means that you are healthy, right? I don’t think that necessarily. Maybe you’re super wise and kind and resilient, or maybe you’re an asshole. And if you have a mental illness, kind of the same thing, maybe you’re wise and kind, or maybe you’re an asshole. It’s just part of the human condition. 

And so I think what I’ve loved in coming into the disability community is it sort of expanded that understanding. What I already knew about just sort of brain difference, I’ve seen applies to a whole host of different things, whether that’s chronic illness, whether that’s chronic pain, whether that’s physical impairments, that people are just human beings. And those human beings that have had to struggle, that have had to reimagine themselves, that have had to figure out how their day-to-day lives work, those are the people who are the wisest. 

And often those people deal with labels that the rest of society thinks disqualify them from wisdom or disqualify them for joy. And I think that that’s a problem with our society and not with the people who have actually learned how to survive in our society, right? 

Lyndsey: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there’s something there about, as you said at the beginning, creativity being essential to our survival. And I think there’s something—because creativity is essential to our survival and our wholeness, that consciously or unconsciously there’s a reason it gets kind of beaten out of us a lot of the time. Because it’s such a resource to draw on to become more whole and to become more connected.

Heather:  Right. Well, I mean, like, so like, for instance, my own sweet children, like my youngest daughter is tremendously creative and constantly dreaming up projects. And honestly, like, like I have mad respect for her skills on many levels, but it causes me no end of inconvenience. When children are coming up with creative ideas, like they are making a mess. They are like, you know, taking all the supplies in the house and commandeering them for some projects that might destroy them, you know, like, it is hugely inconvenient when children, you know, like in school, like if you’re if your kids are being super creative in their classes, that it’s not necessarily going to be seen well by the by the teachers, because it’s disruptive, right? Like they’re not staying with the program, right? And so yes, it absolutely gets gets beaten out of us. Right.

Lyndsey: And then, of course, we, you know, consciously or unconsciously, again, we get that message if we are disabled or mentally ill or in any way don’t fit, we get this message that we are inconvenient. And often our creative ways of surviving are sometimes inadvertently shamed just because they’re not, like, creativity is rarely comfortable. And it doesn’t make the people around us comfortable, I think is what you’re saying too. 

The other part of your title of your book is ordinary creativity. And I just really loved I might like print out and frame your meditation on the word ordinary. Can you talk more about that?

Heather:  Oh my gosh, Lyndsey, when I looked up the etymology of the word ordinary, it’s like, oh my gosh, it changes everything. So it is related to the word. Yeah, it is related to the word for order and it’s related to words like ordain and primordial. To be ordained is to mean that God purposes something, you know, or to be in God’s purpose. 

It is, it gets back to, I’m trying to remember now the etymology, it gets back to the words related to weaving. And it means that something is has like a regular pattern and is repeated. And literally that’s like with threads on a loom, that there is sort of an order there of how you put the threads together. I just thought like we think ordinary means nothing special, right? But it’s sort of like, no, this is the basic fabric of everything. 

Because our days are made up of all of these moments woven together that really don’t look like much on the outside. Like nothing that we do, like doing the laundry does not feel so earth shatteringly important, but like we don’t do anything without clean clothes, right? Like, I mean, you could, but you’d stink. So, and, or like, you know, cooking dinner, sometimes that looks like, you know, giving your kids cereal because you have no bandwidth with for anything else, but nobody is going to be able to, you know, get through the rest of the day without you at least providing that amount of care for your kids, right? It might not look awesome. But that is those are the things that our life are made of. 

And they’re connected to our sense of purpose to the to the creation of the universe, because everything is built up a very modest building blocks, right? Like everything is built up of these very small things that by themselves don’t look like very much but when combined together make something breathtaking.

And I think that if we denigrate the word ordinary we’re denigrating just the very small moments that make us who we are that give our lives meaning and I’d like to have creativity anchored in that reality because crafting a book or making a painting is also just full of very small things like a sentence, a brushstroke that only at the end kind of comes together and doesn’t really look like that much at the beginning. I mean, if you’ve ever done those things, you know, you feel like an absolute putz when you’re getting started, like every single time. 

So if we understand that it is both super humble and also connected to the meaning of everything. I think that gives us a little bit of the feel of what is really happening when we’re creative. Because most of the time it’s not going to look like that much, but in the end, it’s always a kind of miracle, no matter how humble our skills are or the end product is or what our day looks like is. It is important even though it doesn’t look flashy.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I, and survival is that way, right? And we—and I think we sometimes when we’re super overwhelmed, and we feel like, we know that we have to figure out how to survive, we’re waiting for like, the moment of insight or the rescue that’s gonna appear. And actually survival itself is a matter of like, eating some cereal and doing it again tomorrow. And yeah, I just love the way you wove those, the creativity and the survival and the ordinariness together over and over and over throughout this book and in the process made all of those things so much more accessible. 

And so many of I do think so many other things you say, like, “We have to learn to incorporate our mistakes and failures into what we’re doing and let them be a part of the process.” This is not something most of us have never ever heard before, but it also, for some reason, when it’s about “Creativity,” it gets couched in, this is a special skill of incredibly talented people. When like, yeah, actually, it’s like a life skill. You can apply to a lot of things. 

Heather: Yes. 

Lyndsey: Why do we say “Creativity” in this voice and categorize people as creative and not? Why do we do that?

Heather:  Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think even just studying the history of creativity kind of gave me some insight into that. Like, I think a lot of it is about power, right? 

So I found out in the course of researching this book that back in ancient Greece, you know, they had the muses, which were like the the spirits of inspiration and creativity. There was no muse for visual art. There was no muse for sculpture. There were muses for theater, there were muses for poetry, there was muse, I mean, there was like multiple ones, different ones for different kinds of poetry, but they didn’t have any painting muses because the people who were painting were slaves. Like the people who were making sculptures were usually slaves. That was considered manual labor. 

And so this idea of like what actually counts as creative is very tied to notions of power, right? Like it’s always has been that way. And in our society, the people who have, like who are visibly creative and who are lauded for their creativity, they have a lot of, they tend to have a lot of money because of that. Like that is what is counted as worthwhile in our society. And so those people, they are considered hugely creative. 

But like, back in the Middle Ages, people didn’t put like the architect’s name on the cathedral because there was not one architect. They would have to have multiple architects over the course of the, you know, 100, 200 years that it took to build something. There would be multiple artisans that were coming to finish a cathedral inside and out. And so the idea that this one person was responsible for this one work of art, like that was a weird concept. 

You know, people were not lauded until the Renaissance individually for being creative. And people just made stuff because they had to. There was no way to go to Target and buy your blanket. Like you had to make it yourself. 

And so this, this habit of making things, I think because of our capitalist economy, I think because our understanding of what counts as success and what counts as meaningful is so tied to money, it has erased the work that most of us do each day in our houses in very modest and quiet ways to make stuff, to solve problems that ordinary people have always done and ordinary people without power have always done. And we just don’t see how that kind of toxic power dynamic works. And so we assume that what we’re doing doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t really count unless someone else tells us that it counts or someone else pays us money for it.

Lyndsey: Yeah, which in my experience of my life becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like if it, if my potholders that I made on my loom don’t count, then I might as well just go buy some from the Dollar Tree and there’s less creativity in the world now. 

Heather: Yeah, yeah, totally. And I mean, to be honest, and I think also like so many of us are having to work so hard just to get by, you know? But there is honor and creativity in making do with what we have under those circumstances. 

And the idea that, say, someone who’s struggling with poverty isn’t being creative. It’s like, okay, have you learned what it is to navigate like the welfare system in our country? Yeah. Right? Like, have you learned what it looks like to put together a meal when you’re on food stamps and what that kind of ingenuity that requires and the planning? Like, those are real skills.

Like I would be helpless in that situation unless I had someone to help me, right? It would take me a long time to learn those skills. So the idea that those are not creative skills, like that’s just, that’s trash. It’s not true. But because it doesn’t look fancy and powerful and is related to money and prestige, we think it doesn’t matter. But it’s truly, like all of us are doing those kinds of things. 

And it isn’t necessarily only with painting or with yarn or whatever. It’s everyday stuff. It’s problems. Like creativity is just problem solving basically. 

Lyndsey: Right. Yeah. I hear so many of the things you’re talking about make me think about my experience of improv theater in college. And I think that taught me a lot of these things about creativity that are harder to get at without an experience. Because improv is collaborative.

It makes something that—it can be recorded, but mostly is never going to exist again in the future. Um, and it’s there for the experience of it, for the people making it and the people, the audience as well, just to have, to share a moment and then disperse, you know? Um, and that is so different from a lot of the other things we think of as art and, um, or as valuable.

And at the same time, I’m so aware that I totally fluked into doing that thing. And that also I was in college and I had, you know, the most resources ever to sit around for hours and hours just experiencing and experience with other people, you know? Yeah. But that has continued to just inform how I understand creativity and by extension the world and spirituality and life ever since then.

And I wish we, I just wish we had more spaces for to try things, I think, is part of what I’m getting at. And I wish we had more spaces to share things without judgment besides just college. 

Heather: Yeah. No, and I think our culture is because, because like, skills like singing or dance or whatever have been so commodified and so professionalized. It means that families don’t make music together in their homes, right? Because nobody has is good enough for that to work. Like when my mom talks about, you know, her relatives getting together and people who, you know, had some high school band experience were like playing their horn, you know? It’s like because they didn’t have that much else to do. She grew up in a very small rural town and there wasn’t much else to do besides that. 

And I don’t want to like negate the difficulty of that. Like my mom didn’t always like that fact, but at the same time, like the idea of getting to make music, very modest, humble music together with your family, like we would just put on Spotify now, right? And there’s, you know, I don’t want to be nostalgic for the past, like there’s real difficulties there, but also this idea that you have to be so good. You have to have so much skill to not be embarrassed at putting your skills out there. 

And it’s like, I wish that we hadn’t raised the bar quite so hard. Like we’ve all seen such, we’ve all grown up people of your, yours and my generation have grown up with such heavily produced forms of creativity that require multiple editors and choreographers and producers in order for them to be ready for public view that we think that that is what is necessary in order to get joy out of something but like, oh my gosh you get together in a room with a bunch of amateur singers and you can have like such a good time right. 

Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah, an irreplaceably good time.

Heather: You and improv comedy, like yes that’s exactly that’s exactly the kind of thing i’m talking about. 

Lyndsey: Yeah. I spend a lot of my time just sitting around imagining ways to recapture at least a little bit of that. And you point out in Ordinary Creativity how much community-building itself is also a creative, like an immensely creative act. If creativity is problem solving, like that’s what community building is. I was really inspired by that too. 

Heather: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, being autistic, building community is not something that comes naturally to me. And people, you know, like put me in a room with, you know, an X-Acto knife and some paper and I will happily amuse myself. And people are like, oh, you’re so creative. And I’m like, yes, I have these skills, but there are other skills that I really struggle with. Like autism makes it easy for me to focus and build crazy paper models over 12 hours. Like that requires no effort for me, but like, you know, getting a group together for a group dinner, like that’s terrifying. Like, oh my gosh, the people who can do that and who managed to get me there and like happily talking to other people. I’m like, you’re amazing. Like, how do you do that? That’s magical. 

So I just, it’s like we overlook the skills that come easily to us. And I’m saying like, maybe we should pay attention to those things that we do without even thinking because they are so, because we are actually gifted in them, you know?

Lyndsey: Yeah, and I think the just feeling allowed, being willing to pay attention to how we perceive those things as creative, gives us the space to incorporate more, create more ordinary creativity into our lives and more dignity to the humble work that we or the people around us are doing. 

I wanted to ask you, there’s not like a ton in your book that says this explicitly, but I also felt a really strong undercurrent that creativity as so broadly defined is a spiritual practice for you. And that spirituality is a creative practice. And I wanted to just hear you talk about that aspect that’s this interesting undercurrent here.

And perhaps my guess is that attending to the power structures and forces sort of involved in all of this is a spiritual practice for you too. 

Heather: Yeah, you know, I think a lot of it is about paying attention, right? And being present. For me, like the more healthy my spirituality, you know, I’ve been a Christian for a long time, the more healthy my practice of faith has become. It’s about like listening, it’s about being still, it’s about not trying harder to impress or perform for God, but just sensing that God is already present where I am. 

And that is a work of our insides, right? Like that is a work of paying attention to a spark of joy or a spark of peace or a spark of yearning. And when I write things or when I make a painting or when I get started on a new scarf, like, it’s kind of the same skill. It’s kind of that same like, what is it that I’m really yearning for here? What is that color that makes, just makes me so excited? Like, I mean, seriously, when I started like crocheting, I’d be like, I see a color of yarn and be like, oh, like, I’d feel like I’m scheming or something? Like this sense of yearning of joy of, of hopefulness almost. 

And it’s the freaking exact same feeling. Like that, that sense of like, what is this whole part of me inside of me that I think is God, right? That wholeness, that sense, that that beautiful spirit that I think lives within each of us. How am I connecting to that? And what is the next thing that it’s that that presence is telling me to do? And I think that that can be a spiritual exercise. I think that that can be a way of solving a problem. I think that that can be a way of making something new. But it feels the same to me. And like the healthier I’ve gotten in all those areas, the more I’m like, yeah, this is all one thing, right? This is all one practice. It’s just different manifestations of it.

Lyndsey: Yeah, yeah. And and I just feel it is worth reiterating until everyone is really sick of hearing it. What you’re also saying is it all being one practice is, you know, lending your art supplies to your kid and helping them clean up their mess and letting—I was just I was just letting the dog in and out. Like she just wants to go in and out and in and out of the house every day. And I could, I could just not let her, but I don’t know. That caretaking is life making. 

Heather. Yeah. And it’s an art.  I actually homeschooled my kids. And a lot of the stuff that I put in this book, I’ve learned from homeschooling them, because, you know, it’s, when you grow up with certain ways of judging success or judging achievement, it’s kind of hard to talk yourself out of them. But when I had my kids at home every day, we were doing sort of this radical leftist, hippie style homeschooling that was like unschooling, especially when they were very little. Like, we just play to learn math. I mean, it was very hippie-dippie. 

But what was amazing to me is my children thrived and I kept thinking like, what I’m giving to them, I want that for me. Like what would it look like to have radical permission to learn skills with absolutely no pressure and absolutely no comparison to anybody else? Like what would that actually, what would that feel like to me? 

And like, again, like that is the kind of graciousness that God is giving each of us. Like all the pressure that we feel to perform and meet standards, that is not Jesus, right? Like it is so much about, you know, becoming like little children and actually loving our neighbors well and not about presenting a front that people will be impressed by, right? 

And so, yes, it was absolutely in caregiving that I realized that the sort of permission I was struggling to learn to give to my children, that that applied to me too. And that could be, you know, with a dog, that you’re like, you just have creaturely needs. Like you need to be going in and out all day and I’m gonna have patience with that. Like, that is the kind of graciousness that God gives to each of us. And we should pay attention to that and honor it. 

Lyndsey: I think there’s something with this dog where she is like, she just wants to go outside in the sun and she’s very black and she wants to get really, really hot and then come back in and lay on the cold floor. Like, that’s what she’s doing. And I think of her so much as my mentor in the, this like paying attention to what we love. Like what you’re talking about, just, “I love this yarn and I need to hold this yarn in my hands.” Like that, what you, like you just said, the creatureliness of that. I’m like, I will facilitate this for you. That’s fine.

Heather: And what a wisdom to know like, this is what I wanna do right now. Like I wanna go lay in the sun. Like what, like that pleasure is available to every freaking human being alive. And how often do we not give ourselves the freedom to enjoy that simplicity? It costs nothing. It doesn’t even take very much time. And it’s available to us all the time. And to learn how to actually do that would be a crazy gift to each of us.

Lyndsey: Yeah, exactly. Well you just mentioned hope. And I like to end by asking my guests, how do you define hope? And where are you finding it right now? 

Heather: Oh, we’re ending on the easy question, huh?

Lyndsey: Maybe you can start with where you’re finding it and then you’ll know how you define it. I don’t know. 

Heather: You know, I was I was in therapy the other day and my therapist was was helping me remember ways I’d been resilient in the past and talking about like, you face this problem and see how you managed to solve it.

Like at that point where, you know, like for instance, when I was home with my kids, that experience for me was quite terrifying in a lot of ways. That was one of the things I was remembering was the terror of it. And she’s like, “but you also said that it filled you with joy.” Like I was talking about the terror and then I said, but it also made me truly full as kind of an afterthought. She’s like, “let’s sit with that for a moment.” 

And I think to me, hope is like how I’m trying to live into hope is remembering those things in the past where I was terrified of something that was actually life-giving because it’s sometimes it’s really hard to be that vulnerable, right? To really allow the thing that you’re yearning for to really go after it. That can be really terrifying. But I have seen that it is worth it. 

And so for me, like remembering through life experience and just the testimony of people around me, that it is worth it to live that openhearted. It is worth it to go after those things that I’m yearning for. And that hope for me is the radical permission to really do that and to think like, I have hope that when I live that way, even if it doesn’t look successful, even if it’s countercultural, even if it kind of makes me feel like a putz to other people, like, hope is trusting that that is the right move because it is in the past always led me to a better place.

Lyndsey: Awesome. That’s amazing. Your book is amazing— Ordinary Creativity: How to Survive with Joy. I’m just going to keep going back to it. I want listeners to know you talk about The Artist’s Way a few times in your in this book.

And you also say, you know, there was a time in my life when it was great for me and there was a time in my life when it just would have destroyed me to try to do this. Like, it’s a really big undertaking. And I don’t know if you did this on purpose or not, but your little chapters and journaling reflections in Ordinary Creativity feel like the opposite, like the doable thing. If someone has little kids or a disability or this whole topic is really overwhelming to them, that you can pick this up in 10 minutes a day and put it down and come back to it. And I will be doing that more as I’m revisiting it in the future. So thank you so much for writing this, Heather. Thank you for being with us. 

Heather: Thank you, Lyndsey. It’s been such a pleasure.

Lyndsey: Hi! Welcome back to Crumbling Empires, a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I’m here with Alicia Akins and we’re going to talk about her book, The Gift of the Outsider. Thank you so much for being here, Alicia.

Alicia: Thanks for having me, Lyndsey.

Lyndsey: I told you as soon as I heard several months ago that you were writing this book that I’ve been waiting for it for such a long time. I was so stoked to get to read it early and I’m so grateful for it. Yeah, so thank you for writing, thank you for sharing it with us and I just can’t tell you how excited I am. Just how much this topic matters to me and I think is weirdly overlooked.

Um, so I thought a lot, I thought about a lot of starting places for us. And what I ended up doing actually is writing down this list of words that you don’t really use, um, that I think this book applies to. Here’s my list. Okay. It’s like,
check your privilege,
microaggressions,
dominant culture,
savior complex,
violence of assimilation,
fragility. And so my I don’t think you necessarily, I don’t get the impression that you are shy of those concepts, but you don’t use those words. And so I wanted to start there and ask you how you think about the angle you approach this topic from, and perhaps how you think about using, why you chose to use the word outsider, where maybe in certain conversations we’re more used to using words like marginalized or oppressed.

Alicia: Yeah, that’s a great question. So actually a part of the reason that I didn’t use those words, which I don’t object to, or those phrases, which I don’t object to, is because I have noticed that those words feel maybe empowering to the people who use them, but less so for the people who hear them, who are on the receiving end. And so I wanted this book to do two things.

I wanted it to encourage people who were on the outside and marginalized. And I wanted it to challenge people who were on the inside and had different kinds of privilege. And I know that there are a lot of words that people who are on the inside and have privilege hear that immediately makes them stop listening. And I wanted to keep the lines of communication open.

It wasn’t a deliberate choice. I think this is just kind of how I talk to people about these things. But in the first chapter, I talk about this concept from C.S. Lewis when he’s talking about outsiders and insiders and about how at some point in everyone’s life, they will find themselves in a position where they want to move closer and closer to the inside. And so it was that kind of framework from CS Lewis and his inner ring kind of work that he’s already done that led me towards outsider language.

Lyndsey: Yeah. And there are so many ways that you list in your book that you have spent time as an outsider. They’re just so illustrative. And I really loved how you wove those together in this book that speaking to the outsider and to the insider because, and you acknowledge, we all live in both of those spaces, and we move in and out of them.

What are some of the, just a few, or however many you wanna talk about, like times and places in your life that you have experienced being an outsider?

Alicia: Yeah. Well, I feel like the most obvious one is a Black woman being both a woman and being Black. Those are often positions that are marginalized. I mean, the Black people are in the minority in the U.S. And so already there, I’m on the outside of that sort of racial demographic. Um, and women are often not the ones in power.

And so, um, in that sense, I’m an outsider, but I’ve spent five years of my adult life living abroad, um, in Asia. And so as an ex-pat, um, I was also an outsider to that culture and that country and the language that they spoke and the customs and things that they had. So that was one experience.

I’ve been an outsider religiously in terms of multiple occasions. I’m not saying that these two are as extreme, but living in Seattle and living in China where Christians are not the majority. In the case of China where not only is Christianity not the majority, but there’s government sanctions

06:17
against the spread of Christianity and certain kinds of practices of Christianity. So in terms of being like a religious minority, I tend to travel in religiously conservative spaces, but I’m not politically conservative. And so that has often been a source of friction, trying to convince people, no, really, I love Jesus, like, I do. I promise you, I love Jesus. But then also convincing people who maybe I am more closely politically aligned with that like, no, really, I’m not crazy, you know. And so being in that space as well, I think those are some of the maybe more obvious or bigger ones.

Lyndsey: So I did have this question throughout reading the book, which in some ways you answer by say by the book itself is called The Gift of the Outsider. That’s a place that you have found to be very generative and spiritually alive for you. But there’s still this question the entire time with me: Why do you stay in some of these spaces? Do you think that there is a place where you are an insider or that you haven’t found yet?

Alicia: I don’t know. I feel equally outside everywhere for some reason or another. And I’ve talked with some friends of mine about this. They’re like, oh, why don’t you find a different church? Or why don’t you find this space? And I’m like, To be honest, I can’t think of a space where there wouldn’t be some element where I felt not at home. So I’m sort of equally not at home everywhere that I go.

But in terms of why I stay in some of these places, when I lived in China, I lived in China for three years after college. One of the things that I tried to do was realize that I was an ambassador for not just Americans there, but for Black people as well, since most Chinese people would have had relatively scarce interaction with Black people, just because there aren’t a ton of Black people in that part of the world. I got really good at being good humored and patient and– I don’t want to say accommodating, but I guess accommodating of people who were curious or who lacked the level of knowledge about people like me that would make me feel 100% comfortable engaging them.

And that’s something that as a part of my day job, I get to talk to people who are preparing to go abroad and sometimes talk with people of color and say, here’s what you can expect, but here’s how your mindset can help you be successful in those spaces. And so I do feel like that helped build a muscle for me. And continuing to approach those situations. And I wouldn’t say that I was treated poorly, but I was definitely treated differently in a way that made me comfortable with being uncomfortable, that made me
okay with having to answer the same questions over and over again with different groups of people.

And so I feel like in a way coming back to the States, I’ve still been in situations where that has been required, even though I’ve been back in my home country. And I don’t know where I would go where I wouldn’t have some amount of explaining of myself to do some element of the culture that I don’t completely understand. And so I feel like I don’t feel called anywhere else. And so why not be helpful where I am?

Lyndsey: Yeah, yeah. That’s really helpful for me to hear. And I think maybe a lot of listeners that, I think for a lot of us, there was a space that felt like home, especially perhaps religiously. And there’s been a lot of coming to terms on my part with the fact that that space is not going to ever exist again. And it’s kind of strange to be like, I don’t know, like church sick or community sick for something that like, isn’t going to return.

Alicia: Um, yeah, it’s, it’s definitely a strange and sometimes unsettling place to be in. But I just, when I think about all of the spaces I could be, I’m like, where will this not? Where am I disclaimer free and totally comfortable? And I can’t think of a place.

Lyndsey: Yeah. Well, I’ve also had the experience, well, kind of more and more sadly, where something appears at first glance to be to cast itself as this thing that I think I’ve been searching for. And often, for a while, it was these spaces where people did know all these words that I listed at the beginning of this conversation. And then the gap between knowing the words and practicing the practices and being in the relationships became really evident really quickly.

And I actually, so that is what I like find so very precious about your book, is that you are talking about the spiritual practice of actually doing this thing, where so many spaces and people want to talk about on this high level what it means to be in community across difference. And you’re talking about how we actually do it and do it with God.

One example of that was when, I mean, I think we could talk, maybe we will talk this whole time about your chapter on discomfort.

Alicia: One of my favorites.

Lyndsey: Yes. And I think such a rich conversation to be had there. And one of these really simple practices that I’ve realized a lot of people aren’t just don’t have like the muscle you’re talking about is when you said, “How often do you wonder about who the least comfortable person in the room is? And how could you charge their comfort to your account?”

That is just such a simple question that I think it takes a lot of practice to do that. What are some examples of where you see people doing that? Or not? What do you think gets in the way of doing that as well?

Alicia: One example that comes to mind is sometimes after racially charged incidents of violence, police brutality occurs towards black people. It is like, all of the white people come out with their questions and they they want to know like, “what can I learn? How can I know more? Tell me more about this. Tell me more about that. What are the resources?” Like it’s like class time, you know, class is in session. And I once had a friend who was like Alicia, a white guy who was like, “Alicia, send people to me. And if you just need to rest, like, I will take the questions for you. And I will help like, yeah, I’ll help take them for you. Or like, I, I am a person that you can come to when things like that happen. If you’re feeling overwhelmed.”

because I think people do think like, Oh, you know, Alicia’s really helpful. This is a time where we can get answers from her. And I think he saw that. So he was like, “I will be the one to be overwhelmed instead of you in this particular situation.”

So that’s one that I think of. Sometimes it could just be like as simple as you show up at church and you see someone who’s new sitting on one side and you see your friends on the other and it would be much more comfortable and maybe immediately gratifying for you to go and catch up with your friends who you haven’t seen. But instead you decide to have awkward conversation with the visitors, you know, and like stand there and think about what can we talk about? Maybe you’re not the best conversationalist, but you see that there’s people who are alone. And so that’s like one kind of way that you can…

Those people are, I don’t know, maybe they’re comfortable, but if they are new, they’re feeling some kind of way. At least every time I’ve been new somewhere, I feel some kind of way about it. Is anyone going to come talk to me? I shouldn’t have come early. What is this experience going to be like? And so you help share, or not even share, but reduce some of their anxiety about what’s about to happen rather than just going and catching up with your friends.

And so I think to your second question about what keeps us from sort of charging other people’s discomfort to our account. I think one thing is just being focused on ourselves. So often we go through the day to day tasks of our lives, thinking about ourselves and not thinking about who the other people are we’re engaging, not thinking about the way our words are impacting them, not thinking about the days that they’ve had, not thinking about the baggage that they’re bringing or the assumptions that they might have. We’re thinking about our assumptions and the days that we’ve had and all of those things.

Which makes sense because those are the ones that are most immediate and the ones that we know about. But I think taking some time to sort of step back from certain situations and really sort of take a read of the room or take a read of the people we’re engaging. And even just assume the worst and the best way. Assume that they’ve had a bad day. Assume that, you know, they’re bringing baggage that you can’t understand, as my boss likes to say, “assume positive intent.”

But like just thinking about who you’re interacting with, I think is one thing. And then I think a second thing is what I talk about in the chapter is people don’t like to be uncomfortable. And I have been thinking more and more recently about building muscles, partially because I’ve been exercising more but I’ve also been doing language, starting language classes. And I just keep thinking back to like, if you don’t do something regularly, it’s not gonna be something you regularly do. And the need to, maybe it’s baby steps and often that’s it for me. It’s like, I’m still using the five pound weights, even though I’m very far from the big, you know, weights that I would like to be using. If I don’t use the five pound weights, I’m not gonna get to the bigger ones. And so sort of figuring out what the five pound weights are in terms of your own level of discomfort and what you can handle now. And then just gradually pushing yourself further and further into things that are a little bit less comfortable.

But I think people are just like, oh, discomfort, I’m out, you know, like, I don’t like this. So being, not being short-sighted about how discomfort muscle grows and being aware and actively thinking about other people I think are helpful.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I guess you don’t like, you know, give a lot of advice in this direction, but would you encourage people to like, if they feel like they spend a lot of time being an insider, seeking out spaces that are comfortable as one does. Would you encourage people to also seek out a space to be an outsider?

Alicia: Absolutely. I think I do make that recommendation in the book to intentionally put yourself in positions where you are the outsider. I think that that is incredibly valuable. And I say that anecdotally, because the way I’ve grown in my comfort with being an outsider is because I’ve intentionally put myself in places.

There’s one place in the book where I talk about choosing the least diverse least like me small group to join after my very comfortable small group of people who are like minded and I shared common interests with disbanded. I was like, I’m going to go to this group of people who couldn’t be less like me, and I’m going to build friendships there. And I think that that is valuable for anyone to do, not just me. I mean, like, to be honest, I probably at that point in my life didn’t need that extra experience of being around people who weren’t like me since that’s been my entire existence. But I think that that is an example of the kind of deliberate choice that people can make to engage people who are unlike them to help them grow in this area.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I have. I’ve I’ve seen this over and over and I and myself. Where? I think people people want to ask, I think I’ve often had people ask me, like, how do you do this thing? How do you have this conversation? How do you sit with this person? And they’re asking me how I how I make it not awkward. And the answer is like, “It’s awkward.” And I, the more awkwardness you just live with, the more, the less of a like catastrophe it feels like. Like humanity is awkward and that’s like a great thing about it.

Alicia: Awkwardness is not the end of the world. Yeah.

Lyndsey: You were talking about the prophets as outsiders at one point, as these voices railing often against the status quo that we’re generally not listened to, generally not welcome, which I hope that your thoughts are welcome, but I felt a very strong prophetic sense from your chapter about suffering.

To be honest, I was like, at first I was like, where is this going? Cause you were talking about Christians being persecuted. And I was like, I don’t know if, you know, having to deal with pluralism is the same as being persecuted, which is not what you were saying.

Alicia: That chapter was really hard. Yeah. Find the right balance because I was like, somebody who’s not persecuted is gonna come in and be like, oh, I’m being persecuted. And that’s like always the challenge.

Lyndsey: Well, and then I also realized I think maybe you were kind of trying to like walk gently into this topic of suffering because the later in the chapter you said “We Americans are the Walmart of Christianity.” Our faith is cheap and not that great. And we think that we think we’re, I don’t know, the Nordstrom or whatever.

Alicia: Yeah, some high-end store.

Lyndsey: And nobody wants what we’ve got. And so I really wanted more from you on that. And I think, how do we get from like, baby stepping into discomfort into this, the actual giving up of ourselves that you’re talking about when we talk about suffering and giving something up for Christ in our lives. Something that’s really costly.

Alicia: Yeah. So to go back to the exercise and language learning example that I shared before, when you said, how do you get from baby steps to like giving up your life? There is a sense in which we have in each day unlimited opportunities to die for ourselves or die to ourselves and choose to live for other people or to put it another way to honor others above ourselves, to seek the peace and prosperity of others before we seek it for ourselves.

Um, in the daily work emails that I send to people, I can try and score points, which I often do, uh, as per my previous email, you know, or I can decide to just like take a hit and respond with kindness. And so I feel like each day does present us with opportunities for practice that we might not realize or practice. Um, if we think that the small inglorious sort of victories that we yield to others are insignificant or are not worth making, then we won’t see ourselves as having as many opportunities to improve. Like it doesn’t take a huge–sacrificing ourselves doesn’t have to be huge, but it won’t be huge if it doesn’t start little.

I guess that kind of goes back to what I was saying before, but I think another thing that’s really helpful in this way or in this process is to do this in community and to have trusted people who are on this journey with you who you can fail with, and people who are on this journey with you who will let you fail.

And in the beginning, when you asked about why stay, I think I’m a person that other people can fail in these ways around. And I think it’s important to have those kinds of people around. People aren’t going to cut you off if you say the wrong thing when you’re trying to figure out how to be an ally or how to be supportive. They might say like, I don’t have the bandwidth for this conversation in this exact moment, but they aren’t like, “I can’t talk to you because the way you’re behaving is antithetical to my beliefs.”

And so I think the community that you’re a part of can really help shape and determine your ability to grow in making sacrifices for other people. And honestly, the kind of suffering that some people go through, the only way they get to it is because the suffering has presented itself to them in their life. Like, people don’t think that they can get through cancer until they get cancer. People don’t necessarily think that they can get through infertility or miscarriages until they are faced with one.

And so I think in a sense, when those really hard and trying things happen, is when you discover whether or not you’re able to do them well. And then when you face them, looking back and being able to see, oh, you know, when I think about the things that God has done in my life, or done in other people’s lives, done in my friends’ lives, done in my family’s lives, I can bear this in community well.

And I know that some people only have negative things in their own life to look back at. They look back on their life and they see disappointment and failure and failure from the people that they would expect to be on this journey with them. And they don’t have past experience with a church that has been the kind of church that moves people in this direction. And to those people, I would say find community wherever you can. It might not look, everyone’s community that’s helpful for them in welcoming the outsider might look different.

Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah, that is super, super helpful because lots of reasons, but when we talk about giving up something of ourselves that also you go back several times to, like that requires so much discernment. And so we do, we can’t even start to really do that in a healthy or effective way if we don’t have some sort of discernment community around us as well.
Yeah, I think in some ways there’s like, times when I am really uncomfortable with language of loss of self. And then there’s other times when I use it. But we talk about letting go of the ego. Like, that’s kind of the same exact language.

And I’ve been really, like my entire life, one thing that has stayed really constant in my love for Jesus and my tenacity of staying with Christianity has been like a certain sense of adventure. And I feel that with you too. I hear that in your writing and in your speaking and your language learning and having gotten to know you a little bit before, I think a lot about the songs we sing and or used to sing about like–spirit–whatever the song is: spirit send me on the water and what’s that song? “Lead me where my trust is without borders” Where is that actually playing out in our lives? It has to be where we stand to lose something.

Alicia: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s, you’re absolutely right. And I do think that this giving of ourselves or however you would put it, like the example that we have in Christ is something that is costly. And there’s a small book that is my favorite Christian book. It might be, by small, I mean like, it might be 20 pages, 30 pages, and each page only has one sentence on it. It’s like my kind of book. But each of the sentences starts with “if.” It’s by Amy Carmichael, and it’s just like a darling book.

But one of them says, “if I forget that the path of the cross leads to the cross and not to a bed of roses, I have, I do not understand covenant love,” or something like that. But the point about the way of the cross actually leading to the cross, I need that reminder often. And it’s not like a, let me torture myself. But I do think that there is a sense that the cross isn’t all bad. When we are led to the cross, that is like the fruit of Christ’s work in us.

And there, if I had to choose a life where I could see fruit that Christ was being formed in me in some way, that I was being shaped in the same manner as He is, versus one where I just look like me all day, every day, with no evidence besides the words that come out of my mouth that I have any kind of relationship or understanding of God and Jesus–then I would choose the one where it’s obvious who I’m following, you know?

Lyndsey: Yeah. And that, when I think about crumbling empires, I think I often talk about things in a slightly weird way, because I just start from an understanding that death, things die and Jesus, like Jesus brings us to a place where that’s not the worst thing that can happen. Or, and where, like you say, in the book, where what we’re relying on is not this, these systems and structures that seem so all-encompassing and all powerful. I think you talk about this suffering and this, like Jesus-formed, cross-shaped life a lot in the book.

But speaking of adventure, actually, and just the many places you could have taken this, I’m curious how you actually chose the chapter titles, like the gifts you chose to specifically talk about, because there are so many more gifts of outsiders.

Alicia: I should have asked you before I did the outline. Because I could have used some more, like I could definitely. I was thinking about, to be honest, a lot of, I started working, well, I started working in earnest on this book when conversations were happening, like publicly on Twitter and in other places about diversity initiatives in the US and things that were getting shot down, like different kinds of programming, like we can’t talk about this anymore in certain places in the states.

But also when there was a lot of discussion about Christian nationalism, and I was just going on Twitter every day and seeing the kinds of things that those people were elevating as good and right and was just kind of reacting strongly against those. Like, oh, you’re afraid that Christianity will become a minority religion in this country? and you claim that like the church in a country where Christians are free to do whatever they want to do is the strongest church? Well, have you heard about these Christians in this other place where they’re the minority and they’re like, like run laps around us in terms of their faith and perseverance?

Or it’s often the case where people who are healthy, you know, like at the end of the pandemic or depending on whether or not you think the pandemic is still here, towards the end, when things were opening back up and sort of the church was going back to prioritizing healthy people and their ability to gather together and sort of forgetting about people who were immunocompromised or had other health issues that required that they not rejoin. I thought about those people.

I thought about I myself as a single person who’s… Maybe 10 years ago, it was like me and my friends and we were all single and it was great because people get married later and now everybody’s married except for me. I used to be like, being single is not that bad. People who lived in the suburbs were always complaining about it. I was like, “Just move to the city where everyone’s single!” Now I get it in a way. It’s not that–
I still am like, okay, being single, but I miss my friends. And I’ve noticed that the world kind of revolves around people being married and people having kids. And the way that people think about the contribution single people have to make to the church, I think needs correction.

And so the way that I came up with the list was kind of like, who do I think a lot of people in the church are, what are the values that the church is starting off with, or the assumptions that it’s making? That if you’re healthy, if you’re married, if you’re in power, if you have money, if you’re comfortable, if you have freedom, if you sort of– I don’t know how to fit justice into that piece, because justice is one of the chapters, but like keeping quiet about injustice, I guess, like not making okay, in that way. That these are the ways to a healthy, vibrant church and me being like, no, I that’s not, there’s no causal relationship between those two.

And in fact, some of the very things that you prize could be doing more harm to you as a church than you think.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I actually had another piece I wanted to read that is exactly about that from The Gift of the Outsider. You wrote:

“In the church of the insider, everyone assumes their concerns are universal, exhaustive and paramount. Fringe concerns, when they do arise, are not addressed, as they do not have the critical mass worth expending the effort to find a solution.” We also could have talked for 45 minutes about that. “Cultural references are assumed to be meaningful to all.” You described some other ways– “the status quo is sacred, groupthink is worshipped over shalom, and challenges to it are viewed as threats, not opportunities. Such a church is plagued by the paradox of people not seeing themselves because they only see themselves.”

I think we could frame that and put it on the wall of every board, church board meeting room. You know, the ultimate insiders. Like if this is not at the top of your mind in every meeting, then this is going to be your default, you know?

Alicia: Yeah.

Lyndsey: And so I’m so grateful for your voice in all of these spaces. I know a ton of my readers and listeners are gonna really be so grateful for your chapter on chronic illness and disability. And-

Alicia: Thank you for your voice in that space. I’ve learned so much from you. Like, honestly, I started having chronic health issues like back in 2019, so not that long ago. But when I was thinking about like, how do I handle this and faith? And I was like, I know someone who deals with this and I’m gonna go find the things that she has said. So you’ve been very helpful for me in that space as well.

Lyndsey: Oh, that’s so wonderful to hear. Cause we, you know, we just put things out there and they go away.

Alicia: Like half of your Instagram posts like bookmarked.

Lyndsey: Oh my gosh. Wow. Well, my final question is usually, how do you define hope and where are you finding it these days?

Alicia: How I define hope. This is maybe not going to be the best answer that anyone has ever given, but hope is,
Uh, let’s see,
A time-bound effort to believe the promises of Christ. And by time-bound, I mean at some point we won’t need it because the promises will be completely there and true and staring us in the face. And we won’t need to hope for anything. So hope is something that we use to get through our days here, not something that we will need when we encounter Christ face to face.

And I think some of the ways that I’ve been seeing, finding hope recently, are, so I’m in a leadership position at my church and the first couple of years I was convinced that there were things I needed to do to improve the church. And if my initiatives didn’t happen, then everybody’s screwed, you know, like I am so important and the things that I want to do are so important. And I went on sabbatical and while I was gone, things started to happen. Since I’ve been back from sabbatical, it’s been really encouraging to see.
Not just that they’re happening, but that the Lord did them without me, which is kind of a strange thing to say that you find hope in that, but like God’s love for his church is bigger than my love for his church. And I’m encouraged that he will, in his time and in his way, bring beauty to the church in the ways that it’s needed.

Lyndsey: Yeah, there is that trust. There’s not a way to build it other than to experience things like that. Thank you again for being here. I’m so grateful for your book. It’s coming out on September 5th, The Gift of the Outsider by Alicia Akins. It’s a gift itself. So are you, Alicia.

Alicia: Thank you. Thanks, Lyndsey.

Click here to listen to this conversation.

Hi, welcome back to Crumbling Empires. I’m Lyndsey Medford, and this is a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I’m here today with Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, and I’m so honored and so excited about this. Dr. Chanequa’s book is coming out in August, and I think this podcast will also be coming out in August.

It’s called Sacred Self-Care, and it’s a devotional space, a reflective space, and so full of information and theology about self-care. Thank you so much for being here—Dr. Chanequa just invited me to call her Chanequa, and I don’t think I can do it—Let me practice. Chanequa, welcome and thank you for being here. 

Chanequa: Thank you. It’s great to be here. 

Lyndsey: I was so excited about this book. When we met, which was a few years ago, you were teaching a writing workshop that I was blessed and privileged to attend. And we had a lot of conversations about the medical system and about self care in that context. And so you’ve been a mentor to me from here and far in that space for a long time. And so I’m really excited that this book is spreading your wisdom and knowledge. 

I wanted to give this book some context within all your other work. You’re a researcher, you have like 12 degrees in psychology and in theology. And so you have researched where the myth of the StrongBlackWoman comes from. Your book before this was about racial reconciliation and I go around recommending that book all the time. 

And you are a two-time breast cancer survivor. And that’s important, I think, for my listeners, because so many of us have chronic illnesses, and the rest of us, of course, love someone with a chronic illness. I would just love to hear you set up for our listeners who are new to you and your work, who you are and how this whole story has informed coming to the place of writing this book.

Chanequa: Yeah, yeah, thanks. Um, and this book, I think at its face, it seems very different from the work I’ve done before. But, um, as you know, from our conversations and people who’ve been in conversations with me know that in addition to my work around racial and gender justice issues, there’s always been this thread of self care and they’re very much connected.

My own entry into ministry begin with a health crisis. It began when I, you know, right at my 30th birthday, dealing with chronic unexplained pain, high blood pressure, all sorts of stress-related problems, and beginning to say, I gotta do something different, right? And that actually was the start of my self-care journey, but it was also when I learned about the StrongBlackWoman because I was trying to figure out why I was doing what I was doing. Why was I just pushing myself beyond my limits, really to serve the needs of other people. And in my readings, I stumbled across this thing called the Strong Black Woman. And I was like, oh, this is me, right? 

And so I started really focusing on my own care, and I experienced this drastic turnaround in my physical and mental wellbeing. Well, mental more than anything. A lot of the health problems were still there, right? But they were, they were manageable, right? But mentally. 

And so I began to say, Oh, I should do this with other women, right? If this was helpful to me, this could help other people. And that was actually when I first heard my call, the beginning of my call to ministry. So I ended up working with the women at my church around self care, and at the same time, continuing to think about the StrongBlackWoman.

Um, so really I say I have this now 20 plus years self care journey. I was talking about it a lot in activist spaces. Um, you know, so I get in these activist spaces. I’m trying to find my place because, um, I’m not the person who’s going to go march a lot, right? Like I’m like, I don’t know about crowds. Like how far do I have to walk? Can my body maintain? Like, can I do it? 

Lyndsey: Yes. Very familiar.

Chanequa: Am I going to be in too much pain? I don’t know if I can do this, right? At the same time, like lots of friends in the Christian community development world, right? And they’re moving into these impoverished neighborhoods doing this fascinating, incredibly important ministry. And I’m alongside them saying, where’s my place in this field, right? Because like I need to be near certain types of medical centers and grocery stores, and there’s certain types of food that are and are not good for my body. Where do I fit? 

And one of the things I found over time is that no matter where I was, I was encouraging people to take care of themselves. And I began to find, oh, this is my place in this movement. I’m the encourager. I’m the one who sees the activist, the pastor, whoever, and says, hey, you’re doing great work. 

And so over time, I started weaving this into my classes. I’m a seminary professor and I just kept doing it more and more. I taught a spiritual formation class, our intro spiritual formation class. I decided to upend the model for how we taught about it. And I wasn’t just gonna talk about spirituality. I was gonna talk about self care in a very holistic way, right? So that my class was not about just taking care of your spiritual self. It was, I want you to develop a plan for how you’re gonna sustain yourself in seminary, right? And then in ministry, right? And so this book, it begins to put all of this together. So that’s sort of the long story. 

And then more immediately, 2021, Lent is coming up, right? Um, we’ve been in lockdown for a full year and my family and I really went into lockdown for the first, probably, I think until all of us were vaccinated, we did not leave the house. We just didn’t leave the house except to go to the grocery store. And only my husband did that. My son and I stayed at home. Um, and so we were talking about, I was thinking about, what does it mean to give up in a year where collectively we’ve given up everything?

And I thought, you know, I don’t think I want to give up. I think I want to take on, right? I went into quarantine knowing that caring for ourselves was going to be really important because of the stress we were all under, that we got to like double, triple down on our self care. And so I decided to do this Lenten challenge online where I said, let me invite people for my practice. I’m going to deepen my self care. Let me invite other people in. 

I started writing these daily prompts and having these discussions with people. And about midway through, one of my friends, oh, it was her birthday yesterday actually, she reached out to me and said, “You know this is a book, right?” And I was like,”yeah, I think it is.” And so yeah, finally, and for years, I kept saying, everybody knows what I say about self care. I don’t need to do anything with this. And it was really that process that was like—Oh wait, there’s a way I think about this that is different than how most of these conversations are happening. And so that’s what I tried to put in the book. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, what, I mean, for you, what is that way that’s different?

Chanequa: Well, the one thing is thinking about self-care that in this way that is not capitalistic, right? And so that’s a big thing that once the language of self-care went mainstream, you have all these corporations that have kind of jumped into it. 

And when I talk to people about self-care, what I will often hear from women is: “Self-care is selfish. I’m concerned.” From Christian women especially—”I’m concerned about this being selfish,” right? And so having to help people understand why. 

But also the other thing people would say, well, I take a vacation or I go get a massage or yeah, I don’t really have the money for a pedicure. And I would say, you don’t need money, right? Like that, it’s none of those things. Like money might help, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something much more basic than that. I’m not talking about the occasional treats we give to ourselves, right? The day spa, the vacation, those are treats. That’s not self-care, right? It can be part of self-care, but it’s really not the fundamental. 

And so part of the way that I’m thinking about it is thinking about self-care, is getting back to the heart of what’s ourself, right? And for me, is rooted in this idea of the Imago Dei, that we are created in the image of God by a loving God. And I’ve always thought, if this is it, right, this body is God’s greatest gift to me. Like this is it. That’s the thing. Every one of us at our birthday, we got our best gift ever, right? When we were born, it was like, God gave us us. And thinking about that, like we have a responsibility to care for ourselves because we’ve been given this great gift of existence. And so how do we take care of the gift that God has given us? 

So it’s really about getting in touch with our embodiment and trying to figure out, wait, who am I? What do I need? And then how do I make sure that my needs are being fulfilled? 

Lyndsey: Yeah, I, well, I don’t want to say that a lack of self care makes me suspicious of people because it’s so ingrained in us to – we don’t learn these skills, we don’t hear these encouragements and these arguments and even the scientific and psychological research that tells us why we need to be doing this. I don’t want to say suspicious exactly, but I think when you talk about the gift of ourselves. And then you when you’re in a space where people, I’m thinking of activist spaces in particular, or in possibly church spaces, where there’s just no sense of what it means to care for ourselves or to have boundaries or to leave margin for people’s for each other’s bodies and needs—I start to I start to wonder about the bigger picture, right? 

Cause like if we’re not taking care of the gift of ourselves, I’m starting to wonder. We all know what we’re against here, or we all know what is like driving us towards urgency here or whatever it is, but do we know what we are for? Like do we know what we are cultivating together? If we can’t do that in our individual lives, as far as finding the space to be our full selves or to have pleasure or to be present with our bodies and present in relationship, then are we going to be able to find that space together on a larger scale either? 

Chanequa: Yeah, right. It’s part of, I think for me, self-care, it does help us to figure out just that what we’re for, right? Not just, okay, we don’t want this world. But then what do we want? And how do we begin to experience that now? As opposed to a lot of activism is oriented towards, we’ll just lay it all on the line because we’re striving for this great world. And then maybe once we get to this great world, everybody gets to care for themselves. 

Increasingly, I don’t think we’re gonna get to that great world. I think a lot of what we have to learn to do is how to survive and thrive in the midst of crumbling empires, right? We have to learn, how do we experience joy? So what does it mean to be in the context of just messiness and to say, “and yet,” right, “and yet I still want health to the extent that I can. I still want joy to the extent that I can,” right? I want that for myself. I want that for other people. Yeah, I think it’s important for us to begin to figure out what it is that, what flourishing looks like. Like how can we strive for a society where flourishing is happening if we don’t have a taste of flourishing, if we haven’t experienced that, and we’re not experiencing that in our own lives?

Lyndsey: Yeah. And a lot of my listeners are like, just really tired of the word “self-care” because it is obviously, we can be, get an A plus at self-care and still it’s insufficient. Like we need more. And particularly, when people are chronically ill or disabled, or in any of these sort of justicy spaces and fights, there’s so much need. It’s not always fair to put that on individuals. And I know you acknowledge that in this book. And I want to acknowledge that in this conversation. So I can be the person saying, self-care is not enough. I’m tired of it. 

I also remember being the person in my early 20s, particularly as a young Christian woman that had this thought that everyone should take care of everyone else, and then we would never have to take care of ourselves because we would do it for each other, and that would just be better for some reason.

I, and so I’ve gone, I’ve gone from these, I’ve been on these two different pendulum swings and I’m still trying to pull them back together. Where does self care and community care intersect and intertwine? 

Chanequa: Yeah. And they definitely intertwine. I think for me, I always come back to self care because I think ultimately we are responsible for our own lives. Right. Um, ultimately I feel like if there’s going to be an account, right. Um, for how we spent our life at the end of our life, that that’s on us. And so I come back to it for that reason. 

The other thing though, is I think when self care is, is, is put in the right perspective and what I’m hoping I’m doing here is that it becomes tied to our relationships, right? So I talk about relationships as part of self-care because I think we are not meant to live in isolation. We’re meant to live in community with other people. So part of our care is connecting with other people, loving other people, caring for other people, being loved by other people. That’s part of that. So self-care is always this tension between self-differentiation, right? And being part of community.

But one of the reasons I think they’re not necessarily disconnected, it actually came up experientially. When I first, 30 years old, started practicing self-care and really focusing on myself, I would start in with, I’m putting myself first, right? What are my needs? What do I need to do? I need to exercise, I need to meditate, I need to pray, I need to read my Bible. And I kept doing these things. I need to do this for myself and then I’ll go to work and then I’ll do these other things.

What I found was the more I intentionally focused on my own care, the more I reached out and connected to and cared about other people. It, I mean, and initially it was really strange to me because I’m an introvert. I only like this much, right? Like I like people in like small doses, like, okay, this is my people time. And now this is my me time. And suddenly I found myself like walking the halls of my department and stopping by my colleagues and being like, “Hey, how you doing?” And they would look at me like, “and what do you need?” And I’m like, “Oh, I don’t need anything. I just came to see how you’re doing.” Right? It was so foreign in our workspace for that to happen. 

I found that I started reaching out to friends more, right? And part of what I’ve realized, and it makes complete sense when we think about stress, when we’re under stress, which is usually what is happening when we’re not practicing self-care, our stress response system is activated. When your stress response system is activated, you’re not thinking about loving other people as much. You’re in survival mode. And so it becomes, “Oh my God, I need this, I need this, I’m so tired,” right? 

It’s a different type of self-focus than if we start with this sort of expansiveness of, oh wait, I can care for myself, I’m worthy of my own care, I’m worthy of my own time. We end up then sort of filling ourselves up and we do have this overflow. and that space and it’s like, “Oh wow, look at this. I have all this energy now, right?” Oh wow, I have this abundance of compassion because I’ve been directing it inward and it starts to grow. And so now I’ve got extra compassion. Let me start spreading this, right? And so I found out that when we really start thinking about self care the right way, it actually deepens our connections with other people. 

Now it might strain some connections because there’s some folks that we realize, you know what? I don’t think this relationship is good for me. I think I might need to put a boundary here, right? And we get some clarity on, there are people, for me, the people who are most in my corner were often the folks that I put the least amount of effort into. I was ignoring those folks, family and friends. I was ignoring them. Yeah, I’ll get to call you eventually cause I’m focusing on all this work stuff. But then I was like, “Wait. Now those are the folks who show up for me. Those are the folks who love me and care for me.” Relational self-care means I gotta put some time and investment into nurturing those relationships. 

So self-care is not at all in tension with, I mean it’s a little bit of tension, but it’s not necessarily contradictory to community care.

Lyndsey: I think it only feels that way because self-care has been co-opted so much by this super individualistic lens. I do wonder, I really want to highlight that you are a researcher in psychology and in theology because I’m starting to see a lot more people really worrying about how, um, certain different trendy therapy buzzwords get sort of gobbled up or leaking into spiritual spaces in ways that are like murky and muddy. 

Um, and then I, as we’re speaking, there was recently this, um, this kerfuffle about Jonah Hill using sort of therapy speak to try and control other people—highlighting how easy it is for people to walk out of their therapist’s office with perhaps a tool, like if their therapist is a good therapist, trying to offer a tool for thinking about something and then they take it and they just like wield it as a weapon, like totally out of context. 

So I think, just that hyper-individualistic idea of what a self is and how we care for ourselves and how we maybe, how we contribute to the world or live a good life can really twist that relationship. But if we’re taking the whole of what you’re saying here and what you’re drawing from both science and the Bible and the Christian story, where they’re not, like you’re saying, they’re not in tension. 

Chanequa: Yeah. And I should say, you know, my background as a psychologist is even more unique because I was a family psychologist. And so I was trained in family systems theory. And so there are a lot of therapists who do have a very individualistic focus, but system therapists, even if we’re working with one individual, we’re often thinking about their embedded relationships, right? 

And so for me, even when I worked with, you know, it’d be a mom in therapy and I would tell them, you know, kind of what is your desire for your life? Do you want to be like, fulfill all your wildest dreams? I can do that for you, but you might end up by yourself, right? Yeah. Or if you want to maintain your relationships, if you want to raise kids that are healthy, I’m going to work with you a different way, right? So that then we might put some constraints on some of the things that you are part of your dreams, maybe you don’t get to do right now, or maybe you don’t get to do ever because there’s a trade-off on some things because being in these relationships is also giving to you, right? So having, yeah. And, I’m thinking about your kid who’s looking at you as an example of how to be in the world. So I think there’s a way in which that infuses my work too. 

I’m often, even with my students, I’m often telling them, you know, when they talk to me about what they wanna register for, and I’m like, wait, don’t you have a partner? Don’t you have kids? Yeah, this plan, is it good? You might get out of school faster, but you might also be divorced, right? Right, so let’s think about what our overall goals are. 

So I think there are ways in which we can, if we start grounded with this idea that we are created to be in relationships. And that doesn’t necessarily mean romantic partnership, right, that’s friendships, that’s family relationships, but we are, that’s part of who we are. And if we start with that, then self-care takes on a whole different idea, right? It’s not just about getting my needs met to the exclusion of other people or at the expense of other people, it becomes, yeah, I wanna get my needs met, but part of my need is for my friend to be happy. Part of my need is for my kids to be fulfilled, right? Part of my need is to have a good relationship with my partner so that self-care actually encompasses all of that as well. 

Lyndsey: Oh, that’s brilliant. I’m just gonna confess to you. I really want your next book to pull out more of this because I’m thinking, as you’re speaking, so much of your previous book whose title I cannot currently recall—I Bring the Voices of my People—because so much of what you’re saying just sounds like, it sounds right in like a Hallmark movie sort of way. “And then they remembered that family was more important.” But in our day-to-day lives, it’s also not obvious to us. It is not the assumption we bring to our class registration form because of white supremacy, basically.

Chanequa: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that that yeah, everything that I do the choices I make, because we’re taught in the US in particular, that our work life and our home life are separate, right? And we keep them boundaried. Our school life is separate. 

And so we do school, I increasingly think about the ways we educate people away from their families and communities, right? So people go off to school. And then suddenly you can’t actually talk to, you know, I get seminarians who talked about, they can’t go back home, right? Now that I’m in seminary and I’m learning this and I’m thinking, I can’t go back home. I don’t fit anymore, right? And I think, I don’t think that should be what we’re doing. Right? We want people to be able to go back to their communities and bring them along the journey. 

So for me, beginning to think about, and I think again, it comes from me having been educated, all of my education was in predominantly white institutions. Most of my professional life has been in predominantly white institutions. And at some point I realized how much culturally that I’d lost or given up in an attempt to kind of fit in to achieve all the rungs of success. 

And I realized that—but those people, those relationships, those cultural practices, that was my grounding. And okay, how do I get that back? And that for me also meant, okay, so then how do we, how do we help people to understand that that’s also part of who they are, right? And that caring for yourself might mean some ways finding out how to be in connection with the communities that raised you, right? Even if, even if you have tension with them, right? A lot of us who are more progressive Christians, we live in this tension where, like for me growing up and realizing the church that nurtured my faith didn’t mean all the things that I thought they meant. 

Lyndsey: Yeah. 

Chanequa: Like, I’m like, oh. Yes. Oh, you didn’t mean all God’s children? Oh. [But] that tradition is still an important part of my coming into being, right? And so how do I take that and say, let me hold on to parts of this, even though I know I don’t fit there anymore, but I don’t have to jettison all of it. And so I think part of this idea of self for me is really so much more contextual, right? Yeah, it is our people. We are our people. Good, bad, ugly, that’s part of who we are as well as our individual journeys. 

Lyndsey: Yes. I have been really slowly reading After Whiteness by Willie James Jennings and now I want to go hang out with you in a few minutes and run back to that book because it’s been such a wellspring. It’s one of those books where you’re like, “This is so good. I have to put it down.” Yeah, it’s taking me so long. 

Chanequa: It’s funny though that you mentioned him because he was, yeah, he was my professor at Duke and it was in his class. I had already been a faculty member because I did my psychology graduate work before I went to seminary. And I remember sitting in the classroom and watching him and saying he’s, he’s just completely himself. Like he would tell jokes that nobody else got and he would just crack up at his own jokes, right? And it didn’t matter if the whole classroom was just looking at him like, what are you saying? And he’d just be laughing. And I’m like, he is having a grand old time because he is being himself. 

And so it transformed me in terms of how I started operating in both in my teaching, but also my other work, right? Like, oh, this really is about coming to ourselves. That’s the work that we’re trying to do. I think that ought to be the work of Christian discipleship, right?

Who did God create you to be? What are your needs? Like, what needs do you have as a person God created you to be, your particular history? What are your needs, your desires, your wants, your joys? And how do we help you to live more into that? Because we think that if you’re doing that, that actually makes all of us better. To me, I think that sort of needs to be the heart of Christian discipleship as opposed to, here are the rules, this is what we think everybody should be and do regardless of your own unique expressions of yourself. Yeah. 

Lyndsey: Well, that was actually my next question was the questions you were asking. You say in this book that we can’t steward ourselves well if we don’t know ourselves well. So, I mean, maybe this is—This is probably also contextual, right? But how do we start to know, as you say, our bodymindspirit, it was all one word, how do we start to know ourselves? How do we start to know what our needs are? Especially if we are overwhelmed and this all just feels very foreign. 

Chanequa: Yeah. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of action and reflection. Like there’s doing things and then thinking about its impact. Trying something new and then seeing how it felt in our body, right? And it starts with something small. When I started with self care, I think I had, if I think, remember correctly, there were like five daily practices. Drink enough water. Like that was, like just drink enough water. 

Lyndsey: That’s very small. 

Chanequa: It’s very small. Drink enough water. Take a lunch break during the day because I was used to working through lunch. So stop and pause and take an actual lunch break, get enough sleep, meditate and pray and exercise. Like that was it. And it wasn’t necessarily that I was trying to do all those things every day, but I picked five behaviors. It was just like, I am going to focus on these five and just see if I can do that. And some days, if it’s really hectic, it’s, you know what? I’m actually only gonna, drinking enough water is all I can manage today. 

And so it became, let me do this and then see how it feels. And I would try all manner of things. I learned that some of the things that people say are good for you are not good for me. Right, like even like some nutrition stuff, right? And it took me a while because I kept saying, “I’m trying to be vegetarian. I really want to be vegetarian.” Well, I have these GI issues and they kind of don’t like beans and nuts. Like in a whole, like it’s kind of hard to get protein if you’re not doing that. And so finally I was talking to my therapist who does gut-based mental health. And she was like, so why are you eating that? And I was like, well, cause they say you’re supposed to. She was like, but isn’t your body telling you something different?

And so sometimes it’s really, this can be so hard, especially for women, right? Because we are so used to, and you were both southerners, so there’s this idea of the good Christian girl in the South and how you do, you follow the rules. That’s what a good Christian girl, you follow the rules. And so for me, it’s still a struggle for me to interrogate sometimes the rule if what happens by following that rule actually doesn’t feel right for me. 

And so learning to say, let me try, I’ll try it on. I’ll try doing this type of exercise. You know what? No, that’s not good for me. That doesn’t work for me. Right. But, oh, if I keep playing around, maybe I find something that this lands well. Or I can exercise, but I can’t give you the 30 minutes you want because my body does things to me at like that 20 minute mark. My body starts doing things, right? It starts hurting and I know I’m going to trigger a flare. And so then, okay, so what can my body do? Right?

And so I think a lot of it really is, it’s trial and error. And so part of what I do in the book is I ask people to try on these practices, right? Just try it. If it doesn’t fit, toss it out the window, right? But then if it does say, okay, now this is part of my own toolkit.

And knowing that that is going to look different for every one of us. And for us to be okay with that, like it’s okay that if my body needs something different than your body, great. Right? We know that. So now let’s try to make sure we can each give our body what it needs. 

Lyndsey: Yeah. You talk about a lot of how a lot of these, and you’ve been talking in this conversation about how so many of these sort of attitudes and skills start with ourselves and spread out to the relationships and communities around us. And this is one I’ve been thinking about a lot. I think because I’m starting, like anticipating entering into parenthood, I’m realizing that for whatever reason, there’s this whole skill set of paying attention to things and caring to notice what results from an experiment, and being curious about why that is and then moving forward with that information, that we are not always taught and doesn’t come easily. 

And I think even people want to try things, but then even the process of trying itself is unfamiliar, right? And how to actually gather information from that. And I’m realizing that is a skill my disease has taught me that is like infinitely transferable. And so, you know, everyone doesn’t have to be grateful for their illness. I am grateful for that, that change in my life as a result of illness. And I really appreciate you like, explicating the steps of that process. 

Chanequa: Yeah. It’s such a gift to, I think, to teach children, right? We tend to do the exact opposite with kids. We tell them how they’re feeling. Yes. We tell them what they’re gonna like and what they’re not. “You’ll like it, just try it.” Um. Like we tell, as opposed to teaching them to check in with themselves. And I think the more that I do this for myself, the more I’m able to say then for my son, “how does it feel when you do that? Oh, you didn’t like that, you really didn’t like that. Okay, then honor that. What symptoms are you feeling right now? What are you feeling?” As opposed to me telling you, think about what you’re feeling, what you’re able to do. Do you think you can manage? 

Like today he had swim practice, even though he wasn’t quite feeling well, but I asked him, “Do you think you really want to do this?” As opposed to me making the decision, no, I don’t think you should do that because of this. I might have some wisdom, and there are times where I might have to put a boundary, but there are also times where I can say, let’s let him try it for himself. If he says, I feel like crap, but I think I still want to go to practice, then let him do it. And then say, and how did that feel to do it? Do you still think that was the right decision? And then he gets to have that information for himself, like, no, next time maybe I shouldn’t do that, or actually, yeah, so I know that if I feel like this, I can still get through practice, right? I’m not at my limit yet. But I think it’s important for them to help them figure out their own limits, right? When they say, I wanna do something, you know, when we’re trying to rush through, right? And we’re like, okay, let them try to figure it out, right? They’re trying to figure out the limits of their abilities as well.

It can be a really great gift. I’m trying increasingly to help my now-15-year-old check in with himself. Because it’s important to me for decision making, right? Check in with yourself. What do you feel like? Do you feel nervous right now? Because then, okay, pay attention to that. Don’t override it because I’m telling you, you shouldn’t be nervous because if he’s out with friends and they start doing something and in the pit of his stomach, he’s feeling that thing that feels like, “I don’t think we should be doing this.” I want him to know what that means. Right? Yeah. And I want him to honor that. So again, know yourself. Yeah, this says no. This says, okay, I’m backing off because I want you to be able to do that for your life. 

Lyndsey: Yeah. And that’s what you were saying about discipleship too. And I think there’s a real temptation that we don’t talk about in the ministry and nonprofit worlds also, to tell people what to do or to take responsibility for how other people are feeling or what their moral obligations are or all these other things. When actually maybe the job is to do some of that equipping as well. 

Chanequa: Yeah. 

Lyndsey: So we have to start wrapping up here slowly. Um, my, uh, last question is usually, uh, how do you define hope and where are you finding it right now in the midst of a world that’s probably never gonna, you know, easily facilitate our self-care and our flourishing, as you said earlier. What does hope mean to you?

Chanequa: I think hope is about an expectation that goodness is still at work in the world. And for me, I look for glimpses of hope. Like I think there are times depending on where you look, it seems very hopeless, the world that we’re living in. Like if you just get on, I can’t remember what I was doing on social media earlier. And yeah, and you just like, “Oh my God, like how is the world falling apart today?” 

But one of the things I try to do, and I think this is part of my self-care, is I train myself to look for glimpses of hope and to see signs of the world that I hope would exist, right? And that to me is like, okay, all right, like, okay, maybe 95% of it seems bad, but look at that 5%, right? Like that, so it’s whether it is sort of the rose in concrete, it is the glimpse of sun in the midst of a cloudy sky, right? Like knowing, like the sun’s still back there, even if the rain clouds are there, the sun is still there. I think that hope is that knowing. It’s that knowing that even if I can’t see it, the sun is still there. And so I just wanna, can I catch a glimpse? And that is enough for me. 

Cause I, but I think part of it is I’m an optimistic person. So all it takes is a little bit. Oh, there we go. Right? Racial justice is possible because of that little thing!

Yeah, so I think for me, those are the things that keep me going. Babies give me hope. The idea that life, like God is still in the business of new things. And so every new birth is a confirmation that God is still doing new things. Like that there’s always this possibility. And so, puppy videos and baby videos are often when I feel like I need my spirit lifted, it is time to go to YouTube and watch a montage of babies doing adorable things. So yeah, that’s kind of where I find hope. 

Lyndsey: Awesome. I love that. It doesn’t cost money.
I did want to ask you also to read one of the benedictions. So Sacred Self-Care is a devotional set up for seven weeks of reflection and action and experimenting and journaling. Each week there’s a benediction that you’ve included and these are so sweet and meaningful. I wanted to let our readers go with one of these from you. You have that? 

Chanequa: Yeah, so let’s see. Let me pull it up.

All right.

May the Spirit of the Living Christ fall fresh on you, inviting you into a new way of life, one in which you abound in care and love for yourself, for humanity, and for all of creation. Go forth with the assurance that God’s love for you is for you. Dwell in that love as you seek to love your neighbor and to love God. Be revived, be renewed. Be resurrected. Amen.

Lyndsey: Amen. Thank you so much, Dr. Chanequa. 

Chanequa: Thank you.

to listen to the podcast version of this interview, and read reflections and link lists from Lyndsey, visit lyndseymedford.substack.com.

Lyndsey: Hi, welcome back to Crumbling Empires, a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I’m Lyndsey Medford. I’m here today with Caroline J. Sumlin, who is the author of the new book, We’ll All Be Free: How a Culture of White Supremacy Devalues Us and How We Can Reclaim Our True Worth. I am so excited about this book. Thank you for writing it and thank you for being here, Caroline

Caroline: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor and a pleasure.

Lyndsey: Awesome. So there are so many directions we could take this short conversation. But I did want to just start with your last couple of years.

You wrote that January 6th, 2021 was a turning point for you – Although it also, as your story continues, it sounds like this was in the midst of lots of other things, of course. But I’m curious for you what it was about that moment that shifted something for you.
And it just sounds like in the last two and a half years, that has been a really intense journey. And I want to hear a little bit about what these last couple of years of shifting your perspective on life or supremacy culture have been like for you.

Caroline: Yeah, thank you so much for that question. I even felt myself getting like a little chill and like a little emotional when I just kind of thought back to that moment when you’re asking that question of like what that was like when I was just sitting and everything that was transpiring on –
did I say that word right? Sure, yeah. I can’t hear myself talk because I have my headphones on. I know. Am I speaking correctly? I apologize.
– Everything that was transpiring that day on the screen and remembering how heavy I felt and how angry I felt and how frustrated I felt and how I also realized that there was something missing to what I had been, what I had always understood about my lived experience as a black woman in America.

My entire life, I was raised in my history. Thankfully, my parents were very adamant about ensuring that my education in the home, outside of what I was learning in school, was very black-centered and pro-black and truthful. So I very much understood from an educational standpoint, as well as a lived experience standpoint, racism, systemic racism, the things that had been done to ensure that black people specifically and then from the directness of the racism towards black people, every other person of color by default essentially, the barriers that have been put in place for us to maintain the bottom of the racial and social hierarchy in our country. I had understood that.

What I didn’t understand, however, was the vastness and the depthness of what white supremacy was. I, like most people, understood white supremacy to be the Ku Klux Klan, excuse me, and other white nationalist groups.
For example, in the 80s and 90s, the skinheads, all the way up to today with the Proud Boys and other groups. And that was about the extent of what I had thought of when I thought about white supremacy, was a specific person in a specific extremist group that had extreme ideals about the supremacy of white people. And the racial order essentially, that they believed it and fought to physically, violently fought to uphold and maintain.

I didn’t realize, even though I saw it firsthand, I didn’t realize that our society was one of white supremacy because it was so normalized. It was so normalized.

And when I watched that moment on TV, mind you, that was a year after we watched the protests, the Black Lives Matter protest following the death of George Floyd. Not only did I see violence in the most extreme form on January 6 and saw the representation of those people that were committing that violence, but I also saw the response and the vast difference between the [response to the] predominantly peaceful protests and the few violent riots that broke out as a result that weren’t even the goal of the peaceful protesters of the Black Lives Matter movement and the response to January 6th.

That is when I had this moment of, this is so much deeper than the systemic racism that I knew about, that I knew in my education and my lived experience, this was deeper than that. And, but I didn’t know exactly what it was until I began researching and figuring it out. And I essentially went into it with wanting to figure it out for my own peace of mind. Cause I’m like, well, why? I really asked myself, what did we do for real? Like I was at this point where I was like, what did me and my black brothers and sisters do to be this hated and to be this, that’s the only word I can come up with, to be treated this poorly, for there to be such a strong belief that our world, our society is in shambles if white people are not reigning supreme. What is it that we did? And when I went in seeking that answer for my own just understanding is when many, many light bulbs went off about white supremacy and also white supremacy culture. And that’s what led to the writing of this book. And you’re right, it’s been very intense. It’s been very intense few years. So it’s been a journey.

Lyndsey: Yeah, because your book is just so full of this research that you have done and the answers you’ve found to that question, which are obviously:

Black people didn’t do anything except exist. And White, you discovered how far this sort of disease of white supremacy goes down to steal the humanity of White people and Black people to enable that hatred. But you also, of course, the book is about how White supremacy culture is a form of hatred also manifested these ways that we have forgotten how to label as hatred. And so they are normalized. And so we cannot see them.

And, however, moreover, your book also just fills this gap. I have been waiting so long for someone to address, which is the space between understanding all these things, even perhaps understanding the depth of their impact on us as individuals, depending on art, which is different depending on our race. And then there’s another step, which is: okay, how do I move forward in the world with this knowledge in a productive manner? And I am so grateful for the very specific steps and the sort of framework you’re offering us for how to start that journey of moving forward.

And yeah, I think I said to someone else on the podcast recently that I have been waiting for years for their book, but that is very true of both of your books. I don’t say that to everyone, I’m just saying.

This book, How a Culture of White Supremacy Devalues All of Us, it is for Black folks and it is for everyone else. I’m curious what it was like for you to write for an audience, like such a wide audience and people who share certain experiences and cannot share other experiences of how White supremacy culture affects us.
And why did you make that choice to call the book, We’ll All Be Free, and the daring choice to include everyone in that?

Caroline: Yeah, thank you for that question. Because I know that sometimes that can ruffle feathers. It can ruffle feathers on multiple sides. How are you going to speak for an experience that you don’t know about? Or the fact that we don’t want to forget, of course, that white supremacy specifically was created to ensure the oppression and marginalization of black people. And as a result, every other person of color and want to make sure we give a special consideration and category for indigenous people as well. And I make that very clear in my book. I make it very, very clear in my book. This was created, this entire, you know, societal ideology was created for that reason.

But as a result, and I’m not the first person to talk about this. In fact, Heather McGee in The Sum of Us talks about how racism affects everybody and the effects of racism, the effects of hatred will always come back and bite everybody in the butt. That just is what it is. And we have to see that about white supremacy as well. And my reason for wanting to attack it this way was two things. One –

Well, actually, let me say three things. One, I felt the Lord say to do it, so I did. Let’s just be real. I was like, all right, here we go. But I realized, listen, this is what we’ve been talking about this at the core for a while. At the core, we are human beings. We are human beings. Yes, I’m not the kind of person that believes we’re human beings or our identities don’t matter. No, no, no. We’re human beings and our identities matter and our lived experiences matter and our race and our culture and our gender expression and everything else, those things all matter. But at the core of it, we are human beings. At the core of it, we have all experienced that feeling, especially in our society of feeling like we are not enough, that we’re doing something wrong.

And I noticed, I apologize, there’s a gnat there. I’m gonna… I’m so afraid I’m going to eat the gnat. I apologize. You ever do that? I apologize.

Lyndsey: Summer problems.

Caroline: Or keep it in the podcast. Everyone can have a laugh. You ever be walking and the gnats are just flying out and then it’s over for like 10 minutes? I’m sorry. I got so distracted. Okay, bring it back.

So at the core, we are humans and in our society, if you look everywhere, everywhere you look, you realize that someone is dealing in some capacity with this ideology of: I’m not enough, I’m not good enough, I have to strive for more, I have to be better, something’s wrong with me. And that is not an accident.

And it’s obvious when you look at the history and you look at our culture and you see the type of culture we live in and you wonder, where did that come from? Why did we get to this point? I started asking questions, why do we have this hustle culture? Where did we get this obsession with being thin? Why are we taught certain things in school that cause us to think that some people are more intelligent than the other? Where did that idea that you have to pass a certain test in order to prove what you’re worth in order, as far as your education and your higher education and your career opportunities are concerned, where does that come from? And when you answer all of those questions, all those things that we would never even consider being connected to racism, when you answer those questions, you’ll realize, oh, that’s actually all intentionally connected to racism.

So when you realize just how much White supremacy affects us all, you can’t not address that. You can’t not address that, that because it is harming us all. And the third reason, I believe I counted correctly, the third reason is that when we went, excuse me, when we realize just how much something is affecting us personally, and while this is very selfish, it’s true, it’s human nature, we tend to care a little bit more.

We tend to realize, oh, this is why we need to do this work. There are so many people that when they see white supremacy, ooh, they are triggered. They think, oh, nope, you’re attacking white people, you’re blaming white people for your problems, and that’s because we have been trained as a society to have that mindset towards racism and towards especially post-Civil War era. So they’re triggered by that. They think, oh, how dare you speak about white people? How dare you say, X, Y, and Z, you’re just looking for things to point your problems about because they’re not realizing just how much they themselves are harmed by the same systems and structures.

So my hope is that people that would not normally pick up a book like this, would normally be feel triggered by the words white supremacy, would pick up this book and realize that it is harming us all and realize it’s not about an attack on a certain person or a certain race or the existence, even, of Whiteness. It’s about the idea that Whiteness is superior, Whiteness is supreme, and the society and culture we’ve created as a result, thus harming everyone in its path. So that’s why I dared to include that all in there.

Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah. I’m also, the other way people look at it is like- White people – is like, those people over there, the KKK people, they’re the White supremacists. They’re bad and by having an opposite political view from them, the problem is not with me or for me. I think that connecting to how it’s harming us all also helps to uncover where we’re participating in these things we don’t see and sometimes refuse to see.

You had put that about how it’s harming us all. The way you put it in the book is our society’s warning lights are worn out from flashing, which I think is so… I loved that metaphor. And I talk here on the podcast about crumbling empires. And I feel like there’s… Some people feel like that’s strong language. But you talk a lot about the many ways and it sort of keeps expanding out from like a cataclysmic January 6th center to all these other ways we’re seeing white supremacy and white supremacy culture corroding everything around us and everything even within us.

One quote is: “For us to heal, to reclaim our worth, we must not only dig deep enough to discover the roots of our collective feelings of unworthiness, but also dig deep enough to pull them all out together.” And you do a great job of keeping these things together of like, as individual, the first step is to heal ourselves and accept healing for ourselves. And the second step, the only way to continue and complete that healing, is also to insist on the healing of the world around us. And so I’m curious, like, so far on your journey, or even in places you’re observing around the country or around the world, how does that reciprocal relationship work? What does it look like to do both of those things at the same time? Or is there a relationship there that shifts and changes between the two? And how do you pull them together in a practical sense?

Caroline: Yeah, I think, like you pulled out with that quote, I think it’s always important to understand that our own healing, we do have to be a little bit selfish when we begin this process. As with any type of healing, right? I mean, it’s such a cliche, but there is a reason why they tell you to put your oxygen mask on first before you assist your children, because you can’t assist them if you aren’t getting the oxygen yourself. And that’s just so true with any sort of healing.

So even just taking this aside, I always encourage anybody, whatever it is, like you do have to work on your healing or at least begin that process, at least begin that journey. But I also emphasize too that I personally don’t believe that we’ll ever be fully healed from something, anything, whether it be our individual personal traumas or white supremacy culture and the trauma that it has caused us individually, collectively, I don’t think we’ll ever fully be healed because I do think that that’s something that we’ll achieve on the other side of heaven, but we can get closer and closer to that and we can get more and more healed and more and more whole and the more that we do, then the more that we are able to begin spreading that that healing or at least assisting or or encouraging whatever that looks like for you to those around us.

And I think we know when it’s when when we’re ready for that, you know, I think it’s, it’s kind of like, this is going to sound weird, but it’s kind of like when you know you’re ready to like date again. You know what I’m saying? Like when you’ve gone through a breakup and you’re just like, I’m working on myself, you know, I’m not looking for anybody right now. And then you don’t, it just kind of hits you out of nowhere when you realize that that work that you’ve been doing, that you’re ready to receive love again, or you’re ready to work on a relationship, you’re ready to invite that that other person in and the dynamics that come with that.

I think when it comes to this, it’s the same thing. I don’t think there’s any sort of rule that says, all right, what you’ve done, X, Y, and Z amount of healing, you’re ready to begin working with others and spreading that to somebody else, you’ll know.

Either it’ll be an opportunity that comes to you, either it’ll, you know, whether that be in a friendship of yours where you’re having a conversation with a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whomever, and you realize it’s an opportunity to share something, or you’re in an environment where you’re, you know, with a group of people, or you’re in a work environment, or something where you just realize that certain things, certain ways you used to see things, you see them differently now, you see yourself responding to things differently now. Maybe people start asking you questions about, oh, I’ve noticed a little shift in you, I’ve noticed you’ve changed your perspective here. Those opportunities will come and they’ll come organically.

And I think that’s the beauty of it. We don’t have to feel forced, it doesn’t have to feel like you have to meet some sort of standard. We’re saying no to those types of things, saying no to perfection. It’s all going to look different for all of us. And I think when we have our eyes opened, that those opportunities will come. As long as our eyes are open, we don’t have to force anything. I’m not sure if that 100% answers your question, but that’s the way that I would like to answer it, I guess, and hopefully that comes as far as a hopefulness and a little bit of a pressure off, because I know sometimes people will say, oh, this feels like a lot. I get it, I get it. Take a step, slow down, take a step back. You don’t have to save the world tomorrow. I promise, it’s gonna be all right.

Lyndsey: No, I love that answer. I actually, and I feel like that is an answer that resists the sort of infiltration of white supremacy culture into activism culture. Where it is like, things are wrong and we’re going to fix them and we’re going to fix them tomorrow.

Caroline: Right.

Lyndsey: And it just causes more harm, often, so often, so astoundingly often. And I think when we have started with our personal healing, we also can know how to continue to integrate that into our work in the world, rather than leaping into work or relationships or organizations that are triggering or bringing out the worst in us without us actually knowing – because we haven’t started from that place of integration with ourselves.

Caroline: Um, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Lyndsey: I actually, and I also, I was so grateful that you named the characteristics of white supremacy culture in your book. Um, because I, I find so many of these conversations just refuse for some reason to get very specific. Um, and also because I think once we’re being specific about some of these things, we know a little more what we’re dealing with. And we can be a little more aware and awake to those places where white supremacy is showing up in the organization around us or within ourselves. If we get good enough at naming these things, we can start to be like, Oh, I’m doing this thing and I didn’t mean to. And now it’s time to take a second and figure out where that came from for me so that I’m not contributing to its perpetuation around me.

So I’m just gonna name, save the list so that it can continue to be out there in the world.

Caroline: Yes, let’s do it.

Lyndsey: These are Dr. Tema Okun’s characteristics and I have seen some other lists that are also helpful, but I do come back to this one a lot. They’re time tested and well researched.

Fear,
perfectionism,
one right way,
paternalism,
objectivity,
Qualified,
either/or thinking,
denial,
defensiveness,
right to comfort,
fear of conflict,
individualism,
power hoarding,
progress equals more,
quantity over quality,
worship of the written word,
and, our favorite, urgency.

I am curious. If someone just read that list for the first time, how would how would someone understand first of all, what these words even mean? What they denote refer to? And what if people struggle to even imagine anything different for a business or a church, or their family or themselves? Where would we, where would they take this list in their life?

Caroline: Yeah, that’s such a good question. And actually that’s what my, my last chapter of the book helps a lot with. Um, I name the tenets of white supremacy culture. I kind of, and this is me taking Dr. Tema’s work and kind of bringing my own spin to it. And, um, five tenants of white supremacy culture that I believe pretty much everything can be lumped into and then what characteristics. are aligned with those tenets and then what the antidotes of those are. So if you read, when you read chapter 10, that’ll help you out in kind of understanding, well, how would this look if I was to do it differently?

Because you’re right, it is so hard to imagine when something so normalized, another way to do it. And that’s, and a lot of defensiveness comes up there too, because it’s like, well, wait a minute, why are you like, but it wouldn’t it just make sense for these standards to be in place? Because

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that’s what success is or that’s what professionalism looks like or that’s what prestigiousness looks like or whatever we’ve been taught, right? So it definitely comes up as a lot of times one of the first characteristics that you will display when you see that list is a little bit of defensiveness, like, whoa, whoa, what do you mean? Because I’ve been told that these are the right ways to be, the one right way to be, right? So I think that-

Lyndsey: And the either/or thinking is like- If we’re not going to do that, then we have to throw it all out and throw it all out. If people can’t have qualifications, then what is there?

Caroline: Exactly. No, no, no. You’re absolutely right. If people can’t have qualifications for something, then how will I know that they’re qualified? There’s that very either or black and white binary thinking. But you know, taking, for example, something about qualifications, it’s about looking at, well, what are the qualifications that you’re requiring and why? What are those rooted in? Why are they specific to? And then what, for example, if you’re, you know, say you run a business and you’re hiring somebody for a job and you have such and such qualifications, are you asking yourself what those are rooted in? Are you asking yourself for these equitable qualifications? Are you accepting more than one way to meet a qualification? Are you accepting more than one way to exhibit and exude professionalism?

There’s multiple ways to do so, but we’re taught that it’s a certain way to speak, a certain way to dress, a certain way to write. And that if it’s not those particular ways that one would essentially utilize when they’re writing an essay for the SAT, then it’s wrong. We’re writing their dissertation for their PhD. Then if you’re not, if you don’t sound like that, then you’re not professional. If you don’t sound like that, then you don’t represent somebody well.

This is actually such an, I don’t know why this just came. No, I do know why this came to me because I was just watching this show. But this, this example actually just came to me. So I’m obsessed with a show called All American. It’s on the CW. And it’s just wrapped up its fifth season. It’s going to go into a sixth season, by the way, everyone should watch it because there’s a spin off, All American Homecoming.

Those two shows are the first shows on the CW to have predominantly black casts. And they do an excellent job of portraying black culture in a realistic but positive way. Anyway, that – just watch it. And you can binge watch both shows on Netflix right now, all the way up into their current seasons. So do that.

But anyway, I was watching one of the episodes of one of the shows where One of the girls, just to give you a little picture, she is a black, queer, gay girl. In this episode, she’s about probably about 18. And the first show All American, it takes place in the Crenshaw neighborhood in Los Angeles, which was very well known to be one of the black neighborhood in that area. It’s known for a lot of gang activity and things of that nature.

And so this, the girl, her name is Coop, that’s what they all call her, her name is Tamiya Cooper, everyone calls her Coop, and she ends up going from being heavily involved in gang activities to taking her first pre-law class in a university, a made-up university in the area, of course. And she’s in that class, but of course, she doesn’t use – not of course, I shouldn’t say of course, that’s the wrong thing to say, but she, being from the Crenshaw neighborhood, being her upbringing, she doesn’t utilize the most prestigious law terms when she speaks. She speaks very just from the heart. She has an African American vernacular English dialect and she is more intelligent than every single person in her class. And because of her ability to be real and to break things down in a way that you can understand, all of her classmates love her. They’re able to understand the law.

I’m not sure if I’m even using the right terminology. I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. But the concepts essentially of the class, so much better when she breaks it down because she’s like, okay, listen. So so and so the did it and she’s kind of goes into it like forget all the terminology, forget being prestigious, forget, forget the advanced words and let’s just be real with it. That’s how she presents it.

And her classmates love her, but the professor is always on her because he has already stereotyped her. He’s already, you know, he looks at her like a charity case and constantly gets on her for the ways that she dresses. She dresses well. She dresses like a queer black woman. She has on like a vest and she has on some slacks and a belt and she got some cornrows in her hair. And she doesn’t look raggedy, but because she doesn’t dress like all the white girls in the class, he deems her as slouchy. Because she doesn’t sound like all the white girls in the class, he deems her as unprofessional and he essentially rags on her about the way that she’s presenting herself and she knows exactly what’s going on, she knows exactly how she’s being stereotyped in this class.

So all that to say, that’s when we’re looking at white supremacy culture, that’s what we mean by qualifications. We mean the specific types of qualifications that you think someone has to do or say in order to meet some sort of standard that essentially deems themselves worthy of whatever it is that they’re trying to achieve. That’s an example of that.

Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah. And I actually meant to quote this from your book right before you lay out this list, you write, “Most of the characteristics of white supremacy culture are in opposition to the cultural norms of Indigenous, African, Black, non-Westernized European and other non-white cultures because those cultures tend to focus more on collective community than on power, profit, and individualism.”

And so this made-up definition of professionalism helps to protect power, profit, and individualism for a certain group of people. And it also keeps us from that focus on collective community. It keeps, it would keep Coop from explaining things to her classmates.

Caroline: And really the lawyer that she wants to become, which is a lawyer for the people in her neighborhood, to have the type of representation that they that is essentially, um, usually not available for people that that are from neighborhoods like Crenshaw. That’s exactly why she’s doing what she’s doing and that’s exactly why the systems were created the way they were created exactly what you’re saying, you know, there’s there it’s it’s created to to to to create it. I’m saying the word create a lot, but it’s it’s there to to make sure there’s a divide between you know, white people and black people and what that hierarchy is supposed to look like socially, economically, and within, of course, the power and control in our country. That’s the reason why white supremacy exists. And then the way we see it playing out is an example like in Coop’s case.

Lyndsey: Oh, my gosh. I love that example so much because I feel like that’s one, the professionalism thing is one of those things where people are like, it’s not that big of a deal to put on a blazer and straighten your hair. And it’s like, well, first of all, if people say it’s a big deal, it’s a big deal. But second of all, it has all of these continuing downstream effects anyway that you just laid out so well.

And I did really love the third part of your book that was like, all right, here we go. We’re going to sit down and take this list and take as long as it takes to figure out where it’s showing up in your individual life. And so I had, I read this book in about a week for podcast purposes, but I will be going back through it and all the journal prompts and the last part for as long as it takes for probably a couple of months. Just for the reader to be aware, there’s a whole journaling component for you. So you’re not just like reading this stuff and then putting it down and weeping and not having any other recourse.

Caroline: Putting it down, putting it down and weeping! Did not want that to happen.

Lyndsey: And your book also, I want to mention for people interested in it, has a whole personal story we haven’t gotten to as well. And so throughout this, you’re also talking about healing from personal trauma as well as our collective racial trauma.

I just think for both of those things, there’s this temptation to be like, something bad happened and then I worked through it, and now I have progressed beyond that. And I really want to not frame the hard work and the horrible realizations and the difficult conversations and the losses and the grief. I don’t want to frame that as just…bad things.

Caroline: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndsey: But they’re part of who we become.

Caroline: No, I hear what you’re saying. I think it’s, it’s, it’s so important to understand that. And okay, so one thing that I that I make clear in my book is that I am I am a believer. I’m a deconstructing believer, but I’m a believer 100%. I do a lot of criticism of Christianity in the book, so don’t get it twisted, but I am a believer, and I 100% believe that the Lord takes our ashes and turns them into beauty. They’re not ashes that he intentionally caused. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that he’s a God that causes harm, so we can learn a lesson. I used to believe that. I used to feel that way.

But in my deconstructing of Christianity and Western evangelicalism, I’ve learned since that that’s not the God that we serve. But he is a God that will take every single dark thing that we’ve gone through and he will use them for his glory and use them for our good.

And so that is how I view the difficult, every single difficult moment, the reliving of the trauma that we have experienced, understanding that there is going to be trauma in our futures. It’s going to happen. That’s part of the human experience. And we will have to continue to rework not only these particular steps that I have in the book in that, but also other things that are only healing. That’s why I say healing is ongoing. It’s ever present.

Sometimes we have to start over. Sometimes we have to pause from it even. It’s hard and it’s messy work, not to sound cliche, but it is. It’s hard, messy work that’s extremely meaningful. And I hear you, like to not just think of it as like all this bad thing that I have to get over. I’m going to get to the other side. I’m going to dance in the mirror. I’m going to sing Beyonce and everything’s going to live happily ever after. No, not at all. I sing Beyonce in the mirror and then I have days where I have to go through an entire process all over again of learning how to love myself because I still fall into those mindsets. I still fall into those frames of thinking. I may have seen something on Instagram that triggered me.

It’s ongoing, but that’s okay because I’ve learned and I’ve grown in that process. So I have the tools to equip me every time I get knocked down and you will too. Um, in, in this book and, and many other resources, I’m, I’m, believe me, it’s just one of many resources that I hope that people can have in their, in their tool belt.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I loved your resource list at the back of your book. You may have just answered this. I love to wrap up asking interviewees, how do you define hope and where are you finding it in your life right now?

Caroline: Mm. I’ve never actually thought about how I define hope. That’s a good one. I’ve never I’ve just never actually put like a like a definition to it.

Lyndsey: I’ve been really I’ve been like very stuck on this question for like a few years since I heard Ta-Nehisi Coates be like, you know, I don’t have to be hopeful. I don’t have to. I’m like, wait, that’s I hope is in my Bible. Not that Ta-Nehisi Coates has to care, but I have to figure out what this means to me. So I’m always curious where people are with that.

Caroline: And I feel what Ta-Nehisi Coates is saying, one of my favorite authors, because there are days where you just don’t have hope. And I think those days are OK. I do. I used to feel shame, shameful. I used to feel ashamed. That’s what I’m looking for. I used to feel ashamed when I felt hopeless because I felt like I was doing something wrong as a Christian. Because as a Christian, I should always be hopeful. I should always be faithful. I should always be did it. But that can sometimes cause you to neglect your very human emotions as well. And allowing you to sit with those heart emotions of being like, this does not feel hopeful right now. I don’t know why I’m doing this.

But I think when you actually feel that, then when you get up the next day, that hope is oftentimes renewed because the Lord can come in and like, all right, you got that out and now I can come in with my goodness and I can renew that hope for you. But I do think when we force ourselves to feel like we have to always be hopeful and have to always be faithful and we don’t allow ourselves to go through the ebbs and flows of what hopefulness looks like and feels like that actually causes more harm than good.

I think if I were to define hope, it is number one, it is God. I know that the times when I feel hopeless, it is through God that I’m able to get back up again the next day and have renewed hope. I know that I can’t do that on my own. That would be the one definition I guess I would put to it.

But also hope is, I find hope in humanity because I don’t know if this is the definition, but I can say where I find hope, I do find hope in humanity. I think that humans are beautiful. We are beautiful, complex creatures who love and laugh and cry. And, and I look at our children and I look at, at, at goodness happening around me. I look at conversations that I may have had with somebody in the store when she’s trying on jeans and I’m trying on jeans like, Oh girl, you look good in those jeans. Okay. I see you, you know, little things like that, or, or just even going on Tik Tok and looking at a hilarious video and you’re just busting out laughing because humans are hilarious. Like humans are fascinating people. We are awesome. And I really do find a lot of hope in humanity as a whole.

I do think that we will be okay. I think we got a long way to go, but I do think we’ll be okay. And I think that’s because we are sometimes the hope. We’re not giving up on ourselves, you know? And I think when we lose hope is when we’ve given up on ourselves. And we can’t afford to do that. I don’t think we will. So I’m not sure if that defines or answers the question for you, but.

Lyndsey: Absolutely it does.

Caroline: That’s what comes to my mind.

Lyndsey: I love it. Caroline J. Sumlin, thank you for being here. Your book is, We’ll All Be Free: How a Culture of White Supremacy Devalues Us and How We Can Reclaim Our True Worth.

42:22
It’s really good. It’s a resource I’m going to be coming back to a lot. And your Instagram also, I do not sit and look at infographics on Instagram very much. I don’t normally think that’s a useful place for me to absorb information, but I really like yours. And if people really want to get into more of the details of where we’re alluding to histories and systems and the definition of White supremacy, etc. You have these really helpful resources on your Instagram as well. So that’s @carolinejsumlin and We’ll All Be Free, and we’ll link to the book and Caroline’s website in the show notes.

Lyndsey: You’ve been listening to Crumbling Empires with me, Lyndsay Medford. As I speak right now, I am 35, 34 weeks pregnant. As you’re listening to this, I will probably be snuggling my newborn. So getting these podcast episodes and essays all lined up for my maternity leave has been such a joy and it’s been a labor of love. So if you are appreciating the podcast, if you would like to get more essays from me in your inbox, and hear how baby life is going, go ahead and join me over at lyndseymedford.substack.com as a subscriber or as a paid subscriber to help keep it going and to continue to share about living in crumbling empires with realism and with hope. Thank you so much for listening.

Click here to listen to this interview.

Lyndsey: Hi, welcome to Crumbling Empires. I’m here with Sarah Billups, the author of Orphaned Believers, and I’m super excited to share this book and to hear from Sarah. Orphaned Believers: how a generation of Christian exiles can find the way home. I think even in that word “exile,” there’s a lot of crossover with the idea of crumbling empires. So We’re really glad to have you here. Thanks for coming on, Sara.

Sara: Thanks for having me, Lyndsey. I’m really looking forward to talking to you. And, you know, we’ve been connected online for a minute, so it’s nice to actually have time to chat screen to screen.

Lyndsey: It really is. Yes. Um, so I wanted to start this time with a quote from the end of the book. Um, so you wrote:
“The white evangelical church is rupturing for several reasons, including the industry of fear that was built around end times, culture wars that divided families and congregations with single issue voting and nationalism, and a lack of spiritual formation that was no match to consumerism. The market has told us that instead of losing our life to find it, there is a way to self-actualize our best life, to keep spending until we find peace of mind and purpose.

The church is an institution, and any institution is really just a bunch of broken people. People aware of their brokenness are the most human. We are empathetic, in touch, and have eyes open to hypocrisy. We are the ones with the power to change things.”

So this quote, you wrote that the White Evangelical Church is rupturing. In my somewhat limited experience, that seems, that’s my sense of things. But you also wrote that more people started identifying as evangelical while Trump was in office than stopped–like that identifier grew. So is white evangelicalism, in your opinion, is it a crumbling empire or not?

Sara: Ooh, I like that question. That’s a good one. I mean, yeah, that was, that stat was interesting to come across in research because I think that a lot of folks that have been in church for a while or that are struggling to figure out our relationship with church, you know, we see people leaving or maybe we’ve left, maybe we’re taking a break. The kind of common narrative, at least in my circles here in Seattle, is that churches are hemorrhaging young people.

But because of a sort of flavor of, and I would say an echo of, any sort of actual Christian narrative, because of the Christian nationalist narrative being preached from the pulpit in many, many churches that I think have completely conflated politics and faith. These churches are growing because there’s a subculture that I would argue is very much not about the upside down kingdom Jesus invites us to, but it’s very much about identifying as a person who is maybe seeing demographics change or shift in America, is seeing that becoming, is concerned about security or is concerned about change or pluralism, and so is really grasping at identity and community around nationalist rhetoric. And so those churches are swelling or like busting out the seams.

And so interestingly, so I do think, I do think there’s different ways to talk about it. I mean, if I were to put a whiteboard behind me and just sort of mark out, here’s, you know, I’m not Catholic or Greek Orthodox, I’m Protestant. I don’t identify as a liberal Protestant, so I’m. I grew up in an evangelical tradition. Like I could flow chart it out and say, yeah, I’m an evangelical. I mean, I go to an Anglican church right now, in the ACNA, but there’s a way that if it was just not emotional or more mathematic, you could certainly see the trace of evangelicalism, but there is a great social cost in identifying as evangelical when there are many, many people and the general public perception of evangelical today is certainly white Republican, racist, sexist, a lot of ists and isms.

So I think the real question for those of us that came up in the tradition is, where is the, like, what matters and what do we want to keep and what do we want to set aside? And so for me, as a result of researching orphaned believers and writing the book, like, I am more convinced than ever at the potential beauty of the church just being the gathered body of believers that Jesus left us with, you know, I think that’s really lovely. On the question of what that means for evangelicalism to begin with, I mean, yeah, I’d say evangelicalism is a crumbling empire, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are not sort of like blooms or sprouts or things to keep or preserve or hold on to in the midst of a lot of brokenness.

And the last thing I’d say, I think is that the headlines we see for a lot of good reasons are about abuse, celebrity pastor. I mean, you know the list as well as I do, Lyndsey, but the sort of ordinary folks working quietly that don’t make headlines, that are just doing really good work in their communities that go to evangelical churches around America are certainly active and lovely people, and certainly globally, evangelicalism expresses itself differently. So I think it’s complicated. So I’m really careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater while being clear that there are real systemic issues that are quite broken and need to be reformed.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I really appreciated that you’re calling back to the global church and churches and institutions of color inside the US and historical traditions like Catholicism as resources and also as just these, even these precious things that evangelicalism actively threw away for a while and how much we have to relearn even about the heart of Christianity itself from these other Christians.

Sara: Growing up, Catholicism was considered, like, I don’t think that, you know, I was basically told we should be suspicious, there’s a lot of smells and bells. They’re probably not really Christian. I mean, there is a, and that’s sort of a historic, there’s been the anti-Catholic rhetoric for a long time. I mean, that’s not like a new thing, but that really showed up for my family. And I think a lot of families in the eighties and nineties.

Lyndsey: yeah, no, yeah. And we’re, I think we’re about 10 years apart. So I’m like firmly in the millennial generation.

Sara: And I have one foot in millennial, one foot in Gen X.

Lyndsey: Yes, you do. And that’s like a really fun part of this book, actually, is how much you let that meditation on generational differences infuse this whole story. But my point was just that we, I also remember us, our family, trying to convert a neighbor from Catholicism to Christianity.
I was a child. And yeah, I had no idea what Catholicism even was, but just that it wasn’t quite right enough to be right.

And yeah, there’s a couple of things going on in this book. There’s like the historical piece of like, understanding where all this came from, and then there’s the really, and there’s a theological piece of like, what are we salvaging? How? Where are we going? How do we– Where does an Orphaned Believer go? And how do we find God again? And then there’s just the really personal piece that’s not even always so much of a theological conversation about just grieving something you have lost but still love. That I think I’ve even heard a lot of other people say they really resonated with about this book and that was really healing for them about reading this book. There’s a sort of a motif throughout the book where you’re talking about your relationship with your dad, which so many of us are trying to navigate in ways that feel just extremely specific to our own families and then also extremely stereotypical or stories you hear over and over again. And I also I found the the metaphor of your own falling-down childhood house very moving, actually.

Sara: Yeah, yeah, I found a listing of the I grew up in an Indiana ranch in a cul-de-sac built in the fifties, and I found a listing of it on like Zillow. And the way it was foreclosed and the way it was listed was almost like they were breaking it down for parts. Like the house has closet, like toilet, shower. It was just so weird. Like it was very functional. And then thinking about the very visceral memories I have of growing up there and going through puberty and these sort of big events like the Berlin Wall falling, that sort of distance between those two, my memory and the explanation was really interesting to find.

Lyndsey: Yeah, that is funny. And I think there’s a resistance to just wanting to not feel like we’re breaking down our childhood faith for parts. Even though that might be sort of like an easy answer or a systematic way of going about organizing this very amorphous, emotional thing we have been tasked with.

Sara: Totally. Yeah, that’s right. And there’s this way that I think when we kind of grow up and decide how we’re going to claim a faith if we were raised in Christianity, if we’re going to claim that and how there’s this other, just to keep going with that metaphor of like leaving the family home, there’s this other way of sort of launching out and seeing what happens. And for me, that ended up being a lot of bewilderment and kind of wandering around a spiritual desert for a while. It took me a long time. I’m in my mid forties and I’d say it took until my late 30s to really find an orientation back to faith in a way that was growing and flourishing. So yeah, I think that we can play that metaphor a little bit more. I like that one.

Lyndsey: Yeah. And that’s very encouraging to hear. If I was at the beginning of my own bewilderment, that would be very discouraging to hear. But now that I have been through a few iterations of this wandering, it is helpful to hear you say, you go and you come back and you go where you need to be. You discover eventually that it was where you needed to be.

Sara: Yeah, I think that there is a, I remember hearing, there was a NPR interview with a Christian writer and I’ve tried, I mean, I’ve probably spent hours trying to find this tape. Lyndsey, I can’t remember what it was and it makes me, it’s just this unanswered question. But I was in my late twenties when I heard it and I stopped and turned it up and I called my husband into the room because this person said that he had spent 10 years of affliction where he just did not hear from God, where it was just 10 years of wandering. And I remember thinking that is wild and I cannot imagine.
I cannot imagine what that would be like. It was just unimaginable to me. And after having 12 years of an experience like that myself, like I not only see that if we are given the gift of a long enough life, which is a privilege if we are, there is sometimes it takes a little while, you know? And then also I think I just began to realize, especially through the pandemic, like many of us, that the empathy that can come, the way that we can look around and see a lot of other people in a similar place. Like all along the way, even in seasons of wandering or bewilderment, there are markers, there are little Ebenezers or markers of hope or community. There are things to hold on to. There are some handholds, I think, in long seasons of wandering.

Lyndsey: So you kind of walk through three aspects of white evangelicalism that a true Christian counterculture, as you name it, might be looking to undo and relearn an entirely new paradigm and way. And so those are Christian nationalism, consumerism, and looking towards the end of the world, perhaps in various forms. And there’s a political element to that end of the world as well that you talk about. And as you’re talking, it’s making me think, you know, in a lot of ways, I wonder if the nationalism and the consumerism, as things that give us a semblance of an identity and things that give us a feeling of purpose, sort of, are also ways of resisting that call into a wilderness.

And even even when I think about– you talk really beautifully about how people can have really good intentions from their own point of view, and also cause pain. And I think that’s just a really important lesson to learn as adults that’s that’s like, hard to teach kids sometimes, I think. And anyway, I see how a parent or a pastor or a leader could really want to protect a younger Christian from the pain of that wilderness and feel like they’re doing the right thing. But also we end up constrained and quote unquote protected from the beauty and the wildness and the humanity.

Sara: I love that. I hadn’t, you know, I hadn’t put together, I had put together you know, nationalism, consumerism, various identities in the market, whatever they may be as a form of some kind of some kind of community or collective identity. But the idea that those things are also a means for avoidance is really connecting them like that is really interesting and makes so much sense. Yeah, I think that’s right. And the thing that I think the better way the healthier way through, and I say this as a person that learned the hard way, the better way through seasons of wilderness then would be a awareness of how politics and exceptionalism and capitalism try to kind of infiltrate our soul, like on a spiritual level. But really to be, I think that’s an invitation to being well-formed, to spiritual formation as an inoculation against the forces that sort of want our identity or wanna give us belonging. When really, I think belonging, if we identify as Christians, is a beautiful invitation towards the upside down kingdom.

Lyndsey: Yes, and that is exactly where I wanted to go as well. That spiritual formation, as you point out, is so much more than Bible drills, or having the answers.
You write about cultivating imagination and cultivating all these other pieces of ourselves and ways of relating with God and just skills that we need to make our way through not having the answer but finding where God is leading us in one in a present moment.

And I also I think that’s so, just so astute and so even urgent or maybe, I don’t know if that’s word, urgent for me right now that this is what Jesus did in amidst an empire that was decaying and amidst injustice on many sides. Jesus called people into imagination and Jesus offered people new ways of relating to each other and to God and so, he talks a lot about spiritual practices and prayer and community. And so I want to, I just want to hear you talk about spiritual practices, spiritual formation that has helped you ground in love and truth, either the ones in the book or anything else.

Sara: Yes, there are so many competing forces for our attention, our time, our spiritual energy that it’s easy to be swept away. And so I think that for me, part of becoming better formed spiritually meant going back to the basics. I guess just talking practically for a second, there is a woman named Debbie Tacky Smith, who I started to work with in spiritual direction in maybe 2018, 2017, and that was a profound gift personally, because as a writer and an Enneagram Four and someone that has an imagination that I think can get me into trouble sometimes when it comes to anxiety, it’s kind of the other edge of that. Being guided into visual prayer, you know, we would do prayers where she would, you know, rooms of the heart where you would sort of sit in silence and imagine a room of your heart and where God, where Jesus was interacting in that space, or lectio divina, visual prayer, putting yourself in the scene. I’d never done anything like that before. And it was, it was really, it really resonated with the way that I think and pray. And I think with a lot of folks that lean mildly creative or visual, it can be quite helpful.

And so I think that doing so interestingly led me to more empathy, helped me to kind of humanize. Like I think that culture wars tell us to make a bad guy or an enemy or an us versus them. But I think that I was able to start to see my family and other people that maybe are across the aisle from me politically or socially or whatever with more empathy by being able to visualize the way that I think we’re all really loved.

And so that’s the other thing that happened. I spent a couple of years just reading just a various verse a day and just sitting for a few minutes about God’s love, because I think that a lot of us here, if we grow up Christians, from the time we’re quite small, that we’re loved by Jesus. But being able to really believe that is something that I’m still working on, and it takes a long time. I really was invited back to the basics to really understand that if we are made beings, and if God is good and God is real, that we are loved. And so just very fundamental pieces like that were where I started and has kind of led into more liturgy.

Because liturgy just means the work of the people, it’s how we’re formed. And so I was raised in a very American liturgy. My liturgy was going to the mall on the weekends. My liturgy was sugary cereal and then going to church on Sunday. I mean, there’s something wrong with the way that my heart was oriented towards various things that I think were not good for me, were not vitamins, but were kind of like spiritual. I just wanna say junk food, that’s kind of corny, but really just sort of understanding what feeds our soul in a way that’s healthy, that can then orient our hearts towards justice, towards service, towards other people around us has been a pretty big shift in the way I think about my faith these days.

Lyndsey: Yeah, um, me too. I feel, I think of these three things, between, um, anticipating the end of the world and Christian nationalism and consumerism, I think consumerism is definitely the most insidious and the one, um, that’s most difficult to disentangle from, even when, even once we’re like, “Christian nationalism is the devil!” We might even say consumerism is the devil, but you even write in your book about how that impulse morphs. And so I am also in that space of looking for the daily formation away from that.

Sara: I’m still understanding in my childhood how consumerism formed me and has impacted the church, the American church in a lot of ways. I think that I have a cognitive understanding of that. I have an understanding and acceptance of how that may have formed my childhood. But I’ve really lately, after writing Orphan to Believers, been inviting myself, I hope in a way that I would like a friend to say, like, if I looked at what I’m browsing at night, like if I look at what I’m taking in, If I consider my receipts, if I look at my bank account, like, how am I living? How am I modeling that for my kids? Just like, what is different? Like, what is an invitation to continue to go deeper and to shift and to do that kindly, but with like self accountability? And so I think that there’s an invitation just from me personally to continue to be honest about those things.

I mean, for example, just with social media and being a person that identifies as a woman and a writer and a Christian there is–as I’m sure You’ve experienced, Lyndsey–a real conflation between self-help and wellness and faith that is is certainly concerning to me. But I see myself and how am I am I doing that subconsciously or consciously am I comparing myself to other people? How am I interacting? What am I projecting? How are other people just that that whole world?

It’s endlessly fascinating to me. So that’s a whole other reason that I’m trying. I think that, I guess I’m just saying, I think the work is ongoing and there’s an invitation to continue to go deeper into it.

Lyndsey: Yes, I, maybe we don’t have time to go this way, and this may not be relevant to everyone, but that there is such an important aspect of that consumer ideology that becomes even more insidious when you are, feel compelled to try to be consumable. And there’s serving a marketplace and then there’s meeting people where they are. And then there’s being a consumable brand.

Sara: Yeah. And that’s the… I know that we’re… I don’t want to go too far, I feel, but the last thing I’d say about that really quickly is there’s this point when you are a person that writes a book about Christianity and you see that you are trying to sell that book. It is so easy to build a career and a life and then name on talking about the church, but then you are no longer formed or shaped or changed. There’s this way that you can build a whole platform and life and name in a way that is done much more insidiously by celebrity pastors and lights and big money churches or whatever. But like It’s so easy to do. So how are we invited gently again and again towards the way that Jesus models the first being last? How do we protect ourselves from that space? It’s really top of mind. How do I continue to call myself out in a way that’s, I hope, for the benefit of being a person that loves people better?

Lyndsey: Yeah, and I do think those practices of formation and imagination and prayer are places where we find another way, in a positive direction rather than a judgmental, overly analytical, overly suspicious, joyless way. That’s very easy to, you know, in the consumerism conversation.

Anyway, I want to shift gears because I think there’s a whole other part of your book that would also really resonate or be of a lot of interest to my readers and listeners, which is this whole weird, weird interconnection between the rapture stories and ideologies and Christian nationalism, and how that’s continuing into politics today even though we don’t have the satanic panic as much and no one’s really reading Left Behind anymore. So, and you come back to this over and over, that your dad continues to believe as he has since the 1970s that the rapture will occur in his lifetime, which since he was not even a very young adult in the 1970s, his lifetime is shortening.

And I… So the rapture, again, this was something that I lived with, this weird… And so many of my friends have these stories, and in retrospect, you know, of all the things that our churches thought we were facing and needed to be dealing with in life, this really became a central one. Like, are you ready to be raptured at every moment? And at the same time, it was not as huge for me as it was in your life. It felt a little, there was always the admission that most of us may not live to see it.

And so but at the same time, I this returning to this motif and thinking deeply about this element of evangelicalism, really got me thinking a lot about belief and truth and information and where we find how much of that has potentially contributed to the really dire confusion about competing truth claims and factual claims. Well outside of religious life now. And you compare it to QAnon.

There’s so many directions and questions I’m trying to ask you right now. I found it really fascinating that your family felt, your church family and your family felt so compelled to distinguish yourselves from Pentecostalism, as if maybe that legitimated the rapture part or made it seem more academic or reasonable. I think, and of course, some candidates have declared for the election that’s trying to get rolling that I am dreading. How are you thinking about truth claims, information, and faith?

Sara: Yeah, well, a couple thoughts. So interestingly, yeah, my dad still believes that he’ll be raptured before he dies and he has treatable but not curable bone cancer. So it is an interesting, I write in the book that I was convinced he was just avoiding what’s coming. And so we took this trip to the ocean. And I just brought my laptop and sat in the front seat and asked some questions and listened for a couple hours. And I wanted to understand what it would look like today for somebody to believe the rapture will come soon, to have a view of the book of Revelation that’s, you know, pre-millennial dispensationalist.

And also what that meant about how we thought about things today, how that affected politics, and also about healing, you know, because my dad, when he got sick, had a pretty profound experience in the hospital that he considers a healing experience, spiritually if not physically, but yet we were raised, he was, he’s a cessationist, he thinks that spiritual gifts ended with the early church and so doesn’t believe in miraculous things right now. And so there’s all sorts of contradictions, but the thing that I think is interesting, the through line to, I think, misinformation and conspiracy theories today is that when you grew up, I grew up in a house where we thought we knew this sort of secret truth that we wanted to tell other people. For me, I was a kid, so it felt melodramatic or like I had this sort of intense need to share what I knew to be true, what I was told was true.

But there’s a sense of exceptionalism that can come when, and a power dynamic that is just naturally in place when you happen to be in a position where you know how things are gonna go down, you truly believe that you do. And so I think looking at QAnon, which has been a heartbreaking way that many people have really lost family members, just such a intense and sad and complex thing, but really the reasoning I think holds true that when you think that you know the secret, they pull the curtain back of what’s actually going on in the government or in politics or in the world or with whatever people are kind of pulling the puppet strings, there’s this way that you have a sense of power. And that’s a really hard thing to give up. And in fact, I think you would do a lot to keep it, including estranging yourself from family or including going deeper, almost like pulling, almost like opening like, what are those like Russian dolls? Like maybe if I just open one more, there’s just this way that you’re seeking, you’re, you’re looking and you’re sort of take a posture of suspicion.

And so, um, so I think that even though end times culture and held in these like late great planet earth and Christian scare movies, which now sound a little campy and are kind of hokey, right? Like even though it’s a different era, it’s really the same kind of core human emotion, desire, need, we’re all just trying to feel like we’re in control and we know what’s going on because we’re scared, right? So that’s, that’s, that’s like the throughline’s pretty clear, I think, you know, between these things.

Lyndsey: Yeah. And I have very strong reasons why I think this is different, but I also, it really has me thinking that when I talk about systems and structures and histories that are forming our experience of life in ways that we do not see and often are not meant to see, I understand that to many people that reads very similar to conspiracy.

Sara: Oh that’s so interesting. Oh interesting. Okay.

Lyndsey: Which has become I I’m starting to see more people on social media in particular talking about losing their family to leftist ideologies in ways that may sometimes be exaggerated, are probably often exaggerated. And also, I recognize that impulse to seize control of a narrative and a cause and effect problem solution way of looking at things.

Sara: Yeah, that’s such a human thing. That’s so universal regardless of any identifiers, politically or socially.

Lyndsey: Yeah, and so that was one more thing I really was convicted and inspired by about your writing here was that you were not shy to name these systems and structures, not shy to talk about doing justice as essential to what faith in Jesus is, and to name even whiteness, and some of the more unpopular idols for naming, and also the grace you were talking about finding for your family and for others in God’s love for all of us, feels very refreshing to me that we can have that without, and it doesn’t equal compromise.

Sara: Yeah. I mean, for me, it’s important to, I’m not trying to burn it down. I’m trying to bring, I think we are called to bring truth to light, to speak truth to power. I think that surfacing the many things that are wrong. I mean, sometimes people say, why should we talk about difficult stuff? Isn’t it just going to highlight what’s wrong? And we need to be positive. Like, no, like, we need to talk about what’s wrong boldly, clearly, plainly with conviction. And I think personally that is, and it is because we’re convicted that there is something compelling about the way of Jesus, that if this whole thing is true, if this is really true, this is our time. And it’s our time to make things better and to work together to bring restoration and healing and justice.

And so I try to end the book with hope. And I actually truly feel hope that there are many of us working to reform and change and grow, the community of Christians in America that are actually trying to pursue Jesus right now, not some sort of politically changed version of that. So for me, it was important to end with hope because I actually do feel hope, which is a little ironic after researching this book, but it’s a wonderful grace that I do really bear it and hold it today.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I also try to end with hope even though if someone else forced that, um, forced a hope question on me at the end of an interview, I might take it somewhere weird.

Sara: Yeah.

Lyndsey: Usually my final question is how do you define hope and where are you finding it right now? Yeah. Um, I mean, I think that I’m, I’m thinking three, like three different things. So I’ve gone to the same church for 18 years, Presbyterian forever, we all voted to become Anglican. The church has over 18 years gone through so many, like so many ups and downs, just seen many waves of people. When Mars Hill ended in Seattle in 2014, we just doubled in a Sunday. I mean, just really being sort of faithful to this community for so long, even though there were various seasons.
There’s something that I was talking about last night–We had a meeting–that I think is shifting. Like I am hopeful that even after the pandemic, after masks, after the way that the murder of George Floyd was politicized. I mean, again, after all that we’re going through and have been through in American Christianity and in politics, I think that there are still like a magnet, like maybe a gentle pull towards people that are following Jesus finding each other. And so I feel hope that the church will remain.

And for me right now, that looks like an actual congregation on Sundays. For a lot of people in my life, that means taking a break, but not isolating, but pursuing someone else to talk to. For some people, that means an online space. Like when I say church, I mean that loosely and openly, but I mean finding each other and coming together. Because I think there’s something really beautiful about collective worship and expression.

So I really do think that a lot of us are looking around and think nodding our heads, thinking like, we’re still here and there’s something good. And so it’s bringing me a lot of hope to think that maybe that will continue. Like maybe, I don’t know that anyone’s turned a corner. Maybe things will just get worse. Maybe denominations will keep dividing and things will keep coming. That’s not really what I mean. There’s just a hope I think in our humanity and our kind of shared need for community. And for me right now, that’s enough.

Lyndsey: Yes, for me too. I’m so glad to connect with you as a fellow Orphaned Believer, and so grateful for your work in this book, Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home.

Sara: Thank you, Lyndsey. This has been such a lovely conversation. Grateful for you, grateful for your work.

Lyndsey: Absolutely, thanks for being here.

Lyndsey:
Wow, thank you to Sarah Billups for joining us for this episode. Thank you to you for listening. If you’re enjoying our podcast interviews and audio essays on the Crumbling Empires feed, we would love to have your support on their new paid Substack that we just launched. Paid members are going to get two extra essays a month and those will also be available as audio versions on a secret podcast feed. So, and that’s a great way to support the time that goes into this podcast, the accessibility of recording all the essays and audio and putting all the interviews via transcript online, so your support is needed and appreciated. We’ll see you next time on Crumbling Empires. Thanks a lot!

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Hi! Welcome to Crumbling Empires, a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I’m Lyndsey Medford and this show is a branch of my Substack newsletter that you can find at lyndseymedford.substack.com. You can also read a transcript of this interview by looking in the show notes for the link to that.
I had such a great time talking with Kim, Noel Zeller, and Aaron Stribus about parenting in the midst of crumbling empires. So let’s get to it!

Lyndsey: Hi, welcome to crumbling empires. I’m here today with Kim Knowle-Zeller, and Erin Strybis. They are the authors of a new book called The Beauty of Motherhood, Grace-filled Devotions for the Early Years. Thank you so much for being here!

Kim: Thanks. We’re so glad to be here.

Erin: Thanks for having us, Lyndsey.

Lyndsey: Kim is a pastor in the Lutheran Church in America and a mother of two. And Erin is a writer and mom of two and a former editor of Living Lutheran. So they are working moms. And of course, I have a vested and very biased and personal interest in this conversation.
if you haven’t kept up with me on social media. I am five months pregnant now and so I’m personally super excited about this conversation. I’m also, as a person in the world and a fellow author and a Christian person, very excited that this book.

And of course all these questions are addressed to both or either of y’all.

What spiritual or faith background, or even assumptions about the narrative of motherhood, did you bring into your own experience of motherhood? Before this book existed, I suppose.

Kim: I love that question. So both Erin and I have grown up in the Lutheran church and it’s been our home for many, many years. And so in the Lutheran church, we fall back on grace over and over again. And that’s been the driving force in our book. And so we brought that into the book because what we had been experiencing in motherhood, but also just Christian life in different circles and groups and college or in our church communities, is that sometimes it feels like you have this pressure to do and be the perfect wife, mom, Christian. And so there’s never any attainment of that. And it brings a lot of, can bring some guilt and frustration. And so we brought that counter story into our writing, that there is grace for the mom, grace for us. And that was what led the way as we were writing.

Lyndsey: That’s awesome, that’s beautiful. I read somewhere else in an interview or something with y’all that you were looking around for a progressive devotional or spiritual journey of some sort about motherhood and you couldn’t find it, which really surprised me. And–not that I have searched out a lot of resources about motherhood up until now–but then I thought about it and I haven’t run across that many. I did just want to hear what progressive actually means to you, because I like to tease out that term that we like to just throw around as if we all know what it means. And what is progressive faith and maybe what is progressive motherhood?

Erin: Wow, that’s a meaty question. I want to just go back to kind of that story that you were referencing about. I was searching for devotionals when I first became a mom, when I went back to work, and it was a very challenging time for me. I remember just feeling wracked with guilt when I stepped back into my role as an editor. I felt just very torn between that vocation and then the vocation of motherhood and feeling like I couldn’t do either one well, and then I was being set up to fail.

And so I think some of what Kim was saying earlier about this book being very much grounded in grace is something that I was looking for in a resource that I was just really struggling to find. And there are so many devotionals for moms out there on the market. So when we say we identify as Christians who are progressive, I think what I mean by that is I’m really just informed by my Lutheran upbringing, a faith that honors social justice and some of the messages of Jesus to minister to those on the margins and to really be focused on the liberation of others, as well as honoring and loving all. And when we welcome others into the church, we really mean to include others.

So that’s part of that. I don’t think it’s a whole definition, but I also want to note that when we were writing this book, even though we were writing from our perspective as members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, we very much ended up writing a book that is inclusive. So however you identify faith-wise, Christian faith-wise, we really feel like we wrote in such a way that we hope that these stories can be for you.

I think inclusivity is one of our core values as writers. And so we focused on, you know, the gospel and shared messages of hope and love with others while knowing that we didn’t want to necessarily pigeonhole the writer–or the reader, I’m sorry–into a label necessarily. But I do think some of these devotions that we wrote speak to an inclusive faith that again, Kim has already said it’s grounded in grace. And I’m thinking of one in particular that sort of speaks to there’s a there’s a devotional I wrote called We Are One. And it’s about my son praying a prayer that he actually learned from his Montessori school at the dinner table. And it honors and acknowledges the wide variety of faiths that exist in the world. And called us as a family to consider how we are one with others and honor the dignity of all. And so there’s devotions like that that kind of lift up different aspects of our faith tradition.

Lyndsey: Cool. Yeah, I thank you for that. And I agree wholeheartedly. I’m glad you said that. That it is not just Lutheran. Because the extent of my Lutheranism is like really appreciating Nadia Bolz Weber, you know, but I’m somewhat United Methodist and somewhat Episcopalian and a little bit closet Catholic. So, and all of this really spoke to me. And I think if people don’t know what Lutheranism is, you know, a really great definition is, as y’all have mentioned, the focus on grace. And that really comes through here. And it’s really even in the experience of reading it and not just the–not, like, theological words about grace, but the sense of being come alongside and welcomed. And so I appreciate that from y’all.

Kim:Thanks. That was our hope that in sharing our stories of where grace is breaking in: that moms and families will be invited to see their own experiences of grace and to share that with others.

Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah. I think that I’m really excited to see how that unfolds because I feel that really strongly.

Erin, you just mentioned going back to work. One of these devotions is about that experience in particular. Another one of them is about the emotional labor that moms end up carrying for families, and you might say also for organizations and workplaces and stuff. So I appreciated that these structural issues were kind of addressed in those spaces. I’m wondering how you were thinking in any broader sense or in your lives, how that contributed to your experience of living and writing this book–to pay the attention to those wider structural issues that women and mothers face in particular. And then I also wanted to know how this prayer and practice that you are guiding us through in this book, help you as you are facing those systemic big things that we face.

Erin: Well, yes, that’s a lot. And I just want to acknowledge, you know, I think we both, as Kim mentioned already, from the aspect of storytelling, we wrote this book, knowing that in order to speak truth, it’s really helpful as a writer to write very specifically about the challenges you’re facing. Also knowing that some of the challenges that I face as a privileged white woman are not necessarily representative of the whole of all these structural issues moms face, especially in the United States, but all over.

Moms receive so many conflicting messages about what it means to be a good mom. And so I think when I was just writing my personal stories and a universal truth that might come out of that and a gospel hope that might come out of it. I definitely wanted to push back against some of these challenges while just acknowledging that they exist.

So this book is not necessarily a book of solutions so much as it is about honest storytelling and then finding probably some hope in the stories in support of others that are around us. So in the instance of the devotion that I write about going back to work, I’m finding hope and God’s presence in the face of other mothers who I see are overcoming and still facing these challenges, but as I see living into their God-given vocations. And so I think our faith offers an alternative vision to what it means to be moms living at our work, whether that’s in our homes doing work. And I think that our book also offers a lot of dignity to the work of caretaking, or if that’s also working outside the home.

And so I was really leaning on theologian Martin Luther’s theology of vocation and saying that changing diapers is also as important as preparing taxes. And so this work of tending our kids is important. And so just kind of honoring.

Kim: So I was working the first year of my daughter, my first child’s life as a pastor. My husband and I were both pastors. And, you know, it just sorta came up close and personal with what it is in the church specifically and how the church can be a place to welcome families. And that a place to do that would be with your pastor and their family. And yet how sometimes, you know, humans, it doesn’t always, you know, we’re human, we make mistakes.

So I was living that and living it with my husband, who both of us, same vocation, pastors in the Lutheran church. And yet it’s one thing for the mother to take her kid to church. And it looks totally different when the father does. And it just, you know, like here he was lifted up, how beautiful it was. Oh, Pastor can have his kid at church and look at how great he is. Right. And I mean that in all love and seriousness though, but that’s what it, what it is. And I’ve, I’ve heard that from colleagues. There’s just a lot of reckoning and honesty and truth telling that needs to happen. If we want to care for families, which churches do and can do so beautifully that sometimes with their pastors, this is the place to start.

Lyndsey: Yeah, that’s actually giving me a lot of different thoughts. I really appreciated Aaron’s phrase, dignity to caretaking, though. And I think maybe when we are like, well, there’s a man holding a child, we’re like trying really hard to offer some dignity to caretaking, but that’s because we think envisioning something as masculine is giving it dignity, right? And so I think I really appreciate–I think a lot, I talk a lot about how we should value caretaking, and how we should find, you know, really lift up the spiritual. dignity and importance and beauty of caretaking in a lot of different roles, but you guys are doing it in this book. And I really appreciate that.

I wonder if there’s any other ways that you have experienced or are hoping to see there become more of a reciprocal relationship between when we talk about justice and we talk about caretaking. Sometimes we end up putting those into separate spheres when in reality I think they’re the same. I see this in your book and I really wanted to tease it out and give y’all a chance to talk about where you’ve seen that play out in your lives.

Erin: A friend Jess has this great shirt on it that says, Raising the Future. And I think that speaks to the stewardship that is placed on all parents to cultivate citizens, children of faith, people with so many different spiritual gifts to offer the world and better the world. And so when I think about the relationship between motherhood and justice, I think about the work of child rearing from the very early stages of loving on your kids in whatever way you see is best. Diapers, cuddling, etc. All the way up to where I’m at now, which is my oldest is a kindergartener. So the conversations that we’re having about what does it look like to be a good neighbor to others and how can we be kind to our friends and helping him see his classmates of all different backgrounds as valued important people.

And you know what, it’s so basic, right? The lessons that we learn in kindergarten, and yet we see time and again in stories that often come up from the news of people who miss those messages that our neighbor, that we need to love our neighbors first, right? And so I think some of the love that we’re pouring into our kids, which to me is very much indicative and inspired by a loving God, these are very important lessons that we’re offering future adults or even kids honoring their dignity now in the world and the beautiful influence that they can be to us as people. There are some devotions in which we sort of flip the script and talk about how our kids are pointing us back to this vision of beloved community or offering us messages and lessons in our faith as we’re parenting them.

Kim: Yeah, I love that. And just in, along with the simple-ness, part of some things just that I need to remind myself too, is the work of justice and child rearing is taking a walk in your neighborhood and being in the community and with the people. And especially if you don’t agree or with some of the people in your community, but the call to be kingdom builders is to be out and to be engaging and listening and loving. And so that’s what we do as a family.

And, you know, we have with little ones, it’s really just about presence at this point too, and having them see us engage with friendships and service. And then, you know, over time, then we get to get to those questions of, well, why of the societal, like the structures, why are structures like this that we have to feed hungry people? Yeah. Why are people, you know, talking about these things and not, or, and we’ll get there. But starting with the presence and being in the community first.

Lyndsey: Yeah, and the more time I’ve spent over about the last decade in various social justice spheres, the more I see people who have gotten the sociology lesson that you’re pointing to, Kim, but not the kindergarten lessons. And they’re…They’re simply not effective, you know, regardless of my judgments upon them or whatever, it’s not very effective to be right, but not able to sit down with someone in empathy, not able to roll up your sleeves and serve when you don’t actually feel like it. And you do you learn that when you’re four or five, and it’s like, now you’re gonna pick up your toys. That’s where it starts. And I think we really overlook that a lot.

I also love that about being out in the community, Kim. I’ve thought about I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, so we just moved to a new neighborhood. Well, to a new state. We landed in this neighborhood, and so I’m starting to be a part of the conversations in this neighborhood and in our current social sphere and a lot of it is about protecting our children, which is really important and also something that we can overdo, I really believe. And it sounds like you are equipping your children to participate in the world because you know you cannot protect them from it forever. And certainly that looks different when they’re two or three or four than when they’re 10 or 12 or 16. But I appreciate that going on a walk is a practice of encountering the unknown together and walking through that.

I also, Erin, you just touched on this. This really stood out to me that you talk about learning from your children, and I’m not sure that it’s the title of any specific devotional here. But that was another thing I really wanted to lift up about what you’ve done here. Because even as I’ve read bell hooks in the last year or two and some other feminist scholars and learned a little bit more about–like, the words “child liberation” were not on my radar before then. But I think this is such a crucial and illuminating and just like really beautiful and joyful practice of humility.

And going all the way back to your mention of being, you know, trying to figure out how to do this thing as privileged white women in often in privileged white spaces. That humility piece, I think is so impossible to overstate the importance of it. And I just love how you’re demonstrating the practice of that with in learning from your kids.

I wonder what, how, what does that like look and feel like in the day to day? Because I like, I think it’s a nice flowery thing to say. And then the, like the practice of it is very different. I wanted to hear how that, how that’s looking for you now or in your homes.

Kim: Yeah, I love that word humility, because it’s about humility and also realizing too that we don’t have all the answers. We’re not supposed to. And for me, it’s about noticing and just being open to what’s in front of me. Whether that’s the questions my kids have, their uncertainties, and a lot of it, just their joy too, is a good reminder for me.

Erin: Yeah, I mean, Lyndsey, as I was listening to you speak on this, and Kim as well, I was thinking about one of the themes in our book, which is repair and forgiveness. And so I think I’ve learned a lot from my kids when I’ve because children are a mirror, especially when you start to enter that toddler years. You it any parenthood every stage brings you to your knees.

And so there’s a few devotions we write about, Kim and I, experiences where we’ve stumbled in parenting. And so I’m thinking about the avocado toast devotion I write about where toddlers are maddening, you will give them exactly what they want and then they will be like, “‘Nope, I don’t want this anymore.'” And so I just have this moment with my son in the book where I just kind of falter in that situation and then the devotion kind of takes the reader through means of repair and a prayer for forgiveness and just kind of reminding the reader that God offers us grace even when we mess up and how important it is to apologize to our kids.

But I bring that up because I had another moment recently with my now kindergartener who is the subject of that devotion. And he was just like, you know, “Mommy, you’ve been kind of doing this a lot, like raising your voice, using your loud voice.” And it’s like, “well, Jack, it’s because you’re not listening to me. But I’m taking that feedback in mind and I’m sorry. Yeah, I messed up.” And so again, our kids are teaching us and are mirrors to us and reminding us, when we see them do something or when they, you know, reflect our behavior back to us, kind of humbling us and reminding us how to live and love better.

And so these focal family relationships, I think are super important because then they extend out to how we interact in the world and how it’s just, it’s such an important thing that we’re receiving feedback from our kids and then trying to support them better. And we know we’re gonna keep messing up because we’re human, but I just, it was humbling to say the least in that moment.

Lyndsey: Yeah, and you’re pointing to another pattern in this book that I wanted to bring out, which is that a lot of the, I think all of them include a prayer, and some of them also include a practice. And I really love that and I really appreciate how intentional you were about bringing those practices down to a very granular and doable level.
So I’m wondering where that idea came from and what it was like to to put those, to write those. I, in my experience, those are some of the hardest parts to write actually.

Erin: Right. And that was sort of the gift to have just our lived experiences moms about what’s worked and didn’t, hasn’t worked over the years. And that, and that’s the gift also then logistically about writing with a partner and that we got stuck on something we could, we had, there were two of us. There were, there was some back and forth and conversations. And so we could ask, well, what do you, does, when we were editing each other too, we could say, does this work? And we were always, always thinking about the reader, this mom who is busy and tired. And so we wanted things that were not overwhelming. Again, not one more thing to do. But how are how is this something that can really connect you with God or with with others?

Lyndsey: Yeah, a practice that’s sustaining not not draining like another thing to do.

Erin: Yeah. And it helps that we are indeed the target audience for our book. So anything that made me feel tired when I was writing and I was like, Nope, we can’t do this. Really providing throughout the entire book, a gentle tone and a tone that is just saying, Hey, I see you and here’s something to think about. I still think we were able to be convicting in a gentle way. Like that is definitely our goal. Um, but we just, we just know how much is being thrown at moms. And so we were thinking about, what do I still need?

And Kim and I come back to this all the time when we’re talking about this book, like we still need words of grace daily as parents and encouragement. And I think it was truly for me. So I was mothering my youngest as a baby as I was writing this book. And it was my hardest writing season ever. Like I had brain fog, I was sleep deprived and whatnot. But I also think it was truly a gift from God to be writing through that season, because I could still relate to the exhaustion that we feel as caretakers when we’re caring for the really little ones, but also big ones too. So yeah.

I’m still finding beauty in it in a way that we didn’t want it to be toxic positivity, like true beauty holding the tensions of what is difficult and what is uplifting and honoring all parts of the parenthood experience. We’re not just saying like, oh, it’s beautiful. So you should feel better. But just saying like, Right. This is really hard. And I think there is some beauty.

There’s a devotion I wrote on sleep deprivation. There is some beauty when you’re surrendering to and caring for a child in the middle of the dark and you’re just, you’re tired beyond belief, but you’re modeling, you know, you’re modeling God. The work that you’re doing is the work, the way and the love that you’re sharing with your child is the way that God loves us. And that metaphor of a heavenly parent becomes even more powerful when you step into that role.

Lyndsey: Right. I, as we’re starting to wrap up here, I did want to get into two of these practices that y’all wrote about that really stuck out to me. Erin, you wrote about playing in the snow with your son and, like, you weren’t just like, “Wow! play! love it!” You were like, this was hard for me to make the time and stop and get out in the snow and do. And it became a beautiful thing. How have you continued to carry a commitment to play through your mothering? And how have you found it popping up in your spirituality?

Erin: Gosh, that’s a really good question. Well, I’m still going to be honest. So part of that devotion, I admit that I’m not the best player, my mom. My mom is a retired gym teacher. And so I look to her for guidance. And so she’s actually caring for my son right now. But I actually I struggle with this. But as I had written, I see how much it means to my kids.

So one of my new rituals right now is when I start the day, I have an early riser, my youngest is an early riser. So he helps me make my coffee after I feed him. We start the day and then we just get on the floor together. And my phone, I don’t know where my phone is. It’s across the room, hidden away. And I really just try and focus on what my toddler needs. Even though, and this is probably gonna get me a little slack. I do think that parenting can be really boring and sometimes playing with little kids can be boring. It can also be really beautiful.

So that time, I think it can be in a way a spiritual discipline, a discipline of like, okay, I’m going to get on the floor with my child and give him my undivided attention because I know how important that is to his development, even though that’s hard for me.

But that being said, there’s other aspects of parenting kids and all different ways you can find play. And one of the most fun things for me right now with my kindergartener is actually reading to him. And I mean, I love books, I’m a writer, I love avid reader. And my my oldest just got into Harry Potter. So that has felt like play to my husband and me because we’re both reading to him, introducing him to this beautiful magical world that we can explore together.

Lyndsey: That is exciting!

Erin: Yeah!

Lyndsey: And Kim, I was really moved by your devotional about hand-me-downs. As a side note, I often title my email newsletters like, “the spiritual practice of…something really mundane.” And so yours was about the spiritual practice of hand-me-downs. And I just loved how you were casting an alternative vision of prosperity for us.

I think it maybe struck me as I’m, you know, so much is about like, what are you going to buy for your baby? It’s like, I don’t know. And I have some friends that I think are pretty much going to have it covered for me, so I’m like, I’m not buying anything. So they can look however my friend’s baby looked. And I just wanted to hear more from you about sort of resisting a consumerist idea of prosperity as a family through the beautiful practice of community and of sharing and valuing what’s not, you know, brand new because it’s not brand new.

Kim: Right. Right. And which it’s, I mean, there’s so much stuff with kids, so much. And so, yeah, definitely the clothes, especially with clothes, there’s something so powerful about what this, what a tangible object has held and who it was holding and to then just to be aware of those stories and that. I mean, that’s what we believe with bread and wine and water, that there’s something mystical and magical within and under it and all around it.

And I think that too, with the things that get handed down, and especially if we can be intentional with it and which a lot of families are, right? I mean, if you’re in mom’s group, she passed things down. And there’s joy on the other end too, when you’re watching somebody else wear your kids’ clothes and then it connects you all. And then there’s the memories associated with it. And it is this picture of that we have enough. That we have enough, we are enough. It’s there.

Lyndsey: That’s perfect. That’s beautiful. My last question that I like to ask, and I’ll hand it off to each of you individually, I suppose, is where how do you define hope and where are you finding it right now?

Erin: Good question.

Kim: I can go first. I find hope. I mean, this is the conversation too, but within my kids, that I see it in, to go back to the forgiveness, I see it in the modeling, the humbling that can happen, that over and over I can mess up. And over and over again, each day there’s this chance. And within each hour, there’s these God’s new mercies that are there.
And that is hopeful because it is so hard to be a parent, to be a human, to be a partner and a friend. And so it’s hopeful that there’s new mercy every day.

Erin: I would echo what Kim said. I see a lot of hope in relationships with my children and others. I’m also finding a lot of hope right now. So it’s springtime when we’re recording this. And so Chicago, where I live, has finally just like burst open. Actually talk about this in the introduction of my book, In the Midwest, spring is such a tumultuous season.One day it’s snowing and truly two days ago at my son’s tee ball practice, it was snowing. And then one day we’ve got flowers bursting forth.

And I just feel like that’s a really good analogy for the world we live in right now. Like one day it’s snowing and we’re just like, we’re hearing all these stories about gun violence and it’s just very, very upsetting. I have a very strong heart for peace. And so this is just really hard for me whenever I hear news of this.
And all of us, right? Because we want to live in a safe world and these stories are really upsetting. But at the same time, there’s beauty and there’s moments of true kindness happening in this world, in this created world. And you can see that in the flowers, you can see that in relationships.

And I often find hope in some of these other alternative news sources that will offer stories of people just being really, really kind to one another. Or moments from my day where someone just offers a grace. I still think about how when I miscarried, people were showing up for me and providing me flowers, meals, and just words of comfort when I was walking through a really difficult time. And so when we’re walking through those difficult moments, I think seeking out the flowers and the sunshine and signs of spring and new life in relationships can really bring us back to ourselves and just know that both coexist in this world, that God’s love is shining through in these relationships and in the natural created world for us. And there’s just this holiness scattered all around us that shows up so much, I think, in the springtime as we see new life bursting forth from everywhere.

Lyndsey: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I think this book does that, brings us back to ourselves and back to relationship at the same time. And that’s really feels like the heart of so much of what, you know, I need spiritual practices to do for me on a daily basis. And it’s, but it’s also really hard to, to do and to guide each other through. So I’m really grateful for you all and for your work. And I’m also grateful for your friendship and the similar book launching season. Maybe you could look forward to some Voxes from me about babies also.

Kim: Oh, we would love that. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lyndsey: Oh, I want to have you all say, um, each of you say your name so we can, our listeners can make sure they know who’s talking and where we can find you.

Kim: Yeah. Thanks, Lindsay. My name is Kim Knowle-Zeller. So my website is kimberlyknowlezeller.com. And from there you can find info about the book, some, um, some occasional writings on my blog, Instagram as well. I’m there and I have a, I have a Substack as well, which is my monthly newsletter that goes out called Walk and Talk.

Erin: And I’m Erin Strybis, and you can find me online on my website at erinstrybis.com where I occasionally blog, and I also have links to our book, other publications, as well as my monthly newsletter, which is called Nourish. And it’s a newsletter to help you be kinder to yourself and others. I’m still holding down the fort at MailChimp and offering that to my readers here. But I would love to connect with you there. That’s one of my favorite places to write. And it’s been a joy to connect with you in this space. So thanks for having us, Lyndsey.

Lyndsey: Yes, thanks for coming! We will share all that in the show notes along with the link to The Beauty of Motherhood, Grace-Filled Devotions for the Early Years. Thanks, y’all.

Lyndsey: We talked a lot in this episode about maintaining kindness and connection as part of the web of what holds us up when things are crumbling and difficult around us. I know I really love and feel seen when my friends send me things to read or to listen to that remind me of them in the middle of their day, and that makes me feel really connected to them as they’re going about their lives. So if anything in this episode made you think of a friend, go ahead and take a few seconds to send it to them. It would of course mean a lot to me and I hope that I would mean a lot to you. All the links that we mentioned just now are going to be in the show notes so you can connect with me and Kim and Erin over there. Thanks so much for listening.

Hi, welcome to Crumbling Empires, a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires, both wide awake and with hope. I’m Lyndsey Medford, author of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires and your neighborhood chronically ill keep-going coach. I write about the practicalities of spirituality, social justice, and how the system of your life interacts with the larger systems of our world.

This is a Substack podcast, which means that you can listen via your favorite podcast app. Or you can subscribe to the Hopeful Cynic Substack to receive the recordings, transcripts, essays, links from me, and other things once a week in your inbox. Hop over to lyndseymedford.substack.com to subscribe. On to today’s interview!

Lyndsey: Hi, I’m here today with Paul Bowers. He is the author of the Brutal South Substack newsletter, he’s a former neighbor and a good friend of mine. Thanks for coming and talking with us, Paul!
So your newsletter is called Brutal South, and it makes a lot of sense to me because I know you, but it’s been interesting to see how much it has resonated with lots of other people because you write, probably most of the time, about politics in the South and particularly in South Carolina, but almost as much you write about parenting or about being a formerly evangelical, still Christian person, or you’ll write about music. I am curious where the name Brutal South came from and what you would want to tell us about the origin of your newsletter.

Paul: Yeah. I’m trying to think, I think I might’ve, I think I met you a little bit before I started it, um, cause I was still working in the news business at the time. And, um, so I was a local news reporter for about eight years in Charleston area and lost my job in 2019 and just wanted to keep writing. And I, I knew a few other people who’d lost their news jobs at the time. And newsletters or just, you know, blogs basically were sort of a life raft for people to keep writing, sometimes make a little bit of money on the side. And so I knew I wanted to keep writing and I have to do it to stay sane a lot of weeks. So I just set myself a fake deadline of every Wednesday, I’m going to put something out there and then I did it for like four years now. So.

I never had like a mission statement, but the name was sort of like this vague illusion to brutalist architecture, which is like, one of the most hated styles it’s like the giant, Soviet-looking concrete blocks and stuff. Um, yeah, I don’t know. I’ve always had kind of an affection for it. And like the first thing I ever wrote for the newsletter was just this weird self-indulgent piece about a Brutalist federal building in Columbia, South Carolina. So brutal in that sense, brutality in the sense of brutal politics that dehumanize and harm people, particularly in the South. And then also brutality in the positive sense that it’s used in heavy metal where you might say someone wrote a particularly brutal riff and you mean it in a good way.

So, yeah, I don’t know. It was just vaguely thematic. I didn’t and still don’t have a mission for it. But those are all things that are kind of in my wheelhouse. So I stuck with it. And now I think I’m stuck with it.

Lyndsey: Yeah, you are. We were just hanging out outside like a month or two ago with some other friends, and some guy rode on a bike and pointed at you and he was like, “Brutal South guy!” So you are very stuck with it because that’s your name now.

What is it you… We’ve talked about brutalist buildings and stuff a few times, but I don’t think I know like exactly what it is about brutalism that you love so much. I also don’t know if you loved Brutalism first or if you were a socialist first.

Paul: Ooh, that’s a good question. I don’t think you can be a socialist unless you are actually organized and doing organizing work. So I loved Brutalism first because I had beliefs about the world but wasn’t acting on them in a lot of meaningful ways.

Lyndsey: That’s a great point.

Paul: Yeah. Brutalism was my first of those two loves, I think. And it’s just, you know, everybody loves an underdog. It gets looked down upon. But I just had a friend, a friend of mine, Gardner, started sending me pictures of like, you know, weird sculptures from Eastern Europe and, you know, Marcel Breyer buildings. And then I found, oh, there’s one right down the street from where I went to college in Columbia. And I just kind of felt this sense of awe. And especially for Brutalist churches of which there are a few around the world. I just think there are different ways to think about the fear of God and the the awe that we can feel in the presence of God. And I think that sometimes like a mountain of concrete is one way to think about that.

As far as socialism, I, you know, I worked in the news, I couldn’t really take sides explicitly on much of anything. Like, uh, especially when you go to work for a traditional newspaper, like a daily local newspaper, at least the place I worked, you had to sign a contract that said, I will not, uh, you know, publicly endorse any candidate, join any protests, join any activist organizations.

I should back up and say, I think reporting is inherently a political act and that you do bring your own politics into it. But outside of doing journalism, I wasn’t politically engaged. I guess the one other thing I did was vote, which that always feels a little futile around here, but I did it. I still do it.

Lyndsey: Yes, it does. You were writing about education there too, weren’t you?

Paul: Yeah, I covered kind of every beat when I was at the Alt Weekly in town and I went to the daily paper and covered kindergarten through 12th grade and then eventually higher education and some of the state level politics around it as well.

Lyndsey: So you were at a South Carolina Senate Education Subcommittee meeting last week to testify against a bill. Can you just tell that story such as it is?

Paul: Yeah, sure. Yeah, I still feel kind of thrilled to be able to take a side on these things, but South Carolina is like a lot of states right now where a lot of the political action around schools involves censorship, um, especially of, uh, history and literature from black perspectives. And especially of anything that would teach people about sexuality and gender. So, um, you know, wherever you are in the United States, this is probably happening on some scale too.

One of the most high profile bills in the legislature this year would, uh, write out this list of forbidden topics that teachers cannot discuss in class. And it’s sometimes described as like a ban on critical race theory, which is however the ideologues would like to define that term from day to day. But it’s also a way to punish and hide or force into hiding gay and trans people, including both teachers and students. So.

These all are concerns of mine as a, among other things, a parent with three kids in the public schools now. Like, there are constant concerted attacks on public education in the state. This is just the most current one. This is the angle they’re trying this year. So I had a day off week, day off work last week. My brother was in town. He left early in the morning on the last day. So I had a free day and I knew this hearing was going on. So the first time in my life, I went up to Columbia and talked to some state lawmakers and gave a little testimony. So I don’t know.

It was interesting because I know a lot of people who do that routinely and have been doing it for years. So I still kind of feel like a little bit of an interloper in that world. You know, like I’m trying to watch and take notes from people who know what they’re doing up there. And I don’t know, it remains to be seen if my little speech or my presence there made much of difference. But I’m really glad that I could, you know, because it’s, you know, it’s Wednesday morning, most people can’t travel across the state and just do that.

Lyndsey: I was so surprised that you that it was the first time you did you say was the first time you’d been to the State House?

Paul: As a public speaker, you know, I’d been a few times as a reporter. But yeah, right.

Lyndsey: Okay. Yeah. Because we had been to a couple of city council meetings that we had both attended and county council stuff happens. And so I was familiar with seeing you operate in those areas. And I was really surprised that you haven’t done the same thing on a state level, just because most of the, most of the activists I know in South Carolina are spread so thin that they end up just doing everything all the time, which I don’t necessarily, um, advocate myself, but.

I have not spoken to any sort of state legislators before either. But when I have testified in in city or county council meetings, I’ve always been very struck by the incredible mixture of despair and hope that I feel walking away. It’s interesting to me, I think a lot of people end up talking about their state politics and feeling almost more hopeless about it than about their about federal politics, which kind of confuses me because I don’t, it should be a place where you have a little bit more power to be seen and heard or to organize with other people, right, directly and to make a noise that someone hears. I guess I just want to hear more about what made you want to testify and what your experience was even walking out of that room and the rest of the day. And then you wrote about it in your newsletter, if you’ve heard from other people.

Paul: Yeah, I definitely struggle with despair about everything from national politics to the school board. And I don’t know. I think going and speaking to politicians has limited efficacy. They might dismiss you out of hand. But I still think it’s good to speak the truth regardless. And that’s kind of keep that in mind that, you know, there are questions of like political strategy and what’s, what’s going to move the needle. And then there’s beneath that still a moral imperative just to go and speak, you know, bear witness when you can.

I don’t know. I always take a deep breath whenever we get to the end of a legislative session, because it’s like there are these series of concerted attacks where they’re going to try to funnel public school money to private schools, or they’re going to pass a don’t say gay bill or whatever the thing of the year is.
When we hold them off long enough to get to that finish line, that’s such a relief.

And like, I remember one year I talked to several people I know who’d been going to the legislature throughout that and pushing and fighting. And I don’t know, it’s hard to call that a celebration, but they looked back and realized in a small way, we did win the day. You know, for now until next year. So I don’t know, I’m not a very, not a very encouraging person. And I’m trying to be more encouraging.

Lyndsey: No, it’s OK! I feel like the name crumbling empires is probably weeding out a lot of people that are looking for like a happy shiny ending or story.

Paul: Yeah.

Lyndsey: but I feel committed to it because that’s the feeling that I feel on a daily to weekly basis is that there is a sense of like, how much of how much are we just trying to stave off disaster? And how like, when do you stop trying to stave off disaster and start preparing for it?

When we all learn to just get by in the midst of ongoing disaster, what does that do to our capacity for imagining something different or recognizing what power we do have and recognizing what leverage points or tipping points we’re reaching?

So I appreciate your honesty. And I, I think when I am in those spaces, my the hope part just comes from seeing other people willing to be there. Mostly knowing that we’re going to be ignored or ignored at best and berated at worst.

Because when there are people I don’t know, I feel really hopeful about that. And when there are people I do know, it’s like, “here we are again.” And at the very least, we saw each other. And we know that, like you’re saying, that for every person in that room, there’s 100 people that can’t be there on a Wednesday morning in Columbia.

Paul: Yeah, especially in that case, teachers. You know, teachers are working that day. Yeah.

Yeah, I do think that my experience with faith and hope is that I really can’t carry on with either of them alone. Like that all has to be experienced in community. So I mean, part of going to church is looking around and seeing these people that I know continuing to hold out faith. Thinking, “if they can be here, then so can I.” And I think, yeah, part of going and giving testimony bearing witnesses, yeah, looking at the, what do you call it, the crowd of witnesses, like people around you who keep showing up. And yeah, if they can keep going, then so can I. So yeah, I do. I do take some hope in that for sure.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I definitely, I did not understand how dire the education situation was until I met you. In South Carolina in particular, and I’m just getting to know what the deal is here in Tennessee, I didn’t know that like–you might know the percentage off the top of your head of state legislators whose children go to private school.

Paul: Oh gosh, yeah, I haven’t checked in a few years. We asked them all several years ago and it was, yeah. I mean, a lot of them It was in the 80s or 90s. Yeah, yeah, most of them have no skin in this game, you know.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I didn’t know that the South Carolina state constitution requires that every student be provided with a minimally adequate education. And it is, and they keep like stretching, trying to find the limits of how you could possibly define even minimally adequate.

And I feel like this is just very representative of these things that like, again, are kind of crumbling around us and it has like, is happening somewhat slowly. And a lot of us can kind of find ways to escape the worst consequences of it, like in your and my circles and it’s very, it’s really unclear when we’re going to notice that it’s the thing we used to call public education is pretty much gone. But I wonder just what your experiences of reporting that over, like over all these years. And if you’ve heard other people say that they’ve learned something or gotten involved or made a change.

Paul: a lot of the people I talked to knew all this before I ever talked to them so I’m not teaching them anything but I think that standard of minimal adequacy is both a legal term and a thing that really weighs on people psychologically sometimes. I grew up in the public schools here. I graduated high school in 2007. Back then, I remember being aware of where South Carolina public education stood and all the different state rankings, test scores and everything. They used to say, thank God for Mississippi, because without them, we’d be 50th in the country. Actually, Mississippi passed us a few years ago. They’re doing better by some measures. And I think to hear that as a kid can be pretty damaging. I had more advantages than almost anybody and got a great education.

In spite of everything, I had phenomenal teachers who showed up to work despite every incentive to quit. Looking back, I think it was pretty miraculous that our schools worked as well as they did when I was in them.

I think one thing I’ve been learning about a lot the last few years is how this thing, this public school system that’s crumbling was a great achievement and still can be. And so before we had the minimal adequacy standard of education, we had a constitution that was written by Black Republicans during reconstruction. And South Carolina’s constitution was I think the first in the South to require free education for all students, black and white. And it was flawed, it was segregated from the start, but this was the dream of people like Robert Smalls and these black statesmen who had only just been liberated a decade before and we’re now trying to rebuild this state.

So their standard of education, what they wrote in the constitution was, I think they set a liberal and uniform standard of education, like that there would be something equitable and that is a positive good for all children in the state. And the project of the post-reconstruction white redeemers in the state was to tear that down. And they rewrote the constitution. They, uh, they attacked the black schools and, uh, in some ways that project morphed and continued to this day.

And, um, I think when we talk about something crumbling in this case, it’s, it’s the crumbling of something that is inherently good and that was, and still can be beautiful.

And also when you talk about something crumbling, there are a lot of people still stuck inside it, you know, including, you know, my kids, a lot of my friends who teach and who increasingly are quitting teaching every year, you know, we have to, we have to hold this thing up because we, we need it. And there are a lot of good people stuck inside and it should be something that builds up and ennobles us and not something that’s like an anchor that pulls us down.

So that’s a lot of mixed metaphors. But I think part of having a broader creative imagination about schools is revisiting what the original dream was, what they’re for. And if we can reclaim some of that mission, I think that’s part of what it takes to overcome where we are now.

Lyndsey: Yeah, the sort of the flip side of an empire that’s been crumbling for a long time is that to rebuild it is to is to unlearn the habits that that empire has taught us and then to accept that it’s going to also take a long time to start rebuilding something new. And so I appreciate so much that you’ve been reporting on this for so long and you’re like not, not about to stop.

There’s like a gap in our civics education of like, there’s like, you learn the schoolhouse rock song about how things work and they tell you to go vote and then there’s a whole big space of like what it means to be a citizen that’s engaged with this whole process that is really kind of left out. And maybe we could talk a lot about the reasons why–that’s another education question.

I’ve been wanting to ask you, Reverend William Barber says there are no red states, only unorganized states. And I’ve been really, mostly I agree with that, but I’ve really been wrestling with it again and unsure of what I think. What do you think about that?

Paul: Yeah, that’s an interesting way to put it. Um, yeah, I think, uh, most people don’t vote here. So it’s hard to say what an entire state’s will is when, uh, most people are not expressing their will through voting. Um, in fact, they’re sometimes expressing their will through not voting. Like, um, I don’t know. I mean, that’s probably true. The way we the way we build a state, it does become a zero sum game. And the way this state is laid out and constructed and the way our votes go is controlled in the state Senate, house of representatives and governor’s office by Republicans. So I think, yeah, it is. It is true that that can change, that there’s nothing inherently Republican about the state any more than it was an inherently Democratic run place before the 1990s. That’s all malleable.

Lyndsey: so you still live in South Carolina. I still live in the South. And I’m committed to staying here as long as I possibly can. Um, which I hope will be forever. What keeps you here? What do you love about it?

Paul: My family. Yeah, I my my whole extended family almost is here. Yeah, not not leaving that. Yeah, it’s not the weather. It’s not the food. People that I’m surrounded by. You know? Yeah, I I used to think about my wife and I both thought about getting out getting away somewhere. And there was maybe a window where we could have given it a go, tried to move somewhere and get fancier jobs in a big city, but now we’re rooted here. And yeah, we don’t, we don’t intend on leaving. And it’s just, it’s just because of the people here. This is home. So we’re sticking around.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of profundity to that that I maybe wouldn’t have like quite grasped in my 20s. In terms of like, that connection to family or an extended family, not just being like sort of a totally personal or individualistic or, or a nuclear family overly-oriented stance, but something that actually really matters to who we are and to the place that we’re in and what makes us us and makes the place the place.

I just heard Nick Offerman talking about that really beautifully on the On Being podcast. I also just finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, and he talks about that. The narrator in the book, fictional narrator, talks about that. Um, in really beautiful ways. So I appreciate you, um, bringing that up.

Paul: Did you ever read the book Gilead by Marilyn Robinson? Yes. That was, yeah, that was so formative to me. Um, just to think about, you know, this, this small town pastor who lives his whole life in a small town in Iowa and, um, built a rich life in community there. And you know, could have these profound, you know, theological moments and build a very complete life in a town where you see the same people every day your entire life. And I think that can be overly romanticized. But I do think, yeah, now that I’m getting getting a little older in my 30s. I do appreciate some of that sameness and some of the consistency and the people who keep showing up in my life. Yeah, I value that more now.

Lyndsey: I think that impulse to measure a life or an impact even in terms of like sheer numbers of people interacted with or your reach on social media or whatever is its own kind of small personal imperial project that doesn’t necessarily actually serve as many people as we might think in the end.

You touched on this a little bit earlier, but is there anything you want to add about how you would define hope?

Paul: I don’t know. I think it’s an activity. It’s not something that you just kind of passively receive. It’s like something you do, and you do it together.

I think, yeah, like the idea that another world is possible is something radical that keeps me going that, yeah, things don’t have to be the way they are. I said that one time that I was at a newspaper conference back when I worked in news and I was talking both about the state of schools in the state of newspapers because news.

Local news has been dying since I was a child. It’s sort of a cliche by now. But like, it’s not something people said often in the news business. And like, several people came up to me afterward and said, Wow, that was, that was really profound. And to admit sheepishly, I was just ripping that off from some book, who was ripping it off from someone else. But like, yeah, the notion that like, nothing is set in stone and that all this can change, I think is, yeah, that’s something worth clinging on to.

Lyndsey: That’s a whole, whole other awesome conversation that we got to have another time. I’m super grateful for Brutal South and for you as a person. Um, and I, and as a writer, your work has really inspired me that you, in the same way you like show up to witnessing and caring about education, you like show up to your own creative self and it’s really turned out to resonate with a lot of people and that’s really cool. So thanks again for sharing your thoughts with us today.

Paul: Yeah, no, and I feel the same way about you. I think, yeah, I don’t know that many people have written an entire book. And yeah, your steadfastness, like keeping on showing up and completing a project like this. That’s something I’ve never done and I aspire to. And yeah, I really have, I don’t know, I’ve valued, I mean, your friendship first, but your insights. Whenever I tell people about you, I’m like, oh yeah, she’s the first person I ever heard quote bell hooks from the pulpit. I grew up Southern Baptist, I’m still doing remedial theology, trying to think right about the world. And yeah, I think you’ve been a profound influence on my life in that way. So thank you.

Lyndsey: Well, thank you. That’s really kind. So if you’re listening and you want to witness my and Paul’s oblique, indirect conversations between our newsletters and lives, you can all have the link to Brutal South in our show notes, of course. Thanks, Paul.

Lyndsey: You’ve been listening to the Crumbling Empires podcast. To find Paul’s work, you’ll look for him at brutalsouth.substack.com. That will be in the show notes. I’m Lyndsay Medford. My book is called My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World that is Sick. It’s about what my body and autoimmune disease have taught me about spirituality and about how we heal the world. Thanks for listening! We’ll see you another time on Crumbling Empires.