Episode 1: A Subsistence Spirituality, with Barbara Brown Taylor
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Show Notes
Co-hosts
Jeff Chu
Find Jeff online: @byJeffChu on Instagram or @JeffChu on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Jeff’s newsletter, Notes of a Make-Believer Farmer on Substack.
Sarah Bessey
Find Sarah online: @SarahBessey on Instagram or @SarahBessey on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter, Field Notes on Substack. Explore Sarah’s recent books on her website.
Featured guest
Barbara Brown Taylor
Barbara Brown Taylor is a best-selling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest. Her first memoir, Leaving Church, won an Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association in 2006. Her next three books earned places on the New York Times bestseller list. Taylor has served on the faculties of Piedmont College, Emory University, Mercer University, Columbia Seminary, Oblate School of Theology, and the Certificate in Theological Studies program at Arrendale State Prison for Women in Alto, Georgia. Her latest book, Always a Guest, was released in October 2020 from Westminster John Knox Press.
Explore her work on BarbaraBrownTaylor.com, and follow Barbara Brown Taylor on Facebook.
“ I’ve started wondering about what this talk gave me an invitation to do is to begin thinking of what a subsistence spirituality might look like. It’ll never sell. It sounds way too meager. But wouldn’t it be interesting to cultivate a way of being with God and one another, that is lean enough to live in the wilderness for as long as necessary?”
Thanks to our producer, SueAnn Shiah, who also provided the music for this episode, you can listen to her album A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, or Bandcamp and find her at @sueannshiah on Instagram and @sueannshiah on Twitter.
Transcript
JEFF: You who doubt, you who struggle, you who feel lost—you are loved. Atheists, agnostics, seekers—you are loved. You who are disabled, you who carry chronic pain, you whose bodies challenge you in ways you are tired of explaining—you are loved. Shy people and introverts–you are especially loved by me. You raging introverts. You raging extroverts. I don't even want to say the word. You raging extroverts. I still do not understand you. But you are also loved. You who do sex work to pay the bills. And you who are clutching your internal pearls because I just said sex work—you are loved. Pentecostals and Catholics, Latter-day Saints, all manner of frozen chosen, Anabaptists, Baptists, church surfers, the denominationally promiscuous—you are loved. You white people, and you whom our good and gracious God has blessed with extra melanin and skin that neither cracks nor wrinkles—you are loved. Conservatives, liberals, moderates, those who detest these classifications. Those of you who didn't tell your loved ones what kind of conference you were at—you are loved. Straight, gay, bi, trans, nonbinary, asexual, pansexual—you are loved. You who maintain a facade of perfection even as you fall apart on the inside; you who are flagrantly messy. You who bring incalculable grief with you. You who are irrepressibly, annoyingly joyful—you are loved. All who are simultaneously sinner and saint, all you children of God, all you are cherished siblings. You are loved. You are loved. God loves you. We love you. And we are so glad that you are here.
[ Instrumental Music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
SARAH: Hi friends, I’m Sarah Bessey
JEFF: And I'm Jeff Chu.
SARAH: Welcome back to the Evolving Faith podcast as we kick off season two together! These beautiful words you heard from Jeff at the start of our episode today were taken at the 2019 Evolving Faith gathering in Denver, Colorado. And that is our focus for this season of the podcast. We’ll be sharing the sessions and talks from that year’s conference, featuring our friends like Lisa Sharon Harper, and Pete Enns, Jen Hatmaker, Chanequa Walker-Barnes, and so many others. So looking forward to it. So Jeff, welcome back to the host chair. It’s been a while since we were here doing this, this here together.
JEFF: Did you not get my resignation letter? I thought I was done with this talking thing.
SARAH: I rebuke that. And also, if anyone gets to quit first, it’s me. First in, first out. So, how are you?
JEFF: I’m tired. I’m always tired.
SARAH: Well, you have good reason. This time right now you just released a new book! So for those of you who maybe missed it, Jeff co-wrote and completed Rachel Held Evans’ last book for adults. It was called Wholehearted Faith. Became an instant New York Times bestseller. And so that was a huge labor of love and so no wonder you’re tired. But you being tired has never stopped me from dragging you along and I am just a blessing.
JEFF: A true friend. A true friend.
SARAH: I live to serve. I live to serve. So, aside from the book release, though, it has been a busy few months on our side of the microphone. Both Jeff and I took a bit of time to recover from the push of 2020 for both the Evolving Faith gathering and the first season of our podcast in the midst of the collective things that we were all going through and walking through together. Behind the scenes here at Evolving Faith, we took 2021 as a foundation-building year. We’ve hired some new staff, reorganized our set up a wee bit. We’ve learned how to do things in something other than the hardest way possible. Who knew. It’s been a growing experience, which can be both good and painful. But I think we’re both excited to share that we’re back at it and glad to be back here with you all.
JEFF: I have had to reengaging my pillow-fort-building muscles, and we’re also imagining what the Evolving Faith community can and will be going forward, from our gathering to our online spaces. I guess we needed to find a little bit of an oasis for ourselves so that we can make our spaces a better oasis for all of you.
SARAH: Yeah, I think so. You know, we took this time away from the microphone and from the gatherings in order to really dream about not only what will serve this community well and all of you well but how it can be done in a way that is a sustainable and healthy way for all of us. And I think we’re on a good road. I feel hopeful anyway.
JEFF: We are also welcoming a new producer to our podcast, SueAnn Shiah. SueAnn has so many talents, and we’re thrilled that she said yes to us. She’s a filmmaker and a musician, a theologian and a writer. She’s currently in a graduate program at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, studying musicology. So we’re delighted to have her help making us sound much better than we actually are.
SARAH: She has her work cut out for her. So let’s talk about the clip, though, that we shared at the very beginning of our episode. Those were your words, powerful words, for the 2019 conference. And I was on stage with you when you spoke those words in Denver. And they were very hard-won. We were on stage—just to set the scene for everyone as we’re moving into this season, I guess. We were on stage for the opening session and, of course, our friend and the cofounder of Evolving Faith with me and Jim Chaffee, Rachel Held Evans, had died only a few short months before. And so this was our first time on stage without her. And we were both pretty emotional and raw at that point. What made you want to say that out loud at that moment?
JEFF: Honestly, I didn’t want to say anything out loud at that moment. I didn’t want to be on that stage at that moment. Except that, in my head, I could hear Rachel yelling at me to just get on with it.
SARAH: Oh, you hear that constantly, too? That’s a relief.
JEFF: All the time. But what’s important to me about Evolving Faith—both the gathering and this podcast—is, I think something that was core to Rachel, that we’re gathering in acknowledgement of and for the purposes of encouraging, and lifting up, and cultivating hope, and at the heart of all that is love—God’s love, first and foremost, and then our love, which grows out of that. Our belovedness is something that Rachel thought and wrote about a lot, and it’s something that matters tremendously to us.
SARAH: Yeah, yeah, that sense of belonging—the themes of belonging and belovedness. The longing for it even, that’s been an absolutely stubborn focus for us, for sure.
JEFF: I think at that conference—I know at that conference—many of us were sad about Rachel and many of us still are. Our grief might be somewhat different now, and it was different then in that we were personal friends with her, we knew her differently, but I don’t think we have to rank grief. There’s something significant about being able to gather and to hold that grief, in all its different shades and textures, to hold that grief together. And also, again, in my head, I could hear Rachel yelling at me just to get on with it.
SARAH: You know, since Rachel's death, it's actually been her words that have comforted me the most, which I suppose makes sense, but you know, I could name so many different passages in her books and just even our conversations that you can point back to, but I was particularly reminded in Searching for Sunday when she wrote, “There is a difference between curing and healing. And I believe (she believed) the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter into one another's pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around, no matter the outcome.” And so a lot of the gathering that year felt like that to me. I think that’s even what we’re trying to do here at the podcast even now: we’re looking to enter into each other’s pain and anoint it as holy and stick around. That we’re not called to curing; we’re called to that slow and difficult work of healing, whether that’s for our own stories or for one another and even for the world, right. So despite our mutual best efforts to quit podcasting and talking and generally leading anything as the Enneagram 9 and 6s that we are, here we are, right. We’re sticking around and showing up anyway.
JEFF: I think this is where you wanted me to say something about joy, right?
SARAH: Yes, I think it is.
JEFF: But here we are. Here we are.
SARAH: I’ll take your admission of where we actually are. So looking ahead at this season, I think it's worth mentioning and acknowledging and talking about the fact that Rachel actually planned a lot of that gathering with us. So her fingerprints are all over this entire season. It’s now been almost three years since Rachel died, and I cannot pretend that we aren’t all still completely devastated and heartbroken, and we’ll probably always be talking about Rach here at Evolving Faith. But I also want you to know, and I want to say this very clearly: she would not be happy with me or Jeff, if we turned Evolving Faith as a conference or a podcast or whatever we do in the future into a shrine for Rachel. And frankly, she would be pissed. It just was not her vibe. Being anyone’s influencer or guru wasn’t her thing any more than it is our thing. And so she would want us to serve you well, to love each other, to have a lot of laughs, to not lose sight of the story that has captivated all of us or frustrated all of us in some measure, and I don’t think she would want us either to lose sight of the people in the room for whom that story is not always true.
JEFF: Yeah, I agree with that, and Rachel would be annoyed with us, I think, if we talked much more about her. So why don’t we turn to our first teacher of the season? We’re kicking off with one of the greatest, none other than Barbara Brown Taylor.
SARAH: Barbara Brown Taylor is well-known to many of you, I know. And hardly needs a bio read, but here we go anyway. So for those of you who may not be aware: Barbara Brown Taylor is a best-selling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest. Her first memoir, Leaving Church, won an Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association in 2006. Her next three books earned places on the New York Times bestseller list. Barbara has served on the faculties of Piedmont College, Emory University, Mercer University, Columbia Seminary, Oblate School of Theology, and the Certificate in Theological Studies program at Arrendale State Prison for Women in Georgia. Her latest book, Always a Guest, was released in October 2020 from Westminster John Knox Press. She also lives in a very special chamber in my own heart. So meeting her in person at this event nearly sent me to Jesus.
JEFF: There’s something creepy about how you said she lives in a chamber in your heart—like she’s a prisoner!
SARAH: Like she’s a (inaudible) who lives next to Jesus!
JEFF: Anyway, Barbara has been such a great friend to us at Evolving Faith as well as to me personally. The first time I met her in person was at a writing workshop where she, Rachel, and I were all teaching. She and Rachel were keynoters, and I was on the undercard, and a few minutes into my little session, this regal, white-haired lady walks in and plops herself right in the front row, and I thought to myself, “Dear God, I am teaching Barbara Brown Taylor something about writing.” I wanted to die. If you’ve ever had imposter syndrome, I am sure you can understand how a young writer seeing Barbara Brown Taylor sitting in the front row of their writing class might induce a severe case. But then we got to talk a little bit later, she was and is the loveliest, most generous, most down-to-earth human being with a wicked sense of humor, and she has since become a friend.
SARAH: You know, I do not know how you did it. I would have just quietly and calmly packed up everything and walked right out of the door. Like good night everybody, we’re not doing this!
JEFF: Honestly, I still feel hot and flushed and sweaty just at the thought of that seminar.
SARAH: There aren’t too many people I turn into a slobbery fan girl for, but Barbara is definitely there. I remember meeting her, and I think she told me to call her Barbara, and I think I turned into an embodied Saturday Night Live Chris Farley sketch: Hey, remember when you wrote that book I loved? Remember when you said this really cool, wise thing? Yeah, that was cool. I just was like, oh my gosh.
JEFF: And she’s just always so gracious in spite of all our weirdness.
SARAH: This is so true. So all right, let’s listen to The Queen Barbara Brown Taylor. And then stick around afterwards as Jeff and I continue our conversation. After all, the world has changed rather significantly since these talks were given and recorded so we may need to talk through some of this for our shared realities now.
JEFF: We asked Barbara to speak about evolving faith and the wilderness. And one thing people may not know is that we don’t actually coach our teachers and speakers about their talk. We just give them a broad topic, like evolving faith and the wilderness, and simply let them go where they want to go. We are always surprised at how, by the end of the conference, all of the talks are woven together in a way that would make you think it had been orchestrated, but no, we don’t.
SARAH: We wish we could take credit for being that good at weaving the event together, but it turns out it's probably all the Holy Spirit.
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*This is a verbatim transcript of the spoken presentation and is not for publication without the speaker's permission.
MC: I’d love to welcome Barbara to the stage.
BARBARA: Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love to be third! Not least of which because I can hear the ways the Holy Spirit visited three different houses and said the same thing. And maybe you can hear, too, whether you are in this room or in your own home, of how the Spirit works.
Evolving Faith and the Wilderness
In the beginning you weep—because all the familiar landmarks are gone, because you don’t know where you are, because the only food left in your backpack is disgusting and the little bit of water in your canteen has turned green. You’re hungry, you’re tired, you’re lost, you’re alone. It’s getting dark, and even if the sky is clear enough for stars tonight, you don’t know how to read them. You always meant to, but you never learned. So now what? If you’re a pray-er, you pray. If you’re not a pray-er, you pray. What else can you do, once you have come to the end of what you can do for yourself? It’s time to find out what faith means, out beyond the boundaries of where you were warned not to go.
I know we’re using “wilderness” as a metaphor this morning, but if it’s a good one, then physical reality can only help. I was in a National Wilderness area, last week, in the high desert of Arizona, with lots of hikers following a well-worn trail to the end of the canyon, where they sat in twos or threes under scrub junipers eating tasty-looking lunches out of Tupperware boxes. It was lovely, but it wasn’t the kind of wilderness we’re talking about this morning.
Once, in a meeting of teachers of religion, someone gave an inspiring talk about how exciting his students had been with the wilderness rafting and camping trips he took them on. There was something about the riskiness of it he said that opened them up in ways the classroom never could. And even when they got back to the classroom, they seemed more willing to take risks with each other as well.
When he was done, another teacher raised his hand and said, “Excuse me, but were your students ever in any real danger?”
And the first teacher said, “Oh no, I wouldn’t let that happen.”
And the second teacher said, “Well, if there wasn’t any real danger, it wasn’t a real wilderness. Because in a real wilderness, there has to be something that can kill you.”
I think that’s the kind of wilderness that kicks faith into evolution: you know, one where the death of your identity, the death of your certainty, your old community, your life as you know it. Those deaths are all entirely possible. They’re all in mortal danger. And though the dangerous thing doesn’t have to kill you, it can. Otherwise, you’re not in a wilderness; you’re in a park, where there are rangers to keep the trails clear and to keep dangerous things at a distance so you can take pictures without becoming anyone’s food.
But since we’re working a metaphor here, let’s not forget the dangerous places where there are no mountain lions or bears. If you’ve ever spent any time in a radiology oncology unit, that’s a wilderness. So is a neighborhood where parents have to teach kids what to do when they hear gunfire. A dying church, a wilderness. Addiction, wilderness. Losing too many friends all at once is a wilderness, especially when they’re young. Aging is a wilderness. Deep love for this suffering planet is a wilderness.
Basically, anything that shows you how breakable you are, how breakable everything is, does the trick, which means, face it, wilderness is not optional, part of the human condition, and no one gets a pass. Sooner or later, everyone comes to a place of frighteningly diminished resources, where everything that could be done has been done, and things that could once be ignored can no longer be ignored. Even if you thought you had accepted the fact that none of us has control of our lives—only the illusion of control—still, the full loss of the illusion can take your breath away. So, this is how bad things can really get. So, this is who you really are with all your props kicked out.
If you’re a believer, there’s one more thing to clarify, which is God’s presence in it all. Is this a trial? Is it a punishment, a correction, an oversight? Is this a refiner’s fire? Or is it the definitive absence that you feared all along? In the wilderness, answering these questions is the one thing left to you: to decide what it all means.
This, I think, is when a religion comes in handy—not the posted rules or the marked trails; not even the friendly ranger’s best efforts to keep you mindful of them really for your own safety (God knows I wore that hat for years). These may all be helpful functions of religion, but the potentially life-saving feature I’m thinking of at the moment is the way religion can give you access to an ancient body of teachings about the wilderness experience: what it’s like, how it acts on the soul of a person or a whole people, the meaning they have found in it, the graves they’ve dug, and the records they have left so that you might, might find meaning in it too.
But Christians (biggest group here), the most famous wilderness story is probably the one about Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, where he decided what he would and would not do to manifest his vocation as God’s Beloved. Simply put, he decided against all the obvious exercises of power to relieve his wilderness situation, such as making bread out of rocks, such as commanding angels to make sure he didn’t get hurt, such as taking control of all the kingdoms of the earth, which presumably included the desert that he was in. He turned all of those protections down and decided to go hungry instead, making himself empty enough, hollow enough, to be useful for whatever God had in mind next.
And when that had happened—when the wilderness had hollowed him right out—the same Spirit that Mark says drove him into the wilderness, it led him back out again, to become the most translucent person that a lot of people had ever met. He was so different from the rest of them that they thought up names to call him like Lord, and Master, and Lamb of God—but the name he called himself was “Son of Man,” “Son of human,” perhaps hoping they might get the hint that that’s what they were too. That what he was, they could be too.
As singular as Jesus’ wilderness experience may have been and him in it, his religion had taught him the names of those who’d gone before. Like Hagar, like Ishmael, like Joseph, Moses, and Miriam, and Elijah, Jesus joined a long parade of people who both lost their lives and found them again in the wilderness, the wild places. They went in one way, and they came out another way. They went in heavy, and they came out light. If you track their stories through the Bible, you find their encounters with God happened in three kinds of wild places: in deserts, on mountains, and in clouds. If you add Noah and Jonah to the list, then add water deep enough to drown in as a fourth kind of wilderness, whether they were in it for three days or forty, on top of it or underneath.
With that kind of tradition behind him, Jesus didn’t try to protect anybody from the wilderness. Instead, he led them into it, dragged them into it, every chance he got. Longest sermon of his life was from the top of a mountain. He fed thousands of people in a food desert with seven loaves and a few small fish. He got into a boat with his disciples and led them straight into a windstorm. When time was short, he took three of them to the top of a mountain where he appeared with Moses and Elijah before a bright cloud swallowed him up. When time was even shorter, he took all of them to the Mount of Olives and asked them to pray with him.
But they fell asleep— and Luke says it was out of grief. They kept hoping Jesus would make the mountain less steep, the desert less hard, the cloud less scary, but he wouldn’t— He couldn’t do it? —because those were the places God changed people. After they’d run out of everything, they could do for themselves, after all their old certainties had bit the dust—then and only then were they empty and confused enough for something new to take root in them. Maybe it wasn’t even new. Maybe it was the saved seed of an old, divine wildness in them that had been paved over too many times, shoved down every time it raised its head, that needed a good long stretch in the wilderness to come to life again.
That’s what I’m thinking, anyway. I’m thinking about how tired a tame Christian can get—tired of self-censoring, tired of swallowing the questions that matter most, tired of putting more energy into being good than being alive. Is it because we bought too much stock in spiritual success, or is it because we want so much to belong that we’ll lop off anything, any part of ourselves that falls outside the lines? Is it because we’re too well fed, or is it because we want so badly to stay safe? Safety and belonging, those are not small things. It’s why so many of us are here—and why some of us are living on a lot less of both of those, safety and belonging, than we once did.
A new entry into this talk, I’m reading a book I can’t put down called The Wild Edge of Sorrow.* It’s by Francis Weller. And the title’s all you really need for the purposes of this talk, but one thing he says is that almost everyone who falls off sorrow’s wild edge spends a lot of time wanting the grief to go away so they can get back to where they were before. But we are not meant to go back. There is something feral about grief that makes it necessary to the vitality of the soul. “It’s an act of protest,” Weller says, “that declares our refusal to live numb and small.” It keeps our hearts fluid and flexible, launching us on a pilgrimage in which we’re gradually “able to embrace the full terrain of living.” Responding to the sorrow we see in others and doing what we can to repair.
So, with all of this in mind, what I’ve started wondering about what this talk gave me an invitation to do is to begin thinking of what a “subsistence spirituality” might look like. It’ll never sell; it sounds way too meager—but wouldn’t it be interesting to cultivate a way of being with God and one another that is lean enough to live in the wilderness for as long as necessary? You’d have to stop being afraid of dirt and bugs—hell, you’d have to eat bugs if that’s all there was—but not without finding some way to split it in half first, to give the other half to somebody whose body odor was just as bad as yours was and it was bound to cancel your vote out if there were an election in camp tomorrow. You’d have to give up some of your ideas about how to live together for the good of the group. You’d have to make pain, peace with pain and with impermanence, not once but every single day. You’d have to be able to see the sacramental possibilities in the tiniest piece of bread, and I think you’d have to imagine the wine. But above all, you’d have to have some, some, some kind of faith that God is in the wilderness—that the desert is for you, not against you—whether you survive it with your subsistence spirituality or not.
Because that’s what the religion of Jesus says: that the finding of life is all wound up with the losing of it, that there is no rising up without lying down, and that the steep path to God ends in the cloud of unknowing. There’s no fat in that, there’s no padding that would allow one to ask why things are so hard or so scary. Subsistence spirituality may even be what Jesus had in mind when he said, “a blessing on the poor in spirit”. I don’t know anyone who wants that blessing, do you? Everyone I know wants to be rich in spirit. They want the kind of faith that can move mountains, not the kind that moves into the shadow of one, or enters the cloud on top of one, with no assurance of coming out in one piece.
In the beginning you weep, because this isn’t what you had in mind. It’s not what you had in mind at all. When you said you had faith, you meant that you had faith this wouldn’t happen to you, you had faith you’d find your way out sooner than this. You had faith someone flying over would find you in time, you had faith in something. You meant you had faith that God would come up with a better plan.
And you know what, the Son of Man knows all about that. He also knows this: that when that kind of faith falls off the wild edge of sorrow, a leaner, hardier one rises up in its place, one that can make you translucent too. He just forgot to say it like that. What he meant to say was for those who tried to make their faith secure, they’ll lose it; but those who lose their faith will keep it. That’s when the weeping stops, and the wild beasts call it a night just for tonight, and the ministering angels come.
So, I don’t know what your wilderness is all about, but you do, and you’re the only one who can decide whether God is in it or not. Even if you decide on “is'' instead of “is not,” you can still lose everything. What you gain though is the re-wilding of your soul because the desert is the spiritual wildness protection program, open to anyone willing to leave the pavement and be empty right out, making room for God-knows-what is coming next.
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SARAH: I may never recover from this one.
JEFF: Is it rude for us to talk about this talk? Because I don’t think we can add very much, honestly.
SARAH: No, we can’t, but that’s never stopped us before.
JEFF: Maybe one helpful bit of context is that she preached this in October 2019, three months before COVID began sweeping its way across the globe and six months before the pandemic really shut down what was then normal life in the United States. We didn’t even know we were on the edge of another wilderness.
SARAH: I mean, let’s talk about that. Right from the start when she said, “In a real wilderness, there has to be something that can kill you. I think that's the kind of wilderness that kicks faith into evolution.” And those of you who have been around for season 1 of the podcast know I’ve often said that we cross the threshold into the wilderness because of grief, but I don’t know if we’ve ever talked quite so honestly about what happens on the other side of that threshold. Because as she said, if there isn’t danger, then it’s just a park. Me, I prefer parks, to be honest. And as you said, you know, we found ourselves in a new wilderness worldwide that we couldn't have imagined then.
JEFF: And neither you nor I is the biggest thrill seeker. We are the kind of people who like to sit with afghans across our laps.
SARAH: We are both grandmothers of another era.
JEFF: Different cultures, but strangely similar habits sometimes. Would you, for instance, like another cup of tea?
SARAH: Listen, already got it.
JEFF: So there’s a line in Barbara’s talk that I’ve turned over again and again, and I’m still puzzling my way through it. It’s where she says: “There's something feral about grief that makes it necessary to the vitality of the soul.” And I think that what’s stopping me a bit is the word necessary. Do you think she is saying that grief is really necessary? Because I don’t want it to be necessary. I want it to go away.
SARAH: Yeah, no, I understand that. To me, I receive that as grief is necessary because love is necessary. A year or two ago, I can’t remember exactly, I heard a young Cree poet named Billy-Ray Belcourt on a radio program here in Canada called Q and he said the line, “To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.” That line has stayed with me ever since because it rang so true, right, just like what Barbara said. It’s necessary to the soul because love is necessary in the wilderness. And our capacity for love is deepened by the wilderness—not always, of course, but for many of us, yeah, because we’ve grieved, we are able to still have faith enough to love, knowing that we will be devastated. And doing it anyway. We’ve all experienced such tremendous personal and collective grief in these past two years in ways that I don’t know that we’ll ever fully understand. And it’s because we love. I want you to know I am working really, really hard to not quote WandaVision, but I am in my heart thinking of that line from Vision where he said, “What is grief if not love persevering?”
JEFF: You didn’t work hard enough because you said that out loud. It wasn't in your heart. This is a podcast.
SARAH: You see right through me.
JEFF: It is true. Love is a bold dive into the potential of devastation that we can’t understand ahead of time, that is true. You can’t see all the way into the water.
SARAH: So one other thing that has stayed with me, though, from this talk—maybe because of this—and one that I feel is very helpful for these days is when she talked about subsistence spirituality. A leaner survival kind of form of faith. She said, “Wouldn't it be interesting to cultivate a way of being with God and one another, that is lean enough to live in the wilderness for as long as necessary?” And that part resonated with me because my experiences of wilderness have almost always involved loss first. There’s been a stripping away. It’s almost like removing all the excess and the fripperies, the things I thought I needed in order to know and walk with God, to find the real substantive thing underneath it. What is the the core of the thing? To just get down to that and keep going.
JEFF: Frippery is a really good word Sarah, I’m impressed. It's like you're a writer or something.
SARAH: I wish.
JEFF: It’s so thought-provoking, because I wonder if so many of us have been sold an image of faith that wants faith to be lavish and extravagant and even comfortable. Big faith is painted as good faith. Abundant faith is even better faith. But what if it’s not? What if what we need is a tender and heartfelt but gritty, sinewy, and lean faith like Barbara describes?
SARAH: Exactly. Right, when she said, “Everyone I know wants to be rich in spirit. They want the kind of faith that can move mountains,” and coming from the charismatic, Word of Faith, Penecostal tradition, like listen, that's our jam. And she talked about the kind of faith that moves mountains, not the kind of faith that moves into the shadow of one, enters the cloud on top of one with no assurance of coming out in one piece. So that’s me. I am 100% that person. And so when she called me out with saying what you—“When you said you had faith, you meant that you had faith this wouldn't happen to you.'' I felt that in my actual body. I think especially in that aftermath of losing Rachel. I was like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it.” I had faith that that wouldn't happen to me.
JEFF: Barbara clearly meant that as a personal callout in public, Sarah.
SARAH: Listen, she's a stone cold killer.
JEFF: It’s true. The sweetest one though. I think the beauty of that line is that it just cuts through so much B.S. to the heart of how so many of us live and act. Performing faith is easy until the devastation comes to you and your house and your heart. Thoughts and prayers are sufficient until it’s your loved one—or you.
SARAH: Right. And I think that’s how a lot of us feel in the wilderness. And so her reminder that “Those who tried to make their faith secure, they'll lose it. But those who lose their faith will keep it.” That’s, that's why it's such a comfort and such a good word. So is the solidarity of grief, the companionship of knowing you’re not alone in this. You’re not just losing, you’re gaining. You’re gaining your soul—or as she called it, the rewilding of your soul, speaking of writers. There is hope in that. The worst can happen and love will remain even here.
JEFF: It's hard in the midst of grief, though, to talk about gain. When you're so surrounded by loss, it's really hard to talk about gain or even believe in the possibility of gain. I don't know if I’m super comfortable with thinking about the gain that comes from grief.
SARAH: Well, because it's not a transaction. It's not a “you get this and you get that.” Nothing makes it worthwhile. I don't know if when you experience that kind of grief the things that you gain are necessarily things that you wouldn’t trade in a minute. Things that you lost sometimes.
JEFF: And then there’s the question of how you can know. Do you know that you’re going to survive this grief? There isn’t certainty.
SARAH: You know, even when we were working on this episode, our producer SueAnn mentioned that so much of what we’ve been sold as faith is actually a form of certainty. Faith is asking, by it’s very nature, is asking courage and vulnerability from us while certainty really, really doesn’t. And I think that was a good reminder: that the very fear that we find in the danger of the wilderness is actually rich soil for the cultivation of faith in some way.
JEFF: And maybe evidence of that love, that goodness, can be found in the testimonies of those whom we’ve grieved, those who have come before. Barbara subtly pushes back against the de facto individualism of the faith that so many of us were raised with when she talks about how “religion can give you access to an ancient body of teachings about wilderness experience, what it's like, how it acts on the soul of a person or a whole people, the meaning they have found in it, the graves they've dug, and the records they've left so that you might find meaning in it too.” She’s saying to us: You’re not alone in this. You’re accompanied by your ancestors. You can learn from them. You’re not a pioneer—and isn’t that good news? That you’re not alone. That you belong.
[ Instrumental Music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
JEFF: You can find all of the links mentioned on today’s show as well as info about Barbara and her work in the world and a full transcript in our show notes at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. Subscribe to the Evolving Faith podcast to listen to all the great talks and conversations we’ll be having this new season and follow on social media at @Evolvfaith on Twitter and Instagram.
Throughout our time together at Evolving Faith, there’s one thing we’ve heard over and over from you: We need community. Being in the wilderness can be really lonely. You can feel too isolated—even those of us who are profoundly shy introverts. We need companions for the journey. We need folks to accompany us and be alongside us.
So we are delighted to invite you to join the Evolving Faith Community online, a new space we’ve created—and we hope you will co-create with us—for better conversations, deeper connections, questions big and small, and content that we hope will be inspiring and meet you where you are.
It’s free to join the Evolving Faith Community. Our desire is that you might find some fellow travelers in this oasis with whom you can feel a renewed sense of belonging and maybe even some hope. So come, explore, and share. All you have to do is go to community.evolvingfaith.com and sign up. We can’t wait to greet you. See you there.
You can sign up for my newsletter at jeffchu.substack.com and find photos of my dog Fozzie and me on Instagram at @byjeffchu. The Evolving Faith podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, along with SueAnn Shiah, who also provided our music.
SARAH: You can find me at sarahbessey.com for all my social media links, my newsletter Field Notes, and, of course, my books.
And please join us next week as we listen to our friend, the psychologist, professor, preacher, and writer Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes bring a whole word. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Evolving Faith podcast, friends. We’re glad you’re here. And until next time, remember that you are loved.
[ Instrumental Music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
*Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. North Atlantic Books (September 15, 2015).
