Episode 4: A Messy, Mysterious Faith with Pete Enns
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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
Pete Enns
Peter Enns (Ph.D. Harvard University) is Abram S. Clemens professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University (St. Davids, PA). He has taught undergraduate, seminary, and doctoral courses at numerous other schools, including Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, and Temple University. Enns speaks and writes regularly to diverse audiences about the intersection of the ancient setting of Bible and contemporary Christian faith. He is also the host of the popular podcast The Bible for Normal People, blogs at peteenns.com, and has written, edited, and contributed to over 20 books, including The Sin of Certainty, The Bible Tells Me So, and most recently How the Bible Actually Works.Enns resides in suburban Philadelphia with his wife Susan.
“The Spirit of God is not beholden to a system. You cannot control this. The Spirit blows where it chooses. This is not predictable. It can’t be harnessed.”
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
Intro
<<MUSIC>>
JEFF: Hi friends, I’m Jeff Chu.
SARAH: And I'm Sarah Bessey. Welcome back to the Evolving Faith podcast.
And we are featuring our dear, ridiculously smart and hilariously snarky and deeply loving friend, Pete Enns. I am so excited about today’s episode.
JEFF: Just a reminder that you can find us online and join our Evolving Faith Podcast After-Party, where you can ask us every impertinent question about our episodes, at community.evolvingfaith.com. Come make fun of us and our reluctant podcasting there.
SARAH: I do look forward to all your impertinent questions being aimed straight at Jeff. It is actually a very loving and supportive community so—and it has been very fun to discuss these episodes with other listeners so we will, for sure, catch you all there.
JEFF: I’m really not a big fan of fun, Sarah. You know that.
SARAH: That’s not true. You’re very fun. And you have fun in your own ways…
JEFF: Yeah, sure. Everyone loves fun with quotation marks around it.
SARAH: You are a discriminating fun-haver. I’m going to use that as a segue like a real podcaster would. Speaking of “fun”—which Pete would probably find hilarious. But anyway! So as we mentioned, today we’re hearing from Pete Enns. This was Pete’s second time with us at Evolving Faith. He was part of our first gathering in 2018 too.
JEFF: Okay! So Pete is super smart and overeducated but also really funny and kind. He says his job is to tell stories about the messy Bible and what it means to read Scripture with both eyes open to its problems and challenges, its promises and possibilities. Pete, who has his PhD from Harvard, is the Abram S. Clemens Professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University outside Philadelphia. He has written, edited, or contributed to more than 20 books; the ones he has written include The Sin of Certainty, The Bible Tells Me So, and, most recently, How the Bible Actually Works. Pete cohosts the popular podcast The Bible for Normal People, he also blogs at peteenns.com, and he lives with his wife, Susan, in suburban Philly.
Here’s our dear and brilliant friend Pete Enns, speaking to us from Evolving Faith 2019 in Denver, Colorado.
Part 2: Pete’s Talk
<<<<TRANSITIONAL MUSIC>>>
I've been trying to process the emotions of this gathering for a while now. I'm having a lot of difficulty doing that. In part, because I'm an American male, and I have an emotional range, which is like this. It's, it goes from like sarcasm to despair. I don't know what to do with anything else.
But I think the word I came up with was, wow, if that's an emotion, because I'm looking at—there are a lot of people here, you know, and there are a lot of people back here and out there.
And, you know, we're all here exploring an evolving faith. But just think about that for a second. We're all here exploring an evolving faith, just because maybe we don't know what else to do. And we all come at this from different experiences, different histories, different things that have happened to us, different things we've had to process. We're all in different places.
But I want to say what I think holds us all together is—I believe this is actually a work of the Spirit of God. And I even have a proof text for you. Because if you know me, you know how much I like proof texts, right? This is a story of Nicodemus, which is not just an entrance ramp to get up to John 3:16 and football games. It's actually a story of someone, I think, whose faith is evolving before our eyes.
See, Nicodemus, he was part of the system. Any of you ever been part of religious systems in your lives? He was part of a system; he was part of a structure. And so he goes to Jesus at night. There's a Pharisee named Nicodemus, who went to Jesus at night. He said, “Rabbi, we know that you're a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do the things you do apart from the presence of God.” See he was a leader himself. He was someone who had a reputation. And he came to Jesus at night. Maybe he, I don't know, directed the choir. Maybe he had a reputation for delivering great sermons—“Spot on, pastor. Way to go.” Maybe he was someone in charge of a children's ministry or just somebody that everybody respected. And so he came to Jesus at night because it was a risk. He could lose a lot.
And he came at night, and he said, “We know that you're a teacher from God.” Who's the we? All the Pharisees? No, read John; they don't get along very well, Jesus and the Pharisees. Who's he talking about? Okay, you guys go to church. Some of you or a lot of you. Do you hate it sometimes? You have a small group of people you talk to and say, “This isn't working”? This is the group of people I think that Nicodemus had around when he said, “We know that you're a teacher from God. No one can do the things you do apart from the presence of God.”
And Jesus said, “I know, right? Thank you for for saying that. I just I've been, I mean, how many barrels of water do I have to turn into wine before people figured this out? That was just a chapter ago. And then earlier in that chapter, I was telling the Sadducees that, you know, I'm the temple as like—how much, what else do I have to do around here? So thank you, Nicodemus, you're just the kind of person we want for our movement. You know, let's have coffee sometime and figure this out. This is fantastic. Thank you so much.”
No. Jesus says none of that sort of stuff. He goes right for the throat. He says, “Very truly I say to you, you cannot enter the kingdom of God unless you're born again. What you want, Nicodemus, is you want—and I get this—you want the kingdom of God. You can't get there from where you are.”
You can't get there from within the system. You have to experience a transformation that's so radical that I can only talk about it as being born again. And people hear me, this is not a story of conversion from one religion to another. Right? This is Nicodemus coming to terms with his own faith, what it means to be a true child of Abraham.
See, just like us—that's why this story affects us. I think it's not about becoming a Christian. It's about people on the inside finding a way forward to move to a deeper realization of what it means to be a child of God. That requires the work of the Spirit. And then Nicodemus says something that on the face of it is the stupidest statement in the entire Bible.
“Well, Jesus, okay. I'm old. What do I do? Do I crawl back in and come back out again? Is this, you know, how does this work?” Right? It's not a serious question. He's being a Pharisee, in a good sense of the word. They're battling back and forth. They're negotiating, so to speak, and Nicodemus is simply doing what Pharisees do. He says something ridiculous to draw Jesus out a little bit.
He says, “What are you talking about here?” It goes, Jesus says, “Listen, you can't get there apart from the spirit. You can't do this in a flesh way. That's where you are now. You have to come out of that. You can't experience it some other way. You can't do what you've been doing all along.” And it's not just the Spirit, if you read that portion of John, verse 4 or 5 someplace, he says, “by water and the Spirit,” which is weird, isn't it? What does Jesus mean by water? I think he means baptism. “Are you telling me you have to get baptized to be saved?” This isn't about getting saved.
Right? What is baptism? Commitment, public, risk—you can't stay in the system. Oh, and another thing that Nicodemus—about Nicodemus—I should have mentioned in the beginning, because it's sort of important, but I'll say it now: The Spirit of God is not beholden to a system. You cannot control this. The Spirit blows where it chooses. This is not predictable. It can't be harnessed. And so Nicodemus can't grasp it. And he says, “How can these things be?”
I so track with this guy. This is an Enneagram 6. You've heard of the Enneagram. It is like a new thing some people are talking about, right? It's all about control. I get that. Boy, do I get that. He cannot conceive of something that is so outside of his territory, outside of his experience.
And Jesus says, “You call yourself a teacher of Israel, and you don't understand these things?” A little harsh, I think, you know, at that moment. This wasn’t like, “Hey, that's a great question. Nicodemus. Let's text each other. Let's get together for coffee and hash this out.” He said, he's telling Nicodemus, “Listen, in your own tradition, there's a depth you haven't seen yet. You really don't understand this.”
Well, we don't really know what happens to Nicodemus after this story. He's mentioned two more times in John's gospel, once in chapter 7, and there's some brouhaha with the Pharisees about Jesus doing something they don't like. And Nicodemus is sort of there, but he's still inside the system. And then in chapter 19—you miss it if you're not paying attention—Nicodemus is there at Jesus' burial. I like to think he went public. And he moved out of the system, thinking that it's going to give him the words of life when it doesn't.
I sympathize with Nicodemus an awful lot. He is a Pharisee. What do Pharisees do all day? Argue about the Bible. Okay, that's sort of my life. I'm like, I'm a Pharisee. Okay, whatever.
But I sympathize with him because being born of the Spirit is hard. It's about, you know this, it's about letting go of what's familiar. It's leaving safety. And the thing about this second birth is that, unlike the first birth, we're fully conscious of what's happening. That's what makes us so hard. We're aware of the mess, of the blood, out of the—talk about being out of control, being birthed.
Hm. It's a lot to ask. You know, Rachel talked about, she described herself as a doubt-filled believer, right? That's a great way of putting it. My more clunky way of putting it is that I'm an agnostic Christian. And I've heard other people say that too. But either way, doubt-filled believer, agnostic Christian, these are not system words. These are not things that the system values. These are not things that make you at home in the system. The systems exist to make sure you don't do that. This paradox is something that is a part of our faith.
For me, I use the language of left and right brain, not that I really know what I'm talking about. I'm not a neuroscientist, but the left brain, like the analytical, the, you know, the logical part of this, that's a big part of my life. And I can deconstruct every square inch of my Christian faith if I want to. It's not hard to do.
But then there's this other part, the intuitive part, the right-brain part, the experiential part, that comes through shining clearly where every time I let down my guard of the left side of my brain. And I would like these two to sort of work together. I'm looking for that—you know, I can't stand people who don't get that. You know, I mean, I have, like, relatives. I love them. But you know what I mean? It's like, “Really, nothing? You don't like—there's no cognitive dissonance at all. Like, okay, here's the Bible. I'll just go anywhere in the Old Testament, how about this? God's so mad, he wants to kill the Israelites, and Moses has to calm him down. Nothing? Nothing? No, not a problem. Good, good. This is okay. How about human trafficking? No, this? No? God is good all the time. And all the time. God is good. Okay, let's talk about that. See, this is called the problem of evil. It's been around since the Babylonians. So I don't know why you don't have a problem with this.” But God bless them, as they say in the South, but bless their hearts.
But I'm going to guess that probably most of us here aren't like that, you know. We are bothered by the questions, by the doubts. And my whole adult life is really, it's having a system that's deep in me, because it's been a part of my life, right. But learning to leave it well, I guess, is a way of putting it. And that's not easy to do. See, I went to seminary. How many people here went to seminary? That's why you're so screwed up. I know that, like half the hands went up. Like, yeah. That's what happened to me too.
Anyway. Um, I'm not going to rehash my whole story. But I went to seminary as well. I spent four years there. And it was a Calvinist seminary. And any Calvinists here? The same people are probably gonna raise your hands, yeah. That's not to make light of it at all. But I mean, Calvinism is a system. Right? How many of you experienced that? As far as Protestant Christianity goes, you're not going to find a tighter system than Calvinism. God’s a little bit of a jerk in that system sometimes, right? But it's a tight system. And this is the one that I was sort of raised in. And so I left there, I went to graduate school, and within a month or two, I was saying to myself, “There are cracks in the system.” What kind of a system is it if it takes two months of reading, and all of a sudden, you're like, “Oh, this, my goodness gracious,” right? Maybe not the best system in the world.
But here's the thing. Within a couple months, I knew that there were problems with it. But guess what? I left there. I went back to the seminary that taught me. I re-entered the system. And guess what I did for 20 years? I buried it. I buried the experience. I buried the thoughts. I buried the feelings. And I spent 20 years very much internally, without really being conscious enough of what I was doing, I tried to make peace with that system. Teaching for 14 years. You might ask me, “How did that go, Pete?” Not very well, to be honest with you. I wound up losing my job because the heat was turned up. And again, this is not about like, I was right completely on that thing. They were wrong. But it's not about that. It's not about that at all. It's about a system and me not feeling, like, comfortable with it. And maybe I needed reminding from people on the outside to let me know that.
So I left. How many of you have left systems because you've been pushed out or ostracized or not made to feel welcome? A lot of you, my goodness gracious. Why else are you here? Right? This is a part of our experience. And so I left, and I lived happily ever after that moment. That's not the case at all. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Because for like six months, I was so happy. I stopped eating Oreos all the time. I exercised. I even tried yoga. You know, I stopped stress eating, and I felt great for about six months.
And all of a sudden, I don't know what happened, but I wasn't doing well anymore. I left the system. Nobody was telling you what to believe anymore. Be careful what you wish for. Because systems play a role. They keep you circumscribed, right? They keep you within and you don't have to think about what you believe.
So without a system—I remember standing there in my bedroom. And a voice in my head—whether it's my psychotic self or God, I can't tell the difference sometimes—say, “Okay, Pete, you got what you wanted. Nobody's telling you what to believe. What do you believe then?” And I said, “I haven't the slightest idea.” I was being asked to exercise muscles I didn’t even know I had that had atrophied for all those years.
And so I went through what I would call an atheist phase, and I don't say phase to minimize it. It's just, it's a part of my life for months, rather, that I went through. And I remember lamenting the loss of my faith. I remember lying on the sofa in my study, which is in my basement. By the way, never have a basement study with no natural light when you're going through stuff. Okay? It doesn't work. It didn't help. But anyway, just lamenting. Like I remember, again, I don't know if any of you have been there too. But just thinking, I'll never celebrate Christmas again. I'll never sing a Christmas carol. Who am I? I had no sense of self anymore.
And so I got depressed. Fun fact: I had three books come out in 2012. And all this was happening in 2009. I finished three books in 2009 while I was going through this. That's how I process this stuff, by—my books are memoirs, people. You don't really realize that, but that's exactly what they are. It's what I'm going through at the moment, but it just gets vomited out onto a page. Right? And publishers, if you want me to write for you, just give me an existential crisis. And I'm done. I'm good for that.
So here's the thing, okay. I'm not an atheist. I'm an agnostic Christian. What happened? Well, here's the 10-point plan for happiness in your life. No, you know, folks, I honestly tell you, I have no earthly idea what happened. That's sort of the point. I just, months later, I just found myself like I had been teleported or something just further down the path where belief in God was viable. And I don't know how I got there. It wasn't through “Well, let's analyze this. Let's see where this goes. Where did I fail?” It was, I don't know what happened.
And I'm not going to try to figure it out either. Because I cherish that as a God moment where the Spirit blows where it chooses. And I, like, had no say in it. That's what I needed. Me the Pharisee, with the words and the control of Scripture and the debating and this and that. I needed to be completely out of my head. I needed to learn how to honor the head but not live there all the time.
So I got a break from my head for a few months and things had to be cleared up. I don't remember a lot of what happened during those months. But I do have a couple of memories I want to share with you and maybe close out this way.
One memory was in therapy. I went to a therapist for 10 years. I know what you're saying, “Pete, not you.” Actually, you're probably saying, “Thank God, Pete. We had no idea.” Anyway, yeah. My family says … anyway, but anyway, I have a couple of memories of evolving from a system faith to sort of an evolving faith. It was a therapist. His name is Ted. I saw him for basically 10 years, just stopped in May. He retired; I feel partly responsible. 10 years of me is enough for anybody. I think a month with me is enough for anybody. But we were talking. I said something to Ted that I had never really articulated before about this whole journey. And I started teaching at the seminary where I was in 1994. And I left in 2008. And I told him, I said, “You know, I already had a strong inkling deep down in 1996 this wasn't gonna work.” And he said to me, “Okay, that's interesting. Why didn’t you leave?” I hate when therapists ask pointed questions to get right to the heart of things, don't you? Yeah. “So why didn't you leave?” And I said, “Well, that's where I went to school. This is my family. This is my home. These are the people I know. This place was like a church to me. This is where I was comfortable. This is where I—you know, where do I go? This is, this is just, this is my home. I can’t just leave this. And also, you know, we had a house and I had a job. Don't knock it in academia. If you have a full-time teaching job, you're doing pretty well. And there's ballet lessons this and sports camps that, and you know, how do we live if I do that?” And he said to me, Ted says, “Pete, you know what you sound like?” I said, “No, Ted, why don't you tell me what I sound like for $60 an hour?”
So now Ted is a very gentle guy. He says, “Pete, you sound like a battered spouse.” I said, “What?” He goes, “Yeah. Why don't you leave? Where will I go? How will I live?” And he said, “Pete, you've got a decision to make every day. Actually, Pete, for you, it's probably every minute of every day you have to be thinking about this. You have a choice to make: Will I fear— Enneagram 6—will I fear or will I trust?”
The system never taught me that. I had to learn it some other way in the wilderness, like the other speakers talked about. And the other story, and this is my favorite one. And if you've ever heard me speak on anything I work this in, because this is one of these moments where things just sort of clicked for me. And again, one that I didn't plan, I didn't know was coming. I was just, I really don't remember what I was doing other than I was on the computer. And I find this story of Mother Teresa. And when I talk to my students at Eastern University about this, I say that things changed for me when I met this woman on the internet. [Audience laugher] I'm glad—they don't laugh at all. They don't think that's funny. I think it's hilarious. But anyway.
But Mother Teresa. It is the story of John Cavanaugh, who was a moral philosopher at the Jesuit university, Saint Louis University, and he was having his own crisis of faith in the mid-’70s. So he said, “I know what I'll do. I'll go visit Mother Teresa. She'll figure this out.” So he goes to visit her, and she goes, “What can I do for you?” And he goes, “You can pray for me.” And she goes, “What can I pray for you for,” and he said, “Well, pray that I have clarity,” which is why he's there. And if you know the story, she says, “No, I will not do that.” And he said, “Why you little …” No, he did not say that. But I would have said that. He said, no—she said, “I will not pray for you for that.” He goes, “Why not?” And she said, “Because clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.”
And I read that and I said, “Oh, surely, that's me.” And then he said to her, “Yeah, that's not the answer I was expecting. You seem to have tons of clarity.” At which point, if you know the story of Mother Teresa, she just laughed. She goes, “I haven't had a clarity a day in my life. But what I've had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.”
The system never taught me that. It's not set up to teach you that. So the Spirit blew in my life, so to speak, through experiences like this, unexpected, imperceptible, and out of control. I will always be a doubt-filled believer. I will always be an agnostic Christian because I dare not be anything else. As soon as I try to solve the paradox, which my mind really likes to do—as soon as I try to solve the paradox, all I've done is created another system, which is death. But living in this messy, uncomfortable, out of control, mysterious faith that we have, this faith that's beholden to no system? Well, this is where we sense the work of the Spirit. And that's the space that we all live in. And this is a space that I choose to live in. As Jesus says, “Do not be astonished that I said to you, you must be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. This is how it is with everyone who was born of the Spirit.”
Amen.
Part 3: Conversation
SARAH: I know that we are going to talk about a lot of good and very important things here, but please do know how much I enjoyed Pete saying, “I went to seminary, how many people here went to seminary?” and then everybody put their hands up, or the people who went put their hands up, and he said, “And that's why you're so screwed up.” I know like half the hands, “That’s what happened to me too.” As someone who did not go to seminary and is equally deeply distrustful and envious of that particular system, that did make my day.
JEFF: Well, I was way screwed up well before seminary, so I don’t know what you do with that.
SARAH: You’re just extra blessed.
JEFF: One of the things I really appreciated was how Pete talked about his atheist phase. I think for some of us, the way we were raised in the church, those seasons not just of doubt but actually of disbelief or unbelief—they’re not things you talk about. And candidly, in the churches I grew up in, atheists were often referred to either with pity or with scorn. Others might suspect that atheists are there. Somewhere in someone’s personal history there might be that phase of disbelief or unbelief, but it’s not to be discussed in polite company. I know Mike McHargue dared to go there in his talk in 2018, which we aired last season. And Pete did it this time around. And of course, as Pete notes, for some people, it isn’t a phase so much as it is a landing place. But for him, it was a phase. And I think that’s true for a lot of people, and I wish we talked about it more, because it’s important not only to name but also to make room for and to learn from.
SARAH: Absolutely. And maybe some of that is still even our old needs for labels and systems. Maybe some of it is freedom and permission, right? Pete talked about how Rachel referred to herself as a doubt-filled believer, and he liked that language. So do I. I like that language. But he pointed out that a lot of the words that we all use to describe ourselves—doubter, believer, agnostic, atheist, Christian—those aren’t the things that the system really cares about. Paradox isn’t part of a system. He talked about those two sides of his brain, right—the left and the right and how he wants both—and that actually reminded me years later of a lot of what you and Rachel wrote about in Wholehearted Faith. And I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little about that?
JEFF: The simplified classifications we sometimes try to put on ourselves and on our beliefs, I think Rachel really struggled with that. Because life isn’t that tidy, and faith resists clear binaries. Rachel’s hope with Wholehearted Faith was really to encourage people, wherever they are in their spiritual journeys, not to feel the need to perpetuate those artificial and often unhelpful categories. Let your mess be messy. Let your heart wonder. Let your open questions morph into half-answers in their own good time. And let all of this be, because underneath it all, you’ve still got God’s love. God’s love is the thing that makes everything whole, and God’s love is what creates grace for what’s still in process and in progress. And even if we can’t really always feel the entirety of God’s love, even if we might just feel the slightest thaw in our cold, hard hearts some days, the promise of it, the suggestion of wholeness—sometimes that’s got to be enough.
SARAH: And I remember in that book, in Wholehearted Faith, which I remember actually a lot of it because, for those of you who don’t know, a number of us who are friends of Rachel’s recorded the audiobook. And I think I did five or six chapters there at the beginning, but I remember really clearly that line that, “Wholehearted faith, like all wholehearted living, requires taking risks, and cultivating vulnerability, and embracing uncertainty, both in our individual lives and in our communal life together. It demands that we admit all that we cannot know, and it encourages us to pursue it nonetheless.” I think that is what Pete was getting at. I hear that in what you're saying. It's something that a lot of us have experienced. That the invitation here is to that sort of wholeheartedness, not to a new system.
JEFF: So Nicodemus is such an interesting conversation partner with Jesus in this regard, because he’s so heavily invested in multiple layers of the existing system: As a Pharisee, he was educated and part of the elite. He is an authority figure who has a lot to lose. And to me, it makes him such a compelling person—and how he has to meet with Jesus under the cover of night. I like to imagine that, under the safe cloak of that darkness, in the security of that relatively hidden space, Nicodemus was able to ask bold questions and maybe even find some healing.
SARAH: I do love that. It's interesting to me in light of the metaphor and the language here that Nicodemus and Jesus are using around being born again. Because one of the things when it comes—in my experience around birth—is that you are often craving darkness, craving quiet. To have that sort of space, that cloak almost around you, it's like the really bright lights and stuff just seem really not conducive for the work you're trying to do, right? So even that resonates with me, but anyway, back to the actual thing we’re doing here. So Pete said right there near the beginning as he spoke about Nicodemus, and I found it really poignant, when he said, “You can't get there from within the system.” Which I think is super frustrating for those of us who have maybe been promised that the system would save you, right. The system was the point. For Pete to say, “Listen, you're not going to get there from within this thing. You have to experience a transformation.” That it’s not about becoming a Christian or even from this standpoint becoming a different kind of Christian but coming to a deeper realization of what it means to be a child of God. And Pete was not wrong, that’s a radical thing to a lot of people.
JEFF: I will say that I do wish Pete had been a little clearer about what exactly this system is that he’s talking about. My left brain is screaming: Can you just define this system for those of us who don’t have PhDs? I think I sort of get it. And I think Christianity is a radical, countercultural thing—and to become a child, in some ways, that can seem so impossible, because it means you almost have to slough off all the scar tissue of adolescence and adulthood and rediscover that kind of purity that kids have, in which they’re so boldly curious and unafraid to say the impertinent thing. I wonder sometimes whether we misunderstand those places where Jesus talks about the little children because I really don’t think he is talking about the sweetness and light that we edit kids into. Anyone who has spent real time with kids knows kids are messy and funny, and they’re somewhat irreverent and irrepressibly real, and they're brutally honest. And little kids also know, just in their guts, I think, when they’re loved.
SARAH: This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves. It drives me bonkers when people use that phrase “Have faith like a child” as sort of this shorthand way to shut down questions and wonder. Like, I mean you said it, if you’ve spent any amount of time with a kid, you know, they ask a lot of questions! It’s kind of their thing, and they’re not characters in a book; they’re people. And that’s part of the beauty of that invitation of faith like a child to me now is that it’s an invitation to wonder and curiosity, even persistence, not unthinking acquiescence. There’s something irrepressibly themselves that is there. It reminds me, just very recently, our youngest daughter—we have four kids—and our youngest daughter had soccer starting up. And they were going around, it's a small thing, but they were going around the circle and introducing all the kids to the coaches, and the coach had kind of set this ice breaker where he was like, “Do your very silliest dance and shout or scream your name and your number to introduce yourself.” And they go around the circle doing the silly dances and the, you know, shrieking your name. And he gets to Maggie. And she just kind of stands there, and she looks at him and she goes, “That makes me uncomfortable. I don't want to do that, but my name is Maggie.” And like, at first for me, I was someone who, if a teacher tells you to do something, a coach tells you to do something, you just do it, even if it doesn't feel like something you want to do. And yet she was just so fully herself and was just, respectfully, was just like, “No. You know what? This is not how I’m going to express myself.” And to his credit, he was like, “Hey, that’s totally fine. Thanks for letting us know.” And he just kind of, you know, moved on. But I was really struck by that, where I was just like, that feels important to me.
JEFF: I love that story about Maggie, and I think she’s one of my heroes.
SARAH: Me too. So Pete followed up what he said about his atheist phase with an experience I think a lot of us have had. And it's that “Oh, crap, now what?” moment. We leave the system or the space. Or we are left. Sometimes it’s a bit of both. And there can be that initial euphoria of freedom, and then all of a sudden, you realize you’re out here on your own. That the system did play a role and now what? You didn't want someone—what was it that he said? You didn’t want someone telling you what to do or how to believe, so what do you do now and what do you believe? Did you have a similar experience?
JEFF: I don’t know that I ever had the euphoria of freedom that you’re talking about, because even when I was in my childhood and young adult churches, I always felt a little out there on my own. I always had to do some extra bridge-building between the system and where I was. So I think there’s probably a cohort of us that, because of our minoritized experiences and our context, we’ve always had to do that work.
SARAH: That’s really true. Everyone’s experience will be different. It does depend on so many factors. I do remember having that “Oh, crap, now what?” sort of feeling, which actually—maybe not totally surprisingly—brought me back to Jesus. Because I was like, well, I know what people tell me about Jesus or about this thing, but I feel like I need to kind of learn this for myself to know for sure what I’m rejecting, but I ended up finding someone, or finding God, who was so much more loving and good and true than I ever really could have imagined. It wasn’t that new system, but it was like Pete talked about, that “born again” sort of experience, like Pete talked about. A whole new way of being.
I was really struck by Pete’s admission that he knew there were problems with the system within months of starting seminary, that his learning and experiences there at that young age had exposed him to this, but that that was scary. And that he went right back to the system. For like 20 years, he buried all those things and just tried to make peace with it. I often call that like doubling down. You’re just going to double down on what used to work or what the system you think is what’s there. You know he’s going to serve as part of the system himself right up until he can't. And I feel like that’s a very common experience for a lot of us. I know I have had that experience. There was almost this initial longing to go back. Like, life was easier when everything was black and white, when you could if-this-then-that your spirituality. It’s the nuance and the complexity, the humanity and Spirit and love part that can be so messy and hard. I had a lot of that experience myself with grief and loss, which was absolutely part of what propelled me to the wilderness. I lost how I used to pray, what I believed about God, what I thought about things like healing and miracles and hope. And even though I already knew that I had lost them, I didn’t want to let go yet, and so I did what Pete did. I kept practicing and praying and enacting the systems, hoping it would click again as it once had, but no, it wasn’t and it never would. I think Pete names that season of stuffing down our questions and doubts well. And it can go on for years. And even though I’m really glad I persevered through that, I think it’s a real thing. Those first few steps across any sort of questioning threshold are scary and isolating, and I wonder if we also don’t talk about that enough, right? Like that longing to go back simply because at least we knew what we’re doing in that system, right? I guess to carry his metaphor.
JEFF: Except that a part of us is dying all the while, and even as we are feeling it rot, we’re saying it’s living and it’s thriving, because we’re so afraid to be honest, because of the potential consequences of our honesty. We’d sometimes rather sit in the familiar disease of what we know than walk into the unknown. And I will say that maybe this is where some of us who are marginalized in particular ways have something of an advantage—and I don’t even know if advantage is really the right word, because honestly, this is not something to be envious of. Because the system—the system that so loves its straight, white, tall, blond, blue-eyed man, the system that so delights in its straight, white, huggable, motherly woman, the system that so adores the 2.5 products of your procreation—that system rejected so many of us anyway, we didn’t have to make quite the same choices sometimes about whether to take those first few steps across the threshold, because we had already been flung across the threshold. But I want to add something here that might be difficult for some folks to hear: Do you find yourself having moved away from that system, only to have replaced it with another one, one that is maybe a little more egalitarian, but that’s actually no less racist or no less elitist? And when I say “you,” of course I don’t mean “you, Sarah Bessey.” I mean more of the general “you.” English is annoying and inconvenient sometimes, sorry.
SARAH: You can always use the Royal We when referring to me, that’s fine too. But yeah, I think you’ve landed us right back at what has apparently emerged as our official theme of the season. We can’t just trade one system for another one without questioning the very things inherent in the system that make it so unsatisfying and ungodly. Which, I guess, reminds me even of one of the things I really loved about Pete’s message here, you know as we begin to wrap up, but maybe it's something that would surprise a lot of people, right. Pete is a very soulful person and he speaks often of the Spirit, more than most people might expect if you know him only through one of his books or a lecture, perhaps. But that’s an aspect that I feel we also don’t talk about enough in this wilderness season: sometimes the Spirit, the wind, will blow where She chooses, and we have experiences or knowings that we cannot left-brain our way through. We are being born again, and there will be things we learn or experience or know or live into that defy old system language, and that’s not just okay—it’s good. And we can rest in simply knowing that God was in this place at that moment.
Part 4: Outro
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JEFF: You can find all of the links mentioned on today’s show as well as info about our friend, Pete, and his work in the world, links, and graphics to share, as well as a full transcript of this episode in our show notes at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. Sign up for my newsletter at jeffchu.substack.com and find photos of my dog, Fozzie, who has been whining in the background, and me on Instagram at @byjeffchu.
SARAH: You can find me, Sarah Bessey, at sarahbessey.com for all my social media links, the sign-up link for my newsletter, Field Notes, and of course, my books. The Evolving Faith podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, along with the multitalented SueAnn Shiah, who also provided our music. And please join us next week as we listen to our friend Tanya Marlow. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Evolving Faith podcast. And until next time, remember that you are loved.
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