A Few Substack Video Conversation Highlights
Deconstruction, Forgiveness, Scapegoating, and Bible stuff with the Jim Palmers, Brad Jersaks, Liz Charlotte Grants, Grace Ji-Sun Kims, and Paul Youngs of the World.
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🎙️I thought this insight from
(around 55:29 of our conversation) about an unhealthy way to approach deconstruction was golden …I think that one of the most important things things to know, for example, as a spiritual director, is to be very careful of sort of preferencing your spiritual path or belief system on other people, you know, which is hard to do, especially for people to come out of religion because we all think, you know, there's one right way and I've figured out what it is and now I've got to sort of steer everybody into it. And versus the idea that what we're really doing as spiritual directors is
Carl Rogers really built on this idea in what's called person-centered therapy. The idea is that every human being has an innate proclivity towards growth and actualization and fulfillment. What we do as counselors is we provide the ingredients and the environment for that person to in their own autonomy and independence and freedom to cultivate their path forward.
So we give them positive regard, empathy, understanding, and so on. We don't like go in suggesting that, well, maybe you should read this book so you can believe this or... One of the biggest problem—one of the biggest mistakes in religious deconstruction work is what I call the belief system swap, which is, you know,
out with all the old bad theology and here, read Richard Rohrer or whoever, and, you know, like, that's your new thing. I love Richard Rohrer, you know, and they've— we've talked several times over the years, but the point is not a belief system swap. The point is for a person to cultivate a different kind of relationship with
themselves so that they're kind of self-authoring their path forward. Now, I don't mean self-authoring, meaning you go sit in a room and you just like, it all goes on in your head because part of self-authoring is being very engaged and observant about being with the rest of the world. You know, like, One of the biggest mistakes,
I think, with developing your own philosophy of life, your own belief system, is this idea that it's the individualized, or even self-actualization, that it's a sort of individualized process. It is happening inside a realm of relationality.
🎙️And consider what
is saying (around 14:12) as we asked him about what kind of matrix he runs his thoughts through as he considers attempting to name injustice in a healthy way …I don't feel like I am, but I'm glad you brought up a matrix to run it through. So even if we're doing this imperfectly, and I'll just name one cause of the imperfection, One cause of the imperfection is if you say nothing, you're complicit in injustice. If you address injustice, you appear to be partisan.
You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't actually. So then you have to say, well, I guess I'm just going to have to think about what's in front of me and whether what's in front of me requires justice. or asks me to address it. Then I also have to ask myself exactly what you're saying.
Am I just projecting and mirroring my own issues? And one thing I'm hyper aware of is this saying I got from Archbishop Lazar Pahalo, moral outrage is a form of confession. And so when I feel moral outrage, I need to just It could be because something outrageous is happening, but also it could be that it's bothering me particularly because of some unresolved thing in me.
All right. So now like I'm particularly, I get outraged at, at fundamentalists. Why? Oh, because I haven't come to peace with the fundamentalist I once was. And because I haven't, he still pops up just on the other side of the issue.
It's, it's, you know, so I do work at that daily. And, um, um, and the way the matrix I use then is, is the Beatitudes. I have tried to pray them daily for my goodness, a dozen years or more now. And I, I call it a furnace of discernment if you install the furnace of the beatitudes in your heart and you run everything through it that you think might be a good idea or a revelation from god or a projection from your own like it's complex well it's less complex when you run everything through the beatitudes so so let's say i'm outraged about something it's like okay blessed are the poor in spirit theirs is the kingdom of god blessed are those who mourn okay i'm mourning that counts. I get to mourn. I'm going to mourn with those who mourn. I'm going to get to mourn the, and then, and then, but, but wait, but like blessed are the meek or the gentle.
Oh, okay. So in my mourning and even in my lament, uh, maybe I shouldn't be smashing everything. Oh, but wait, I blessed are those who hunger and thirst after justice. That's the same word as righteousness and greed. Um, I do hunger and thirst for that because look at what's in the news and look at what's happening to my friends. And then the next one is, well, blessed are the merciful. So my reaction to the injustices in the world is like, what's going to help? Oh, mercy. To be a person of mercy. But I get tired and I get weary and I get secondary trauma. Oh, okay.
Well, then blessed are the pure in heart. let your heart be cleansed. What will wash your heart today? What's a good bath to give your heart when you're in the midst of, okay, now maybe you can be a peace builder. Blessed are the peacemakers. But otherwise, I'm just a red-eyed angry activist.
And then, well, okay, now I'm going to be a peacemaker, peace builder. What would that look like? Well, I know one thing. The next thing up is persecution, and I can't claim that. So I've not been an effective enough peace builder to claim. I see a lot of victim mentality in the church of, oh, we're so persecuted.
No, maybe tell me that if you're a Coptic Christian in Egypt. Anyway, that's my matrix.
🎙️And I found
’s response (around 45:13) to our question about reading the bible in a co-partnering kind of way important, when she said …Oh, I hope so. Yeah. I have been really, really moved by the Barthian way of thinking about the Bible, just to say that the Word of God becomes the Word of God to you as you read it. And so there's this idea that on its own, on the shelf, it's not like a particularly magic-dusted book, but it...
But it does contain a part of God, and we can't exactly understand how. We can't measure it. But there is this kind of creative action that happens when we engage expecting to meet God, right? You know, if we believe that the whole world contains God, too, you know,
all of a sudden I can kind of go outside and experience. divinity right i can say i'm expecting to see god here and then god might arrive in some immeasurable way i mean i just think what's challenging is uh we can't we
can't measure these things you know we can't be sure um and i think so many of us in the west like to be sure don't we certain want to know that we're meeting with god and to be able to define the parameters but the fact is that that is not what it's like to interact with a spirit deity.
Like,it's just not, you know, and I know, I'm sure you've, you all have gotten pushback in this, you know, because Jesus is a man and had a body and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you know what? It's pretty hard to attach to Jesus right on this side of history.
I can't sit face to face and look eye to eye with Jesus. It requires an imaginative capacity to be able to engage with God. And I think being able to recognize that and agree with that and make space for that, I think that's really important.
And I think that goes into what we were talking about with experience too, where there's just this reality where we kind of have to say, you know god is bigger than just the words in this book and that means that people's experience interpret and interpretation of this book and of god is deeply valuable you know we need need need those to be able to understand who this deity is that has made us you know continues to interact with us um Yeah, I don't know how you can have faith otherwise, right?
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🎙️Oh, and I had to laugh when
started talking about sin around 8:36 of our conversation because, you know, the old tired pushback against progressive Christianity is that it’s “soft on sin,” which I just think is funny because once you start to try and engage, what you realize is that they’re not so sure progressives are soft on sin as they are sure that progressives are soft on the kind of sin they want you to be hard on and hard on the kind they want you to be soft on! (Btw, I’m digressing into “you” and “they” language, so that’s probably not healthy, but I assume you can see where this is going.) So, I loved that Grace was clear about our need to call the sin of whitneness and patriarchy out when she said …If we continue to have this white male notion of who God is, that continues to legitimize whiteness. So it's like a big circular kind of thing that we really need to dismantle because whiteness then allows this white male God to exist.
And it just goes into this circle, continuing to legitimize each other,while the consequence is that there is racism. And, you know, people in the church or in society think, well, racism isn't that bad. But when we really dismantle and think about racism here in American, you know, soil, we know the genocide was created by racism.
It's the church that allowed you can take the land and kill those on it if they're not Christians. So, you know, manifest destiny and You know, the doctrine of discovery, that's all, you know, racism being played out. And racism, you know, that meant 90 to 98% of Native Americans were murdered. This is how dangerous racism is.
And we know that racism also led to the enslavement of Africans on this soil. You know, that is just a horrific part of our history. And it just continues on and on and on. even till our present time. So that's why racism is so dangerous.
That's why the church really needs to call it a sin so we will stop being so racist. We can try to dismantle this concept of whiteness so that we can live out the gospel and recognize that we are all equal and that we're all created in the image of God.
🎙️Finally, for now, I’ll just say that
’s thoughts on forgiveness around sexual abuse was incredibly powerful (around 34:38), when he said …I was involved in a Swiss documentary about sexual abuse and I went to the premiere they were showing. It was a big theatre, packed theatre. And in the end, I was the only guy — sexually abused history—there were women and a therapist. So, we did a roundtable at the end and they asked each of us to speak to the community.
I said, “Look, statistically, there are many men and women here who’ve been abused and statistically, some of you are perpetratoers and I want to say to the perpetrators … ‘You are loved with an everlasting love; you are indwelt by the full presence of that love—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—you can make the choice to stay hidden or not but nobody comes to healing in isolation.”
And I just loved on them. It was the Spirit’s leading. The outflow of that was just amazing because it’s not usually what happens in that setting. It was beautiful. And the panelists, the women who were on the panel who had been sometimes horendously abused, resonated with what I said. And in that moment, it had to be a man who said what I said. It doesn’t always have to be but in that moment it had to be. And that’s the beauty of being involved in moment by moment response because you’ve give up control and you never know what’s about to happen.
Thanks everyone for being a part of my life, for helping us make these conversations happen. (And to
who’s an amazing conversation partner on these videos.) We are all in a crazy time period right now … so much performative cruelty, degenerative mimesis, and polarization going on … I still think love is in the mix and if so, there’s hope moving forward.All my best, subscribe or upgrade if you can,
✌🏼 Jonathan
Great highlight reel! Good stuff right there
Great highlights of some excellent podcasts!