Episode 226: I Am a Woman of Faith | Tackling Imposter Syndrome
Sometimes it’s hard to untangle specific beliefs from our ideas about faith. Is struggling with church policies or doctrinal tenets an indictment of a Latter-day Saint woman’s faith? What does it even mean to have faith? And who gets to measure ours? In Episode 226, Cynthia and Susan take on a topic that comes up frequently for church members who find themselves on a journey of expansion or redefinition: Imposter Syndrome. It’s a conversation about faith vs. knowledge, Churchianity vs. Christianity, the place of doubt in a religious life, and finding hope by leaning into personal spiritual authority.
Notes & Quotes:
Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, by Sharon Salzberg
Learning to Walk in the Dark, by Barbara Brown Taylor
About My Faith, by Jane Fonda, 6/10/2009
What We Talk About When We Talk About God, by Rob Bell
ALSSI Newsletter, July 2021
An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, by Barbara Brown Taylor
Super Soul Special: Rob Bell: Let’s Talk About God, Oprah’s Super Soul, 1/10/2018
50 Years of Exponent II, by Katie Ludlow Rich & Heather Sundahl
“In Pali, the language of the original Buddhist texts, the word usually translated as faith, confidence, or trust is saddha. Saddha literally means ‘to place the heart upon.’ To have faith is to offer one’s heart or give over one’s heart.” —Sharon Salzberg
“I had begun to feel I was being led. I felt a presence, a reverence humming within me. […] I began to notice that the dance was gone…I had started my journey with a powerful sense of the divine presence, but the linear approach seemed too rigid to contain this and I began to get scared: What had I gotten myself into? I had met some inspiring, extraordinary Christians, but there were others that came at me, fingers pointing in my face, demanding to know my position on this or that and if I could not say certain key words like ‘died for our sins,’ it meant I wasn’t a Christian.” —Jane Fonda
“Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it’s alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren’t opposites; they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.” —Rob Bell
“The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self—to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.” —Barbara Brown Taylor
"There is nothing to prove.” —Rob Bell
“Let’s stop for a minute to think about this whole question of ‘do I fit?’ Whether or not I fit has never been an issue. That’s not a question that I ask myself. The issue is ‘Do I want to be here?’ and how do I help these people ‘fit’ with me? We all fit in the church; we just sometimes have to work with folks to get them to understand how we fit.” —Cathy Stokes