Episode 226 (Transcript): I Am a Woman of Faith | Tackling Imposter Syndrome
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Christine Fitz for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
CW: That reminds me of one of my favorite Rachel Held Evans quotes. I just read it the other day, where she said, “Grace is already out of hand when Jesus said, ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’”
Like it’s out of control with Jesus. Or at least when you switch to the Jesus that you just described, that's much different than the “Jesus of the contract” or the “quid pro quo Jesus”.
SH: Right.
CW: Yeah. We really struggle with… let me personalize that. I really really struggled making that shift, but it had to be made, and it gave me my faith back, so I totally resonate with what you're saying.
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SH: Hello, I'm Susan Hinckley
CW: And I am Cynthia Winward
SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today's episode is, “I Am a Woman of Faith - Tackling Imposter Syndrome”. Hello, Cynthia! Let's do it.
CW: Are we qualified at all to talk about imposter syndrome? I would argue we actually are.
SH: I was just gonna say, who is more of an expert at imposter syndrome than I feel like I am. So yeah, we are. I mean, the greater question is, do we have any expertise to talk about faith? And I'm not totally sure about that, except for my own.
So let's start the conversation right there. Let's preface everything by saying we're just gonna talk about our own experiences.
CW: That's what we're gonna do. Should we jump in?
SH: Let's do it.
CW: Well, we had our July book group, which can I just pause and actually give a quick advertisement? Our next book group is October 9th, and it's The Next Mormons by Jana Reiss.
And I just wanna say Lindsie and Shaless do the most amazing job running our book club. Even if you don't read the book.
SH: They're so good.
CW: They are so good. And I hate to admit, but there have been times where I haven't quite gotten to the book, or I haven't reread the book in years, and we show up and they put on the most amazing discussion.
So that's our plug. If you're looking for a little bit more community, go to our website and look up information there about our book group. So anyway, we had our July book group, we're on Zoom, and on that call one of the participants was lamenting that they had imposter syndrome now that they are navigating this big faith change. And then on another Zoom call (we actually attended someone else’s book group), one of the men on that call said that he really appreciated what you wrote in the book, Susan (I think it was your Metamorphosis chapter where you wrote about being a woman of faith?). And I just have been thinking about those two experiences.
And so my question I would love to discuss with you is when we're navigating these big changes, why do we all of a sudden jump to, like, “imposters”? I think what that woman was saying was like, “I'm still showing up at church. On the outside everything looks the same. On the inside, though, I feel like an imposter.”
SH: Right. I totally get what she's saying. I've been there.
CW: Well, I get it too, but it still makes me really sad that, you know… I mean, it's understandable, but also if we grew up reading the Book of Mormon our entire life and then all of a sudden we have a hard time with scripture… I mean, Susan, a man in my ward, he just announced in a talk that he's read the Book of Mormon over 150 times now. Why the audience needed to know that, I don't know, but this is who we are!
This is who we are. We are scripture readers, particularly Book of Mormon readers. So if you're sitting in a meeting and you hear someone say something like that, and you've been in church your whole life like I have, you've probably taught Primary many times and you've prayed over every meal.
I mean, we pray over every donut at seminary, like, we are praying people. Then when you get to that shifty point where we are changing and probably some of those spiritual practices are changing, then we kind of say sadly to each other, “I guess I'm not a woman of faith”.
SH: Right.
CW: And that's heartbreaking.
SH: Yeah. I hear it all the time. I just had this conversation with a woman just a week or two ago where she used those exact words: “I guess I'm not a woman of faith”. Because she had found that General Conference wasn't really working for her the way that it always had, right? And so her immediate assumption was that her faith had somehow slipped.
You know, my own experience with this… I say that I really resonate with imposter syndrome, but it's not anything that's happened to me recently. It's a little bit different twist on it because I always felt like an imposter Mormon, you know? That's how I spent most of my life feeling.
And then as I've talked about a million times [00:05:00] on the podcast, I came to realize that actually I'm a woman of great faith. And that was a life changing thinking shift for me. But as I thought about it for this episode, what happened? Like, did all the stuff that I had struggled with my whole life suddenly resolve? I think that you know that's not true.
CW: Nope.
SH: No. But actually what I've come to is that my struggle with struggling resolved. Wrestling shifted from being an indictment kind of word to a signifier kind of word: “You know, I actually care a lot about this stuff.” And I've continued to seek God despite not having an easy time of it really ever in my life.
So now I think of my wrestling as hanging on and demanding the blessing like we've talked about from the Jacob story. That's sort of how I think of my faith life now.
CW: I love your struggle with struggling is what changed.
SH: Well, if I could give women in this space one gift that would be high on the list of things that I would want to give, is the idea that it's okay to struggle. That's not an indictment of you or your faith or anything else. It's… in fact, I would say it's sort of what we're meant to do.
CW: The whole point.
SH: It's the whole point. Yeah. Well, let's start at the faith scripture, shall we? And this is Hebrews 11:1. In the KJV, it says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
CW: Oh my gosh, you've probably heard that 150 times from the pulpit as well.
SH: Right? Absolutely. At least. I thought it was interesting that the Joseph Smith translation substitutes the word “assurance” for “substance” and assurance is like confidence or a promise.
But when we're talking about faith, it's like we give that assurance to ourselves. Like, someone else assuring us does not magically grant us faith. It can't come from anyone else. And we're also talking about things that we can't know. We can't know the things that require us to have faith, but for whatever reason (and the reasons are gonna vary by the person), we feel confidence or promise in these things.
So here's my question looking at those scriptures. If we can't get faith from anyone else, then how does anyone else get to determine whether we have faith or not? I feel like we have to give this grade to ourselves.
CW: I think it's easy to see why we can feel so… what's the emotion that came from your friend when she said, “I guess I'm not a woman of faith”… I don't know how to describe that emotion.
Like on that zoom call when they said they're an imposter. Is it a disappointment in themselves? Is it a sadness? Like, they seem forlorn to me. What is the right word there? It's all of the above, I guess. But it's easy to see why we feel that disappointment about being a woman of faith when we see words like in that scripture you just read: confidence and assurance. Because I think we reach a place where we're like, “Well, I'm not really confident in any of this”. So I like that you say you have to grade yourself there, meaning we're not grading on the curve, we're only looking at ourselves and assessing where we are.
SH: Yeah. And I feel like, as I think about when a woman says that, “Well, I guess I'm not a woman of faith,” to me that seems like that's confidence in herself that has changed.
CW: Well, yes, exactly.
SH: Which is different from what the scripture's talking about. I just scrolled back in my notes and I also had what the NIV said in there, and the NIV says that scripture this way: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
So I'm not necessarily sure if I were to ask the woman who is struggling with General Conference - has the things that she hoped for changed? Like, has she lost confidence in those things? Because when she says, “I guess I'm not a woman of faith because General Conference isn't really doing it for me,” to me that sounds like she still has hope intact.
She showed up wanting something that she didn't get there, right? So the things she was hoping for are still there, but I feel like her confidence in herself has diminished.
CW: I think that's a better way to look at it. What we hope for hasn't really changed. I'm thinking here about my own life when things got really shifty for me, thinking, I agree with that statement. What I hoped for hadn't changed. Just, I was grading myself on a curve and that’s never gonna end well.
SH: Well, I'm just gonna say not in this church, Cynthia, but that's maybe too cynical. You can [00:10:00] cut that out. [laughter] In my own journey with this, untangling faith from knowledge and belief really helped me as I started to approach the idea of, “Am I a woman of faith?” You know, I began to see that faith and hope actually have a lot more in common than faith and knowledge.
CW: Yeah
SH: But growing up in the church, that's not how I felt about it, you know? I felt like faith was really talking about things that I believe or, even better, know. That's what having faith was about, right? And so I think of it this way: the thoughts going on in my head are different from the actions going on in my life, and knowledge and belief are about how we think, but faith and hope are more about who and how we are.
CW: Totally agree with that.
SH: And that changes it for me.
CW: Yeah. Big distinction.
SH: I love this quote from Sharon Salzberg, from her book, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, which I think we have referenced before on the podcast. Highly recommend.
CW: Highly highly recommend - five stars.
SH: Yeah, five stars. But she says this: “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.” So to me, this gets to the motivation for what we're doing, right? Are we doing it (whatever it is) from our hearts? Because if our hearts are engaged, then I think we can grade ourselves as acting in faith.
CW: I think that changes everything. Like I'm sitting here with my math mind, I like to think of things in equations and I'm thinking faith = what you place your heart upon.
Like, how could anyone hear that definition and still lament that “I guess I'm not a woman of faith” or “I guess I'm an imposter in this church, in my own life”, whatever. Because whatever you put your heart upon is where you're putting your faith. In other words, we all have faith. We may just have faith in different things. And I would argue, Susan, maybe even the things you have faith in and the things I have faith in are probably a little bit different as well. Just because we are different women, and I think that's the way it should be.
SH: Yeah, absolutely! And the thing that I thought of when you just said that was, the next thing I would say about that is: and faith is in things that we do not know. We're placing our heart into things that we do not know. So how can we not all have faith? If the problem is that you don't know the things that you used to know anymore, I don't think that's anything to do with your faith slipping. So part of it is we need to redefine that word, I guess, and how we think about faith.
CW: Totally agree. And I think that's totally fair for Latter-day Saints to have to redefine what faith is. You just have to, when things start getting shifty, you have to redefine it. Otherwise you kind of do feel like we were saying just this heaviness of, “I guess I'm not a woman of faith”. It's like, no, you still are, you just have faith in different things. And that's good.
SH: Yeah, but I think it represents more understanding because I think sitting in church my whole life understanding faith as being the things I know or believe was misunderstanding what that word actually means and how it's meant to operate in my life.
So in a way this is progress, I think, when we come to a place where we can redefine some words and understand them in a broader context or a deeper context. I think that's progress.
CW: I'm sitting here thinking our little Primary song we've sung our whole lives, “faith is knowing the sun will rise, lighting each new day”.
And I'm like, well, I would define that a little differently than “faith”. “Faith is knowing the Lord will hear my prayers each time I pray,” - I think that's the line. I'm reciting this from memory, but yeah, I can see how we sung about it in Primary in a more certain way than I think… those words to me sound way more certain than I would describe faith now. So, that makes sense.
SH: Well, it does make sense and I think that's maybe why I absorbed a lot of the messages I did as a kid. I think that often at church, principles are taught in the very simplest terms. Things get reduced a lot to very simple terms, especially when you're dealing with Primary children.
But when you start building on that simple simple foundation as Primary children and then everything sort of reinforces that as you go along, it’s no wonder that when you get to be 60 years old and the wheels come off General Conference for you, [00:15:00] you think, “Well, this is what faith means. So I must be wrong. I must be slipping.” I can see why it happens.
[Music Interlude]
Unfortunately, I think worthiness also has a place in this conversation too. And how could it be an LDS conversation without worthiness having a place? [laughter]
CW: Susan, I just hope everyone has their Bingo card out right now and they have blackout now, like, “Fear; how many times are these ladies gonna talk about fear? Oh, how many times are they gonna talk about worthiness in the arc of this podcast project?” So go ahead. I wanna hear what you have to say about worthiness and faith.
SH: Here's how I'm gonna throw worthiness under the bus this time. I think that in our church we get this mistaken idea that our faith is really subject to the same kind of worthiness assessments that we are subject to at church.
So like, in the same way that we get judgment passed on us, we pass judgment on ourselves and on our faith. So like I was thinking about, you know, can you have faith and drink tea? Can you have faith but not be certain about what happens after you die? Can you have faith and not love the temple? Can you have faith but also question certain doctrinal tenets? Can you have faith but disagree with policies of the church? Can you have faith while not wearing your garments? Can you have faith and disagree with the prophet?
I mean, I think a lot of members of our church would argue that your answers to those questions are signifiers of your faith. And maybe they are in a way, right? They demonstrate fidelity to specific beliefs, but I'm not sure that's the same thing as faith.
CW: Correct.
SH: There are a whole lot of people of faith in this world who have never heard of our Mormon beliefs. So I don't think having a set of right beliefs guarantees that we have faith. I think faith is more likely a fidelity to hope. It's more like that.
CW: Your favorite word.
SH: Yeah, my favorite word. So if it's not necessarily beliefs, then what are more reliable signifiers of faith?
CW: Nice. Oh, are you asking me? [laughter]
SH: I don't necessarily know the answer. I am asking you. I'm asking myself. I mean, because I think most Latter-day Saints think our beliefs are the signifiers of our faith. And I'm not necessarily saying that they can't be. But like I said, I think that faith is more like fidelity to hope than to specific beliefs.
CW: Okay. So that's my next equation then, I'm thinking faith = fidelity to hope. I'll put it on a pillow for you, Susan, and send it to you for your birthday next year.
SH: Thank you! Yes! It's almost worth getting older just to get that pillow. [laughter]
CW: Oh gosh. But that's another great definition - a fidelity to hope. Thank you for that.
SH: My next question for you is to whom do we owe faith? Like do we owe it to God or do we owe it to the church? Like can you have faith in one but struggle with the other? Because I would posit that faith probably belongs more to God and less to manmade institutions.
I don't know. Another word for faith is trust. So when I think about faith as trust, then it becomes really easy for me to see how someone could have perfect trust in God, but struggle to have that same kind of trust in a human led institution.
CW: Well, just that description right there that you used of institution - human led. I mean, ding ding ding! We would always be disappointed in anything human led or humans themselves - all of the above - because we are all imperfect. But having faith in God, and faith that God guides us, and God may guide you differently than me… That's a pretty powerful place to place your trust, I think, so far for me anyway.
SH: Right, right. And God may guide the church, you know, to be fair, or the leaders of the church in the same way that God guides us. But you know, the whole thing is an imperfect game of telephone really, on this human earth.
I mean, for between me and God, and between any human being and God, I think you're basically playing a game of telephone. So it's fraught. It’s easy for me to have trust directly in the source. A little harder for me to have trust at the other end of the telephone can when there's someone else “middle man-ing”.
CW: Okay. If we're gonna talk about human led institutions, then can we also talk about how often… I mean, I think this leads quite perfectly into a conversation about how I think we confuse faith with religion. And I mean, this is obvious, but I wanna talk about it anyway, even though it seems obvious. Because I think intellectually we know that faith and religion can be different.
Like you just said a minute [00:20:00] ago. The world is full of people of faith who aren't even necessarily a part of organized religion or, you know, not ours. Ours is a very small blip on the map of the whole world map.
But I feel like we need to quickly look at how as Latter-day Saints we behave in our natural habitat? Can I put it that way? You know, so that we can throw some grace to all of our listeners in this conversation because our natural habitat has its own little ecosystem. And it's easy to see how we kind of end up in this spot where we believe that we're not a woman of faith.
And I would guess that for most orthodox and orthoprax (I'm gonna add both of those in there) if an allegiance to right thinking and an allegiance to correct actions/practices… I think us as orthoprax and orthodox LDS folks… if you have that Venn diagram, you have the two circles. One is religious life, one is faith life. And I'm gonna guess for a lot of people in our religion, it's pretty much the same circle or heavily heavily overlapped, like 90% overlap.
But I would say for me now, the overlap is very small and I had this experience (well my husband had this experience). I haven't been really going to Gospel Doctrine this year - confession - because it's the Doctrine and Covenants.
SH: I was just gonna say two words, Cynthia - Doctrine and Covenants. [laughter]
CW: Exactly. But my husband, he just… speaking of religious life and faith life, he just went to a Gospel Doctrine lesson where the topic was, I don't know, they were talking about the three degrees of glory.
And he came home and he's like, untying his church shoes and taking 'em off. And he's just lamenting to me and he says, “They just made God so small.” And I thought that was really interesting. He said, “They were just so sure about how all of the divisions work,” and I have no idea if they drew the three circles on the board for all the different kingdoms. And then, you know, within the tippy top kingdom that one gets divided. And then he said, “They were going on about, well this is the kind of body… you get different bodies… you're resurrected to different bodies depending on what kingdom you go to.” And I'm like, oh my gosh. I mean, my husband was just not uplifted at all by that conversation.
So my question… like, if I stood in front of that Gospel Doctrine class, and I would say, is this a religious conversation? I think everyone would say “yes”. And if we ask like, is this a spiritual or faith promoting conversation? I'm sure plenty would say “yes”, but I think my husband was trying to say “no”, it wasn't a faith-filled conversation for him.
Obviously, if he felt like they were making God very small, then it wasn't one that particularly touched him. I mean, how could you be arguing the geography of heaven and body parts? How can that ever be a conversation of wonder, of faith, of awe? Like it's not just me and my husband, right?
Like I don't think… I mean… as I'm telling you this, I'm sure you're, you know, face palming right now (I can't see you). But I don't know. The Venn diagram overlap there was very small, I think, that day for my husband as well.
SH: Yeah. And if they didn't draw that diagram on the board, we've all certainly been in the lesson where they did. If it wasn't that one, they're certainly talking about things we can't know. I will give them that.
CW: Well, yes.
SH: Interesting. I'm stuck thinking about your Venn diagram because that image really is sort of part, for me, of how I realized that I'm a woman of faith. Because I used to think that faith would fit kind of entirely within religion or like they'd be on top of each other, like you were saying. But then, it's like my personal diagram kind of flipped. And so many of the things that I'm spiritually hungry for and that have nourished me, exist outside of my religion circle.
And so like talks about the three kingdoms or diagrams about that, those do nothing for me. But there are all kinds of things over here that do feed me. And so if anything, my religious life became this little circle within a huge faith circle.
CW: Oh, that's gorgeous! So that's not even really like a Venn diagram. It sounds like you resonate with maybe a different visual for that. But I really like that of… I'm thinking, here's your faith life - this huge circle, and our religion became a much smaller circle within it?
SH: Yeah. That's part of it.
CW: But yeah, I just think… I hope we can see these types of experiences that we have at church and give ourselves a lot of grace because those types of conversations don't resonate for me anymore. And I can imagine the same for a lot of our listeners. And so [00:25:00] I can see how someone could walk out of a Sunday school class like my husband experienced and just be like, “I guess I'm not a faithful person because that did nothing for me.”
But clearly like the men in the class who were raising their hands like crazy, like they were getting something out of it. I don't know what. If nothing else, the need to be right, or to argue or to emphasize doctrine or whatever. So yeah, lots of grace for those of us for whom those kinds of conversations don't resonate anymore.
SH: Well maybe in a world where (or a conversation where) we are talking about faith as fidelity to our hope - if you're a person who places a lot of hope in things like three degrees of glory and all of the details associated with it, then I can see why talking about those things maybe would feel like an exercise of your faith. If you're a person for whom those ideas don't really do anything at all, I can see why you'd walk out of the class going, “wow, that did nothing for me.”
CW: Yeah, good point.
SH: So again, we're all having a different experience when we're at church. We just don't realize it. And you know, even just that fact, just coming to really internalize that fact as being true, I think can do a lot towards smashing imposter syndrome for you.
CW: Yes.
SH: You're just having a different experience from other people in the room and tons of other people in the room are also having a different experience. We just don't say those parts out loud.
CW: I was thinking after my husband told me about that experience that my new comment that I'm gonna keep in my back pocket (when I do go back to Gospel Doctrine)… Maybe I'll go back sooner rather than later. But my new comment I'm keeping in my back pocket is exactly what you just said: “I think it's important to realize that everybody in this room is having a different experience and we can't just assume that we all are on board with - whatever - this type of thinking,” whatever the topic is that there are.
How many times, Susan, have you said, “There are as many Latter-day Saint women as there are Latter-day Saint women in the room”. And so I think that's just my new (I've decided as I've been thinking about this the last couple weeks) that's my new back pocket comment. I'm just gonna pull out… instead of arguing, instead of getting into the three kingdoms and different resurrected bodies, blah, blah, boring, blah, blah.
I think I would just raise my hand and say, "You know, I think we need to leave a lot of room here that we’re all experiencing this differently, and that's a good thing.”
SH: I love that idea. And I feel like that's a very safe comment. Like, even maybe I could make that comment, Cynthia. [laughter] So it must be a very safe comment, but I feel like I could make it, and I feel like as often as we could give a nod to the idea that the silence going on during the lesson is not necessarily agreement, you know? Or sameness. As often as we could point that out, we would all benefit from it.
[Music Interlude]
Okay. Do you care if we talk about Church-ianity versus Christianity for a minute? Because I heard that word the other day, and I think I just sent you a note saying, “yes!”
CW: You did! You texted me immediately and I was like, how have we never heard of that made… How did we not make up that made up word - “Church-ianity”?
SH: Exactly! It's the best word ever. And what does it describe? Everything. [laughter] That's how I feel about it. That word just described everything to me. I think the concept of faith for Latter-day Saints gets really complicated because sometimes we can be really prone to Church-ianity. Like, we might be more invested in being Mormons than in being Christians. Does that sound fair to say?
CW: Very fair.
SH: Yeah. I don't think most members would really admit that, but I feel like fidelity to church trumps pretty much everything else in our church. At least for many members. Maybe changing how we think about faith could change how we think about all of it.
And as I got thinking about that, I was trying to think of examples. Like for one example, Jesus has been this giant magnet for me, pulling me toward my larger faith life that I described in the diagram. Exchanging my small box God for a larger God also meant, you know, trading in my old Jesus for a Jesus that I see differently.
And to be really specific about it, I swapped the “quid pro quo Jesus” of my previous understanding for an “abundance out of hand Jesus”. But as I thought about that and broke it down further, I realized, like the first one asked for my belief. It's like, did I understand and assent to the fine print of the sacrifice that was made on my behalf? And how my baptism obligated me to that.
But the “abundance out of [00:30:00] hand Jesus” beckons me to faith because that's more like, can I trust something so big that I can never get my head around it? Am I willing to trust God's love and to just keep walking toward it?
CW: There's a lot of mystery in that, though, in what you're describing, and I don't think… I think mystery is really hard for us; in the “church of knowing” that's really hard. But I'm with you there. I'm leaning into that mystery.
SH: But that's why I think faith is really hard for us.
CW: Absolutely.
SH: 'Cause we are a “church of knowing”. So I think faith really gets short shrift in our church. We like that legalistic Jesus because we can look at the contract and understand the language of it, right? We know what we're dealing with there. And we know what it requires us to do.
But, man, that abundance out of hand, we're really uncomfortable with that. 'Cause we can't nail it down and define it. It just requires trust, and what is faith if not trust?
CW: That reminds me of one of my favorite Rachel Held Evans quotes. I just read it the other day, where she said, “Grace is already out of hand when Jesus said, ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’”
Like, that abundance out of hand that you’re talking about (which is grace). It’s out of control with Jesus. Or at least when you switch to the Jesus that you just described, that's much different than the “Jesus of the contract” or the “quid pro quo Jesus”.
SH: Right.
CW: Yeah. We really struggle with… let me personalize that. I really really struggled making that shift, but it had to be made and it gave me my faith back, so I totally resonate with what you're saying.
SH: I didn't really struggle with it, I just didn't know if I was… I didn't know… I didn't think I was allowed to have that Jesus. Like, I didn't know we… I was like, “Oh, we can do that? Oh, well then, okay! Lemme give you this one back, thank you.” [laughter]
CW: Yeah. “Here's your contract back.”
SH: “But I'll let you keep that one.” Exactly. I don't know, I just… as I look at my life as a Latter-day Saint, I can really see where I've had these two very different relationships with Jesus.
But the first one directed my focus inward. Like all my focus was inward. It was this place where I could never quite measure up because, you know, would I qualify for the atonement? What does that even mean? You know? And I’m like parsing the words and trying to figure out where I am on this “measurement stick”, you know, where am I? The legalistic framing inspired fear (and there's your second Bingo card word of this episode). It inspired fear in me, but it did not inspire faith.
So part of coming to faith for me, also, was giving away my fear and all of the things that inspire it. I don't engage with fear-based messaging anymore because they are destructive to faith for me.
CW: So I have a question then. When you came to that realization, is that when you finally said to yourself, “Oh, I am a woman of great faith”?
SH: When I actually had the realization and those words actually came into my head, it kind of went along with when I realized God's love for me, that I, you know, I've talked about having that experience where suddenly I realized I was loved by God. But I think that those things actually do go hand in hand. I moved into a place of trust in God's love. Which I'd never had before.
CW: Gosh, that's so beautiful, Susan.
SH: And so that was a step away from fear and away from myself - like, outside myself. Because now it's teaching me to think about God and myself and everyone else differently, right? It gets me to look at something beyond my own kind of worried, white knuckle perfectionism, which is where I lived most of my Latter-day Saint life.
CW: What you're describing to me… I wanna go back to those words I said a few minutes ago. Like, is this awe? Is this wonder? Is this expansion? And what you just described to me is yes, yes, yes. So thank you.
SH: So it was an easy trade for me to make, I think, because it was powered by this deepened acquaintance with God's love. I think it was easy for me, but I can see how it would be very hard for someone for whom the previous model worked really well.
Like for me, part of it was the previous model was never really getting me anywhere. So, you know, it was easy for me to trade it in, but if everything had worked well for you your whole life, then I can see that being pretty hard to swallow.
CW: That was me! I'm raising my hand. You can't see me, but I'm raising my hand 'cause that previous model worked really well for me. I've said that how many times, like I was good at hustling until I wasn't. So you and I ended up at the same place, but through different channels and I find that fascinating.
SH: Exactly. That's one of the things I love about our conversations is that we're very often on the same page, but we got there by such different routes, usually, that it makes space for a lot of women's stories, hopefully, among our listeners.
But just to summarize this section, I just wanna say that's where I believe faith lives. I believe faith lives somewhere [00:35:00] outside and beyond ourselves. So this laser focus that goes on in our church on ensuring our own salvation, that is never gonna get me outside my worthiness.
And so going back to what you said about Paul's experience in Gospel Doctrine, you know, church services very often are focused on inward looking things like personal or family exaltation. What's more inward looking than three degrees of glory and you're breaking down what kind of body you're gonna have? That is naval gazing of the highest and holiest order. [laughter]
CW: It really is.
SH: So I feel like when our understanding of faith and/or our actual faith expands, especially if it's new to us, then it can be pretty easy to feel out of sync with what's going on at church. And we might wonder whether we're “faith-ing” right.
I think this is what was going on with the woman with General Conference. She's thinking, “I'm not doing this right anymore,” right? Or (and I wanna give a nod to this because I think it's a pitfall also) we can be convinced that others are not doing it right. We can doubt that they're doing it right because we think we're doing it right now. And that's also a problem. There's gotta be room around something like faith for everyone to be experiencing it and practicing it in their own way.
[Music Interlude]
CW: Can we talk for a minute about how religious folks have a very narrow definition of spirituality? I mean, I think if we're gonna talk about faith…
SH: This is not just Latter-day Saints.
CW: No. No, no, no. Notice I said “religious folks” and I would add particularly, high demand religions such as ours, right?
We have a very narrow definition. I mean, can we go back and read your list about your qualifiers? Like what about going to the temple and could you drink tea and feel the spirit - all these kinds of things. And so I think… I mean, Susan, how many missionary homecoming talks do you think you've heard in your whole life?
SH: So many, Cynthia.
CW: So many! I mean, I'm 10 years younger than you are, and I'm gonna guess I've heard probably a thousand at this point. But what so many of them seem to have in common… and it's totally understandable, like if you're working for the organization (and that's what missionary work is) and you are totally into this for 18 months or two years, I totally get that you have bought in to the mentality of “our product is the best”.
You think of those silly infomercials at midnight, “If you don't use this knife, I don't know what you're doing with your life,” kind of a thing. [laughter] And so, you know, I've heard a million missionary homecoming talks, and I'm thinking of one I heard recently where the sweet missionary said in their talk something about people not in our church are spiritually dead. And I was like, “Oh”.
I mean, I'm going to give all the missionaries who come home buckets and buckets of grace. Because like I said, they've been selling a very specific product and so they've totally bought into, “We are the best and everyone else is the worst”. But if you hear enough rough messages like these, and maybe for those who have served missions, maybe they're like, “Oh yeah, I gave that homecoming talk as well,” then it's easy to understand when a lot of it crumbles, why you begin to doubt that you're a person of faith.
I think I came home from a recent missionary homecoming talk. It's the summer and I live in Utah, people, so we have a lot of missionaries who go out and come home in the summertime and give their missionary farewell talks and their homecoming talks.
And so I was texting you about a recent one I had heard and can I read the reply? Is that okay, Susan? Am I breaking our friendship confidence if I read your reply here? I'll bleep out any bad words.
SH: I was just gonna say, you can read my reply, but I reserve the right to hit the bleep button at any time.
CW: Okay. You replied to me, “Why why why is this the way we want to be with each other? Where did Jesus teach us this? I honestly have to wonder. We have to learn a new way of treating people, or this church needs to go away. It's not any God I want any part of.”
SH: Ouch.
CW: First of all, thank you for commiserating with me because I was really, speaking of forlorn, I was just so sad when I came home after hearing a specific talk and those were the words you said to me.
And I was like, you know what? That's it. Why is this the way we wanna treat people? Why would we ever throw shade at people and say, well then you're spiritually dead. We need to learn a new way, like you said, of treating people.
SH: I'm thinking about that message that I sent you and what's behind it. Because you have to admit for me, I mean it's pretty… those are pretty strong words.
CW: Those are pretty strong words for [00:40:00] an introvert. But you were texting me and so…
SH: Saying that the church needs to go away, that's pretty strong. But I think I was probably speaking to my own sadness for having sort of felt like my own faith was under suspicion my whole life.
You know, it's like, I guess I understand something about feeling like members of our church might think you're spiritually dead. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but, like, that really hurts me. It hurts me. It feels personal to me. And that tells me that there was maybe a lot of spiritual damage being done during all the years that I was letting other people define all of these things for me and struggling so hard.
CW: When you hand out such a narrow definition of spirituality then plenty of people are gonna leave a meeting like that feeling lacking. Feeling lack, you know?
SH: I actually think when you were telling me about this, and when I sent you that text I was actually listening to Sarah Bessey on a podcast, and I was hearing her talk about why she loves Barbara Brown Taylor so much.
So of course I picked up my pace immediately, my step quickened, because in my excitement to ever hear anything about Barbara Brown Taylor… I certainly love her as much as Sarah Bessey or anyone ever did, but she was specifically talking about learning to walk in the dark. And I know that you and I both have had a relationship with that book.
CW: Yep.
SH: So we're in good company; Sarah Bessey has too, but she talked about the metaphor from that book, of full solar spirituality versus lunar spirituality, which is… we've quoted it, I think we've quoted that part in full on this podcast more than once because it's so resonant for both of us.
But here's what she said about it I just loved. She talked about how that image landed with such deep validation for her. She said it was like having a dislocated shoulder popped back into place because she suddenly regained the full range of motion of her own spirituality.
CW: Wow. That's a good metaphor.
SH: I was just like, yes! Yes! That's it! It resonated so much with my experience of that Barbara Brown Taylor metaphor. Because for me, there was something about hearing her define the full solar spirituality and lunar spirituality where it's like I suddenly had permission to have spiritual difference and not just to other people, but also to myself because faith ebbs and flows, which I didn't really realize it was allowed to do, you know?
That was the giant “Aha!” to understanding that I'm a woman of faith. It really was.
CW: There you go.
SH: And understanding that I'm a woman of faith is the thing that has given me back the full range of motion of my spirituality. Well, I never had the full range of motion before. I didn't realize I was operating with a shoulder that didn't really work.
I didn't know that I was, but my faith was a product of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It just was. That's where I learned it, that's where I practiced it, all of it - it all existed in that circle of the Venn diagram. And I honestly thought that the church owned the copyright. I know that sounds really silly and immature, and I guess it was, but I don't think that it was too crazy that that's the message that I absorbed.
CW: Well, Susan, can we talk for a minute about… going along with what you just said, who gets to define what it means to be a woman of faith. If you're someone who walks by lunar spirituality, and I know that you are and I know that you even wear a necklace of a fingernail moon…
SH: You’re right. Thank you for knowing that!
CW: Yeah. That resonates so well with you that obviously you're to the point now where you’re defining what it means to be a woman of faith for yourself. So much so that you wear jewelry to remind yourself of it and I just love that about you. But here's another woman of faith I actually wanna talk about and, surprise, surprise, it's Jane Fonda. [laughter]
SH: Okay... Not on my bingo card.
CW: Well, I watched her in the last few years. She had a documentary and I watched it and she talked about how she came to Christianity.
And it's interesting because as I listened to her story, it very much sounded like the flip of what you and I experienced. You and I were raised in a high demand religion and then we kind of ended up having to like, define faith on our own. Whereas she was raised as an atheist, but then in her sixties she became a Christian.
And she said this: “I had begun to feel I was being lead. I felt a presence, a reverence humming within me.” I love that word of this... something was humming in her. So she jumped head-in to Christianity. She said she started going to Bible classes. But then she says [00:45:00] - and this can probably resonate with a lot of us… like you jump in head first and then she began to notice, like, this dance was gone. This dance that she had been like having with Jesus. She started her journey, she said, “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.”
SH: Wow.
CW: Can I add to that and say, for so many of us people could point at us and say, “Well, if you don't believe in the three degrees of glory and blah, blah, blah then you're not a real Latter-day Saint.” So this totally resonated for me. I really relate to that experience.
My Christianity also feels like this “humming within me”. I loved that.
SH: That is a beautiful image.
CW: Yeah. But we have this pull of our faith tradition that says it is very linear. And I love that she used that word. Very linear. Very definitional. Like my husband's experience, very much like my husband's experience in that Gospel Doctrine class, this very linear experience.
So, go Jane Fonda for feeling this humming, feeling this draw towards Jesus. Then you begin to get a little bit scared, but then you say, “No, wait a minute. I am a woman of faith and this is how I am going to practice it.”
SH: So I guess Jane Fonda would probably say that we get to define what it means to be a woman of faith.
CW: I think she did that for her very self, so, yeah.
SH: And I think it's also important to this conversation that we can redefine what it means to be a woman of faith, because I'm pretty sure that most of our listeners have already… they didn't come from atheism into Christianity in their sixties. They've had this ingrained definition of what it meant to be a woman of faith before now and so it's gonna require a redefinition of that word.
And the thing I love about the idea that we learn to redefine it is that we can continue to refine and redefine our relationship with that word as we go.
I mean, to me this means choosing what we care about or what we don't care about, what we prioritize, what our spiritual practices are, all of those things are gonna be fluid throughout our life. And so, even though we're baptized members of a specific church, the copyright of our faith belongs to us. We can do what we want with it, right?
CW: Yes.
SH: And actually our own… well and life's inherent really changeiness is actually excellent fuel for a robust faith life. It may not seem like it 'cause it may seem like it's always trying to shake things up, but I love this Rob Bell quote. It's from his book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, which I also loved, I think you did as well.
He says this: “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.”
I think that's what Jane Fonda was talking about when she said the dance stopped, or the dance went away all of a sudden when she realized that she had to nail down all of these things and that people were going to expect that of her. So keeping the dance alive, I think, means that when you encounter these table bumping moments and your faith spills out all over the table and doubt comes in, that's an opportunity to reengage in the dance.
CW: I just think we all get to that point - where I now am excited for that dance and I'm excited for the definition and the constant redefinition. Like you've said, your faith is this moving thing. If you're not moving, you're dead, or however you put it, Susan, I just love that - that your faith constantly will be moving and growing.
[Music Interlude]
Okay, well this next section - I originally had it called Latter-day Saints Gate Keep and Label. And then I was like, well, no - religious people. So then I renamed it Religious People Gate Keep and Label. And then I was like, no Humans Gate Keep and Label! [laughter] I mean, for crying out loud, anyone who's been to junior high knows that like everyone is sorting everybody and labeling everybody.
SH: Right, right.
CW: And it's just what humans do.
SH: Pretty sure it was going on in the Old Testament also. So, you know, this has been around for a while.
CW: Right. I was looking back… I was trying to find something specific on our website and I ran across one of our old newsletters of all things and we can link to it.
[00:50:00] In that newsletter we were talking about an old episode with Kajsa Berlin-Kaufusi (episode 54 - Being Like Mother Eve) and we talked about Eve from, I think, our very celebratory LDS point of view. That Eve ushered in humanity. This is glorious, right? We revere her, we love her as opposed to, I think, how many other Christians (not all, but a lot) see Eve as the agent of man's fall. Like, “We would all still be eating fruit and having a grand old time in the garden of Eden if it hadn't been for her, dang it.” So, not surprisingly (I had forgotten about this), the Christians came after us and they called us imposter Christians and heretical.
SH: Interesting.
CW: Yeah. I just sat there thinking, “Okay, we were toting the LDS line of Eve ushering in humanity. And they were like, ‘How dare you! You are imposters!’” And I thought, “Okay. So they were drawing lines around us, whereas we have our…” anyway, everybody just has their own lines. We have our own lines. Ignore the lines that say, faith is this and only this. That's kind of what I took from that experience.
SH: Wow. I had totally forgotten about that. So thank you for reminding me. It's a wonder that the Christians haven't come after us more often than they do, Cynthia. So I'm gonna knock on some wood right now, if you don't mind that.
Drawing lines, though, might be the human-est of all the human traits, I think. But when I put it in the context of my own experience in this conversation, like the fact that thinking or speaking (which is a step further) or even existing in any way outside the traditional LDS lines feels so wrong that it could keep a God-loving woman of faith, such as myself, from knowing that about myself for more than five decades… that tells you how deep and powerful and destructive lines can be even in the “truest” of churches. And even against ourselves, not just lines we draw against other people, but lines that we bump up against ourselves. It's destructive to our spiritual lives.
And I wanna say again, that worthiness comes into this too, because that's this trap that binds all of us in this hyperawareness of those lines and of ourselves in relation to them. Lines just so easily get in the way of our ability to truly see or understand or love anyone, including ourselves.
Here is where I wanna bring in Barbara Brown Taylor 'cause I'm not gonna have a conversation about faith without a quote from Barbara Brown Taylor. [laughter]
CW: Yes. Good job.
SH: So here is something that I just love from An Altar in the World. She said, “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.”
CW: Wow.
SH: And I think she's talking about all of those lines and the way that they not only separate us from other people, but also imprison us in this focus on ourselves in relation to the lines.
CW: Absolutely.
SH: It's a huge problem. I wish I knew how to take a giant chalk eraser and just erase all of them. Unfortunately, I think our lines are not drawn in chalk.
I think they’re drawn in ink. It's gonna require some other kind of stain remover to get rid of those. I don't know if it can be done, but I can dream of a church in which the lines are not quite so effective in closing us off from each other and from our own faith and our own spirituality.
CW: Well, if nothing else, you've erased those lines in your own life as you got rid of that worthiness?
SH: I guess that's really all I can do. Yeah. That's really all you can do.
CW: It's all any of us can do.
SH: And look, let's not make it about St. Susan either, because those lines are still, man, they are still there. I can wash them and wash them, erase them and erase them, but they bleed up through again, you know? And it's amazing how deep they are in me.
So I use them against myself and I use them against others. And I probably draw new ones. I don't want anyone to think that I have conquered the lines. I absolutely have not. But again, part of understanding that I'm a woman of faith also gave me lots of grace for other people doing it their own way.
CW: Absolutely! I think that's one of the biggest gifts of erasing those lines for myself is erasing them for others and just giving them as much grace as I needed to give myself. So yeah, definitely.
Well that leads us into our last section we titled There's [00:55:00] Nothing to Prove.
SH: Are you sure?
CW: Is that crazy talk or what, Susan? [laughter]
SH: I think that now you're just talking crazy talk, Cynthia.
CW: You do not have to prove anything. But I mean, in a church where our worthiness culture is paramount (and I think that is the right word - it is paramount), I think we do have to prove it behind closed doors every two years if we measure up. This might be the biggest hurdle we have to jump. So I'm really glad that you brought in the worthiness talk again for this episode. And I was thinking of jumping that hurdle of worthiness, like, “oh gosh.”
And I just think, no, it's not just a hurdle for those of us who were raised LDS and have spent our whole faith lives here, like it's the steeplechase. For those who don't know, the steeplechase is the hurdles like dialed up to 11. Like, you gotta jump the hurdle, you land in the giant puddle, so then you're running with sloppy, wet shoes.
Getting to the point where we believe we have nothing to prove seems like a steeplechase to me. Like, you're going to get wet. There is a lot you're gonna have to go through to kind of knock those hurdles out of the way.
SH: I'm gonna be thinking a lot more about that steeplechase image. I think that we have just begun to plumb the depths of that image. That is a good one. Thank you for that. Man, I'm not gonna lie…
CW: Sad, but true, right?
SH: Yeah. The fact that we do have to actually prove ourselves to other church members in worthiness interviews. Man, as you said it, I'm like, “Ooh, that's one of the things that screams a human institution run by earthlings to me.”
That is a really hard one because it's like the clubiness of our church is probably the big strike against it. Because it's really really hard to maintain that kind of environment without a lot of lines and, like, deep ones.
CW: Yeah. There's a favorite interview of mine where Rob Bell was interviewed by Oprah. I think it was on Super Soul Sunday, but I just have it bookmarked in my podcast app and we'll link to it, but it's one of my favorite interviews. And at the very end of the interview (and I've listened to this interview at least three or four times), I don't know how I missed it, but this last time I noticed, like I never noticed before.
Her final question to him was, “What is the lesson that has taken you the longest to learn?” And his answer was, “That there's nothing to prove.” I think this is an older interview. I think he was in his late forties by then. So, you know, he had pastored a church. He had been fired from pastoring that church. I mean, he was proving a lot. And to get to the point where he realized, “I don't have anything to prove to anyone.” I'm sitting there going, “Rob Bell, gimme that magic pill!” [laughter] You know, because like you said, Susan, those thick lines that were drawn, they still surface. And I'm not saying they don't surface for him, but I just love that and I'm gonna write that on a sticky note and keep it in my mirror for a little while.
Yeah. There's nothing to prove.
SH: I think there are people who do get to that place. I think Rob Bell may have gotten to that place. My husband still listens to his podcast quite a bit. I haven't listened to it for a while. But I mean, he's doing some wacky stuff on that podcast.
CW: Yeah he is, I know!
SH: And so, yeah, I think to him, really, there may be nothing to prove and I love that. Yeah, give me some of that medicine. I agree that I think there are people like that. I'm trying to imagine existing in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and feeling like none of us had anything we had to prove. That would be an entirely different church organization, I think.
CW: Agreed.
SH: Our church has never felt like that to me. I've always felt like I had to prove all of it, really. I had to prove everything. I don't know, I felt like for so long like I didn't fit in the church. But the fascinating thing about all of this for me (and it's a good place for me to kind of wrap up my thoughts about it), is that figuring out that I am a woman of faith has finally given me a place in the church.
CW: Nice.
SH: And so maybe that is a little bit like not having anything left to prove in this particular thing, right?
CW: I think so. Yeah.
SH: And it happened for me while I was having that Relief Society teaching calling. And it happened to me because of that Relief Society calling because I was working my way through my silence crisis out loud in that room trying to figure out whether or not there could be space for someone who wasn't sure about really foundational things like whether there was an afterlife.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And so like when suddenly something happened to me and I realized I was beloved by God and just being there engaging and asking those questions in my ward proved me to be a woman [01:00:00] of faith, it's like for the first time ever I stopped worrying about proving that I fit in.
CW: Gorgeous. Yeah.
SH: Maybe I just gave up, realizing I'm never gonna fit in. I don't know. [laughter] But whichever, it was peace at church to me for the first time.
You and I have been reading the book 50 Years of Exponent II in preparation for a conversation we've been invited to join and as I was reading that book, I came across this interview between Linda Kimball and Kathy Stokes. And I had the great privilege of being at Midwest Pilgrims during some of the Kathy Stokes years when she came and led the music at Midwest Pilgrims, which was an extraordinary experience.
But there's this little piece in that interview where Kathy says, “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 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.”
CW: Wow.
SH: And that is exactly what I had a chance to do in that Relief Society job. It wasn't so much proving that I fit as helping women see that we were all fitting already, right? Solar, lunar, any other kind of faith that showed up. Just by virtue of being in those chairs together.
CW: Wow, Susan, that's a beautiful… that's awesome. That's a really great way, I think, to end a conversation about being a woman of faith is to quit asking, “Do I fit,” but “Do I wanna be here?”
That's beautiful. In context of the church, of course, some people have stepped away or whatever, and so they've answered that question for themselves. But I love love the idea of erasing lines, of not having anything left to prove, of just kind of sinking into that realization that “I am a woman of faith” and I hope we've helped some of our listeners today. Because they are, you are, I am.
SH: I hope so too. And you know, Kathy Stokes was talking about church, but maybe in the wider context, the question is, what do I want? Where do I want to be? You know, what is that desire of my heart? Because that is a question that only you can answer.
CW: Thank you, Susan.
SH: Thanks, Cynthia.
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Voicemail 1: Hi, Susan and Cynthia. I was just listening to Episode 223: All About Change. Also, thanks for hanging out with me while I clean my basement. Made it go a lot faster. First of all, as someone who has ADHD, I feel like I'm predisposed to like change, so I don't necessarily find change as hard as I think some people do.
However, I feel like this whole thing could be filed under one of your episodes called We Don't Believe Our Own Stuff. My favorite Article of Faith is Article of Faith number nine: “We believe all that God has revealed, we believe all that He does reveal, and that He will yet reveal many great and important things.”
So right there, when leaders say that things can't change, and they have been this way, and they will always be this way, they don't believe their own stuff! I reserve the right to change my mind. I want to learn. I want to grow. I want to change. I don't wanna be the same today that I was 10 years ago, and I certainly don't want to be the same person in 10 years that I was today.
And so I just feel like, anytime anyone is really digging in on any topic in this church, I just say, “Hey, the only thing that I know is that all of this could be revealed to be a completely different understanding than we know now today.” Thanks for all you're doing.
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Voicemail 2: I'm going to tell about a time when we had just become a new ward and everyone was anticipating a new calling. I've been in the Primary for 45 years. I've always longed to attend Relief Society just to raise my hand and make comments, but I've always been called to Primary, ever since I was a junior in high school.
When the bishop or counselor came to issue me a calling, I decided if I get called to the Primary, I might just say no for the first time in my life. And sure enough, he called me to be a Primary teacher. However, he told me who the Primary President was, and I really liked her, plus the bishopric counselor told me that the Primary President felt inspired to ask me to be a teacher trainer as well, and I loved that idea.
I had been a Primary in-service teacher many years ago and enjoyed that calling. I had been praying for more than just a Primary teacher calling, and this calling felt very inspired. I said yes. Then, long story short, the stake Sunday School President visited our ward to give a training. I mentioned to him that I [01:05:00] was called to be a teacher trainer for Primary.
He gave me this really skeptical look and asked, “Who called you to that calling?” I named the bishopric counselor. He said that teaching is under the direction of the Sunday School President, a male, and that he would need to talk with others and get back to me. I felt deflated because I was just so happy to have that calling and in an instant, a male leader could just snatch it away from me.
I was powerless.
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