Episode 236 (Transcript): We Don't Believe Our Own Stuff | Resurrection
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Quinn Nilsson for her work in transcribing this episode!
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CW: And even if tomorrow was known, even if we did have, even if resurrection, the literal resurrection, we had a knowledge of that as opposed to having faith in it, I still want to live today differently. I want to savor, drink in, and soak up now. So yeah. I’m glad you’re showing up with me too to have this conversation ‘cause I’m done. I’m done kicking the can down the eternal road of all this stuff. I’m just done.
SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley
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 We Don’t Believe Our Own Stuff: Resurrection.
CW: Welcome back to We Don’t Believe Our Own Stuff.
SH: You know, what makes us think we get to talk about resurrection?
CW: I dunno.
SH: I don’t either. Here’s the thing. This is not the first episode, by the way that we have sat down to, and I’ve said, what on earth makes me qualified to talk about this? It happens fairly regularly, but I hope that by doing it anyway, maybe we help women have the idea that it’s okay to have big thoughts about big topics. You can do your own thinking about this stuff. Right? CW: That’s what qualifies us.
SH: Yeah, exactly. What qualifies us is we’re members of the church and we’re thinking human beings. So, we’re qualified.
CW: Yep. Well, Susan, I’m sure we have some new listeners who maybe don’t know what our franchise of, we don’t believe our own stuff means. So since we haven’t had one of these episodes in like a couple years, I think,
SH: Wow. Has it been that long?
CW: I can’t remember the last one we did. I think it’s been at least a year or two. So do you wanna what is our, we don’t believe our own stuff franchise about?
SH: So, we don’t believe our own stuff, these are episodes where we talk about the kinds of things that get lip service in our church and sometimes really significant lip service. Like really foundational ideas that when it comes right down to it, we don’t really seem to believe. So examples would be like faith, you know, we don’t actually believe in faith.
We believe in knowledge, right? Or grace. We don’t really believe in grace. We believe in our own efforts. Maybe personal revelation. You know, we believe that leaders revelations always come in ahead of personal revelation, which is really funny in Joseph Smith’s church where-
CW: Yeah, it is
SH: He was told to disregard all of it.
We don’t believe in Heavenly Mother, like we don’t believe in any actual defined Heavenly Mother at all that I can discern. We only have this vague title of Heavenly Mother. Or agency, I think agency might be the one that kicked off this whole series of we don’t believe our own stuff. And yeah, and agency’s just gotten worse, in my opinion, like we pivoted to something now called moral agency.
I’m using air quotes there. And what that means basically, as far as I can tell, is there’s only one choice, which means no choice actually. Right. So these are things that I have come to understand differently from the way that they’ve always seemed to me or I’ve heard them talked about in our church.
CW: We could also maybe call this series like a fresh look on “Fill in the blank.” Right. Okay.
SH: That would be less cynical and probably better. Yes. We should probably, I guess as adults rename it in season 11. But for this season, we’re sticking with, we don’t believe our own stuff.
CW: I like it. I like it.
SH: So let’s talk about resurrection.
CW: Okay. Well, ever since our episode with Jody England Hansen, episode 230, I think that was just in August, we talked about, do you remember? It was like at the very end of the episode, and, well, maybe not. Anyway. At some point during the episode, we were talking about Holy Week, we were talking about those days when Christ was in the tomb. And it got me thinking a lot more about resurrection or, I mean, it actually reignited resurrection for me because truthfully I have been thinking about resurrection ever since I started reading Richard Rohr books. He talks so heavily about the incarnation of Christ, the Resurrection of Christ (hashtag holy envy, right?) Other Christian denominations, they really talk about resurrection and those days in the tomb, much more than we do. But anyway, then I read, about five years ago, Adam Miller’s book, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ Before You Die. And that’s when I thought, aha, this is our stuff.
This is our stuff of resurrection. But we don’t really believe our own stuff. Adam proved it in that book for me ‘cause I thought this is such a fresh way, speaking of that phrase, to talk about things. And so I think in our church we’re really good about talking about resurrection in a literal sense.
That one moment in time that hopefully, I guess you and I will find out about someday what resurrection really means, but really isn’t the gospel of Jesus Christ all about resurrection, all about renewal? I think the [00:05:00] seeds of something really magnificent are there for us in Mormonism. And I personally have been like plumbing those depths on my own, the last few years of darkness and rebirth of order, disorder, reorder.
And it’s changed everything for me. And the very first inscription, I don’t know what you call it, in Adam Miller’s book, right in the introduction, he has a little poem, I’m not sure if it is, by Marcus Aurelius, and it says, “think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”
SH: Gorgeous.
CW: That’s kind of where I wanna go today.
SH: Let’s do it.
CW: To talk about how we live it properly. Well, before we talk about that though can we, since we are Latter-day Saints, talk about the little resurrection of Jesus just for a little bit. And I wanted to just bring this up about Mary Magdalene.
First of all, we don’t talk about Mary Magdalene enough, so anytime I feel like we can squeeze in something we’ve learned about Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles, I want to squeeze it in. And I read Karen Jo Torjesen’s book, When Women Were Priests. I mean, the title right away should make every At Last She Said It listener wanna read that book When Women Were Priests.
And she has this really fascinating section in there. I highlighted it all in yellow and I just couldn’t even believe this where she was talking about after the resurrection, or excuse me, after Jesus died, Mary Magdalene, and as we know, she was the first to see Christ after he was resurrected. But I just wanted to read a little bit here how…
How once again, women got cut out of the narrative and the authority got pushed over to the man. And in this case it was Peter. But Dr. Torjesen writes in her book, “Mary Magdalene was not only the first witness to the resurrection, but was directly commissioned to carry the message that Jesus had risen from the dead. The original version of the gospel of John ends with the resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene and her witness to the twelve in chapter twenty.” So John chapter twenty, that’s where it originally ended. “The story of the appearance to doubting Thomas at the end of chapter twenty teaches early Christians to believe without seeing.”
And these are those verses that end the Gospel of John. “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book. And these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life.” So that’s originally the very end of the Gospel of John.
But Dr. Torjesen goes on to say, “a later copyist added another ending to the book of John chapter twenty-one. In this chapter, Peter was made the key witness of the resurrection when Jesus appeared to Peter and the disciples while they were on a fishing expedition in Galilee and commissioned Peter to be the shepherd of the flock. New Testament scholars have long puzzled about the reasons for this gospel’s two endings, chapter twenty, highlighting the role of Mary Magdalene as witness to the resurrection and chapter twenty-one highlighting Peter.”
Are you surprised?
SH: I’m not surprised at all. I’m just surprised that I was this many, this many decades into my life as a Christian before I really had this pointed out to me or noticed it.
CW: Right. And she has more information. If people are really interested, they can read the book. She talks about the reasons why I don’t think I need to really, we don’t need to go into that. Suffice it to say like, it’s always better I guess when we put a man in charge, as, you know, Peter got to be the pre-eminent witness of the resurrection. And Mary Magdalene was like, oh, thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. We got it from here, ladies. So I just wanted to bring that up because this is At Last She Said It and I feel anytime we can bring the woman’s story back in full circle, I always want to do.
SH: Beautiful. I love prefacing this conversation with that. Thank you.
SH: When I sat down to approach this topic, no surprise I went to the church website because, every good discussion of We Don’t Believe Our Own Stuff starts on the church website. But anyway, I went there and I wasn’t really surprised by what I found there under resurrection because here’s my experience of resurrection in our church.
My experience is that resurrection is what we’re talking about when we talk about, you know, Jesus coming back to life after he died.
It’s like, what’s gonna happen to our physical bodies after we die? It’s like the absolute least interesting. I mean, no, it’s pretty extraordinary when you think about it. It’s hugely interesting, but spiritually it’s like the least interesting part. There are all kinds of other parts of this that come into it. And so I [00:10:00] was not surprised to find that when I went to the church website, it focused on that part that I felt like had always been highlighted. And it says this quote, “Resurrection is the reuniting of the spirit with the body in an immortal state no longer subject to disease or death Through the atonement of Jesus Christ, all people will be resurrected and saved from physical death.”
So I’m not surprised that Christianity has this belief because this belief answers the natural human fear of death, which is huge.. It’s kinda the whole point of religion, right, is our natural fear of death. It’s, we’re looking for some, we’re looking for some balm for the reality that human beings are going to have to die, and that the people we love are going to die and that we’re going to die.
But it surprises me in a way because isn’t the real hope for LDS people supposed to be not just the physical resurrection, like it’s supposed to be exaltation. And that’s something totally different the way that we talk about it. And so, like, in my opinion, we diss the resurrection all the time when we specify that it’s for everyone.
And then over here we’re insisting that there’s something much more special for the chosen few. Right? So we have put our own spin on that. And here we have the most magnificent story ever told the day that death gets kicked to the curb for all of mankind. But we tell that story with an asterisk that, as I have thought about it in approaching this conversation, I cannot believe was meant to be the point. I mean, to be clear, I don’t think physical resurrection was the point either. Even though it may have happened, right? I believe that this was not meant to be a story of reward, but a story of process, and those are different things.
So the point becomes how we live now instead of what happens after we die. Does that make sense?
CW: That’s the whole reason I wanted to have this episode, all of it.
SH: Good. good. Alright. I’m on the right trail then. But you know, since we have no knowledge about what physical resurrection means or looks like, I mean, okay. We have lots of ideas about what that might look like.
CW: Yeah. I definitely do.
SH: I was thinking about like attitudes toward cremation. Do you ever, did you ever hear like Mormons don’t believe in cremation?
CW: A hundred percent.
SH: I know I was certainly raised with that idea. Or how we dress our dead.
Right. It’s funny to me that it matters what clothing we put on a body when we bury it, or like how we position bodies in graves. I think I was an adult before I heard anything about that.
CW: Wait, I haven’t.
SH: Yeah. They face a certain direction so that when they rise up, you know, they’ll be facing…
CW: In our church?
SH: Yes.
CW: Oh gosh. I didn’t, it was this many days old then. Okay.
SH: Face East, of course, because where’s Jesus coming?
CW: Where have I been?
SH: I mean, to me that’s so funny because it all shows, it exposes this very small view to me. Like this very small, grounded in physical things view, you know, I, like, I’ve always thought, it’s so funny to me that we can’t resurrect a cremated body and yet, you know, we were made from dust to begin with.
So, like, I don’t understand what God they’re thinking of when those beliefs, you know, developed around it. To me, the bottom line point is this, what can we take from the concept of resurrection? And to me the concept points to the fact that death can lead to rebirth. I wrote a tiny bit about this in our book.
I’m just gonna quote one paragraph of it. But just because I have done a lot of thinking about it, this is what I said. “Jesus came out of the tomb having been transformed. We don’t know exactly what took place on a cellular level. We don’t know exactly what that promised rebirth could mean for the cells of our used-up human bodies either. But we can understand that it means something, whether we know what it means for us personally or what it will look like in the end, we can trust ourselves as our lives pull us toward our own transformation.” So I think the important part of resurrection has to be this idea of transformation, and I think that has to be meant to start now while we’re living, which, you know, we do believe that it’s important to get some things done while you are alive, right? We have a very specific belief that ordinances require living bodies. So why would suddenly…why would the focus on something like ordinances be all about what happens after you die?
And yet it mostly is, right? It mostly is. So we have to shift the focus from this physical aspect in order to be able to draw meaning from the larger metaphor. And I think that’s what we’re gonna talk about now is kind of symbolism of resurrection.
CW: Yes. Yeah. Let’s… I’m glad we got the physical part of it out of the way.
So let’s jump into what I think you and I [00:15:00] really would love to talk about is the symbol of, the symbolism of resurrection. Because like you, I have no idea if Jesus was literally reunited with his body. I think that’s a matter of faith for all of us. No one has a knowledge of that, and that will be a very specific moment in my eternal life.
Again, that’s a matter of faith. Someday I will finally know if that is going to happen to my spirit, if it’s gonna get its body back or not. But personally, I have found way more meaning and awe and richness, more lessons to live by, I think in considering a symbolic resurrection. And that’s the part that happens daily.
And I think that’s why Adam Miller’s book meant so much to me because he’s an LDS person. I was like, okay, it’s not just fringy people like you and me that are thinking about resurrection in new ways. So I really appreciated his book. But also, speaking of another book that you and I have been loving, Francis Spufford, he wrote a book called Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense.
SH: So good.
CW: I know. So good. And in this book, he said, “Is the damn story true? Not what its history is, or what literary category it belongs in, whether it actually happened, well, I don’t know. I think it did miracles, resurrection, and all. But I don’t know. And you will have to judge for yourself too.”
So way to just lay it out there, Mr. Spufford.
SH: Well, because no one can know—can knowing be the point? I don’t think so.
CW: Ding ding ding.
SH: I think we’re meant to not know clearly.
CW: Well if we’re a people of faith, that’s what faith is about, is the things that we don’t know…
SH: Right. Yeah. But we don’t believe our own stuff about faith, Cynthia, we already established that.
CW: We don’t. We already established that, and I mean, how many times, get out your bingo card, have we put the Richard Rohr quote out there where he says, “To take the scripture seriously is not to take them literally. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning.”
Put your jellybean on that about literalism, because you and I are always harping on that as well. So, so let’s widen it then. If we’re gonna talk about resurrection, and I’m gonna quote Francis Spufford again, but before I do, I want to make our listeners aware that one of the genius things about his book is that he repackages sin.
Like instead of using the word sin, he says, “Why don’t we think about it as the human propensity to f things up?” He doesn’t say F. He says the word, but we’re G- rated, so we’re gonna just say it that way. And I just loved the idea of taking something that has a lot of baggage, the word sin, and explaining it the way he does. Because yeah, our propensity as humans is to just f things up. And anyway, it’s kind of a long quote, but it’s a great point about resurrection.
And he said this, “Like all good stories, resurrection can’t just be understood one way. It creates a repertoire of possible understandings. And right from the beginning, these understandings have ranged across several things Jesus could have meant when he said he came to bring life in abundance, life without limits. You can take the story as meaning that, if you believe in Jesus, you’ll live forever with him in heaven. Many Christians have and many Christians do. You can, but you don’t have to. You can also believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection redeem us right now in our lives by acting to free us from our pasts. I’m a very, this- worldly Christian. I am averagely afraid of dying, but I don’t believe because I expect or want to have an unlimited future tweetling about with a harp while the stars of the Western spiral arm burn out one by one. I believe because I know I’ve got a past and a present in which the human propensity to F things up did and does its usual work, and I find a way of living which opens out more widely and honestly and lovingly than I can manage for myself, which widens rather than narrowing with each destructive decision. Like the Christian aid slogan says, “I believe in life before death.” Life before death.
SH: Well, I thought about when, a lot about when we were approaching this topic, whether it matters if you believe in a physical resurrection or not.
So I was really glad that you had that quote in there actually, because I mean, he’s articulating the argument that it doesn’t really matter. But here is an argument for why it might matter how we think about resurrection, whether or not we believe that it physically happens. And this one comes from a blog called Real Life Pastor.
It’s from a woman named Kim, who’s an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. And she says [00:20:00] this: “Our calling as followers of Jesus is to open our minds and our hearts to being transformed. Because transformed people is what the world needs. People who aren’t afraid to change, people who live God’s love boldly and creatively. People who are kind and generous and imaginative. The world needs followers of Jesus to believe in resurrection because the world is suffering. Earth is suffering. People are suffering. Christians aren’t the only people who can heal the world, but we have a responsibility and opportunity to contribute what we have to act the world into well-being, our belief in resurrection.”
So I think the belief in resurrection as a principle actually is central to what we’re trying to do as disciples of Jesus Christ. And I love that phrase that she used to act the world into well-being. Speaking of Adam Miller, it reminded me of his phrase body out right? We body out our belief in the resurrection through how we live.
So it hardly matters what we think about death, right? Or what happens after death. It matters how we live anyway. And you might remember Jen Dilly talked about an experience where she realized that she was prioritizing the dead over the living.
CW: Yes. Yes.
SH: Do you remember that? Yes. And it was profound for her.
That realization shifted something in her and changed how she approached things after that. Of course, I had to do a little digging to see what Barbara Brown Taylor has to say about this topic. And I didn’t have to look far. I went into her book, which is one of my favorites, Always a Guest: Speaking of Faith Far From Home in which she has a whole sermon that she delivered on an Easter morning.
And I wanna share a thought from that. And she said this: “Most Christians are content to think of it—resurrection—as something metaphysical that happens after we die. However we do or do not understand it, the basic reasoning is that since God raised Jesus from the dead and took him to heaven, God will do the same thing for those who believe in him. So far, so good. But if that is the best we can do, then today becomes the day we thank God for what will happen when our lives are over, and Christian faith becomes the faith of those who care less for life than afterlife.” She continues that she once heard one of her Religion 101 students say, “I love studying other religions because they have so much in them about how to live. This is different from my own religion, Christianity, which is about going to heaven when you die.”
CW: Nailed it.
SH: Nailed it. That’s what we get stuck on. It’s what we get stuck on. Yeah. It’s, we get stuck on, as Richard Rohr would say, like the least level of meaning, the least important thing. Why does it matter?
Something we absolutely can never have any knowledge about. Why could that be the priority? Things that happen after we die, and yet it is. So I hope that reexamining a topic like resurrection for me personally, can help me take like an a really abstract concept and then figure out a way to apply it to my actual living.
That’s what I’m looking for in these conversations, which is really what I’m looking for in church, but I don’t always find it when we’re focused on like the lowest level of meaning. Right. I feel like that’s supposed to be the point of scriptures. I think Richard Rohr got it just right, but words like resurrection can really easily just become wallpaper over a lifetime of church lessons.
You know, like this concept you hear about, but how do you really apply it? What does it really mean in your life? So I feel pretty privileged to have someone who wants to show up and have these conversations with me that make me engage some of the big ideas that I’ve professed belief in and that I’ve talked about my whole life, you know, and read about, but never really gotten down to look closely at where the rubber hits the road in my own life.
CW: That could maybe have been another name for this series instead of We Don’t Believe Our Own Stuff is like the wallpaper of our lives, because I think that’s what you and I are trying to do and these types of episodes is take that background, that wallpaper that’s just there, that just disappears and bring it to the forefront and say, let’s talk about this.
This is freaking amazing. Let’s go here. Yeah. And I’m not sure when it hit me, it’s been years, when it finally hit me that I was so tired of kicking the can down the eternal road like that quote you just read that Barbara Brown Taylor said one of her Religion 101 students said that was like, well, Christianity’s about going to heaven when you die.
And it’s like, I’m sick of talking about when we die, I’m sick of kicking the eternal can down the road. I mean, I wanna live now. I wanna enjoy my life now. I want, I mean, it’s not so much as, ‘cause I’m sure this is what came to my mind, as I’m writing these thoughts out for our notes, the scripture, the Book of Mormon scripture came to mind, you know, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. You know, [00:25:00] God will smite us with a few stripes, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, okay, that’s not what I’m doing. But my conditioning often my first reaction is, oh, you’re just wanting to eat, drink and be merry. And it’s like, no, I want my life to be more of a, if I could rewrite that scripture, like savor, drink in, and soak up now because tomorrow is unknown.
And even if tomorrow was known, even if we did have, even if resurrection, the literal resurrection, we had a knowledge of that as opposed to having faith in it, I still want to live today differently. I want to savor, drink in, and soak up now. So yeah. I’m glad you’re showing up with me too to have this conversation ‘cause I’m done kicking the can down the eternal road of all this stuff. I’m just done.
SH: I love that distinction. Between eat, drink, and be merry and the, and you know, savoring and soaking up. Now I’m thinking about, and honestly I should go find this sometime because I, and I may have even quoted it in our book but I didn’t cite where it came from, but I think it came from President Nelson actually.
The line, “The present is the only thing that lasts forever.”
CW: Wow.
SH: Which I love that line because we talk a lot about eternity lasting forever. But really the only thing that we reliably have is this second right now. And maybe that’s why it just occurs to me as I say that maybe that’s why the focus on doing ordinances when you have a body, maybe the importance is really not anything that God cares about it, but the fact that we have to kick that into the present in order to experience it.
Now that doesn’t say anything about why we do work for the dead, except as I’ve said before, I think all of that’s for us too. But that’s a whole other episode. Right. But I feel like if we can’t make resurrection about the present, then resurrection really becomes about nothing. It’s gotta be about now.
CW: Well, my thought is could the symbolism of the resurrection be the antidote to the greater church today. Not just us, but not just our church, but you know, the church that Barbara Brown Taylor student was talking about, like so much in Christianity, right? Like, could that be the antidote to us? I don’t know.
But I know I would rather be in a church where we don’t just settle for the lowest form of meaning. Right. And it’s funny because in, in researching for this, Susan, I guarantee you this is not on your bingo card. Today we’re going to read a quote by Brigham Young.
SH: Wow. Okay. Unexpected. Lay it on me.
CW: Right on. Believing in a literal resurrection. Here’s what Brigham Young said, and tell me if you think this would ever be said in conference today. Because when I heard this I was like, wait, what? Like we did used to think in a more expansive way. Anyway, he said this,
“I would not give the ashes of a rye straw whether you believe what I tell you about the resurrection or anything else, or disbelieve it, if you love God and serve him with all your hearts. You may believe what you like. If you will do good, continually and no evil, if you will never suffer yourselves to commit another sin against God or your neighbor, but always from this morning be full of good acts serving the Lord with all your hearts.”
SH: I think you’re right. I cannot imagine ever hearing that in General Conference. You know what I think the difference is it was a church all made up of converts. They came to Mormonism with their previous Christian beliefs, right? So you’re not gonna change people’s minds on their foundational beliefs about Christianity or about something as foundational as resurrection.
I don’t think you’re gonna change them. I think they’re gonna add what Mormonism brought to their previous Christianity. So I think that Brigham Young is standing up and saying, look, I don’t care where you came from and what you believe. I care about how you’re living now. I think Brigham Young is saying exactly that what is happening in the present matters, resurrection as some kind of abstract concept doesn’t matter at all.
CW: Okay. You just kind of blew my mind. Like how had I never thought about the early churches all being converts, including Brigham himself and to quote another…
SH: I think I wrote about it in our book. Cynthia, haven’t you read our book?
CW: Oh, sorry. I read our book dozens of times sadly, we both have.
SH: It’s wallpaper. It’s wallpaper now,
CW:I guess. So my apologies. But I’m in this, I love that relearning, that I am relearning or reremembering that the church was all made up of converts. And so to quote another prophet, wow, we’re do, we’re being really Mormon today. President Hinkley, when he said, “Take all the good that you have and see if we can add to it.”
And I think that’s what Brigham was doing. Good job. Love it.
SH: Yeah. That’s good. Good stuff. Thank you for [00:30:00] bringing that Brigham quote.
CW: Alright, well let’s talk about dying before death. Kind of what Adam Miller was- you know why? It’s probably why he put that Marcus Aurelius quote right in the beginning of his book. About, dying before death. So if we’re going to look towards the doctrine of the resurrection as a blueprint for our lives, then I think we do need to practice dying right now.
And when I think about it, like every big transformation in my life required something to die damn it. I hate looking at it that way. Right. But, you know, 2020 is hindsight when I look back on the most foundational things that have happened to me, that have changed me, it required something dying.
Our most fundamental ordinance in our church, baptism symbolizes that dying. Right. That’s why we baptize by immersion. You go down into the water, like into the grave, and then you come up symbolizing this new life, this new resurrection. So if it’s right there in our most fundamental ordinance, then why do we collectively as a people get an F?
Okay. I am not being very nice again. Okay. A D+. I feel like as Latter Day Saints, we get a D+ in this because if we really believed our own stuff, I think we would be a lot better at this dying before death thing. But I don’t know, we kind of seem to prefer that white knuckle grip that you always talk about on almost everything.
Like faith changes. No. Like double down being worthy, being a good girl, double down on that, like all of these things. We prefer to just white knuckle it instead of letting it die. Being reborn.
SH: Well, I always understood in our baptism, I always understood it as symbolizing, you know, dying and coming up again being resurrection.
But I thought it symbolized physical dying and physical resurrection. Like it didn’t ever occur to me to blow that out, if you know what I mean. I, sure, yes. I knew it was symbolic and I thought it had, I thought the symbolism was important. I just didn’t realize that. I thought it was symbolic of much less than I think… you know, it is symbolic of, so that’s interesting. Yeah. Like I’m as guilty. I get an F on this like everybody else does.
CW: No, D+.
SH: Okay. D+.
CW: But I mean, there’s this scripture in Romans chapter six, verse four that says, “By our baptism, then we were buried with him and shared his death in order that just as Christ was raised from death by the glorious power of the Father so also, we might live a new life.”
And so I think that’s what you and I are trying to get at today is let’s all commit to that part. Like whatever needs to die, let it die over and over. And that’s okay because we get to live a new life.
SH: Love that. And I probably have heard that scripture a thousand times.
And never thought about the promise, like the electricity, the life in that phrase that we might live a new life, meaning now we’re living right now, hello. This has to happen now. Okay. But living a new life is really hard, Cynthia. I mean, every day I wake up and I’m the same me. I dunno if you find that, but it’s happening to me with alarming frequency.
Like it’s just like wake up worrying about the same things, you know? It’s like everything. All my meanness just descends on me again every time I open my eyes in the morning. And this is where resurrection as a metaphor comes in really handy, I think, because I’m pretty sure that Jesus wasn’t thinking “everything’s going so well.” You know, when he was hunched over in the garden, no begging to let the cup pass, right? I mean, it was clear that he was gonna have to go through some stuff to get to the other side, but there was another side. And that’s the instructive part. You know, that I have a whole document on my computer of quotes from that Adam Miller book myself.
So I love it as much as you do.
CW: I didn’t know that. Okay.
SH: Yeah, I do. I just love it. So I’m gonna call on one of those right now. And so this is from Adam Miller’s book “An Early Resurrection”. And it says this,
“The only way to save myself from the future’s tyranny is to willingly sacrifice that future on God’s altar.
I have to give the future away. I have to let it go. I have to stop trusting in it or hoping for it. I have to hand it over to Christ. I have to consecrate the whole of it, and I have to do so while remaining alive and embedded in time.” So being embedded in time means right where I wake up every morning, right in my own life right now.
That’s what it has to mean. And this is why the ability to seed control has been central to [00:35:00] my faith journey. Put a jelly bean on your Bingo card. For a number of times I talk about seeding control because I absorbed from my church life the idea that I could actually control outcomes through good works and right beliefs.
Oh, we all did. I did. Yeah. And since I couldn’t, well, I mean, goodbye peace. No peace in this life, right? When I’m convinced I’m supposed to be doing something that is actually not possible. I think the resurrection story gets all tangled up in this because of that pesky exaltation idea.
CW: Oh, okay. Yeah
SH: That complicates things because that takes you, well, okay, let me say it this way.
The magic of resurrection, applying to everyone should actually make it so that we can stop worrying about death and trying to control everything. That’s the magic of the resurrection in my opinion. ‘Cause control is really just fear, right? And Jesus’ resurrection asks me to quit being afraid so that I can get on with the real work of living and loving right now, but when we take it and we throw exaltation, that’s a wrench in the works of that good news because then even the resurrection is dependent on me and what I’m doing now.
CW: Okay. I’m just gonna poke at you a little bit, Susan, because you are my friend. I just love that you were the one to read that Adam of Miller quote.
‘cause I remember that when he says in the book, “I have to give the future away” because you my friend, you are the one who always is the one talking about your controlling grip- Jelly bean on the Bingo card. Oh yeah. And so I just love that you’re the one here picking that apart because. I know that’s been so central to you, and I’m not saying I’m any different.
I just think it, for me, it’s controlling my life has happened in a different way. For me, it was all about worthiness. Right. And so you and I are, we’re not that different, Susan, but anyway,, thank you for bringing this up. It just
SH: manifest differently. Yeah. I can’t give away the next 15 minutes.
I mean, that is just the sad truth. And while I’m getting better at it, what I’m really getting better at is finding my way around that tendency that I have to peace anyway.. It’s really coming to this realization that I actually do deserve to have peace. And so I very often have to just walk around myself where I’m standing in front of myself.
I have to walk around and, you know, fineSusan, you stay back there and try to control everything. You numb skull. I’m going over here where the peace is. That’s kind of how it has worked for me. I’m not getting that much better but I am getting better at least recognizing the tendency in myself.
And that has helped a lot.
CW: I love that though. Finding more.
SH: Thanks for knowing that about me, Cynthia.
CW: Well, but I love that you found that work around. Because you do deserve that piece. I do. Everybody does. I think talking about this idea of resurrection, being a part of our daily life can be one of the tools you keep in your tool belt, I think towards greater peace.
CW: That just leads us right into talking about personal deaths. And I don’t mean like the one moment in time where you and I will cease to be mortals and we die. But those personal deaths that do happen every day, all the time, control the death of that, control of the control grip. And can I bring up your three word prayer here?
Open my hands.. So, so, so when you were talking about peace really, I don’t know, is I’m, I’ve started thinking about peace as being the opposite of control.
SH: No, I totally think it is.
CW: Yeah, a hundred percent. Right. And Adam Miller, we’re just gonna quote him this hold dang episode, he said
“This kind of rest is a very precise description of what the onset of a resurrected life in Christ feels like.
In my everyday life, fallen and forgetful, I feel the weight of time. Time is heavy and demanding. I rush from place to place. I forget where I am and what matters. I feel guilty about the past. I’m bored by the present. I’m stressed about the future. There’s never enough time. It’s hard to sleep at night.
Anger and regret are close at hand.”
This sounds like what you were saying above about, you know, I’m still me, I’m still waking up, is me waking. Anyway, he goes on and says,
“Life is slipping away, but Christ is offering something else. Not just rest in the next life, but rest as a way of life. Life in Christ offers a way of handling time that allows us to enter into the rest of the Lord right now.”
CW: Just reading that quote, it reminds me of like he’s selling us something, but only he’s selling us something that we all want. Right. Which is that peace. Like, we’ve all seen the late night infomercials, you know, are you stressed out or do you need peace? Do you need rest? You know, or maybe the guy in the trench [00:40:00] coat on the corner.
Right, Come here. I got something for you. So, yeah I just thought that was such a beautiful, that quote is kind of what cemented for me. Aha. The opposite of control is peace.
SH: Man, I wish I’d known where to buy that knowledge though because it, it would’ve saved me decades, literal decades, most of them that I’ve been alive.
It would’ve saved me the pain of life prying my fingers off everything. ‘cause that’s what life has pretty much been for me is you know, you don’t have to be afraid. You’re in control. That’s how I have approached life. And that’s a very different message from, you don’t have to be afraid.
I’m in control. You know, those two are very different things. But I didn’t know how to get to that second message. I was stuck in the first one, which is why life has continued to clunk me over the head with control lessons. And I expect that to continue. The reason I have a three word prayer is ‘cause I need to pray it every single day.
It hasn’t happened for me yet, but I’m working on it.
CW: Well, I can’t think of a better three word prayer than that. Like that’s, I, since you have told me that years ago, that was your three word prayer. I, it, I hear myself saying it as well. So it’s not just you. It’s not just you. We all need to pry our fingers off clutching that bar so. Well, if we’re gonna talk about all the different deaths that need to happen.
Can we talk about the death of hustle culture and prosperity gospel, which we excel at? I feel like as Latter Day Saints, we excel,
SH: it’s never gonna die, Cynthia
CW: Hustling. I have hope. We can talk about it. We can die. Well, it’ll die for me. I can’t control the institution’s message, but I am committed to getting rid of hustle culture, at least in myself.
And I have a favorite episode of Kate Bowler’s podcast, where she interviews Richard Rohr, and I’ve listened to it so many times and she asks him the question about nuns and priests and if he thinks they’re so good at lifee because they practice dying all the time, meaning nuns and priests, they give up all of their money, they give up all of their possessions.
And I thought, oh yeah, we’re not good at that. And I’m not saying that’s what everybody needs to do. And I’m not sure that’s what Kate is saying, but she’s saying that’s one of their tools probably to practice this daily resurrection is because they have given up so much to lead the life that they’ve chosen.
In our own church, I think that idea of resurrection, I think it’s staring us in the face in our scriptures, but I do think that we lean towards prosperity gospel instead because dang, it’s alluring. It is so alluring to think that we can just become the bestest at everything and we deserve it. We deserve all the things.
SH: Right. Well, I mean, I think in the scripture story where Jesus, where the young man asks, you know, what do I’ve done all these things, what do I still lack? You know, and he says give away everything and come follow me. And the man can’t do it. I think that’s exactly what he’s talking about is dying to all those.
I mean, I think, yes, he probably was talking about money, but I think the larger lesson is dying to all those parts of yourself that are holding you back from following me. I had never thought about that with nuns and priests like the amount of ambition that you would’ve had to give away. I mean, you’d give away everything.
You’d give away everything. Fascinating. I don’t know. This concept of needing to die has been one of the most foreign feeling to me as a Mormon. I never heard anyone ever talk about that until I moved into this space. Just never heard anything about it. In fact, when I first heard someone talking about it, I was like, what do they, what is they, what do they really mean?
What are they talking about? And maybe it’s foreign to all Christians because Jesus beat death forever, right? That’s the whole point of Christianity in, in many people’s minds. So death must not be important, but without death, there can be no resurrection.
CW: Yeah.
SH: We had a conversation about this in our Friday live chat recently with the group of women who were there and they were talking about the importance of the darkness and the womb and the tomb, right?
Yeah. The darkness being a place of growth and of transformation and of change. And I feel like we don’t really think a lot about that. Our church, we do ourselves a real disservice when we ignore, we sort of gloss over the concept of death in our hurry to focus on rebirth. And I think you and I talked about that with Jodi.
In that conversation that got you thinking about all this to begin with, that we were sort of mourning the absence of the whole Holy Week journey that some other Christians go on every year. Right. Where they move through that dark place. And we never do that, but I mean, a cure for cancer, you know, wouldn’t be the same kind of miraculous good news without the pain [00:45:00] and suffering that cancer causes.
Like, you have to have both parts of that thing in order for it to have to be the miracle that it is. And so I feel like the good news of Jesus is that life really really sucks sometimes. It can be really dark and, and I don’t think it’s “but” here, I think it’s “and” we don’t get to skip or dismiss or refute all of the stuff that comes before the and that life really sucks part is important.
CW: Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh there.
Yeah. Well I didn’t mean to laugh there, but I really like how you put it. ‘cause I’m, I need someone to make us a Jesus meme, you know? And the speech bubble says life really sucks sometimes. So I was laughing at that.
Sorry. I wasn’t, ‘cause what you’re talking about is actually very serious. But I don’t know. We laugh at a lot of things. Yeah.
SH: Yeah. We do laugh at a lot of things and we should we should. Because how else are you gonna survive this sucking life sometimes Cynthia. Yeah. You gotta be able to laugh.
Oh. Anyway, that place right there in that dark though is where exaltation rears its ugly head again to me. And here I’m gonna come at you with a quote that I heard in real time when it was delivered, haven’t stopped thinking about since. And when I dropped it into the notes for this episode, I’m not sure that you were terribly happy to see it there roaring back to life, but here it is.
It’s it’s from President Nelson’s. Well, this is a really difficult quote for me to it is from President Nelson’s talk. Come Follow Me from 2019, and he says this,
“Some erroneously believe that the resurrection of Jesus Christ provides a promise that all people will be with their loved ones after death.
In truth, the Savior himself has made it abundantly clear that while his resurrection assures that every person, whoever lived, will indeed be resurrected and lived forever. Much more is required if we want to have the high privilege of exaltation. Salvation is an individual matter, but exaltation is a family matter.”
I mean, way to rob the resurrection of the good news, Cynthia, you know? Who wants this immortality that has somehow been scraped clean of all of the good parts, you know, all of the loving relationships that we have on earth. Like what is left to live forever for I honestly don’t know.
But when I read that quote, you know, it’s no wonder to me that some latter day saint women feel an almost unbearable weight of responsibility for getting their whole family to heaven, like, which I felt myself. This is what made it so challenging for me when my children decided to leave the church.
Well, I mean, there that goes. I didn’t accomplish, I had one job. I had one job. Yeah. And I didn’t accomplish it. This talk goes on to suggest that what happens to us after we die is in our control because President Nelson assures us we can receive ordinances, make covenants, and keep them, and that will quote, “qualify us to receive that privilege.”
And so the hamster will begins right there. Right there is where it starts. And grace recedes, you know, until it’s a tiny speck in the distance. Like you can’t even see grace from where we are when we step on the hamster wheel, because suddenly we’re responsible for all of that.
CW: You know, I just, as you’re reading that and talking about that, I realized that the last few years, my life has been so grace focused that anything that makes Grace recede. Right. That’s the phrase you just used. I’ve decided is not for me. And I really mean this when I say I love that so many people love that talk and it maybe gave them a lot of peace and comfort.
I’m just saying that for me, and I know so many women, because over the years, ‘cause that talk is now six years old, we’ve had so many women say that talk broke them. That anything that makes grace recede for me is just not for me. And I can safely set that down and just say that not for me.
SH: I love that approach to it. And I wanna also say something about that quote, like, I don’t choose that quote as any kind of sort of Gotcha. You know, against President Nelson. I do like you, I have been witness to a lot of pain that it has caused women over the years since it was delivered.
‘cause we do hear about that. And I am 100% confident that President Nelson could deliver a beautiful and hope filled message about transformation, resurrection, being symbolic of transformation, living now about all the things that we’re talking about. Like, I think he would absolutely also deliver that message.
But the message that he chose to deliver was this one. And so the reason that I point that out is that it explains to me why I internalized some of the things that I did. Why I failed to internalize the message of resurrection, talking [00:50:00] about, you know, rebirth into my life now.
It wasn’t presented to me and it still isn’t judging by that talk. From the church anyway, not presented to me from my own church.
CW: I’m glad you said that. Back to Adam Miller. He says, “I’ve spent a lot of time trying not to be weak. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to put myself beyond the need for care.
I’ve worked hard. I’ve exercised, I’ve earned degrees, I’ve written books. I’ve bought new clothes, I’ve driven new cars. These things aren’t bad in themselves. They can be good. They can in fact be done with care. They can be undertaken as acts of love, as means of service. But as a rule, I haven’t done this.
I’ve treated these things more as idols than as occasions for care. I’ve pursued them as props for projecting a fiction of worthiness, independence, and strength. But I am tired. So tired of pretending not to be weak. I’m tired of pretending I’m not going to die. I’m tired of pretending I don’t need Christ.
If I’m serious about Christ, then my only hope is to let these idols die. My only hope is to practice living with as much care and patience and attention as I can. In this sense, care is the work of no longer pretending to be strong. Care depends on finally being honest.”
I can’t tell you how much I resonate with that quote with his list, all of it.
But I wanna say, even though I agree with the first half of that quote, and it’s so beautiful and it’s so descriptive, and I’m raising my hand going “me me me”. So that’s kind of next level to get to that point where we put all those things in their proper place. Right.
SH: Yeah. Adam Miller’s somewhere way up here.
I’m, we’re way down here, Cynthia,
CW: Yeah, that’s true. But also I feel like in that quote, he’s a, he’s admitting, he’s kind of one of us too. Like he is. Well, you know, but I mean, there’s something about that last line honesty, about finally being honest that really perked up my ears. Like until I get honest with myself, living with that kind of care, with everyday things, cars, clothes, careers, whatever.
Like the rest seems impossible until we can get honest with ourself. And I feel like, especially as Americans, I mean, we have the prosperity gospel of being Latter Day Saints, but also being capitalist Americans on top of that. Like, like it’s all stacked against us. Susan, this is really hard stuff, you know?
You might as well tell me I can walk to the moon. Yeah, you can tell me that. Because if I’m really honest about my humanness or as Francis Spufford writes about our human propensity to F things up. Like, right, that’s when we can welcome a grace-filled life by just admitting all of this is so hard.
And then, and only then I feel like is the first half of that quote of living with care even attemptable. But we gotta get real. We gotta get, we gotta get honest about what we’re doing.
All right, well then let’s talk for a minute about like the death of our old faith. And this is probably, if people are listening to our podcast even, this is probably something that is very… everyone’s gone through this part. Maybe the death of some old aspects of your faith, because what are we afraid of?
If we are Resurrection people, then what are we afraid of? And here’s a quote by Rachel Held Evans, who exactly talks about being resurrection people. And she says, “But death is something, empires not Resurrection people worry about, in any case, I wonder sometimes whether we’re playing at death and calling it life, maybe we’re playing dead when we refuse to ask the big questions.”
She’s so good.
SH: She’s so good. Okay. I like that she brings this up. I’m thinking about it in the context of my own faith journey. You know, our, so our journey to experiencing resurrection begins with our willingness to face the reality of death. Right? And I think that this-
in my experience anyway, is so applicable to our faith lives. It’s foundational actually, yes, to what’s been going on for me in the past few years. I had to sit in the dark for a long time and I had to, you know, admit to myself that I didn’t care what the outcome was. This is, I think, like Adam Miller was saying, I had to get honest about this stuff, right?
I couldn’t even get to asking the big questions as Rachel Held Evans describes it until I could release every answer I previously had. I had to be able to let that all go to just like set it down. But, you know, allowing disorder is really hard for me. Maybe it’s part of being a control freak. I don’t know why, but like, I’m a person who can’t have one single dirty dish in my sink.
If you come to my house [00:55:00] anytime day or night, you will not find a dirty dish in my sink. I just can’t live with it for some reason. And I had to live with dirty spiritual dishes, you know, piled to the ceiling, and I had to let go of caring whether they ever got washed before I could even begin to imagine any kind of reorder in my faith life.
I, I couldn’t even visualize it.
CW: Good metaphors.
SH: So, I think she’s exactly right. I think I was playing dead. I think I was playing dead in my spiritual life before. I think that’s true. But in order to be able to live again, I had to be able to admit that I was playing dead and I had to lay right down, put it all down.
CW: We have to give up playing dead so that we can ask those big questions that she’s talking about. And going back to our episode with Jodi England Hansen, my gosh, I love that episode with her so much. Like I also haven’t stopped thinking about mercy since that episode. And my takeaway from that episode, this is the one line that I’m keeping in my pocket now, is there is mercy in mysticism because the more mercy we give,
the more mercy we get. I mean, duh. I know that, but. But something about the discussion in there was like, oh yeah, this really is a mystical thing. And in that same Richard Rohr Kate Boer episode that I quoted above talking about the nuns and the, who am I talking about? Nuns and priests. Sorry.
They had a convo in there about the bad math of God. And I think that’s what mercy and mystic like, this is really bad math. Because personally when my faith as I knew it died, it took years, but then I got a better faith in return. Like, that’s bad math. Right? And Ephesians 2:4-6 says this, but God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, I’m going to insert the, you know, the human propensity to F things up here to mean our trespasses.
So even when that happens the mercy of God made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved and raised us up with him and seeded us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That’s what I want. That’s what I want. And we have a pretty good darn blueprint.
SH: The Kingdom of Heaven is now in that quote.
It’s now raised us up with him and seeded us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
Right now.
CW: Right now Susan
SH: This is big stuff.
CW: Well, for our last section here, ‘cause we’re over time, can we just talk, kind of zoom out and talk about institutional deaths, kind of, of things that don’t always serve us well.
You know, not just our church. The greater church. I think in America at least, I know this is not just a problem here in America of churches dying, but I guess my question is like, can the church change? Obviously you and I, we have no control over this, but I think we can hope, and we’ve talked so much about hope, like a hope that, an insistence that things could be different and should be different.
SH: I love that you used that phrase, because I’m thinking, I mean, I love that as a description of hope, but I also love it as a description of resurrection. Cynthia, what is resurrection really, but an insistence that things can be different. Like even the ones that seem really hopeless. What is more hopeless than death?
I think that’s why death is where we get the concept right, because it’s like the ultimate, hopeless thing. Resurrection is an insistence that even things you do not think can ever be different. Actually can and will.
CW: Let’s quote Rachel held Evans one more time. And these quotes are from her book, “Wholehearted Faith”.
As usual, we will link to everything. And she said this about the institutional church. She said, “I’m not afraid to say that if the church in the US is dying, let it die. Let it die to the old ways of hegemony, which I had to look up that word. It just means dominance. Let it die to violence. Let it die to control.
Maybe the church in the US is already dead, but the fear of death is the province of those who do not believe in resurrection. Aren’t Christians supposed to be living testimony to the miracle of the resurrection? May the church be resurrected to the way of humility. May the church be resurrected to the way of curiosity.
May the church be resurrected to the way of mercy. May the church be resurrected to the way of service. May the church be resurrected to the way of wholeness”. I’m getting emotional. Let me stop. “May the church be resurrected to the way of the cross. May the church be resurrected like Jesus. May the church be resurrected by love.”
SH: Beautiful. Maybe a resurrection of any [01:00:00] church would require first and foremost it would be a resurrection of its members. You know, like you say, we, we don’t have the power to change things and we don’t, but members have the power to transform. I’m gonna give the last word in this conversation to Barbara Brown Taylor.
In a chapter called Practicing Resurrection, which is an idea that I just love. In, in the book that I referenced earlier, she’s addressing in this congregation on Easter morning, and she says, “may the news of Christ’s risen- ness touch the dead spots in your heart and bring them back to life so that you become part of the good news that flows forth from this place.
May you be springs of living water in all the dry places on this sweet parched earth. May the fresh life that God has given you spill over to freshen all the lives that touch yours in your homes, in your work, in your schools, and in your cities. May you be resurrection people this day and forevermore.”
CW: Beautiful. Susan,
SH: I wanna be a resurrection person.
CW: Let’s fist bump on that. Together. Thank you Susan
SH: Thank you Cynthia.
Voicemail 1: Hi Cynthia and Susan. I wanted to talk about how exhausting it is to speak up and how much appreciation I have for you guys. I am one of the more nuanced members of my ward, and I have been talking to leaders and pointing out things that are important to me and important to women. And our bishopric was wonderful and they were making all of these small changes and I felt so much hope.
And then inevitably, the Bishopric changed pretty recently, and I feel like we’re back to square one. We’re back to all male sacrament meetings, we’re back to thanking the Aaronic priesthood. We’re back to all of these things that I took time and effort and energy speaking up about, and we’re back to square one.
And I’m just so discouraged right now that it looks like I’m going to have to re-speak up every five years for the rest of my life in order for these changes to stick.
Voicemail 2: Hi, Susan and Cynthia. A few months ago I started listening to your podcast and decided to go back to the very beginning. And today I finished.
I have listened to every single episode and I just want to thank you for the work that you’ve done. It’s truly been life changing for me. I sat in this space for several years alone, just kind of rediscovering truths and having some concerns and didn’t share them with anyone for a really long time.
And it was so comforting to listen to other women sharing the same things. I am grateful for all of the things that you’ve taught and for always bringing it back to Jesus and God and loving others. And that’s really what I feel to my core. I know about the rules and the dogma, that the emphasis on sin and satan and worthiness and purity, all those things that the church teaches, just don’t work for me.
They haven’t changed my heart. They haven’t helped me to develop a healthy psychology. But just focusing on loving God and loving others and learning to listen and sit with others in their pain has brought about the changes that I had been looking for. And bringing me up has brought me a lot of peace.
Like Richard Rohr says, “God doesn’t love us because we are good. He loves us because he’s good.” And I just wanna thank you for helping me know more of that goodness and to have it in my life. You guys are the best.
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