Episode 242 (Transcript): Are You There, God? It's Us, Susan and Cynthia | Part 2
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Rebecca Graham 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:
SH: So once you let God be a weeping God, then it’s sort of pandemonium, actually, if you think about it. Like, what are you gonna tell me next? That God thinks love is the most important thing? But again, to me, here’s the brilliance of Jesus as the example, because in Jesus we see, you know, we actually see
CW: Right,
SH: Several different places in the scriptures, a God weeping. And so I don’t really know how it could be made more plain than that. And yet, I do feel like, and latter-day saints are not exempt from this, I do feel like human beings have a natural aversion to that. We want God to be somehow more omnipotent, more powerful.
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SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.
CW: And I’m 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, “Are You There, God? It’s Us, Susan and Cynthia, Part Two.”
CW: Woo-hoo!
SH: Yay.
[laughter]
CW: I love this topic so much. I’m so glad we’re revisiting it.
SH: Me too. Yep. I mean, we were just laughing before we signed on that we have 10 pages of notes
CW: Uh-huh.
SH: And it’s because we love this topic so much.
CW: I know.
SH: I can’t wait.
CW: Yeah. Well, what we really love is what other people have said about God, because we might have more quotes from smart thinkers in our show notes today than any other. I don’t know, but that’s okay.
SH: [laughing] Well, where else are we gonna get these great ideas? From ourselves? I don’t think so.
CW: Right? Right! And that leads us right into, I think, why I wanted to have this conversation again with you, Susan. My favorite conversation buddy, because, like you, I collect God quotes. I put them on my phone. I don’t know if you write them on sticky notes or whatever, or mark them in books, but if I am listening to a podcast, if I’m watching a sermon, I’m reading a book, and someone says something about their experience with God that just touches me. I think, wait I gotta write that down!
SH: Yeah.
CW: Because it’s just, it’s, you know, the oasis in the desert. It’s like, ooh, ooh, I see something ahead. I see some fresh water. So I have a lot of ideas I want to share today. So this is really a purely selfish episode, but when I told you, you were like, woo, let’s do it.
SH: [laughing]
CW: So maybe it’s selfish for both of us.
SH: I think it is.
CW: Yeah. So like we said, we’ve had an episode on this before. We probably should have had the number ready, but people can look it up. Which is, you know, the part two we have in our title, but also, we had a chapter in our book by the same title.
Fun fact, Susan, It’s the longest chapter in our book that we co-wrote.
SH: Really?
CW: So yeah, today’s no different. So clearly we always have so much we can say about the topic of God, but I really feel like we could have had this episode probably every two years for the life of this podcast, maybe every six months kind of a thing. But then also, our episode last week with Kathryn Knight Sonntag about mysticism…
SH: Yes.
CW: …Has really kind of left me on this spiritual high, so to speak. Like I haven’t stopped thinking about our conversation with her because mysticism is all about connection. It’s all about, to use LDS words, kind of erasing any kind of veil between us and God? So I feel like today is just, is just gonna be the dessert.
Kathryn was the meal, she provided the meat.
SH: Exactly.
CW: The meat, potatoes, and vegetables. And today we’re just gonna have a little dessert about it.
SH: Love it. Love it so much. I couldn’t agree more about our conversation with Kathryn and so I’m thrilled that it worked out that we had that one first as kind of a setup for this one.
CW: Mhmm.
SH: And now we can go into this one. If it’s okay, I wanna preface our conversation today by saying one thing, and that is something that I once heard Barbara Brown Taylor talk about when she was talking about God. And that is that, you know, even the word “god” might present a disconnect for some people.
So I, I want to say right here that when we’re talking about this, let’s think of the word “god” as a placeholder, right? As something that we’re pointing to, but not specifically describing, if you know what I mean.
CW: Yes.
SH: Because my ideas about God may not be your ideas. For some people it could be, I don’t know, the great everything, the universal, you know, however it is that people are thinking about God the word “god” is a nice, short three letter placeholder for a much larger idea. And that’s what we wanna talk about today.
CW: I love that idea of a placeholder. So thanks for bringing that in right at the very beginning of this discussion, because you’re right, we’re just two ladies sharing all the synapses that are firing in our brains about this topic.
SH: Right, exactly.
CW: But just two. Just two. [00:05:00]
SH: That’s right. That’s right.
CW: Well, this whole season, as we’re getting to the end of Season 10, we’ve had a lot of conversation, a lot of great conversations, I think, about navigating change, and we’ve been sharing lots of stories from women. We’ve had a lot of bonus,I think at this point we’ve had four bonus episodes on just voicemail after voicemail of women telling us, like, what triggered their faith journey. And I feel like what I’ve learned is that almost anything can trigger it. I mean, Susan, have you been surprised sometimes like when women are…
SH: Absolutely, yes.
CW: Women are telling us. I’m like, really? That’s what triggered it? Fascinating. But it seems like whatever that trigger might be, it almost always leads to also opening the God box as well. And maybe it’s obvious, but why do you think that is?
SH: I’ve been thinking about this, actually, since last week. You and I were doing a book event in St. George, and sometimes I don’t know what I think about things till I hear them come out of my mouth.
CW: [laughing]
SH: And I don’t remember what question someone asked or what I was trying to answer when I said this. But what I thought about was that, for a lot of women, I think the God box gets smashed by life.
So it’s not necessarily that they’re approaching it thinking, I need to expand my thinking about God.
CW: Mmm.
SH: And so they’re gonna take the lid off that box, right? It’s that something happened, a truck drove in and rolled over the box. You know, the box is gone suddenly, and then they’re forced to reckon with what is or isn’t inside, you know, when that happens.
CW: I like that.
SH: And maybe they didn’t even know that there was a box, but as they start sort of unpacking this God vacuum that they find that they suddenly find themselves in, then they realize, oh, I had pretty narrow thinking, pretty narrow definitions of this thing in my life.
CW: Mmm.
SH: And so that’s the way that it happens, kind of in my experience. I wanted to share a Nadia Bolz Weber quote here, which is from a piece that she wrote called “The Opposite of Faith.” Of course, all of the resources for the great ideas that we talk about today will be posted in our show notes, and Nadia wrote this,
“So if you feel a distance right now when it comes to God, it might be that the distance you feel isn’t between you and God, it’s between you and the ideas you have had of God up until this moment. And that’s different. And more interesting and actually hopeful because sometimes growing in faith looks like reconsidering all of it. Our old ideas that might have worked for us in the past sometimes need an update, and that, too, is a form of faith.”
CW: Mmm.
SH: So, I love that idea that when you wake up one day and what you thought was in the box isn’t there at all, the journey that might send you on is also a form of faith, even if it’s just sitting with nothingness.
CW: Mmm.
SH: You know, I’ve talked a lot about that, where I was like, it was all gone. I had to get comfortable with it all being gone. Well, you know what? That getting comfortable with that, was actually also exercising faith.
CW: Yeah, it was!
SH: But I hadn’t really ever thought about that until Nadia said it, so.
CW: Mhmm. Well, I think of all the ways that we eventually have to navigate change with faith shifts, and there are a lot of ways: relationships, how we’re gonna participate in the church, all those kinds of things, right? Raising our kids.
I think navigating changes around one’s beliefs around God. I mean, they’re definitely the most personal. They’re definitely the most private, but also maybe the most scary?
SH: Totally. Totally agree.
CW: I mean, it all comes back to, you know, God. So, yeah, there’s a lot of fear around that. When, maybe, the God box blows up, and maybe we should even say, I mean, some people might be tuning in for the first time. We keep saying God box.
SH: Right.
CW: Do you know that Richard Rohr quote off the top of your head about it?
SH: Let’s see. It’s something like, “God is always actually bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not spend too much time protecting the boxes.”
CW: That’s right.
SH: It’s something like that.
CW: Yeah. And that’s what’s kicked off all…I feel like our chapter in our book episodes, everything. It was pretty pivotal for you, right?
SH: Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
CW: Okay. That’s fine. I just wanted to get that kind of definition of what we’re talking about here out of the way. But, speaking of our book, you wrote in our book, taking the lid off that box was the biggest scariest, so there’s that word, scary, present. So it was a gift to you that you’d ever been given, so…
SH: Yeah. It really was opening the most terrifying present of all time.
CW: Mmm.
SH: I was thinking about, as we approached this conversation, and I think probably a leaf blower was going somewhere [00:10:00] in my neighborhood because it always is, [laughing] it always involves landscapers in these conversations.
But anyway, I was thinking about pruning because, you know, so, I live in Arizona, and everyone’s got landscapers. And the landscapers are, what’s the right way to say it? They’re not always terribly imaginative. What I most often notice them doing is they have these electric hedge-trimmers and they just trim every shrub.
CW: [laughing]
SH: Nno matter what it is, into this, like, little round shape, it’s this little round ball, no matter what type of shrub it is. And so what happens is, when it comes time for these shrubs to bloom. They’ve often cut off much of the blooming part.
CW: That’s so sad.
SH: So you’ll get weird little patches of flowers, you know, on these round shrub balls.
Whereas, if they had just let it be a little more natural, if they had pruned in a way that encouraged blooming or growth, which is a lot of what pruning is about, right?
CW: Yeah.
SH: Yeah. It’s something that’s actually very healthy and like, we need to do it in gardening. We need to cut those things back, but it needs to be done with a little bit more attention
CW: Mhmm.
SH: To what’s gonna help the plant grow, be well-shaped, and what’s gonna flower in the next cycle for the plant, right? So you have to pay attention to pruning. Well, they just don’t here. And I’ve said here, talking about my own kind of faith formation and development, that I felt like growing up in the church had stunted my growth.
CW: Mhmm.
SH: And the first time that I wrote that sentence, it was the second scariest sentence, actually, that I had ever written. That was really hard for me to admit because, you know, it touched on a lot of things. But as I thought about that, really, what I think that’s about is that my spiritual life had been groomed by those electric hedge trimmers.
CW: Mm.
SH: Like, the church had just pruned me into a shape without a lot of consideration for, personally, the places that I was gonna need to be allowed to grow more, or where a strategic cut was going to help me bloom in a specific way. I hadn’t
CW: Wow.
SH: My own pruning had not been attended to in that way. And so really, kind of, for the faith development for me in this phase of my life has involved paying attention to the plant of myself and seeing, like, what do I need? And where’s the best way to make the cut? And where are the parts that need to be cut away and where are the parts that need to be allowed to let grow?
And it made me think about a Merabi Starr quote. It’s from her book, “Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life Is Sacred Ground,” which I’ve been reading, because you put me onto it actually. So good. But she said this:
“Organized religion can, in fact, be an obstacle to direct experience of the sacred. Most religious institutions insist that you purchase their brand of God and forsake all others. Not only do they demand exclusivity, but they require intermediaries for anyone to even hang out with the divine. The function of most clergy and their customs is to get you to live whatever they deem to be a godly life, not to actually connect with God.”
So really, what I found is that I had to get those pruners into my own hands.
CW: Mhmm.
SH: In order to make that connection for myself.
CW: I think we’ve already reached the lying down part of the episode, Susan [laughing]. Because just you reading that quote and you talking about hedge trimmers versus, you know, gentle pruners, I’m like, oh my gosh [both laughing]. I need to go lie down as well.
I’m gonna be thinking about that metaphor for a while. Thank you, I think, I don’t know. No thank you. That’s hard.
SH: These conversations often come with a thank you and also, no thank you.
CW: Oh, yeah. Well, I have here in the notes, just thinking about our episode last week with Kathryn, she used the word “bottomless” and how sometimes this can be really scary.
Because it feels bottomless. I feel like I need to come up with a different word. Like when you open that God box, like, it’s really scary. It’s very freeing at the same time, because you can go anywhere. But I mean, also, freedom is scary!
SH: Right.
CW: Freedom can be scary. And so maybe the word isn’t bottomless because that just seems like an endless descending, you know, maybe it’s just eternally expansive or something, I don’t know what.
SH: Yeah. I was gonna say without bounds maybe, you know?
CW: There you go.
SH: It’s no longer defined in the ways that, that it has been.
CW: I like “without bounds” better than bottomless. I think that could help get rid of some of the terror around that.
SH: Well, let’s talk about something in that quote for a minute, because it’s something that I started thinking a lot about in preparation for the Kathryn episode, and I’m still thinking about it.
And that is the question, you know, does the church prepare us to connect with God?
CW: Yeah. What do you think? [00:15:00]
SH: Well, okay, you, in these notes, you posted something that I wrote you in a text, actually
CW: Yes.
SH: The other day. Do you wanna read that? Do you want me to [laughter]
CW: [laughing] Well, this is what I wanna say to protect Susan who is very innocent. I don’t want to read your text word for word if you don’t want me to. So I put your text in here.
SH: Oh, I don’t care. You can read it.
CW: Okay. Alright. I’ve been given permission, listeners, so this is what Susan said to me about, there was a recent article October 6th in the Salt Lake Tribune, and it was, I think it was called, “Is Orthodoxy Receding Among U.S. Latter-Day Saints?” or something. And so after you and I read that article, we were texting each other, and this is what you said to me.
“I think it [meaning the church] also does a pretty lousy job connecting members to God. It connects us to programs, it connects us to leaders, it connects us to a set of rules and a set of beliefs. But how many members are out there on their own seeking God above or beyond any of those confines?”
And that so struck me that I copied it and saved it for this episode. So, that’s kind of what I want you to touch on. Why did you say that? In what ways did you not feel prepared after a lifetime of sitting in the pews at church? How did you not feel prepared to connect with God?
SH: Yeah. And I mean, let’s recognize right here, that this might just be me. Anytime I’m sending you a text, it’s probably revealing more about me than about whatever I’m saying, right? So it didn’t prepare me to connect with God.
And I think that’s why I spent so long sitting in nothingness, you know, when I took the lid off that box and realized it was empty, I didn’t know how to know God.
CW: Mm.
SH: I didn’t know how to begin to do that. I had been taught about God, like, handed a specific format for communicating with God.
CW: Yes.
SH: Told where I was most likely to find God, right? And where I probably wouldn’t. All of those things. And so really, when I ended up in that nothingness, it’s like, God had to get my attention, I think. And luckily, you know, when I landed in that spot, I intuited that remaining open and being willing to sit with that nothingness was what I needed to do.
Or maybe that’s me putting a nice spin on it looking backwards. I don’t know, maybe I just came up so empty that I was so flattened by it, you know, for long enough that I didn’t even have it in me to get up and do anything.
CW: Yeah.
SH: So I sat with it. Whichever it was. Anyway, I wrote a piece in Say More this month about that shift in focus from what you know to how you know.
And for me, this was the crucial shift, really, at that point in my life. Because my previous relationship with God had been based on everything I’d been taught about God. All my ideas were things I “knew” using air quotes there. But the problem is that there was no “how” I knew them to support all of that knowledge.
So I had to set aside all the things I knew and figure out how to know, if that makes sense.
CW: It does. And you just said something, I don’t think I, in all our conversations, I’ve never heard you quite say it this way before, that you had kind of reached a spot where God had to get your attention.
SH: Yeah.
CW: And I think that really is different. I mean, it’s kind of, literally the opposite, I think of, what you had been doing, it sounds like your whole life, was trying to get God’s attention, but now you were sitting in this nothingness, completely flattened, and it was like, okay, God, your turn. Like, you’re gonna have to come to me. Does that sound right?
SH: Yeah, it does. And that’s a new insight, actually, for me in this conversation.
CW: Okay.
SH: That hadn’t really ever occurred to me before now, but that’s exactly what I needed to have happen. And that’s what did happen.
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CW: Well, you and I are both doing a course with the Center for Action and Contemplation right now. It’s called “The Essentials of Engagement,” where we are learning all kinds of ways to connect with God, new ways, maybe ways we’ve heard of, but we’d never really tried before. Ways definitely, we had never been taught about, I think, in our church, specifically, like meditation, centering prayer, those kinds of things.
And yet, we have, our whole lives been taught to pray always. This, I know this isn’t an episode on prayer, but I don’t know if you can have a conversation about God without talking about prayer. And for us as Latter-Day Saints, formal prayer is the main way that I was taught to connect with God.
Like, do you remember hearing, growing up, when you want to talk to God, you pray. When you want God to talk to you, you read the scriptures.
SH: Yes. Yes.
CW: Like it, it’s a pretty defined formula of, these are the steps. And [00:20:00] then, for someone like me who went to BYU and you had to take, like, tons and tons of religion classes to get credit to graduate, I was then taught in those religion classes that modern-day prophets are more important than the scriptures in terms of hearing God’s word. So then it’s just, like, dialed up.
SH: Oh, that totally makes sense to me that that would be the messaging
CW: That was the messaging. It was pretty explicit. But, in thinking about praying always, I do really like the scriptures in Alma, where, in Alma 34, where the prophet Amulek, he’s advising the people to pray for prosperity in their fields, to increase their flocks.
And I mean, the exact wording is “cry unto him over the crops of your fields that ye may prosper in them, cry over the flocks of your fields that they may increase.”
SH: Mm.
CW: And so while that is a scripture about praying over everything, which I like, that’s the part I really like, it’s still kind of the typical LDS prayer of asking for something, right? It uses words like prosper, increase.
SH: Right.
CW: So it’s very much a transactional-type prayer, which is kind of the only prayer I had really known about growing up. But now, I’m more interested in the consider the lilies type of prayer.
SH: Right.
CW: Just, consider. Less transaction, more, more mindfulness, communion, more contemplative-type prayer, more connecting-type prayer, you know, considering, just pondering on those beautiful lilies that God has planted for us. And so, I guess what I’m trying to say is like, the formulaic prayer, that type left me disappointed, but this second type of prayer that has come into my second half of life, has never failed me.
SH: Mm.
CW: And it’s pretty astonishing that reinventing even the definition of prayer
SH: Right.
CW: Is kind of what has saved me.
SH: Well, it seems to me that that first kind of prayer is connected to the vending machine God.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Which gets us in all kinds of trouble, right, when we’re relying on that. But it’s, it’s the only way that I knew, it’s the thing that I felt like
CW: Same
SH: I had been given, even though I think probably our leaders would laugh and say no, we were never teaching you about a vending machine God. So for whatever reason, and maybe it’s just, this is what human beings do, for whatever reason, the message came to me that way - that I was gonna ask God for things, and then based on my actions, I was gonna get ‘em.
CW: Right.
SH: You’ve heard me talk a lot about demolishing everything that I knew about how prayers were supposed to be. I love it. But then, you know, once you do that, then what next? And so, you know, for me it’s been this move away from communication and toward communing that has felt right for me at this time in my life.
Our listeners are gonna get so sick of hearing about our CAC lessons, but honestly they’re just a big part of the thinking that we’re immersed in right now.
CW: Right, right.
SH: So I know it’s gonna flavor our conversations for the next year, but hopefully some of the goodness can rub off on these conversations and we’ll all benefit. But anyway, this week there was a description from Carmen Acevedo Butcher in one of our lessons where she’s talking about monastics and getting, I think the lesson was actually about getting spiritual practices out of the monastery, right? But so she was describing the monastics and how they live, and she said this: “They live by the rhythm of silence and they are not content to say prayers. They want to be prayer.”
CW: Wow.
SH: “To practice unceasing prayer. And they take that as a practical direction, not an impossibility.” That idea of being prayer.
CW: Right
SH: Was deeply resonant for me. I, too, want to be prayer. I was thinking about, what good is a prayer that never comes out of your closet, you know, if you know what I mean?
CW: Yeah.
SH: What good is prayer that is not in your life with you? Dishes can be prayer, Cynthia. Gardening can be walking, singing, you know, whatever we’re doing. The minute we shift to doing it with some intention of being in it with God…then I think it’s prayer.
CW: Mhmm.
SH: And you reminded me the other day in a conversation of an “On Being” episode with Roberta Bondi that we both love and she talks about setting a timer to just be with God.
CW: Yes, she does.
SH: And then reading a book or whatever is pleasant to you. And that’s about intention, right, doing whatever you’re doing on purpose. And figuring out that whatever negative associations that you might have with God, being with God can actually be whatever you want it to be. She says in that episode, there is no right way. The important thing is to find your way.
CW: Wow. That is so liberating
SH: Isn’t it?
CW: To find your way. Yeah. It really is. Like, where was that interview 10 years ago when I really,
SH: Exactly.
CW: [00:25:00] really needed it. Like to me, that just sounds like that could have been the best gift that, you know, over a decade ago when everything was so dark for me, like, to have someone just say that, I mean, okay, forgive me, but I’m just gonna read some of the transcript, a couple paragraphs.
SH: Oh yeah, do it.
CW: ‘Cause that episode was so, I mean, even now, 10 years after, you know, kind of being in that dark pit, it just meant so much to me. She said,
“Often I tell people to set a timer (like you just said) for this because it’s still hard enough for them that they have to know that it has an ending to it.
And then to sit there and read the novel or work a crossword puzzle or do hand work or something, and then when the timer goes off, say, thank you very much, God, that was very enjoyable. And then go and do something else. After a while, that’s a way of learning that God is a safe person to be with. And you know, maybe it takes six months, maybe it takes two years.
Maybe it takes 10 years. God’s got plenty of time and we’re not doing this because we want to be good people or we’re following a command, but because we’re made to long for God and it’s for our own wellbeing and happiness, and so we find it for that reason, not because we ought to.”
SH: Gorgeous. Life-saving. Life-giving.
CW. Gorgeous.
SH: Yes. Amazing.
CW: Yeah. Love it.
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CW: Okay, Susan, let’s talk about creating God in our own image.
SH: I mean, we’re doing it, so let’s talk about it.
CW: I mean, we’re doing it. Thanks Susan. [laughing] Cut right to the chase. That’s kind of what we’re doing. And also, and we’ve talked about this so much, so you know, I’m trying to just have new thoughts here and not just rehash old ones where we’ve talked about this, but in our book.
Can I just read a quick paragraph that has meant a lot to me, what you said about this. You said,
“It never occurred to me that we all create God for ourselves. We don’t know what God looks like. No one does. Joseph Smith had a mental image, but I can’t fully understand the nature of his experience, though he has described it to us in words. That’s not the same as seeing for ourselves. So we each conjure something.”
You just said it.
SH: Yeah. I don’t know when it occurred to me that, of course we’re creating God in our own image because we’ve all dreamed up a picture in our heads, right? It’s like anytime you read a book and you’re imagining, you’re imagining the action unfolding in your head, you’re seeing a movie that you’re creating for yourself, right, while you’re reading. And everybody’s is gonna look different. And I think that Latter-Day Saints, very specifically, have created God in men’s image.
CW: Yes.
SH: I don’t know how members could argue with that. And if you go to the temple, it’s pretty explicit. It’s on the screen.
CW: Yes.
SH: But I think that the scriptures did that first. And I think that God actually sanctioned that whole idea from the beginning by specifying that people are created in God’s image, right? So that’s the first thing. We’ve already been kind of told this, and then the second was by sending Jesus Christ to earth as a mortal.
So, when I take those two things together, you know, it shows me that this is what Christians know to do, right? We know to think of God as in some ways, person-like, and that’s great, that’s fine. It gives us a place to easily wrap our minds around, except that it also can put some real limits on our thinking, right?
CW: Right.
SH: Because once God is like a person, then we expect God to have all kinds of personality traits: things like ego, all kinds of things that come with being a person. But also, this is the really brilliant thing about the idea of Jesus, right? Because Jesus as man and as God
CW: Yeah.
SH: You can’t quite get your head around that. Which is really the point, I think.
CW: Yeah.
SH: We’re not supposed to be able to. And so I think we should stop trying, I don’t wanna just move from like a small box to a different, even if it’s a bigger, even a more expansive, box. I wanna be rid of boxes altogether. As Richard Rohr said, “God is always much bigger than your imagination will allow. So go beyond your ability to imagine.” But that can be kind of scary and kind of a hard place to get to sometimes. We wanna put manners on things. We wanna be able to control them.
CW: Yeah. You know, as you were speaking about, you know, we all imagine in our head, maybe, what God is like, I was just thinking, you and I were at a book signing event and someone came up to us.
And they were like, “oh, you’re At Last She Said It?” We said, “Yes.” And they said, “You look so much different than I had pictured.” And we were like
SH: Exactly! I forgot about that
CW: Uh-oh. [laughing] And we were like, be careful what your [00:30:00] next words are, gentleman. What did you mean by that? And I can’t remember what he said, I don’t know if you do, but I mean, he had a very nice image, you know - good save, stranger man. But what he said was, I can’t remember now, but it was very lovely. And I just think, I don’t think there’s any, I’m gonna go straight to the word sin. I don’t think there’s any sin involved in imagining God, how, maybe we need to, because that’s just what humans do, right?
We have these brains and we have to, to use a quote that we put in our book, you know, “God is a blanket we put over mystery to give it a shape” something like that.
SH: Yeah.
CW: Yeah. And I think that’s all we’re trying to do there. There isn’t any mal-intent here. It’s, we’re just trying to take something limitless, and with our limited minds kind of, give it a little bit more shape.
SH: Yeah.
CW: So that’s my way of extending grace to myself and all of us who maybe create God in our own image. Like, it’s really hard not to, you know, really hard not to. But also as you’re talking I did put in the notes here, this is a little sarcastic, but another Mirabai Starr quote from her book, “Wild Mercy.”
She said, “Pretending God is a dude hasn’t exactly worked out for the vast majority of the human family, let alone the animal and plant communities or the air or the waters.”
SH: Right?
CW: So, I’m just gonna leave that there.
SH: Yeah. I gotta think about that. If God is God of the whole world, then of course, necessarily, God is not gonna be able to be reduced in the ways that we’re so fond of reducing them.
CW: Right.
SH: Sometimes I like to think when we’re approaching a topic like this and we have a conversation, it points to things in our doctrine that are actually pretty expansive sometimes. But that
CW: I agree.
SH: I haven’t privileged in my own thinking about it, you know, or that in my experience it hasn’t been highlighted to me and I came across another quote from Carmen Acevedo Butcher. I wanna say right here that Cynthia and I are on a campaign to get Carmen on our podcast.
CW: [laughing]
SH: And that is not why I’m quoting her all the time, but I’m quoting her all the time so that you’ll know when we do get her on our podcast what an amazing thing that’s gonna be.
But anyway, she said, “We are being yearned for, even as we yearn, remember that our desire for God is already within us. God is already within us, desiring us.”
CW: Yes.
SH: And I read that idea and I was like, man, it’s such an expansive thought. It’s such an empowering thought to me as I go thinking about exploring and reaching for further light knowledge on this.
But then I thought, it sounds familiar, right? This sounds familiar to me. Where have I heard this recently in our own church? And here’s where it was, it actually came from Elder Patrick Kearon in April 2024. In his talk, “God’s Intent is to Bring You Home.” And he said this. Well, first of all, the idea in the tagline for that talk is that everything about the Father’s plan for his beloved children is designed to bring everyone home.
CW: Oh, really?
SH: Yeah. How often do you hear that message, right?
CW: Mmm.
SH: On the billboard from the church. But anyway, the quote was, “God is in relentless pursuit of you.” It’s another way of saying exactly the same thing.
CW: Yeah yeah yeah. Yearning.
SH: So I don’t think that a lot of these ideas that you and I talk about are really lacking entirely in our church. I think that we just don’t hear or talk about them in lessons and things like that as often as we could. And I offer that also, you know, in hopes of empowering some of our listeners that they can bring up these ideas, that if you go looking for some of these ideas within our own doctrine and our own materials, you can find them and highlight them in the lessons and talks and things that you’re presenting.
Let’s get talking about the good ideas, and the expansive ideas.
CW: Good tip. And also, maybe we could have called this, “We Don’t Believe Our Own Stuff: God Version.”
SH: Absolutely. A hundred percent. Yes. Apparently we could have.
CW: Yeah, it’s there. It’s, and actually I have more ideas on that. We’ll get to that in a little bit.
But if we’re gonna keep talking about creating God in our own image, I heard Brittany Hartley, who’s been on our podcast, but now she has been on the Soul Boom podcast with Rainn Wilson, say the most amazing thing. I was traveling, I’m on a road trip. I’m in the middle of rural Utah, and I’m listening to her podcast with Rainn Wilson.
And she said something like,
“Tell me who you are and I can tell you the kind of God you believe in,” or, and then she flipped it. “Tell me what kind of God you believe in, and I can tell you who you are.”
And I was [00:35:00] like, aha. We all do it! And she’s not wrong. I feel like especially with, like, the temperature right now in the United States of America, like I feel like I can grab any of these Christian nationalists and be like, tell me what you think of God.
And I’ll be like, yep. Vengeful. And then recently, I know we read a quote on our own podcast a few episodes ago from President Oaks, I was quoting like an old general conference talk where he said that God’s wrath and anger are evidence of his love. And that kind of goes back to, you know, Brittney’s quote.
And I mean, it’s simply not a way that I see God as vengeful and wrathful. So it’s really hard to know why or how that ideology…Well, I mean, I guess I know how that ideology developed because it’s riddled throughout the Old Testament especially, right? There are tons of stories of God’s wrath, but I see that now more as a commentary about a group of people who also saw God as vengeful, and so that was their lens that they were bringing to pen and paper as they wrote about God.
And then it reminded me of Barbara Brown Taylor, a quote where she says, “Our God view came to resemble our worldview.”
SH: Mm.
CW: And I was like, ahh. That kind of perfectly explains, I think, all of the violence in the name of God in the Old Testament. I think it explains what I’m seeing right now in our own country. So, you know, gosh, again, humans 101.
SH: Yeah, I love that line from Barbara Brown Taylor. And actually, it explains why I kind of love that quote from President Oaks, actually. It’s one of those
CW: Really? Tell me more. Wow.
SH: Okay. I’ll tell you why. Because it gives me this sort of overarching context that can explain a lot of other things that he says,
CW: Oh.
SH: So, I look at that and I’m like, okay, this tells me lots of things about how you approach some things. And therefore, it gives me a lens to think about and hear other words that he says and sort of understand where they’re coming from, right? They’re coming from this same place. That’s a really foreign feeling place to me.
CW: Yeah.
SH: But at least it makes sense within his worldview. So, so I can see that. He’s describing a God who while he’s whipping you with a belt, you know, he’s saying through his gritted teeth, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”
It’s that kind of God, right? But there are people for whom authority figures have occupied that kind of place. I mean, there are people for whom that God would make sense, and I think those would be people in the Old Testament, also a God like that made more sense. It’s a God that we don’t recognize as much, but again, we have all had different experiences, so we’ve all seen that kind of father character portrayed somewhere.
It doesn’t come out of nowhere, but, so it’s useful to me as I consider going into a President Oaks presidency now, which we’ve entered into. It’s interesting to me to know a little about this God that he envisions as we’re going in. And that’s not to say that he won’t change also, right. That his ideas about God will not continue to evolve. Because hopefully we’re always in the business of revising our ideas and our opinions about God. There’s this book called “99 Stories of God” by a writer named Joy Williams that I read some years ago, but one line from it is, has stuck with me and it’s this one.
She says, “We can only know what God is not. Not what God is.”
CW: Interesting.
SH: And so I feel like we’re allowed to know, you know, when we hear something that doesn’t speak of the God that we’ve come to know. Like for me, when I hear something that doesn’t speak love to me then it’s not, I know, it’s not my God talking.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And or like you always say, Cynthia, you always say you don’t have to believe anything that makes God seem like a jerk or something like that [laughing].
CW: Exactly what I say [laughing].
SH: Right. It’s the same kind of thing. You know, we’re just, we’re each bringing our individual perspectives to this.
CW: Oh my goodness. I love that. I love how Joy Williams said it better than my snarky way of, you know, jerk talk. We can only know what God is not, like that’s pretty fantastic.
SH: It is. That’s, it’s because it feels true to me.
CW: It feels true to me.
SH: Yeah. My heart is tuned to know good things when I see them. And so when I see something that is not I can know that.
CW: Yeah. I’m with you on that 100% now. That’s interesting. Well, I kind of brought up America earlier, so I kind of wanna, this is really fascinating to me. Like, what kind of God do Americans believe in?
And in reading Diana Butler Bass’s book, “Christianity After Religion,” she actually highlights this study from Baylor University where they found that 92% of Americans believe in God, but that we believe in four kinds of gods.
SH: Okay.
CW: So this is what [00:40:00] the research turned up, 31% of the population believe in an authoritarian God.
SH: Okay.
CW: So, you know, the Old Testament God, maybe. 23% believe in a benevolent God. 16% critical God and 24% distant God. So here’s how they define those categories.
An authoritarian God is a wrathful, sin-hating deity may come closest to beliefs about God that once dominated American Protestant majority culture.
SH: Okay.
CW: Sounds familiar. A benevolent God, the forgiving friend of sinners, a peacemaker and caring healer. The critical God, the bringer of justice, who will make all things right at the end. And the distant God, the cosmic creative force behind and beyond the natural universe.
SH: Interesting. That sounds right. I’d love to know where Latter-Day Saints generally fall. I think we would fall scattered all over just like Americans do. I think that in any congregation you’d have people with all of those thoughts about God.
CW: Right, agreed.
SH: Interesting. It reminded me, my husband and I a couple of years ago had a conversation over pancakes because I like to do most of my deep thinking over pancakes, as you know, since you and I often eat pancakes together when we’re together.
But anyway, we had come up with our own three God types as we were considering what we had learned really about God in our lives as Latter-day Saints.
CW: Really!
SH: Yeah. And so our three types we had come up with the appeasement God, which would be like the God of the Old Testament. I mean, you watched the people in the Old Testament trying to do whatever they could to like, keep God happy.
You know, making sacrifices, whatever. Let’s not make him mad at us. So whatever they could do to appease an angry God or maybe just an unpredictable God, and then the contract God. Which is like putting God in our debt, which I feel like a lot of Latter-day Saints walk right into that category.
We have this love of a contract God where we can read all the fine print and understand exactly what’s expected on both sides. And then there’s the loving God, and that would be that God that centers in trust and growth. And I can find all three of these gods, actually, in our scriptures.
And to me, these three categories kind of represent a progression through God knowledge, sort of like stages of faith. These would be like stages of God, how it’s operated for me. And the first one seems like the most rudimentary, like scary God, right? It’s a God that we can’t really understand.
So we just do whatever we can to keep him from being angry. And the second one is a little bit more mature, the contract God. If only because it’s a little bit more complicated than the first one.
CW: True.
SH: It’s a God that requires our action like the first one does, but the reason for the action is still kind of off base. We haven’t got to the transformation of, you know, why we’re doing something in a quid pro quo relationship, right?
CW: Mhmm.
SH: We haven’t had transformation yet. So it continues to underestimate God hugely, in my opinion. And I feel like Mormons get stuck on that one. Or maybe we love that one because we can control it.
CW: Ding ding ding ding, bingo card
SH: That’s a God that can control, right? So we love that version, including me for most of my life [laughing]. But then, you know, the third God is the God that I want now. That’s the God that I yearn for now. And I think the one that I can conceive of yearning for me also, right. Which puts me in a relationship of trust or, I mean, another word for that would be faith.
But anyway, so that was our deep thinking about God.
CW: I love it. What are in those pancakes?
SH: I know, right? Those are good. They were really good pancakes.
CW: Those are really good pancakes. [laughing] Oh my gosh. I wanna go to have pancakes with you AND Russ now, that sounds…
SH: No, let’s do it.
CW: That’s so fabulous. But I totally agree with your whole list. That absolutely sounds like kind of a stages of God kind of thing.
SH: Yeah.
CW: Like you said. Yeah. Appeasing, contracting, loving. That’s, that sounds true to me. I know it’s true. [laughing]
SH: [laughing] Well, I wasn’t bearing my testimony, but thank you for doing that.
CW: Well, yes. Sounds testimonial to me actually.
_____
CW: Okay, let’s talk about, ‘cause speaking of, we don’t believe our own stuff, we do believe, it’s right in our scriptures, right in Moses 7:29 “A God who weeps.” And I can’t think of anything more comforting than knowing that when I’m hurting, deity is hurting along with me.
SH: Right.
CW: A weeping God. Like a God who has passions. Who has feelings. I mean, that’s our actual doctrine. So I wanna, let’s riff on that for a little bit because I think. That’s the good stuff of our Latter-day Saint doctrine. Moses 7:29 Enoch says unto the Lord, “how is it that thou canst weep seeing thou art holy and from all eternity to all eternity?”
And in that [00:45:00] whole section where they’re talking about the weeping God, like that phrase, “heavens weep” is mentioned three times, that the heavens weep for us. And that just makes me feel so seen. I feel such solidarity when I think of a God like that. And Greg Boyle, I have read all of his books now because no one has made me, I don’t know, just speaking of a God who weeps like, he brings that God to life for me with his thinky thoughts about God.
And in his book, “Barking to the Choir,” he tells this story. It’s cute but he has such a profound point to it. So he says, “I was once saying mass at the San Fernando Juvenile Hall with nearly 300 detained minors, mostly gang members. A homie reads from Psalm 1:38, I’m seated, vested, eyes closed, choosing to listen to this kid’s proclamation rather than follow along in the liturgical sheet that rests on my lap. He reads, with an overabundance of confidence, “the Lord is exhausted.”
What the hell? I open my eyes and hurriedly refer to my sheet. It says, “The Lord is exalted.” But I think exhausted is way better. I’m not sure I want to spend eternity with a God who wants to be exalted, who longs to be recognized and made a big deal of. I would rather hope for a humble God who gets exhausted in delighting over and loving us. That is a better God than the one we have.
Isn’t that beautiful?
SH: So beautiful. That IS a better God than the one that I have had for so much of my life. You know? And I think that we see people’s natural aversion to this idea of God as being maybe, well, a God who weeps. Well, actually as, let me back off from that idea for just a second because I’m thinking about, when I was talking about earlier investing God with human traits.
This is another example of that, actually. But an example that I kind of like. And I guess it’s because, I guess I like it because it’s comforting to me, like you mentioned, because it feels true to me because it’s what God is asking of me in the world. So it makes sense that it would be what God is also here to put into the world.
CW: Love it.
SH: And it gives me kind of an access point for being present with a little bit more human God. Like God, it’s, God is not a God that doesn’t have feelings, right? It makes me think of, I was reading also this week, something from Jim Finley, who is one of the great contemplative teachers currently alive in the world, in my opinion.
And he was talking, it reminded me of, you’ve shared the Greg Boyle quote before about the God, I think you shared it in our book actually, about the God who protects you from nothing but sustains you in everything.
CW: Yes.
SH: Is that, am I quoting that right?
CW: Yes. And he actually got it from James Finley.
SH: So I quoted the wrong person.
CW: Read us the real quote [laughing]
SH: I have the James Finley quote. Well, it, this is probably not where he originally said it, but it’s where I heard him say it this week or saw him say it. And he said this,
“God is the presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things, and there’s the rise and fall of circumstance, but there’s this non-invasive, primordial depth of presence that rides the waves with us and walks with us and sustains us. And we’re trying to sensitize our awareness of that. So by being aware of it, we can say yes to it and to learn and live in fidelity to it.”
And there’s that kind of trust relationship that I was alluding to earlier. So this idea of a God that weeps with me, I can understand that.
CW: Yeah.
SH: As a result of my human relationships, right.
CW: Yeah.
SH: I’ve had weeping conversations on the phone just this week with people that I love who are going through amazing things and so it gives me this reference point for how God is with me even when he doesn’t fix or spare me really from anything. But can still be with me. That’s the weeping God to me. And that’s kind of new insight for me because I haven’t always really known what to make of a weeping God. But I think we see a lot of aversion to this idea of God right now, particularly in ideas like the sin of empathy, like we talked about in the beginning of our podcast season.
CW: Yeah.
SH: You know, a compassionate God is a weak God to some people, right? And an unreliable one. Like, it’s a God who might love people that we hate, right? Or who might forgive people that we don’t think should be forgiven or who might let the wrong folks into heaven eventually. And so it’s a God who maybe doesn’t privilege all of our very specific good works and our worship in our ways of [00:50:00] living.
It’s a much more expansive, welcoming, and comprehensive idea of God. So once you let God be a weeping God, then it’s sort of pandemonium actually, if you think about it.
CW: [laughing]
SH: Like, what are you gonna tell me next? That God thinks love is the most important thing? But again, to me, like, here’s the brilliance of Jesus as the example. Because in Jesus, we see, you know, we actually see…
CW: Right
SH: …Several different places in the scriptures, a God weeping. And so I don’t really know how it could be made more plain than that. And yet I do feel like, and Latter-day Saints are not exempt from this, I do feel like human beings have a natural aversion to that.
We want God to be somehow more omnipotent, more powerful than that. And yet, as I’ve had these hard things in my life this week and these conversations that have required for me to descend into some really hard places with people that I love.
CW: I bet.
SH: And to sit in those places and to weep with them, I can hardly think of anything that actually feels more sacred, more God-like to me than that,
CW: Than a weeping God.
SH: Yeah, than a weeping God. And so I feel like that is very specifically what we’re called to do and what Jesus was sent here as an example to do.
_____
CW: Okay. Let’s talk about the mystery of God. So, we were just interviewed by the Faith Matters podcast and on that episode we talked a little bit about the God questions ‘cause I mean, it was in our book and that’s, you know, a lot of what the interview was about was our book. And I can’t remember exactly what we said, but I do remember trying to explain that I’ve moved from having huge God experiences of which, I mean, for years I was embarrassed to say like, I think I’ve had maybe two or three actual God experiences in my whole life.
So I’ve moved from the God of experiences to wanting like, daily God moments. And in the Center for Action and Contemplation, kind of, I don’t know if it’s their mantras, but they’ve given me a lot of things that I have decided to take as mantras. And one of them is
“Exploration over explanation.”
SH: Oh, so good when it comes to things about God. So good.
CW: Yes. Right. It is so, so good. And Rachel Held Evans has said, “We are not looking for more info about God, we’re looking for more experiences.” So that’s the exploration part. And that’s where I’m landing right now. That’s what I want.
I just want more of these, these moments, these daily moments that I can just touch. That’s what’s more meaningful to me right now. And Paula D’Arcy has the quote, “God comes to you disguised as your life.” And that’s another thing that’s really helped me in this whole mystery of God is just kind of be like, oh yeah, God is right there with me, disguised as my life. This is it. ‘Cause I lead a really ordinary, boring life, you know? I mean, it’s not boring to me. I love my life, but from the outside, you would never write a movie. I would, there’s not gonna be a, “The Real Lives of Cynthia’s Life” kind of episode out there.
SH: [laughing]
CW: So the idea that God comes to me disguised as my life is really meaningful.
SH: Mm. I think that’s such a beautiful thought. I, when I start to think about, kind of the mystery aspect of God, which is something that I continue to gain more and more appreciation of, actually, it’s the place I’m comfortable sitting at this juncture in my life.
CW: Same.
SH: Yeah, I love being in that space, but I always think of the Julian Barnes line: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”
Because to me those words sort of capture this kind of wistfulness that can characterize the ebb and flow of the God relationship. You know, I mean, because sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t. I think in our Faith Matters episode, I love this image so well, Aubrey talked about sometimes, you know, the air conditioner clicks on
CW: Yes.
SH: And that’s all there is, right? That’s all there is.
CW: Yeah.
SH: I just think of this empty room where you hear the air conditioner come on. Yeah, sometimes that has been my God relationship and some days, you know, I feel like it still is.
CW: Mhmm.
SH: But I just feel like that captures it so well. So, like, how much can we really know, honestly? And how much would we wanna know if we could?
CW: Ooh.
SH: You know, I have to ask myself that question because would a God divested of all mysteries still have the same, um, je ne sais quoi, god-ness? Would there be any god-ness?
CW: [laughing]
SH: Any godness in a God to which there was no mystery? It makes me think of my own line from our book, [00:55:00] “Please let God be bigger and more mysterious than a man” right?
CW: [laughing] It’s my favorite.
SH: I mean, I was saying that specifically in reference to Joseph Smith’s vision. But really that is how I feel about it. I need more mystery than that. And I have, I love this characterization from Jonathan Sacks. It was on an On Being episode, it was years ago, and I’ve never stopped thinking about it.
And he says this: “The Bible is saying to us the whole time, don’t think that God is as simple as you are. When Moses at the burning bush says to God, who are you? God says to him three words, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. (or however you pronounce that) Those words are mistranslated in English as I am, that which I am, but in Hebrew it means I will be who or how or where I will be.
Meaning, don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you.”
And I love the idea of a God who is going to surprise me. That is so hopeful to me.
CW: Yes.
SH: Because then I can give up all the pretense of being able to control God through my worthiness or my righteous actions or desires. I think accepting this idea of surprise is like a foundational step to seeding control of outcomes. But I had never thought of it until I heard Jonathan Sacks say it. “I want a God who is going to surprise me.” Because, well, okay. Is a God that I can’t control scary? I mean, yeah, I guess, but even scarier for me is the idea that everything is riding on my shoulders.
CW: Yeah. That’s worse.
SH: God gets scary to me. That’s way worse.
CW: That’s really good. That’s really good. I don’t even have anything I just wanna bask in that, but that is really good. A God of surprises. And I don’t mean to, like, poke at our church too much, but to me that is like the complete opposite of the whole, you know, “God is bound”
SH: A hundred percent.
CW:You know what I mean? Who has ever been able to bind God anyway? Who has ever been able to control outcomes and then turn to God and say, I did my part. You have to do…like, I mean, maybe for some people that really has worked. For me, that has not. And so yeah, I’m with you. A God who’s going to surprise me is one that I can get behind.
That sounds more true to me, anyway. And in my 50 plus years of living now. And it sounds like it’s been true for you too.
SH: Yes.
CW: Right. So instead of the mystery of God, we could also just, in my snarkiness, I just think, can we just call it, ‘cause like my patriarchal blessing says that the mysteries of God will be made plain to my soul.
SH: Right, right.
CW: Okay. But I mean, and that’s good. And that actually meant a lot to me as an 18-year-old. I really liked that line because it made me dive into the scriptures more and comb and try to find exactly what those mysteries are. You know, spoiler, here I am now going, oh, it’s ALL mystery [laughing] wah wah. You know, it’s all mystery.
But I just wish that we had a lot more intellectual humility about who God is in the church and I mean the larger church. So yes, I’m kind of poking at our church but I wish we really did leave more of that mystery.
SH: But the thing I love about that line from your patriarchal blessing, and I love putting it in the context of where you are now, the thing I love is that I feel like you’re on a journey through the mysteries of God now.
And like it didn’t say, the mysteries of God are all gonna be made plain to you. I mean, I think they’re made plain to you in moments again and again and again.
CW: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a nuance to everything and definitely to that line. I agree.
SH: I love it.
CW: Well, can we close with our last section? And I’m so glad this is our last section, talking about God as love. And on our original episode, like, this is actually the only section we’re repeating. So we might be repeating ourself a little bit here, but also, can we ever talk enough about God as love? Probably not. So, Cynthia Bourgeault in “The Wisdom Jesus” she goes through each of the beatitudes and she breaks them down how each is an exchange of love between us and God.
And in our book I used this quote, I used one quote from that section of the book that says that “our hunger for God is a sign that the bond of love is already in place.”
Like, how could we hunger for something that really isn’t there? And so she uses words, or rather, she refers to words in the beatitudes, like hunger, yearn, thirst. And she says that those are a sign of this two way desire, our desire for God, God’s desire for us. And that, of course, love is the default.
That’s the spoiler to the story, Susan, is like, this is the default. It’s always going to be [01:00:00] love and we can’t escape it. Even when we try to, and Greg Boyle again, sorry folks, but gosh, he just has really touched me so much in the talk about God. He says, “No one escapes the notice of God. So we try to find the joy there is in God’s finding us. God intends our happiness. We pull up our antenna to its furthest peak and place ourselves on the lookout for glimpses of joy at its most unleashed. The path is cleared and God’s own tenderness is locating us. We never stop looking until we realize that we have already been found.” Good job. [laughing]
SH: It’s so gorgeous. Greg Boyle has this way of just making things feel accessible to me.
CW: Completely.
SH: Like, bringing the biggest ideas down to size and locating them in my human life. It’s so good. Yeah, when I saw when you put together the notes for this episode, I saw that you wanted to end on God is love and that’s something that I have thought so much about, written a lot about, you know, continue to chew on.
But also the reason that is, is that God being love…that is the part of God that has been the hardest for me actually to really believe, if that’s the right word, and to experience in my life. Like, love, it’s what eventually gave me an access point, because I had this experience where I realized God loved me, right?
But it was the wall. It had been the thing that was blocking me from really getting to God all my life. And so, you know, I continue to think a lot about that, but I just wanna end by reading something that I can’t say it any better than this. This encapsulates for me, kind of why love has been the stumbling block in a relationship to God for me.
CW: Okay.
SH: But kind of where I’ve gotten to with it now. And I wrote this: “As a very young child. One of my first church memories is of being on my grandmother’s lap and hearing her sing God is Love. I had kind of a hard time feeling and believing love. It didn’t seem trustworthy to me as a kid, but this grandmother was one of the foundational pillars in my life. I believed the deeply familiar safety of her off-key voice. I felt the truth of it. One of my first witnesses of truth, because I knew and felt known by her. I’ve often struggled to hear or believe God’s love in my church life.
But that childhood experience came to my mind many decades later as I began to find and understand God’s love for me through my personal life experiences. The memory and the feelings that accompanied it helped me begin to trust that God IS love and that I’d misunderstood the relationship I thought we were supposed to have. Standing at the threshold of old age, I now know what to listen for. If something doesn’t speak love, it doesn’t come from God.”
So that’s really where I am with the whole thing now. I trust my own heart in this relationship. I trust my own seeking, and I trust that I also am continuing to be sought, and that’s huge for me. That’s everything, that’s opened everything up for me.
CW: I mean, what else could you need then to know that you are loved?
SH: Agreed.
CW: That’s amazing. Thank you, Susan, for ending this conversation on such a beautiful personal note. And thank you for showing up to talk about this with me again. We’re probably gonna just keep doing this ‘cause
SH: I mean, I hope so. As long as there’s a podcast, I hope we’re chewing on these ideas and I hope they continue to grow. So, well done us. Thanks Cynthia.
CW: Well done.
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Voicemail 1: Hi. Thanks for all you’re doing to share some really hard things. I just wanted to leave some thoughts about what it was like to grow up in the seventies and eighties as a young woman, and a young parent in the nineties, with career aspirations. So, I wouldn’t have put away my career aspirations and stayed home to raise our kids without the heavy doctrine that was infused into every teaching during that time.
Obedience to it meant that I cared deeply about God’s plan for me and my spouse, my marriage, children, and eternal family, enough to set aside my selfish career desires. At least, that’s how it felt to have career desires at the time. Looking back, I don’t regret my choice, actually.
Frankly, I surprised myself. I thrived as a stay at home mom. Nonetheless, I wish I could have chosen that for myself without the dogma and the prophetic law behind it. Working wouldn’t have [01:05:00] translated into failed motherhood, failed marriage, failed eternal families, but I didn’t really know that. But looking back now, I can see that would’ve been the case.
It feels like the church and the church culture now are whitewashing it as if those teachings were never really a thing. The false narrative effort to erase what an LDS girl and woman’s life was during those years feels like my life at the time, the reasons for my choices, and for my sacrifice, are being erased, as if it was all in my head.
It’s incredibly hurtful.
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Voicemail 2: Hi, Cynthia and Susan. Your podcast has meant so much to me the last five years. I wanted to say thank you and share what started my faith journey. A little background about me. I was born and raised in the church and of the generation of Gordon B. Hinckley and all that entailed for a good Mormon girl.
Despite that, I’ve always been a very nuanced thinker. The world was never black and white to me, but somehow I internalized the mindset that that was a weakness and I must hold myself to a so-called higher standard. I became acquainted with a God who loved me, but it was a transactional relationship in which I never felt like I measured up, and I was often uncertain, unable to act, and played it safe because of fear.
When I became a mom to three children who are all neurospicy, all with early diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and/or anxiety, it didn’t take long for me to experience the ways church can be hard when you don’t fit in the box. For the first time in my life, church became personally painful, but I looked at my children and knew God made no mistakes when they were created and they were loved perfectly, even if they didn’t fit into the church’s expectations.
I saw myself reflected in them. I realized not only had I been handed a God box, it was a neurotypical God box. When I finally met a God full of mercy and grace, that box opened wide up. And then I looked around and became very aware of other marginalized individuals and systems that harm, especially as they relate to women.
Things that I had ignored for years and had compartmentalized couldn’t be ignored anymore. I finally gave myself permission to listen to my own personal authority and inner voice that I had silenced for most of my life. I’m still learning what that voice sounds like, and I am an attending member of the church.
But it’s on my own terms now. There’s still a lot of pain and frustration and a lot of unknown, but that nuanced thinking I used to believe was a weakness, turned out to be a strength that connects me more than ever to a God who I can have hope in. Thank you ladies for all you do. To help women like me find their voice and feel less alone.
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