Episode 247 (Transcript): Let's Get Curious About Curiosity
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Lindsay Riggs for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
CW: And that was really hard to let go of all those things that I knew, air quotes there, but in some ways it was the easiest because all it required of me was curiosity and awe and wonder. Like we’ve all been the four year olds asking the million questions. So in a way we just kind of need to go back to that like Jesus says, like be as a little child.
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 Let’s Get Curious About Curiosity.
CW: Hooray. I’m showing up with you, Susan, for our season finale, and it’s about curiosity. This is a good day.
It’s a great day.
SH: This is a good day. I mean, I’m excited that it’s the season finale. Not gonna lie. We’re ready for a break, Cynthia. It’s been quite a year for us. But also, I’m really excited for this conversation specifically. So thanks for showing up. Ready to do a deep dive.
CW: Well I love that we’re having this conversation for our closing episode.
We’re just barely squeaking it in because on our first episode of the season, right, we said we were gonna do it, so we’re finally doing it. And I didn’t think I had anything new to say on this topic ‘cause it’s kind of my hobby horse. But you made the document and once you did I was like, oh, I actually have a lot more to say.
So apologies right now. Susan, I probably put way too much in the notes, so we better get started.
SH: Are you kidding? You put great stuff in the notes and I don’t even know how many pages of notes we have and I don’t wanna know because it’s too many. But we’re just gonna have a great time going through this topic.
CW:Yes.
SH: So, can’t wait. Let’s get started right away. Okay. Why a conversation about curiosity? I gotta be honest and so our listeners won’t remember. I don’t remember exactly why that came up in our first episode of the season. Like, I don’t remember the context of why. You said we should, maybe we could have a conversation about curiosity.
And I said we’re absolutely having a conversation about that. I don’t remember why or what we were talking about, but as I have reengaged with the idea now in preparation for this conversation, so because we said we would is the first reason why. Right?
CW: Sure.
SH: And it makes sense to me that in a season about change, you know, we need a conversation about curiosity.
Because if your curiosity isn’t aroused by change, then that says something about your orientation to the change. Doesn’t it? Like, if you’re not curious at all about what’s happening or why or what the implications are going to be, then you’re not, you are resistant, I guess is what I would say to the change.
It’s a very resistant stance.
CW: Totally agree.
SH: So if I wanna approach change with a growth mindset, which any of our listeners have been paying attention, they know I’m trying to learn to do, and it’s hard for me, it’s not my natural stance, right? Then that is going to begin with getting curious.
CW: Well, like I already said, I love this topic so much. We wrote about it in our book. I’m gonna talk more about that in a minute. But I feel like for me, curiosity is the drum I will always beat as a nuanced Latter-Day Saint. Like I think we have a famine of curiosity quite often.
SH: Ohh yes. A curiosity drought in our church.
CW: Yeah, I think so. I think so often, and I think we said this on our season opener, like the thinking has been done. And so we just kind of don’t have to think about a lot of those things. And I can say that as someone who, I don’t think I overtly thought that before it all came crashing down for me.
But there was an element of that, like, wow, this is really easy because all the hard work has been done. I don’t have to think much about certain things, so.. I hate admitting that. I hate admitting that.
SH: Yeah. But it rings deeply true to me. As a nuanced LDS person.
CW: Yeah, sadly.
SH: Okay. Reason number two, because it’s a great lead-in to our upcoming conversations in season 11.
Drum roll. Season 11, we’re going to talk about big ideas. Capital B, capital I. That’s where we’re heading next season. Often our ideas for conversations come about because of previous conversations or because of what we’re talking about. Right? Our podcast episodes often build one on the last, and I feel like our seasons have built the same way.
We get about midway through a season and we start saying, you know, where I think all this is going. Next season, let’s talk about, and for both of us, this time, it’s been big ideas. We’re kind of tired of talking about some of the same old stuff, some of the disappointments maybe, and [00:05:00] challenges in our church.
We’ve been talking about them for 10 seasons and we kind of wanna talk about bigger things. Does that sound like a good description of where you are?
CW: I think that’s exactly why you and I, honestly, I think simultaneously, you and I kind of settled on this idea of big ideas for next season. And it was after we had Katherine Knight Sonntag on, and we were, I think, was that it might be we were just blown away.
SH: It might be. Yeah. Yeah.
CW: So that’s actually our, is that our third reason then? ‘cause…
SH: That is maybe our third reason. And then our next reason is because curiosity is where any search for God or actually anything bigger, anything beyond ourselves begins. It has to begin in curiosity.
CW: Yeah. When we talked about mysticism with Katherine, she used that phrase, the imaginal realm. And wow. That kind- I’ve just been thinking about that ever since. And so I think any search for God requires the imaginal realm. It requires a dive into mystery. And on that episode, she said the imaginal realm has been a huge part of generating hope for me and generating a sense of healing and creation.
That she experiences things through emotion and intuition, and that hit me so hard. I haven’t stopped thinking about it because you and I talk a lot on this podcast about hope, about the generation of hope- And about healing. And so when Catherine said that, I said, that’s it. I want to head into episodes talking more about big ideas because I want, I need, I’m gonna say it that way-
I need hope, I need healing, and I’m interested in creation. I’m interested in all those big things that Katherine was talking about.
SH: Can I ask you a follow up question actually on this? I’m just looking at that phrase again, the imaginal realm, which I love that phrase. It feels like an opening to me.
It feels like a portal somehow. Right? It’s like a portal in a two word phrase.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Did you feel like in approaching God in your life as a Latter Day Saint, have you felt like the imaginal realm has been part of your sort of personal search for God as a Latter Day Saint?
Because for me, like I didn’t, I don’t feel like there was any imagination involved. I felt like I was taught from the time I was a young child what and who God is and-
CW: Yes
SH: -is not. And so like there was, my imagination was never summoned to that exercise at all.
CW: Correct. I never felt that way before, but in the last decade and I would even say, I was going to say in the last decade, I’ve gotten a lot more curious about God, but I would actually say for me, it’s probably only been in the last three or four years that I’ve really wanted to go into that imaginal realm, to really just spitball, toss around ideas what God could be like and the, just the mystery of it all is so glorious to talk about.
And I didn’t have that before, but it’s a quest of mine now.
SH: I feel like also, and this is just occurring to me as I’m thinking more about the idea -imaginal realm- I feel like my temple experiences really sort of hampered that for me because the temple feels very locked down for me. And I know as I say that someone like Jodi England, Hansen is probably thinking no-no-no-no.
The temple is expansive on these things. And I know some members do experience it that way, but for me, like I’m hearing a specific voice of God, you know, I’m seeing images on the screen of a specific idea of God. So I feel like that’s the place in my life where those ideas have been most locked down, most confined to a very specific thing. You know, our listeners know that I haven’t attended the temple in some time. That’s something that I decided to not do some years back. You know, I didn’t attend for years after I still had a recommend, you know, but it really isn’t until I stopped attending the temple that I started to feel at liberty to imagine God for myself.
And I’m just realizing that like in this moment, that those two things kind of coincided in my life. Giving myself permission to step outside the box of the temple was part of opening up the God box generally.
CW: Okay. Now I wanna have a whole side conversation about that, but maybe we’ll need another ultimate Big Deal episode where we talk about our ideas of God and how the temple affected that, because I have so much to say, but that’s not in our notes.
So I guess we should move on. But that’s a really cool thing that I would love to talk about with you either over hamburgers or on a microphone.
SH: I mean, it sounds to me like the ultimate big idea also. So maybe we’ll put that in our notes for next season and revisit that. Next reason that I came out with was because [00:10:00] curiosity is a useful tool in our lives and relationships.
It’s how we learn, right? By being open to new ideas and experiences. So that’s really what this whole conversation is going to be about.
CW: Richard Rohr said that the Achilles heel of Protestant mysticism is that it disconnected itself from the imaginal world. Once you do that, you can only go so deep.
Aha. That just goes back to what we were saying about the temple. You know, we could only go so deep, or at least we felt that we could only go so deep. And he goes on to say, you’ll remain on the level of where the conscious mind can be in control- ding ding ding- of the story. And so I feel this deeply as someone who tends towards being logical minded.
I always loved the church because it just made logical sense to live a certain way, but now I can see we’re clinging to the logical side of Mormonism as just like a way of life really stunted me.
SH: My favorite word in this conversation. I mean, I’ve talked about my own growth, spiritual growth, feeling stunted, right?
And that was a hard thing for me to admit out loud, but, so it actually feels really good to me to hear you say that- that this clinging to the logical side. Because I think often in engaging with Mormonism, it really does feel like there’s a logical side. Things are, the church has tried to lay things out very analytically, very plainly.
I feel like we get all the fine print and are asked to assent to it with all of the dots connected for us. And yeah. To me that being locked into that kind of a contract sort of approach to religion really did feel confining to me.
CW: Well, I mean by small and simple things are great things brought to pass.
That’s what I taught and internalized that. It’s the small and simple things. You don’t need to worry about the big things.
SH: Right- don’t worry your pretty head about that. Right. We’ll find out about that in the next life. You’ll understand everything that you don’t understand now. Right?
CW: Sure, yeah.
SH: Yeah. But that didn’t give me permission to imagine very widely.
Curiosity looks outward, I guess, in a way that I haven’t always felt at liberty to do or haven’t felt encouraged to do- I guess as a Latter-day Saint- it looks outward. It shifts our focus from who and where we are and what we know to who and where we are not, and what we do not know.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And I think that as Latter Day Saints we’re locked into this specific plan, right?
We’re part of this plan of happiness, of salvation, of whatever that is very much focused on who and where we are right now, and what we know about that, and what we know about where that path is leading us. That’s kinda what the whole thing is built on, the who and where we are and what we know.
CW: And that’s very comforting.
SH: Sure. I think for a lot of people it really is comforting. I mean, I’m sure it’s comforting to me on some level or has been, it’s limiting.
CW: It was very comforting for me. Yeah. It’s limiting. So you pay a price for the comfort level. Right. It’s a little bit limiting.
SH: Right, right.
CW: Yeah. About eight years ago when I was kind of in the dark pit or just maybe starting to come out of it, I wrote an essay about grieving and I chose to use the metaphor of a growing tree and I talked about all the different rings I was adding as my tree was growing outward.
That essay is now in our book. But I needed to write it down because that essay was all about my tremendous grief that I was going through. And I named all these changes happening to me as I was kind of in that liminal space and I likened it to a tree, adding rings to it. And one ring that I said I added was the ring of curiosity.
‘Cause I really do feel like I had not been very curious, at least about big ideas about God things and my place in this universe, that kind of a thing. And then a few years later I felt like, ooh, I’m in really good company because I read Brian McLaren’s, I don’t remember which book of it, I think it’s Faith After Doubt where he uses the tree ring analogy as well to talk about faith development.
That we’re continually moving outward. We carry the rings with us each time. Right. We don’t get rid of them. We just kind of keep adding more to it. So I love that you said curiosity is looking outward ‘cause that’s exactly how I feel like a tree grows. It just gets bigger and bigger and that was a very useful metaphor for me when I was in that liminal space.
SH: Isn’t it great when you come across something like Brian McLaren using that metaphor that you had already really, you know, [00:15:00] worked through and figured that out for yourself. Doesn’t it feel wonderful uhhuh when that happens to you?
CW: Uhhuh- It did.
SH: I’m on the right path. I love it when that happens. Oh gosh. Okay. Because curiosity fosters empathy and creates spaces of invitation and sharing, I think that makes it a natural for a conversation at At Last She Said It. I saw a really simple internet meme this week that said, “I wonder why”- three words that make space in your heart for empathy.
CW: Nice.
SH: And I think they were talking about like, looking at someone else and thinking, you know, I wonder why they’re reacting this way. I wonder why they’re feeling this way. I wonder what about their experience has brought them to these conclusions. I feel like that’s a really useful tool. I wonder why it’s a really useful tool in the world that we’re living in right now, where it can feel like there’s a pretty big wall between myself and my neighbors. My literal neighbors actually. Living where I do there’s some deep ideological divides. Even within, you know, my ward between me and some of the people in my ward. And so I wonder why is a pretty helpful tool for me.
CW: Do you remember me saying sometime in the last few months in one of our episodes that even when church is as hard as it can be, I still, I can go and try to see the humanity of the people? And that’s exactly-
SH: Yes. It’s one of my favorite things that you said this season.
CW: Well, thank you. But that’s exactly what I mean by seeing their humanity. I say to myself, I wonder why they’re reacting this way. I wonder why that gives them comfort. I wonder why. You know? Why did they believe that?
Why did they vote for him? Why did they put that sign in their yard? Why? I mean, I could go on and on with all the wonders and not just in a they must be crazy. That’s not my conclusion. But in they have good reasons for why they landed where they’ve landed.
SH: Right. They have reasons, just like you have reasons. I mean, I have to assume, anyway. I mean Okay. I’m gonna be honest. Very often my first assumption is just like, you’re crazy.
CW: Well, yes.
SH: And I do not understand you. But yeah. It would serve me well as a disciple to have a more open stance in approaching other people, and that can begin with some curiosity about them.
And their experience.
CW: Ouch. It’s hard.
SH: It’s so hard and we’re having so much opportunity to practice it right now.
CW: So much opportunity.
SH: All the time. Oh, okay. You know, this is gonna be one of my favorite ones because curiosity creates. Curiosity is the engine of creativity. Like whether it’s an artist or a cook.
People make things in pursuit of ideas. Rudyard Kipling’s got this famous vision of heaven in a poem that that he wrote that’s very well known where heaven was a place where creativity existed without any earthly restrictions, like having to make money, right, or having to face criticism for your work, or pursuit of fame, or, you know, physical limitations that keep you from creating.
So creatives in his heaven could work forever just for the joy of creation, and that sounds like heaven to me- it does. That would be a kingdom ruled by like the unlimited posing of a question rather than the single answer to that question. It would be a very different version of heaven than the one that I feel like I was given by my religion. That heaven resides in the single answer to the question.
CW: Love that.
SH: And I want the heaven of unlimited pursuit of questions and then, because curiosity is the opposite of fear, right? I’ve said a million times fear contracts and curiosity expands. I was thinking about this the other day when I read an article in the New York Times. Of course, we’ll link to all of our sources in our show notes if people are curious, but it was about a woman’s journey with cancer and she said the very last line of the article, she said, that’s what I found on the other side of fear.
The knowledge that I can handle it, whatever it is, as long as I’m 1% more curious than afraid. That feels so empowering to me and like such a lesson, like I have a lesson to learn there.
CW: You wrote this one line about fear. I just think it’s funny the bingo cards- put a little bean on fear or jelly bean or whatever.
SH: Exactly. It’s definitely a bingo card word.
CW: I know we seem to work a conversation about fear into all of our episodes. Sorry. Sorry, not sorry listeners, but-
SH: I think we already hit control in this conversation too, so they’ve already got at least two, two beans out.
CW: Yeah. But when I saw that you wanted to talk about curiosity being the opposite of fear,
I thought about there’s this one great line you have in our book that like perfectly defines I think why we choose as Latter Day Saints to contract rather than expand. And I feel like we’ve already talked about that, but the line you say from your essay [00:20:00] In Search of a Larger God is- who wants to seek when they fear that what they find may be unacceptable?
I think we’ve said that over and over on the podcast. Like this is scary stuff. Like if you don’t know what you could find. You could keep digging and searching and your curiosity may take you to a place where you’re like, what you find might be deemed unacceptable by your fellow Mormons in the pews.
SH: Right, right.
CW: And then what do you do?
SH: Definitely when it comes to spiritual seeking, that is the case. And but also seeking in life more generally, I mean, you have to be prepared to be surprised. I think what you’re gonna find when you ask honest questions. When you ask real questions you can’t, you don’t get to control the answers.
Right. And so you have to be prepared to see, to be surprised by what you’re gonna find and maybe not like it. And maybe it calls into question a bunch of other things that you thought were already, you know, settled law in your life. And that’s, man, that’s scary. That’s hard.
CW: Well, and that phrase you just said, be prepared to be surprised.
I feel like you could say that in an expansive way. Like be prepared to be surprised. And it’s also like, be prepared to be surprised.
SH: It’s both ends for sure.
CW: It’s totally both ends. So I think depending on your approach, that can sound like a scary thing or a liberating thing.
SH: I think the scary part of it is what kept me from it for so many years as a Latter Day Saint.
The scary part overruled everything else.
And then eventually the desire and the need sort of overruled the fear for me, and I was forced to walk away from that fear.
There’s a Barbara Brown Taylor quote that I love about getting curious about our own fear and about the experience of sitting with it and sort of leaning into it and seeing what it can teach us.
And of course, it’s from Learning to Walk in the Dark. And she says this- become more curious about your own darkness. What can you learn about your fear of it by staying with it for a moment before turning on the lights? Where can you feel the fear in your body? When have you felt that way before? What are you afraid is going to happen to you?
And what is your mind telling you to do about it? What stories do you tell yourself to keep your fear in place? What helps you stay conscious even when you are afraid? What have you learned in the dark that you could never have learned in the light? And I love that last line because the answer for me feels so obvious.
I feel like I have learned everything in the dark that I had not learned in the light. The dark has felt really instrumental to my journey now.
CW: Oh, yeah. Looking back I say I totally agree. In the moment, of course, it’s completely awful. But it reminds me of that favorite Nadia Bolz-Weber quote that I have on a, I have a sticky right here on my computer.
It says, you know, the things that have transformed me have never been a result of me trying harder. And I feel like that’s what Barbara Brown Taylor is kind of hinting at right there in that quote. And I love the questions that she asks. Like, can you imagine when things were that dark, if you had that list of questions?
Where can you feel the fear in your body? When have you felt this way before? What are you afraid is going to happen? Like just, good stuff.
SH: It’s such a good, like, sort of like step by step analysis of what it might mean to just sit with it.
CW: To just sit with it. Yeah.
SH: And that’s the thing that I feel like a lot of people, once they land in the liminal space, that’s the hardest part is being willing to just stay there with it.
Just like be patient.
CW: Oh, for sure.
SH: Yeah. Get out the Doritos. That’s what Barbara Brown Taylor is telling you to do. Just get out the Doritos- get comfortable there.
CW: Get comfortable. Fluff your pillow.
SH: Exactly. Okay, let’s zoom out really fast and we’re gonna go really fast through this part and look quickly at curiosity as a concept. So like all the different kinds of curiosity and how we can categorize that based on the motivation behind it. So I didn’t know all of these names before I started getting ready for this episode, but the first is diverse, right?
Diverse curiosity is unfocused curiosity that comes from a desire for novelty and variety. So think you’re social media scrolling, right? You’re just kind of endlessly curious about what people- Yes, unfocused definitely. And also just kind of, you know, looking for a diversion. And then there’s epistemic curiosity, which is focused with a specific desire to acquire new knowledge and gain understanding.
So you’re going after a specific piece of knowledge. Right. And that can be broken down into a couple of different things. There’s interest curiosity, which is exploring for the sake of learning. You start college and you don’t know exactly what you wanna learn next, but you’re interested in finding that out.
And you go about it by taking a lot of classes. Right. You’re exploring for the sake of learning. And then there’s deprivation curiosity, which is the need to fill a specific knowledge gap that you [00:25:00] have or resolve. Find the answer to a specific question
CW: That makes sense.
SH: And then there’s perceptual curiosity, and that is something that’s triggered by some sensory input, like when you need to, like when you hear a noise in the middle of the night and you need to find out what made the noise.
And then there is joyous exploration curiosity, which is like a high energy desire to learn and experience new things. Oh my gosh. I have a friend who I would describe as- if there were an Enneagram of curiosity, she’s this right here, she’s the joyous exploration one. It just describes her personality.
And I think some people really are driven by a desire to always be having novel experiences and learning new things. It’s not me by the way. And then there’s social curiosity that is interest in other people’s behaviors and thoughts and feelings. And you can get that a couple of different ways.
One is overt, which is an interest in understanding people directly. You ask them questions, you know, that’s my mother actually. Anyone she sits down with, it’s, you know, tell me about you. She just wants to know about people. Yeah. And then there’s covert and that’s more like me. That’s a noticer, right?
That’s gathering what you know about people indirectly or surreptitiously. I’m sure you’ve heard me say before that most everything I know about life and the world I heard through my bedroom wall. I mean, that’s me. I feel like I have, I’m the person with the glass up on the, you know, wall of the world and taking in information that way.
So there are a couple of different ways that people exercise that social curiosity. And then the last one is thrill seeking. And that’s a desire for intense and complex experiences, which is kind of driven by embracing anxiety. So like, maybe people who can’t stop going on rollercoasters, it could be that that’s a way of combating their fear of rollercoasters. If you know what I mean. So it’s a way to sort of kick fear in the face and go thrill seeking.
CW: That’s- Oh, I know people like that and that ain’t me.
SH: Uhhuh. No, it’s not me either. Although, I mean, I do have ways that I kick fear in the face.
Right. But it’s not, it’s not climbing mountains or whatever. So, but yeah-
CW: It’s not, I wouldn’t describe it as thrilling. Like that’s not the type of curiosity I have.
SH: Right, exactly. Same. But so I tell you all of those things to sort of set up the premise that curiosity is about finding out something.
So it’s what drives scientists is what drives four year olds who ask you endless questions. It’s what drives students and seekers of knowledge of all kinds. And when I thought about it that way, I thought, If I wanna get this down to about one sentence, the best one I can think of is James 1:5, and I’m sure you could quote it with me.
If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. This is the curiosity scripture, and I don’t think it’s a really big leap to conclude that God delights in our curiosity. Like that makes sense to me based on that scripture. But also based on, I guess the God I want to believe in would delight in those kinds of pursuits.
And in fact, I’m gonna call James 1:5 the curiosity doctrine. I’m gonna go that far. As Latter Day Saints I feel like we’re taught this approach as the God sanctioned way to find truth from the time that we’re, you know, at very youngest primary children. I don’t know when I first encountered that scripture, but I would’ve been very young when that story first got told to me, but so do we believe our own stuff about that?
CW: Maybe that’s what we should have called this episode then.
SH: I mean ‘cause I don’t think we do.
CW: No, we don’t. I mean, have you ever had a lesson in church called like, let’s be curious or let’s talk about curiosity or this very episode?
No. I That’s what I’m saying. It’s, yeah. Okay.
SH: Don’t ask questions is more like the most of the lessons that I’ve felt at church. Ouch. I shouldn’t have said that out loud. That’s not very thoughtful, Cynthia, but it feels true to me.
CW: Oh goodness. Okay. But I absolutely want us to see James 1:5 as our curiosity doctrine, because I don’t think that’s-I think that’s fair to say that, but like I just said, we’ve never had lessons on it.
SH: Right.
CW: If we had a lesson on it, I think we would call it Joseph Smith’s curiosity doctrine. I think we think that scripture was for him. And now, 200 years later, we can have a conviction about his answer. I mean, I think it was on our one, it was on an episode earlier this season. I quoted Kelly Corrigan who said that we have a conviction addiction. And I would say that we definitely have a conviction addiction when it comes to what we say we know what Joseph Smith saw, so I don’t know. I want to believe that James 1:5 is for all of us. Maybe it is, but I think our leaders would say there are limits- that there are limits in guardrails.
SH: [00:30:00] Yeah I think that’s, I think that’s fair. And I’m now going to say back to them that I think conviction is the opposite of curiosity as I look at that word written on my screen here. I mean, I know fear is the opposite of curiosity. We can say a lot of things are the opposite of curiosity, but I think conviction really probably is.
CW: Nailed it.
SH: I mean, that’s what confirmation bias is, right? That’s the whole thing. So, yeah. Conviction, addiction might be the problem.
CW: And I’ve also said like when people say in testimonies, I know, what they’re really saying is, I am thoroughly convinced, meaning I have a conviction that this is true because nobody really knows. That’s not the job of religion. Religion is the faith business. But as we know, we’ve dialed that up to 11 to where it’s like, no, I do know. Faith, go take a seat. I am convicted about this.
SH: I am convicted about this. And I think that people could stand up and say, I no longer have any curiosity about this thing because I already know it so I don’t have to engage with it anymore.
Interesting. In an On Being episode that’s on my short list of favorites titled All Reality is Interaction. And part of why I love it is the title, all Reality is Interaction. Physicist Carlo Rovelli says this. The fascination of science is not what we have learned. It is the process of learning.
It’s the discovery. It’s the wonder of what we learn. Wow. Then the wonder creates more curiosity and we realize that there is so much we have not learned yet. The beauty of the scientific enterprise is that we are in touch with the unknown. We try to make steps into it.
CW: I have so much, I have a lot I wanna say about that, about the scientific enterprise.
But I’m gonna put that on hold for a few minutes here. Keep going.
SH: I mean I know we’re not talking about science today, but I think the same principle applies in a spiritual life. And the title of that On Being episode that I love really catches my attention in a spiritual context because I believe at the heart of a spiritual life lies relationship as I’ve said a million times.
You know, our listeners can probably just like finish my sentences for me now. I’m so sorry listeners. But anyway, I’m pretty predictable- at the heart of the spiritual life lies relationship. And so like mysticism is interaction with something larger, right? It’s relationship with the great whole, it’s where you touch that relationship and experience the interaction.
And so the fascination of a spiritual life is not what we have learned. It is the process, it’s the discovery. It’s trying to make steps into the unknown of our own lives. I’ve just finished reading Mirabai Starr’s book, Ordinary Mysticism, which I love. Oh, and I know that you loved it also, but the thing I loved so much about it is the mysticism that she’s writing about is really like just heightened interaction with the reality of our life.
CW: That’s why I loved it.
SH: Yeah. It’s so good. And as I thought about it, I thought, okay, why does this feel so true and so familiar? That’s probably why it feels so true to me, is because it feels so familiar. But I think that’s also what Jesus was trying to call our attention to actually, like, who are the people around us?
How does the natural world operate? Right. Like, who’s who’s feeding the natural world, right? Like, where do we see God reflected in these things and how is love manifested? How do we see that happening, and how do the dots in our lives connect to each other, and how do they connect us to everyone and everything else?
It’s like it requires this ongoing, heightened curiosity to live into the answers to these kinds of big questions. And I think that’s why Jesus asks a hundred times more questions than he answers, because he’s modeling that kind of existential curiosity for us. I mean, I think it’s a big part of what Jesus is doing in the scriptures.
CW: Earlier you talked about four year olds, right? That’s how four-year-olds learn. Right? But I mean, Jesus says that we need to become as a little child. So I’m thinking that means you need to be curious. Be curious. Like you were just saying about your natural world that’s around you, the humans that inhabit it, the animals where you see God reflected in it, all of it.
Thank you for connecting those dots for me. I never really thought about that ‘cause I have a lot of feelings about that scripture, you know, become as a little child, but I hadn’t thought of it in that way until you just put that all together. Okay, so I do, I know you said this isn’t a science episode, but I actually think there is a lot that science can teach us about religion and in Brian McLaren’s book, the Great Spiritual Migration, How the World’s Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian.
That’s why I picked up the book, that title alone-
SH: Oh, I haven’t read it yet. Now I want to.
CW: it’s pretty good. He has an entire chapter talking about science and religion and specifically how religion can [00:35:00] actually learn a lot from the scientific method. I mean, we all know from eighth grade science class what the scientific method is, and he says in the book, science’s primary loyalty is not to the facts it currently proclaims, rather it pledges its deepest loyalty to a method or practice. The scientific method of experiment, observation and measurement claims priority over any statement today considered to be a fact. So. That meant a lot to me because I thought, okay, so for people of faith, where’s our loyalty?
Is it to the method? You recently said, Susan, you’re more interested in the why of things. So is it, is our loyalty to the method which requires like a tremendous amount of curiosity? Or is it to our long held beliefs, what we might call our doctrine?
SH: I mean, I’m gonna leave that as a rhetorical question because the answer is so obvious.
But also as you read this, I’m thinking about even just the ways that this is failing in the world generally. Not just in religion, but like part of what we’ve seen, it seems to me that, and this kind of cuts along political lines, I think, but part of the problem that we’re seeing right now, it is that people have this distrust of science because the facts keep changing and people don’t understand that science is in the business of changing facts.
Changing what we know about things. That’s why they keep asking the question, because the answer is expected to change. Hopefully we know more tomorrow than we knew today. Hopefully it continues to be revealed. But shouldn’t it be the same way in a living church?
CW: Yeah.
SH: Shouldn’t we expect to always be knowing and learning more?
Which requires asking. It requires the curiosity doctrine. To me, that should be the engine that runs our church, is the curiosity doctrine.
CW: Once again, I don’t know. Are we gonna have that lesson anytime? Maybe that’ll come up in gospel doctrine next year. You know, the curiosity doctrine or something. I don’t know.
I would love to have that conversation-
SH: Don’t hold your breath.
CW: - with our fellow saints. I know. I’ll have to just have it with you. ‘cause I don’t think it’s gonna happen at church, but I want to read it. It’s kind of long, like two paragraphs from Brian McLaren ‘cause it just solidified for me why we have such a problem with curiosity, and anyway, he says this. That’s why I say it’s high time for religious communities to learn a lesson from science. Could we adopt a willingness to question even long held beliefs when new evidence arises? Could we allow our beliefs to be open to testing and improvement? Could we say that our religious communities are held together not by forever subscribing to the same beliefs, but by forever upholding the same passion to learn?
Even if new learning requires regularly admitting we were previously wrong, it would be dangerous for a Christian leader to say this because even admitting the possibility that our beliefs might be wrong could set the heresy watchdogs growling and howling. But it would also be dangerous not to say this because presuming to be error free would send most thoughtful people looking for the door.
SH: Wow. That’s like the whole thing that is going on right now in religion. Laid out.
CW: It is. Yeah. And it’s really interesting because, and you and I were texting about this about Oaks, how, like a year ago he had a talk where he used the phrase temporary commandments.
And so part of me wonders if rather than admitting error, which is what Brian McLaren is talking about, that we now have leaders saying, I mean, instead of they say doctrine never changes.
Right? So now they’re kind of having a subcategory under that that says, but sometimes we have temporary commandments. I don’t know, maybe they’re not connected at all, but they feel- That feels a little bit connected to me that what Brian McLaren is warning us about is what I see happening in real time-
SH: Yes, totally agree.
CW: -in our church
SH: It’s what you see in any church that never disavows anything that they’ve done or said before.
CW: Well, and because we just had the D&C 132 lesson, like there’ve been like Faith Matters has done some great podcasts about it. Like we rereleased a podcast that, a conversation we had about polygamy, like it’s kind of everywhere right now.
Substack essays, it’s all over. And I think isn’t that interesting because we refuse to disavow something that evidence now shows is harmful, which is what the scientific method is- is retesting and retesting because we know more about human relationships and sociology now we should be able to say- Dang it, that was a mistake.
SH: I feel like they just muddy the water by, [00:40:00] like redefining terms, by calling things temporary commandments, right? It’s sort of like we update doctrine without ever explaining that the doctrine needed to be updated. Like we don’t ever touch that reason for why the scientists at the head of this church might need to continue to refine things.
Liminal space is prime real estate for exercising curiosity. You know, totally when the wheels come off, then curiosity can offer us a way forward.
Even sitting with nothing. Even sitting with nothing and being willing to do it if you’re maintaining an open stance is curiosity.
It doesn’t require much of you. It just requires you to sit there and be willing to admit that you maybe don’t know for a minute before you turn the lights on in that dark, sit in the dark for a minute.
I think it’s exactly what Barbara Brown Taylor was getting at.
CW: I like that idea of an open stance. Like I’ve been trying to get better at meditating and so I try to keep my palms facing upward, open, just kind of as an openness to what could be out there. So,I don’t know. Yeah. I’m not good at it yet, but I’m trying. So anyway.
SH: That’s funny, I was just practicing that in the shower this morning. That’s really funny and weird because I was just thinking when I was in the shower, I was thinking, why do people hold that position? When they’re meditating. And I thought, and as I did it, then I thought, oh, okay. I can see how this sort of shifts the energy, right? Of what you’re doing. It’s like a physical manifestation of your intention.
CW: Yeah, I think so.
SH: I’ll report back. Okay. Well, I’m pretty dense. It takes me a long time to come to these things.
CW: Same, same, same. This is why we’re friends. Susan.
SH: I’m afraid, Cynthia. Oh gosh.
CW: But I’m really glad that you brought up liminal space because for me, hanging in that liminal space and Parker Palmer calls it the tragic gap. You and I have called it the hallway. All the metaphors we have for it, for me that really was the birthplace of curiosity. Like the goal becomes not to weed out the doubt or the questions
SH: Right
CW: But to just kind of find and pursue what is meaningful and transformative, I think.
SH: Right. It’s not about knowing whatever you do not know, but it’s about living anyway. And there comes my anyway tattoo again. Right. Anyway speaks to this idea of like going on proceeding anyway despite, you know, whatever it is that you don’t have or don’t know. It reminds me of one of my all time favorite Rachel Naomi Remen quotes.
She’s one of my most quotable quotes person. But she says, I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions and those questions have helped me to live better than any answers I might find. So embracing uncertainty, that’s really about what this whole thing is about. Curiosity acknowledges that our human knowledge is inherently incomplete.
And humility is like the natural precursor to learning. You have to be willing to open your mind to let something new come in, right?
It’s the old, you know, is your tea cup full? Or we talked about life bumping the table, right? So that some of what you have spills.
Yep. I feel like our leaders are sometimes quick to acknowledge their lack of knowledge, though. Like, president Oaks talking about Heavenly Mother, but then they tend to emphasize what we do know, rather than emphasizing the value of seeking more about the thing we don’t know. Because what he doesn’t say in that clip is we need to find out more about that.
CW: Right. We don’to know and?
SH: We need to start asking about that. And it’s the and right? And this has created a church that’s about what to know rather than about how to know, which I’ve talked about other times in this season.
CW: It’s like what I talked about above with science, like what to know is what I think LDS people would call doctrine, whereas like how to know is method and faith. And I think it was our, when we were on Faith Matters, I’m pretty sure -I’m pretty sure it was Tim. I’m pretty sure it was Tim Chavez when he said something about, you know, when we talk about faith, he said very often in our church we’re emphasizing beliefs.
And we were like, yes-yes yes yes. And so I feel like that’s what we give priority to is we are a church like so many other churches that focus on correct beliefs. And how do you enforce that? Like how do you enforce what goes on between someone’s ears in their brain? Like that’s always just perplexed me so much and yet we do.
SH: Oh, we do. We [00:45:00] definitely do because think about like a temple recommended interview where you’re asking questions with yes or no answers, right? That’s very much a policing of belief. Now, I’m sure there’s so much more nuance in the answers going on between the people’s ears than that yes or no would reflect, but again, to me it’s looking for the lowest bar, like the lowest level of meaning or engagement to reduce that to a yes or no.
And yet the church is satisfied with that. I mean, at least on the surface, maybe they expect you to be deep diving with those questions between your ears, even though you’re not saying those things out loud in the interview. I don’t know. But it’s sort of a disappointing process to me because anything with a yes or no answer is not really showing your work on deep reflection and you know, looking and reexamining your life, I guess, in whole and in full, it’s pretty hard to reduce that to a yes or no. You know, engaging with questions, whether they’re our own or with others, like forces us to reexamine our faith and our practices and leads to a deeper understanding of what we believe and why.
And it was, you know, in speaking of the Faith Matters interview Tim had asked me a question because I said something about, I knew things, but was it my truth or something like that. And Tim said oh, okay. Here’s where people are gonna push back. You know? There’s only one truth. There’s not your truth and my truth.
And really, like what I was talking about is how did I come to the knowledge I have? And is it really my knowledge? And to me those are much better questions than the yes or no of belief that I might give in a temple recommend interview. Like, how do you know I can? Right.
CW: I can, yeah- and I can tell that this is something that you have been thinking about quite a bit because you even wrote about it in our substack. And I don’t know if this article you wrote was before that interview with Faith Matters or after, but I can tell you’ve been thinking about it a lot because you wrote this, I realized something, faith wasn’t a tidy thing to carry in my pocket like an ID card.
It wasn’t membership in a club or assenting to someone else’s rules and principles. Faith didn’t really have much to do with what I knew or didn’t know, but was instead about how to know. So again, there’s the process, there’s the scientific method. This is how you know, not what you know. It’s really good, Susan, that was really good.
SH: Well thank you. This is one of those places where I happened to stumble onto something that now seems to be right. And so it’s another tree ring for me, Cynthia.
CW: Yeah it feels right to me.
SH: It feels right. I was thinking about a few years ago, President Nelson, I’m sure people will remember this -he instructed members to quote- stop increasing your doubts by rehearsing them with other doubters.
CW: Oh, yes.
SH: Yes. And in that he, I feel like he’s cautioning that by expressing our doubts out loud and listening to the doubts of other people, then we’re reinforcing them. Right. And this is exactly the approach that I feel like led to my own spiritual stunting or bad spiritual pruning like I was talking about a few weeks ago, like the answers and the questions were scripted for me, right? And so this approach created this curiosity vacuum, which I think is completely counter to how natural spiritual growth occurs. I think natural spiritual growth occurs in the how that we were talking about not the what. The way President Nelson is framing it asks us to consider even our own lived experience as being an unreliable teacher.
CW: Oof.
SH: Right? So the how, you know, isn’t really important, like that is kind of dismissed when your own experience is not allowed to teach you, right? And so I wanna contrast that with a few of a few other ideas. And the first is this line that I have loved for decades from novelist Zora Neale Hurston.
And she wrote, there are years that ask questions and years that answer.
This is so true to me. My own life poses the questions and my own life also answers them. This is what life has been in my experience. And I think that’s the very essence of what I’m here for. I’m here to have experiences and to learn from them.
Like the ideal is to- I’m gonna say- as Roka describes that quote, live my way to the answers. I’m sure that you’ve heard that quote a thousand times. He wrote, do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. I just feel like that is a description of how we know things. It’s a description of method. I came across an Elizabeth Gilbert quote when [00:50:00] I was preparing the notes for this episode.
And I’ve listened to the actual interview that it came from multiple times and I’d recommend it to everyone. It’s an On Being episode with Elizabeth Gilbert titled, Choosing Curiosity Over Fear. No wonder I love it. Right?
CW: It’s so good. It’s so good.
SH: It’s so good. But she says, I think curiosity is our friend that teaches us how to become ourselves. Again it’s that living into the answers, and it’s a very gentle friend and a very forgiving friend, and a very constant one. So, in other words, you know, I feel like these great thinkers are, reminding us that our lives move line upon line. And I don’t know that President Nelson would’ve disagreed with that, but the way that he framed it felt very limiting to me, that was not an open-handed framing, you know?
CW: Well, and as you were talking about that quote by Nelson you heard me wince. Sorry about that.
SH: That’s okay, it’s wince-y to me too.
CW: But it’s, well, it’s because I kind of wince against anything now that tells me not to talk about something like that, I mean, can I quote my friend Susan Hinkley? Make me.
SH: Right, right. Well, and don’t you have a podcast titled At Last She Said It like, the whole point of this enterprise is to be able to talk about things.
CW: Right. So I feel like anytime someone, a religious leader of all people tells us, you know, don’t talk about your doubts with other doubters, like that is the double down.
It’s not working. And they know it’s not working- either they don’t know what else to say, so they just double down, or they do know what they’re doing. And that’s the part that makes me wince is I don’t want to think that they’re purposefully doubling down anyway. I don’t, I can’t get into their minds.
I don’t know why they say the things they say, but it reminded me again, I’m gonna quote Brian McLaren where he says, today, both the Catholic and Protestant methods, and I’m gonna add in the Mormons- face, a real problem claims to infallibility and an errancy in today’s world are liability not an asset.
The more you double down on infallibility or inerrancy, the smaller the corner you paint yourself into. If you want to earn people’s distrust today, there are few things more guaranteed to work than to claim- What I’m about to tell you is absolutely true because an errant authority says so.
SH: Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s really true.
But I do have a follow-up question and that is, do you think it works for some people?
CW: I do, I do think it works for some people.
SH: Right. To not engage their questions. Does that work for some people?
CW: No, I’m gonna say if a person already has doubts and questions, then doubling down. I think it can make you unwell.
SH: Well, I think it can make you unwell too, but I do, I could be totally wrong ‘cause I can’t get inside anyone else’s head or heart, but I do feel like there are likely to be Latter Day Saints who live their whole lives just refusing to engage with the questions that arise for them. They just push them down or set them aside or say, those aren’t important.
I’m not going to think about them, and I’m certainly not gonna read anything about them or discuss them with other people.
CW: Yeah. I guess I’m only speaking for myself. Like, trust me, Susan, if I could have shoved down the questions Oh, I would have,
SH: Yeah.
CW: I really would have. So, you’re right.
I can’t get into anyone else’s mind, so I don’t know. I’m sure for some people they do have the questions and they, and the double down does work. But in a church that is supposed to lead well, that does, and that has millions- like we need to be able to reach everybody. And when we hear words like that about not talking about your doubts with other doubters, I just think, oh my gosh, you are putting gasoline on the fire that is already burning.
And that’s why I winced, because you and I spend so much time in this community where we see the burning down of it all because our leaders refuse to engage with the questions.
SH: And I think that here’s where lived experience comes back in, because I think there are a lot of members who will pretty happily stay in that space until their life comes in and drives a truck over everything that they thought they knew, right?
And so then they’re forced to engage. I think very often we have to be- something has to move us to the space where we’re forced to engage. And so where an idea like the one we’re talking about from President Nelson gets really harmful to me, is that then that’s an indictment of your faith.
This is how you come to feel like there’s something wrong with you. Because you can’t continue to shove those questions down, right? It becomes about something you are doing wrong. If you had more faith, if you read your scriptures, if you went to the temple you know, if you were doing all the things, then you wouldn’t be in this place where you had to engage with some [00:55:00] of your questions.
And I feel like I could be totally wrong ‘cause I’m not a young person, but I feel like young people are more easily moved to a space of engaging with their questions than someone- say a woman in her eighties now who has invested a lifetime in the answers that she had been given. And it’s really just easier to not open that Pandora’s box.
CW: I would agree with that for sure.
SH: I’m still, if there are any 85-year-old women listening to us, I’m still going to counsel you to indulge your curiosity. I’m just saying -it’s so, it’s such a- It came as such a breath of fresh air into my personal spiritual life. To be able to look at questions straight on and indulge them and pursue them. It’s like totally reinvented to me what it means to be spiritually alive. I mean, that may sound kind of hyperbolic, but really that’s what it feels like to me. I wasn’t alive until now in very many ways.
CW: Beautiful. I think you and I were really surprised when we started this At Last She Said It project just how many people would come to us in faith crisis. And so I love having these kinds of episodes where like, can we find God in our uncertainty in those liminal spaces when the burning down of it all has happened, how do we find God? And in some ways I feel like speaking personally, like it was the most difficult thing I ever had to do and it ended up being the easiest thing ever.
Difficult because it required letting go. It required me to, I mean, literally open my hands, have my palms face up saying something, put something in my hand. And that was really hard to let go of all those things that I knew, air quotes there. But in some ways it was the easiest because all it required of me was curiosity and awe and wonder.
Like we’ve all been the four year olds asking the million questions. So in a way, we just kind of need to go back to that like Jesus says, like be as a little child, and I just finished reading Cole Arthur Riley’s book, This Here Flesh: Spirituality Liberation and the Stories that Make Us, my gosh, she’s a gorgeous writer, and this is what she said about curiosity and awe and wonder and why it resonated with me- why this feels easy to me is she writes: to encounter the holy in the ordinary is to find God in the liminal, in spaces where we might subconsciously exclude it, including the sensory moments that are often illegibly spiritual. And then she says, wonder is a force of liberation. It makes sense of what our souls inherently know we were meant for.
Every mundane glimpse is salve on a wound, instructions for how to set the bone right again, if you really want to get free, find God on the subway, find God in the soap bubble.
And that’s why I say for me, this has been the easiest thing is because when I switched to okay, I’m a spiritual person because I know all these things about God in his true church, and I switched to, I can find God under a tree, or like Cole Arthur Riley says, to find God in a soap bubble or on the subway-
That’s why I said in a recent episode like this type of spirituality never fails me because I never cease to be amazed at my surroundings. I hope that’s what people find when they’re in these liminal spaces at least, is the awe and the wonder in trees, soap bubbles, your grandmother’s pie, all those things.
SH: I think it feels, I think when you’re in that space, it feels pretty hopeless that the answer could be in things so small or in something as imperceptible as a shift in your stance. Right. As turning your palms upward. Like could it be that easy? Because I think particularly because we come from religious tradition where it never was easy, right?
There’s sort of this endless list of requirements and we had been on the hamster wheel. So the idea of it being as easy as just turning your hand upward speaking metaphorically, of course, that sounds, that’s hard to trust. That’s asking you to trust big things like grace. You know, I mean, that’s a, it’s a whole shift in your orientation toward your faith.
And I think that it feels like a big ask, but once you do it, once you manage the trick of doing it, then it’s like. It’s like this easy flood of things.
CW: That’s why exactly, that’s why I said it was both the hardest thing I ever did and the easiest.
SH: Yeah. It makes me think of a piece I just read by Barbara Brown Taylor, like last week on her substack called Lord, Increase My Bewilderment.
But she was talking about this prayer from Sufism that is, Lord, increase my bewilderment. [01:00:00] And she said about it- What a petition, what a verb. To ask for more bewilderment, not less from a higher power. Who must hear billions of prayers for more certainty, more conviction, more proof, more faith. I wrote the prayer down, meaning Lord, increase my bewilderment.
I wrote the prayer down, then realized that wasn’t necessary. It was only four words long with such good news in it that I memorized it before the ink dried. My increasing bewilderment wasn’t a problem after all, it was an answer to prayer.
CW: That’s what I mean.
SH: Yeah. So good.
You know, as I think about this in this conversation, Cynthia, I really like the idea of approaching curiosity as a muscle, right? Just like we’ve talked about hope as a muscle. This idea that weak things can become strong. I always go to the metaphor of wood glue. Because when you use wood glue on a piece of wood, where you make that join with the wood glue where the wood was broken, it actually becomes stronger than the wood originally was.
Right? And so I like to think of that with myself when I exercise some things. If I think about my lack of curiosity, applying some wood glue to that actually that can become a weak thing that is stronger for me than it ever naturally would’ve been. And I feel like that’s happened for me in my life with curiosity.
Like the thing I didn’t feel at liberty to have in my religious life has become my religious superpower, really. And that’s because of that wood glue. But anyway, keeping my faith behind the velvet rope like I did. And like I think you and I have talked about before, that it was this place that I wasn’t allowed to bring my mess to, right?
It’s like my, it’s like keeping my faith in a curio cabinet, you know? My grandmother had a cabinet with the lights and she had her special things in there. Yeah. My faith used to live there in my own life, and it just doesn’t anymore because I’ve finally allowed my curiosity to have the full run of my faith and of my life experiences.
Nothing is sacred, right? It can go anywhere, it can touch anything. It can draw on anything that I have. And while that was terrifying to make the initial shift I can see how it’s actually like my faith is so much stronger. I’m using air quotes there because I feel like faith is a loaded word in our church in some ways. Like people take it to mean belief for all kinds of things, but I’m saying -right- according to my own definition of faith and what it feels like and how it operates, for me, it’s so much stronger than it ever was before I allowed it to be touched.
CW: I love that we’re taking your favorite metaphor of hope as a muscle and now applying it to curiosity. And I just wanted to read one more quote by Cole Arthur Riley. She says, I think awe is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually.
Awe is not a lens through which to see the world, but our soul path to seeing.
Any other lens is not a lens, but a veil. Oof. And I’ve come to believe that our beholding, seeing the veils of this world peeled back again and again, if only for a moment, is no small form of salvation. That is it, Susan, when you’re talking about your definition of faith, now taking away those velvet ropes, taking away the veils and beholding is a form of salvation.
SH: It takes me right back to that Carlo Rovelli interview where he is talking about interaction, about relationship. She says, awe is not a lens through which to see the world, but our sole path to seeing, it’s a way to enter into relationship and interaction with the world, right? That’s what awe opens the portal too. That’s what curiosity opens for us. Incredible. These ideas feel so sweet to me. They feel so good. They taste so delicious. I only want, it only makes me wanna go deeper. Okay. We’re gonna each offer up a curiosity quote here at the end as a conclusion and hopefully something in our conversation today has either provided that little note of validation for someone that they think, yes, I’m on the right path, or at least maybe given them the curiosity to step onto this path.
If they haven’t really known how to access it until now, I would urge people to turn your palms up and just see what happens. My quote comes from Albert Einstein and he says, the important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe. When one contemplates the mysteries of eternity [01:05:00] of life, of the marvelous structure of reality, it is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day. You just have to touch it once a day. Reach out for it once a day. It makes it sound doable to me.
CW: I think so. My closing quote- sorry again, is Cole Arthur Riley. She says, my faith is held together by wonder, by every defiant commitment to presence and paying attention.
And that has meant so much to me as I have just tried so hard to be present and to just pay attention to the natural world around me that has felt like faith to me. So we’re not alone in that.
SH: Amen.
CW: Thank you, Susan.
SH: Thank you, Cynthia. See you next season.
CW: Yay. See you in a couple months everyone.
Voicemail 1: Hello, Cynthia and Susan. I am very late to this season, but I am listening to episode 222- Bonus Mailbag. I just heard Susan tell the story about going into the temple to witness siblings being sealed. And I wanted to add a further perspective on this because my parents adopted three children through foster care when I was 21 years old.
And as a 21-year-old, I was not married. I was not endowed because I hadn’t served a mission and so I was not allowed to go to their sealing. I was told that since I was over 18, even with a limited use recommend, that recommend was not good to go see my sibling sealed, even though it says literally printed on the piece of paper that I was there to witness the sealing of siblings.
My 14-year-old sister was able to go and see those children being sealed to our family. My brother and his wife were able to go. I was the only one excluded. Because I was not endowed at the age of 21, and yet I had always been taught that I could not be endowed at the age of 21 unless I served a mission or got married.
And so I have spent the last way too many years struggling with this and having to explain to these children who are special needs, why I wasn’t there, that I’m actually part of their family. That I felt like I was being punished for not serving a mission and for not getting married before I was 21.
Voicemail 2: Yes. I just finished listening to the episode about resurrection, I think it was 263, that we don’t believe our own stuff. And I was reminded of a statement that my sister had told me a long time ago about the resurrection. She pointed out that it is, resurrection is more important than we realize, and that each day when we go to sleep and each morning when we wake up is a symbol of the resurrection.
So when you were talking about daily deaths and daily renewals, it reminded me of her saying that and how every single day as I go to sleep, I put that day away and each morning is new. And it just solidified that idea that you were talking about, that we need to let things go and start fresh. And I just love the idea.
I, you know, as we go throughout our day, we are slowly falling asleep. We’re getting more and more tired, and the day drags on and it’s harder and harder that our bodies just need to go to sleep because it’s so hard and that the morning we have just that rejuvenation and being able to start each day new is just a great reminder that we have been given that gift of resurrection.
And like you said, it’s not just at death, but it’s a daily activity.
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