Episode 254: Big Ideas | Piety

Does piety serve anything besides the ego? Is our piety an asset or a liability? And what are we—individually and collectively—getting from it? In Episode 254, Susan and Cynthia consider these questions and more in a conversation examining the piety that is a cultural hallmark of our church. For Latter-day Saints and other Christians, is a focus on outward appearances or superficial “churchiness” sometimes a stand-in for real inner transformation?

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Notes & Quotes:

The MAP: Archetypes of the Major Arcana, by Dr. Aisling O’Donnell
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr
No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear, by Kate Bowler
Randy Woodley’s “Being Human” Facebook post
Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, by Francis Spufford
The Power of Ideas: Words of Faith and Wisdom, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, by Diana Butler Bass
Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings, by Joanna Brooks, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Hannah Wheelwright
TADROSS: Women, Why Are We Hurting Each Other?, by Veronica Tadross, The Vanderbilt Hustler, 9/21/2022
But I Say to You, by Debie Thomas, Journey With Jesus, 2/9/2020
Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil, Gustave Thibon (Editor), Emma Crawford (Translator), Mario von der Ruhr (Translator)
Beware of Spiritual Bypass, by Ingrid Clayton PhD, Psychology Today, 10/2/2011
Mission and the Cultural Other: A Closer Look, by Randy Woodley

“Being pious is not the same as being true.” —Dr. Aisling O'Donnell

“You cannot avoid sin or mistakes anyway (see Romans 5:12), but if you try too fervently, it often creates even worse problems. Jesus loves to tell stories like those of the tax collector and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9–14) and the famous one about the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), in which one character does life totally right and is, in fact, wrong, while the other, who does it totally wrong, ends up God’s beloved! Now deal with that!” —Richard Rohr

“For some reason, religious people tend to confuse the means with the actual goal. In the beginning, you tend to think that God really cares about your exact posture, the exact day of the week for public prayer, the authorship and wordings of your prayers, and other such things. Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer. Your conscious and loving existence gives glory to God.” —Richard Rohr

“I just saw so many people climbing the ladder of perfection, each defined differently, each person what perfection was, and of course, always failing at it, and then thinking there was something wrong with them, which I would call the way of ascent, climbing, to be more moral, more virtuous, more heroic. Those are desires of the ego. They're not desires of the soul. The soul knows that it has learned best in darkness, not in light.” —Richard Rohr

"People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall". —Thomas Merton

“We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.” —Richard Rohr

“By denying their pain and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual depths—and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights.” —Richard Rohr

“People like to be Godlike. I want to be humanlike, because that's who God made me to be, is a human.” —Randy Woodley

“Being human is the most natural and spiritual way we can be.” —Randy Woodley

“If Christianity is anything, it’s a refusal to see human behavior as ruled by the balance sheet. We’re not supposed to see the things we do as adding up into piles of good and evil we can subtract from each according to some kind of calculus to tell us how, on balance, we’re doing.” ―Francis Spufford

“If faith in God means anything, it means humility toward oneself and love of neighbour and the stranger. Sadly, faith has not always led to these things. It can sometimes lead to self-righteousness and hatred of the stranger.” [...]
Faith is understood in the living and proved in the doing. We encounter the Divine presence in prayer and ritual, story and song. These lift us beyond ourselves toward the infinite Thou at the heart of being, who teaches us to see His trace in the face of the human other, leading us to acts of loving kindness that make gentle the life of this world. Faith is the bond of loyalty and listening that binds us to God and through Him to humanity. Faith is life lived in the light of love.” —Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

“The why for Christians is therefore deceptively simple: Christians do certain things seeking to imitate Jesus and Jesus’s followers who went before. This is not a set of rules, a prescribed piety, a list of dos and don’ts, or convention. Rather, following Jesus and our forebears involves encountering the same God they encountered through prayers, study, and worship; imitating Jesus and the saints means enacting God’s love in the world by feeding the hungry, comforting the sorrowful, standing for the oppressed, caring for the poor, healing the sick, and making peace. Jesus and the saints serve as models and mentors in the way of practice. Indeed, Jesus promised his friends that they would not only do the extraordinary things that he had done, but would do “greater works than these” (John 14:12). —Diana Butler Bass

“While the first generations of Mormon feminists developed analyses of power disparities between Mormon men and women, there is additional work to be done in analyzing modes of power that have been available to Mormon women, including the use of public piety, submission, ostracization, and other forms of microaggression to establish hierarchies among Mormon women and to manage our relationship with the non-Mormon world.” —Joanna Brooks

“Nadiah Kristensen, a research scientist in evolutionary modeling, uses the idea of the “patriarchal bargain” to explain that women criticizing fellow women is sometimes the only way to gain relative power in a system that disadvantages them….Women don’t tear each other down because they dislike each other, but because they need to do so to succeed in a male-dominated society. For women to change, the system needs to change.” —Veronica Tadross

“I wonder if the problem is in part a cultural one. As a 21st century Christian living in America, I am inclined to read Jesus’s sermon—or rather, I am inclined to read all of Scripture—through an individualistic lens. Whenever I see “you” in the text, I think: “Me. Me, Debie Thomas. This is a warning to and for me.”
But that is not an accurate reading. Jesus isn’t admonishing individuals in his Sermon on the Mount; he is calling forth a new community. A blessed community. A beloved community. A community meant to initiate a radical way of doing life on the earth. A community Jesus trusts will follow in his footsteps, and incarnate divine love to a world hungry for hope and healing.” —Debie Thomas

“Piety in regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist.” ―Simone Weil

“Spiritual bypass is a defense mechanism. Although the defense looks a lot prettier than other defenses, it serves the same purpose. Spiritual bypass shields us from the truth, it disconnects us from our feelings, and helps us avoid the big picture. It is more about checking out than checking in—and the difference is so subtle that we usually don't even know we are doing it.” —Ingrid Clayton

“Every tool for spiritual and psychological development has a purpose, and conversely, a place where it’s of no help whatsoever. Nothing is a panacea. We know that vitamins will not cure loneliness, but in other less obvious ways, we think that one pursuit will give us what we want in every area of life. We think that these practices should afford us freedom from the messiness of life, as though perfection is an attainable standard. We especially feel this way about spirituality.
...I am spreading the news about spiritual bypass as a reminder that we are not supposed to rise above it all. We can’t out-run our own feet. We can’t out-think our own brains. We can’t override this human operating system that we live and breathe in every hour of every day, freeing ourselves of pain and problems.
We need to remember that spiritual practice and emotional growth are not about achieving a particular quality of feeling (”good”). Being a human being on a spiritual journey isn’t about getting cash and prizes all the time. It is about being in the present moment, whatever it happens to look like. What are you experiencing right now? [...] There is something very necessary about being who and where you are.” —Ingrid Clayton

“Even the word humus, from which we derive human, is connected to the organic soil, animated by billions of living organisms.” —Randy Woodley

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