Episode 257 (Transcript): Big Ideas | The Beatitudes
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Amanda Gunderson 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 about that Barbara Brown Taylor, she said “It has been 2000 years and the poor are still with us. Those who hunger for justice are still hungry. The mournful are still blowing their noses and the excluded are still waiting at the border. The Beatitudes may work for people who can wait until they die for their reward, but meanwhile, there are other people who have lost faith in Jesus’ promises, they aren’t feeling the joy they need Heaven now.”
SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.
CW: And I am Cynthia Winward.
SH: And this is At Last she Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things and the title of today’s episode is Big Ideas, the Beatitudes. Hello, Cynthia.
CW: Hello, Susan. Are you ready to have a big, big idea and maybe a big, big convo about it too.
SH: I mean, I gotta be honest, like, I am. Okay. I love this conversation and it’s because I’m hanging on by my fingernails in this one. This is, this just feels to me like slightly, like just enough, slightly above, my head that I have to run to keep up with this big idea.
CW: And oh, same.
SH: I love being in that situation. Yeah. So I’m excited to have it.
We have tons of stuff. Should we just dive in?
CW: Let’s just dive in. So, I’ve been wanting to have this episode for a year. I feel like I’ve mentioned it to you here and there probably ever since I read Richard Rohr’s book, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount, and he just had so many good ideas, that I was like, let’s do this episode. But, you know, because we have so many other ideas, not every episode gets to happen when we actually think about it, right? So, so I’ve had an extra long time to think about this, and after I read Richard Rohr’s book, I couldn’t help but remember, that the very first time I did a deep dive into the Beatitudes was when I was taking New Testament at BYU and some people who are my age might remember, there was like this really big orange manual, and I remember in that manual, under the Beatitudes, it talked about how the beatitudes are basically the list of an exalted person.
SH: Okay.
CW: I’m sorry, I’m already laughing because I know, huh? I know what you’re thinking, Susan. Like really exaltation, perfection.
I mean that is not what I would think of now when I think about the Beatitudes, but in the moment I was like, okay, this is what I’m being told we…
SH: I always thought of them as aspirational, like, I mean, I thought that was what I was supposed to be aiming for.
CW: Okay. Well, even aspirational, is better than exaltation and perfection. I don’t know. We just dial it up to 11.
SH: Always.
CW: In our church. Always. Right, right, right. Now also, I know we just had an episode on piety and in that episode we talked so much about focusing on our own holiness, spotlessness, cleanliness, all of the above. And then, you know, we had an episode earlier this season on purity culture. So just taking those two episodes, kind of bundling them with this one, I can’t help but think of, like a more insular take on the Beatitudes than to make it about perfection and exaltation. So that’s why we’re filing this under big ideas, because I wanna take a bigger take, Susan, and I want you to go on that journey with me. So let’s do this because after working on the notes for this episode, for days. I basically said to myself, why can’t we take the Sermon on the Mount, which is where the beatitudes are found. Why can’t we make that a more serious topic for us in the church? I mean, you know, every few years, in Come Follow Me, we study it for probably one lesson or something.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: But in preparing this episode, I, you know, I’m out on the worldwide web reading this, reading that, reading books from our favorite thinkers, and I read an article about a church that studied the Sermon on the Mount, so the entire sermon, not just the Beatitudes, for 18 weeks, Susan.
SH: Wow.
CW: 18, four months, over four months. And then Rob Bell, he did 22 sermons on them when he was at his church, Mars Hill in Michigan. 22 sermons straight on the Sermon on the Mount.
SH: They don’t have as many books of scripture to get through as we do, Cynthia.
CW: In our defense, that is true.
And also, come on.
SH: Yeah.
CW: I want to spend that kind of time on the Beatitudes. Today, we don’t have that kind of time. We’ll give it an hour and some change, but
SH: We did come up with 15 pages of notes though, so I feel like we’re taking a run at it.
CW: We are. [00:05:00] But I’m just glad that you and I get to sit down and kind of chew on this together because after all, speaking of other books of scripture, Susan, they are, the beatitudes are found, pretty much word for word in the Book of Mormon in 3rd Nephi. So come on, doctrinally important speaking. I know, doctrinally speaking we should, I feel like we should be taking them more seriously. If they’re found in more than one place. So let’s do that together. Why don’t we start out by actually reading the beatitudes and you’re gonna do that?
SH: Okay. I’m gonna read from Matthew chapter five verses one through 12, The NRSV,
“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak and taught them saying, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you, falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
CW: There’s a lot to chew on there.
SH: Yes, there is. I think that’s why they’re called the beatitudes.
CW: Well, let’s just start out by saying, kind of defining what we mean, well not we, because we didn’t write this, but blessed or blessed, however we’re gonna pronounce it. Like what exactly does that mean? And we have done three episodes. Is that right? Three, four, I think at least three episodes on blessings, and we dedicated a chapter to it in our book.
SH: Right.
CW: So can I just go ahead and quote you at you, Susan?
SH: I mean, if you have to.
CW: Okay. Well, on page 102 in our book, in our chapter on blessings You Wrote, “But if to be blessed means to be made holy, that’s entirely different from popular usage. Talking about things like good fortune, a desired outcome or comfort. That simple little definition opened a crack of light for me into this whole complicated conversation. I could suddenly see that a blessing is not an event nor something we receive in exchange for what we do. It’s independent of external circumstance because blessing is an internal state.”
It’s that last line.
SH: Yeah. I still like that paragraph. I still like that definition. It’s still doing its work on me all these years after it first occurred to me. And I particularly love the way that it sheds light here, because to me it sort of gives an immediacy to the beatitudes. It’s like Jesus isn’t saying, here’s what you’ll get later. Here’s what you’re gonna get in heaven if you are, you know, fill in the blank. I feel like he’s saying if you are mourning, you are blessed. If you’re poor in spirit, you are blessed. It’s an announcement. Rob Bell describes it this way. He says, quote, “the gospel is the announcement that in your pathetic, bedraggled, confused, morally ambiguous state, in which there’s nothing good within you,
God announces, I’m on your side.”
CW: Oh.
SH: And I feel like that’s sort of what these statements are telling us. No matter how you find yourself now, and it ain’t that great, in this list of traits that Jesus uses. I’m on your side right now. Yeah. Is what God is telling us.
CW: Okay. Well that’s what Susan Hinkley thinks about what the word blessed means. Let’s see, Nadia Bolz Weber wrote this about the Beatitudes. She said, “it can be easy to view the beatitudes, the blessed ares as Jesus’s command for us to try real hard to be meeker, poorer, and mourny-er in order that we might be blessed in the eyes of God. Plus, it can be easy to look at, say Mother Teresa, and think, well, she’s a saint because she was meek. So if I too want to be blessed, I should try to be meek like her. Don’t get me wrong, we could use a few more people trying to be like Mother Theresa. I just don’t think that her virtue of meekness is what made her considered blessed by Jesus.” She continues, “but what if the beatitudes aren’t about a list of conditions we should try to meet to be blessed? What if they are not virtues we should aspire to? What if Jesus saying blessed are the meek is not instructive, but performative, that the pronouncement of blessing is actually what confers the blessing itself.”
SH: Okay. I’m sort of, I’ve got a funny mental picture here. I’ve got [00:10:00] a picture of Jesus, like touching the different groups with his wand.
CW: with the glitter star at the end.
SH: Yep. With the glitter star. Yes.
CW: I like it.
SH: I don’t know when you read that, that’s what occurred to me. Let’s see what Barbara Brown Taylor has to say about it. In a sermon about the Beatitudes she describes, quote, “stopping to remember just how many people are beloved of God, those we suspected and those we did not. Those we can name and those we cannot, those who left their marks on this world and those who vanished without a trace.” And that’s from Always a Guest: Speaking of Faith Far from Home, I should say, right now at the beginning of this episode, we have so much material in it, and I wanna remind everyone that you can find that on our website in the show notes for this episode.
Anyway, Barbara Brown Taylor describes the Beatitudes as quote, membership requirements that we belong and we are beloved of God. And she says, quote, “they don’t ask for much spiritual poverty. Mournfulness, meekness, mercy mindedness, single heartedness, unwillingness to fight, willingness to get beat up. If you were to take a tour of the places where such blessed people have traditionally been found, you would visit a lot of jails, funeral homes, courthouses, cheap restaurants and emergency rooms, as well as some nice homes in the suburbs. And a palace or two, it’s a mixed crowd we belong to.”
CW: Oh my goodness.
SH: Right?
CW: Yeah. So good.
SH: I’m not sure that’s how I’ve thought about it though.
CW: No. All the wheels are already turning, just as I’m discussing it with you. because I worked on this, I worked on these notes for a long time, but now just talking about ‘em with you, I’m having more thinky thoughts.
In researching what blessed means, because you and I don’t speak Greek, we’ve already established this. Right? Right. Another word for blessed in, in this formula, the way it’s used is happy.
SH: Okay.
CW: Which sounds totally bananas to me. I’m not really sure I’m on board with that one. Like, happy are those who mourn? Like what I don’t know, but we’ll talk more about that in a little bit. But Richard Rohr says that they could be called the happy attitudes, but also from a secular point of view. He said that would be like saying to someone, congratulations.
SH: No, love that.
CW: I like that a little bit.
SH: I love that. But I’ll tell you why, because I did some poking around because I said, like I said a second ago, this is not traditionally how I have been thinking about this. When I saw that you had put in the notes happy attitudes or congratulations, I thought, okay, I gotta figure out what are we talking about here. And so I did a little reading actually on Bart Ehrman’s blog. And there was a post on there by a New Testament expert who is a blogger for him. And I’m gonna massacre this name, my apologies. It is Julius-Kei Kato.
CW: Sounds good.
SH: Here’s what he says. One way of thinking. Well, this isn’t his quote. I’m just going to explain it here for a second. One way of thinking about this is to put the Beatitudes into their historical context, which is kind of what you were trying to do. When you say, you know, we don’t speak Greek, if we did we would understand some of these words differently. But. Jesus is a rabbi teaching within the quote, apocalyptic hope of late second temple Judaism.
Now, what does that mean? This means that, get ready, there are big words here, but I understood what it meant. I hope that you do and our listeners do, and I think it’s super important. Okay? Quote, “the historical Jesus and his disciples lived and breathed in an apocalyptic environment and accepted its main presuppositions. One main foundation of that worldview was the belief that in their immediate future, God was going to intervene directly in the chosen people’s history in order to defeat Israel’s enemies and set everything right once again.” Okay, so this is a group of people who are expecting a reversal of fortunes, basically.
All right. All right. He continues, quote, “The historical Jesus, as well as the original audience to whom the Beatitudes were directed. Were hoping for an imminent world changing intervention of God, also known as the coming of God’s reign into their historical world. That would then create a new world order where the really poor, the literally hungry, the weeping ones would be the beneficiaries of this revert of fortunes brought about by divine action and will be truly, and not only spiritually blessed, thus, truly worthy of being congratulated.”
CW: Aha.
SH: Aha. That’s what I said. But you know, for Christians today, I think there’s also a way of looking at this as the beginning of Jesus setting up his upside down world that you and I have talked about so many times. Right? It’s the same world in which he constructs his parables for us.
Barbara Brown Taylor explains, “If the only way to get to the second half of the sentence is to go through the [00:15:00] first, then who in their right mind wants to go? Jesus is not telling anyone what to do. He is telling us how things really are. Everything that follows is going to be based on the tipsy worldview of the beatitudes. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you.” I mean, it’s like maybe only work for an hour and get paid for all day. Right. Cynthia?
CW: Crazy talk!
SH: It’s like the ultimate come as you are sermon Oh no. In which heaven happens right now. And the blessings don’t always look like what we expect they will or come to the people who we might expect to be blessed and the blessings are not deferred.
CW: Okay, Susan. So basically we’re only about 15 minutes into this conversation and already you brought up Grace.
SH: Right?
CW: I mean…
SH: Maybe we should have just led with that another episode on Grace.
CW: But I love that because I mean, Jesus, he’s sure a consistent fella. He just can’t shut up about Grace and all that goes with it.
SH: So yeah. So my question is, why don’t we read everything about Jesus as being about Grace? Why don’t we? But like I’ve said, I think already three times in this episode, that’s not the way that I’ve always thought about it.
CW: Well, and like we’ve said so many times on our, I don’t know, 5, 6, 7 episodes at this point, we’ve had on Grace, we don’t believe our own stuff.
SH: Right?
CW: So I’m not surprised. I’m saddened, but I’m not surprised that we don’t read, in our LDS context, we don’t read the beatitudes through a lens of Grace. Of course, we read it through a lens of exaltation instead.
SH: Right?
CW: Of course we do.
SH: Surprise.
CW: Yeah.
CW: Well, if we just defined what blessed is, then I would say that the opposite of being blessed is being cursed. Okay. And Jesus is being his usual Jesus-y self defining who is blessed and who is cursed. And, you know, for example the first shall be last. The last shall be first. Like, he’s getting political.
SH: Okay
CW: We’ll get to that, in a little bit. But, you know, this is what Jesus does. He’s, you know, flipping proverbial, sometimes literal, but in this case proverbial tables. So, Rob Bell kind of gives us a definition of who the Beatitudes are not for. In one of those 22 sermons that Rob Bell gave, one of them is called Blessed are the Poor in Spirit. And I wish I could get all of his 22 sermons, but I only managed to find one of them on YouTube. And in this video that we will link to, he said, “the moment we look down on somebody because they aren’t disciplined, hardworking, upright, smart, responsible, moral, good looking, Bible believing Jesus trusting, or as God-fearing as we are, because they’ve made idiotic stupid immoral choices again and again at that moment, we are rich in spirit and Jesus isn’t denouncing anything to us.”
So that’s who it’s not for Susan. Do you ever find yourself in that list? I find myself in that list quite a bit.
SH: I’m gonna take the fifth on that one, Cynthia.
CW: Okay. I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you. Okay. Along with continuing to define what the beatitudes are, in my research, I found out that the beatitudes or that beatitudes were a common way of speaking in Jesus’ time. So the formula of how he delivered this, it wouldn’t have been new to those listening to Jesus because they were kind of everyday sayings about the good life.
SH: Okay?
CW: We, you can find a lot of them in Proverbs and even the crazy book of Revelation. But of course, Jesus comes along and like you said already, it’s backwards world. So here’s another quote by Barbara Brown Taylor from her book Gospel Medicine, she said, “What was so shocking about Jesus’ list was not the form, but the content. Blessed are the meek, the mournful, the poor in spirit. Who was he kidding? What was so happy about hungering and thirsting for righteousness or about being reviled and persecuted? No one with a lick of sense was going to vote for any of those definitions of the good life. But Jesus didn’t ask for anyone’s approval. He just redefined the good life in nine short sentences and held them out for everyone to see. Nine portraits of kingdom people, previously known as victims, dreamers, pushovers and fools.”
SH: I love that phrase, nine portraits of kingdom people. I think latter day saints are very concerned with what it means to be kingdom people. What is it gonna take for me to get to the celestial kingdom? Right? And so, I mean, I would say this really is like the ultimate backwards world in which all the people who you do not expect to be on that list show up there. Yeah, but are our church members ever going [00:20:00] to make the mental flip of that switch? Like, is that even possible? Within our church as you know, and love it?
CW: As it’s presently constituted, yeah no, but I would love it that we could get there and maybe this episode is just our volley out into the world, Susan, that
SH: Yeah, for sure. It’s that,
CW: that it can,
SH: Yeah it’s two women dreaming basically thinking, you know, wouldn’t it be great if…
CW: wouldn’t it be great if…, for sure.
I like how Brian McLaren kinda describes what the beatitudes are. He says here, “I think is the key to the beatitudes, rather than interpreting them as God blesses. These people think this is performative, like performing a wedding and saying, I now pronounce you legally married. Or we pledge allegiance. The saying of the words performs the action to bless is to speak highly of, to praise the goodness and value of the point is we bless these people here and now we say they have worth and value. We say their lives matter. We say they count, we say they are important.”
SH: Okay, so he’s in the Nadia Bolz Weber camp.
CW: Yes.
SH: Of Jesus with his starry wand. Yes. Blessing these people like decreeing it, that it’s so, I love that. But the one thing I love about that is the idea that we as members of the church could make that switch in our own minds then.
CW: Absolutely.
SH: I mean, we can bless these people here and now. Just like Brian McLaren just said. So maybe it’s not a change that we have to wait for to happen from the top in our church or in official teachings or anything else. We can change the way that we think about the Beatitudes and the people in them.
CW: Well, I know I have. I know I have. So it’s an inside job.
SH: An inside job.
CW: It’s gonna be an inside job probably.
SH: Okay. The Beatitudes in Luke interestingly provide a less spiritualized version and probably more historically accurate from what I understand. So this is Luke in the NRSV and it says, “then he, Jesus, looked up at his disciples and said, blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now for you’ll be filled. Blessed are you who weep now for you will laugh.” So poor in spirit becomes poor.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Right. And then in Matthew we get a more spiritualized version where poor becomes poor in spirit. It’s like they wanted to dial the spirituality up a little bit.
I guess, and I think that happened because when Christian communities started to realize in the first few centuries of Christianity that God’s literal intervention was not coming immediately like they hoped, right? Then they had to start to sort of reinterpret some teachings. But historical Jesus was talking to people who were poor, poor, and hungry and actually crying because they were oppressed.
Right. He was talking to oppressed people. So I love this quote from Dr. Kato, who I was quoting earlier, and it’s in line with what Brian McLaren was just talking about when he puts it on us to announce that marginalized people’s lives matter. He says this, “In the wake of the original apocalyptic context of the Beatitudes being unrealized, they should now be theologically interpreted through the lens of a realized collaborative incarnation, eschatology by which the promised rewards of the beatitudes no longer depend on an apocalyptic intervention of God, but on the followers of Jesus, or practically anyone else, even agnostics or atheists, who think that Jesus was a great teacher taking on a liberative praxis to create in some way and realize a new social order where the really poor, the truly hungry, the weeping and marginalized ones really come to experience now, not later in some heaven, some may, some measure of the blessedness that God’s reign should bring with it.”
In other words, you know, as disciples, perhaps we can read these as a call to action, to realize a better social order in the world now to make real this upside down world of parable grace that we talk about in which the marginalized do actually become blessed, and we have a part in that.
CW: Yeah, this is where, okay, so you and I were trying to figure out what should we call this episode, right? And so this is the season of big ideas, right? So that’s what we landed on. But we have other episodes where we’re dancing with, right? Kind of doing a mid rash. And so this, right, just hearing you read that quote by Dr. Kato, it’s just like turning that prism another way and kind of looking at it through a different lens. And so I feel like this is kind of the part, Susan, where you and I are like dancing. It could mean this, it could mean that, well, because this didn’t happen, maybe we could take it to mean this way. So I really like the visual of. Of you and I kind of dancing around this and just playing with it and
SH: Yeah. I [00:25:00] have no answers, Cynthia, but I love being able to look about, look at it as many ways as I can and looking at it through a lens of present day discipleship really does change it for me. Right. It’s not about something like, what do I need to be? It’s more about what do I need to do? What can I do? Like how can I help realize this on the earth?
CW: Right? Right. If I were to start a charity now where I was helping the poor and the oppressed and the hungry, I think I would wanna call it: upside down world.
SH: Oh my gosh. Can we do that?
CW: Yeah. Putting the first last, and the last first. Right.
SH: So good.
CW: It’s funny, just a week or two ago, my husband was reading out loud to me from the Salt Lake Tribune about a charity not called Upside Down World, but it’s actually called Solomon’s Porch in St. George. And I went back and I’ve read the article several times because I was just so touched by these people. I wish I could tell the whole story of it. I will link to the article, but in the article, one of the pastors, it’s a couple, so it’s two persons who are basically pastors of this church who are running a soup kitchen. And Pastor Jimmy Kestin said this, “We love people unconditionally with the goal of introducing them to the gospel of grace and the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the process we try to meet people’s needs.”
SH: There it is. Yeah.
CW: There it is. There it is. So it’s interesting the part that Paul and I were like gafawing and rolling our eyes at is, there was actually, I don’t know, like a city councilman or something who was talking to this pastor saying, wait, really? You run a soup kitchen? We only have like six homeless people in St. George.
SH: Wow. Okay. Even I know that’s not true.
CW: Right? What city only has six homeless people? Give me a break. But it was funny because the pastor was like, well, we’re actually feeding 10 times that every weekend, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.
And it just kind of made me think how often we think there is no need.
SH: Right.
CW: I was just really touched by. This couple who saw a need in a city that they weren’t even from because they just, God told them, move to this city, and they did. And here they are performing something that, Susan can I dare say, like, I wish our church had started this charity to feed hungry people.
Why in a church of billions aren’t we? Why don’t we have soup kitchens in every city now? Now, to be fair, our church now supplies Solomon’s kitchen with provisions for hungry people. So that’s good. But yeah. And missionaries, even some of our missionaries will even staff it.
But I just, I want us to be more. I want us to be the ones to start the soup kitchens instead of just being the helpers of the soup kitchens. But anyway, I guess that’s where we go back to saying this is an inside job is because if we see a need, we need to just fulfill that need and quit wishing that our church would do it.
CW: Okay. Let’s talk about how the Beatitudes are for the here and now. Spoiler. They’re for here and now, Susan. They’re not about later. They’re not about exultation imperfection, but they are for now. Because to quote myself, like I always say, I need a church for the living, not just the dead, and people need to be blessed now. They need their suffering eased now.
SH: Right.
CW: And Barbara Brown Taylor said “the first words out of Jesus’s mouth she’s talking about here in the Sermon on the Mount. So the first words out of Jesus’s mouth are not blessed, shall be, but blessed are. Blessed are the poor and spirit, not because of something that will happen to them later, but because of what their poverty opens up in them right now. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, not because God is going to fill them up later, but because their appetites are so fine tuned right now.”
SH: This is part of what I love about dropping the Beatitudes back into their historical context like I was just a minute ago. Because the people that Jesus was talking to, and I think scholars would probably argue the historical Jesus himself, were looking ahead to this time when God was gonna come in and fix everything. Right? And I think a lot of Christians have fallen right into the same trap, right? We’re happy to talk and think about rewards in this future heaven, where God works everything out and makes everything right. But if you wanna take this kind of text and make it about us here and now, then it’s gonna ask us to do things. But it’s also gonna require us to change the way that we think about how and what we are here and now. So like, if we’re walking through hell right now, what can we grab? If we’re hungry, what are we hungry for? And where can we find it? Like, how can we make peace in a world where there isn’t any? I mean, these questions [00:30:00] feel really. Really immediate and really have big resonance for me in my life right now. I’m looking for peace, Cynthia. And there isn’t any in the world that I can find. And I think part of the blessedness of these conditions is going to reside in how we address them in ourselves.
CW: Yeah, I definitely think we’re gonna have to address them, in yourself, in myself, because like we just said a minute ago, I don’t see anything really changing at the corporate. Can I say that right? That’s ouchie at the organizational level
or
SH: in the world. Right? Or in the world.
CW: There you go.
SH: The world is not gonna fix this. God is not gonna come down and fix this for us tomorrow.
CW: Right, right. Well, and this is where like I was saying earlier, you know, this is where I feel like we’re dancing with the Beatitudes and it comes in at a really deep personal level. I would even say this could be some shadow work. Okay. Susan, we just had an episode about that. So, you know, our addressing our collective shadow as a church and I don’t know, can we get Jana back on speed dial really quick to jump into this part of the conversation? I don’t know that, it’s just funny. I’ve been thinking so much about shadow work lately and just as you’re talking about that about the beatitudes, about putting them back in their historical context and actually let me change my train of thought here.
When we talk about, like, now we talk so much about Jesus coming again, and there’s a lot of spiritual bypassing involved in that, right? Like we, we have people who are hungry, poor, and mourning and suffering right now.
SH: Right?
CW: And yet, how often are we hearing, oh, Jesus just needs to come, Jesus just needs to come instead of like dealing with the problems that are here today because great may, maybe Jesus really is coming, but that, but he’s not here today and so we have work to do today, and that’s where I feel like this is part of our collective shadow is how much spiritual bypassing goes on in not just our church, but in plenty of other Christian churches where we’re always looking forward to Jesus coming and fixing it later on.
SH: Actually, I think a conversation about the potential shadow work presented to the opportunity for shadow work presented by the Beatitudes for Christian people is a really interesting thought.
CW: Right.
SH: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just feel like there’s a lot there that it exposes because of the spiritual bypassing that I think pretty naturally occurs. But, you know, I have to think some of that was occurring at the time that Jesus was delivering this to, because right. We were, we’re talking about these apocalyptic people who are thinking God is gonna come in and fix everything. So they just have to hunker down and wait. Right. If they can just hold on this is gonna get fixed. And I really feel like we’re in a very not dissimilar mindset now. Many people in our world.
CW: Humans 101, Susan, that’s,
SH: Nothing’s changed, Cynthia.
CW: Nothing has changed. Oh boy.
SH: This whole place is staffed by human beings, so it’s not going to change.
CW: Oh goodness. Richard Roar, in his book, Jesus Alternative Plan, he says this, “notice how Jesus also uses present tense.” Just the quote we read earlier from Barbara Brown Taylor. It’s now not later. Anyway, lemme start again. “Notice how Jesus also uses present tense. The reign of God isn’t later. We are the free ones. Now, if we remain without anything to protect or anything we need to prove or defend, I know people who have left Christianity to become Buddhists precisely because of the doctrines of emptiness, simplicity, and non-violence that they discovered in Buddhist teaching. If only they had been taught these same foundations in Jesus’s beatitudes.”
SH: I mean, I would argue that they are taught those things in the Beatitudes, but that’s not what they’re looking for in them or how they’re reading them.
CW: Yeah. I just thought it was a really interesting way of saying yeah, I mean, because Susan, guilty here. I mean, I’ve turned to Buddhism for a few things that I couldn’t quite get in Christianity.
SH: Right.
CW: And so I really like how Richard Rohr is like “Yoohoo”,
SH: Right! They’re right here in the Beatitudes. People yoohoo, you don’t have to leave for Buddhism. It’s all right here. Exactly.
CW: Exactly. So I really appreciated that. Speaking of our friend Jana Spangler recently I was having a conversation with her and I was being snarky. I know it’s hard to believe. I was being really snarky. We’re talking about like the three kingdoms doctrine, that we have in our church. And I said something like, well, you know, the temple tells us that right now, this world that we’re in now is the telestial world, which for those who don’t know, that’s like the lowest kingdom in our church. And I was like, well, I don’t know. I don’t care if. If this is the life that I inherit, you know, I don’t care if I’m telestial now and then I get a telestial reward later on, life’s pretty good for me. If I don’t get anything better. And [00:35:00] then Jana kind of said, well, okay, but which part of this world do you want to inherit. Do you want your middle class life? Or do you wanna be a woman in the Sudan? And I was like, ah,
SH: yeah.
CW: Point taken.
SH: Right?
CW: Point taken. My life is quite different than than plenty of other women’s lives on this planet. And about that. Barbara Brown Taylor, she said, “it has been 2000 years and the poor are still with us. Those who hunger for justice are still hungry. The mournful are still blowing their noses and the excluded are still waiting at the border. The beatitudes may work for people who can wait until they die for their reward, but meanwhile, there are other people who have lost faith in Jesus’s promises. They aren’t feeling the joy, they need heaven now.”
So yeah. Blessed are the poor in spirit or you know, that’s Matthew or Luke saying blessed are the poor.
SH: Right.
CW: Is probably not a blessing that I necessarily need right now. But it was a good reminder to me that of course there are people outside my own door that need that blessing right now.
SH: Right. We both have, you and I both have our things that we’re our ideas that we’re sort of, sort of known for pushing or things that we’re known for saying. And one of mine is that I think we know what we’re hungry for when we get it. And I didn’t realize really that I was so poor in spirit. Like I’m not sure when we hear the beatitudes that we. Necessarily know where we are in that list of people. Always, I and think that it can change at different times in our lives. Yeah. Yeah. Really where we locate ourselves, we’re in that list. I didn’t realize that I was spiritually starved until I began to find nourishment. And, I think that part of the lasting value of the words of the Beatitudes is that they can apply to everyone differently at different times in our lives. And I think that’s another great way about the immediacy of the way that they’re expressed, because I don’t think they necessarily ever get, you know, fulfilled and then we move on. It’s like we can be blessed now, and now again, and we can always work for the blessing of others.
CW: That’s great.
SH: So I love that about the blessed are,
CW: yeah.
SH: It goes on and on…
CW: …on and on. Thank you for that. Okay, we’ve already talked about this a little bit, but let’s dig in a little bit into the idea that the Beatitudes speak to those who are suffering. And Nadia Bolz Weber says “that humans seek power, but God blesses vulnerability.” And Richard Rohr says, well, he’s right when he says that Jesus’ loyalty is to human suffering. So I mean, if both of those things are true, then of course Jesus is going to start like the most important sermon of his life, start off right off the bat by blessing those who are suffering.
And I have to say, like over, over the last several years, maybe it’s Kate Bowler’s fault. You know, it’s her fault. Ever since I read her book, “Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve loved,” that pretty much since I read that book. I don’t know, eight or nine years ago, I have constantly kind of had my antenna up to pick up signals to combat the toxic positivity or prosperity gospel that she talks about so much in her book and still in, in her work. I feel like that’s her life’s work. So I always have my antenna up trying to pick up new ways to combat what we might call, like a Pollyanna take. And I think that’s possible here, even with the Beatitudes, to put a toxic positivity spin on them too, I never wanna idolize suffering is what I’m, is what I’m saying.
And about that, Barbara Brown Taylor said, “whatever you believe about Jesus, believe this about you. The things that seem to be going most wrong for you may in fact be the things that are going most right. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fix them, it just means they may need blessing as much as they need fixing, since the blessing is already right there.”
And it was that line: This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to fix them.
SH: Right.
CW: It, you know, to me, that kind of tied them together. It’s both, and.
SH: Yeah.
CW: You can be suffering and to quote Rabbi Steve Leder for the millionth time, “if you have to go through hell, grab some tools on your way out.”
All right, Richard Rohr, we’re just quoting all our favorites today, Susan. He said the beatitudes are heard differently depending on your situation. Kinda like I was just saying earlier, right? Well, my life is different than a woman in the Sudan. He goes on and says, A shorter version occurs in Luke, but Richard Rohr likes to say that Matthew is particularly suited for us, meaning like middle class people because quote “middle class people can hear Matthew more quickly than they can hear Luke. Luke is talking to the poor in a [00:40:00] way that will make them feel invited and accepted by God. Mark is doing the same thing for people with a little more security. It seems this is a good example of how we should speak in a way that enables us to be heard.”
SH: Interesting.
CW: So once again, everything in life depends on our viewpoint, which is just also, I learned this from Richard Rohr, right, it’s just a view from a point, this is my one and only experience. And so, Jesus was preaching to an occupied people and the Beatitudes, I think are his way of acknowledging their daily suffering of basically saying to the people I know. It’s bad. It’s bad. It’s really bad. I know. And yet here I am offering you a new vision of hope. It’s like he’s saying, you know, I’ll bless you while you are here in this moment. I’m gonna give you spiritual bread for the journey.
SH: That sort of is the both, and right there.
CW: It is the both, and. Yeah. Back to Barbara Brown Taylor. She said, “Much of the power of the Beatitudes depends on where you are sitting when you hear them. They sound different from on top than they do from underneath. They sound different from upfront than they do in the back. Upfront with the religiously satisfied and self-assured, they sound pretty confrontational. Where is your hunger and thirsty? Well-fed Christians? Where is your spiritual poverty? Where are the bones of your soul showing through your clothes? And why aren’t your handkerchiefs soaked with tears? But way in the back with the victims, the dreamers, the pushovers and the fools? The beatitudes sound completely different. Shh, they say, dry your tears, little ones. The whole earth belongs to you, though someone else still holds the keys. It won’t be long now, heaven’s gates are opening wide for you, and the first face you shall see, shall be the face of God.”
SH: Okay. I have to say something about that. Then when I hear you read that quote, then I think, well, part of the way that I internalized the beatitudes was probably because of where I was sitting in my smug and self satisfied LDS chapel. Right? And so I think that her quote right there really kind of speaks to what you were opening up about a woman in the Sudan having a completely different set of needs and way of accessing these ideas, these big spiritual ideas that apply to all of humanity. That the, that where we are and the way that we’re approaching them really changes our access to them. And so I don’t wanna, I don’t necessarily wanna excuse myself, but I wanna explain myself to myself when I say that, I can see why I thought about them the way that I did, and I can see why I might have thought, well, I might have to leave Christianity and go to Buddhism to shed some of this stuff. Right? Because I wasn’t positioned in the right proverbial chapel. I wasn’t sitting in the right place to hear them that way. So to me, it represents real progress to be able to see and hear I guess a wider interpretation of these things for myself.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Then I felt, I approached this conversation thinking, well, here’s how I’ve been taught about the Beatitudes.
Right. And like the fault was in the teacher. Right. The fault was in the way this was presented to me.
CW: Right, right.
SH: But I feel like as we’ve gone through this conversation, and then when you get to this Barbara Brown Taylor quote, I can see how it’s a little bit more complicated than that.
CW: For sure.
SH: And that maybe some of it is incumbent on me to try to change where I’m sitting as these teachings come to me.
CW: Yeah. That’s good, Susan. Well remember earlier that crazy definition of blessed as happy.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: And you know, I touched on the idea, well, maybe the opposite is being, you know, the opposite of being blessed is cursed. Okay. So here’s where I think Jesus is making a political statement that once again the last are first, the first shall be last, the upside down world that we’ve been talking about. And I found a blogger named, Simply the contemplative pastor, and he or she don’t know, said this, “And so just as surely as Jesus was offering a word of hope to those downtrodden and hungry, he also, in a not too subtle way, was making a political statement about how different the nature of God’s kingdom is. In God’s reign, the hungry will be fed, the last will be first, the poor will be wealthy. Those picked last for the dodgeball team will be the captains. It is radically different from the realm in which those with power rule with an iron hand and sneer at those whose voices cry out for justice.” Good stuff.
SH: Good stuff. You know, it makes me think of Richard Rohr talks about, well, let me back up and say, you and I are also coming to this from a point of being products of like, Western civilization. [00:45:00] Right. We have a very specific place in the world, and worldview. And that’s huge. That goes way beyond just our religion.
But Richard Rohr talks about how men, including the original disciples and the early fathers of Christianity, and then like many of the 2000 years of men that have come since he described that they quote, “wanted a god of domination,” but then Jesus shows up with all of his feminine characteristics instead. And so it’s not surprising when they miss the point. And if the men who have crafted this entire thing, this entire Western civilization that you and I have been handed, including our religion, if they missed the point, well then how did we have a chance of finding the point, if you see what I’m saying. Right? So like, I’m not sure that I think that even our view of Jesus was skewed.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Really. By all of this culture and religion, everything else that we were handed, that we were born into. Richard Rohr says, quote, “ever since the sermon on the Mount, the gospel and western civilization have been on a collision course. And the winner wasn’t Jesus, the winner was Western civilization. We’ve taken Jesus over and placed a crown on his head, not a crown of thorns, but a royal crown, which he expressly rejected.” But we didn’t see that. And it’s because it’s not what the men of the time were looking for? And I feel comfortable saying, men, I feel comfortable putting this on men.
CW: Oh, for sure.
SH: I mean, Richard Rohr is willing to put it on them. But as a woman, I’m willing to, because I feel like I had no control over the forces that shaped all of this. And women had no real substantive control over that either.
CW: Yeah. I just feel like, in giving grace to myself here, there are so many layers to shed to really see the beatitudes, probably the way I should have been seeing them all along. And one of those definitely is Western Christianity, and can I say like American?
SH: Yes.
CW: Middle class Western, it gets even more specific Western Christianity. Yes,
SH: yes.
CW: It gets so, so specific. Yeah. That I just think that’s why I have to give myself all the grace here because like you just said, like this is. This is what was handed to us. This was well,
SH: and give our church a lot of grace. Like the organization, right. And the teachings, the way that they were handed to us. Right. Give all of it. Right. Hold all of it. So lightly hold all of it so lightly, I think as we consider finding a new approach for ourselves. It begins with holding what we have very lightly.
CW: Yeah. And I know we don’t have too much time to talk about this, but just kind of what you and I were saying about, you know, giving grace to the church. I mean, I have to, I want to do that because like for a really good time, Susan, go on the church website and just look up all the talks about the Beatitudes and you’ll be like, okay, this is the lens that was handed to me.
I never stood a chance.
SH: Right, right, right. You know, I can totally see that.
CW: Right. And so, but what’s really interesting, as I look at the church as, I look at the, I look at the messaging that was given to us. Like I said, starting out with, like, these are, you know, the beatitudes are all the attributes of a, an exalted person.
SH: right?
CW: But like, our church has, I don’t know, I don’t know how many websites at this point our church actually has, but one of them is cominguntochrist.org. And so that’s the one, like, I guess if you were someone who was investigating the church, you would go there. And there are lovely things on there about the Beatitudes. I’m gonna link to this lovely little, like 49 second video that talks about being blessed if you are poor, hungry, meek, like all of the ways that we suffer and all the ways that we need blessings. What’s hard for me is I think, why is that the message that we want to show to people investigating our church? But you and I as members, we are the ones that get the ouchie message of exaltation. I don’t know, but it’s something I’ve been noticing, not just with this topic, but that we give a different message to our friends looking into our church than the message that you and I have been steeped in.
SH: Oh, it’s totally code switching and not in a good way.
CW: That’s, thank you. I could have just said it’s code switching. That’s exactly what it is.
SH: Interesting. I feel like that’s another whole episode, Cynthia.
CW: It is.
SH: I wanna dive right into that. I’m fascinated. I’m fascinated by the idea that we’re doing that. I understand why we’re doing it. Also, I’m totally pissed off that we’re doing that.
CW: Uhhuh
SH: I don’t even know, I have lots of feelings about that.
CW: I don’t even know if we’re doing it intentionally.
SH: I don’t know either. I wanna explore that more. That’s fascinating. Thank you for digging in and finding that I’m interested. Because I watched that [00:50:00] video that you put, that you linked to in the notes ,and of course it’ll be where our listeners can find it too. But I watched that, and I totally agree.
CW: Yeah,
SH: Totally agree.
CW: Yeah. So I just wanna also mourn that a little bit that what you and I were steeped in is different than the messaging that we give.
CW: Okay. So here’s the fun part where for the last few minutes of this episode, I want us to just kind of get personal and talk about how the Beatitudes have become a big idea in our lives.
SH: Oh, good. I’m excited for
CW: this. Okay. So I’ll go first.
SH: Okay.
CW: Okay. So as a woman now in her fifties, the Beatitudes are teaching me for the thousandth time to, like so many of the other, of Jesus’s other teachings to let go of achievement as a marker to claim goodness and blessings. Like even saying that Susan is hard for me
SH: because Right. Even articulating it,
CW: even articulating it uhhuh because I’m so steeped in it. But anyway imagine that I get to claim goodness and blessings just by being, hello Grace. So the beatitude blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. I would say this particularly means a lot to me because over the last dozen years or so, I have been wearing my heart on my sleeve. I have been filled and have shown a lot of vulnerability. And to be in mourning, I think is to be vulnerable. Admitting, admitting out loud that I don’t know what I once knew. There’s a heck of a lot of mourning in that.
SH: Right.
CW: And I particularly like how The Message, which is a Bible version right of the beatitudes, I really like how it, its take on blessed are those who mourn. It says, “you’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope.
With less of you, there is more of God and his rule.” I don’t know about you, but I have felt that I have, there has been less of me. And that’s made room for a lot more of God to fill me up about being a woman in her fifties. Speaking of getting older. Richard Rohr says this, “but something happens to us as we grow older. Some are in their thirties or forties when the truth starts sinking in. Dying is a part of life. By 50 or 60, we must learn that dying is not opposed to life. It’s a part of a greater mystery, and we are a part of that mystery. The older psyche is ready to hear such sober truth.” So again, more grace for me that I didn’t know these things in my younger years. That there’s really is something about getting older that allows that truth to start sinking in.
SH: It changes your seat in that proverbial chapel and you start to yes, receive teachings and sort of interact with them differently.
CW: Yeah, for sure.
SH: There’s a lot of truth in that.
CW: Okay, a couple more. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. Richard Rohr says that most Bibles soften that beatitude to say, you know, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. But he said that’s, well, like I said, that’s a softer, more religious message when the word in Greek clearly means justice.
SH: Interesting.
CW: And so I have really felt a call towards social justice in the last few years. And I’m okay even saying that I direct my tithing dollars now to charities that legally support such causes to support people who are in desperate need of justice, especially in America right now in 2026. There’s a whole lot of injustice going on.
And my last one that my last beatitude that has just meant so much to me, is blessed are the pure in heart. They shall see God. Because I see God now in the ordinary. I see God now, in the every day, I have finally stopped looking for God in what I always thought was the holy and sacred. It’s like no, God is in the messy, the ordinary, the every day. And again, The Message Bible version says for this beatitude, “you’re blessed when you get your inside world, your mind and heart put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.” Richard Rohr says, “when the heart is right, seeing will be right.
Jesus says, he ties together heart and sight. Consider the saying, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is God. All we need to do is keep the lens clean.” And I just feel like this is that internal state that we mentioned in our book when I was quoting you at the very beginning of this episode. Like, I’m clumsily trying to become this mindful, meditative person. And at least that’s where like my compass has been pointing me towards. I feel like, well, like I said, I’m really clumsy at it. I think that’s why I’ve wanted to do this episode for at least a year now, because there’s really something something quite melancholy, I think something, well, definitely something very [00:55:00] unsettling about the Beatitudes. They made me shift in my chair uncomfortably quite a bit because they’re not about winning. I mean, there’s nothing about winning in these beatitudes. They’re like the anti winning scriptures. I’m showing up for that.
SH: Yeah, I think I told you yesterday, I think I texted you yesterday to tell you that my husband and I were having a conversation over breakfast about whether the beatitudes were the path of, well, he had asked me if I thought the covenant path was the path of ascent.
CW: Okay.
SH: And I said, yes. Absolutely. It’s one thing building on the next, right? As we go up. And I and as soon as he said that, because we were preparing to do this episode, I said, I think the Beatitudes are more about the path of descent.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And he wasn’t totally sure about that. He said, I gotta think about that. I don’t know if I see the path of descent and the beatitudes, but I mean, as you just laid it out they’re not about winning right there, there’s nothing winning about the Beatitudes. So I’m gonna stand by my assertion that this is the path of descent, which, I mean, if. If we wanna follow Richard Rohr, that’s the path to spiritual growth and development, right? I mean, that’s the way that it has to go. So that makes me wanna favor the beatitudes over the covenant path. And now I wanna do an exploration of how those two things actually could work together. Because I’m very curious about where the covenant path fits into this. Like how it would mesh with the teachings and the beatitudes anyway, all that for another day.
CW: Do you really wanna have that conversation?
SH: Not really!
CW: That sounds super ouchie.
SH: I feel like it has to be there. I feel like it has to be there. Like our, I feel like our highest church leaders would assure me that it’s there and it’s like. I wanna discover what they would be talking about if they said that.
Anyway, good stuff. This conversation has just made me more interested in know the attitudes, right? I mean, not less.
Okay I’ll tell you a little bit about where I’m with some of this now. My dad once told me that once a year he puts on his best suit. He stands in front of the mirror and he recites the beatitudes.
CW: What?
SH: It is like his personal sacred ritual. It’s one of my favorite things he has ever told me.
CW: Oh,
SH: It was such a glimpse of one man’s personal sacredness.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And I don’t know what it means to him. He didn’t really explain that much about it to me. Okay. But it means something to me that he does it. Like, I found it deeply meaningful knowing that this good man does this. And I haven’t thought too much about the Beatitudes personally, I gotta be honest. But thinking about them for this episode. I have really started to try to unpack the truth of them in my life, and I’m gonna go with The Message version because I love the way that version lays it out in plain language.
And sort of elaborates on each one a little bit. I found that the best for connecting dots in my own life for this conversation. So I’m gonna start with number five. “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are. No more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.” Okay. Being enough was not something that I ever even considered until I started roaming my fifties. Kind of trying to get a clear picture of the road behind me, but also trying to discern the road ahead of me when time starts to get short. And for me it got short really suddenly at age 50. Yeah.
You know, a lot of our listeners might know about me. Then suddenly enough really matters. And it caused me to take stock and realize that I already had that. And not only that, like I had a lot to spare, even within myself. But I’m not sure what would’ve woken me up to that. I mean, I’m sure something else would have eventually, but I’m deeply grateful that it happened for me at 50.
CW: Good grief, Susan. Talk about the path of descent. I mean.
SH: I know. I know. Wow. I mean, and everyone hits the path of descent at some point in their lives, right? I mean, that’s just where it happened for me. But that’s really kind of what it exposed for me. What was enough changed.
CW: Love it.
SH: Okay. And then number six, “you’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.” And it’s part of taking stock of my life that happened in my fifties. I realized that I had spent most of it being starved for God. It’s like I arrived at 50, completely malnourished but never having known that about myself. The Mormon mirror did not tell me this truth, Cynthia. I had to find it out the hard way. I had to find it out by realizing all this stuff I thought was there, was missing.
CW: Oh gosh.
SH: And I think I’ve told you before, like as a kid, I had a really hard time gaining weight and my parents used to send me to my grandma’s farm in hopes of fattening me up. And my fifties and sixties have been two decades of me sending myself. To places looking in search of spiritual fattening, right? Looking for ways to [01:00:00] grow my spirit. That’s really been my pursuit of these two decades. And The At last She Said It project in large part grows out of that quest.
CW: Yeah love that.
SH: It’s a product of it. And then, last one I’ll do is number seven, “You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being careful, you find yourselves cared for.” And as I’ve stepped cautiously into these last couple of decades that are certainly going to constitute the last third of my life, the things that I care about have shifted in subtle and also not really subtle ways. If the last few decades of my life can only be about one thing, I think intentional caring, would be a worthwhile goal for them. I spent the first 50 years of my life caring about stuff that other people told me I had to care about.
CW: Right.
SH: Or about things that I thought I must care about in order to be loved.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Right. And casting off some of those cares has been really painful. It’s been ripping bandaids off. I found that there were deep wounds where some of those things had been attached to me, and now I am choosing to care. And the thing I find that I care the most about actually at this part of my life and hopefully from here on out, is loving.
CW: Oh. Good stuff, my friend.
SH: I’ve loved this conversation. Do you have a good closing for us?
CW: Yeah let’s give Nadia Bolz Weber the closing. Why not? And this is what she says, “Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’ lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside blessing. All the accidental saints in this world, especially those who, that world like ours, didn’t seem to have much time for people in pain. People who work for peace instead of prophet people who exercise mercy instead of vengeance. Maybe Jesus was simply blessing the ones around him that day who didn’t otherwise receive blessing, who had come to believe that for them blessings would never be in the cards. I mean, come on. Doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do?
Extravagantly throwing around blessings as though they grew on trees?”
SH: Good. Good. Beautiful stuff. Thank you so much.
CW: Well, I, we didn’t give it 18 weeks, Susan.
SH: No we didn’t.
CW: We gave it a solid hour. We gave it an hour. Yes. Thank you for showing up and having this convo with me.
SH: Thanks for inviting me into it. It really has given me so much to think about. More to come.
CW: I know. Yep. More to come.
Voicemail 1: Hi, my name is Lori. The LDS concept of sin has had a big impact on my life. As a newborn, I was adopted into a loving LDS home. I always knew I was adopted and that I had been hoped and prayed for, and my family considered my arrival to be a great blessing. However, being LDS, the idea of sin was clearly taught, from a classic hymn, “Choose the Right,” scriptures like, “wickedness was never happiness,” and the “wages of sin is death.”
There was a very clear line between righteous choices and happiness and sin and misery. The way I internalized these teachings was that my very existence had come from sin, and thus I deserved a life of misery. Sadly, this led to an unnecessary lifetime struggle of self-destructive thoughts and behavior.
As I began to study grace a few years ago, I came to realize that I couldn’t support the ideas of, choose the right way and be happy, I must always choose the right. I can’t know if a lifetime free of what I now look upon as cruel LDS rhetoric regarding sin would’ve meant a happier life for me. I know many people say that the LDS view on sin and repentance is freeing and loving.
I do not see it that way. I no longer have a desire to try to fit myself into a place of deserving to dwell in the presence of an LDS God. I now try to find a way to sit comfortably in the thought that as beloved creations of God. We have always been deserving of that loving place.
Voicemail 2: Hi, Susan and Cynthia. Thank you so much for everything you guys do. I’ve had a pretty crazy relationship with sin in my life because I had scrupulosity as a kid. I remember driving to go volunteer and I thought, this is my chance to finally not sin. I was afraid of sins of omission and I would sing primary songs all the way there, and I’d roll up my windows because I didn’t wanna be prideful and let people know I was singing primary songs and I wouldn’t turn on my air conditioning because that was bad for the environment. So it was also a sin. And I remember being devastated when I realized that I was still driving a car, so I was still sinning. But now as I’ve grown older and my heart has softened, I just see sin so differently. I don’t even really use that word anymore. I really like what Gregory Boyle Father Gregory Boyle says, “He says that sin is a symptom of something that’s happening.” And now when I do something that I don’t love, I sit down and I take a breath and I look inside and I find out what’s going on instead of trying to punish myself hard enough that I’ll remember not to do it next time. [01:05:00] And I treat other people that way too now. And I love it. I love being. I love having an open heart and loving people first, and if there’s a problem that maybe my kids have or something I solve, I don’t just try to make it so that they’re miserable enough that they won’t do it anymore. I try to find out what’s going on.
SH: When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up, do that again.
That doesn’t make sense. We’re in the same way. Sorry. I’m gonna do that line again.
CW: Okay. Am I not even quoting? Is this his quote or is this just me?
SH: I don’t see where the second set of,
CW: oh, I just
SH: have quotation marks
CW: are, I think you’re just
SH: him.
CW: Let me start again. That when the heart is right, seeing will be right.
Jesus says, oh, sorry.
SH: We ready?
Okay.
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