Episode 70: What About Worthiness?
Episode Transcript
Cynthia: Hello, and welcome to today's podcast episode. I'm Cynthia Winward and I'm here with my good buddy, Susan. How's it going down in Arizona today, Susan?
Susan: Hey, Cynthia, it's going better now because I'm recording a podcast! The rest of the day, we'll just—it's Monday. We'll scrap that and move on.
C: Why do we record podcasts on Monday?
S: I don't know, and why would we record a podcast on a big meaty topic on a Monday? That's just silly.
C: I don't know. I don't know.
S: We'll see how it goes..
C: Well, speaking of our topic, we're calling this episode, What About Worthiness? And I would have bet a million dollars, Susan, that we had already done this episode, or if I'm honest, like 10 episodes on—
S: Right?
C: —worthiness. Because I have such strong feelings about it. And the only one who probably can match my strong feelings is you. You might even have stronger feelings about this topic. But—we haven't done this yet. So I'm going to go ahead and talk about worthiness, and because I'm not so sure that we know how to be diplomatic about it—that's my caveat upfront is this might expose our Achilles heel, big time, Susan! This just might be the topic that, I don't want to say takes us down, but we might need some chocolate cake after this episode.
S: Yeah, we'll see.
C: So why don't you go ahead and kick us off today with introducing our topic, please?
S: Well, you know, when you're going to talk about worthiness and you say you can't believe we haven't already recorded 10 episodes on this—I mean, we have talked about things like grace a lot, and so you're often talking around worthiness, when you're talking about things in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A lot of things touch on this word. And so it's high time that we took this on. You know, worthiness is—or I think of it as being—the quality of being ‘good enough.’
C: Oooh.
S: But good enough for what, Cynthia, and good enough for whom, right? I mean, how do we assess whether or not we're good enough, except by comparing ourselves to others? You know, it's only in comparison to others—
C: True.
S: —that we normally think about that. And how can that ever give us an accurate picture of our bottom line worth to, say, our parents?
C: Hmmm.
S: It can't, right? I mean, could comparison to others ever help us fully understand our intrinsic worth?
C: Nope.
S: No, I don't really see how it could. There's a scene in one of my favorite movies that I thought of immediately when we said we were going to do this topic and it's Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom. And in the scene, the boy's dog has been killed. And as they stand looking down on this little dog's body, one of his friends says, "Was he a good dog?"
And the boy's answer is one of my favorite moments in all of film. He says, "Who's to say?" I mean, who is to say whether or not a dog is a good dog, right? With such limited understanding of the ways of dogs—we're not dogs, Cynthia—we don't know what it is to be a dog. So how could a human being possibly make that determination?
Is the dog who bites when he's defending his territory a good dog? What about the dog who pees all over your house? Right? What about the dog who steals whole sandwiches off your kitchen counter? (I've had that dog by the way.) What about the dog who eats your homework? It's a ridiculous question! All dogs are good and bad dogs, right? All dogs are just dogs. They're just dogs.
And all dogs have the capacity to make someone else feel loved. It's one of their best qualities. All dogs rely on some kind of grace for their survival—someone's feeding them, or nature is—something. Dogs are by turns greedy, selfish, loving, loyal, giving, thieving. It sounds kind of like people, doesn't it? So the idea of dog worthiness is, to me, a good window into the contemplation of my own worthiness, because it's kind of ludicrous.
It's kind of ludicrous, but worthiness as a concept gets really big play in our church. We're taught from the time that we're young to pursue worthiness for ourselves, right? And then when we have children, we're definitely encouraged to give everything we have in the attempt to train it into our children.
C: Yup.
S: To the extent that many parents would turn away from children they deem unworthy, before they would give up on trying to "beat" worthiness into them, basically. I mean, this gets very outsized play in our culture, in my opinion.
And that's where the worthiness wheels came off for me, was with parenting, because I realized when my own children suddenly became less worthy in the eyes of my church and its members, and even the people who loved them—
C: Wow.
S: —even the people who loved them, then I knew that they were exactly 0% less worthy in my eyes as their mother. Zero. And it was really destabilizing for me to realize that I was expected to see my own children as being less worthy somehow. I simply couldn't. I couldn't see them that way.
C: No wonder the wheels came off!
S: Exactly!
C: Gosh, Susan.
S: Well, I knew their worth, I think any—well, I can't say any parent, but many parents—who've had children leave the church will know what I'm talking about. That suddenly everyone pities your children or feels sorry for them, or doesn't care about what other accomplishments they're doing in their life, right? They just think—they just assume—you feel so bad that your children aren't in the Church. It's like they stop celebrating all of the other wonderful things about your children. Your children are suddenly less worthy. And so this led me to really Big Questions (capital B capital Q), about the ways that I had been taught to think about my own worthiness and definitely about the way that word gets thrown around at church .
C: Yeah.
S: Brene Brown says, "Worthiness doesn't have prerequisites." And I love that line, but I have been taught that there are many prerequisites to worthiness. Do you feel that way? Do you—is that your understanding?
C: Of course!
S: I mean, worthiness is just—
C: The water we swim in!
S: it's all prerequisites. Some of them are explicit and some are less so. I mean, some are actually so explicit as to be quantified into a list of questions that I answer to receive a physical card, right, that certifies my worthiness! And some are murkier, cultural things that don't impact my card, but they do impact the ways that other members perceive me and talk about me behind my back and that kind of thing. Worthiness makes good gossip fodder sometimes.
Sometimes it has felt to me like in our church—here's the bottom line—sometimes it has felt to me like the only real question that matters to anyone is: Was she a good dog? Like, that's the only question anyone answers. And that's a problem for me because that's a question I don't even really believe deserves to be a question.
C: I was at church yesterday and after church I was exiting and I saw a friend, and I know that all of her children have left the church. And I asked her specifically about one of her children in particular, by name. And I said, how's she doing? And she kinda gave me a little update. And she said, "Thank you for asking. Nobody asks."
Nobody asks. Because you're right—we care so much about the worthiness question that once we think we have that figured out, what else do we need to know about a person?
S: What else is there?
C: What else is there that we need to even know? It's—I haven't been able to stop thinking about that. It kind of broke my heart.
You said that worthiness as a concept gets big play in the Church. That's an understatement—like, huge understatement because in preparation for this, I went through the Church handbook and I did a search on the word worthy. And it's mentioned 69 times in the Church Handbook of Instructions.
S: Get right outta town.
C: So to say that we give it big play? It really is an understatement. It is, like I said, it's the water we swim in. It's very, very important to us in our church. So let's jump in.
S: Okay. We have a few points that we decided to unpack around this word and this concept. And the first one is that we need a better word, Cynthia! I just feel like we need a better word. Words matter.
C: Amen.
S: And worthiness is tied to worth. It's got worth right there in the beginning of it. It leads with worth. So, you know, I mean, it's a terrible thing to me to suggest that we somehow earn our worth, right? Isn't it damaging to have to earn worth for ourselves? Or to demand it from others? To demand other people earn their worth? I'm not sure that worthiness can ever not be a flawed concept for me at church, because I believe that the word itself is fundamentally flawed.
C: Well…it's not even a word! Like you and I were laughing as we were preparing our Google doc and putting our notes in here, and the word worthiness kept getting underlined by Google in that blue squiggle line, because it's like, "Uh, not a word! Choose a different word!" It's like, yeah, I know. I know it's not a word, but you gotta be Mormon.
S & C: 'Cause then…it's a word!
S: Yeah. So I would like a better word. So that's something we can think of as we go along and hopefully some might occur to us.
It's always a problem for me too, to set one group of people up as judges over another group. How does that ever end well?
C: You have said this before!
S: Well, I don't believe that people are capable of seeing one another's hearts. And I don't believe that they're capable of completely seeing past their own biases. Maybe I should say it this way: I'm not capable of seeing past my own biases, Cynthia.
C: Right, right. Let's just both admit it.
S: I'm not capable of it. And I don't see other people's hearts. I wish I did sometimes, but I don't have that capability. So it's a problem.
C: Well, I don't think anyone would disagree with this, that two different bishops will determine the same woman worthy or unworthy. You know, we all hear that term 'bishop roulette,' right? And I think that's real because we're human, we're just human. And so who is right? Which bishop is right? The person that gives her the recommend, the person that won't give her the recommend? You know, why should the human frailties of one man determine the covenants that I get to make? Why?
And going back to the handbook, I said, you know, I was reading it in preparation for this, and reading the handbook, it's even stipulated a couple of times that bishops and stake presidents need to be—and it used the word—satisfied that someone is worthy. I mean, can you think of a more subjective word than satisfied?
S: No! I hate that word.
C: No! Every night my husband has a bowl of ice cream and it satisfies him. I do not eat ice cream when it is cold, it would not satisfy me. It would upend my life because I would sit there and shiver for the next two hours. So satisfy is probably the most subjective word when it comes to ice cream and probably when it comes to worthiness.
And I just couldn't understand how that—I don't know, I'm just going to say it—got past the editors of the handbook, that it could actually have this as a sentence: Quote, "the leader does not proceed with readmission until he is satisfied that the person has repented and is ready and worthy."
S: Wow.
C: I'm kind of speechless about us using the word satisfied to determine—to determine a person's worthiness, Susan. So let's just move on from that. 'Cause it's awful.
S: Cynthia, you mentioned people determining what covenants you can make, you know, someone else being responsible to determine that. And it made me think of maybe my first substitute word. My first substitute word has occurred to me. And it's one of your favorites, ‘willingness.’ Willingness.
C: Hm…I like it!
S: What about people who are willing to make those covenants, shouldn't that be the determining factor?
C: Oh, yeah. That's beautiful.
S: Well, I'm not sure anybody else thinks it is, but it just occurred to me. We'll see if we can think of more words. I want more words.
You know, it's telling of a flawed power structure for me, that a woman's worthiness is always dependent on certification by a man.
C: Um hm.
S: I can't talk about this without pausing there for a moment.
C: Oh yeah! It's never, ever the other way around.
S: Right.
C: Or it's never, ever a woman determining another woman's worthiness. Like what would that be like, to have women be in charge of women even? I don't know. I'm just daring to dream here! That would be wonderful.
S: Well, 'judges in Israel,' and all that. Uh, and we're not, but that's problematic for me. So I just wanted to put that idea out there. It seems impossible to me to develop any kind of healthy love of self when our spiritual worth is measured in external validation.
C: Good point.
S: I sometimes feel like the church doors may as well have marks up and down both sides. You know, when you stand up to the door frame and your parents mark how tall you are?
C: Yes.
S: I feel like that's what the church doors may as well have on them, where we step up to get measured by each other every Sunday. Somehow that's what it's felt like to me..
C: I don't think you're wrong in feeling that way. We have that famous talk by Pres. Uchtdorf, where he says that there's no sign saying your testimony must be this tall to enter. Do you remember that talk? But—I mean, I agree with him completely, there is no sign saying it has to be this tall to enter—but I feel like once we're inside, we definitely measure how you'll be able to participate.
And so I like your use of the word 'willing,' because if people are just showing up, showing up means they're willing. So let them in, let them participate. And quit worrying about whether they're good enough.
S: Showing up means their willingness is ‘this tall,’ and this is how much willingness you need. You need to show up. That's the willingness.
C: Here's another phrase, instead of worthiness, and I've heard it for a couple of years now: the phrase 'spiritually ready.'
S: Oh, I like that.
C: Yeah, not bad, right? So instead of saying worthy to enter the temple, use the phrase 'spiritually ready' to enter the temple. And I think that's loads better. At least that's a completely different word than worthy, right? Because that's just so problematic, like we've been discussing. And so I like the word 'ready' rather than 'worth.' I mean, even then, I don't see how any human can determine someone else's readiness, but I think it's better than what we have now.
S: Right. Well, I think it is too, and it speaks more to something that the person can judge for themselves or know for themselves, right? They know when they're ready, they can assess their own readiness, their own willingness.
C: That's a good point.
S: And this, this is why—and I've told you this before, probably about a million times—but I think the last question of the temple recommend interview is the important question. It's probably the only real question.
C: Years ago, that was the question I stumbled over, Susan.
S: Really?
C: Like I felt like I could answer all the questions correctly, and then I would get to that last one. And I would audibly say to the bishopric member, I would say, ooh, that's a hard one! Because whoever is—do they ever feel completely worthy? Like I said, we swim in this water so much that I wasn't even sure that I was worthy!
S: Am I worthy? Right. Yeah.
C: Yeah. I mean, that was years ago. Now I feel a hundred percent like you do, like that last question should probably be the only question answered to go into the temple, but you and I are not in charge, so it is not up to us.
S: We're not in charge, but we do get to have the discussion.
C: We do! We can talk about it all we want.
S: Uh, next point. And this is something that I think about a lot and it comes from something my husband said to me once, but Cynthia, who wants a God that loves me less than I love my own children?
C: That's one of my favorite things you've said to me.
S: Yeah, I don't want that. Who wants that? I don't know. My love for my children may be the only thing in my life that I've consistently known for sure. I know that every day and all the time, and I don't have any control over it, right? It just arrived with them. It just is. And if that's not the nature of truth, then I don't really know what truth would be.
C: Well, here's the thing. I'm pretty sure that you could still be in the same room, probably even give your kids a hug and a kiss, with a child that was in jail, right? You would show up on visitor's day and you would be so proud to just be in the same room with them and to love them and to be with them.
S: Yes.
C: So to think that God loves less than we puny weak humans can love a child in jail—I think it's ridiculous.
S: Yeah.
C: It just does not compute in my brain. People—I mean, and I know that people are going to hear this, and they're going to say, well, God can't love you less, but you can't live with him. You can't be with him. You know, that's that whole 'no unclean thing can dwell in his presence' idea. I mean, first of all, people aren't things, so I have a hard time with that scripture, but that just doesn't make sense either way to me. If grace is what makes us clean, and I think we're all on board as far as believing that it's the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ that makes us clean and makes us—I'm not going to say worthy because we're trying not to say that—
S: I was waiting!
C: —but it makes us okay in his eyes. I mean, so aren't we covered either way? I mean, either God can stand to be with his unclean kids, or the grace of Jesus makes us clean.
S: So that we can be there.
C: And so either way, we're all good. Yeah. We're kind of all good. And I looked up in the handbook, speaking of, you know, unclean. It said, "The Lord said that no unclean thing can inherit the kingdom of heaven. Our sins make us unclean, unworthy to dwell in the presence of our Heavenly Father."
So this isn't just like you and me being extra sensitive. This is explicit to us, is that if you are unworthy, you can not be with our Heavenly Parents.
S: Yeah, but there's an atonement for that.
C: Uh, we forget that, I guess! We forget the whole crux of the gospel! Yeah.
S: As Latter-day Saints, we really, really love the idea that the things we're doing are super important. We love doing things. Beehive State, and all that, right?
C: Beehives! We are bees.
S: So here I would like to stop and posit that doing things to be worthy does not—that's not what makes us worthy. That doesn't make us worthy.
C: Gasp!
S: I know that I'm gonna be in trouble for saying that, but I'm going to give you a little bit of a scriptural sort of backup on that. I was thinking about Matthew 25 verses 34-40, and that's where the sheep and goats are being separated, right? And in those scriptures, the righteous weren't doing good things because they knew that it earned them brownie points. They didn't even really seem to understand that they were earning any points. And I just want to read you what those scriptures say:
“Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
They didn't know! They didn't know that they were serving God in doing those things. They didn't know that they were racking up brownie points with their good deeds. They were just good-deed-doers. I don't know…is there value in doing right things for wrong reasons? I mean, what if you did think you were earning brownie points and that's why you did all the good things in your life? Um, maybe there's still value in that, you may—you know, you've still lived a good life and probably served a lot of people. But in my mind, it probably doesn't have the same transformational power for you.
C: No, of course not.
S: Because, you know, seeking God because we want to be rewarded is not the same as seeking God because we want to heal or be healed. Those are fundamentally different things. And the resulting relationship is completely different.
C: Yeah. Doing things for the wrong—doing good things for the wrong reason, maybe that could be a first step? Maybe the training wheels?
S: Yes, exactly. That's the training wheels! That's the training wheels.
C: But you're right that training wheels don't transform a person. So yeah, at some point, those training wheels need to come off. We need to do the right thing for the right reasons. I think that list that you read through that scripture, that list that Jesus runs through, it's really quite telling. He didn't say, if you believe this, or if you avoided coffee, then you're okay in my book. His list was: visiting sinners, and clothing the poor. Basically, alleviating the mental and physical suffering of others.
S: Right.
C: Others. So if there is a qualification to be with God, to be deemed quote/unquote worthy, then that's the list I can get behind. Thinking of others, alleviating their suffering. The end.
S: Exactly. It probably—if there is a qualification, it's not thinking about yourself and all the good things you're doing.
C: Right. The opposite.
S: All of this is centered in others.
C: Right. And side note, you know me saying that, this isn't an admission that I drink coffee. I don't—I actually find great value in the Word of Wisdom, but not because it makes me a better person or more qualified to be in the temple. And that kind of leads me to—I had read this great article called, Rethinking Worthiness, on the blog By Common Consent. And I just want to read this one section of it. She said:
“But the flip side of worthiness is dark. The consequences of falling short of the worthiness minimum standard of perfection are terrifying. Temple recommends, marriage sealings, saving ordinances, employment, college degrees, housing, callings, families, friendships, acceptance in the ward community – it’s all at stake if we admit we’ve failed to live up to the Church’s standards. If we fail to check specific boxes, the church claims the authority to cast us out from the body of Christ.”
C: If you can't earn grace, Susan, and you can't, by definition, grace is a free gift that you can't earn, then doing good things to make myself more worthy to be with God is futile. And I'm not saying that being a good girl isn't important, I'm saying it's not important to being worthy of God's help or influence or love because we can never take that away.
We are—I truly believe we are—divine. It was my favorite Young Women's value, Divine Nature. It was my favorite. And if there was one thing I wanted to pound into the girls' heads, it was that you are divine. You are divine. You've got this, you've got this.
S: Well, Cynthia, if they believe you, once we see this inherent worthiness in ourselves, then I have to believe that we're a lot better able to see it in others also.
C: Oh, it should lead to that.
S: It should change the way that we think about people. In changing the way that we think about ourselves, we transform the way that we see others. So, you know, if we have to earn our worthiness, then we'll expect everyone else to have to earn it too.
And as I think about that, you know, basically…there goes empathy, right? There goes acceptance. There goes seeing as God sees. Because we think everyone's problems are their own fault, and that if they want to be worthy, they could—if they want to be as worthy as I am, they could, right?
C: Right.
S: But that's goodbye to love, at that point.
C: It kind of is.
S: I have a quote from Anne Lamott, from her book, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, that I just love. And she says this:
“We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side....”
C: Oh, that's such an Anne quote.
S: I know, I know. Well, I feel pretty dusky and dappled most of the time.
C: Dusky and dappled.
S: So yeah. That speaks to the truth of what I am and what others are. But once I've accepted my own worth, then I'm—I have to accept theirs also, and it changes everything.
C: It reminds me of our most famous of LDS scriptures ever, is that 'the worth of souls,' right? The worth of souls is great. So our worth is an innate part of our creation. So whether we're dusky and dappled, you can't change our worth. You just can't.
S: Maybe part of the problem is that we have all of these confusing, contradictory scriptures. What about that?
C: Oh my goodness! We could do a whole 'nother hour on that.
S: Beause let's talk about Romans 23 and 24 for a minute:
"For all, have sinned and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus."
And then if you drop down to verse 28, "A man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law." Right? So no matter how good we are, we're never going to save ourselves.
C: In researching for this topic, I pretty much ran against two trains of thought throughout our scriptures about worthiness, and I'll share them with you. First, either grace makes us all worthy, just like those scriptures you just read in Romans, or second, nobody is worthy except Jesus himself, which is kind of what king Benjamin was talking about.
S: Right, right.
C: So either way, it becomes problematic, I think, in our LDS culture, when we humans think that we can decide who is worthy based on what someone is doing or not doing. I mean, our practice of doing that, it seems to go against scripture, to me anyway. And I have another quote that I wanted to read about that, from that same By Common Consent article.
S: I'm going to link to that in our show notes.
C: Yeah, and they don't give her full name in the article, but I believe her name is Carolyn. And she said—background, she is an LDS woman. She was marrying a Catholic man and they were going through, I think, like pre-marriage counseling with his priest—and she said this:
“When my Catholic husband and I started dating, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ “worthy” vocabulary was one of the first things he flagged as distinctively jarring. He insisted that no works of ours make us “worthy” of Christ’s grace. For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”
Just like that scripture you just read. So I think that's really interesting that, you know, when you pair a Latter-day Saint together with a Catholic and he starts learning a little bit about our doctrine, he's going to be like, uhhh, this is kind of a red flag for me. So I thought that was really, really quite interesting.
And speaking of other people not of our faith, there's a pastor and his name is Benjamin Perry, and this tweet of his has been going all around social media. Maybe you've seen it. And he says:
"Do not deny anyone communion. Ever. Communion is not a reward. It is not a privilege for the righteous. It is an invitation to step towards God's table where everyone has enough and everyone a place. Remember: Jesus fed Judas."
I actually used that line this morning as I was talking to my husband about what we were recording. And and we were kind of arguing, kind of going back and forth about, you know, should the sacrament be withheld from quote/unquote ‘sinners?’ And finally, I just kinda shut the conversation down by saying that Jesus fed Judas, you know? He did. So clearly it's not about worthiness. Not a reward, like Benjamin Perry says. It's an invitation to step towards God. That's it.
S: I'm really puzzling about this though. I'm really puzzling, as I'm listening to you talk about this, about where this idea got started for us.
C: Oh, I have no idea.
S: Where did this idea gets started? I can't—I mean, I don't know. A historian might be able to point at a moment in Church history when this—or a theologian might be able to trace, you know, the roots of it into other religions that existed at the time that ours was founded, but I'm not sure. I don't know enough about other religions to really know where this idea came from. But we do believe that being with God—that being in relationship with God—is a privilege, as I think about it. Because if you want the Holy Ghost to be with you, you need to be worthy, right?
C: Uh huh.
S: If you want exaltation and not just eternal life—if you want exaltation, to actually be with God—you gotta be worthy, Right? Everybody gets resurrected, but not everybody gets to be in relationship with God at that point.
C: Right. That's completely different then.
S: And so that is completely different from this idea that Jesus fed Judas, and that it's an invitation—that it's an invitation to come to God, rather than, you know, a privilege or a reward. Something that you've earned.
C: Yeah. Willing, reaching, inviting, those are completely—
S: They're different.
C: —completely different. Yeah, completely different.
S: So I'm not sure how we can bridge the divide here, because there—that's something I'm going to have to think more about. We may have to have a follow-up worthiness episode after we’ve pondered this question a little bit. Because like in the conversation that you had with your husband, you said, you know, you were able to shut it down by saying Jesus fed Judas, because—mic drop—it's a great line!
C: Well I had just read it in a tweet the day before.
S: Right. But I think many members would say, but—but! Because relationship with God is deemed a privilege. Taking the sacrament is deemed a privilege in our church.
C: It is a privilege in our church. And I'm just going on record as saying that I don't think it should be. I think—I mean, I've said this before—our sacrament prayer has the word willing in it, and it means more to me than anything, that I'm showing up with an outstretched palm that is open, saying, "Feed me." And why would we ever take that away from someone? I don't know.
C: So Susan, I was listening to an old Robcast episode the other day. You and I love Rob Bell, right? So you can't go wrong. Listening to his old episodes from years ago. And he has a series called Wisdom, and he has different parts. And I was listening to Alternative Wisdom, Part One, and we'll link to that. And it's from April, 2017. And it stopped me in my tracks because I was like, wait…what? He's calling us out! And yet, of course I know he's not calling us—our church—out. He's calling out worthiness period.
S: The larger 'us,' right?
C: Oh, there you go, the larger 'us.' And I wanted to go ahead and read a few paragraphs that I transcribed from his podcast, if that's okay. He says:
"If Jesus wisdom, if Alternative Wisdom, was simply an announcement that, ‘Hey, all the good people are in! Hey, God loves all of the 4.0s!’ that wouldn’t be anything new because that’s how the world works. Jesus Wisdom—Gospel Announcement kind of Wisdom—is about a completely different wiring. It’s in that exact moment when you have been stripped of all of the things that you were relying on to prop yourself up and make yourself feel good about yourself. It is exactly in that moment when all those things are gone, and you’re hungry and thirsty and blind, that you hear: ‘You’re okay. You’re loved. You’re a child of the divine. Can you trust that? Can you trust that?’
“The Jesus Tradition (meaning religion) took Jesus Wisdom, and because it’s so foreign to our ears, because it is such the opposite of how the world works, it took this tradition and just turned it into another law, into transactionalism, which is: If you believe the right stuff, then you’re in. If you live the right way, then it kicks into the gear. Not just that but then You then have to believe that other people aren’t. It’s not just the ‘in-ness,’ it’s also the ‘out-ness.’
“Religion…often turned Gospel Alternative Wisdom—the good announcement is that it is in your loss, your failure, your emptiness, your death, that you’re actually found, saved, loved, valued—and it turned it into another transaction. ‘If you just do the right deeds. If you’re just with the right group and not the wrong group.’ It’s not a transaction. It’s an announcement of what has been true the whole time.
“So for those of you haunted, on a regular basis, by the sense of ‘not good enough-ness,’ Gospel Wisdom—Jesus Wisdom—is what meets you in exactly that moment. Not with shame and condemnation, but with the idea that nothing can separate you from this love. With ‘nothing you could ever do could separate you from the love of the divine’. It meets you with, ‘Wait—you didn’t think there was a point system?’ That’s the whole point of what Jesus is doing. God is throwing out the point system. We’re not doing the law here. We’re doing grace. We’re doing gospel.
“And for so many people their understanding of gospel was so shaped by law and transaction that when they hear actual gospel it sounds wrong, it sounds heretical, it sounds too good to be true. Because it’s so alternative. And it’s so different. And it’s so counterintuitive. And my friends, it’s so life changing. It’s so life changing."
S: Oh, Cynthia. Thank you. Thank you, Rob Bell. It is meant to be so life-changing, and so I guess, until you're changed by it, maybe you haven't really met it yet, you know? I don't know. I've said on podcasts before that the 'Good News' never felt like good news to me. I'm sure you and I have talked about that before. Um, I just couldn't understand what people thought was so good about it, right? It didn't—I don't know. What's so good about an endless to do list that, even after you do it all, you're still going to fall short? Like, how is that good? And, you know, people are also going to be judging you all the time while you are running as fast as you can. I don't know. It sort of feels to me like a long, slow process of watching yourself losing a race, you know? Like you're only ever seeing the backs of all the people who are slightly ahead of you at church.
That's what I feel like because in our church—and when I say our church, I'm going to say the church, meaning the larger church. It's all organized churches, I think, it's not just ours. We're not that special, but—there's always going to be someone who appears to be slightly ahead of you in some way, either by the callings they have, or, you know, the titles they have, or whatever it is. They're just slightly better at it than you are.
The good news—as I misunderstood it, I can now see—felt demoralizing to me. It didn't feel energizing. It felt hopeless, and pointless. It felt like something that I not only couldn't live up to, but something that I didn't even have any interest in because I couldn't feel the love that I craved so desperately in it.
I couldn't feel love in it. If that sounds really cynical, we can leave that right on the cutting room floor, but it's really honest.
C: Yeah, yeah.
S: And then, kind of like Rob Bell says, I recognized actual good news when it happened in my life, and it didn't have anything to do with my needing to become more worthy. Instead it had everything to do with who I am already, right now. You know, I hung around with my ear pressed up against God's door long enough to finally, finally hear someone speaking my language and saying something that I could understand. Saying something that I could feel. And thank goodness, because honestly, Cynthia, I could easily have wandered away and never looked back.
C: But that's what I feel when I heard those words from Rob Bell. I felt the goodness.
S: Yes, yes!
C: I felt the goodness of God. I felt, you know, as he calls it, 'Jesus Wisdom.' And I really like that he gave me permission to be like, look, this sounds crazy to you. And it's not—it's not just me—but I felt like he was talking to me because when you hear it, when you finally get grace, it does sound so crazy! You're like, this sounds too easy. This sounds like a get out of jail card free. Like this—you know what I mean? And he was right. That's exactly where my brain went. And I've talked before about that on the podcast before, you know that sometimes that's where our brain goes immediately. It's like, well then what's the point of being good? What's the point of being good?
S: Exactly.
C: He goes on in the rest of the podcast to talk about the purpose of good deeds. And so if people are interested, they can go and listen to that. But I love your analogy of, you had your ear pressed to the door for so long, trying to hear what you needed to hear.
S: Yeah, and when I heard grace, it felt true in my bones.
C: Same, same, same.
S: Worthiness never felt good. It never felt good to me. But grace, I feel—I feel that in my bones.
C: Yeah, but I think sometimes we have to—like, Rob Bell said—we kind of have to get to that low place before we're like, okay, fine. Okay, fine. I'll listen to actual 'Jesus Wisdom,' and not just the rules of this church. Any church, Any system, any organization that tells us that we have to run on that hamster wheel to keep trying to get something that was always ours to begin with. Our worth. It was always ours, it was always there.
S: It's always there.
C: I'm going to get personal for a minute here. I feel like sometimes, Susan, this podcast, I kind of divulge a lot about myself on it, but—
S: We all do.
C: I know, but I get sweaty in my armpits when I start thinking about maybe some of the things I'm going to talk about, but here it goes anyway, I never cease to be amazed—and we've said this before, and we're going to say it again on the podcast—at what can trigger faith crises or transitions or whatever we're going to call it. And rarely is it what we're told in church, in my experience of the hundreds of stories that you and I have heard. It's never that people want to sin.They're lazy learners. They didn't read their scriptures.
S: Nope.
C: For me, I was doing all those things, all the good things I was supposed to be doing, but for me, it was the concept of worthiness. That's what started the crumbling of it all. Not 'it all...'
S: Well, I mean, it did for me, too! As I said, that's when the wheels came off for me. It was around worthiness.
C: Well, yeah!
S: So that's interesting that we'd both come to it from this place.
C: That's why we're pals.
S: Okay, tell me more. Tell me more.
C: Well, and I never called it a crisis because if anything, I felt like once I started to deconstruct worthiness, my faith in God and Jesus seemed to get stronger as I started to unravel worthiness. And I think that's a good thing. And it didn't ever really feel de-stabilizing to me—I know it can for some people, and so I don't know why it didn't for me—but it didn't, thankfully. And the way I used to see worthiness is I always took it at face value, meaning exactly what the Church taught me, meaning what you do makes you worthy.
S: Right.
C: And so before, kind of my 'faith transition,' I never would have questioned what we are talking about today. I would probably be one of those people, maybe I wouldn't leave the comments? We get comments on social media saying, "This is baffling to me!" Right? We just had someone use the word baffling yesterday. And so I would probably be one of those persons that said, "This is baffling to me! You know, I don't—why is worthiness such a big deal for you?"
S: "Why is this bothering anyone?"
C: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you do what you're supposed to do and you'll be fine. To me that was worthiness: Do what you're supposed to do, and you'll be fine. But the problem is, all of our lives are tangled up in other lives. And so my choices aren't just my choices. They affect other people's choices for good and for ill, right? And every one of us knows someone who is baptized or confirmed, or maybe like, a person getting sealed—they weren't worthy to be sealed in the temple. You know, we've all heard the stories about the cute little young couple that messed up the week before, and they went anyway, and whatever. And so, here's an example: If a man isn't worthy to baptize his child, but does so anyway, we say that the ordinance counts because God is merciful and he wouldn't punish this child, right? I mean, it's not his fault that his dad was drinking beer every day or whatever. So we show mercy looking back.
S: Right, right.
C: So why can't we show the same mercy looking forward? So if an ordinance, like baptism or sealing, if it's always going to count whether the person officiating is worthy or not, then is worthiness even a thing? Like this is kind of where everything started crumbling for me. Is it made up? Why not let a dad baptize his kid, instead of shaming? I mean, I was talking about this with my brother actually, because he went through this very thing—and he gave me permission to say this that, you know, he likes to drink a beer every once in a while, when he works out on the car. He's a big gear head. And so the bishop was like, Well, you know, how about you set this back a couple of months? How about you don't baptize your son until you can work on this?
And I just think that, why should the child have to wait and be embarrassed? And my sister-in-law be embarrassed, and like—why couldn't the bishop just say, Hey, let's keep working on this together and go ahead and schedule your son's baptism for this Sunday. Why couldn't the mercy be shown looking forward?
Now, this is my opinion. Ironically, my husband was like, Actually, I agreed with the bishop, and we don't have time to get into all of that. Because it was really interesting, as I talked to my brother and as I talked to my husband, both who have been in the Bishop's office and have had to try to, you know, reconcile things in their past that they wanted to do better at, both of them agreed. So I know we're not—we don't have time to go in that direction—but maybe another time I'd like to explore, do men do better with the whole 'worthiness/punishments from a bishop' rather than women, because there's a power dynamic between men? And I don't know, but I thought—anyway, that was just a little side note.
But in this conversation with my brother, he was telling me about when he was a missionary and they were about to baptize a woman, and she was a smoker. And they said, Okay, you need to be two weeks without smoking before you can get baptized. And a week before her baptism, she said, I messed up. I smoked a cigarette. And they said, Sorry, the clock starts over. You have to be two weeks smoke-free. And this was back in the early nineties and I'm not sure what it is now. And I said to my brother, so of course smoking isn't a good thing. It's not good for our health. But do you think God cares if someone is a smoker before they covenant to be part of his flock? To be part of the body of Christ? And my brother was like, That's a great question. I don't know the answer to that.
But Susan, I don't think God cares if someone is a smoker. Like why—why smoking versus someone who's emotionally abusive to their children?
S: Right.
C: I mean, we don't make someone go two weeks without saying unkind things to someone before they—and yet, what's a bigger deal? I think it's a bigger deal to be emotionally abusive. And yet, you know, Word of Wisdom is such a big dealio in our church that that's kind of where we have a definite line in the sand. And I'm not—I'm really upset by that. Like, it really does upset me, these arbitrary markers.
S: So that kind of started the great unraveling.
C: It did!
S: Okay.
C: It started the great unraveling for me. And there's more to the story than that—
S: Sure, of course.
C: —but that's what started it, Susan. That's what started the ball rolling down—the snowball—and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. So we'll just leave it at that for now.
S: Well, I have no answer to any of those questions. I don't have any answer to any of those really, you know, very specific and policy-oriented questions, and all that kind of stuff. But the great unraveling for me came because I did get an answer about worthiness. And I realized in the answer that I had worthiness all wrong, my whole life, as a result of being in the Church. Because the answer that came to me was that I am known and loved by God.
I got that answer for the first time in my life in my fifties. In my fifties. And that's when I realized that my ideas about worthiness—um, what I'm going to call my extremely immature training-wheel-ideas about worthiness—were preventing me from having a relationship with God for 50 years. For 50 years. I had to have that unraveling in order to step into the relationship that I'd been seeking and desiring.
It was my own flawed understanding, but, it, you know—that fundamentally changed my approach to everything. So while I have no answers to any kind of concrete questions in terms of what worthiness means to my church, I do have an answer for me about what my worthiness means to my God. And that has to be enough for me at this point.
C: As you're speaking, it reminds me of—we've said this quote before by Terry Tempest Williams on the podcast—"Our undoing is also our becoming."
S: Yes.
C: And I'd like to think that the undoing, or the unraveling, of worthiness, for you and for me, is what has allowed us to become better disciples of Jesus Christ. I believe that, I really—for myself, and I'm only speaking for myself right now—I believe that. And that's why I said I didn't call it a faith crisis because for me it was like the scales fell off my eyes and I was like—
S: Yes, yes!
C: Oh—this is Grace!
S: Yes. It was a quantum leap forward in my faith!
C: Yes!
S: So no, I also don't call it a faith crisis.
C: Yeah.
S: It was understanding it for the first time.
C: As we've been preparing this episode for a week or so, and we've been talking daily about it, we kept saying to each other, wait, wait—this keeps coming back to grace! We just keep coming back over and over and over to grace.
S: Right. Circling back.
C: And I don't know if we can have worthiness and grace get along together and play together in the same room. I just don't.
S: I'm not totally sure that we can. I think we need a different word. We might be able to find a different word that can play better with grace. Because Cynthia, I really truly believe that there are no human levels of worthiness. Glennon Doyle has a quote that I'd like to share here about this, where she said:
“Christianity asserts that God made himself human. Those are two different categories—two different levels of worthiness. God is one category, and human is another. That’s a downgrade. After that jump, there are no more categories—no more downgrades. There are no human levels of worthiness. There is no hierarchy in God’s eyes.”
And it made me think of the scripture, Matthew 6:27 that says, "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?"
You know—
C: That's a smackdown scripture.
S: I love that scripture! It's such a great one, to be reminded that we can't make ourselves better than we are. Jesus Christ can make us better than we are, but without Jesus Christ, we're just humans and we are all boringly the same. And so when was ranking ourselves above others, you know, ever going to be the answer?
In a theology of eternal progression, which I believe we have, where we stand in relation to anyone else is meaningless, isn't it? I mean, how tall we are into today, in relation to any kind of height requirement, won't keep us from becoming. That gift, of the potential to become, has already been freely given to us.
Can we end with a little—a line by Chieko Okazaki?
C: Oh, never a better idea than to end with Chieko! Go for it.
S: Chieko said this: "The good news of the gospel is that who we are is okay. Our best is good enough. The Savior came for us—just as we are."
I want to believe it. Cynthia. It's truth to me.
C: It's truth to me as well. Thanks for showing up and discussing it with me, as always.
S: Yeah, we solved nothing, but—
C: We never do!
S: —I love going away with things to think about, and I've got plenty of those.
C: Oh, thank you so much Susan.
S: Thanks, friend.