Episode 76: Who Said You Could Do That? (Grown Women Don't Need Permission.)
Episode Transcript
C: Hello, and welcome to today's episode of At Last She Said It. I am Cynthia Winward and I'm here with Susan Hinckley, as always. Happy New year to you, Susan!
S: Happy New Year to you! It's always a good year to be doing this podcast.
C: Mmhm. Well, let's jump in! Our topic for today—well, our title for today—is, Who Told You You Could Do That? (Grown women don't need permission.) Yes. The title alone! I don't need permission, Susan. I'm not asking anyone. But this was your idea for this episode. And I'm excited. You put the document together at first, and I loved all the notes that you put in, but why don't you go ahead and give our audience a little bit of an intro why you even wanted this topic.
S: Well, we have a lot of interaction with listeners and we have recently, especially because we just did the Ask Us Anything episode. So people did ask us things, right? And sometimes we get comments or even questions from listeners that make me feel like people are saying, "Who told you, you could do that?" When we express sometimes views, or different spiritual tactics that we might use, or approaches or ideas. I sometimes feel like people are thinking, well, who told you you could do that? And I think that makes a lot of sense, because I have felt, as a Latter-day, Saint woman, I have felt 'Who told me I could do that?' lots of times.
C: A hundred percent.
S: So, I can speak from a position of having felt like I needed permission my whole life, having felt like I didn't have permission, and that holding me back spiritually. And so when a specific question came up for us recently, I wanted to do an episode to answer it. And so this is the answer to that question.
At first, I was thinking that I wanted to record an episode about prayer, and as I kind of got into thinking about it and preparing for it, I realized that actually I want to talk about a larger idea, and my experiences with prayer were really just sort of the gateway to it. So I want to talk about spiritual permission.
C: Hmm.
S: And what started my thinking about this topic was actually an email question that came before Ask Anything, it came several weeks ago. It was directed at me. And the listener asked in this email, "How do you find the balance between revering Heavenly Parents and Jesus, and also having a personal relationship with them?" She described having grown up in a home where very formal language was used for prayer. I think a lot of us grew up that way—
C: Oh yeah!
S: —using very formal language, but that language, for her, hadn't fostered relationship in the way that she wanted. She said, 'Susan, I hear you talk about relationship all the time. I'm not really sure how to get there because, you know, I've been taught to use this formal language.' And that was my experience exactly, Cynthia.
C: Same.
S: I could so relate to what she was asking. So I've talked about it on the podcast before—several years ago, I realized I was going to have to throw prayer out, as I had always known it, and rebuild something from the ground up in order to be able to move to the next step that I felt like I was being called to in my relationship with God. I could feel the pull to do it, but I didn't know how, and after chewing on it for awhile, I thought the only way I know to get there is by demolishing prayer as it has been in my life previously, and starting over with something new. And the tough thing about that, as I thought about it, was that I couldn't give myself permission to do it. I didn't know how to give myself permission to even try.
It was so hard for me to overcome everything that I'd been taught, and everything that I had practiced, all my life. I mean, we learn to pray as very, very young children, right? And we're given this specific language and format for prayer. And so I had deeply, deeply ingrained ideas and expectations about what a prayer of a Latter-day Saint looks and sounds like. It's just very deeply part of me—I don't even think about it anymore.
C: Oh, no.
S: So when I mentioned this to you, interestingly, I mentioned something that a mutual friend had said on a podcast once, and that hearing him talk about that experience was what gave me permission. And you said, "Me too!" That was a 'switch-flip' for you also. And it was hearing Matt Jones, on Dan Wotherspoon's old Mormon Matters podcast, talk about yelling at God one night while he was taking the trash out to the dumpster after work, right?
C: Yep.
S: He's talking about hauling the trash out to the dumpster, and he's yelling at God. And I don't think he had ever had an experience like that either. It just happened. He starts yelling at God, and it flipped a switch for him also, as I remember him talking about it. But the thing about this story that so had my attention was that...he'd been a Bishop!
C: Mmhm.
S: He was talking about his experiences as a Bishop on that podcast. And so there was something about a man having been a Bishop, talking about this transformational spiritual experience where he's yelling at God, that gave me permission. I don't even want to analyze that. I don't even want to analyze why I needed 1) a man, 2) who'd been a Bishop, to give me permission. Let's just say my Mormon-ness runs very deep Cynthia. But whatever—that is what it is—that gave me permission. It's like, after that, I was able to forge ahead.
C: I completely remember that episode. In fact, I also thought that was funny, when you started talking to me about your notes for this episode. I was like, wait, what? Me too! Why was this such a pivotal moment that both of us remembered this several-years-old episode, about Matt taking garbage out to a dumpster and yelling at God? I don't know. I mean, probably for all the reasons you said as well, but maybe I've told you before, or maybe on the podcast—we've been doing this podcast long enough now, we're repeating our stories, Susan—
S: Of course we are! Of course we are.
C: —I'm sure of it! But my first God-yelling experience was the day that my husband and I found out that we wouldn't be able to have biological kids. And I couldn't sleep that night, obviously. And at 2:00 a.m. I knelt down over my pink couch, and I knelt over it and I yelled at God as, like, hot tears just rolled down my face.
And Pete Enns, in The Sin of Certainty—as soon as I knew we were going to be talking about this, the line that Pete Enns says, as he calls it, the 'thanks for nothing' kind of prayer—
S: The 'thanks for nothing' prayer! I love that!
C: —yeah, that was my prayer, at 2:00 a.m. 'Thanks for nothing, God.' Like that really was my prayer. And even though I had done my own 'thanks for nothing' kind of prayer, when, you know, I was 20—early, 23, 24 years old—somehow hearing also maybe a Bishop do it, it wasn't so much that it gave me permission, but that it made me go, oh, okay. Spiritually mature people give these kinds of prayers too, not just losers like me! But someone who knows what he's up to and knows what he's doing. But here's the thing, is that I kind of thought I was being naughty and rebellious giving that kind of prayer, because we don't talk about [that] in church.
S: Right, right.
C: We just don't.
S: No. We're all about faith promoting.
C: Oh, it has to be faith promoting, yeah. So Pete Enns, he also says, "Complaining to God is a way of standing by God. Sometimes it's all we have." And I really like that because I thought, you know, when you have those 'dumpster prayers,' at the very least you have faith that someone's listening, and probably that they can take it.
So I think those really are 'standing by God' kind of prayers. And I think that, yeah, sometimes that really is all we have, and sometimes that's okay.
S: Absolutely. I mean, what are we afraid of? Are we afraid that God can't take it? Are we afraid God isn't gonna like us anymore? Are we like—I don't know. I don't know where this comes from—this inability to talk honestly to God—because let's face it, we all have times in our lives where 'thanks for nothing' is pretty much what we have to say. Just as you were talking about Pete Enns, and his kind of thinking about that, I was thinking about Anne Lamott—and I first encountered Anne Lamott's writing in the, I don't know, mid 1990s maybe? And I loved it so much—but the reason that it appealed to me so much, I think—I mean I loved it immediately. I was just drawn to it. And the reason it appealed to me so much is sort of because she had this very real way of talking about, and talking to, God, that was mesmerizing to me.
C: Well, you call it 'real.' But I think in our church we would call it irreverent.
S: We would call it irreverent, and she IS irreverent, but Cynthia, life is pretty irreverent! It just is. And certainly I am—you know me well enough to know that—that is part of who I am. And so I realized, in her writing, I realized that I had been approaching God my whole life as a sliver. A sliver of myself.
I brought almost nothing of my whole self and my whole experiences to my prayer life. No wonder it wasn't serving me.
C: Right.
S: No wonder it wasn't serving me. So when I wanted to remake it, you know, because I'm so much more comfortable expressing myself in writing than I am in speaking—I don't know, I trust my writing voice much more and I can edit, right? I can edit before I hit publish on anything—so even to God, I don't have to hit publish to God without editing first. So I'm very comfortable writing. And because of that, I decided to approach it in writing. So I did a little project—a little creative writing project—where I wrote a prayer to God every day for 30 days.
And I know that I've talked about that on the podcast before. I addressed them To Whom It May Concern. And, uh, yeah... it ended up being pretty much THE transformational experience of my faith journey. Because it got God back for me. It started a relationship and—well not got God back, got God, for the first time. It started a relationship. It was the first step into a relationship.
And after that, I mean, prayer has just kind of become an adventure for me. All kinds of things—I've talked about 'vespering' before on the podcast, where I would take these night walks, right? These prayer walks where I pretty much, um, yell or praise or whatever, at the starry sky as I walk. And those have been amazing for me. I have out-loud conversations with God, all the time, while I'm driving or whatever. I'm deep into the two- and three-word prayer thing.
C: Yeah!
S: I just love that—that's been so useful.
C: I love those three-word prayers as well. I think I learned them from Anne Lamott and, further, from talking with you. And I use them all the time now. I would say that's probably my primary way that I pray to God now. Here are my phrases I use all the time: 'Thank you,' 'Help me,' or 'Help them.'
S: Mm...'help them!'
C: I'm a parent, Susan! I'm a parent. So I say that one a lot. "Help them! Help them 'cause I can't anymore. So help them."
S: Oh, I also love Rob Bell's 'Show me'— that's one of his two-word prayers—'Show me.' And I have my own personal three-word prayer that I use quite a bit, which is 'Open my hands.' And I say 'Open my hands' all the time. And that is about loosening my grip, you know? I just sometimes realize that I'm holding whatever situation it is so tightly that I just have to sometimes ask God to please peel my fingers back off this thing and help me.
C: I love that.
S: Help me get my hands off it. But anyway, usually when I say those, you know, there's so much—you can say the one word and the thing it does for me is, there's a whole lot more to that conversation, going on around it, behind it, you know, everything else. But the one word sort of orients me to realize that I'm directing some of this emotion, and some of what I'm feeling, toward God. And hopefully gets God's attention too, right? I don't have to say everything out loud. I can just say, 'I need help,' and then, I feel like I'm in prayer. And this is sort of how the 'pray always' thing has come to be realized in my life—that I'm not always saying, you know, any kind of formal prayers, but man, 'help me' comes out of my mouth a lot, and that's become prayer to me. And it just sort of reorients me.
So all of these things—all of these kinds of things that I've mentioned—have felt like real communication or relationship, I guess, to use the word that I'm fond of using, with God for the first time. And I do still engage in traditional Mormon prayers also. My husband and I pray together at night. Those are very traditional, Mormon-sounding prayers. I find value and comfort in that ritual. I mean, I've been married 40 years. We've been doing that a long time. And so that's just sort of a foundational ritual in my life. And I somehow find even, you know, a spiritual grounding, kind of, in the language of my fathers, so to speak. That is soothing language to me.
C: Mm. Beautiful.
S: But now, I think I can even access the spirit in those prayers in ways that I never could before. And I think it's because at last, I feel like I own them. I'm choosing them as one of the meaningful forms of talking to God—as ONE of the meaningful forms of talking to God—that I have at play in my life. And so it's like I've given myself permission to claim them in a way that I couldn't before. They're mine now.
C: Hm, there's power in that, claiming it in your way. And I know that until I went through what I call a 'faith transition,' I never quite understood the power of ritual. I would describe it as boring, doing the same things over and over, but like you, I find that our ritualistic Mormon prayers, they have been the foundation of my life. And so I still like them as well in certain contexts, mainly in communal spaces, like in church. And like you mentioned, you know, praying with your spouse or your family, but even then, we can shake them up.
S: Yes.
C: A couple of months ago I was asked to give the opening prayer in sacrament meeting. And while I did all the usual—addressing Heavenly Father, closing in the name of Jesus—you know, I kind of went off on, not so much maybe talking about the meeting, like bless the speakers today and this and that, but I kind of talked more about help us go and do. Help us as a community. Fortify us, give us the strength. And I didn't think it was anything that different, but it was because afterwards several people commented on my prayer, not just to me, but like I think I was sitting in Relief Society and someone said, "Wow, that prayer, that opening prayer today in church, I can't stop thinking about it. Blah, blah, blah." So anyway, my whole point is just that even our ritualistic prayers, I think we can claim them differently for ourselves. Kind of like what you were talking about. Just shaking things up a little bit, even if we only shake it up in our mind.
S: Right.
C: But in my case, I was shaking it up with my language and how I spoke to God.
S: My guess is probably that something you said was something that she was hungry for.
C: Maybe...?
S: Maybe she didn't even know that she was—she was in prayer starvation, you know, for something that she wasn't getting—but she knew when she heard it, a little bit like me reading Anne Lamott for the first time. I knew the nutrition that had been lacking when I saw it.
C: Nutrition.
S: So in this email, that I kind of wanted to build this episode around, our listener had talked about having difficulty with the concept of respect. And my guess would be that a lot of Latter-day Saints who read Anne Lamott would have difficulty with the concept of respect, of finding respectful, you know—a respectful approach—or what they're used to or comfortable with. So she was having trouble with the way I talk about relationship, and the way that that would intersect with respect. And I understand that. And here's what she said. She said, "I can't seem to untangle the idea that showing reverence has to include formal language." And I knew exactly what she meant on that because I had had the same problem, right? It was really in the shift in language. Okay, well, first of all, I felt pretty prohibited from writing prayers down, but second of all, writing them in real language was really, really hard—
C: Not King James language.
S: —because how would I know it was a prayer—right! How would I know it was a prayer, if it didn't sound like one? Would God know that it was a prayer, you know? I dunno. So I thought a lot about that and a few questions occurred to me: Did God want a relationship with me? Or did God really just want worship from me?
C: Oh, that's key.
S: I thought a lot about that at the time that I was really wrestling with this and trying to figure out if it was possible for me to demolish prayer and start again. What did God want from me?
And my experiences as a parent told me that God wanted reciprocal love between us. I didn't know—I couldn't get to any other conclusion than that. That if God is my parent. They want reciprocal love.
C: Well, I totally identify with that part of her email, that showing reverence has to include formal language, because we are a very formal church!
S: Oh, totally!
C: We go to church in formal clothes—suits and ties and dresses. I mean, and we use 'thees' and 'thous,' in at least our out-loud prayers. I think at church it's very rare, you know, to hear someone say 'you.' So I get it. It totally resonates with me that reverence for God has to include this very formal—I'm going to say stuffy—kind of language.
But something you said about relationship versus worship—oh my goodness. I think that's a really key distinction, and I have never really been motivated by the worship part of God, if I'm honest. I mean, I don't want to sound selfish, but it's kind of like, well, what's in it for me when it comes to worshipping God? Nothing. Like, I don't really get anything out of it by just, like, prostrating myself and kissing someone's feet or something. I mean, I don't get much out of that. And honestly, when I think about what's in it for God, I also want to say there's nothing in it for God as well, because when I think of God and I think of...this perfect being, I think of someone who's devoid of ego.
S: Ahhhh—
C: And to me, worship is about feeding someone's ego. And maybe that's just our human language because, you know, we have kings and rulers on earth, and so it's always about, like I said, prostrating yourself.
And I was thinking about, you know, in the movie, The King and I, how no one's head could be higher than the king—
S: Yes.
C: —and so like, you know, Deborah Kerr's character, she's wearing these huge hooped skirts and it's getting harder and harder for her to get lower and lower because no one's head can be higher than the king. And that's like a form of worship. And anyway, to me, that's just—it just screams ego. And I'm sure some people are listening to this and thinking well, yeah, but to me, worship is how I show gratitude towards God.
And I guess I just see that differently. And maybe this is just semantics here, and word choice, but to me, worship is about ego, but gratitude is about my willingness to recognize that every good thing in my life is something to be grateful or thankful for. And to me, that's relationship. And gratitude is about relationship. So for me, it really is more about gratitude towards God, instead of this egoic type of worship. I don't know if that makes sense.
S: Well, I mean, what I'm thinking about as you're talking about it—I'm thinking about you as a mother and me as a mother—is that, what do you want with your children? You want relationship! You want relationship.
C: Yes!
S: That's all you want. Can you imagine how ridiculous it would be to be worshipped by your children? First of all, that's never going to happen, for me.
C: Nope!
S: But I do crave relationship with them.
C: Oh gosh—
S: It's what I want. It's all I've ever wanted! You know, I also think that people sometimes miss the point of relationship when they think of it like fawning or bowing down, or that your head has to be lower than the king's. Even devotion—even being devoted to the object of your worship—doesn't really quite get it right, I think, with God.
I think worship really—to be meaningful—has to come from a place of genuine love. It has to come from relationship, and we know that we show God love by doing what God has asked us to do, right? Love others and love ourselves. This is how we 'worship' God. So worship is about realizing love in our relationships, and kind of just in our way of being in the world. I think God knows where our hearts are.
If God and I both wanted a relationship, the question for me became, how could we get there without me trying something different?
C: Kind of impossible.
S: Impossible. It had not been working for, you know, 50+ years. There was very little chance that suddenly it was going to start working without me trying something different. And so that was the permission that I needed. It's like, it happened for me.
I was thinking, when I was pondering this episode, I was thinking about Mark Twain. [He] gives the character Huck Finn, that famous line: "You can't pray a lie." And that line has had my attention from the first time I read it as a child.
It's like somehow I—it felt like such an indictment of me, because I knew that I was often praying a lie, Cynthia.
C: As a kid, even!
S: As a kid I knew I was praying a lie! But it's because my words didn't really convey what I needed to say. I wasn't saying the things that I needed to say, I wasn't telling God what I wanted God to know about me.
I was telling God what I thought God wanted to hear from me. And so my words sounded, you know, reverent and worshipful and the way they were supposed to sound—formal and all those things—but they didn't speak my heart. No matter how sincerely I prayed them, they didn't speak my heart. They didn't sound like Me.
And they didn't say the hard things that I needed to say.
C: So you didn't really feel free to, kind of, have a 'dumpster prayer' where you're taking out the trash and yelling.
S: No! There was no dumpster prayer going—no! No, but I knew I was starving for that. When I heard him talk about it, I knew I was starving for it.
Well, all of this prayer angst came at a time for me when I was really struggling with some big—capital B, capital Q—questions. Like did God really exist at all?
C: Oh wow.
S: Actually, yeah. I mean the big questions, Cynthia. So, you know, it's hardly a surprise that the wheels were coming off prayer for me. I wasn't even sure—like I said, I went clear back to 'To Whom It May Concern,' because like, I didn't even want to make the assumption. I didn't even want to address the prayers in the way that I—I just wanted no assumptions. Could we just start from something as basic as we can possibly get, right?
C: Right.
S: I was wondering, did religion matter to me? Did I want it in my life anymore? Was it—did it really do anything for me? It was more than a faith crisis, really, it was just sort of like a complete 'spiritual fall-apart.'
C: Oh, interesting.
S: Basically, it's just like my spiritual life—I mean, I didn't know what my spiritual life was, or how it could work for me, or if I needed it, or if it had ever been real, or, you know, any of it. I didn't know.
C: Wow.
S: I once heard Serene Jones, on the On Being podcast, say, "People living at the beginning of the Renaissance didn't know it was the Renaissance. They just knew everything was falling apart."
C: Ooh—
S: And that's kind of how I felt. It was about a year of just realizing that everything was falling apart in foundational ways for me. But what I didn't realize, Cynthia, is that I was living at the beginning of my own Renaissance.
C: Oh, that's gorgeous. Yeah.
S: When I—when it came out of her mouth, it was truth to me.
C: Hmm. I, I think that's why it's important we give ourselves grace in those moments when the wheels are coming off—
S: Yes.
C: —because that may very well be a defining moment in your life. I really like that: a Renaissance. I'm going to remember that.
Sue Monk Kidd has an entire book called…Waiting on the Heart…about those waiting moments in our life when we're kind of on the cusp of big change or something, Or this kind of cocoon or chrysalis 'Renaissance' moments, whatever metaphor we want to use. And that's the book—I just read it over Christmas break, so I'm probably going to quote it a lot in this—in this podcast here. When the Heart Waits, by Sue Monk Kidd. And it was CA Larson...do you remember she quoted it when she was talking about the little red hen?
S: I know that it's in our 'Books We Love,' on our website, so our listeners can find a link to it there.
C: Well, I barely read it. I should have read this a long time ago 'cause it's one of her older books, but I read it over Christmas and it might be like scripture to me now, it's that good. But in this book she said, "Those moments held a compelling awareness for me," speaking of, like, those 'beginning of a Renaissance' moments. She said, "...making a cocoon and the transformation that goes on inside, it involves weaving an environment of prayer, but not the sort of prayer we usually think of. No, this is something mysteriously different. This isn't prayer about talking and doing and thinking, it's about postures. Postures of the spirit. It's turning oneself upside down so that everything is emptied out and God can flow in. It's curling up in the fogged spaces of the listening heart, sinking into solitude, wrapping the soul around some little flame of hope that God has ignited."
C: And that's kind of what I hear. Susan, as I've heard you talk many times before about this kind of spiritual falling-apart, is it sounds like for you, there was this little flame, this little flame that was still there. And it was maybe up to you how you were going to fan that flame—make it into something new—without permission?
S: Well, there was desire. There was always desire.
C: Desire?
S: There was desire and hope, right? There was desire and hope, but I didn't know how to take it to anything—to make it anything real. I didn't know how to make it real for myself at that point.
C: Yeah.
S: I don't know, I mean, looking back now, I can see that God had sort of tried to pre—God had been trying to prepare me to survive this, over, I'm going to say, the 10 years prior to this maybe.
C: Ah—
S: By teaching me that growth requires really hard changes sometimes. I had learned that lesson—even completely destabilizing changes that change, you know, everything, and that we think can't possibly be right at the time that they're happening.
C: Yeah.
S: I know that you've probably been through changes like that. I know that my family has, we've been through some really hard things in our family, in the 10 years prior to this happening to me. And they were things that sort of called into question everything that I thought I knew about love and about my number one job as a parent. I had to sort of relearn some really foundational lessons. And having my ideas about stuff that I thought I really knew completely obliterated, and then working to rebuild those, should have helped prepare me for this!
C: Oh, yeah.
S: But this was an even more foundational lesson. Like, I didn't really think we could—I thought we were already at bedrock, Cynthia, and we weren't!
C: Dang it!
S: Because this went even deeper than that. And I just hadn't totally internalized that yet, apparently. I've heard Rob Bell say something like—and I just love this idea, I think about it all the time—it's something like, 'actual transformation is always going to require disruption of the old.'
C: Hm. Disruption.
S: Mmhm. Transformation requires disruption. It doesn't happen if we keep going along in the same way that we're going along now, and I've really come to believe that this is true. I mean, to use a grade school—a grade school level metaphor—I've got to stop being a caterpillar to become a butterfly, Cynthia! Even if being a caterpillar is all I've ever known. And I think even more importantly, even if a caterpillar is what I thought—what I was totally convinced!—I was created to be.
C: Okay.
S: I mean, at what point does a caterpillar realize, "Wait a minute, wait a minute! This isn't it, this isn't everything! This isn't the whole picture. Uh...there's something else that I'm meant to be."
You know, I realized that I had been praying ‘caterpillar prayers,’ right? I had been praying these small little 'blinder' prayers, 'caterpillar prayers.' And if I was going to keep praying at that point, I was going to have to figure out how to pray 'butterfly prayers' instead. And it was terrifying.
C: Oh...terrifying! And that reminds me, using that word terrifying, of another quote that Sue Monk Kidd uses in her book. "In our youth, we set up inner myths and stories to live by, but around the midlife juncture, these patterns begin to crumble. It feels to us like a collapsing of all that is, but— it's a holy quaking."
S: Mm—holy quaking!
C: And that's going to be my new favorite phrase—holy quaking—because it is terrifying, but that doesn't mean we're doing anything wrong, because there really is kind of this holiness or sacredness wrapped up in this 'caterpillar-ness' of needing to change, and realizing there's more. There's more out there. That's my new phrase: holy quaking.
S: 'Holy quaking' is a good phrase! I love that. I'm going to put that one in my pocket, if you don't mind, and keep it because I know it's going to come in handy. Looking back, you know, now, I can see that I was in sort of a natural place in my own progression.
C: Well, yeah!
S: I can see it now, right?
C: You see it now!
S: Now, now I can see it. But it's like my old spiritual software—and that of course included prayer—just like, wasn't running effectively anymore. I have this—I was gonna say 12 year old, but 2007, that's more than 12 years old now isn't it?
C: Yes. Time flies.
S: What are we, to 14 years old now or something? 15 years old?
C: Yeah!
S: I have this desktop, this dinosaur desktop computer that sits on my desk, and darned if it doesn't still do some things in ways that I like much better than every computer I've had since. So it's there—it's like it's earned its place there, but, Cynthia, try getting it to talk to anything else! It doesn't talk well to other things. And that's because it stopped getting updates a long, long time ago. And that's what had happened to my prayer life. My prayer life was that darn 15 year old dinosaur desktop. There were some things about it that I still really, you know, liked to use it for. But I needed to install a serious—a serious!—prayer update. In fact, a whole new operating system. I just had to.
S: Well, let's talk about some other questions about this, can we? I mean, so who's in charge of our spiritual lives, Cynthia? Who is in charge of this anyway? Who has authority over our relationship with God?
C: (sigh) Yeah.
S: And with our own spiritual lives—because I didn't have any authority over mine. That became clear pretty quickly.
C: To me it's so sad—
S: I had to figure out how to take that for myself. It's tragic.
C: It's so sad we even have to discuss this, but it's important 'cause it's happened to you, and it's happened to me.
S: Exactly! Exactly.
C: So I know it's happened to others.
S: I mean, who even can give us permission—
C: Right.
S: —to seek this kind of relationship with God, right? Who can give us that permission? And yet, as Latter-day Saints, we seem to need, or want, permission from someone, for a lot of things. And like—why is that? How could we need permission when we're talking about a relationship with our own parent, Cynthia? I don't know.
C: It is bred into us.
S: It's bred into us! I don't know.
I gave a presentation—I don't know, four years ago maybe now—about my personal 'church history'...where I talked about Chinese foot binding. And that was a custom in late Imperial China, where they would break the women's feet and tightly bind them—well, not the women's feet. It's when they were children, when they were young girls, right?—in order to change the shape and size of their feet.
C: Yeah, young girls.
S: And these bound feet were prized as a status symbol and a mark of feminine beauty. People have been doing things—people have been squeezing women into all kinds of shapes and sizes for a long time.
C: This is another episode!
S: Another episode. But anyway, it was a painful practice. And not only that, it limited the mobility of women, and it resulted in lifelong disabilities. They couldn't walk right. They didn't have real feet. They didn't have real, functioning feet. And at the time, I said that I felt like my spiritual feet had been 'bound' as a result of growing up in the Church. I know that that sounds—that might sound—really cynical to some of our listeners. But I really do believe that my personal spiritual development was hampered because I didn't feel control of, not only my own thoughts and my own questions, but even the very language that I could use to express them, right?
C: Oh yeah!
S: I was spiritually disabled to the point of paralysis, in some ways.
C: I don't think that's too cynical, to compare it to foot binding. I actually think that's a really good metaphor. I mean, I know for myself, I can think of a couple of pivotal moments in my life that shouldn't have shaken me to the core the way they did. And if I had had better spiritual skills—let's call it that—if I hadn't been bound, I think I would have gotten through those crazy moments maybe a little bit more smoothly. I mean, of course there's no way to know for sure, but I can look back now and I can—I don't want to trivialize things that I've been through—but I can look back and be like, oh, well this is what I would do now: Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing!
S: Right.
C: But I was so bound, bound up as well. And I've said before that I think the Church provides amazing scaffolding for our youth. This structure that's built up around them that really holds them up. But here's the thing—we're not teenagers anymore. I'm an adult. And for my very messy, complicated adult life, the scaffolding isn't sufficient. I mean, scaffolding is not the main structure. It's just supposed to be something, obviously, that's wrapped around the building, you know, to either make repairs, or to build it to begin with. But you know, in very real ways, I too—like you—I really did feel complete collapse of my structure once that scaffolding was removed due to trials. And, I mean, it just couldn't bear the weight of my messy life.
I have adult sized problems. We all do. And I relate. So thank you. Thank you for talking about that. I had forgotten, I'd heard your presentation before about having bound feet, but now I can use that metaphor as well, and kind of look back with a little bit of hindsight, and go, oh, I really was kind of bound. It shouldn't have had to be that hard probably.
S: But I don't really know what we do about that, because—I don't want people to get the mistaken impression that I don't value what I was given—
C: Yeah.
S: —from my youth in the Church and my childhood in the Church. I do! I do.
C: Same.
S: It's the place where I received my introduction to spiritual things. It's the place that ignited the hope that sustains me now, that introduced me to that. And so I do value it. What I don't know is how I failed to somehow make the jump—
C: The software update—
S: —from the scaffolding to the building. I didn't—yes, exactly!—I didn't get the update somehow. I failed to internalize that.
The thing about it is the fact that you and I both can relate to that idea tells me that we're probably not alone.
C: Unh uh. No way.
S: We're not alone. And so that's something else that I think about a lot, is how we can improve that, I guess. How we can improve that.
S: But, you know, if we can't claim our own relationship with God or make it be, you know, what we need and want it to be, as adults in our messy lives—if we can't do that, then what's the point of engaging in religion...really?
C: Isn't that the whole point?
S: I mean, I think it's meant to be the point, right? Religion is meant to provide a framework that helps us with our messy lives...I think?
C: Uh, well I think so too. And I think, Susan, if there's one area that we should feel the most free, the most able to break away from the old, let it be our private and personal relationship with Deity, right? I mean, no one's ever going to know how you pray!
S: Right.
C: Not your kids or your mom or your Bishop, or even your spouse, really.
S: Right!
C: So I think this is actually a really good exercise in claiming your own spiritual authority, and saying yourself, I'm not going to ask permission. I think this is a really good place to start maybe—is prayer—because no one really has to know.
And there's this great quote by Richard Rohr. And he talks about, well, let me just read it. He said, "How good of God to make truth a relationship, instead of an idea. When you're not in relationship, you have to have religion by formula."
S: Whoa. Wait, just a minute! Truth is a relationship?
C: I know! Crazy Richard Rohr!
S: Crazy Richard Rohr is responsible for completely transforming my spiritual life again and again, basically.
C: Uh-huh.
S: Introducing me to what could be, and what I want. And this is one of those cases. Truth is a relationship
C: It is! Truth is a relationship. And again, we're not trying to pick on our church. Because I don't think I would change much, actually. I very much valued, like you, my upbringing and how things have worked out. But, a religion by formula? Yeah, that's kind of what we have.
S: It is! Very much what we have.
C: We like to dole out the math and be like, this is how things are gonna work out, and maybe that's okay...until it isn't.
S: Yes, exactly. I mean, I think maybe that is the way most religion functions. Maybe it is actually incumbent upon us to do the hard work of transforming ourselves within this inadequate framework of religion.
C: Right.
S: What I'm thinking—it's dawning on me just now, as we're talking—what I'm thinking is that I wish our church gave more lip service to that.
C: Me too.
S: That's where I think the magic of Richard Rohr has been for me, is that he has respect for the value of organized religion—
C: Yeah, tremendous—
S: —even as he is very open about the fact that it's going to take more than that to get you what you need...and want.
C: And I wish at church that someone would just say that, like this—we can only take you so far in the church with our manuals, you know, seminary lessons, gospel doctrine lessons—like we can only take you so far, and the rest you're going to have to do on your own. I wish someone would just kind of even say it that way, because I don't really want someone to tell me how to have a relationship with God.
S: Right, right, exactly. No, they have been doing that! Yeah.
C: But at least nod to it. A nod to it, for me, would be great.
S: Yes, yes! It's like this great secret. It's like this secret no one talks about.
C: Yeah, really and truly.
S: Interesting.
C: Sue Monk Kidd, in the book I keep quoting today, she also says, "We emphasize learning about God over being with God."
S: Hmm.
C: And that's what I'm trying to teach my youth Sunday School class, I'm trying to teach them how to be with God. You know, we're recording this on Sunday, and today was our first Old Testament lesson. And actually we started in Moses, because that's what Mormons do. When we talk about the Old Testament, we start in the Pearl of Great Price.
S: Yes we do, yes, bless our hearts.
C: But I thought at first I would give the kids a little, you know, historical rundown of Pearl of Great Price or something. And then I thought, no, I want to teach these kids how to be with God. And they're only going to listen so long because they're 12. And so that's what I wanted to focus on is relationship.
And so I wrote on the chalkboard today, "What does it mean for heavenly parents to know us?" Because that was part of Moses chapter one, is it says, you know, that God knew Moses. And so I asked the kids, you know, what does that mean for your Heavenly Parents to know you? And I kind of gave them the example, you know, I called out some of the kids and I said, your earthly parents, if I called them up and asked, what is Jenny's favorite food, they would know the answer. She said, "Oh yes, they would know. And they would answer this," you know? And I asked another little boy, what would your parents say if I called them up and asked them, you know, what's your best subject in school? "Oh, well it wouldn't be math!" You know, it wouldn't be this, it would be this.
I said to them, okay. If your earthly parents know you that well, think of how well your Heavenly Parents know you, and take advantage of that and claim that relationship with them because they know you so, so well. And do that—do that for yourself. Learn that when you're young.
I have no idea, Susan, they're 12. I have no idea if they even understand what I'm trying to say, but I was trying to put it in a context of, 'look at it from your earthly parents’ point of view, and maybe that will help you see how you can have that same relationship with God.' You know, a little bit different level, but a relationship nonetheless.
S: What a wonderful approach. Uh, do you ever get your mind blown actually while we're in the middle of recording our podcast? Because it happens to me sometimes. And right now, I'm just having these little dots that are suddenly connecting in my head. And, you know, I've said, roughly a billion times on this podcast that, you know, I had this transformational moment where I understood for the first time that I am known and loved by God—
C: Yes.
S: —and that that happened to me in my fifties. And it's all wrapped up in the same thing as the prayer project, and what we're talking about. It's not that people hadn't told me that God knew me. And loved me, but I think, Cynthia, because—I think it all kind of goes back to that praying a lie—because I hadn't felt at liberty to show up as my whole self, in my church life and my faith life. Because I had thought I could keep those parts away from God. It really took me being willing to throw it all out there and show up whole. It really took me giving myself permissionto do that—to just be myself and say, look, I don't know what you want from me, but let's get honest about what I got. This is it—for God to say, "Guess what? I've always known that!"
C: Exactly.
S: "I've always known you and I love you anyway—and because of those things—and, you know, because of who you are."
And so if we could figure out a way to give kids that gift, like you were trying to give your Sunday School class today, that really might be something they could build on.
C: I hope so. I don't know.
S: But it's going to require something different than the language that I was given as a kid. It's going to require something different than someone saying to me, "God knows and loves you." And for some reason...I don't believe what they're saying. For some reason, I can't believe it. And that reason might've been something inside me that I needed to be able to give myself permission to believe it. I needed permission to believe, and I had to do that for myself.
So, the question is, how do you even approach the Divine authentically? How do you show up as yourself, and for yourself, you know, when you've spent your whole life being handed a script for how to do that? And when I say handed a script, like, I mean, it!
C: You mean it!
S: ‘We say this in prayer,’ ‘here's the order that prayer goes in,’ right? I mean that's—we're handed a script, and is it even possible for a woman to just step outside of the whole authority and hierarchy structure, that we spend our spiritual lives within? Is it even possible to figure out how to get to God directly without some painful experience forcing us to it, or some unmet need or, you know, whatever it is?
C: Right.
S: It's like, I don't know another way to get to it. It requires setting aside this whole hierarchy thing—this whole authority thing—doesn't it?
C: Oh, hierarchy. That's why it's so hard for us—and um, harder for women. Doubly hard.
S: Yes. It's even harder for women! We've got to set aside this whole thing.
C: Yep. Hierarchy and patriarchy.
S: Man.
C: I get why it's hard. There's no, no question about why this is hard, especially for women, but it makes me sad 'cause it doesn't need to be that way, but—
S: Well, I don't know how to give it to young people, but I don't know how to give it to other women either. I don't know if someone had handed me that gift, would I have known how to open it—
C: Exactly.
S: —without getting to it myself. It's a good question.
Speaking of the books that we read over Christmas break, and then we quote extensively in the next podcast, I have been reading Mary Magdalene Revealed: the First Apostle, Her Feminist Gospel and the Christianity We haven't Tried Yet, by Meggan Watterson.
C: Ooh!
S: And there's a quote right in the introduction that I just loved. And she said this: "What's at stake is spiritual authority. If how we see, truly see, is not with eyesight, but with a vision, a form of spiritual perception that allows us to know what's real, what's lasting, what's actually true, if this comes from within us, then no one has power over us."
C: Oh, wow. No one.
S: I think it gets really confusing in Mormonism though, because the lip service that's given to personal revelation—
C: Right.
S: —you know, when there's been such a tendency to equate that with confirmation—
C: Right. Oh my gosh.
S: —what do we do with that? What does it mean? What does—if we really believe our own stuff, Cynthia, if we really believe it—then we should be some of the best spiritually equipped people on the planet to go after our faith vibes with personal authority and integrity. Shouldn't we?
C: Oh, that's ironic.
S: Instead, we limit ourselves to confirmation of other people's experiences of God, and other people's insights.
C: Right. That was a really beautiful moment for me recently when we had Channing and Elise from The Faithful Feminists on the podcast. Channing talked quite a bit—do you remember that?—
S: Yes, yes.
C: —about the difference between revelation and confirmation, and how revelation is something new. Imagine that, it's something new—
S: New!
C: —that hasn't been revealed to you before. Whereas confirmation, like you just said, it's other people's experiences and insights. So—
S: Well, if we want something new, Cynthia, we're going to have to do something new.
C: I know! What a thought.
S: It sounds, like, SO obvious, I can't believe we've built a whole episode around it.
C: I know. I know.
S: And yet...right? And yet—
C: Here we are.
S: —five decades later, Susan figures it out.
S: For someone who's listening to this podcast and thinking, well, you know...where do I begin? This is telling me something that feels good to me. I want to go in this direction, where to begin? In my opinion, a good place to start might be for a woman to ask herself, what do I want from relationship with God?
C: Right.
S: What has prayer gotten me up until now? And what doesn't it get me, that I need or want?
C: Those are great questions.
S: Those are the kinds of questions that I sort of had to ask myself, because I knew my prayers were bouncing off the ceiling. I felt them fall on me after I got in bed at night. The prayers rained right back down on me. They did not get me what I wanted. And I was not feeling the relationship that I wanted. So I think those would be good questions to ask. I think when our prayer is no longer serving us, then we often go immediately to the idea that it's something wrong with us.
C: Always, dang it.
S: It's like, that's what we're conditioned to think: Oh, what's wrong with me? I'm doing this wrong! Or I'm not worthy of it, or, you know, whatever. There are all these assumptions that we go to. And I would like to suggest that actually, when you're feeling that, and when you're experiencing that, it's an invitation to something larger.
C: Absolutely.
S: Could you imagine how frustrating it might be to be God, and to continue inviting people? "I'm telling you every way I can, and you're just not accepting the invitation!"
C: Exactly.
S: You know, what we have to do at that point, to accept the invitation, is to find our own way there. And that feels really radical for Latter-day Saints, and particularly for women, because of all of the things that we've discussed. There's all that hierarchy, there's all these levels of what's appropriate and respectful and all those things. But we've got to find our own way there. And bottom line, Cynthia, many LDS women—and I don't think we're that unique in this—we're not used to being in charge. Even of ourselves.
C: Speaking of terrifying, Susan, that's a terrifying realization.
S: Right? It is a terrifying realization.
C: When you finally admit that to yourself, that that's why this is so hard is we're just not used to it, but maybe—maybe we use our new phrase here: Holy quaking!
S: Holy quaking! Cynthia!
C: It's terrifying, but it's holy quaking.
S: It's holy quaking!
C: This is sacred.
S: Bring it on. Bring on the quaking. Rob Bell said something in a podcast I was listening to the other day—I think it's his most recent one that's on right now, I'll link to it in our show notes. I don't remember what it's called, something about ecstasy, but anyway—he said this, and I can't stop repeating it in my head and applying it to everything. I just keep applying it in different situations.
C: Okay.
S: And here's what he said: "Someone, somewhere, has a vested interest in things remaining the way they are."
C: Ooh.
S: So who is that, with regards to our spiritual development?
C: That's a great question.
S: Who is trying to keep us where we are? It's a huge question, with tons of possible answers. I keep thinking of different answers to it, but you know, I believe that's the question that really deserves asking as you start to approach this. What's been keeping you from doing this, and who's benefiting from it? Who would like to see things remain exactly the way they are?
Some of the possible answers might be really uncomfortable, like, who would bind our spiritual feet? Is it the Church? I have to ask, at least.
C: Sure.
S: Maybe in some ways, right? In some ways. Is it Satan, you know? For those members who believe, and many, many do, that there's an 'adversary' that operates this way in the world. Is it Satan that wants to keep us from growing? Is it people in the foundational relationships in our lives—our parents, our spouses, you know, our children, our friends—because it's really scary for other people—
C: Oh gosh.
S: —when we change.
C: Especially women.
S: Yes! Yes.
C: I think, yeah, absolutely.
S: Women taking their power is a really scary thing.
Is it ourselves? Because change and growth are hard. Hard. And they require things from us, right? Changing the way that we engage spiritually, really transforming ourselves, might mean that other things in our lives are affected as a result of that.
C: Oh, always, yeah.
S: And that's terrifying. There are a lot of things in place that might be keeping us from developing spiritually, getting to our next-level selves.
C: These are all valid concerns, Susan, like how others will react. I mean, I definitely think our loved ones have a vested interest in keeping things the same. It's comfortable for them, or they just think this is the role that you should be filling. I mean, it might be that change is scary for them, or even—they might even kind of have an attitude of like, you're not worthy of something better. We've all seen those movies where, like, the main character begins to stand up for herself in different ways. I'm thinking of like Fried Green Tomatoes, you know—
S: Tawanda.
C: Right, tawanda—and her loved ones, you know, her husband goes on the defensive, and it always comes back to fear.
S: Mm-hm.
C: And it's one thing for us, I think, to be paralyzed by fear, and another for loved ones who have no control over us. So they don't know where we're going to end up. So in their defense, I can see why sometimes our loved ones are terrified—
S: Of course.
C: —but that doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't go forward and try to reboot our software anyway.
S: Right. And I don't even think it's a bad thing—
C: No!
S: —when we recognize all of these things that are in place that, it's in their interest for us not to undertake this kind of transformation, it's not necessarily reflective of anything bad on their part, but I think there's value in us recognizing some of the forces that have held us from making the changes that we want to make. Recognizing them helps us sort of navigate them as we move forward.
C: Yeah. It's good to recognize it.
S: And forge, you know, working relationships as we transform.
C: Well, Sue Monk Kidd said in her book, "Jesus was not a pleaser." He didn't go around just pleasing people, so...we can be like, Jesus, in that way. We can reboot our software if we need to.
S: I'm pretty sure that the butterfly doesn't that often think, man, I wish I hadn't done this. I could be wrong, but my guess is the butterfly is happy to be a butterfly.
C: I think so.
S: In conclusion, I want to share one more line from Meggan Watterson. And she said this: "There is no hierarchy in the spiritual world. There's just this circle where the first becomes last, and the last becomes first."
If we've been putting ourselves in last place in the chain of our own spiritual authority, it's probably time that we put ourselves first.
C: Yeah.
S: We're the only ones who can do that. No one else can put us first. Throw out whatever spiritual, hierarchical paradigm we've been living under, and grab the reins of our faith lives for ourselves. Remake them into something that is serving us now.
I think there's actually some truth in that old Mormon adage that 'you can't ride on someone else's testimony.'
C: Oh, yeah!
S: You know, I think you do have to know things for yourself. I'm not sure that that phrase means exactly what people think it means, but I think that there's truth that you have to know things for yourself in order for them to really work for you. And in this case, I really do believe that, that no one else can get us our most fulfilling spiritual life and relationship with God. No one else can get us into that relationship. We have to step into that relationship ourselves. We have to create it for ourselves, and that creation—you know, that relationship—I believe, is our privilege, as well as our responsibility.
C: Stop asking permission, Susan! We will stop asking permission.
S: Man. It's hard though. Are you sure we're allowed to do that?
C: Yes, we are! We're grown, middle-aged women!
S: We're grown women, Cynthia. Onward.
C: Onward. Thank you.
S: Thank you.