bipolar, mindfulness and christian prayer - Interview with John Mark Comer

i got to have a conversation with john mark comer who is a personal hero of mine my favorite preacher in the united states he's someone that gosh i just feel like we've been on these similar journeys for like the past i don't know 10 years and and i've been following his work reading his books listening to his sermons at his church bridgetown in portland and have just felt this resonance with how he expresses christian faith his walk with jesus and and my own walk and my own struggles and values and that and so what's cool is just getting to talk to someone so like-minded and i think uh there's multiple times in this podcast where i forgot that we were recording a podcast so i i and i just know we have so much common ground so i use a lot of references and theological words and maybe some referencing different authors and stuff without maybe doing a good job of defining terms and uh i don't know um pointing out who different people are so if there's some points along the way that feel i don't know like we kind of get into the weeds don't give up hope because we loop back around to a place that's maybe a lot more approachable um especially kind of halfway through i think we uh we get into spaces that are really relevant you know whether you're religious or not whether you're kind of christian or not and i think you know in my email to john mark i just told him hey you're someone i deeply trust and and if i'm going to have a conversation that's really overtly about my religious values you're somebody that i feel um i don't know that i trust and that if people were getting an impression of what it's like to follow jesus or get an impression of what even my religious convictions are it would be in this space talking with john mark comer and he's someone that i can really full and wholeheartedly sign off on as someone trustworthy and someone if you were i don't know having thoughts about faith or real you know religion just more generally he's a worthy and trustworthy source so i'm stoked to get to share this conversation with you it was so personally fun it was so it was so meaningful for me so i hope you enjoyed as much as i did uh without further ado john mark [Music] john mark homer i'm so happy to get to talk to you thank you for taking time to do this with me yeah such a joy to chat to you i've been looking forward to getting to know you yeah well i wanted to tell you a little bit maybe to start just about how i came in contact with your work and the significance of your writing and how that's been for me and so i um i haven't actually announced this publicly before but um so i i wrestle with bipolar too and so that's for those listening that's uh that's a disorder bipolar depression is a disorder where you kind of oscillate between these states so something called hypomania which is like yeah really engaged interest really intense uh energy in your enthusiasm your arousal is kind of like at 11. yeah it's and it really feels that way it feels like you're driving at 100 miles an hour and everyone else is at 50 miles an hour and it's super fun until you get where you want to go but then you pass it and you can't stop and so um a lot of people kind of look at that and i was like wow it would be cool to be able to stay up for just like you know hours on end or like in my master's program i was doing weeks or months worth of school work all just in one sitting you know just because i could wow you can maintain these incredible amounts of concentration like i remember i got into ceramics i like doing pottery and i was doing pieces that you know within a few months that people would take years for people to be able to do but that's just because i would do it for hours and hours and hours on end and if my hands were bleeding i keep going and it was just like this relentless um and it felt like internally a lot like if i didn't reach whatever goal i had in my head whatever standard i had in my head for what i needed to do if i didn't reach that there was some impending doom there was some impending catastrophe there was something that was going to happen to me and so it was very much even though on the outside it looks like a lot of enthusiasm and it can feel like that especially towards the end for anyone who wrestles with bipolar 2 it's it feels a lot like anxiety and fear yeah and uh and like having someone behind you with a whip just like telling you to go and so and that oscillates from from that state into like you're in a car with all brakes and no gas and uh yeah and so that was really confusing i think for a lot of employers growing up like they would just see me like i was in a sales job and i just have months where i'm number one and not number one like doubling the guy in second like you know i used to work at guitar center and and uh yeah come on crazy numbers for sales and then weeks where i'm at the very bottom yeah and uh and my employers how long was that time span between and forgive me if i don't use the right language here but when you began to present you know or manifest the symptoms of bipolar and when it was diagnosed and you realized oh this is what i have and i need to you know adjust my life to it that's a good question how long how long was that are we talking about 20 years two years yeah well high school i'd say so really like around puberty like 13 14 maybe and that's a little early right for bipolar doesn't it normally hit more in your 30s well i mean it can hit in your 20s that's that's probably the most common presentation is is kind of hitting your 20s is what is what i've read but um wow yeah so as a high schooler you already have puberty and hormones and yeah i mean like everybody's a mess at that point so you probably just assumed you're like everybody else yeah and i think i just kind of chalked it up to me being really enthusiastic and i went to a pretty i grew up in a pretty pentecostal kind of world where it was very it was almost like there was a lot of spiritual categories to be able to put that intense hypomania and then and then the darkness was very much demonic oppression like it was very much like and so i just thought i was in this zone of constantly being filled with the spirit and then i i was like i was a worship leader at my church and so i was doing all this stuff and i was volunteering and i was leading retreats and writing music and and uh i was like worship at like three different churches like because i don't even know how that worked but i was like on wednesday nights and friday nights and sundays and and then i'd have yeah that's where i just crashed and i just thought it was well you know clearly the demons know what i'm up to and they and they know about all these great stuff so they're trying to stop me and then and then uh it would feel like temptation anytime i was in this depressive state if i couldn't leap out of it with some sort of spiritual fervor then i felt tremendous shame and guilt and no one really had categories to be able to interpret that for me so the pastors were righteous that i was with were all kind of baffled like i was like right that matthias sees something else let's let's pray more or i know say i'm pro prayer but yeah what a tragic yeah our category when we don't have categories we don't have grace you know we don't have patience and understanding and compassion wow that's a great thought yeah i agree with you it was um so i was i was going through high school kind of flipping back and forth and then um and experiencing pretty intense depression around that time moving into my 20s yeah 22 23. and you're having shame you're saying at the same point like there's a because it's been spiritualized as demonic or as sin or as you just can't get with the program so now you carry you carry not just the the pain of that kind of am a genius of that kind of because as you know bipolar is in a sense a gift it's a it's a curse and a gift it seems like you know so many luminaries of the human condition would identify as bipolar and are such a gift to the world you know but um so you're carrying all of the shame too sounds like that's exactly right yeah and i think i think it was um i think it was seen like that like the way you're describing it everyone kind of saw me almost as this superhuman thing right like when i was when i was 16 i i put together this like city-wide worship concert like that got together like a couple dozen churches and we all got together and then fed the homeless and we were um we just had this like meal with the homeless like a big potluck where everyone brought food and then we had all these churches and it was covered on the news and it was this huge thing and everyone was like was this kid doing this and i and i and then i hit this dip right after that because i think that's that for people struggling with this you realize that like there's these ecstasy highs but then they're followed by this dramatic plummet and yeah and i just and i felt this constant tug and pull of all this potential that everyone saw in me and all this incredible um talent that everyone saw but this inability to be able to control it and to yeah to keep it up and so i this imposter syndrome really like possessed me i'm just like i can do this sometimes and then sometimes i can't and so when people count on me i don't know if i can follow through would you explore that i'd love to hear more about the imposter syndrome yeah well so there's there's this ability that you have that it seems like no one else has and that's this incredible concentration this enthusiasm that's really contagious this intelligence yeah and when it's paired with intelligence i'm really creative and really artistic and really uh i don't know i love reading hard books and so that it just looks like i'm this brainiac talented whatever and then but uh the inverse is just as severe in my life where i just feel completely you know there's these other modes where i feel immensely self-critical immensely self-loathing and then demotivated and you know all so all the the high highs have these inverse low lows and so and they come at unpredictable times and so there's this fear of there's going to be a moment when it really counts when i need this you know almost like like when you're watching the hulk in the avengers right exactly he's like what if it doesn't show up like come on like where is he you know like the aliens are here we need you and uh and i think bipolar one can especially feel like that like um but i think in hypomania it's it's a similar feeling like and i think you put a lot of your self-worth in what you're able to achieve in an unhealthy state and then it's reinforced by other people and that's what i think creates the chain as everyone sees that high output and they're like yes that's what we want yeah and um because we live in a culture that praises high output and that doesn't have categories for rest and uh and so i so i came into your work at like 22 23 i i was reading the sermons of um john wesley and became kind of convinced through his sermons just that sabbath is something that i don't know i just never really heard of like growing up in church yeah no one's talked about hair yeah it was just in the air but and it was that was the thing the jews did and uh that went away with jesus and i always thought that was a little peculiar and then and so i'm reading and the andros and those seventh-day adventists which one of us none of us really knew but are they occult are they who are those people yeah my mom grew up seventh-day adventists too which is oh really yeah she did she she grew up in that whole world uh she's not anymore but yeah and she she uh so she doesn't have tons i don't know i don't want to speak forward i'm sure she has affection for it in some ways but she certainly didn't was like matthias let me walk you into the ways of 70 avetism sabbath observance she right that wasn't the pitch and so i was reading these sermons by john wesley and then just reading the book of hebrews and i'm like sabbath is like at the core of this what yeah there seems to be a message for the new testament church and in the sabbath the sabbath is used as this object lesson in in chapter three and chapter four for something that jesus did and i just couldn't i couldn't put together why no one has ever talked about this and and then yeah i became convinced that the sabbath was in a sense the uh maybe the embodied practice of yeah the rest that we have in christ yes um and to flesh that out a little bit for those listening might be that so jesus you know in the beginning in genesis when god rested on the sabbath day he rested in something very good and he looked at creation and he saw that this is um something he was content with like his work was finished is another way to say that and so we made it holy and then rested in it and there's this in the book of hebrews the author is really kind of trying to pull this significance into the work of christ and saying that christ's work on the cross was a finished good work and that we don't rest in our finished good work because our work is never finished and we're human and we we have a million things that are always not really tied up broke and yeah yeah but then uh but in jesus we can rest in his finished work because his work is good and he is the sabbath rest that we can um constantly sit in how would you explain i know that you explained that in your book would you add to that how would you yeah i mean 110 i mean gosh there's hours of conversation around sabbath i love hebrews you know if hebrews is a bit tricky to interpret you know in chapter four there's that beautiful line there remains therefore a sabbath rest for the people of god yeah and in context you know the author isn't necessarily writing about the day per se he's writing about the larger kind of theological metaphysic behind like what christ has done and the reality of living in the aftermath of christ's life and teaching and death and burial and resurrection and now at the right hand of the father and that i mean that's a metaphysical reality right how do you live into that and i think i'm 110 with you i think what the author of hebrews is saying is that sabbath is an embodied practice or what christians often call spiritual discipline i really shy away from that language because spiritual is such a kind of a lost word for our generation you know it means everything it means nothing and it means disembodied for a lot of people and that's not what it means at all in the new testament and so sabbath is an embodied practice it is literally something that you do with your body that you put on a calendar it has to do with how you posture your mind and your body and your life and everything about your holistic existence your soul and biblical language which is very different than like in greek thought or modern thought where your soul is that like little cartoon part of you that goes to heaven when you die your soul is your whole person it's about in psychological language the integration of your whole person around its center in god and so yeah i think sabbath was an embodied practice by which we cultivate a spirit of restfulness in all of our life so you know it's kind of like training wheels i think of it almost like you know playing you know you play guitar like scales on guitar or you know you have these practices these exercises these drills that you do for a set period of time in order you to enable to kind of live in that capacity all of the time and at a moment's notice and so sabbath is like an embodied practice of rest one full day a week or whatever people's capacity is by which we cultivate yeah that spirit of of restfulness you know in all of our life and it's what you're saying it's like our entire culture and this transcends the left and right binary of our culture right now all the culture wars it's all performative it's a performative identity identity politics the great tragedy of it is it's performative yeah and but that's not just a left thing or a right thing that's a post-enlightenment thing right where the self is the new locus point the self is the new god and that the tragedy of that is it's a god that demands ultimate allegiance you have to discover yourself you have to be yourself you have to take care of yourself you have to fight for yourself advocate for yourself define yourself provide for yourself and it is exhausting because your entire identity at that point is performative and all of your sense of self-worth is rising or falling based on how cool you are how many followers you have on social media what other people say about you you know it's henry allen's interpretation of jesus at the wilderness that our identities are either three things they're what we do what we have or what other people say about us and as long as our identity is rooted in in what we do or in what we have or what other people say and think about us which is not who we are it's who other people think we are or claim we are it's not who we are as long as our identities and rest in that we will strive we will live not from a spirit of restfulness but of exhaustion because our whole life is one of striving and and nobody is immune liberals conservatives urban rural christians atheists none of us are immune this is like the human part of the problem of the human condition that's literally as you said in genesis that problem and so yeah and that's that i think the gift not just of sabbath because you can practice sabbath and not have any kind of identity that's grounded in some you can still take a day off every week not have your identity completely wrapped up in what you do or what you have or what other people say to you about are all three so that's where a staff in the new testament is is not just a embodied practice like yoga or other great things but it's an actual like theology and those two things go together and i do think that in the last it's really only the last hundred years as far as i can tell the theology somehow got disconnected from the practice you know you're reading john wesley in his mind the rest of christ and the sunday as the sabbath are just two sides of the same coin yeah but that it got you know like like christians often do like westerners often do you know going back to the time of plato we spiritualized it and then we lost the embodied power of it you know oh i love how you painted that and that that transition from spiritualizing something and then disembodying it i almost i heard the spirit spiritualizing isn't even the right word sorry we like allegorized it or something yeah theology spiritualized isn't the right word because if you if you take spirit to be something i mean that's not the right word but yeah no i get what you mean though because there's this there's this idea that i was i was kind of piecing a part um in a conversation actually with uh there's a psycho i don't know if you know who steve hayes is he's a psychologist who created something called act acceptance and commitment therapy um or uh contextual behaviors and i was talking to psychologists about this idea that we we're always kind of picking apart things to the point where they become so disembodied that they make no sense to us and and it's like they actually need to be part of the whole in order for it to make any sense or have any utility at all and right i think we have these these theological um this is such a crude way to put it but these theological fetishes that really disembody the yeah maybe the impact and the power of the idea to the point where we feel certain and we feel right and i think that's almost this subvert desire we have to exert control and to feel so yes yes come on to feel safe and people can dress it up in all sorts of good motivations like we're just trying to get to what the text means and that's great like of course i'm about like good hermeneutics and understanding what the bible says and then living your life out of that but there's there's also this um i don't know it's i think that's what a lot of the new testament in jesus's work was about he's like he's like you've lost the heart of it you've lost sight of the hole you've lost inside of like you uh like is it okay to heal on the sabbath like you'd take your ox to water but you wouldn't let a man be healed and that was his confrontation it wasn't in the minutia anyway that's a that's a fun side trail but to no i don't think that's a sideshow i think that's i think i mean i think control based on fear is at the root in my reading of the library of scripture and if i think if i'm hearing jesus right i think that control rooted in fear is at the root of the problem of the human condition you know i think you could you could summarize the entire spiritual journey in the way of jesus and the writings of the new testament as the journey from fear to the journey to love and you know the whole new testament idea that fear and love are antithetical that you see in jesus you see it most blatantly in john you know perfect love casts out fear where there is fear there is no love and you know as long as we're run by fear which is that like evolutionary right survival instinct deep in our body you know all the evolutionary psychology better than better than i and a lot of it's you know i think it sounds like a conjecture masquerading as fact but it's interesting however however it got into our body it's in there now we have this like primal evolutionary survival of the predator on the savannah fear built into our limbic system that often turns into us attempting to control our environment so that we feel safe and as long as we try to control the people around us be it our spouse or therapist or our church or the world or politics or the country we will always sabotage love because control is antithetical to it you know and so until we give that up so no i don't i think that's at the root and that's why sabbath is such a gift because it's a daily it's a weekly practice of not being in control yeah you know yeah that's so good i um i was going to a calvinist bible school and what i started realizing i'm sorry i know it's terrible no no i don't i don't mean i mean no disrespect well we mean a little bit of disrespect but i think most calvidis are used to it by now um yeah i love you calvinists listening i know we have a complicated relationship but i'm happy you're here um so i to just i was going to this school and and that was one of my main retorts to my professors it's like how can love be so controlling why doesn't love create freedom it just seems like that's part of the point is that yeah okay we don't have a completely free will like i can't fly if i want to um i'm not omnipresent like yeah my will is constrained but it seems like um i i was i was in this space like with this and this calvinist for those listening that don't understand all these terms calvinism is this idea that um that god has predestined and kind of already foreordained everything that's happened in the world and that everything is not just known that god knows what's going to happen but he's actually not quite directly chosen everything there's some people that might think that but um four ordained or proved or signed off on everything that's happened and that he's working all things together for his larger plan and of course there's great people who really love and abide by that thought i think what made it complicated for me in that space was there wasn't a high value in things like um christian contemplation mysticism being able to kind of sit back in the loss of control being able to i don't know how do i put it i think i think in my unique struggle around that time of life coming into reading your book um garden city that was about sabbath was this cool cup of water that was like matthias you can rest and it's you don't have to perform you don't have to um achieve you don't have to you don't have to anything you can just be in the presence of god and that's enough for you to matter and that's enough for you to be valuable and um and so i sat in that and and i started practicing this sabbath and i started kind of learning that and then i uh i also several years later picked up your book the ruthless elimination of hurry and um and it was it was an expansion i think of the heart of that idea that continued to kind of teach me just this practice of this rhythm of life that wasn't so dependent on my manic performance and for those i don't know for those of you who might know about bipolar it's like it's a circadian rhythm disorder and so routine is paramount for any sort of recovery or just like right functioning life and and having bipolar 2. and and so i i came into realizing that i had bipolar 2 just in my master's program and and working with a psychiatrist to um i just went to just looking for answers and we just kind of worked it out and we're figuring out what was happening and how old were you so this was um 26 yeah man so that's 10 years of living with that and and no no answers just yeah and just yeah what's what's that what's that line from uh richard rohr i'm not on the same page as him when it comes to theology but he has some beautiful insights um he has that great line about not everything can be fixed and solved but it must be properly named and i think there's something you can't that's it's not that you having a name for something will just fix it as a silver bullet but it will give you a whole name and a capacity to align to it and accept to it make peace with it you know yeah i'm sorry it took so long for that thank you it was um sorry big car rushing by uh i think though that i think that god was showing me how to find balance before realizing that though and uh and i guess i i tell you that whole story just to say that your work was instrumental in me finding that rhythm and that rhythm that wasn't based in in me having to be this superhuman hypomanic thing that could create the output that everyone wanted but that was just uh grounded in the presence of god and uh and resting in him and uh i'm getting emotional but i'm just so thankful man i'm so thankful that you followed your heart in writing those books and and putting that into the world and i'm so happy i ran into them because they uh they guided me and guided me when i didn't have any answers when i didn't know what to do and when i felt really angry at myself and uh they guided me into the presence of god and so i'm really really thankful john mark thank you i'm just so i mean that's so tender thank you for trusting me with that story and it is such a humble honor to get to help in any way you know a fellow suffering soul on the way back to god you know as you're sharing that and man that's just so tender thank you thank you for trusting with that man that's such an honor um let me see if i can find it here i want to read there's this um quote i read yeah this is from saint elizabeth of the trinity very ancient female spiritual writer mystic contemplative follower of jesus i read this by her recently she said i think that in heaven my mission will be to draw souls by helping them go out of themselves to cling to god by a holy simply and loving movement and to keep them in this great silence within that will allow god to communicate himself and transform them into himself yeah man that's that's the work do you know um the work uh has an anonymous author um the cloud of unknowing absolutely 14th century british monk no name yeah no name which is fitting um it really is fitting for that work it's one of the great for those of you listening it's like one of the great classics not just the christian contemplative tradition but kind of just the christian tradition you know yeah he uh yeah it's it's that guy and then the um i think the tradition the desert tradition kind of based in the egyptian yes that's right evagrius and yeah the deserts you know mindfulness is a very common almost vogue thing in our current day um and i've seen a lot in psychology and in my kind of realm of of psychological practice mindfulness is kind of at the very root of it i was yeah just uh i just know so few people who know those authors and then no christian contemplative traditions so i wanted to pick your brain a little bit what do you see as maybe the common ground of like a christian contemplative mindfulness practice and what you see in psychology and then what do you think the root differences are yeah i mean gosh i mean now we're onto one of my favorite subjects of all time you know yeah yeah i mean i mean gosh so i think let's start i mean first off you know a lot of western protestant christians in the modern era don't even realize that there is not just a christian contemplative tradition and not even just a rich contemplative tradition but that some would argue it is the founding tradition that predates buddhist thought hindu thought 110 predates secular mindfulness a number of very smart psychologists would argue that actually the mindfulness tradition which in kind of the etymology as the story is told it's most of the nods go to buddhism but a number would say that actually like like it's the christian tradition but the west is such a kind of reaction right now against christianity that it's just not it's not cool like you can quote you can be a secularist and you can quote buddhist and you're cool you can't quote like saint teresa or saint john of the cross or the cloud of unknown yeah or you know a jesuit or it's just that's just not cool right now um i'm bad sorry go ahead you're great no it's very much a thing but i read this fascinating like it was theoretical but this guy that was based on data was theorizing that yoga actually came from eastern orthodox christian nestorian missionaries apparently there's zero evidence for yoga until the sixth century in india and uh so he made this whole case that actually it was a part of the christian contemplative tradition which is stronger in the east and the christian temple tradition is strongest and the sergeant in the desert fathers and mothers well you would say it started in jesus and then it was strongest in kind of the eastern church and what's now called eastern orthodox and then strains of the catholic church it's never been super strong of the protestant tradition which is really sad um but anyway he makes this whole case that it was like eastern historian christian missionaries who were from that's where the jesus prayer comes from and you know the breath prayer contemplative practice that they actually interjected this into india and then it was kind of subsumed into hinduism so i have no idea if that's even true my point is that's fascinating though there is a like multi-millennia old rich tradition that it's all based on the stories about jesus and the desert specifically matthew 4 and luke 4 luke 4 and jesus temptation in the desert and how that was interpreted by the desert fathers and mothers in the third and fourth century people like ivagrius of ponticus who's one of the most influential christian writers in my life brilliant mind we can come back and talk about him because he is freaking genius i mean he's articulating things in 350-ish is when his book is that is like cutting edge right now neuroscience he's articulating slow brain fast brain pre-verbal thought emotions and thoughts is the same thing sensations of the body unconscious memory he's not using this language but he's articulating like the bleeding edge of what we're hearing right now from people like yourself and neuroscientists in like 352 or something like that just brilliant brilliant brilliant anyway so what i think is similar about christian contemplation and secular mindfulness or whatever mindfulness is the attempt to kind of get outside of your life this like miraculous human ability that we even struggle to even figure out how it works on the science where you can see yourself seen and watch yourself watching and be aware of yourself being aware and you can look at your thoughts and you can look at your emotions and you can look at the sensations in your body from some inner eye that is hard to even name or locate you know under an x-ray or whatever and and and what it shares with mindfulness is the capacity to to slow down to to utilize your body as a as an aide and an ally not a threat or a saboteur and and with the breath attend to the moment and begin to see what you're seeing and think about what you're thinking and feel what you're feeling and be aware of what you're wearing and let these thoughts and emotions and the sensations pass before you in such a way that there's a healthy detachment and you realize this thought this video that plays in my mind this obsessive rumination this feeling that is overwhelming this sensation in my body i've taken this to be myself i've taken this to be my identity i've taken this to be my destiny but actually there's a self if that's not even the right word there's a soul that's below all of this it's deeper than all this martin laird who's one of the best current christian writers on contemplative prayer uses the analogy of like a mountain in the weather he talks about how like your soul or your spirit in biblical language is like the mountain it's like the bedrock and the weather is your emotions and your thoughts and the random i gotta go to the grocery store and this person's horrible and i'm angry about this political thing and what if people are mad at me and don't like this thing or don't like what i said on the podcast that's just the weather and sometimes there's good weather and sometimes there's bad weather and sometimes there's boring weather but the weather comes and goes mount zion is like your spirit is deeper part of you and so i think when you discover that deeper part of you you're you're allowed to detach at some inner emotional volitional place from your thoughts and emotions and sensations in in such a way that you get a modicum of freedom from them and that enables that enables you to stop grasping for control over other people yeah it enables you to both sit in your emotions without being dominated by them or controlled by them it enables you to let depression just be a feeling that you suffer through but not be your whole person not be your identity not be your destiny and it allows a space for compassion because at that point you just begin to see your humanity your vulnerability and that you're one of seven plus billion other people that are human and vulnerable and finite and flawed and broken and deeply in need of healing and saving by god and so i think that's that's the similarity is that that getting to that place of stillness would be christian contemplative language for it of mindfulness of using your breath to get to this space where your thoughts your feelings your sensations are there before you unlike the weather they come and go and you just let them come and go you're not trying to control them or manage them or even fight them per se you're just letting them be and you're attending that deeper part of you to cultivate a less of a grasping of a control for control and more of a freedom and a compassion that where it's dissimilar is that you know in in christian contemplative practice you're not just breathing and trying to detach you're trying to attach if that's the right word to the love of god by the holy spirit so it's profoundly relational in nature so secular mindfulness is non-relational you know it's it's amoral it doesn't have moral judgments you know it's non-relational and that's not bad it's still great like i think every person on the planet should practice mindfulness every grade schooler should begin their grade school day with 10 minutes of mindfulness in class i'm i'm very much for it spoken like a true portland pastor yeah exactly um but you know christian contemplation or really i would just call it prayer but whatever you want to call it is is profoundly relational because what you find when you slip kind of below the weather of your thoughts and your emotions and your sensations is that there's this deeper part of you where in jesus language you know he said his most famous teachings was that we're like a vine we're like a branch and we abide in the vine that is god and that is how we bear fruits this gorgeous agrarian metaphor about human development and secular language and potential or spiritual formation in christian language about how we grow and mature into full flourishing and there's this part of us if you think about an analogy of a branch and a vine you're not even sure like where the branch ends and the vine begins yeah and while i am very orthodox in my distinction between creator and creature like i don't think i'm god but there is a part of me whereas paul writes the new testament my life is hidden with christ and god or as jesus said i'm a branch and he's divine and i'm not even sure where i end and he begins and he begins and i like at that point there's just this communion in christian language there's this in him we live and breathe and move and have our being yes so christian contemplation is not just trying to get below and free of your thoughts it's trying to commune with the inner life of the trinity that we call god and you know as christians we believe that at the center of all reality i mean literally at the center of the universe the causal force behind the universe however the mechanism worked is this trinitarian community of father and son and spirit living in self-giving other centered generous joyful peaceful love and delight just honoring one another loving one another sharing with another giving one and without another with radiant joy and happiness and delight and unshakeable quiet peace that this being that is manifested in jesus of nazareth and this being is at the center of the universe and at the center of our own spirit he's in us by the spirit of god so christian you know a christian mystic is very different than like a you know universalistic mystic or a kind of portland progressive mystic or yeah a christian mystic is just and some people don't like that language i have no problem with it but whatever it is just a christian who's trying to experience in prayer in actuality what is already true of them theologically so so the new testament what a great definition yeah yeah that's it that's all you're trying to do so the testament says my life is hidden with christ and god i'm in christ i'm in you know i am jesus said i'm in the father and you are in me like we're just trying to experience jesus is in the father and i'm in jesus and how do i live and participate in the inner life of the trinity by the spirit and so christian contemplative practice or really i would just say prayer is an attempt to actually experience what jesus made true of us theologically through his life and death and resurrection so yeah that's where i think the dissimilarity is is this relational communion so in my mind christian contemplative prayer is all of the good of mindfulness plus and even better in my estimate humble estimation reality of you're you're receiving love and compassion from the most compassionate strong fierce kind wise real entity person being in all of the universe yeah and um yeah another way to think through that might be it's not you're not just pouring something out you're being filled up with something exactly i i you put that so beautifully i um i work a lot with mindfulness with people just in lots of different world views lots of different ways that they kind of yes identity and a human doesn't it it doesn't require a world view which is which is why it works so well for our pluralistic culture because you can be a christian you can be a buddhist you can be a muslim you can be an agnostic and you're just breathing and trying to you know because it's i think a really core process even just psychologically like in contextual behavior science the whole kind of i shouldn't say the whole premise one of several premises of contextual behavior sciences um that language is a behavior and so the kinds of language um that you attach to and that you interpret to be from the deep core part of who you are versus something that came from your past versus something that's informed by your trauma or something that is an expectation outside of you uh the media the interpretive structure that you give the thoughts that occur to you in your mind it's not just that they impact your behavior it's like no that's part of the flow of you yes yes and so mindfulness is a really um sharp tool to be able to almost get a little bit of distance between you and your thoughts so that you can evaluate which thoughts connect with my values which thoughts are of me which thoughts do i want to act in and then which ones conflict with who i am which ones maybe give me something in the moment that i want but in the long term compromise something that i want even more wow and and then what's cool is like so i have just a few christian clients and i'm not a christian therapist so i don't just see christians i don't right with everyone out of a christian kind of space but i'm christian and so this conversation is very christian because because i i can take all the i i can take all the boundaries off i could just talk and so with a few of my clients who are christian and then have invited that into our work together mindfulness is it's just it feels like we can drive full speed because yeah there's there's all these thoughts and and the christian categories for that is like you have thoughts from the flesh you have thoughts from sin just broadly and into the world and so sin isn't just like this deep like moral infraction that just happens in your own heart but it's also something that is present systemically and present in our everywhere relationships and everything around us right yes and so we are influenced impacted and in our development in utero like there's all these stages that we progress through in life that depart something in our own souls and in our own minds and so it's a crowded room up there in our own minds when we're trying to piece together who am i and then like you stated so beautifully like the the identity ascension of the american west is discover who you are from scratch and make it something unique and make it something desirable yeah and uh and then and then perform it for the world yeah yeah yeah you know i was listening to i don't know if you follow laurie santos work at all she's a cognitive psychologist from yale done some great work and i was listening to her recently and she was talking about all of that you would know this way better than me but the massive shift in psychological research around the self-esteem movement yeah yeah i'm familiar with that with that research this was her summary of it was her and so i'd love to hear you agree or disagree she was basically saying that the self-esteem movement has proved itself to be a bit of a disaster and um you know our generation kind of grew up on that much of which was an overreaction against the generation before us but she said the problem with self-esteem is it's performative and so and it's delusional so you're trying to feel good about yourself by saying kind of a combination of i'm awesome i'm great i'm the best self-talk which is delusional and you know as my therapist would say to me you're never smarter than your brain yeah you know so it's like that's why he doesn't do a lot of like the cognitive stuff because he's like self-talk doesn't really work because you're not smarter than your brain so you can you can tell yourself whatever you want but there's some deeper part of you that knows you're not the best or you're not you know a model or you're not uh you know genius intellectual or whatever you might claim to be you're just you you know you're very human you have a shadow and all of this and then you know the other spot is just saying you know um i'm good i'm great there's nothing wrong with me i'm great just the way i am you know and and the problem is that is first off the problem the first one is there's a deeper part of us that knows we're not amazing or the best or number one or a boss or whatever and then the problem with the other part of it is we're not always good and we blow it and we make colossal mistakes at times and we disappoint everybody most startlingly ourselves and so she was advocating she said rather than self-esteem a better approach is what she called self-compassion so in that moment and the problem with the performative identity like that is it just brings shame so the moment that you realize i'm not the smartest person and i'm not awesome and i'm not great then you just feel shame so you're striving to perform and when you perform you feel good and you keep that fear at bay and then when you screw up you just feel this colossal shame and you have nowhere to take that shame especially in the secular nerve it's like what do you do with that shame you know and such a shame culture that we're moving into in particular the way social media is now used it's just an extraordinarily vicious and shameful kind of place and so um you know she was advocating not for self-esteem but what she called self-compassion but in those moments where you're like i blew it i came in last or second or third you don't say no i'm really the best i'm really good really i'm a there's nothing wrong with me you say i'm human and i'm like all humans i'm finite and i'm i mess up and i do stupid things and i i think things that are wrong and i my body gets ahead of me and i i live out of past pain and i invent new pain you know like and and that's okay yeah to be human yeah and to practice compassion and so i was like oh man i mean for me i of course went like beyond self-compassion to the compassion of god yeah of course yeah how do you practice like not just self-compassion which that's beautiful but also like i'm loved i'm deeply loved by the center of all reality as with all of my screwed up-ness man that that for me feels like such a better path forward that doesn't lead to performance exhaustion and shame but leads to peace rest and love yeah that's right up my alley so i've i use compassion focused therapy and i've had uh scholars and compassion focused therapy on the podcast and oh i got awesome all about it yeah so russell colts the interview with russell colts results he's a scholar in that field and we were it there's there's kind of i had like ten thoughts jump in my head at once when you did i summarize that right beautifully beautifully the way the way i would describe it is exactly the way you do in my way it would be that we have a standard of what is um acceptable and unacceptable and then we have a few different ways that we can view our own behavior in reference to that it's either i hit that standard and then i'm valuable or i'm or even i'm being myself can be a way of setting a standard okay so we have the standard and then i can hit it or my behavior falls short of it and then i can either um destroy the category and pretend like it doesn't matter um and i think a lot of people do that within like a faith deconstruction a lot of people just like yeah let's just uh let's just obliterate the standard because the standard is the oppressive uh yes you know feature in that whole game is like there should be shame and fear bro it's all rooted but but the reality is that it'll just be replaced by a different standard um just in different language that feels easier to hit or that you have more access that's often even more oppressive and more legalistic and more exacting and more hypocritical and more self-righteous i mean it's crazy yeah and then uh the the other alternative would be to just berate ourselves and uh and i think people are shocked it at their own self-loathing thoughts when i point them out to them in sessions wow and like uh like i was like i was i regularly talk to mothers of kids who are having a hard time i do a lot of work with kids with adhd like young boys who oh yeah you know just working through hard stuff yeah problems um i specialize in working with kids who've gone through sexual trauma as well and so that just comes off the whole set of behavioral issues and um and so i work pretty intently often with single moms because you know when you're trying to um work with a dynamic such as a kid going through trauma a kid having adhd um and then you're you're on your own you're working full time you're trying to like make things work and have a warm connection with your kid they're going through something you're trying to be there for it's an immensely complex tangled web yes that that takes many minds to untangle right so um anyway so like i'll be working with let's say a mom who really doesn't want to be like really oppressive and kind of rigid and and shameful like her parents and so she uh she's trying to give her child a space where she can be you know she can be free and be themselves and not really be like weighed down by other people's expectations and not be burdened but you know and that's that's her standard it's like that's what success is success is the child being able to discover and express a full and unique identity not burdened by outside structure and outside domineering i don't know rigid expectations but through clinical work and this is almost every time like there's a flip that happens because the child won't sleep the child doesn't listen to her when she asks them to eat food that the child doesn't want to eat um anxiety anxiety massive problem yeah and uh and in this because there's because she fears structure because she associates structure with her parents that there's no um there's no i don't know space for the kid to even discover what they want to be and what they are because they're almost like wandering out at sea and then there's this huge contention that happens between mom and child and and then mom loses her temper and then feels worlds of shame for losing her temper at her kid and and then i'm so i'm pointing out the shameful thoughts that she has for not meeting her own standards the ways that she's imposing a structure upon her kid that her kid is rebelling against and then her feeling shame for being like her parents and like i think a lot of us think that if we just switch up our ideologies if we just switch up our um we try to replace pieces but we're building the same game yeah and you're placing one pharaoh for another yeah that's a great way to describe it and and so a lot of our work together turns into like let's actually build a structure that we really align with and that aligns with our values and that we feel really good about and then let's stick to it like there needs to be an outside ethic that we think builds a flourishing and good world for our kid and uh and then it can't be guided by our mood because that's often what happens is when we get mad at structure when we get mad at the at the standard when we get mad at the oppressive feature we rebel against that and then we think if we just follow the inner compass then we'll be okay but that inner compass is its own oppressive structure it's its own dictator it's its own it's its own oppressive structure and will build its own instantly and um i don't know it's like the kid and the mother thing comes to mind i also think of even people in their marriages when they're trying to when they're trying to get their needs met when they're trying to feel like they can connect with other people or sorry connect with their spouse in a way that's meaningful but feeling like that person's not this this this this this and they have this entire inner standard that they feel like a relationship should be but then when they notice that standard they feel shameful themselves for i don't know not doing what they feel like they should do i guess yeah i have 10 different scenarios that are jumping in my head but what uh what are situations that you see even just as a pastor in your own church of people playing by these shameful games that they build that they think are really like freeing and open and yeah well i mean first off i think you just articulated better than i have ever heard the psycho spiritual dynamics behind a lot of the culture wars you know wow and behind so many millennials deconstructing their christian faith for those that came from you know i i just when you what i see behind every instagram post of railing against whatever form of oppression it is like when i know the stories behind them it's almost always rooted in wounding and almost always rooted in some painful relational experience almost always rooted in shame and sin and fear you know and i think one of the great challenges and i think you just articulated it is you know the west and this is not actually recent you know patrick dean his political philosopher would argue that this goes back to the founding of america and even the enlightenment um but it's it's reached its full flowering in recent decades but the west in america in particular is really he would say an attempt to make a new kind of human being around the redefinition of freedom from power to permission so what most people mean by freedom right now is the ability to do whatever you want without any external you know rules or structures or authority figures or guard rails in place as long as it doesn't quote harm anybody and of course this is a massive problem on a pluralistic nation because harm requires an agreed upon definition of good and evil it's a very biblical idea i read this morning in romans paul said like love does no harm to a neighbor but paul is working off a transcendent source of moral authority so he can define certain actions as loving or harmful or hateful based on a transcendent source america can't do that we're a pluralistic secular nation with different ideas about the good and we agree on some things um like you know but not all things there's a lot of things we don't agree on and so to call an action harmful or not means you have to agree upon what what's good for a person and what's loving for a person and if you don't agree on that then you're kind of up the creek you know so free this kind of new bourgeoisie definition of freedom is the ability to do whatever the hell you want without anybody to tell you different as long as it's true to yourself and that inner locus point it it turns out to look a lot like what the new testament writers call slavery yeah yeah then you know it's tied to addiction and or compulsion if you want to use you know more technical language and addiction and the addiction kind of epidemic across our country and it's baked into us like i was i was thinking about you know uh frozen like the disney movie like little kids like what's the line in her song no rules no something no right no wrong for me i'm free yeah so her definition of freedom is there's no rules there's no morality there's no right or wrong i can do whatever i want and be true to myself that's freedom yeah and so we're literally enculturating an entire generation that thinks that's what freedom is when the reality is that ends up often for a lot of people being slavery slavery to your shame to your fear to your performative identity compulsion to addiction to behaviors that are self-defeating and self-destructive and rock you with anxiety and guilt you don't have anywhere to take them whereas the new testament definition of freedom and really the classical greek definition of freedom is not permission but power it's the ability not to do whatever you want but to not only want but do whatever is good and so oppression is when any there is very much external oppression that's very much a thing but it's when an external authority source keeps you from doing what is good not when an external authority source has some form of guardrails that are set over your life yeah and um i just made a tick tock video on this i'll post it it's so hard to get these ideas one minute sometimes but i know i don't know how you do it but uh is is an analogy of yeah you know if you have you ever gone to the grocery store and you have no list you're just kind of going up and down the aisles like picking stuff out that you want to eat for the week like it feels like you have freedom yeah right it feels like freedom and then you get home and you forgot lemons or you forgot uh milk or yes and you spent 220 dollars and you're like what the crap now i don't have money for last week and you have ingredients to make like two things and then a bunch of processed food that's what happens it's like i have a bunch of like frozen egg rolls or something and i don't even eat egg rolls why did i buy these and but it feels like freedom but then when you actually get to cooking it feels like slavery or it feels like i think in the video just use like it feels like constraint yeah but when you go into the grocery store at the list and even though that can strain your options it's less fun you know going in with a list because you're you don't know where anything is and you're looking around it's more fun just kind of at least for me like just to wander around i know some people hate grocery shopping and they find the whole i love it yes i love it it's like walking around giant pantry but uh but because it always goes badly but i always spend at least 100 more but uh when you go in with a list it feels like constraint but when you get to cooking it feels like freedom yeah because you have all the ingredients and you can probably make more food for less money yes and so there's this idea that's good we feel like um and and like my language and therapy is very much like value driven behavior right so that's that's something that's kind of world view neutral yes whatever your worldview is yes however you live in alignment with your values exactly yeah whatever you think is right and wrong liv live by that consistently yeah that's the let me help let me let me help you integrate to that yeah yeah it's when we yeah you know use an act outside of our values that there's almost this uh this inner sickness that happens where we say we believe one thing and we act a different way and the most sure-fire way to get to that sickness is just acting on your mood and you know i think about that a lot through the lens of my marriage i'm coming up on 20 years now and you know tim kell yeah tim keller has that great line about how freedom isn't the absence of constraints it's the ability to choose the right constraints that in the end will set you free oh cool and an optimal example i mean you could use a thousand examples of that from the grocery store to exercise to a budget you know great example is marriage marriage is a chosen constraint like you make a volitional decision to constrain your sexuality your body your emotional intimacy your entire life until death do us part to one other person out of billions of other people on the planet i mean talk about limiting your options holy cow you know and even if marriage doesn't remotely mean what it used to in our culture still that's the intention behind it yeah and there are so many every marriage uh except for the dishonest one ones pretty i mean maybe that's an overstatement let me just say the vast majority of marriages that are honest and self-aware at some point want out of the constraint and that marriage feels it feels restrictive it feels suffocating at times it doesn't feel fun or joyful or life-giving this is i think inevitable and i think people that don't talk about that are either just in denial or dishonest i think you know um maybe i'm just really cynical but i don't think i have a lovely wife so this is this is nothing against her she's beyond lovely and uh but it's if i were to say in one of those moments or one of those years or those seasons together i'm out i don't want this constraint this is restrictive this is holding me back for my true self and the life i want and i would divorce her and go my own way then i would be living in the slavery of a heart that always has to get what it wants to be happy and that is a far greater form of oppression and and repression and emotional suffocation then learning to delight in the woman i married almost 20 years ago okay i'm learning for me because i can hear people listening and being like what like would you be like what do you think when you say okay my happiness like the slavery of living in a world where i have to get what i want in order to be happy yes beautiful way to put that open that up yeah well i mean this is like a very christian idea like you know tied to the christian contemplative practice is fasting which is which is not a part of mindfulness it is actually part of buddhist stuff but you know fasting is actually like a core christian practice and it does a lot of things it's holistic it's embodied it's psychosomatic it's you know beautiful but one of the many things that fasting does is it teaches you to be happy and at peace even when you don't get what you want so that of your own will so that when somebody else or life or god or your boss or a global pandemic doesn't give you what you want you can still be happy and at peace so that it's like the little children like the most um you see this you work with kids the most miserable unhappy kids are the ones that who their parents give them whatever they want it does not make them happier it makes them miserable they get stuck they get locked in the prison of their own narcissism and their own self i mean c.s lewis said actually in context this was in a letter where he's actually writing about masturbation of all things and he has a beautiful insight where he said the entire human journey is learning to come out of the prison of the self and he said the great danger is that we come to love the prison and so as long as you live in the prison of where you have to get what you want to be happy no person no marriage no job no life no identity no sexual experience no income bracket no travel experience no passport no job like fill in the blank nothing will ever be able to always give what you want and you will run over people sabotage people people will become objects by which you try to self-gratify and feed your narcissism even if it masquerades as i'm falling in love or this is great or i love these people you know and i'm not trying to be really cynical here i'm just no you're you're absolutely really honest i was listening that's all i'm trying to say i was listening to a millionaire an interview with a multi-millionaire just and he's and he's known on instagram for just living this really like crazy lifestyle with all the rules and yachts and haitians and women and you know just like going really crazy and he in an interview he said it is so profound i think i thought about it for years since seeing this interview he was like i can't just go on a vacation and enjoy a normal vacation like a lot of people in america if you told them hey i'm going to pay for you to go to hawaii you're going to get a room in a hotel and i'll give you a rental car and you know and and maybe some money to go out to eat they would be stoked you know but me i have to have the best jet like i have to have the best yacht it has to be the most beautiful women it has to be the craziest party and because there's a the psychological reality is that you habituate to things that you enjoy so quickly and so if you really are living this lifestyle i have to have what i need or want or i have to feel this way these rules that we set in our lives that that become these standards by which we build our identities really which which which give way to our compulsions which become our addictions and our presence yeah they rule you and uh and you notice and i did a little tick tock video on this too that your the options that you can enjoy get smaller and smaller and i use the analogy in a tiny little video one i got a new mattress and it's just the best it's like so comfortable but then i went to a hotel and the mattress i got a terrible night's sleep and i'm like man before when i had a crappy mattress i could get a good night's sleep anywhere but now that i have a great match now you need it there's that line sleep shrink i think it's leslie jameson and her memoir the recovery and on addiction i think it's her i could be misquoting um i read it in jaime k smith's recent book on augustine which is mind-blowing but she has that great line where she defines addiction as increasing desire with decreasing pleasure and reward so so like the more you feed the more you give in to that i want this let me get it actually it's like few it's like throwing fuel it's like pouring gas on the fire like your desire keeps going up and as the and the law of returns it's diminishing a lot of returns like the reward pleasure satisfaction actually goes down like read a great book i'm spacing on the name of both the author and the book by a psychologist a couple years ago on the difference between like pleasure and happiness and basically it was a psycho-historical take on america saying that america has confused pleasure and happiness needed all the science like you know he kind of summarized it as a difference between dopamine and serotonin and basically talked about how pleasure is something that it's about wanting something about getting pleasure from doing something but contentment is actually more about the absence of want it contentment or happiness is can you define happiness as contentment this sense of like i'm sitting here drinking iced tea on my porch petting my dog and i'm just deeply happy with the world and i don't need to have a new car or a new thing or experience this or have people validate me on instagram like i'm just here and i'm just me and i'm just in the god's beautiful world and i'm i'm at peace that's happiness and when when you redefine happiness as pleasure you just end up you know biblical language chasing the wind yeah and i think there's that i hear that version of happiness kind of working its way into the modern kind of conversation around mindfulness and just detaching from desire the less things you want then the less standards you have to hit in order to be happy is another way to think about that but again it's i i think you'd agree with me it's this pouring out without filling up and there's something so powerful about the christian idea of sabbath the christian idea of christian contemplation sitting in the the presence of god i've been reading a martin laird's book i actually got the recommendation off your instagram i just thought it looked cool oh cool yeah so that's what sent me on this tangent down down like this cloud of unknowing and everything um got it yes it's such a good such a good wreck so thanks for that yes yeah you bet something he talks about is is just you're not necessarily when you're in this silence you're not in the absence of something you're in the presence of everything yes and it's like the silence that contains all noise and absence of noise was was a way that he talked about it and yeah and i've been i've been doing that maybe the past nine days right so is is what i've been like consciously like trying to step into like 20 minutes of just complete silence and trying to like remove my mind from any thoughts and and i thought that was really strange at first because i have all these mindfulness techniques i've learned in psychology that i think work and that are great and so it's just funny playing by new rules a little bit but one of uh the author of the cloud of knowing what he talks about is like you really want to not even reflect on good things he's like because good things will take you on trails and your thoughts like you're thinking about you know how much you love the lord and then you're thinking about all the blessings you have in your life and then you think about the blessings you have today and then you're thinking about the blessings that uh that are coming later and then oh what do i need to do tomorrow and oh today i need to make sure yes and then your head's just gone it's gone so he's like really create a space where you're content and you're at peace in the presence of god without desiring anything without desiring to know anything new about god without trying to feel anything without trying to attain without trying to transcend it's simply being in the presence of god and what i noticed was like i didn't have this big like aha like top of the mountain kind of thing but the rest of my day felt really different and that's what i thought was strange it's like the things i used to really trap like i i wanted to be on my phone less and i wanted to be less distracted and i felt more present with my clients and i was in a moment in the grocery store where i was standing behind a lady that was deciding to kind of like desanitize her car but in the entryway to the into the grocery store and she was taking her sweetie oh no and i noticed this anger pop up but then i also noticed this patience that really wasn't there before and i was like oh this is okay i'm not in a rush like she's she's a little bit older she's just making sure that she's not gonna get sick why am i angry at her yeah like uh i'll i'll pause and it was almost like the world uh in in in that book like he talks a lot about this the world gets different yeah and uh and your pleasures and your your vices and the things that used to grab you and entrap you they feel less um like they have less of a grip on you and even in just nine days of doing it's not very long at all but like just feeling in small subtle moments just this contentment and i think that's kind of what we're getting at and and a lot of people ridicule christianity for this idea and and it's very vogue to get frustrated at um the idea of detaching and fasting and almost this stoicism that feels so antithetical to um just modern culture where that says like stop shaming yourself for wanting and feeling and experiencing pleasure like why do you have all these limitations and and uh but few people articulate a really powerful account for why constraint leads to freedom it's not even just that it's good and that it's a good value and that it's a mature thing to do or something is like no it actually it leads to more of what you really want and what your heart desires isn't just to be pleasured 24 7. it's to be no pleasure is pleasure is not the driving desire of the human soul i don't think i do not think the driving human desire a secular culture would kind of tell us that what most people want is power and pleasure i think what most people want is love and joy and peace yeah yeah that's so good you know that's that's the major difference between uh christian detachment if that's even the right word and eastern detachment is we're not trying to detach from all desire you know augustine and other christian saints would say we're creatures of desire we're run by desire the problem is not that we desire is that we desire the wrong things in the wrong order is what he would say so you know augustine and most of the christian contemplative tradition wouldn't try to get you to the place where you no longer desire it would say that every surface level desire for pleasure for this for marriage to get out of your marriage for whatever for validation is actually it is actually the symptomatic of this deeper desire for union with god and so like you know ignatius the founder of the jesuit order used the language most people translate in english as indifference as a synonym to detachment but a lot of scholars actually say that the word the spanish word he used would be better translate his freedom and what do you call you know he had that famous line like i want and choose you know i do not desire to live a wealthy life or a poor life a healthy life or a sick one a long life or a short one but only what leads to god's deepening life in me so detachment or indifference or freedom or whatever you want to call it in the christian tradition isn't necessarily about detaching from all desire it's about detaching from every single desire except the deepest one whatever leads to god's deepening life for me and letting that desire be completely satisfied through union with god and contemplative prayer is the practice by which we there are others but you know the main practice by which we experience that deep satisfaction and union with god and then you can stand behind in our best moments the elderly lady and be okay or somebody can criticize you and you don't have to defend yourself or the world can be a mess and you can be at peace with that even as you work for its healing and renewal you know yeah i think i think too a critique that i hear often is is really neutralized quite quickly with this idea of that it's out of your affections and desire for connection with god that these things are conducted not out of a way of trying to earn and prove and oh no oh goodness no yes as powerful and beautiful as we're talking about it now it can be just as poisonous if done out of a heart of trying to earn it and oh a hundred percent like we saw that with purity culture like we saw that with this desire to save sex for marriage and and to not touch each other or even date each other like kiss dating goodbye and uh but it was all done out of this at least in my experience and the critics of it we'll talk about it's immense fear and this immense uh not even like desire for like their future spouse and the beauties of marriage and trying to contextualize all that within like their faith it was just it was a standard that they needed to perform and if they didn't perform it then they're insufficient and they're dirty and that caused as much pain and turmoil as the thing that they were trying as the thing that purity culture was trying to help people avoid yeah um i mean it's just amazing how those oh no it's tragic i mean it's no surprise that the founder of that ended up divorcing his wife and leaving the faith you know like that's that's where it goes when that those insidious motivations get in there it everything has to be motivated by love you know it has to just be a a burning desire to receive the love of god and and to give it back in turn when i think about all the disciplines i have in place for my marriage you know yeah and there's nothing bad with like saying like i for moral reasons discipline myself to have a date night or whatever but the reality is there's a discipline there and a structure and a constraint of every thursday night we have a date because i desire intimacy with my wife i desire union with her i want to i want to share soul i want our souls to co-mingle i i want to know what she's thinking and feeling i want to be deeply attuned to each other emotionally on the same page i want that so i schedule in a date night and there are most weeks i can't wait for it uh somebody's like last week i was exhausted i had a bad day at work i was tired i did not i didn't want to go but you do it anyway there is a discipline side to it but it's because there's a deeper part of me that wants intimacy and a healthy marriage and to become a person of love you know it's that if there's deeper i think that's the problem with the west is we really struggle with the hierarchy of desires and often we we forget that our strongest desires which are normally bodily desires for food for sex for whatever pleasure are actually not our deepest desires and that's where like a true christian theology of sex like honestly i think the people that know have the best christian theology of sex are celibate monks and nuns like you know like catholic like ronald rohiser if you've ever read him celibate catholic priest never he's like 70s never had sex he writes about sex abundance his understanding i've been i've been having sex for two decades and his understanding of human sexuality it is so far beyond mine i mean it's just it's so profound because he understands that sex is not actually a desire in your body for an orgasm it's a desire it's a deeper desire in your soul for communion and contribution and like these are and you know the catholic tradition would say you don't have to have sex to have communion and make a contribution and so like what's those deeper desires below the bodily desires for pleasure they're often the strongest those are the ones that present themselves most forcibly to our awareness but actually the deeper desires that's that's what i want that's what i want to give into you know yeah and uh and everyone i know that that has pushed into those spaces out of love has come out better for it but pushed out into those places out of fear has come out worse yes and there's no neutral ground when it comes to okay i want to pursue even something like and that's why the standards don't work like we talked about it in self-esteem we talked about it in performative like identity formation it's like yeah it's not the standard it's the it's uh it's love and it's pursuing what matters to you and it's not bad to have goals like i don't know i don't want anyone to hear this thinking that i'm saying it's it's it's uh it's bad to have ways that you categorize your identity we were just talking about like if you don't have categories then you suffer but it's it's knowing the ontology or the why underneath what you're doing and that actually resonating with something that matters to you and you can go through sacrifice something like sitting quietly for 20 minutes will is a very like psychologically distressing experience it's uh it's anxiety provoking and and right taking a sabbath and really disconnecting from your phone and choosing to like i don't know for us we do all the crap will come up yes yes in here and you have plans yeah you'd rather be doing this you have a tv it's super bowl sunday i don't know whatever and there's all sorts of things but are you sacrificing because you want something more or are you sacrificing because you feel like this is how i perform to be okay and to be valuable yeah and uh and that seems like the center how would you summarize that yeah no not better than you man that was so well said i think people run from any form of silence solitude and rest because your true self comes to the surface in those places whether that's sabbath whether that's 20 minutes in the morning of contemplative prayer whether it's just turning off all your devices and going on a walk before bed people run why is it that we always have to have the radio on the tv plane or every quick second at a stoplight we have to scroll through whatever read the news or like why what is is that just like silicon valley's you know digital addiction stuff or is there is there a deep and cute deeper human fear that who we actually are might catch up to us and and this is where and that is my blatant christianness coming out here i i think that the secular don't let anybody judge you don't let anybody say your behavior is wrong you're good just the way you are speak your truth define good and evil for yourself it is the most suffocating worldview you could possibly have because it's a there is no atonement there's no forgiveness there's no compassion there's no way back to god and you live surrounded by this undercurrent of shame and fear and christians feel this too like when you get into often religious culture is even worse you know and i think the way out is not away from god is toward god and discovering that god and i i'm like i'm an orthodox christian i'm orthodox on all christian doctrines i'm not a liberal but i think that when you when you come into the presence of god in prayer when you rest when you come to the quiet what you experience is a god who is fierce but is also overwhelmingly who is love is not loving who is love this is why in christian theology god is trinity because god is love and love cannot exist outside of relationship therefore god must be a relationship because god is love and when you come into that presence of love i mean in exodus you know god's the one place in all the old testament where god defines himself and he gives his name and he says who he is and what he's like the first thing on the list is i'm compassionate defining character trait of god in his own self-identification is compassion and compassion is an emotional word a lot of times what you know it's a feeling word it's that the root hebrew word there is rahum and it's the word used for how a mother or a father feels about their infant or little child which is probably you know you could give us the science behind it the strongest attachment bond there is between a mother and a child a young child not a teenage child attachments breaking down by then but yeah and like that's how god that's god's baseline emotional disposition toward all is compassion the way that a loving mother looks into the eyes of her you know one and a half year old that's god and all human analogies break down because you know mothers and fathers often get it really wrong and bring their own trauma and woundedness into it so it's not everyone's experience but i think we all get the image of that that that's god's emotional disposition and when you come into the loving presence of that man all the other stuff all the performance all the striving all the earning all the legalism all the fear all the shame it just disappears and you realize i'm is jesus in the desert right in the satanic temptation not what i do i do this little liturgy with my son every morning before he goes to high school we did it today i'm not what i do i'm not what i have i'm not what other people say about me i'm the beloved of god it's who i am no one can take it from me i don't have to worry i don't have to hurry i can trust my friend jesus and share his love with the world yeah that's it that feels like a good liturgy to land on for today it's a little cheesy but no not at all i want to embody that too thank you so much for this conversation it was so meaningful and insightful and we went to all sorts of places i didn't predict and just i had a ball oh well this is a dream come true to get to chat to you i mean obviously like i i kind of part a d part and kind of wishes i became a clinical psychologist and so in the meantime i will just listen to people like you and read and pay attention i just i'm so grateful for the work that you do and the healing of the soul i think that the work that you do even with people that aren't christians and even through you know i love how you do it through that lens but it is pastoral work and um it's an honor to meet you thank you for the light that you're bringing into the world and uh let's get coffee i'd love to i'd love to have an embodied i'd love to share a meal or you know at some point it would be really fun to keep the conversation going me too i'd love it we'll have many conversations in the future anyone listening make sure if anything that john mark was saying just resonated with your soul his book the ruthless elimination of hurry it's just a gym so you got to pick it up all right i'll talk to you next time i

Channel: Matthias J Barker

Views: 5,342

Rating: 4.9352226 out of 5

Keywords: John Mark Comer, Johnmark comer, John Mark Commer, Matthias Barker, Mathias Barker, Mattias Barker, Bipolar Disorder, Bipolar II, bi polar, Martin Laird, Christian Contemplation, Thomas Keating, the cloud of unknowing, centering prayer, Mindfulness, Bridgetown church

Id: yDvng0AUrW8

Length: 85min 12sec (5112 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021