Faith’s Dance With Doubt — A Conversation with Brian McLaren

hey everybody before we get started i just wanted to tell you about a new book from faith matters publishing it's called restoration by patrick mason when we started the faith matters publishing project one of our goals was to explore what restoration really means as the church moves into its third century and that's exactly what patrick does if you're like me and you've ever wondered how restoring israel can be relevant to you you've got to read this book patrick shows how as members of the church it's our mission to truly lead out in bringing wholeness and healing to the marginalized and the vulnerable this book absolutely lit a fire for me and it has totally changed the way i view my own engagement with the church and with the world i really can't recommend this book strongly enough it's the kind of book you want everyone you know to be reading to so that you can talk about it so you can pick up a copy for yourself or for your friends and family at desert book amazon audible and apple books okay that's it on the book for now but we'll be sharing a lot more in the near future thanks as always and here's the episode hey everybody this is tim chavez from faith matters in this conversation we spoke with brian mclaren about his new book faith after doubt brian is a former evangelical pastor bestselling author speaker and podcast host whose ideas we found to be extraordinarily resonant for our own faith tradition in this most recent book and in the interview brian shares his own experience passing through periods of deep doubt and shares how those experiences have been key for him to unlocking a greater sense of simplicity integration and harmony in his life we want to make clear that we recognize that the word doubt has different meanings to different people to some it means an attitude of cynicism summing to questions of faith to others it means an open and honest questioning without a predetermined outcome it's really that latter definition of doubt that brian examines in his book and we know that this kind of questioning can be profoundly disorienting but according to brian it can also result in a new kind of faith that leads to a deep and abiding love between ourselves others and our world and while this episode is in many ways for those who have experienced deep periods of doubt it's also for those who want to stand in love and solidarity with those who have we really think there's something for everybody here thanks so much as always for listening and a huge thanks to brian for coming on we hope you enjoy this episode brian it really is such an honor to have you on the podcast thank you so much for taking an hour to be with us i'm so happy to be invited thanks i loved your book i loved your book and tim loved your book and we have not been able to stop talking about it and actually i feel like it is a conversation that i am hearing all over our our faith community it's just it's really it's really something that has caught fire and everyone is talking about it seems like everywhere i turn there are conversations about this book and one comment that i hear over and over and i feel like it's usually the first comment is that it's so striking that you are having the same experience we have we have kind of this idea that we are alone in this in these hard faith and doubt questions and these growing pains and it was so illuminating to hear all of these stories your story and the stories that you tell because they are so identical they just map so identically to the experience that we're having as as um latter-day saints and it was so comforting to know that we are we are experiencing something so similar to the broader christian world so it it felt like a lot of comfort and it kind of felt like an invitation into solidarity with broader christianity and and mostly it felt like um a real introduction into this whole new wealth of nourishment that i think a lot of us just didn't even know existed so we're so grateful and so just so grateful for the role that your book is playing in our growth you know personally and in our community um and we thought maybe for the listener i would love for the listeners who haven't read your book yet to just get a little taste of what i'm talking about and so we wondered if you would just start with telling us about your own faith journey sure well i i grew up in a wonderful loving family wonderful parents my parents wanted to have a lot of kids and they tried for six years and thought nothing's happening and then i was born and then uh my younger brother was born 18 months later and then no more kids so uh so we always knew we were very you know loved and wanted and uh had from from a really wonderful family um both of my parents were from a little protestant uh denomination some call it a sect uh called the plymouth brethren and the plymouth brethren most folks have never heard of them but maybe folks have heard of garrison keeler he us he used to have a big npr show called prairie home companion he was from my background and he writes about it in some of his books and there's a kind of well-known uh christian political activist named jim wallace who also is from this background but it's not a very well known uh little groups although it has um really interesting parallels with um with the history of latter-day saints uh which we could talk about if we wanted to really go into kind of nerdy religious detail um but in in short we thought that all christians all existing christians at the time our movement began in the 1830s had ruined christianity and we were coming along to fix it and uh that sounds very very familiar when i got old enough to be a little bit cynical about this i called it the church of the last detail because we kept having schisms within our little group because that group didn't have it quite right now we're going to fix this and we will have it just right and then you know the process of finding the last detail but loving people you know and of course when you grow up in any tradition it's what's normal to you and you assume it's the only way to be um i started having problems really as a kind of a young kid because i was really interested in science and dinosaurs and you know stars and astronomy and uh our church was very strict on literal six day creation and so i remember my sunday school teacher telling me once i must have asked a question about evolution maybe we were reading the genesis creation story or whatever and i just said you know what about the dinosaurs and what about evolution and i think my teacher said oh you have to make a choice you either believe in god or evolution and i just remember thinking you know i i don't see why this makes sense and i remember thinking it won't be too long i'll be old enough and i'll get out of this thing so uh and then add to that uh i i was a guitar player and a musician and i played sax and some other instruments and i started playing a little rock and roll band which was totally considered sinful and so i just thought i was on my way out um and i i probably would have been um but then i got i had a couple of people who were a few years older than me who independently took an interest in me and represented a different kind of faith to me and i ended up one of them invited me on a retreat and i had this very powerful spiritual experience there and so i ended up staying christian although i think i was no longer interested in just being within this very little narrow group that i'd grown up with um and i to make a long story short i went to college my plan was to be a english teacher because i loved literature and um while i was in college i was part of a little group that started a little dinner group fellowship group to talk about faith matters and that ended up becoming a little congregation um i i became a college english teacher and then gradually became the pastor of the this the leader of this little congregation and i served in that capacity for 24 years and um just outside the washington dc area and um i started writing books uh because i i i in some ways i started writing books for my own therapy uh and in some ways because i felt that there were certain i don't know truths that i needed to at least put into words or things that i thought were true and that led to more writing and what i'm doing now wow so i'm curious if your experience i mean i feel like you write with so much depth about about doubt you can tell that this was a very personal experience for you did you feel like you experienced doubt for the first time and most meaningfully when you left your you know the faith of your childhood or did was this a a second wave later when you were when you were teaching from this new congregation you know um it came in many ways really um i i think this will make sense you know when you grow up in a very strict group uh you think oh all the problems are with my strict group if i could just get into a little broader group all my problems would be solved well then you get into that group and you find out it's just a slightly broader version of what you had before and so i think each time i break out into a little more space i find out that there were deeper questions and and i and you know one of my other interests is history so i would try to learn the history of these different religious movements and and then you understand you know everybody comes from a context and one of the big things that actually was really at the core of the first book that i wrote um is that i realized you know uh historians often talk about the ancient world the medieval world and the modern world and that's one easy way to divide up a lot of history into a couple of categories and um and in many ways you know judaism and christianity they arise in the uh in the ancient world and then they go through these massive transformations in the medieval world and then they more less less effectively try to adapt to the modern world but what i started realizing is that the story of the modern world was kind of coming to an end and there was what a lot of people call a postmodern world that was emerging and that one of the problems for me you know as a very conservative evangelical christian was that my faith didn't it barely made sense in the modern world it didn't make sense in the post-modern world and one of the interesting discoveries for me is that i found out there were jewish thinkers going through something similar with judaism and muslim thinkers buddhist thinkers it was just sort of amazing to find out how what i thought was only a problem of my religion is really kind of a human problem it happens across religion and religions and cultures and was there any particular time of your life that was like a like a real dark night of the soul for you in terms of in terms of doubt or is doubt been sort of a constant companion that's helped you as you've you know stepped out into into these bigger and bigger boxes no there definitely have been waves um you know probably my first really serious wave was my senior year of high school and then maybe my first two years of college um and part of that was you know you you're suddenly introduced to more things that you didn't know and you tried to integrate it and so that that was my first really big wave and really it continued through through graduate school i think graduate school in an awful lot of disciplines is the perfect time to doubt because in some ways even as an undergraduate you read textbooks that you assume they really know what they're talking about and then in graduate school you read the original sources and you find out that everybody actually disagrees with everybody about everything at some level so um so that was my first big big wave but then after i became a pastor uh and i was leading a congregation i went through another really deep wave and it was in the early 1990s and the thing about that our church had experienced some kind of rapid growth and a lot of the people who came into our church had no religious background or at least maybe you know they've been baptized catholic as children and had never been back you know so they would come with their questions and i would give them the best answers that i had for my theological training and they would walk out and i think they would sort of think does he really believe that that is a good answer you know like they think i like this guy but i can't believe he believes that so uh very often i i jokingly say they would leave with my best answers and i would be left with their best questions and then on top of that um my wife and i have four adult children now but one of our sons was six years old in 1990 and he um was diagnosed with uh uh with leukemia and we had um three and a half years of daily chemotherapy uh he had a pretty tough uh you know brand of leukemia to deal with and um you know i'm sure on top of everything else that added a sort of personal dimension it it i it wasn't so much that i was doubting god why did my child have leukemia but i think i was more aware that a lot of the theology that i inherited within christianity i actually did better the less i thought about that theology um you know the theology in some ways made the whole situation worse it didn't really it it brought more conflict and comfort yeah yeah the um in our tradition the term faith crisis is becoming very common um it's something that i think you could probably say over the last especially like five to ten years that it's becoming a very regular subject of of conversation and it often revolves around a couple of different areas for us one is um one is like historical issues like our our church you know is a relatively young church it started roughly 200 years ago and for a lot of its history sort of its its origins were not were not well known and it's just like all history it can be you know it can be a little bit messy and you know with the advent of the internet and uh sort of just a a general uh broadening of of information that's available to people that messy that messy history has has uh become known and that's led a lot of people to feel a like they have a problem with the history itself and b they have a problem with the fact that they didn't know about it and they felt like maybe there should have been more transparency and then the other sort of like broad category that i think leads a lot of people into faith crisis in our tradition is is around like social issues you know um lgbtq rights uh women's rights all those kinds of things and a lot of especially younger you know members of our church feel like i feel like the church you know maybe is a little bit you know behind the times on on those sorts of things and they find themselves internally in conflict with what they're with what they're hearing at church and i'm curious i'm curious if you like if that maps at all to things that you see absolutely absolutely yes uh of course one of the things in you know the kind of protestantism that i grew up in is that whenever there would be something embarrassing in history you just have a schism so you can start all over again so yeah we're the pure group but then you go back and you try to look at sort of the big christian history and oh talk about messi i mean and and you know you realize that here is the the largest you know speaking very generally the largest religion in the world uh what is it 31 to 33 of the world's population identifies as christian of some shape um and then you find out there is dirty ugly horrible history that has never really been grappled with i'll give you one example um uh i was taught when i was a kid uh that you know good christians abolished slavery you know they were they were abolitionists nobody told me that a tiny minority of christians were abolitionists the vast majority were pro-slavery or and if they weren't pro-slavery they were like we don't want to talk about slavery that's a political matter we want to talk about heaven and and salvation and you know theology and keep it away from that and i remember i was actually writing a book this is in 2010 and i i mean this is i'm almost embarrassed to tell you this but i got really curious what did pro-slavery christian literature look like now thank god they don't publish it anymore um they they don't for general market but they are re-releasing some of the classic pro-slavery texts and so i went back and read some of them and as research for this book and of course it makes you feel dirty you know to to read it but i i realized that the way they interpreted the bible is exactly the way people are interpreting the bible today to justify treatment of gay people or to justify women being in an inferior position um without ever calling it that and and i just remember thinking this religion stopped using its its sacred text to to prove what it was proving before slavery but it never scrutinized its way of interpreting its text that makes you think equally terrible things could happen again wow yeah it seems like that's that's one of the struggles that we often have as religious people is not realizing how much of what we believe is a sort of set in stone belief is actually just interpretation yes you know it's very like we we sort of and it's it's hard to get out of our outside of our own culture and our own chronology and recognize you know how much of that is built up just because of the air we breathe right now you know and so i love i love that you're i love that your book sort of took a broader view and said we don't you know we don't know a lot that's kind of what the thesis of the book is we don't know and we don't know what we don't know yeah and this is one of the weird things that happens in in religion i think protestant christianity promoted this to such an extreme and i think it created the conditions that still have an effect for latter-day saints i think and it is that um it was like we were out competing one another for certainty um we we have to prove that our group is right and we and we're certain and we can show you why our group is right and all the other groups are wrong and and the irony is that part of what i think maturity involves is realizing that certainty is overrated meaning that meaning look i mean one of the hardest things for me in my 24 years as a pastor i you know you can imagine over 24 years i had so many people who had mental health crises and one of the things you realize is that you know when you're dealing with a person who's deep in a manic episode they are 100 certain or when you're talking with a person who has a you know deep case of schizophrenia and is hearing voices you know bob dylan is singing to him you know and and telling him secret messages um then you realize oh certainty is not isn't core related with anything in reality certainty is a psychological experience and when you're looking for certainty rather than truth then you have to get rid of all unknowing you know but so much it seems to me of faith is how we live with unknowing it's it's living with unknowing by acknowledging that there's a gap between what's true and what i understand and what is out there and what i am aware of and and living with humility and wonder and awe in that gap of unknowing is very different than saying oh no we have a religion that gave us all the answers we know everything maybe first would you jump into um just stages of faith we really liked your framework i think a lot of our listeners will be familiar with fowler's stages of faith but this felt more simplified and i really resonated even more deeply with the with the way you described especially complexity and perplexity so um maybe to start would you just talk about why you simplify them and um and then just walk us through the the four stages so yeah the first thing i should say is everybody should be aware that stage theories can be abused um they can be used by some people to look down on other people and judge other people and reduce other people to oh he's just this or he's just she's just that you know so we want to be aware of the dangers like any tool it can be abused it's just the tool um and then i guess the second thing i should say my original exposure to stages was not in the world of faith it was i was a college english teacher and it was part of my professional development to learn about what psychologists were saying about adolescent intellectual development and i was exposed first to a theorist named william perry who was writing in a completely secular context but as i read this secular psychologist i felt like i'm understanding more about my faith than i have for many things i've read in a religious context this matches so much and later i read fowler and then later i read you know all kinds of other theorists ken wilbur and many many others but and and but what i started to see is there's kind of a pattern you could simplify it into two stages i i felt uh four stages gave enough granularity and there was a certain cohesiveness to each of the four stages so it's very simply it's simplicity that's where we all start complexity some of us end up there and spend the rest of our lives there perplexity some of us uh go from complexity to perplexity and we think there's nowhere else to go some people get to perplexity and they decide they don't like it so they go back to complexity or simplicity um i uh and religion often does that for people it gives them sort of a way to go back into simplicity especially and then i think what's happening is more and more people are they get to perplexity and they find that there's actually something beyond perplexity and i call that harmony and it's a deeper way of holding faith [Music] and i know deeper could sound like a judgment or superiority but let me just say it's it's another way of holding faith that allows a lot of people to keep faith um in a more honest way yeah let me ask let me ask this have you seen in your tradition at all if somebody leaves uh complexity leaves that second stage into perplexity and then like you said potentially there can be a movement back into those uh earlier stages but do you ever see sort of a just a mirror image of the paradigm where they've you know maybe they've um completely thrown out their you know throwing out their faith but they're just as certain about their not faith as they were yes yes in fact so if we could say it like this let me just should i just give you a quick summary of each of these yes please perfect okay because the simplest way to say it is simplicity is faith before doubt and we originally get our faith from our authority figures and that doesn't matter if you're latter-day saint or uh or catholic or muslim or buddhist or atheist if your parents tell you there is no god you believe them because kids believe their parents that's what our family believes right so simplicity is when you believe what your authority figures tell you and and authority figures tend to divide the world into twos us them in out good bad heretic orthodox however we say you know safe dangerous friendly uh you know and friend enemy um and that's simplicity and and a lot of religion religion has a lot of practice in working in simplicity giving people the rules telling telling us why we're right and they're wrong that kind of a thing um and then complexity happens when when i was that teenage boy who thought that evolution made a whole lot of sense and i started thinking for myself here's what happened in my mind my sunday school teacher said oh you can't believe in in evolution and and god and i thought maybe i can you know i started thinking for myself i thought well maybe there's a different way of interpreting that story maybe the genesis story is a metaphor and you don't have to take it literally and so you know you start thinking life is a little more complex and when i talked about learning about the history of my faith or you were talking about how information becomes available on parts of history that have been sort of covered up oh now life is more complex and you find out you know often this happens when you fall in love with the wrong person maybe you think hold on i was taught that only people of our group are good people and i just met somebody who really seems like a wonderful person or you meet people in your own tradition who are scoundrels and you think well now my simple world of we're good and they're bad breaks up that's complexity could it be too that that some types of apologetics fit into a complexity framework where like i think a lot of times when you have that dissonance like the one you talked about with you know believing god or believing in evolution apologetics at least that i'm familiar with often to try to bridge that gap sometimes in ways that are credible and sometimes in ways that seem a little bit incredible but like they're definitely like drawing on scholarship and you know connecting all the dots and sometimes complicated ways to make it all to make it all work together in fact i would say i agree 100 um and i would say i think very often the smartest people in stage one when they graduate to stage two they get involved with apologetics because it allows them to be loyal to the group but here's the difference in stage one if you ask a question the answer is this is what the book of mormon says this is what the bible says this is what our leaders say this is what our apostle says is what our prophet says in stage two they'll say well look there's the evidence you know uh and here's evidence and so and it's so interesting at the end of the day they want to bolster the credibility of those stage one sources but they're they want to look for evidence beyond it and and so there's a lot of very smart people energetic people doing that kind of stage two work and you find out you know uh i i grew up you know as an evangelical christian and something we had in common with many latter-day saints says we wanted to convert everybody we could to the truth and then what really is funny when i had a muslim friend who was really working to convert me to becoming muslim you know and just a few weeks ago i was doing part of this book tour i did a thing at a secular bookstore virtually you know through zoom and the host was a humanist and atheist and through the whole interview he was really working to try to convert me you know and but but it's great little do you know why we brought you on this podcast that's right but stage two loves that you know it's yeah that's really really fun part of being in stage two the other part of stage two that i really resonated with was the idea that you're gonna conquer this spiritual mountain you're gonna like take it in three steps and you're gonna become the best of whatever like whatever somebody laid out for you like you are gonna do that and you're going to do it perfectly and yeah and it it i feel like that really we're like amazing at that at church like we've got programs for any possible way you could want to improve and it works you know like you you can set some goals and you've got people that are going to help you and like we just we are thriving in we're thriving there so that was that that was so interesting to me i've never heard that laid out on a stage of faith and i i really resonated with that feeling people develop people grow through those programs right and and that's why a whole lot of people stay in stage two for their their whole lives um uh in you know outside of latter-day saints in sort of the protestant world i think the mega church is the perfect stage to expression of faith because they have a thousand programs and a thousand activities and and uh and there's this feeling we're successful and we're and we're growing and all of that really is stage two uh crack you know i mean it makes you feel high i think yeah uh and um and then though for some people that stops working i think when they say they have a crisis of faith very often uh especially if they're in it this might be hard for latter-day saints to understand because i think there is this big stage two component of uh of you know your in your community but there are an awful lot of conservative catholics and conservative protestants their religion is purely stage one they are given no place to go and it's even a faith crisis for them to go to stage two wow but uh but what happens to a lot of people is when they start questioning the goodness of those stage one easy answers and they start to see all that stage two stuff is keeping us busy but i'm not sure it's doing good for us or i'm not sure it's doing good for the world or or tim when you mentioned people say we're hurting gay people and then you start to have not just you have intellectual questions but often it's ethical questions is this really good um yeah and when that happens very often it pushes people and of course what often happens when you enter perplexity is that all the stage one and stage two people think you're becoming a bad person you're losing your faith you're you know they think you're kind of going backwards when really your your conscience is becoming more sensitive and your desire to know the truth is becoming more committed and and it's one of the hardest things i think about being in a faith community you you you're you're insulted and sometimes condemned you know for being honest yeah i loved that part because i i felt like you really articulated from this other from you know it was a different community that you were talking about but that experience resonated so intensely with me personally and and in conversation with with other people who've felt this perplexity stage and the thing that i wanted to ask you so we have this idea that that doubt comes because you're not watering the proverbial plant you know you're not if you if you're not praying daily or with real intent or you're not reading your scriptures or you're not you know attending your meetings then then you um become susceptible to doubt and if you're doing if you're doing all the the complexity things then you will be impervious to these feelings of doubt and it just feels like for a lot of people it i think there's some part in the book where you talk about doubt being like a marauding bearer like mosquitoes descending and i loved all of those analogies because that that was my experience it felt like something that happened to me like i felt like i was really like doing all the things and i didn't want to feel doubt like i was in any way that i could have controlled for doubt i was doing that thing and so i loved the examples all of the all of the um stories of people who were pastors or ministers who had that experience like that from the outside it looked like they were at like the pinnacle of spiritual seeking you know and and then they had this experience where where doubt descended and so i'm curious if you've found that there is a way to be impervious to doubt and if that should be our goal yeah so here's the problem if you are already perfect then i guess you don't have anything to doubt if you already are omniscient you know everything if every one of your ideas and beliefs is already correct then maybe you don't need to doubt but for all the rest of us we better we better not lose the ability to doubt because we'll lose the ability to learn if we in other words we will we'll uh yeah we'll be stuck in our illusions and we won't know we'll be stuck in our where we've been misled or where we have a wrong idea so but i do think what happens to some people especially when they're just coming to stage three is it looks so scary for them that they double down and return to stage one with this sort of almost extremist fanatical passion because they're not really looking for the truth they're really looking for certainty for simplicity to escape all that complexity and perplexity out there and frankly this is how cults happen when i saw on january 6 those hordes of people storming the capital in washington dc and a lot of them were holding up bibles and i i don't know if there are any latter-day saints in the group but there were an awful lot of white christian catholic and protestant christians um but in a sense political extremism is something similar something similar we that when our brains don't want to deal with a complex reality we're we're very tempted to buy into conspiracy theories and simple ways of explaining reality that well they have all kinds of psychological benefits even if they make a lot harder they they do pay certain rewards yeah and it's it's almost and this is not to correct you at all but like it's almost not that it's not complex to me because like some of those conspiracy theories can actually be very complex it's more that they're it's more that they that they're um it seems to me that a lot of believers are unwilling to accept the sort of non-dual nature of reality yes you know the gray area and that some things can be good and bad you know yes in fact that's the that's a really good clarification to make because yeah very often the conspiracy theories of the doctrines or the politics of a cult are super complex but the one thing that isn't complex we are right yeah everybody else is wrong and we're and we're on god's side and god's on our side and they're on the devil's side and and that simplicity i i must admit i've never understood its appeal but i know its appeal is real to some people i know like i bet those people who are storming the capitol on january 6th i bet that was the happiest day of their lives maybe the next day was one of the worst days of their lives but that day yeah was one of the hap they never felt like their cause mattered and they were true believers and they were following their their dear leader i was just this was reminding me about the conversation that you had with jackie lewis and richard were last year on your um learning how to see podcast where you talked about community bias that was one that i felt like oh i can really see this in myself that this idea that you'll choose tribe over truth because our brains are just wired for that we just need it so deeply so i wonder if you could just talk about that you know how is it even possible to have a community without community bias because we need that i know i can feel that in myself like i need to feel that feeling of belonging but i don't want to be blinded you know by by this community bias so is it even possible to have both well you know it's funny um aubry when you say that a story comes to mind i i don't i should have told this in the book i don't think i did but when i was going through that tough period of doubt in college i had a friend named tom and we were sitting i still remember exactly this room we were sitting and i was on one couch and he was across the room on another couch and i told him tom i'm just not even sure i believe there's a god anymore some days i think there is and some days i it just doesn't make any sense and he's and i said i used to feel god's presence and i just feel nothing now it's just like it's just gone and i was thinking he's about to tell me i'm going to hell and he's about and he just said that's okay brian he said uh he said i just want you to know i'm your friend no matter what he said if you become an atheist and he says i won't love you any less um he said i'm still your friend and then he's i'll never forget this he said and look i need to tell you he said god feels very real to me right now um and um uh and so i feel like i got enough faith for both of us you're okay and if i'm if i'm ever at a place where i'm really doubting i bet you'll be in a place where you can help me and it was just this feeling like our friendship was real whether or not we you know agreed on and here's the here's the irony at that moment i thought there really is a god because in the sense that the love the unconditional love that i felt from him was what i think some deep part of me said whatever god is god's got to be about that you know yeah i you know that i had a very similar experience with aubry what this is now 10 years ago and i uh and i've mentioned this once on our podcast before but i had been having very deep doubts for i don't remember how long it was several months to a year and in our tradition especially like your marriage and and i'm sure this is true for you too is very much built on your faith you know and so it it can be perceived as a betrayal if you if if you start to deviate from the path that you had mutually planned on when you got married and so i was terrified to tell aubrey that what i was feeling i didn't know what her reaction would be and we'd only been married for a you know a few years at that at that point and when i finally when i finally told her her reaction was just it was just so it was so christ-like you know it was the exact it was just like what you related with your friend tom she didn't hesitate for a moment you know to express her love for me and the and um reaffirm the solidarity that we had and i and in some ways you know i and now it's it's hard for me to even imagine you know doubting what my relationship with aubry could be and it's almost like because of that moment you know like that that brought us together in such an almost inseparable way um you know it's it's almost like a before and after you know and and like you said if that's not if if that type of if that type of bond between between people that type of connection isn't god then you know what is it you know i this is reminding me so much of this conversation we just had really recently with a therapist about about religious ocd and i just she made this comment about the paradoxical relationship between what we try to control and how that controls us you know the more we resist and try to control it the more it controls us and i just feel like you know what you both expressed was just this as soon as you felt secure and you could let go of the resistance to doubt then like it it that's like what gives you peace and and safety and in some ways we feel like our relationship with the church is you know is is unstable that if we express doubt then maybe we're we'll be purged you know maybe we'll be pushed away and i just wonder if you've seen that when people can totally accept out and stop resisting and stop pushing away is that generally their experience that they're able to just breathe and work through this or i mean i feel like what our our church leaders are genuinely afraid of is that if we embrace doubt and we stop resisting and we we stop trying not to doubt that we'll all be lost you know that we'll all lose any interest in god at all and i just wonder if this is one of those ways that we're trying so hard to control it that we're actually staying stuck in this in these perplexity stages because we're so afraid and we're so resistant that there's just no we just can't move yeah whether there's a um there's a saying in the addiction recovery world that we're one of the things is we're only as sick as our secrets um and and the fact that people feel they have to keep the doubt a secret the secrecy and the fear it seems to me have very damaging effects and and the more afraid we are of the secret getting out in some ways whatever harm doubts would do i bet they don't do as nearly as much as the secrecy and fear but there's another saying we're only as sick as their reactivity um and when when we're we're in this reactive oh no i'm having doubts uh i i think the the reactivity it also creates unhealth yeah and um and i but here's the problem i i i i want to just be really honest even i think part of being a human being and being raised in a community is that even if the leaders all disappeared you moved to a different country you moved to a different planet and you're totally away from those leaders they have like a little foothold in your brain in other words they played a role in forming certain of the structures of your brain and i think that's part of what makes doubt so difficult it's not just that i'm worried about what other people will think it's that parts of my own mind still are nervous about giving me permission to think that is so true and and one of the things that i think helps us deal with that is to just realize this is not just a problem in our church our religion this is a human problem so if you met someone who grew up in a committed marxist family and they believed that marxism was the answer and they get a little older and they start having questions about marxism they're going to feel guilty wow yeah yeah it's a community it's just a community whatever your community whatever your tribe is you're going to have this seems to be a problem that that's a human problem across do you have do you have recommendations for i mean for i guess general principles for finding a safe place to express those doubts because i like when i first went through it like i said i i i felt like anyone that i expressed it to it was potentially dangerous you know psychologically and i think a lot of people feel that way and they're grasping for uh someone to talk to or a way to express themselves how have you seen that happen in a healthy way you know there's this uh strange figure in literature um across cultures it's the figure of the mysterious stranger someone comes to town and everything changes and before the outsider came in we didn't have a chance i mean e.t is a classic story literally an outsider but uh tim i i think this is why very often the only safe person we can find is someone outside of our tradition um uh you know it's isn't it interesting in this story in in the book of genesis and the story of abram when abram hears a call from god he specifically told you have to leave your father's house in other words there are things that you're not going to be allowed to think in this context and you're going to have to go on a journey it's another theme in literature it's called the hero's journey the or it's called the coming of age story the young person leaves home and goes on a journey and they go through a series of ordeals and they have a series of disillusionments and then they find who they really are and then they are able to come home so very often i think it involves and sometimes this is why people read books you know they can read a book from an outsider that can give them or they can listen to a podcast while they're driving in the car and nobody's around and that becomes like this little secret space of being able to think freely i really think podcasts are super important right now for that reason but i'll just tell you like i i mean i don't know if these names will mean a lot to folks from latter-day saints but um uh i remember i was in sweden and i was i met a penta a swedish pentecostal pastor and he had gone through this deep period of doubt and he literally got on a plane and flew to egypt and he found some monastic community way out in the desert and that's where he went to tell them his doubts oh my goodness totally different tradition totally different part of the world but something inside him said it's not safe for me to talk about my doubts with anybody i don't know anybody i can trust but i need to i need to unburden my heart to somebody you know sometimes people go to a counselor there are things called spiritual directors that are wonderful places to go yeah there was this reflection question i think it was the first question of the first chapter that made me think about this and it was something like what would you say if you felt completely safe like what would you say about your doubts if you felt completely safe and that was the most revealing question i had never asked myself that and it made me realize that there are a lot of things that i do keep my guard up about and if there was some where if there was somewhere to go and say you know the darkest darkness like what is the worst thing like what is the thing i am really afraid to that i don't believe and and it just it that feels like it would be so cathartic and i think there's also something to be said for being able to articulate those feelings because then it gives you more confidence i think sometimes it feels so much heavier because we've never actually been able to put it into words it's just weighing us down and as soon as you can articulate it it just feels like you're able to process it a little bit better and and i think you i've never heard someone suggest that before and i think you're so right like if you can say that to someone who doesn't need something from you that would just that would be such a beautiful exercise aubry when you say that uh gosh it sort of breaks my heart because then i think and what this means is that for so many of us we've turned god into an unsafe listener uh in fact maybe god is the scariest listener of all and i know some people struggle whether they even believe in god but you think if a person could say if anybody i ought to be able to be honest with i ought to be able to be naked and unashamed before god and uh but i know that's one of the things that our religions can do to us they can make us afraid to even be honest with god you know we're we're having to cover up you know yeah and in that way like wow doubt really is a medicine a medicine you know to like start questioning like why did why am i afraid of this being that that i believe you know logically is the embodiment of love you know that seems like something there that needs to be challenged would you oh go ahead oh i was just going to say there's a line of a famous poem by someone named alfred lord tennyson who uh said a line of his poem said there's more of faith and honest doubt than in half the creeds so i heard you i heard you say this little book chat that we did a few weeks ago something that i have not stopped thinking about and it was just this idea that you move from perplexity into harmony when you decide that you're you don't want to be the broken one anymore and you decide you want to start building you want to decide what your life what you want your life to look like and that is really resonated with me because and i think that i think that's an important point because it's a place where people feel stuck they want to get out of this doubt and that was the most hopeful thing to just realize that you you can make a decision to to stop feeling broken and like you've lost something you're supposed to have and that can be your first experience in this harmony stage so do you want to give us a little bit more about harmony we haven't really talked much about harmony yet and that's really important um so the way i would say it is that first i don't want anybody to feel any shame about being in this stage of perplexity because so many people feel so much shame and and then they feel i have to get out of this as soon as possible uh and the way i like to say it is i think there's work for us to do in each stage and there's really important work in stage three and i wanted to get out of stage three as fast as i could i didn't like it i was embarrassed about it and i think i actually it's a little bit like you were saying before i actually prolonged my time in stage three because i was fighting so hard again yeah yeah that makes sense but i do think there's something happens where you say i know what i don't believe i know what i'm against i know what i don't like what do i believe what do i value what am i for what kind of a person do i want to be um what am i committed to i know i don't accept this authority structure anymore i know i i or maybe i accept it but i accept it not as you know an all-or-nothing thing right and and but okay guess what now i'm having children and i'm the authority structure for my children so now all the criticism i've heaped on every other authority structure how am i going to handle being a person with some authority myself and and all of that pushes us to say i you know i've deconstructed enough what am i going to construct or i've taken everything apart what is there anything left and what what do i have left to try to build on and that that to me is is when that's stage four work happens and it's one of the reasons why i think i spent a lot of time going into stage three and trying to fix it which put me back in stage two i i think i i kept riding that fence because i i wasn't willing to say to myself yeah some of that is gone some of what i used to have is gone that doesn't mean all is lost uh there's still some precious things here and in fact the kind of person um through what i've gone through in these first three stages is something that i would never want to lose you know and i think when that begins to happen there becomes a certain moment where you say i'm going to stop condemning myself i'm going to say i haven't been i haven't been a quitter i've been persistent i've kept kept on with i haven't been hateful i've been loving and in fact all that other people told me was a doubt was actually my own quest for truth and the quest for truth has a lot to do with faith in fact one way you can define faith is to say that faith is what makes us seek for truth that we don't yet know certainty is the truth that we already know but faith is what makes you say there's truth that i don't know and i i i'm willing to go out from what i already know because i'm curious and i'm hungry and i'm thirsty for what i don't know and that faith that you say i've been doubting a lot yeah but gosh my faith has really grown well yes yeah i was going to i was going to ask if the transition that you see from uh from perplexity to harmony is qualitatively different than the other like first two transitions that seem sort of like a like really organic like from stage one to stage two it just sort of happens from stage two to stage three you definitely most people don't want it to happen but it happens and i was i was gonna say is stage three to stage four different because you've gotta work but it sounds like based on your answer that's actually maybe wrong and that it is more still more of a release than it is uh you know a client well i think i i think it's probably the part of the book that i you know i i finished the book and thought there's still so much more to think about about what that stage three to stage four transition looks like so many people talk to me and they tell me their stories about it you know especially now that they've read the book that feel like oh this gave language now i can see what i was going through when i was 37 you know and and they they remember and they can we can start to tell this story so i don't think i i think i wish i had more clarity to offer on this but one of the things that happens is that the the stage one belief that we were told that there are certain authority figures who have it right and our job is to believe what they say um in stage three we throw that out we get mad at those authority figures at stage four we say you know what they were doing the best they could they were wrong to pretend that they were more than they are they're human beings they might have been bad human beings they might have been good human beings or they might have been you know well-informed or not so well-informed but they're human beings and they're doing the best they can i've got to do the best i can and once it turns back to me you know i think this may be a little bit what's in that powerful statement from jesus in the gospels when he says don't try to take the splinter out of your brother's eye when you have a big stick in your own eye it's when we say what about me how am i going to live how am i seeing how can i open my eyes how can i deal with my own blindness and i think that act of taking responsibility does two things it's really interesting it's a profound act of individuation it's a profound act of self-definition self-responsibility but it's also what it then says and every other human being i know is in this struggle too and now i have solidarity with them and that word solidarity i think is a huge part of stage four it's it's it's it's unavoidable when we deal with our own issues in our own pain that we realize other people are dealing with this too yeah one one way that you phrase that in the book and i hope i'm not misrepresented here but was that the beginning parts of stage of a of stage three in perplexity there's a lot of suspicion that's sort of outward you know based on or towards institutions and authority figures etc but nearing the end of the perplexity stage the suspicion sort of turns a little bit more inward in fact you you got it exactly right so i be i become suspicious i've been suspicious of everybody else now i become suspicious about my own suspicion and i realize you know what when i'm suspicious of everybody else it gives me the right to look down on them and feel superior over them that's not so good and i've become cynical about my own cynicism my cynicism is me seeing through everything being able to find faults in everything which lets me feel superior to it that's not so good and at that point i become cynical of my cynicism and at that point i just suddenly it that's why harmony is a little bit like a new simplicity i'm now faced with this very simple question what kind of a life do i want to live what kind of a human being do i want to be and then i love this part toward the end of the book where you then you bring up all these scriptures where jesus is saying that love trumps everything you know of faith and hope and love that love is the most important and now that you've kind of led us to this place where we can totally get behind this idea that faith is not defined as correct beliefs but as this radical love it's all there in the scriptures still too and i just loved like how validating that was like i love like reading through all those scriptures that are so familiar and they felt so different to not to not need to define the gospel as correct beliefs my goodness yeah that one little passage that i quote from the book of galatians uh the only in fact if i quote the whole thing uh neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything now i i remember when i was a little boy and i my parents read the bible at dinner and i said what is circumcision and when they told me what it was about i thought that shouldn't be in the bible i was scandalized they were talking about penises but but when you realize that circumcision uncircumcision are the boundary markers they're how we know are you one of us are you one of them it's the ultimate dualism you're either an insider or an outsider neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything the only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love and and that's consistent enough in paul's writings because a lot of people remember in first corinthians 13 he says three things remain faith hope and love the greatest of these is love so this is what paul got and of course it's what jesus got in the great commandment to love our neighbors ourselves so uh yeah i mean it's been there all along it's been there all along but maybe we were just too we we just weren't ready to see what was there all along you know yeah and um you know my friend richard rohr uh says uh all the steps to maturity are necessarily immature wow that's a very good point and and so when he says that it makes me realize of course you know and and it maybe lets us have a little grace toward our religious communities too i mean i know probably a lot of our religious leaders wouldn't ever want to say this but it might be a way for us being gracious towards them of course our religion is immature in some ways of course it's immature yeah that's and yeah can you talk about the tree ring metaphor because this was this was so helpful i think i still have um this real tendency that if you lay out stages that are numbered i'm like okay what how do you get to the top the highest the what's the best stage and like how do we get there and i really love this metaphor of the tree rings because it it explained that in just a simple image that we need that this is a foundation that we're building we need to to learn all of these lessons that each stage offers well um i'm glad that was a helpful metaphor it to me it's the metaphor uh first of all it gets rid of steps that were climbing steps or a ladder that were climbing wrongs or whatever right but it says okay look um when a tree starts it's just a little tiny sapling and after its first winter it gets a second ring around that basic ring but it's not that that basic ring was bad and it's not that it leaves that first string behind it will carry that ring with it for the rest of its life and then the second year it gets second ring third year it gets a third rank and and and uh one way i think you could think about this in the course of a lifetime maybe it took me 15 years to get to stage two right and then maybe i spent another 10 or 15 years in stage three and then i bounced around and started expect extending into stage four but you know i think if you stay in stage four long enough it becomes your new simplicity and because it becomes life starts to feel simple again it makes sense again i have a way that just sort of works but guess what live long enough and some new complexity will come and i i've noticed in my own life this pattern sort of repeats itself and and eventually i think what happens is we start to realize oh the skills of simplicity and the skills of complexity and the skills of perplexity and the skills of harmony are all skill sets that we need and we'll need them for the rest of our lives yeah are there ways that we can um in our own community make it easier to grow through those stages well this is where we really have a tough a tough challenge um and if i can be very frank i mean you would have to say how this would work in your specific community but i want to describe for you something that i've seen happen in the kind of evangelical christian background i came from a young kid grows up he's really a gung-ho christian and decides i'm gonna go to christian college and uh he goes to a christian college because that's where the really sincere kids go and about his second year he starts having some doubts i'm thinking of an actual person i know right now this really describes him he actually started to think oh no i might be gay and um he [Music] he was so afraid um and so there was one professor she was an english professor at his christian college and he thought she respects me so much he was really good in english and so he went to her and she was loving and she was accepting toward him and so what she did and then he found out that there were like 30 students who would come to her with various questions and doubts she was the one safe person on campus that you could go to and so there was this little sort of secret community where they were kind of experimenting with what i would call harmony or stage four and it was this wonderful wonderful experience his senior year he wrote something on the internet about his questions and the president of his college called him in and threatened to not let him graduate unless he recanted because he didn't want a graduate of their school to besmirch the school and so what he found is you could create a little safe space but there might be somebody else who's ready to pounce on you and but you know what that's reality that's the world we live in and i think what it means is that the safe spaces that be can be created are unspeakably precious and they're what give people a chance to grow and um you know sometimes it might take 200 years before the the larger institution is going to be ready to be where that little group got to be in you know the junior year of college but at least you found some place where yeah yeah i was going to ask about this too because it seems like it for many that have gone through those stages and find themselves in in harmony they they might be on that sort of perimeter that richard calls the edge of inside yeah which um i i think is a really sacred space in a lot of ways because it because it is able to sort of see see both sides um but i wonder too if that's if that's sustainable and i like i i would i see you maybe as someone that has been on the edge of inside you know for for many years and i i wonder if you'd almost just share your experience and yeah you know let us know if that's if that's possible to stay there i think a lot of people feel like even if they've you know gone through perplexity into into harmony it's sort of a never-ending trajectory out of the out of the tribe you know and does does that need to be does that need to be the case yeah you know i hate to be prescriptive about this but i also think i ought to try to be realistic and and honest about it so um look this stuff you know some stuff lives on the internet forever so if anybody wants to find out about this just search for my name on please do a google search my name or search for my name on youtube and you'll find out that there's you know all kinds of people who've done whole youtube series about how i'm a child of the devil i got interviewed by a uh i got interviewed by a journalist once in europe and he was totally secular but he was asked to interview me because i was coming to town whatever and so he'd done some internet research and so when we met he holds up this paper of printouts and he said he said in his accent do you know you are the son of satan um so the fact is there are people i call them gatekeepers inside organizations and they their meaning and value and loyalty to the organization show is shown by being watchdogs or gatekeepers and they find anybody who's who's not dotting all the eyes and crossing all the thieves correctly and they they shame them in hopes that they'll conform or they want them driven out i i got a call from a major christian magazine that i was a columnist for and the ed one of the editors called me and said i just came out of a editorial meeting where one of my fellow editors said he's out to destroy you those were his exact words so he said i just wanted you to know you know watch your back um so wow and sure enough a week or two later he wrote a nasty editorial to you know try to make me be not a true christian or whatever so people will do that sort of thing and i think you have to be prepared for it but i think the more you're prepared for it the less freaked out you'll be and the more you realize it is absolutely inevitable you know when when martin luther you know said uttered or posted his 95 theses it was inevitable he was going to get in trouble that's just how life goes but then the question is how do you handle it do you handle it graciously do you handle it you know sometimes you know it's winning doesn't mean that you convince the authority figures that you're right sometimes winning means that you maintain a loving and gracious attitude toward them no matter what yes and i think defining winning in the right way becomes really really important and it involves how do you hold your integrity how do you be loving how do you be patient and yet not compromise things that shouldn't be compromised and all of that happens so um so if i were to offer one piece of advice on this uh tim here's what it would be it would be you realize i grew up in this circle and i might be on the edge of the circle and there might be people who want to constrict the circle to get rid of me well all i'm going to do is draw a bigger circle that includes them and and that desire to draw bigger circles i think is the is is the way that we can move into this without yeah without playing in games that we don't even want to play in anymore um because you mentioned before you know you could be a stage two latter-day saint or catholic or whatever and you could decide i'm gonna become an atheist and you spend the rest of your lives beating up believers because now you're an atheist but in a certain sense you're you haven't grown right you're you're just being combative with a different club yeah yeah so so i have one more question that i just we have to ask because i feel like this is something that we hear all the time i feel like this is this is a question that um just really weighs on parents and and that's the if they are growing through these stages of faith i think that they often feel so worried that they're they know that they don't want to give their kids negative messages that will become pain points with god later but they don't know how to do it any other way so could you just talk about parenting and how how do you make it less disruptive for children to grow through these stages that maybe are disruptive for us yes yes well first of all it really can happen and the thing i'd say i i hope it's okay for me to you know give a plug for something here but i have two friends who started who wrote a book and started a podcast because they grew up in a very religiously well especially the wife grew up in a super repressive religious background and when they had children they didn't want to do the same and the husband it just so happens as a child psychologist and so um so they wrote a book called the six needs of every child and they have a podcast that's called growing connected and and that's exactly what they're trying to do help parents of deep faith to find ways to be parents where they care about morality and they care about faith and they care about spirituality but they aren't going to do the kind of damage to their children that their parents unwittingly did to them you know or that this sort of religious system has unwittingly unwittingly done to them but here's what i would say if i were to give some of my own advice like i think what they say is great but if here's what i would say if you have it very clear in your mind and heart that this thing is about love a friend of mine who who was a pastor and felt he lost everything he he came to me at one point and said here's what i still believe life is a gift and love is the point i said well that's pretty good that's very good but if if we're clear on that then when we teach our children rules that we have to teach them we really want them to say thank you we really want them to yeah sorry we really want them to not bite steal hit you know and uh all the rest so we want to teach them right and wrong but we always do it with a heart of love for the child because we realize we can be parents for something other than love i'm afraid if you yell at your sister in public that will be a bad reflection on me as a parent now at that moment i'm not acting out of love for my child i'm acting out of fear and shame and concern for my own reputation and let's face it in religious settings an awful lot is done out of fear and not out of love so we start saying i would actually like to be a loving person and be motivated by love what's best for my child that's our first struggle but then we teach our child hey listen the reason i want you to uh say please and thank you is that that's a loving thing to do it's a way of showing that you're not that you care about people and you appreciate what they do for you and and the reason i don't want you to hit your little brother you know with a baseball bat is that we believe that love is important and you we want to treat other people the way we be treated and so we make love the reason for stage one and then when they get older and they are learning skills so they can become independent we say well listen the reason these skills are important is so that you can not only take care of yourself but so that you can then take care of other people because that's what loving people do and stage three listen it's important for you to think for yourself i welcome you having questions and doubts and challenging things that i've taught you um i because i want you to be a person who loves the truth and you have to love the truth you have to love the truth and still love people who you might think don't even have the truth and then you're challenging them toward love at every step i i don't know if that makes sense oh i love that yeah i don't i don't remember if it was in the book or on the podcast but you talked about this metaphor of an old house and how if you love the old house you don't you know let it fall apart and you don't move away you fix it you you know you renovate the bathroom and you put a new carpet and and that was a that was a really illuminating way for me to think of perplexity but even in perplexity like you were you can do this out or you can you can um model that harmony for your children and then when they are in perplexity they'll be able to link that to love and the other met you just got so many amazing metaphors the other metaphors i really loved about this um you say somewhere that that these stages are not like calculus where you have to you know master algebra and master geometry and then you can learn about calculus that um you say you know it's more like music and we should be exposing our kids to the best music even when they're brand new students that's right that's right love is the beauty love is the beauty that that we want to teach them from the very beginning and so uh you know they're not ready to play mozart yet but um but uh even with their little scales they're drawn to the beauty and yeah and and here's the thing you can teach children to play the piano and they don't learn to love music um they don't learn to love beauty they don't even nobody ever even explains it to them it's all taken for granted but boy if you teach a child to love beauty then they'll they'll want they'll want the music you know i don't want to learn we were actually i'll just share this little story with you we were we were inspired by your by your book and in our tradition we have a um a tradition where every monday night you get together you get the family together you don't go out for the most part it's not a hard and fast rule but like and you try to like you know talk together about some principle having to do with the gospel or or whatever it is and um so after we read your book we got our kids together who are 12 down to down to three and we had them list all the rules that they could come up with and we went one by one and tried to trace them back to love oh that's so great they were they they were actually so much better at it than i expected they they could be it was so beautiful to hear and some of them they also had to learn the word arbitrary that night because some of them we couldn't come up with anything so he said yeah that was that was totally true but it was really it was really fun and aubry and i learned a lot too like we take things for granted that we don't even think about until it's explicit you know oh my goodness and that story is such a great example of um aubry what you were mentioning before um because what you did that night uh is you you in a sense invited them into a stage three practice you invited them to critique the rules and uh you and you gave them permission to say that might be arbitrary you know and uh so that's to me that's what a beautiful example of good parenting that is that's great i am i wonder if just to close brian i i would love for you to give two pieces of advice one or and maybe just general advice not in and not in response to any specific question but if you could just say one thing to two groups of people the first being people that are in a deep uh sort of perplexity stage and that are feeling maybe a little bit a little bit hopeless in in their doubt and the second group of people um are the loved ones of those that are in in doubt uh or the ones that they're the ones that they're speaking to or around that aren't necessarily going through it themselves could you could you say something to those of those two groups well first to the people who are in that stage three uh perplexity um the thing i would want to say is there's a surface to everything and part of the work of stage three is seeing through the surface peeling away the the wrapping paper peeling away the covering you know i'm in fact when we use the word like discover that's what we're saying to discover is to find out what something is underneath the covering and and part of what doubt in that way is is saying you told me that this is a truth that came down from heaven i found out that you actually we got this truth by adapting that truth from those other people and we didn't want to be like those other people so we made it go this way and we found out there's a story behind it and there's a way of being in stage 3 where you feel like you peel away everything and there's nothing left you take away all the covers and there's and you see through everything everything becomes transparent and almost valueless and if you feel that way you you can be tempted to to say forget it i'll just jump back into stage one but the thing that i would say to a person at stage three is there is a way of seeing underneath the cover where instead of everything becoming invisible everything becomes radiant um everything becomes you find out that there even though there might be problems with this and this and this you do find out there's this little kernel of beauty and to focus on that that radiance um is i think one of the ways that leads you through stage three to something beyond and to the people who are really worried about other people i think maybe i would say two things um when i was talking uh a minute ago about you know the parent whose their two kids are yelling at each other in public and what's really going on in their mind is people are going to think bad of me as a parent right the thing i would say to parents and other loved ones is you better discern to what degree you are just afraid of being thought less of because your child isn't painting in the lines or working with the program so become honest about that um i have a little novel i i've written that i haven't published i i don't know if i ever will but there's this mother in in the in the book who's been a kind of a crappy mother and she gets to a point where she says to herself i gave myself a son i never gave my son his own life well [Music] he's always existed in my mind for my benefit i've never existed for his benefit and you know this mother in this story is like 45 years old when she finally realizes that that and that's one of the gifts that could come to a parent to say i didn't just give myself a child i'm here to give my child a life and this is part of if this is part of my child's life this is part of my job you know to help them um and then i think the second thing i'd say is that your child will always remember the cruelty or the kindness that you show them in their moment of of honesty with you and i would just encourage every parent to be ready for when the moment of honesty comes they better be sure that their first reaction is is love because um you know they can apologize if they messed up but those are wounds that that are that don't go away in my experience they're ones that always the child can have grace toward the parent but it would sure be nice for your first reaction to be loved yeah and conversely like those those wounds you know may may scar you know but like the memory of the loving reaction is just as is just as memorable you know it's something that will stick with them forever in fact my both of my parents have passed away in the last few years and uh i was just the other day taking a walk and thinking about my dad and i remember a night where he was so angry at me oh my goodness he was angry and he didn't even understand what he was criticizing me for but a day or two later i still remember he came to me and he was almost crying and he apologized and he just said i lost my temper with you and that was really wrong and i'm really sorry and you know i feel like when my dad was mean to me that was not the truest and deepest part of him when he apologized there i was seeing the window into the deepest part of him yeah yeah oh thank you so much brian man this has just been incredible the book and the conversation we're just so grateful well i have to tell you if anything i said was good that's nice but i thought your questions and insights were way better i'm really glad you're far you're far too i'm really glad i could be with you guys yes thank you brian and like just the the work i mean the podcast obviously the book thank you so much but like the just the work that you've dedicated yourself to uh over these past decades is just so important and i and we want you to know that it's reaching you know potentially far beyond what you even originally intended it's uh it's meaningful to us and to other people in our tradition and just thank you so much oh i take that to heart thanks so much thanks so much again for listening and we hope you enjoyed this conversation with brian mclaren for more from brian you can go to his website at brianmclaren.net or check out his newest podcast called learning how to see which he hosts with richard rohr and jackie lewis and if faith matters content is resonating with you and you get a chance we'd love for you to leave a review on apple podcasts or whatever platform you listen on it really helps get the word out about faith matters and we really appreciate the support thanks again for listening and as always you can check out more at faithmatters.org

Channel: Faith Matters Foundation

Views: 1,593

Rating: 4.7551022 out of 5

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Id: -qzVFFcbdXA

Length: 82min 47sec (4967 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021