Episode 3 — Shame as Internal Violence: Eve, the Serpent, and the Original Sin of Self-Abandonment

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[00:00:00] Andrew: It turns out, if someone loves you, they’re not concerned about what you’re gonna achieve. They want you to nourish yourself, yes.

[00:00:05] January: Yeah.

[00:00:06] Andrew: They want your life to be tended to, yeah. That’s what Love desires, not some sort of achievement.

[00:00:13] January: Yeah, Love is not worried about whether you’re living up to your potential. Love is your potential.

[00:00:22] Andrew: Exactly. Exactly. Oh yeah. Nicely put.

[00:00:32] January: If you’ve ever wondered why a religion that proclaims unconditional love can feel so full of hatred, shame, and violence, you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong to want something more from Christian faith.

I’m January Jaxon

[00:00:47] Andrew: and I’m Andrew McRae,

[00:00:49] January: and this is Theology Kills, a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive.

If you had asked me at 25 whether I had ever been violent toward a human being, I might well have laughed in your face. I was, well, not kicked off my high school soccer team exactly, but the coach pulled my mother aside halfway through the season and gently suggested that she might want to find me a different hobby because, and I quote, he said I “didn’t have an aggressive bone in my body.”

I would freeze up and refuse to kick the ball if I was even a little bit worried that I might kick another kid’s legs in the attempt. This made me a terrible soccer player, but, I thought, a pretty good person. It was a quirk of personality that got me chuckles and rueful laughs for my lack of soccer prowess, but also a lot of praise for how sweet I was to worry so much about the wellbeing of others. People saw me as kind because of this refusal to risk injury to my friends.

The problem is that my refusal to kick that ball wasn’t born out of a healthy desire to be kind or loving. It was born from a distorted desire to cease to be something: dangerous.

Ever since I was a very small child, some part of me has carried a belief that my mere existence in the world is dangerous to other people. This part of me believes that I can never hope to be good. I can never hope to be beneficial to the people around me. That just isn’t even an option. The absolute best I can ever hope for is to inflict as little damage and suffering as possible.

This caused some problems, and not just for my soccer prospects.

It kept me shrinking myself down and trying to be invisible because I was afraid any impact I had on the world would necessarily be bad. It kept me silent in situations where I should have spoken up because I believed I was bad if I made other people feel discomfort. It meant I rarely spoke up for my own needs because I believed I was bad if I inconvenienced anyone. It meant that I stayed for years in a toxic relationship because I believed it would be bad to cause pain to the person who was hurting me.

In other words, I avoided hurting other people by hurting myself. Badly.

I don’t know what it was in my young life that caused me to imagine myself as dangerous, but it’s a perfect example of how human creativity can go wrong. My imagination wasn’t being used to try to become something new. It was being misused to try to cease to be some way I already was. I didn’t see possibilities. I saw myself as a problem to be fixed, and a desire to cease to be? Well, that sounds an awful lot like a kind of death, doesn’t it?

Eve doesn’t think much at first about the tree in the center of the garden. It’s there, of course. Hard to miss. Sometimes she rests in its shade, listens to the birds. She’s never felt tempted to eat the fruit hanging bright against its green. God said it would hurt them, and Eve believes God. But she doesn’t question the tree’s presence. It’s just part of the landscape.

She’s never felt deprived by the injunction against it. Why would she? The garden’s full of trees, full of fruit. Food is never further than her fingertips. Everything she needs is here. She trusts that, trusts God as implicitly as she trusts the breath in her own lungs.

But one afternoon the serpent finds her there under That Tree. And the serpent, a liar from the beginning, feigns curiosity. “Did God really say you couldn’t eat from any tree in the garden?” he asks. The question is disingenuous. You notice how it sets God up as kind of a controlling asshole?

Eve blinks, confused. Of course that isn’t what God said. “No,” she says, “we can eat from the trees. Just not this one. We’re not supposed to eat this fruit or we’ll die.”

The serpent cocks its head. “I mean, you won’t die.”

You can hear the condescending tone. You didn’t, like, take that death stuff seriously, did you? Just enough to crack the certainty she’s always lived in. And then it delivers the blow. “God knows that when you eat from this one, your eyes will be opened. You’ll be like God knowing good and evil.”

Now, the serpent hasn’t technically lied. We know how this story goes. Eve does eat from the fruit, and she doesn’t instantly drop dead. Her eyes are opened. But there’s a deliberate and sneaky insinuation to what the serpent’s saying. The implication is that Eve is supposed to be wise, but she isn’t. The insinuation is that God has withheld something that would be good for her.

The serpent uses, or should we say, misuses the truth to create a lie in Eve’s imagination: I am not enough. Up to this point, Eve has only ever seen herself through God’s eyes. Perfect. Whole. Loved. But now she’s seeing herself through the serpent’s gaze and what he sees in her? Well, it’s not flattering, and just like that, there are two versions of Eve. One mediated by the gaze of God, and one mediated by the gaze of the serpent.

This new mediation through the serpent’s gaze distorts Eve’s perception of reality, which is to say it distorts her perception of God. Nothing in her outside circumstances has changed. She hasn’t moved. The world hasn’t transformed, but when she imagines it all through the eyes of the serpent, the abundance of the Garden seems insufficient. God seems less like her loving creator and more like an obstacle between her and what she needs to be okay. The warning to stay away from this tree’s fruit sounds less like protection and more like a scare tactic meant to keep her small. She looks up at the tree with the serpent’s perspective, and the fruit that God said was nasty is looking just as beautiful and tasty as all the rest of the fruit in the Garden.

It’s a subtle shift, but it’s enough to rupture her trust and in the absence of trust, conflict is born.

She reaches for that fruit.

She eats.

At first, nothing happens. She chews, swallows, looks around. The garden is still the garden. Birds are still singing. The sky hasn’t cracked open. She doesn’t drop dead.

Huh. Guess the serpent was right.

She glances over at Adam. He’s watching her. Waiting. She hands him the fruit, and he takes it without question. He trusts her. And as she watches her own hand pass the fruit into his, it hits her.

He’s naked.

She’s naked.

Of course, they’ve always been naked, but she’s seeing it differently now. Now it’s not just naked like unclothed. Now it’s naked like, exposed. Vulnerable. Weak.

And Eve recoils from herself in horror.

You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God said, for when you eat from it, you will surely die. God doesn’t lie.

They eat of the fruit and their eyes are opened, but not to wisdom. To shame. For the first time they see themselves as something bad, something revolting, even. Impossible to love. Unworthy of belonging.

And from this shame, a new desire is born in them. Not a desire to be something, but a desire to cease to be something: lacking.

In the 1950s, René Girard was a young French academic teaching literature in the US when he began to notice a pattern in the novels he was teaching. Characters didn’t want things spontaneously; they desired what others desired first. In Don Quixote, Quixote longs to be a knight because he’s imitating chivalric heroes. In The Eternal Husband, a man rekindles his love for his wife only when another man desires her. In the Garden of Eden, Eve is completely indifferent to that fruit until after the serpent points out its desirability.

From this, Girard began formulating his theory of mimetic desire, the idea that our wants don’t emerge exclusively from within us but are received from the people and the culture around us. We don’t autonomously decide what we want. We take our cues from others, often unconsciously. Literature, Girard realized, had been revealing a hidden structure of human psychology all along.

He made the further observation that all desire is a desire for being. We imitate the people around us because we want to become like them in some way. Something about them seems admirable to us our clever brains start looking for ways to mimic that admirable quality.

If all of that was a lot of word salad to you, just think influencer marketing. Right? We now have an entire professional class of people whose only job is to be seen liking products because other people will then buy those products hoping to be as cool as that influencer. That’s it.

When it’s healthy, when our desires are picked up from someone kind and loving who has our best interest at heart, this mimesis, this capacity for imitation, it’s a good thing. It’s what enables us as humans to learn so much, so fast. It’s what enables us as a species to evolve and mature. We don’t have to start completely from scratch every time. We can begin partly from where the previous generation left off. This opens up access to a huge amount of innovation and creativity.

But when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, a desire is born in them that didn’t come from this healthy mimetic mechanism. God doesn’t want to eat that fruit. Even the serpent doesn’t want to eat the fruit. The desire for the fruit didn’t spring up because Eve imitated someone. It sprang up from a failure to imitate.

Instead of a desire to be like someone, even the serpent, instead Eve desires to stop being like someone: herself. This is the moment where mimetic desire flips in on itself. Before, Eve’s desire was about becoming, mirroring God’s goodness and growing into something new. Now it’s about eliminating, removing what she’s condemned as bad. Her desire has been disoriented.

The drive that once led her toward life now pulls her toward disappearance. Shame takes us from becoming to ceasing, from life to death.

This rejection of their own experience shatters Eve and Adam. Shame fragments their integrity of being. It launches them into conflict with themselves, and with God, and flips them into the anxiety of perpetual doing, forever trying to control and fix what they imagine to be wrong with them.

God doesn’t have to exile Eve and Adam from the peace of the garden. They’ve exiled themselves the minute they reach for those fig leaves. The minute they hide from God.

And we are still doing the same thing every day.

In the 1980s, Dr. Richard Schwartz was working as a family systems therapist when he began to notice a pattern in the way his clients spoke about their inner experiences. They kept describing parts of themselves having this or that feeling. A woman constantly criticized as a child might have a wounded part burdened with a belief that she’s never good enough, an inner critic part keeping her in check by shaming her before other people can, and a numbing part that turns to alcohol or drugs when feelings of inadequacy surface. Clients with bulimia would talk about how one part of them forced them to binge eat to comfort and emotional pain, then another part berated then for it, calling them weak or disgusting, while a third part tried to regain control of their inner turmoil by forcing them to purge or starve themselves.

At first Schwartz thought this language of parts was just his clients’ way of speaking in metaphors. But when he asked them to have conversations with these parts as if they were real inner people, he found that parts responded as if they were independent personalities, each with its own fears, desires, and strategies for survival. Just as each client existed as one part of an external family dynamic, so each client had many parts within themselves that acted as an internal family dynamic with all the sibling rivalries and conflicting opinions that implied.

And what he found was that his clients’ parts were in conflict with each other. All of them were trying to do something beneficial for the client, but they all had different ideas about how to go about that good thing.

Some parts became daily managers trying to prevent the client from getting into potentially dangerous situations. Some parts became firefighters. When something bad does happen, our firefighter parts jump in to get us out of it. And other parts of us get exiled from our conscious awareness because our protectors decided their pain was a threat and went to war against it.

If I hold Schwartz’s framework of Internal Family Systems alongside René Girard’s insights about mimetic desire, the picture makes even more sense. Humans are social animals. We are hardwired on a biological level to prioritize relational connection with our social group because for most of our evolution, we’ve depended on a tribe for our survival. When I think about the fact that we have mirror neurons in our brains that allow us to experience in our own bodies what we observe others doing, it makes sense to me that we develop different parts of ourselves based on the mediation of each of the different people we interact with.

This multiplicity isn’t a bad thing. There’s nothing inherently pathological about having these various parts of ourselves. It’s a normal consequence of human biology, full stop. In addition to that, as Christians, we proclaim a Trinitarian God — three Persons, one Deity. If we are made in the image of our God, then it makes sense that we have multiple parts just like God does. But unlike God, our parts can come into conflict with one another, and it’s how we respond to that conflict that causes problems.

We have two primary options when confronted with conflict. We can respond with relationship, or we can respond with rejection and rivalry. Eve and Adam respond to their inner conflict with rejection. In other words, with exile. They traumatize themselves, wound themselves, by rejecting their own experience. They split off from their vulnerability, and they try to cover it behind fig leaves. They don’t want to feel shame, and so they try to hide from God to make their shame go away.

I don’t think it had to be this way.

Imagine if, in that moment — still holding the fruit, the serpent’s words still echoing, confusion spinning her mind in circles — what if Eve had turned to God instead of the fruit?

If instead of grasping for control, she took everything the serpent said and she turned right back around to God and said, “Hey! What’s the deal here, dude?! You told me this thing, but now he’s telling me this other thing, and it’s kind of looking to me like you were full of it! Here’s your chance to explain!”

What if, instead of trying to fix her own confusion, she had let God hold it with her? Instead of rejecting herself and God, she could have deepened her relationship with God by bringing this new serpent-mediated part of herself into God’s presence, in addition to her original trusting self.

We’re gonna talk more about the importance of this when we come to Mary’s half of the Creative Journey, but for now, I just want us to hold onto the notion that a different more connected way is possible. I want us to hold onto that because it can seem supremely depressing that Eve doesn’t take this trusting road. She doesn’t bring her questions and confusion to God to try to repair the relationship when her trust gets bruised. She jumps straight to action and excises a part of her own soul. She buys into the lie that worthiness is something to strive for, that she needs something outside herself in order to be whole, and she doubles down at every turn on an exhausting life of constantly trying to control the uncontrollable.

Sound familiar to anybody else? I assume I’m not the only person in the room who does this.

It’s not comfortable to have to see this in ourselves, but we need to understand what’s at stake so that we can understand why it’s so important to choose a different way.

This is Richard Schwartz from No Bad Parts, his book on Internal Family Systems.

The challenge here is that we are dominated, individually and collectively, by hardline punitive parts who believe that people and their parts are basically bad and need to be warred against. If you believe that within you are dangerous, bestial, or sinful impulses that need to be constantly monitored, controlled, and if necessary, battled against, then it makes sense that you would see other people that way, and your approach to social problems will invariably involve controlling tactics and war. Time and again, we’ve seen how leaders in one country demonize the people in another land to justify going to war against them. As Charles Eisenstein puts it, “There are so many fights, crusades, campaigns, so many calls to overcome the enemy by force. Thus it is that the inner devastation of the... psyche matches exactly the outer devastation it has wreaked upon the planet.”

The war inside us doesn’t just stay inside us. It moves outward. The impulse that made Eve try to eliminate her shame by rejecting her vulnerable parts is the same impulse that will drive her son Cain to eliminate his shame by murdering his brother Abel. The same exile we impose on ourselves, cutting off the parts we judge as bad, is the exile we impose on others. What we refuse to love in ourselves, we refuse to love in other people. And what we see as a threat in ourselves, we will always be tempted to destroy in the world.

What if ending the wars out there begins with ending the war you’re fighting against yourself? What if creating peace in the world begins with creating peace among your own parts?

René Girard said that when we talk about putting an end to violence, we almost always mean the violence of our enemies. Their violence. We are too often utterly blind to our own violence.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you shouldn’t write letters to your congresspeople. I’m not saying you shouldn’t march in protests or do whatever other social action you feel genuinely moved to take in the stand against war out there. But do it in addition to learning how to love your vulnerable parts, your shamed parts, your exiled parts, the parts of you that disgust you or the people around you. Because if all we do is address the problems out there, the things we give birth to will still be distorted by the violence in here.

What if all the violence outside us started with violence inside us?

[00:22:17] Andrew: January, is there a personal experience that comes to mind when you’re thinking through, and this, I mean, this is a personal question. We’re talking about shame as internal violence, so

[00:22:28] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:30] Andrew: I’m almost a little reluctant to ask you, but we are here to have vulnerable conversations.

[00:22:34] January: Yeah.

[00:22:34] Andrew: And so if you’re up for it, is there one that comes to mind?

[00:22:38] January: Yeah. Thank you. There is, and it is a vulnerable conversation, so if you’ve got baggage about middle school sex ed class, this is your warning that it’s time to skip ahead a bit.

[00:22:52] Andrew: Alright.

[00:22:55] January: So one of the things that they did in my middle school sex ed class was they had a day where they brought in this trio of teen mothers in order to talk about how terrible life was you know, being a teenage parent. Basically attempt to scare us all into abstinence forever and ever amen.

[00:23:11] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:23:11] January: And it had the hilarious effect for me. Like it, it completely backfired. Because one of those girls was fat. She looked like me.

[00:23:23] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:23:24] January: And I will tell you right now, Andrew — I hate having to admit this, but it’s true — that when that class started, I did not think that she was telling the truth about that child being hers, because I had so completely internalized the message that people who looked like me were revolting and could not be desired by anyone. So I thought she was lying that this was her baby, because nobody could possibly want to have sex with her. Or me. Ever.

And so, yeah, 13 years old, and that’s the first moment that I realize that I have so internalized the social context of my desirability, or lack thereof. And I didn’t even realize that I thought that about myself

[00:24:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:24:07] January: until that moment. And thankfully by the end of the class, I had wised up. I got on board pretty quick. But so for me, that class was the realization that, oh shit, I might get to have sex someday?! That’s awesome! Definitely wasn’t what they had in mind for that class, but, but it really was that was my first beginning understanding both of the dynamics of shame and the dynamics of mimesis, that this was not a thought that I came up with on my own, this was an idea that I had internalized from the way that other people interacted with me, that I saw in the media that I saw in magazines that I was picking up from my social context that I existed in.

[00:24:51] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:24:52] January: And so I had this understanding that, oh, they’re probably wrong about that. Intellectually, I got that. But then I still existed in that social context. So I wasn’t really able to stop believing it because it continued to be the way that people talked about people who looked like me. And even though my lived experience did not reflect that belief at all, it was like my own experience couldn’t get traction in my own head.

[00:25:20] Andrew: Wow.

[00:25:21] January: Because the way that other people acted was like my experience wasn’t the real thing, that this collective story about my lack of desirability, that was the real thing.

[00:25:31] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:25:32] January: And this did not break down until literally last summer. Maybe a month before the conference where you and I met. Where, and this is hilarious to me. So I was watching Bridgterton. I don’t know if you’ve watched that.

[00:25:47] Andrew: No, no I haven’t.

[00:25:48] January: It didn’t strike me as the kind of thing that you’d naturally pick up.

And to be honest, it wasn’t the sort of thing that I would naturally have picked up either. I think I started watching it because it came out about the time that my housemate started to be gone for lengths of time at a stretch. And so I was like, I’m gonna watch all the things that I can’t watch when Ryan’s around because he’d just be a judgy asshole about this.

It wasn’t even a question of whether I was gonna enjoy it. I was just like, I was gonna watch it on principle just ‘cause Ryan wasn’t there.

[00:26:17] Andrew: Oh, that’s funny.

[00:26:22] January: And again, the joke was on me because I absolutely fell in love with it.

[00:26:28] Andrew: Okay.

[00:26:28] January: And people talk about it like it’s this Regency romance, and I get that. I get why they do that. But I will die on the hill that that is not a Regency romance show. It is speculative fiction in Regency drag.

[00:26:39] Andrew: Okay.

[00:26:40] January: It is this fascinating alternate universe that they’ve created in which, high society got racially integrated in the 16, 17 hundreds instead of when it did.

[00:26:51] Andrew: Ohhh!

[00:26:52] January: And then all of the romance is happening. But then there’s all of these other fascinating political and social dynamics on top of it. And ultimately that show for me, what I realized I loved about it was that it was a show about the ambitions of women and the emotional lives of men.

[00:27:09] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:27:10] January: And that was such a refreshing inversion of the stories that we usually get in pop media. I mean, I was fascinated.

[00:27:18] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:27:18] January: It definitely is very racy, so if that’s not your thing, give it a pass.

But The joke was on me. I got totally sucked in and turned into a fan almost instantly and thoroughly enjoyed the first two seasons. And then last May, the third season came out.

[00:27:33] Andrew: Okay.

[00:27:33] January: And the third season — so each season, one of the Bridgeton siblings is the romantic lead and it’s the story of their romance and eventually marriage.

And in the first two seasons, by a wide margin, the character that I related to most of all was this character called Penelope, who is this short, fat, ridiculously intelligent, very snarky, very creative, but constantly overlooked character who, like, nobody, nobody sees her because of what she looks like. Her appearance has no value in this social system that she exists in. And so the first two seasons, she’s constantly basically being let down by the guy that she’s got a crush on, who thinks of her as a friend, but is utterly failing to notice that she’s head over heels for him.

And I didn’t know going into it that the third season was she was the romantic lead.

[00:28:26] Andrew: Ohh.

[00:28:26] January: The two of them have their love story finally. And so there’s a particular scene which everybody who’s seen it will know what I’m talking about. I’m just gonna call it the carriage scene. Everybody knows, if you don’t know, don’t worry about it. But we got to the carriage scene at the end of the first part, and I cannot explain to this day what happened watching that scene. This was the most popular show streaming on television at that time; in the span of five minutes, they made it cool for boys to have feelings and fat girls to be sexy.

[00:28:59] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:00] January: And I honestly, I don’t know how to explain what happened in my brain. That — I was 40 years old, Andrew, and that was the first time in my entire life that I had ever seen someone who looked even a little bit like me treated as desirable in a piece of media that wasn’t a comedy where you were obviously supposed to laugh at it because clearly that’s never gonna happen, that’s just ridiculous.

[00:29:23] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:29:24] January: I had never seen that in my life. And with one scene, it was like all of that, 30 years of baggage all the way back to seventh grade sex ed class was revealed for the bullshit that it had always been. And it just crumbled into my mental ocean

[00:29:40] Andrew: Wow.

[00:29:41] January: like a cliff face collapsing.

[00:29:42] Andrew: Oh.

[00:29:43] January: Just — I could feel the thought structures coming apart at the seams, and it took a solid six months for me to really feel like my life was stable again.

[00:29:52] Andrew: Oh man.

[00:29:53] January: Because so many of those beliefs were so embedded for so many years, but it really was that mimetic dynamic of, this is a TV show. This is somebody else’s gaze, that’s not mine.

[00:30:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:30:08] January: And they made the choice to present this person as desirable. And somehow that managed to utterly unpick the shame narrative in my head that I couldn’t possibly be desirable, that no amount of my own experience had ever managed to, to make a dent on.

And so, yeah, it was a truly fascinating moment and I was so delighted and so grateful that this TV show was brave enough to do that, and I absolutely adored that the second half of that season, the whole thing turns out to be a story about her stepping into the place of shame and not being run by it.

That is utterly the plot of that season. And I was like, yes.

[00:30:50] Andrew: Oh, that’s great!

[00:30:54] January: So yeah, just I enjoyed the hell out of that, and I don’t know where that’s gonna go in my life, but just finally being free of the burden of that story has been mind-blowing. In one year. I’m like so much more relaxed as a human being because I’m not trying to keep that part of myself compartmentalized or exiled anymore, you know?

[00:31:19] Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

[00:31:20] January: And so, yeah, it was just this fascinating experience of really, really deep shame that got embedded very early on. But that experience of having that shame undone by something as utterly ordinary as a TV show

[00:31:36] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:31:36] January: that I happened to stumble over and would never normally have watched. It just felt to me like such a beautiful example of grace can find us anywhere.

[00:31:45] Andrew: Absolutely.

[00:31:47] January: Grace can find us anywhere and when shame is met with that kind of empathy and that kind of witness, it just can’t survive.

[00:31:55] Andrew: No, I’ll be thinking about this. I can’t, I don’t want to comment too quickly ‘cause that, just, well, thank you for sharing that.

There’s definitely something going on with the two moments that you’re talking about, watching the finale of Bridgerton, and that day in sex ed in seventh grade, that it’s you in the presence of another.

[00:32:13] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:14] Andrew: That is, that’s opening your mind. And a lot of Girardians like to talk about, oh, mirror neurons, right? Like, we’ve got these,

[00:32:21] January: Yeah.

[00:32:22] Andrew: apparently humans have more of ‘em than anybody else it seems. And they zero in very quickly on the fact that you can see someone doing something and it has a reaction in you, there’s collapsing, right? So —

[00:32:33] January: You experience it as if you were the one doing that. Yeah.

[00:32:36] Andrew: Yeah. Somebody else gets an apple to eat and your mouth starts to water or something. That kind of stuff, that.

[00:32:41] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:43] Andrew: But what you’re describing, I’m not a neuroscientist, but it seems like there are probably a few mirror neurons at work here, but it’s, the meaningfulness is not a collapsing, it’s the fact that there is another and you know there’s another

[00:32:56] January: Yeah,

[00:32:57] Andrew: right? It’s…

[00:32:58] January: Yeah.

[00:32:58] Andrew: you haven’t lost some sense of self. It’s the fact that, no, there is somebody outside me and this… that is having this experience that is making it meaningful like that, that it’s consistent. I also, I kinda love how like teachers can have so many ideas of how to plan a class, but like you just, you bring students in, you know, some are a little older. And they’re gonna learn from each other!

[00:33:24] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:25] Andrew: Try and stop that, right? Your lesson plans may be great, I’m sure like you tick all the boxes on how to write a good lesson plan that day. But it seems like with the second episode, it wasn’t so much that there’s a character here that you can identify with, but there’s, a creator, somewhere. And probably a team of creators, but right? There are people making this story. And you’re a creator and it’s opening your eyes to what’s out there to be created in a way. I mean, yeah. Excuse me, for trying to speak to your experience and probably that can be a very constricting, like…

[00:34:00] January: I am inviting you to do so.

[00:34:01] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, and I, I can trust you can tell me to step back when I do this too much, if I do this too much. But yeah, that was new for me, this idea that these mirror neurons are not something that necessarily collapse us into the other, but that there’s a connection that’s healthy, that rests on the differentiation, and yet those mirror neurons are still allowing us to learn, like allowing us to become.

[00:34:26] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Opening us out and growing us instead of collapsing us. Yeah.

[00:34:33] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:34] January: Yeah. I’m sure somebody would have something to say about it if I called it positive mimesis and used that term wrongly.

[00:34:43] Andrew: Ah, yeah.

[00:34:44] January: Because it wasn’t exactly that I was imitating anyone’s desire necessarily, but maybe I was, because it kind of was a permission slip to, as Rebecca Adams talks about, desire my own subjectivity. Desire my own experience.

[00:35:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:01] January: And to allow my experience to be real and not just defined by what other people saw or didn’t see in me. Which has been a trap I’ve fallen into with some pretty negative consequences. Yeah. It’s been pretty wild to discover that that just can’t get its hooks in me anymore, the way that it used to.

[00:35:26] Andrew: Yeah. Well, thank you, Bridgerton. Yeah, I haven’t even watched a trailer of that show. I feel like now I’m like, ah, I wanna watch this. Well, thank you.

[00:35:41] January: Mmm.

[00:35:43] Andrew: I can’t remember if this has been something we’ve been through or not, but I really liked reading your chart on the difference between humility and shame. It felt brand new to me as I was reading that.

[00:35:52] January: No, no. It was brand new to me. I was like, what?

[00:35:55] Andrew: Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:35:58] January: Yeah.

[00:35:58] Andrew: That was really cool. What was the impetus for writing that out?

[00:36:02] January: One of the things that I have a habit of using ChatGPT for is that I will stick a piece of writing in and ask it to argue with me and ask it to poke holes in my logic.

[00:36:11] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:11] January: To make sure that I’m thinking through all the avenues and so I think it was something that it said where it was making some pretty fundamentalist theological arguments about shame is actually good for us. You know, that kind of thing. We’re supposed to be humble, we’re supposed to be lowly, we’re supposed to recognize our own worthlessness and all of this stuff. And I’m like, that is not humility.

[00:36:30] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:36:30] January: I felt very clear that that was not humility. So then I was like, okay, if we’re gonna talk about shame, we need to talk about why it is not humility and what humility looks like instead.

You cannot say, well, there’s good violence and then there’s violence that’s harmful. Like, no, no, no. Violence is harmful, period. I really think that shame is harmful. Period. The humility that we’re after in the Christian life is something very, very different than shame.

And so I broke down this little chart because I had never really thought about the distinctions before, between those two words. I knew that they were something different for me, but I didn’t necessarily know, well, what is it that I think the difference is?

So I went through and made this chart, and I’m gonna read it to you and I want to hear your thoughts on it.

So these are two lists, kind of side by side, and we will have a PDF of this available in the show notes, for this episode. So come find us on Patreon after you’re done listening, and that’ll be ready for download.

You’ll be able to see these lists side by side, but for now I’m just gonna read ‘em to you.

And the first list is the shame list. And shame is rooted in lies. Born from disgust. Shame isolates. It is self-obsessed. It obscures agency. It’s rigid and certain. It is painful because of the violence of self-exile. In the body, it creates a contraction or a tension. It feeds stagnation and death. It refuses creative flow, and it hides from God.

And the contrasting list for humility. Humility is rooted in reality. It is born from curiosity. Humility connects. Humility is self-transcending. It increases agency. It’s flexible and teachable. It’s painful, when it’s painful, because of the grief of self-recognition rather than the violence of self-exile in the body. It feels like an expansion or spaciousness. It feeds aliveness. It receives creative flow, and it opens to God instead of hiding from God.

It’s another thing that comes up regularly in Martha Beck classes. She’s very fond of the term as well. There’s a line about humility in the Taoist Classic text, the Tao Te Ching, which can be translated as something to the effect of, “All rivers flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power.”

[00:39:17] Andrew: Wow.

[00:39:18] January: Yeah,

[00:39:20] Andrew: Whoa, man!

[00:39:24] January: And so yeah, understanding humility, not as this bizarre self-abasement, which... I am not sure where that came from in the Christian tradition, but it’s certainly how it gets talked about in pop culture

[00:39:37] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:39:38] January: Like this is what Christians think, even though that’s there’s plenty of Christians who don’t think that. But there are demonstrable Christian communities who do.

So, yeah, this picture of Christian humility as this constant self-denigration, that’s not healthy. That’s not loving. Why would God invite us into that if God loves us? In no way does that facilitate life and aliveness.

[00:40:04] Andrew: No.

[00:40:04] January: But there is a way of looking at humility that is in line with the natural world, that is profoundly receptive, just in the sense of lowness, not as a form of breaking ourselves down, but simply allowing ourselves to rest and receive.

[00:40:20] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:40:21] January: And it connected for me with all the talk about Jesus as the fountain of living water.

[00:40:27] Andrew: Mmm.

[00:40:27] January: And if we wanna receive the water, but we’re all trying to climb to the top of the hill, like, wait.

[00:40:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:40:38] January: No wonder we’re thirsty.

[00:40:39] Andrew: The point is it’s flowing. Yeah. It’s running,

[00:40:44] January: Yeah.

[00:40:44] Andrew: It’s alive.

[00:40:44] January: Yeah. Yeah. And so there was this picture in my head of God always trying to answer prayers and send us blessings, but if it’s water flowing, are we allowing ourselves the lowness of receiving those blessings?

[00:41:00] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:41:00] January: Or are we trying to achieve everything and have no room for receiving and so in that sense, the opposite of humility.

But the other term that connects to it for me is that notion of beginner’s mind. Humility for me connects profoundly with being teachable or being curious. You have to be able to admit that you don’t have all the answers if you’re gonna get curious about anything.

You have to have humility for that. And so there’s this way that it just opens up all of this aliveness, but it is absolutely not shame. Shame is not the way to arrive at that humility at all.

[00:41:37] Andrew: Yeah.

I liked how you contrasted disgust and curiosity. I had thought through how certainty can get in the way of curiosity. But I think disgust incorporates the idea of certainty and adds a bit more to what’s going on.

[00:41:52] January: It did feel like a bit of a chicken and egg question. Did the humility come first or did the curiosity come first? I don’t know.

[00:41:59] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:42:02] January: And ditto the shame and disgust.

[00:42:04] Andrew: Exactly. Yeah.

I liked how you considered both shame and humility as painful, potentially.

[00:42:11] January: Mm, mm-hmm.

[00:42:11] Andrew: And you, as you were choosing to contrast them, it wasn’t the fact that one would be painful and the other wasn’t. But no, the reasons for the pain either being because of the violence of self-exile or a grief of self-recognition.

Yeah. I like grief being portrayed as a positive thing. That’s nice. I mean, nice.

[00:42:29] January: Yeah. Humility certainly isn’t always painful, but when it is, you know, we have that word humiliation for a reason, it’s not comfortable.

[00:42:36] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:42:38] January: But it is a grief that heals and integrates rather than a lie that distorts our reality.

Is there anything in there that challenges something that you grew up with?

[00:42:48] Andrew: Oh yeah, I would say that definitely humility was considered a performative act.

[00:42:52] January: Mm.

[00:42:52] Andrew: It’s an act of obedience. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and he’ll lift you up. So it’s like you do the thing, and then you get recompense. Rather than, it could just be a declarative statement, like If this is what happens, if you’re humble in the sight of the Lord, you will be lifted up.

[00:43:07] January: Yeah.

[00:43:08] Andrew: It could be read that way just as easily, but yeah, it was always “be humble, choose humility.” It was a thing to be achieved.

[00:43:15] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[00:43:17] Andrew: Yeah. What character trait do you just choose to be every time it happens, you know?

[00:43:23] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:24] Andrew: A character trait, like yes, you can develop character traits, and I guess the virtuous ones can be associated with practices. I think there’s a real connection there, but this idea of, either you have this character trait, or you don’t, depending on what you chose to do in the last, you know, 60 seconds that can’t be right it can’t be something you choose every time again and again.

[00:43:44] January: Yeah.

[00:43:45] Andrew: But that was how it was discussed. More often than not.

I don’t know. I say that although I would imagine that as a child, if I’d heard somebody say, guess what? Humility, it’ll come upon you. And it’s a sign that the presence of God has been active in your life.

[00:44:00] January: Mm.

[00:44:00] Andrew: And it’s not gonna be something you choose, but when it comes upon you, it’ll be a blessing and you’ll recognize it as divine.

Like somebody could have come with that message, completely incongruent with the be-humble-do-humble, and I’m pretty sure I would’ve heard that and been like, yeah, yeah, that sounds right. So I had ears to hear that message. I’m sure. So somebody must have been telling me about it. It wouldn’t have sounded foreign. I would’ve recognized it as true.

[00:44:22] January: Yeah.

Well, let’s talk about your Molly LaCroix quote.

[00:44:27] Andrew: Yeah, let’s do that.

So I probably can’t introduce her as well as I should. But yeah, I ran into the author, Molly LaCroix. She was being interviewed by Tammy Sollenberger. The reason why I listened to it is ‘cause it reminded me of the first line of our intro thing of why does the church that is so excited about unconditional love, why doesn’t it actually look like that?

So LaCroix is a therapist, and I got the impression that she seems to work primarily with religious clients, evangelicals, people that want their therapist to be Christian. She’s somebody that serves those types of folks.

And so she’s written a book to introduce the concepts of internal family systems, to people that might not be familiar with that, but would’ve a familiarity with scripture and the way she uses scripture in the book, you can tell like she’s been raised in a church or if not raised, has spent plenty of time in it.

And, she has this paragraph. She says, “These are the resources we bring to bear when we lead our internal family in harmony with the Holy Spirit. Our spiritual practice shifts from working hard to develop something we think we lack to building relationships with the members of the inner family that block the expression of something we already have.”

[00:45:54] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:56] Andrew: As soon as I was reading that, I was like, yeah, theology kills. That’s what we’re saying. I don’t know, like I gotta,

[00:46:02] January: That sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

[00:46:05] Andrew: I’ve gotta, I mean, yeah, I sat down to read a whole chapter, and I just stopped there and I was like, ah, yeah, I’m gonna have to text this to January.

[00:46:15] January: Yeah, as soon as I read it I was like, yeah, exactly. That is, that is everything that I’m constantly trying to preach in everything that I do. I wouldn’t have put it as specifically as she did in the sense that it’s restoring the relationships that makes those resources available. I hadn’t thought about it explicitly in that sense. But that is absolutely what I believe, and that is very much what I hope I’m talking about on this podcast for sure.

A funny thing that used to happen for me when I first started working with a therapist after my life blew up, it was just a regular therapist. It wasn’t an IFS therapist. And we would have these moments where she would say something, and I could feel my brain sliding off of the concept even as we were talking about it. I could not get a grip on it.

And so I learned to pay attention to something when I could feel a gap in my head. There was place in my head where I knew that a concept was supposed to go, but it was like it was raining and there was this space where the rain wasn’t falling, kind of a thing.

[00:47:19] Andrew: Mm, mm-hmm.

[00:47:19] January: So I could tell that something was there, but I couldn’t see it yet. And may be a bit too woo-woo for the rest of our audience, but there’s a book called The Energy Codes, and one of the things that she talked about that was such a light bulb moment for me was that we often talk about energy in terms of having these blocks in our system that we then have to remove, and that actually what’s happening is that we don’t have those neural pathways yet. So it’s a gap, and we have to build the relationship before the energy can make that flow.

And that’s exactly what Molly LaCroix is talking about right there, is that we have to learn to make those connections. We have to make them in our physical neural pathways. We have to make them between each other as humans so that the larger system of the human organism can function better. But all of it has to do with that energy flow through the system.

And that we don’t need to talk about it as blocks that have to be removed, which is what we’re doing when we exile, that rather what we have to do is build the relationships and bring people closer and integrate things instead. And yeah, that’s exactly what I hope I’m getting at with this notion of Theology Kills, that bad theology kills those relationships, but good theology kills what’s getting in the way of the relationships.

[00:48:30] Andrew: Yeah. She quotes that passage from 1 John or one of the Johannine epistles where, “Perfect love casts out all fear.”

[00:48:36] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:36] Andrew: And she says, I really hope you don’t see some terrified animal being chased off, or the image of someone being run off. When love is casting out fear, you should see the picture of a child being embraced by an adult they trust.

[00:48:52] January: Yeah.

[00:48:52] Andrew: Right? That, that is fear being cast out.

[00:48:56] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:56] Andrew: That’s a passage that’s been in my head since I was a kid and I never attached that image to it before.

[00:49:02] January: Mm.

[00:49:02] Andrew: And I greatly appreciate that. And it is the forming of a relationship, right?

[00:49:07] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:07] Andrew: That clearly, yeah, fear is driven away, but fear is not a person or an entity like, like it’s, yeah. I don’t know. Yeah. Language gets us in trouble. I guess there’s all sorts of metaphor and whichever image you grab onto first to understand a concept probably sticks with you for a long time. Yeah.

[00:49:27] January: What does it change for you to have that new picture of that verse?

[00:49:31] Andrew: Well, just that the image she gave is so entirely non-combative.

[00:49:35] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[00:49:36] Andrew: And I’ve never been particularly drawn to the whole like “spiritual warfare” sort of metaphor. That’s never really done it for me. I haven’t gotten real excited about that. And so, I think what it changes is the imagery of having components of combat in the Christian life.

[00:49:55] January: Hmm.

[00:49:55] Andrew: I don’t have to roll my eyes at it when it’s there. I don’t, I don’t have to entertain it at all. It doesn’t need to be there.

[00:50:02] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:03] Andrew: There’s gonna be another image to understand those passages and those words.

[00:50:07] January: Yeah.

[00:50:08] Andrew: And yeah, I think we find that through the Holy Spirit. I’m in agreement with her that that harmony is something that comes through the Holy Spirit.

[00:50:15] January: Yeah. I think the person that I would most readily refer to as a spiritual warrior in the New Testament is Mary, with her receptivity and her just, “I will not be moved” refusal to return violence for violence. That is my definition of spiritual warfare.

[00:50:34] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:50:35] January: Right? Not that I’m gonna go out there and force anybody into line, but that I’m gonna go out there and be so relentlessly loving that violence just can’t do shit. It just can’t get traction on me.

[00:50:50] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:50:51] January: It can kill me.

[00:50:52] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:50:52] January: It can do that.

[00:50:54] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:50:56] January: Okay.

[00:50:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:50:58] January: If there’s one thing Jesus never does, it’s engage in self-defense.

[00:51:02] Andrew: Yeah. Even in those instances where you think he’d have to, like, there’s a mob trying to push him off a cliff or something, and he, he just like

[00:51:09] January: Yeah.

[00:51:10] Andrew: Walks through it. He just walks through ‘em.

[00:51:13] January: Yep.

And this is a perfect place actually to get you to explain your connections that you made between the three types of parts in IFS and the three pillars of the archaic sacred in Girard. Do you wanna unpack that for us?

[00:51:28] Andrew: Yeah, I texted a buddy of mine that I hadn’t seen in a while.

Senior year of college, we lived in this guy’s backyard. His name was Bob Davenport. And we set up a yurt in his backyard. Well, we bought this yurt, and then we needed to find a place to put it, and Bob Davenport was, he used to be the football coach. And before that, in the 1950s, apparently, he was like one of the biggest names in all of football, and he won the Pro Bowl MVP as a college player.

[00:51:52] January: Whoa.

[00:51:52] Andrew: Back in those days, college players played the pros.

[00:51:55] January: Okay.

[00:51:57] Andrew: And, and so everybody was expecting him to be this great thing, and then he met, the Campus Crusade for Christ guy or something. Anyway, he had some conversion where he felt like he couldn’t work on Sundays.

[00:52:09] January: Mm.

[00:52:10] Andrew: If you’re an NFL player, that’s kind of a problem.

[00:52:13] January: Yep. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:52:14] Andrew: So he goes to Canada and plays in Canada for a few years and then hurts his knee or something and then he was a football coach at Taylor University. Anyway, somebody was like, yeah, you guys should ask him.

And we asked him if we can put a yurt in his backyard and we’re like, oh, we’ll do all this stuff. Like, we’ll clean y-your yard. If you want anything work done, we’ll do it. And he just looked at us and he’s like, no. And we’re like, oh, another no.

He’s like, “Yeah, you won’t do any of that. You’ll have a girlfriend the first weekend. I don’t want you to tell me you’re gonna do anything. Just, just keep it quiet. I don’t want any parties, alright? It is just gonna be you three living there?”

And we’re like, “Yes, sir. Yeah. Yes sir.” And he’s, “That’s it. Okay.” This friend who studied psychology went on to get a doctorate, he was like, “Have you, have you ever read Pirsig?” ‘Cause he’d just read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

[00:53:02] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:02] Andrew: And, and he was like, “It’s my scripture. Quality is caring.”

And our minds were just blown by like, who is this man that’s in his seventies that knows the book that we think nobody’s supposed to know about? And he’s like, it’s my scripture. It was, it was just this mind-blowing experience and he’s giving us a place to stay.

So affectionately, we came to refer to him as Bobby-o, just because it was so absurd to call this gruff man. Like we, I’ve never met a Bobby-o in my life, but it was like, Hey, Bobby-o, like you would never say that to his face. This man was very intimidating. Anyway, so I recently sent a text to both of these guys actually with a Bob Falconer video, the one that you sent where, and I was like, boys, I just, I just found my next Bobby-o, I just found my next Bobby-o.

This man, you don’t understand.

[00:53:59] January: Oh, that makes me so happy.

[00:54:03] Andrew: And so in response to that, he was like, yeah, I had somebody trying to explain IFS to me. But I didn’t get it until, until I watched Inside Out.

[00:54:15] January: Mm!

[00:54:15] Andrew: He’s like, yeah.

[00:54:15] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:15] Andrew: Then I watched Inside Out and instantly, instantly it made sense to me.

[00:54:19] January: Yay.

[00:54:20] Andrew: And there’s definite inroads to IFS with the Inside Out movie of like, there’s a collection of parts, and they all want what’s best, but they don’t necessarily agree. It veers away from IFS with regards to attaching these parts to emotions, and it would lead people to suspect, anybody would know what their parts are gonna be before they’ve done any sort of parts work.

[00:54:42] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:42] Andrew: It’s like, so I’m gonna have a joy part and I’m gonna have an anger part where it’s really, it’s not like there’s these prefigured sort-of types ahead of time that you just need to find. No. You don’t know who you’re meeting till you’ve met them in IFS. But that said, even though you don’t know who you’re meeting till you’ve met them, these parts, according to Schwartz, they fall into three categories.

Really two categories. There’s protectors and there’s exiles, but there’s two types of protectors depending on the situation. You have managers that are more in line with what needs to happen today and what needs to happen every day, and you have firefighters that come in when something needs to happen right now and that something needs to be drastic because this could be the end of the world. And this no holds barred, we’re gonna solve this problem now with whatever it takes. As opposed to, the protector that’s more like, this is how things should go.

And then the exiles are those whose emotions their thoughts, their understanding is far too dangerous to be felt or heard. The pain is too intense, and they have to carry it and they have to carry it somewhere else, and they need to be kept at a distance. So yeah, he calls ‘em exiles.

When I was introduced to that framework in reading the book, No Bad Parts, it occurred to me and this is because I’m hopelessly carrying around my Girardian hammer, just trying to find anything remotely resembling a nail so I can whack it and say, “Yep. Told you! I knew how that worked before you even told—”

That’s, that’s, yeah. Sorry. That’s how I go through the world these days.

And so when I heard three parts, Managers, Firefighters and Exiles, immediately I went to what Girard posits as three universal characteristics of human religion. Period.

And you’re like, what? Hold on, you’re gonna define religion, really? And you’re gonna say, you’re gonna say it’s universal and that all human religion. Yeah, that’s what Girard says.

The three components that he says you will find all human religion, and the reason why he thinks it’s universal is he does not understand religion as something that people start doing.

People don’t take up religion. The whole modernist idea of like, oh, it’s an opiate to the masses, if we just put down this addiction, we could ascend—

[00:57:16] January: Mmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:57:17] Andrew: No! Humans arise from religion. We were created through these religious practices.

[00:57:25] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:25] Andrew: These three things are what made us human. The hominids that weren’t human yet became human because of these three practices. Taboo, which would be prohibitions, ritual, which would be blood sacrifice, and mythology, which is a story about your origin that’s true enough to be convincing, but essentially a lie, in that it covers up the true story.

Myth necessarily conceals what actually happened in order to provide a more comfortable story.

And Girard’s point is that the origin of humanity is very uncomfortable. Tony Bartlett put it that the birth of mind is collective. it’s not a wonderful, awe-inspiring, exciting event in the Girardian system. It goes back to essentially a lynch mob, where a group is in disarray because mimetic desires are not constructive. It’s a runaway escalation to everybody being against everybody, and it’s getting worse and worse, and everybody is at everybody’s throats, and then somebody makes a gesture, an accusatory gesture, towards someone, more or less saying, “It’s you, you’re the problem.”

And instead of people mimicking the desire for some thing that somebody else is grasping at, they mimic the accusatory gesture.

This episode, it’s a cathartic event, and everybody is involved in the group and one person is killed. And that corpse becomes significant. It marks a before and after. There was a chaotic series of events and now once this one is dead, there’s a mysterious calm. There’s an inside and an outside. There’s everybody who survived, and then there’s this dead one. And so over time, this recurrence of this sort of event for Girard leads to the creation of deities, these fearful, awful presences that come into our midst and bring all this chaos when they come, but when they leave, it’s been a blessing the whole time.

And that, embracing this story and turning it into a story about a God who’s blessed us, that story actually precedes humanity. And so that’s the event, the genesis of humanity.

But what’s left over from that traumatic event that is speciation, the coming to be of humanity, what’s left over is three things, right? We’ve got a blood sacrifice ritual, which is a reenactment of the original lynch mob.

And there are prohibitions against certain activities, which go back to the all-against-all stage where there’s certain things that people are arguing over. And so if we have certain rules to keep that at bay, then we can keep our community in line, find some solidarity.

And then of course there’s a myth that’s told about what happened.

And so Girard would say that all three of those things, the remnants of them can be found in every human religion. And that advances were made as far as moving away from human sacrifice and using animal sacrifice instead. That’s clear advancement. But he would argue that originally it goes back to humans killing one of their own and lying to themselves in a way that makes them think that it was some sort of divine encounter.

And so the role of prohibition in human culture, these taboos that you must not do in order to keep things in line, that lines up perfectly with the Managers in IFS.

[01:01:15] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:01:17] Andrew: And the rituals that are intense, and perhaps horrifying, this turn-to-extreme-measures that’s embodied in ritual and bloodletting seems to map on pretty clearly to the role of the Firefighter in IFS.

[01:01:32] January: Yeah.

[01:01:34] Andrew: And then that leaves the Exile. And this was the revelatory thing for me that as far as studying Girard, it’d never occurred to me, but that the pain of bearing a false story — a lie that’s concocted to make things livable — that pain becomes a burden that’s placed upon the Exile, and they’re sent out.

[01:02:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:01] Andrew: The real truth of it has to be exiled, right?

[01:02:03] January: Yeah.

[01:02:03] Andrew: You can’t know that everybody got together and killed one of their own for no good reason.

It was just us deciding that if we all kill this one guy, it’s not gonna be a big problem. There’s nobody that likes him that much, he’s not that important. That’s what happened. It wasn’t a God that came was terrifyingly awesome and then blessed us.

No, it was us picking on the weakest among us. That’s what happened.

[01:02:27] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:28] Andrew: That truth cannot be known otherwise why would you ritualize that? Why would you repeat that? Why would you tell a story about — that truth cannot be known. It must be removed from the stories that we tell each other. And so in order not to tell that story, we tell a story that’s very close to it but doesn’t tell the awful bits. And that’s the mythology.

And the awful bits that aren’t told are nevertheless there. And as soon as people get close to speaking those sorts of things, it’s gonna start freaking everybody out. Managers and Firefighters alike. And so behind every origin myth, there’s a dead body and there’s a truth that must not be told.

And that lines up pretty closely with the Exile, in the IFS system.

[01:03:14] January: Yeah.

[01:03:15] Andrew: Maybe I even got a little confused because I think it is true that there is a truth that would be unsettling, but the idea that the exiles would be privy to that and be holding the quote-unquote gospel story in our analogy, that’s not what we’re saying. Right? There’s going to be parts of it that are false and have to be false in order to make the structure of this interior family stand up for a little while longer.

And so if that’s the case, why would a mental family chase off or keep at arm’s length the one who is bearing witness to the false story that they need to hold onto so tightly?

[01:03:51] January: Yeah. what came to mind for me when you were talking about the parts carrying truth that can’t be acknowledged, I do think that that’s true to an extent in that, when Girard talks about the epistemological privilege of the victim, where the victim knows something that everybody else can’t acknowledge. That’s in there, and that is the truth that the Exiles are carrying.

[01:04:10] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:11] January: But the burden of the part, specifically the burden of an exile. Burdens are another thing that IFS talks about is that parts are burdened with these

[01:04:21] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:21] January: roles that aren’t their natural optimal function within your system, if you will.

[01:04:27] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:04:27] January: And my experience of burdens, specifically in my own IFS work and the work that I’ve done with clients is that those burdens almost always are attached to a story. There’s some belief that that part has internalized about themselves from the rest of the system that just isn’t true. And that’s why it’s that burden, and that’s why it’s forcing them into a role that’s not theirs, or it’s forcing them out of the system.

[01:04:55] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:04:55] January: And so if the rest of the system needs this part to be carrying this burden in order for the rest of the system to function, I mean, if we’re gonna take that and talk about it in terms of what that looks like in the external world, right?

[01:05:10] It looks like: We need you to not acknowledge that child labor is a problem. We need you to not acknowledge that racism and slavery are a problem. We need you to not acknowledge that sexism is a problem.

There’s a story that we’re telling ourselves that makes the world stable, in a way. It makes it quote unquote “function”

[01:05:27] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:28] January: for the people with social privilege. But it’s not working for the people who don’t have social privilege. It’s not working for the Exiles. And yet those stories can still get internalized by those exiled communities. And then a whole lot of healing work has to happen to unburden them from that colonized mindset that they’ve been handed generationally.

[01:05:51] Andrew: Yeah.

I just wanna say it’s really cool because when I was using the word carry, I was using that synonymously with burden. But I really appreciate how you’re saying that these exile parts can carry more than burdens, they are carrying truth.

[01:06:05] January: M-hmm.

[01:06:05] Andrew: It’s just

[01:06:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:06] Andrew: that complexity I think is necessary to the personal nature of parts. By personal I just mean possessing personhood. There’s a complexity there and so they can’t be reduced to a story.

[01:06:18] January: Yeah.

[01:06:19] Andrew: Especially they can’t be reduced to a story that will never change, but that might very well be part of the process of exiling, right? Turning that part into a story that can’t be changed.

And because they can’t be changed, you need to be over there. You can’t talk to us about what’s going on and interact with us. We don’t,

[01:06:38] January: Yeah.

[01:06:39] Andrew: we don’t interact with stories that way. We just play ‘em on repeat and hear ‘em when we need to. You’re not allowed to be a person. You need to carry that story.

[01:06:47] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:48] Andrew: I think more than one Girardian commentator and maybe Girard himself, I can’t remember, talk about the fragility of these systems.

[01:06:56] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:56] Andrew: That’s why you need to go through such effort to maintain it. And there’s all these religious taboos and things that mustn’t be transgressed because our myths, our origin stories, as awful as they can be and destructive as they can be — and they are awful and destructive! — they’re also fragile.

[01:07:16] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:07:18] Andrew: And if you just stop and take a look or interact a bit, they can collapse really quickly.

[01:07:25] January: Yeah.

[01:07:26] Andrew: And um. I’m blanking on the guy’s name. He wrote Violence Unveiled and, [it] was one of the first Girardian books I read, and he talked about how that was part of the revelatory nature of scripture. That there are certain Bible stories that are mythic in the sense of they’re covering up, the violence in a way to try to make it sacred.

But they do such a terrible job of covering it up! There’s so lousy! It’s just like, oh, I can see the seams just bursting. And that’s a form of revelation, right? That… it’s just, so yeah.

[01:07:56] January: And did that get at what you were hoping to get at?

[01:07:59] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think so.

So January, we’ve talked a little bit about the audience and who we have in mind who’s gonna be listening. I want to just go ahead and say frankly that I don’t want the audience to learn theology from me.

[01:08:16] January: Mm.

[01:08:16] Andrew: I don’t.

[01:08:17] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:17] Andrew: I don’t.

[01:08:17] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:18] Andrew: I hope that my audience can get excited about theology because of me. I do wanna build excitement, but I think there probably are gonna be better podcasts out there when it comes to teaching theology.

And I wanna be upfront about that because yeah, I’m about to go on a rant and talk about the Trinity, because The Trinity’s sort of a big deal. So I’m gonna run through this, but the point here is not for me to teach anybody what the Trinity is, and maybe I say a few things that get you excited about learning more about it.

But I think we can learn something interesting about IFS by following through a very brief survey of the history of the doctrine of the Trinity.

And that’s where I’m going with this. I’m not trying to give a full understanding of the Trinity so much as maybe shed light on something about IFS.

When we start to think about parts in IFS versus the use of the word parts — I’m making scare quotes with my fingers right now — in an understanding of the Trinity, generally it’s not considered a heresy to say that God comes in three parts, because nobody’s ever actually believed that.

So in order for it to be a heresy, there have to be some folks that were like really adamant and up there and saying, yeah, this happened. And then some other people come along and be like, wait, no, that’s wrong. You’re a heretic.

So nobody’s ever really said God comes in three parts, right? Take the three parts, put ‘em together, and you got God. But sometimes there can be sort of a folk explanation of the trinity that you might run into in some sort of Sunday school or something that needs to be filled out.

But the Trinity… I think it’s worth saying that it doesn’t really have that much to do with the number three either.

[01:10:04] January: Hmm.

[01:10:05] Andrew: The Trinity comes from observation of what’s going on in a faith community. It doesn’t start with this idea that three is a magic number. And three might be a magic number. And maybe you got the song in your head right now. I don’t know if it’s schoolhouse Rock or De La Soul or what you got in your head right now.

And, and maybe, it’s true, and maybe we can apply that to the maker of Heaven and Earth, but that’s not where the Trinity came from. People didn’t start with three and be like, well, three’s so special, how does that make sense of God? Rather it had more to do with Christians worshiping a man named Jesus as if he were God. And people are, you realize you’re worshiping—? The way you talk about this guy, it’s like you’re talking about God!

And the Christian response was, well no, actually, it’s not like we’re talking about God. We’re talking about God. There’s no like. It is. Yeah. It’s just a full on, yep, that’s right. That’s what we’re doing. And this is really confusing.

You’re saying, he’s a man a human, and he was killed in very inglorious fashion and that’s God? Yep. That’s exactly what we’re saying. So, real quick, now this is not an explanation of the Trinity, but I think it’s a run of the mill way to set up the essentials of what needs to be said.

In order to do this right, I’m gonna say a sentence and I want you to count ‘em off. Okay? I’ll give you one statement and you’ll give the number.

[01:11:33] January: Okay.

[01:11:33] Andrew: The Father is God.

[01:11:36] January: One.

[01:11:38] Andrew: The Son is God.

[01:11:41] January: Two.

[01:11:42] Andrew: Holy Spirit is God.

[01:11:46] January: Three.

[01:11:47] Andrew: The Father is not the Son.

[01:11:50] January: Four.

[01:11:52] Andrew: The Son is not Holy Spirit.

[01:11:55] January: Five.

[01:11:56] Andrew: Holy Spirit is not the Father.

[01:11:59] January: Six.

[01:12:01] Andrew: God is one.

[01:12:05] January: Seven.

[01:12:06] Andrew: All right, that comes from Saint Augustine.

[01:12:09] January: Mm.

[01:12:09] Andrew: And I never said the word three. I did not say the word three. And I didn’t say the word Trinity, but I said everything that was essential to this doctrine. I didn’t need the word three.

And so I think here already we’ve got our first parallel with parts-language isn’t about a particular number.

[01:12:29] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:30] Andrew: Right. it’s not like there’s this certain set of archetypes or whatever, that once you get to know them, then you can find them in yourself and all that.

[01:12:38] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:38] Andrew: No, no. When you meet the parts You have to meet them first in the same way that you know, the early church doctors or writer of doctrines they were observing and meeting the activity in this faith community and finding language to describe it. There wasn’t a predetermined mold to fit in.

Like, well, there’s gonna need to be three ‘cause three is a magic number.

[01:12:57] January: Mm.

[01:12:57] Andrew: It’s the same thing with parts. It’s not like, well, everybody’s got this, that, and the other part. I think we talked a little bit about Inside Out. I actually heard Tammy Sollenberger again had somebody on her podcast and they did a whole 30 minutes just on the Inside Out movie. I don’t think the sequel had come out yet. But they did the whole thing, and the guy she interviewed, he was really into it.

And he was like, yeah, people have talked about like how every person in the movie has the same five parts and that doesn’t really track. And he was like, I think it’s because the whole movie is from Riley’s perspective and she has five parts. So when she’s understanding her mother and her father and her friends and the boy.

[01:13:35] January: Oh, okay.

[01:13:35] Andrew: That’s why they have five parts. And then, so I was like, that’s a really deep reading of Inside Out. I wish he had come to our Mimesis at the Movies. Uh, like that’s the guy I want. But I don’t, I don’t know if that’s what Disney had in mind or not.

But anyway, the mystery of the Trinity, because there is a mystery. I did just lay out these seven statements that get at everything that’s essential, I think, that needs to be said, but it’s not an explanation. It is a little bit confounding, right? You just gave names to three different Persons and said they’re divine, said they’re God, and you said God is one, like that, that’s not an explanation.

So there is a mystery here, but it’s not triunity, it’s not three-in-oneness. The mystery, it’s that there’s an eternal generation, I think is the way to say this. The Son is one who is always begotten, the Father, one who’s always begetting. There were folks in the first century, I think that would understand the Logos as sort of this intermediary between God and the rest of creation.

[01:14:48] January: Mm.

[01:14:49] Andrew: Christians are coming grips with who they’re worshiping and in this new revelation of who humans worship, when they worship the Maker of Heaven and Earth. And the idea that the Logos is this thing that’s kind of in between — one of these people was named Arius, and he actually bothered to think through like, okay, well, either you’re a creator or you’ve been created.

[01:15:16] January: Mm.

[01:15:17] Andrew: It’s one or the other. You’re a creature or you’re a creator.

[01:15:20] January: Mm.

[01:15:20] Andrew: That’s it. There is no in between. So this Logos that you’re saying is in—now, most people didn’t even get this far, and they’re just happy being a Christian and using the Greek thoughts and making sense. Oh, so Jesus is the Word, the Logos.

Arius, actually like thought the thing through and said, yeah, we’re gonna have to say something, one or the other about this Logos. And what the church decided was he chose the wrong option, I guess. And said that the Logos was created, right.

That the first principle would be the Creator, and the second principle that’s intermediary would have to be created. And they’re like, no, he can’t be made. And so that’s when you get the phrase, begotten not made.

[01:16:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:16:01] Andrew: It’s a way to basically point out that Arius, who was the first one to do the methodical thinking, that he was wrong. Not for being methodic in his thinking, but for coming down on the wrong side of it. I think pagans had something helpful there that the eternal first principle, a second principle that is eternally generated.

And so, I think the people putting Arius in his place, they were also able to bring in some Greek philosophy maybe, to help them as they were doing that. But it didn’t go all the way. Because if you got first principle and second principle, that sort of sounds like a hierarchy, right? That’s a problem.

[01:16:40] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:16:41] Andrew: And I think that’s when Athanasius steps in and he’s insisting on coequality.

[01:16:47] January: Mm.

[01:16:48] Andrew: Eternally begotten means an eternal begetter. Eternally begotten, that’s familiar. But the idea that if that’s what we say about the Son, the implication is of the Father eternally begetting.

And when I got to this part, I was thinking, you know, this sounds like what January says about creating, that we are always creating.

[01:17:08] January: Mm mm-hmm.

[01:17:10] Andrew: Because God is always creating.

[01:17:13] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:17:13] Andrew: And so the Son’s dependent on the Father, yes. But then so is the Father dependent on the Son. Because you, not a Father if you don’t have a son.

So there’s a coequality here, between Father and Son. That’s, I think, where Athanasius steps in to go beyond the Greek first principle and second principle and get to this idea of eternal generation, a timeless process, which is I think in some sense, real sense, a mystery.

[01:17:42] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:17:43] Andrew: It’s not easy. I don’t know. Would you attach the word mystery to what you describe as you’ve said already in this podcast a couple times already, I think, that humans are always creating?

[01:17:54] January: That’s a fascinating question. I think that until you asked me that it would not have occurred to me to use that word of human creativity, since there are hardwired biological processes that cause us to be creating all the time.

[01:18:09] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:10] January: And that seems, I mean, it is mysterious in the sense that we don’t understand how all of that works and we don’t have to for it to work, which is great.

But that’s not the same thing as mystery in the sense of when we’re talking about the divine, and something that is utterly and completely beyond any possibility of ever comprehending it, because it is so fundamentally other. At the same time, as soon as you ask that question, I’m like, well, but it is. How creativity functions is a bit of a mystery.

It does depend to some degree or other on inspiration and revelation and things that we don’t control and things that we don’t understand and never will. We don’t understand where inspiration comes from. We don’t understand, necessarily, why we make the choices that we do in responding to that inspiration, and what we create as a result of that inspiration.

So yeah, I do feel like there’s a significant degree of divine mystery involved in human creativity, and very specifically that that degree of divine mystery isn’t of us. It is of God.

[01:19:20] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:19:20] January: It is part of being image bearers of God and the divine in material space. Does that answer your question sufficiently?

[01:19:27] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I just scheduled a few breaks here so people wouldn’t have to hear me ramble on and on without any interruption. Being introduced to your thoughts, that was one of the first ones where I was like, wait a second. Always creating?

[01:19:42] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yup.

[01:19:46] Andrew: Even before you get to, like, is that true? Can that even be? Like how, like what would that even look like? But

[01:19:53] January: mm-hmm.

[01:19:53] Andrew: I do appreciate that formulation of understanding human life.

Yeah. And of course, well, I mean, we’ve said before that our creative processes can be perverted, I guess. I don’t know the exact, which word, yeah. They can

[01:20:06] January: Disoriented.

[01:20:06] Andrew: run amok. They can be askew, disordered, disoriented. Yeah. They go in ways that are problematic and more than

[01:20:13] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:20:13] Andrew: merely creative. Yeah, I guess, we’re gonna get into…

Why can I think of Seth? And I can’t, I can’t think of… Cain and Abel! Like what in the world? Like that’s the reverse of Sunday school answer here. Yeah. No, but you’ve already made the point that there’s no place where only violence is born. There’s always,

[01:20:36] January: Yeah.

[01:20:37] Andrew: there’s things that can glob on and it can lead to disorientation like you’re saying.

[01:20:42] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:20:42] Andrew: But there’s always a creative aspect there.

[01:20:45] January: Yeah.

[01:20:46] Andrew: That’s who God is. God is eternally begetting the eternal begotten Son. And in so much as we are in the image, in the reflection of such a being, then yes, we’ll always be creating.

Now, there are three of them, right? Father, Son, Holy Spirit. They’re co-equal. So why not just say three gods? And the history of why didn’t the Church just say, okay, we got three gods. And the short answer, I think, is ‘cause the first Christians were far too Jewish. They’re just way too Jewish to let that happen. Like there’s no way. No way. I mean that’s probably an accurate answer.

So, okay. Not three gods. Then three... what? Exactly what are we talking about here? And so, some of these Church members, they spoke Greek, they came up with the word hypostasis.

[01:21:44] January: Bless you.

[01:21:45] Andrew: And they said there are three hypostases,

[01:21:49] January: I’m sorry, say that again?

[01:21:50] Andrew: Three hypo— think of hypo like hypodermic, h – y – p – o, and stasis as in being. Okay. The under-being, the under-state. Or…

[01:22:01] January: Okay.

[01:22:01] Andrew: That’s fly by the seat of my pants etymology. I don’t know if that’s actually true or not, but hypostasis is, it’s basically the most abstract, empty word you could come up with in Greek, I think, pretty much, that means an individual being.

Like, a cat is a hypostasis. A table is a hypostasis. A human being is a hypostasis. My hand? Mm-mm. No, that’s not a hypostasis, because it’s not what it is by itself.

[01:22:34] January: Okay. Okay.

[01:22:36] Andrew: Now the Latin speaking church folks said Person. Three Persons.

[01:22:43] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:22:44] Andrew: And as best as I can tell, a person is basically a hypostasis with a mind. And here we’re getting to, I’m saying more than I know already, so I, yeah. I gave a disclaimer at the beginning of this, and I hope January hasn’t edited it out.

You folks are not here to learn theology from Andrew. That’s not why you’re here. You’re here to get exc— hopefully this is excit— .

[01:23:08] January: Yeah, you’re not to learn theology from either of us.

[01:23:12] Andrew: Okay. Yeah. That’s not why you’re here. So hopefully this is intriguing. You’re like, well wait a second. Maybe somebody could talk about this stuff and make sense, and now I’m gonna go find that person. And more power to you if you want to hopefully hit pause and not delete on this podcast.

But yeah, if you need to do that, it’s perfectly understandable. We encourage you, in fact. We encourage you to find

[01:23:32] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:23:32] Andrew: um, actual certified theologians to explain the Trinity to you, but it is crucial to say that hypostases, persons, are not parts. Okay?

Augustine didn’t say the Father is a part of God, because the Father is a complete individual being.

I’m using part because of IFS, if I was just

[01:23:59] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:24:00] Andrew: speaking

[01:24:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:24:00] Andrew: in a Christian context, I would be saying person, hypostasis, I would not be using the word part ‘cause it could just lead to confusion. But what I’m saying is if you take the IFS understanding of part, you’re not gonna have this confusion, right? And this is what we’re actually after.

And I think we are perhaps qualified to teach just a little bit of the concept of what the word part means in IFS. And I’m trying to do it, not because I’ve ever met a part in my life. I haven’t. I’ve been trying, but I haven’t. But I, I trust that January’s here and that she can correct me if I go wrong.

So if we’re made in the image of God and there are multiple persons, multiple hypostases, multiple parts in God’s, it makes sense that we would too. But unlike God, our parts can come into conflict with one another.

[01:24:43] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:24:44] Andrew: I’m blanking on which figure from church history made a big deal about this.

Unlike God, our parts can come into conflict with one another. And It’s how we respond to that conflict, that’s what causes problems for us.

Now, I’m gonna do a little thought example here. Okay. Let’s imagine. We’re driving a car. I don’t know why it’s so easy to always talk about driving. This is probably a… I’m sure there’s parts of the world in America even where, like New York, Chicago, you guys, you guys own cars? Like, you drive places? What’s your, what’s your deal? Yeah, I’m one of those Americans who owns a car and drives it everywhere.

So I’m driving my car, right? And the roads are there in front of me. They’re for me, right? — Well, I, I not really, but that’s how I feel — when somebody gets in front of me. Cuts me off.

Right. Just flies past. I’ve had it happen. like we’re on the on-ramp, right? I’m already there.

[01:25:39] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:25:39] Andrew: They’re well behind me I’m looking in the rearview— and they’re passing me on the shoulder.

[01:25:42] January: Yep.

[01:25:42] Andrew: ‘Cause there’s too many people in the fast lane. And I’m like, that’s dangerous! Like people could— right?

There’s a part of me that’s just ready to like, I’m gonna tailgate this person. I’m gonna be right behind them the whole time, and they’re gonna see me and I’m gonna do this thing where I’m in their mirror and then I’m in their other mirror. I’m gonna do everything so that they know that I saw what they did and that it was dangerous.

It doesn’t matter that what I’m doing is dangerous. Whether you do that and execute that terrible plan of vengeance, there’s a part of me that like that makes good sense. Now,

[01:26:15] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:26:16] Andrew: what would be a good name for that part, let’s say? we’re in the hypothetical world here, right? So a hypothetical driver. What do you think? What could we name that part?

[01:26:26] January: Your inner Road Rager?

[01:26:28] Andrew: Okay. Inner Road Rager. Yeah. I came up with Righteous Avenger because I was imagining

[01:26:32] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:26:32] Andrew: this, this part could do more than just stuff on the thoroughfares, uh, like that.

[01:26:36] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:26:37] Andrew: But yeah, that Inner Rager. I think that’s enough. The Inner Rager, it doesn’t have to be road.

So this person driving down the road, they’re not alone in the car, right? They get cut off, they get swerved, they get passed on the shoulder, right? In very dangerous fashion, but they’re not alone in the car. There’s, uh, let’s say there’s an 8-year-old in the backseat; somebody that’s old enough to understand what’s going on, not old enough to drive, but old enough to understand like, oh, yeah, so-and-so’s angry. They’re upset, right?

[01:27:07] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:27:08] Andrew: And if I got an Inner Rager going, I’ve also got somebody that says, okay, wait a second. I can’t let somebody else see what I’m actually feeling right now. I have these feelings; I have this rage. It’s real. It’s me, but I can’t let people see that. Not this person!

Maybe it’s not a child. Maybe it’s somebody you’re trying to impress, right? And they’re sitting shotgun. I don’t know, right?

[01:27:32] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:27:33] Andrew: But there’s somebody that’s definitely pumping the brakes here. Metaphorically, not literally, even though we’re on the road. Somebody that’s like, okay, this is too much, like, chill out. Right? What would be a name for that kind of part?

[01:27:48] January: The Cool Your Jets part.

[01:27:50] Andrew: Cool Your Jets! All right, Cool Your Jets. I came up with the Super-Duper Ego 100. As in

[01:27:58] January: Fantastic.

[01:28:00] Andrew: 100 for 100. Just try me. I’m spotless. I never make a mistake. That was the one that I came up — but Cool Your Jets is good. Okay.

So the Rager gets triggered. Cool Your Jets is right there behind it. And then, somebody steps in, right? And it’s like, you know, how beautiful is the world… that it begins with nonsense and this tom foolery on the roadway, but I’m brought into alignment because of the presence of someone else. Somebody’s in the back seat of the car. I’m blessed. Somebody’s riding shotgun that I care about. I’m blessed. And it makes me safer than I would’ve been without them.

[01:28:47] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:28:48] Andrew: Right. This, this ain’t a Rager and this ain’t a, this ain’t a Cool Your Jets part. What would you call this part, January?

[01:28:56] January: Hmm.

[01:28:59] Andrew: I just went with Mystic.

[01:29:01] January: Oh, yeah. That works. Yeah. The word that was popping into my mind was Gratitude. The Gratitude part.

[01:29:07] Andrew: Gratitude. Gratitude. Okay. Okay. Now, I am gonna say a sentence and I want you to count ‘em off for me. Okay?

[01:29:18] January: Uh-oh. Okay.

[01:29:20] Andrew: The Rager is human.

[01:29:24] January: One.

[01:29:26] Andrew: The Cool Your Jets is human.

[01:29:30] January: Two.

[01:29:32] Andrew: Gratitude is human.

[01:29:35] January: Three.

[01:29:36] Andrew: The Rager ain’t the Cool Your Jets.

[01:29:40] January: Four.

[01:29:42] Andrew: Cool Your Jets ain’t Gratitude.

[01:29:45] January: Five.

[01:29:46] Andrew: Gratitude ain’t the Rager.

[01:29:49] January: Six.

[01:29:51] Andrew: There is one human driving the car.

[01:29:56] January: Mm seven.

[01:29:58] Andrew: All right. I think you see where I’m going. Now, there are people listening to this podcast who know theology way better than I do, and I guarantee you there’s somebody right now that’s like, “Ah-HA! MODALISM!”

Okay, so not that I understand it completely, but I think the idea of Modalism is that there’s different modes of God’s being. And basically what it does is it takes the three-ness and it turns it into a subjective thing for humans.

[01:30:28] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:30:29] Andrew: Like we experience God in one way in the Old Testament—it’s Father. We experience God in another way when he’s walking around—and it’s Jesus. And then we experience God in a third way. But really it’s just one, it’s one God. But our experience is it turns the three-ness into a subjective thing of the observer. And there’s different modes for the one God.

And that is not the Christian doctrine.

[01:30:50] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:30:50] Andrew: And some people just heard my story and they thought, oh, okay. So at one point you were raging, and then at one point you cooled your jets, and then you got to a place that was gratitude. That’s an awesome progression. That’s a great thing that you did.

And what I’m saying is, no. If you affirm IFS — now, you can’t do this with every experience, but the underlying point of IFS is that the Rager is always there.

[01:31:14] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:31:14] Andrew: The Rager is a part of you.

[01:31:16] January: Always.

[01:31:16] Andrew: The Cool Your Jets is always there, is always a part of you. Gratitude is always there, so don’t be an IFS modalist, right? Don’t fall to that heresy of— that the whole point of IFS is that we, we aren’t just jumping— and again, I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know how to use the words schizophrenic other than in a colloquial sense.

There may be, I’m sure, an IFS way to address these actual psychological issues, but what I’m saying is the folk understanding of schizophrenia, that’s like first you’re one, then you’re another, you’re all these different— that’s not what IFS is about.

[01:31:52] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:31:52] Andrew: It’s, it’s not this jumping. There’s an ongoing, consistent inner relationship between your parts.

[01:31:59] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:32:00] Andrew: And there is, I believe, a connection to be made to the Christian understanding of God this sense.

Um. And again, I’m doing all of this not to give anybody a clear view of the Trinity, but hopefully to shed light on what we’re talking about when we’re talking about parts in IFS.

[01:32:18] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:32:20] Andrew: What do you think, how did it come across to you, January?

[01:32:24] January: No, I love that. I think that’s brilliant and beautiful. Thank you for all of that.

I like the idea that there could be a state the human system, both inside us and between us interpersonally, that really does fully imitate God’s system, where there are three distinct Persons who are also one, and there’s no conflict. There’s no lack of integrity. Everything is perfectly fully integrated.

I mean, that, to me, is a description of an optimally healthy system.

[01:32:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:32:58] January: Where everything is fully integrated. Everything is fully working together to be the full expression of what that system is meant to be. And at the same time, there’s these unique individual pieces that are participating in this system.

[01:33:12] Andrew: Yeah. And these pieces aren’t things in the mind of the therapist to understand the human psychology. There’s an actual

[01:33:18] January: Yeah.

[01:33:18] Andrew: there there. It’s a reality that’s unpacked. It’s not like they simply arise when you stop and take the time to look and analyze your thoughts. Oh, let me, let me analyze myself when I was on the road and that car cut me off. I can divide it up into these three things. No, it’s not a way to do— I mean, again, yeah, psychoanalysis means more than I want it to here, but like…

[01:33:38] January: Yeah. It’s not a projection of an analysis onto an experience.

[01:33:42] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:33:43] January: Yeah.

[01:33:44] Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

[01:33:45] January: Yeah. we’re not retroactively making meaning and applying it to the experience. We are encountering something inside ourselves and asking what was the experience?

[01:33:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:33:58] January: Tell me all about it.

[01:33:59] Andrew: When I got to the part about, Western Church, talking about three Persons and the need to talk about mind, the argument is that God of necessity is of one mind and one will.

[01:34:09] January: Mm. Mm-hmm. Yes.

[01:34:11] Andrew: Uh, whereas humans can be, but aren’t necessarily so. But of God, it’s necessary. because that’s who God is.

[01:34:18] January: Yes.

[01:34:18] Andrew: And so there’s never that disorientation. All of God’s creation’s good, is the simple way to say that. Yeah.

[01:34:26] January: Yeah. And I don’t want to give the wrong impression. When I’m talking about us existing as a healthy system that’s optimally integrated, that doesn’t mean that I think that God is necessarily a healthy system in the way that we think about it.

What I mean is that when God’s nature is manifest in and through us in the material world, that’s what it looks like for us.

[01:34:48] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:34:48] January: Not that we can look at ourselves and take that picture and apply it to God, but that we can take what we understand about God and apply it to us

[01:34:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:34:57] January: to understand ourselves better.

[01:35:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:35:00] January: What’s the most important thing you want people to take away from what you just said?

[01:35:05] Andrew: If we’re made in the image of God, then could it also be possible that our oneness is just as complex and mysterious as God’s oneness?

[01:35:17] January: Hmm. Yeah. That feels very true to me.

[01:35:23] Andrew: There might be philosophical problems all through everything I just said, but for some reason, for me, feels better to sum this up with a comment on the complexity of oneness rather than multiplicity.

[01:35:33] January: Hmm.

[01:35:34] Andrew: Maybe it’s just ‘cause my ancestors in my faith were just, as I said before, far too Jewish to put up with any sort of multiple deities. And maybe that’s all that’s coming out here.

[01:35:46] January: Thank you. That was delightful.

[01:35:51] Andrew: Cool.

[01:35:52] January: And yeah, do agree that it’s really important to be clear, I don’t wanna risk presenting us as teachers of any of this. We are very enthusiastic lay people, but we are not experts.

[01:36:03] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:36:04] January: And we want to communicate and give people our enthusiasm for this stuff, but we want you to go do your own research, go do your own reading. Go listen to actual experts. Please don’t take our word for any of this.

[01:36:16] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. And I, I can’t remember if I said this already, so yeah, but, um, no, I, I really appreciate James Allison’s treatment of, of the Trinity. There’s a Trinity Sunday and so he delivers a homily, he does not do what I did.

If anybody’s interested in hearing a 15 minute exposition on the Trinity that does not bother to go through all the heresies and say, oh, we gotta say this ‘cause we can’t say that.

[01:36:46] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:36:46] Andrew: Right? We can’t say that the Logos, the Word, was made, so it’s not made, so it was begotten. This doctrine that is always a response to something that must be wrong.

[01:36:59] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:37:01] Andrew: He doesn’t do any of that. He just outlines, in one positive statement after the next, a way to understand the Trinity. It’s a beautiful thing. So yeah, I think we should put a link to that in show notes.

[01:37:13] January: Well, that was absolutely delightful. Thank you so much for sharing that. That was awesome. I’m gonna be thinking about that for a while.

This feels like a good place to start wrapping up this episode, and so let’s talk really quick about this episode’s practice.

[01:37:27] Andrew: Oh yeah!

So Letters from Love, what is this? What is this about? Where does it come from and how do you do it?

[01:37:34] January: This is a practice that I picked up from Elizabeth Gilbert who most people know from her book, Eat Pray Love. She also wrote Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, which is my personal favorite of her books so far. And then her latest book just came out, her memoir All the Way to the River, which is a really, really fascinating but very emotional piece of work. I highly recommend it, but definitely practice self-care if you have to put it down for, points in between.

So this is a practice that she’s been doing for years and years. And it’s a very simple idea where you just sit down with a blank piece of paper or a journal or whatever, and you write at the top of the page, Dear Love, what would you have me know today? Or something similar. If that question doesn’t land for you, adjust it. What would you have me do today? What would you have me hear today? Whatever the language is that really speaks to you. And then just free write whatever comes into your head and write to yourself from the perspective of Unconditional Love.

What is the most loving, most compassionate, most honest voice that you can imagine? And just write to yourself from that person. And she makes a point of being clear that like, don’t imagine a specific person that you’re writing to yourself from. Don’t imagine, you know, God or Jesus or a specific religious figure.

Because a lot of the time those can come with very limiting beliefs, right? Like we have real structured ideas about who those people are. And it’s gonna be hard to imagine Love saying something that that person wouldn’t say, in your opinion. And so if you just make it, I’m writing to myself from Unconditional Love, there’s many fewer of those preconceived notions to kinda get in the way of what it’s gonna say to you, and it can surprise you a lot more, which is part of the point of this.

But I wanted to attach it to the Shame as Internal Violence episode because for me, this is one of the most significant and meaningful ways that we can start to heal some of that shame wound. I think that if the serpent mediates a false self-perception to Eve and Jesus offers the true one, how do we practice re-mediating ourselves through God instead of through the distorted lenses that we inherited? And this is really one of the best and simplest ways that I know to do it.

It is super accessible to anybody. You don’t really need any tools to do it except for something to write with. And quite frankly, once you’ve got this as a practice for a while, you don’t even necessarily need to write it. You will find yourself talking to yourself from the voice of love.

[01:40:06] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:40:06] January: Over time.

[01:40:07] Andrew: Okay.

[01:40:08] January: As, this gets into you. It really is a form of mediation that will become part of you.

I love it because there are too many of us in the world who didn’t have unconditional love from a person or from a community that we should have had. And so it can be really difficult if we’re trying to find that in the world outside of us, sometimes it just doesn’t exist out there. That can lead to a lot of hopelessness and despair. And it turns out that the answer is much simpler and much more accessible. That it is right here, and we can just talk to ourselves that way and it can still have the same healing effect over time.

[01:40:44] Andrew: I did do some letters It took me a couple days. I was like, oh, yes, I’m gonna do this. And then I was like, I didn’t do it today. I didn’t do it today.

I’ve got three bulls in with eight other cows that need to be split off, and the neighbor’s expecting to bring his animals over at the beginning of November. And I just It’s not working.

So, I mean, cut to the end of the story. It didn’t happen. I haven’t been able to do it. I knew yesterday was kind of a do or die, do or die—nobody’s dying here! Anyway, I talked to my neighbor on the phone this morning. He’s not worried about it. He’s not in a pinch. But it’s an issue. Like they need grass to eat.

So anyway, it does need to happen. And so I guess I knew there was a part of me that felt very anxious about what I was gonna try and do.

It’s a little scary too, ‘cause they’re big animals and I’m by myself.

[01:41:36] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:41:36] Andrew: Farming’s about the most unsafe job in America, I think. I think it ranks number one for accidents. So I didn’t have a part to talk to. I just knew I felt anxious.

[01:41:48] January: Hmm.

[01:41:49] Andrew: Love said,

“It’s okay to feel awful. Your anxiety is real, but you aren’t, of course, anxiety itself. You’re not. If you’re the only one, it’s not actually about you. It’s about everyone who’s left you to fend for yourself.

I’m here now, for now anyway, but now is still now. And I feel it too.

You can tell me all about it if you want, but before you do, know I already feel everything you’re about to tell me about. And that’s something we can focus on too, if you want. We can focus on the us-feeling and let the you-telling come later if you want.

And I felt like I heard a response that said, “Today’s gonna be a chore. Don’t make me pretend it’ll be fun.”

[01:42:49] January: Mmmm.

[01:42:50] Andrew: I said, okay.

[01:42:52] January: Hmm. Thank you for sharing it.

[01:42:55] Andrew: What else do you wanna share about it?

It’s an openness and a strength to be able to say encouraging words to yourself. That doesn’t have to be a sign of insecurity issues. I mean, there can be insecurity issues, but that’s, not the only thing that that points to. It points to a compassionate Self that’s aware of parts that are hurting. That’s also what it points to.

So I don’t know who I was talking to and I’m not sure who was talking at that point. So there’s a bit of a, there’s a bit of a part mess going on in there perhaps,

[01:43:28] January: or

[01:43:29] Andrew: maybe, I don’t know if that,

[01:43:31] January: How dare you be human, Andrew!

[01:43:37] Andrew: is that the definition of humanity:? Part mess?

[01:43:40] January: Pretty sure it’s one of ‘em.

[01:43:42] Andrew: Okay. Yeah.

[01:43:49] January: So how was it for you doing this exercise?

[01:43:52] Andrew: I do feel a bit vulnerable. I don’t know if it’s the exercise or it’s that I’m talking so frankly about it

[01:43:58] January: Yeah.

[01:43:59] Andrew: with you.

It’s nice to know that I can write things like that. Feels like maybe there’s, there’s some growth, there’s some self awareness that’s beyond cognitive awareness. I think maybe I’m recognizing feelings, emotions. So it is interesting how a written exercise can make headway something that’s not exactly cerebral

[01:44:19] January: Yeah.

[01:44:20] Andrew: at all. That’s not something I would’ve thought to do, or try to do.

[01:44:26] January: What was particularly difficult about it?

[01:44:28] Andrew: I was like, oh, what do you say to anxiety?

And I’m like, well, that’s not the point of this exercise. I’m not trying to say something to anxiety. I just kind of landed on the fact that, well, whatever is being felt I can feel too.

[01:44:39] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:44:41] Andrew: That must be true. Right? It’s me. So let’s make sure every part knows that.

[01:44:46] January: Hmm. Well, do you wanna hear one of mine?

[01:44:49] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:44:51] January: It’s really uncomfortable letting other people hear how I talk to myself. I’m so afraid of being judged for that.

Dear Love, what would you have me do today?

Little Bean, I’m so glad you phrased this question differently today. Your sweet little brain gets involved when the question is about knowing. We are not here so I can drop cosmic wisdom on you. Any cosmic wisdom is incidental. We are here so I can love on you. That’s not a brain game, although your beautiful thinker is certainly invited to the party. I love her too.

You asked what I would have you do today, and at the same time, I also see the part of you that’s so afraid of getting an answer to that question because it is so afraid of one more way to fall short.

Oh my love. This is a vulnerable one. Go get your cozy blanket. Stay there for a minute. Get warm.

Good morning to the part of you that’s already wondering how this letter will sound to other people, whether they’ll hear what they need to hear from this. My love, you are welcome to share this with whomever you like, but remember that you are not responsible for their relationship with Me. Every single person out there has this same tool available to them.

You have a tendency to pass love on to others as soon as you receive it, keeping none for yourself. I know you know this, I love that you’ve set a boundary where you don’t share every conversation we have, because you know you need that container of privacy for true intimacy to develop. That’s wonderful. You wouldn’t publicly post every conversation you had with a spouse. You don’t have to publicly post every conversation you have with me. You don’t have to post any conversation you have with me, including this one.

You are not depriving anybody of me if you choose to keep our correspondence private. They all have the same access you do. The only way to lose access is to buy the lie that you have no access. The temple curtain tore, remember? Everybody’s welcome in the Holy Presence. So you can’t let anybody down by holding the boundary you need to hold. You are serving others by keeping that container as sacred as you need to keep it.

Now about this notion of failure, my love. This is coming from an expectation that I will ask of you things you are unable to do. Where is that belief coming from? Beloved, you are the only one who expects things of you before you’re ready. Well, yes, other people have their expectations too, but those expectations are about them, love. They’re not about you in the slightest.

You are accountable ultimately only to yourself and to Me and to your beloved Christ. And I tell you that neither Jesus nor I will ever ask you to do anything that you cannot do unless we are going to show up and do it with you. That’s how this works, my love.

Participation, not perfection.

So there’s no way to fail at any of this, my love. Do you see? Even a refusal to participate is ultimately a participation. Some things shouldn’t be participated in. You have every right to test that, to experiment, to play. Failure is a lie that culture invents to keep you in line. It is not real. Know why?

Because there is no failure, no mistake, no missed step that cannot be learned from while you still draw breath. That’s your key, my love.

So yes, by all means, be careful with your actions because yes, those actions have consequences for others besides yourself. Yes, allow yourself to sit with and be expanded by the pain and grief of realizing you wish you’d done a thing differently. But feeling that pain and grief instead of numbing it is the thing that forms the neural pathways in your brain to help you choose something different next time.

That is how you grow, my love. That is how you participate.

So what would I have you do today? I’d have you drink enough water. I’d have you feed yourself nourishing things. I’d have you leave your cell phone in the other room so you can attend to one thing at a time.

That’s it. No, really, that’s it today. All those other things you’re thinking of, posting to Substack, tidying the house, being present during Lectio Divina, those are your expectations, lovey, not Mine. Your capacity is much lower than your culture tells you it should be. I would have you accept that as a gift instead of resenting it as an imposition.

You have permission to tend to yourself, my darling. I love you forever and always.

[01:49:21] Andrew: Yeah. That seems so in line with the big theme of our podcast here, right? Like you, what would you have me do?

Yeah. It’s not, it turns out if someone loves you, they’re not concerned about what you’re gonna achieve. Like they want you to nourish yourself. Yes.

[01:49:40] January: Yeah.

[01:49:40] Andrew: They want your life to be tended to, yeah. There’s thriving and flourishing with regards to life that’s what Love desires, not some sort of achievement. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:49:52] January: Yeah. Yeah, Love is not worried about whether you’re living up to your potential.

Love is your potential.

[01:50:02] Andrew: Exactly. Exactly. Oh yeah. Nicely put. Yeah.

How did you feel while reading it?

[01:50:10] January: So uncomfortable.

[01:50:12] Andrew: So uncomfortable. Yeah. Okay. And compared to like when you wrote it?

[01:50:16] January: Oh no. While I’m writing them, it’s always fine.

[01:50:18] Andrew: Yeah, yeah,

[01:50:19] January: Yeah. I’ve noticed that my different parts have different handwritings. And I can always tell when I’m not quite in Love. Like when it’s a part trying to take over and write the letter because my— I, I start making spelling mistakes. I don’t ever make spelling mistakes, Andrew. Ever.

[01:50:38] Andrew: Oh, okay.

[01:50:39] January: Not even when I’m handwriting shit. Like it’s, it’s so vanishingly rare.

[01:50:45] Andrew: Wow.

[01:50:45] January: But it’ll happen four or five to a page when I know I’m actually in that flow state.

[01:50:50] Andrew: Yeah. Oh, wow.

[01:50:52] January: So, yeah, it’s an ongoing practice to try to not go back and edit though.

[01:50:59] Andrew: Oh, I see what you’re saying. So you’re escaping the editor that by actually going back to edit, you might be diluting some of what was getting out or I, or am I still thinking of it—

I know you’re not saying that it would be a wrong thing to, to go back and edit, but I guess even as I’m asking the question, I’m starting to think that maybe I’m still got a content focus on what’s the thing that said, and, and refining how it’s said, when maybe that’s not actually the point of

[01:51:22] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:51:23] Andrew: the exercise is not a clear thought, but a clear acknowledgement?

[01:51:28] January: Yeah. It’s just that moment by moment attention.

[01:51:31] Andrew: Mmm. When you describe that, after you’ve done it for a while, the writing might be a bit superfluous or

[01:51:37] January: mm-hmm.

[01:51:37] Andrew: that it’s not necessary. That you find it’s become a gaze that you’re familiar with

[01:51:41] January: Yeah.

[01:51:42] Andrew: enough that it can come and see you and speak in any moment. I guess I’m curious, when you sit down to write, we have a prompt, right?

[01:51:50] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:51:51] Andrew: Dear Love, what would you have me hear today? …know, change, do today? When it’s happening outside of the framework of a practice with a writing prompt, out there in the wild, not because you’re sitting down to do a practice, but it, it, it just happens and the voice comes.

Do you find that it’s, is there a consistent prompt for it that happens to you? Or are you turning toward? Do you find yourself like, okay, I need to find where’s love right now? What’s, what’s love gonna say? You know what I mean? Yeah.

Is it something happening to you, or are you turning toward it? Or is that question even relevant?

[01:52:24] January: It’s a totally relevant question and the answer is both. A lot of the time there can be things in the outside world that happen that like Love will just be right there going, oh honey, I know this is about to be real hard for you. We’re just remember that I’m here. You’re not alone in this. We’re, we’re gonna have a minute here.

[01:52:42] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:52:43] January: And then other times, yeah. It is something that I deliberately turn toward because I can feel myself getting ramped up and hyper anxious and maybe I’m too blended with a part and I don’t have access to my Self-self in that moment, well, there’s somebody else’s Self who’s available.

Even if there’s not somebody else in the room, like a therapist or a friend or somebody else who can physically bring the Self energy, the Self energy is there anyway, and it’s pretty awesome. So I just find this to be the most wonderful and accessible tool to begin to heal that shame wound.

[01:53:16] Andrew: Yeah.

So the prompts that I’ve heard so far that I remember from Elizabeth Gilbert: Dear Love, what would you have me hear today? What would you have me change today? What would you have you do today? The consistent point there though of all the examples so far is the today, right? This is a here and now

[01:53:33] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sort of exercise. Would you, I mean, I know you’re not gonna say don’t do it. You’re like, yeah, do it, whatever, you know, just try it. Find out. But if you were to start asking questions like, Dear Love, how do I make sense of what happened two weeks ago with this terrible thing? Or what do you think about this decision I’m gonna have to make before this next thing?

If you are pushing yourself outside of the here and now, would you expect, I mean, I don’t know, maybe I just need to ask Love and find out what, like it said. But for people that are listening and haven’t tried this before, would you recommend them to stick to the here and now with their prompts at first?

I guess I’m trying to get at what’s the essential component to this prompt, if there is one. Maybe it’s just turning to Love?

Yeah, the turning to Love and the attentive presence to whatever comes up, those are the really essential pieces. So ask away, whatever questions you have. Is there any question that you wouldn’t bring to God? No.

[01:54:27] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:54:28] January: There’s no question that you can’t bring to Love either for the same reasons. And at the same time, my experience from doing this and somebody else’s might completely vary, but for me it is very much a manna in the desert kind of practice, where you’re gonna get just what you need for today.

[01:54:45] Andrew: Mmm.

[01:54:45] January: Love is not going to tell you what your life is gonna look like in a year or five years or 10 years. Love is not gonna tell you all the things that you have to do. That for me is always a sign that I’m in part. When there’s an agenda in the room, it ain’t Love.

It’s always trying to bring me back to the present moment and always trying to bring me back to far fewer things are essential than you think. But yeah, asking Love for a bigger perspective on something that happened that I’m stressed out about, that happens all the time.

Asking Love for presence to be with me when I’m dealing with some highly activated parts, that happens a lot where it’s just like, yep, sit here and breathe with me. We’re just gonna sit here and do this and I’m just gonna keep writing this over and over again. And it doesn’t matter that I’m repeating myself. We’re just gonna keep doing this until your nervous system is regulated.

Does that answer your question?

[01:55:41] Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Definitely.

[01:55:43] January: What was your favorite part of doing it?

[01:55:45] Andrew: Well, I felt like I might’ve made some headway with parts work, which is, I’d say I’ve been banging my head against the wall, except that would imply that I’ve been trying consistently, which I’m not sure I have.

That I had a, an encounter with a distinguishable part. Yeah. I’m not sure I’d had that happen yet. So that was, that was nice. Yeah.

[01:56:06] January: And you, I mean, you could hear in my letter I’m just constantly switching parts ‘cause parts are coming up and leaving and coming up and I’m just like, hello to you.

Hello to you. Hello to you. I just keep noticing, keep saying hello.

[01:56:18] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:56:19] January: Keep being hospitable. Yeah.

[01:56:22] Andrew: So, yeah. Letters of Love is a practice that. It’s always available. It’s always there. And it will destabilize the shame game that gets played in your head. It’s good at that. And so, yeah, we invite you guys to practice that if you have time.

And that’s probably it for today. Our next episode, we are still talking about violence, but as we all know. Yeah. It’s not just internal, it can be external as well. And when it happens, it looks a lot like blame.

[01:56:56] January: Yep.

[01:56:57] Andrew: Yeah, when you’re looking for something to blame, it’s easy if you can find something disgusting, right? If you’re on the lookout for something to blame.

[01:57:04] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:57:05] Andrew: We’ll be talking a lot about that too, I think. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time.

[01:57:15] January: You’ve been listening to Theology Kills a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive. Your hosts are January Jackson and Andrew McRae, and Season one was written and produced by January Jackson.

[01:57:30] Andrew: Our theme music is things to do In a Day by Simon Lapine.

[01:57:35] January: Theology Kills is exclusively listener funded.

If you’d like to support our work or go deeper with practices, bonus content, and community conversations, join our Patreon at patreon.com/theologykills. You can find everything we’re making@www.theologykills.com.

[01:57:55] Andrew: That’s everything we have for you today. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourselves and each other

[01:58:00] January: and we’ll see you next time.