Episode 7 — Creativity and Integrity: Martha, Peter, and a Path to Nonviolent Conflict

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[00:00:00] January: It’s hard to trust that just changing my own behavior — like, I’m one tiny human in this giant system. What influence do I think I have?

[00:00:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:00:00] January: And yet, what Girard tells us about the power of mediation is that the way that I show up in the world is gonna be contagious to others.

[00:00:03] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:00:03] January: And if I am showing up with greater care, with less conflict, with more courage, with more compassion, more attention, more presence... that’s gonna be contagious to other people, and it’s gonna escalate through the world.

If you’ve ever wondered why 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,

[00:00:53] Andrew: and I’m Andrew McRae,

[00:00:55] January: and this is Theology Kills, a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive.

There’s a passage in the Gospel of Luke that stops me in my tracks every time. Jesus says, Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. He goes on to describe a world where families are torn apart, where people are set against one another at every level. It’s enough to leave a person going, “Tell me again why we call this guy The Prince of Peace...?”

How can the one who brings peace also be the one who says he brings division?

This season on Theology Kills, we’ve been exploring the idea of creativity as a spiritual practice. Not just painting or writing or composing music, but the deep and faithful work of using our inherently creative nature to bring a new way of being into the world. And one of the most important things we’re called to create as disciples of Christ is peace.

But the peace Jesus calls us to is not the peace of politeness, or silence, or pretending everything is fine. It’s not a peace that avoids conflict just to keep appearances calm. Bad theology tells us to keep the peace by hiding, blaming, numbing, or controlling. It tells us that unity means uniformity. That someone or some part of ourselves will have to disappear to make everyone else comfortable.

But good theology? Good theology kills false peace. It calls us to die to our coping strategies of shame and blame, the ones that exile parts of ourselves and others. It invites us to the sacred work of creating peace through truth, kindness, and presence.

Not peace instead of conflict, but peace within conflict.

When Jesus says he comes not to bring peace, but division, I don’t hear a threat. I hear grief. I hear the voice of someone who longs for the fire of divine love to burn away everything false and violent in us and is heartbroken that we’re not yet ready for it. How I wish it were already kindled, he says. That’s not the voice of a vengeful god preparing to split families apart. It’s the voice of the incarnate Christ, fully human and fully divine, who sees how deeply we resist the healing that would set us free. Jesus isn’t creating division in otherwise peaceful humans. His presence beside us reveals the divisions that are already in us because he’s so radically nonviolent.

He’s refusing to let us avoid or hide the fracture lines that run through our hearts, cracks we’ve learned to paper over with politeness, with avoidance, or with exile. In the language of René Girard, Jesus exposes the scapegoat mechanism, the ancient collective habit of maintaining peace by projecting our anxiety and aggression onto someone else kicking them out.

We feel unified not because we’ve fully faced the truth, but simply because we’ve found a common enemy. It’s a shortcut to stability.

And it works — temporarily. But soon enough we’ll be at each other’s throats again, and we’ll have to find someone else to gang up against.

Jesus isn’t playing that painfully human game. He refuses to scapegoat even when the Pharisees try to force him to it. He refuses to retaliate even when violence is done to him. And in doing so, Jesus undoes the one thing we’ve relied on for safety ever since Eve kicked her vulnerability to the curb: our ability to create false peace through exclusion.

We are seeing the consequences of this playing out in our world right now in real time. The reason our political system is increasingly polarized is because creating scapegoats doesn’t work anymore. Not that both sides haven’t tried.

But it’s not creating unity, is it?

Precisely because Jesus’ self-sacrifice revealed once and for all the innocence of our victims. The radical divine reality that nobody deserves violence. Nobody.

What’s left to us when that illusion falls apart? If we can’t rely on shame, blame, or exile to maintain peace, what are we supposed to do instead? How do we come back into relationship when conflict convinces us we’re out of it?

Psychoanalyst Karen Horney observed that humans use three types of instinctive strategies for handling conflict. She called them, first, moving toward, where we collapse ourselves into the other person’s expectations. This is the posture of compliance or what we might recognize as people pleasing. We try to eliminate ourselves to create uniformity in the relationship so that the conflict will go away.

Second, moving against, where we try to dominate or overpower the other person into conforming with our expectations. This is antagonism. We seek to eliminate the other person in order to create uniformity in the relationship.

Or third, moving away, where we retreat, numb out or dissociate altogether. We eliminate the relationship itself in order to eliminate the conflict. These are protective strategies and they do protect us, especially if we’ve learned that conflict leads to harm or we inherited a culture that didn’t do conflict.

But just like the scapegoat mechanism, these are shortcuts. They work, but only kind of. Only temporarily. The relationships we create with these strategies are not sustainable because what they don’t do is heal us.

Unity is not uniformity. We are meant to be wildly diverse parts of a unity, not uniform cookie cutter replications of a single picture. Just like we talked about in our last episode, God gave us a wild variety of parts inside us, a wild variety of humans in the Body of Christ, and variety is the engine that powers evolution. We are not meant to all be a hand or an eye or a foot. We’re not meant to all think and act alike. This means that there will inevitably be conflict.

Horney’s conflict strategies grant us temporary stability, but at the cost of authentic connection and wholeness.

Jen Johnsen is a Master Wayfinder Coach who specializes in helping smart, self-aware people get back into presence and personal integrity. She was one of my instructors in my own coach training and the minute I heard her explain her method for conflict with integrity, it felt like a puzzle piece dropping into place.

Johnsen builds on Horney’s psychological foundation with a simple but powerful framework. She maintains that integrity boils down to three essential elements. For integrity to be present, these three things have to be present. She offers three practices we can incorporate when we realize we’ve adopted one of the three conflict strategies.

In Johnsen’s framework, truth is the antidote to compliance, kindness is the antidote to antagonism, and presence is the antidote to dissociation. These three practices don’t resolve conflict. They create integrity, and here’s an important key: all three of these practices begin in the body. Truth and kindness happen within the context of presence. Without presence, there’s no me in the room to be in relationship with.

So let’s look more closely at these three practices of truth, kindness, and presence through the lens of scripture.

We meet Martha and her sister Mary in chapter 10 of Luke’s gospel. Jesus is staying with their family, leaving the sisters to host, not just this teacher, but his entire entourage of disciples and hangers on.

Martha is in the kitchen, buzzing around, trying to manage a million things at once. Mary meanwhile is in the living room just chilling with Jesus and his buddies sitting around and soaking up Jesus’ presence, just as if she was one of the guys. Scandalous!

Martha is Doing. Mary is Being.

And Martha is doing everything right. She’s serving, preparing, managing the strenuous expectations of hospitality culture. But she’s also collapsing under the weight of it, trying to keep peace by meeting everyone’s needs but her own. When she finally speaks up, it’s with a snarl of resentment. Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work?

This is the compliance instinct of Moving Toward, and Lord, do I ever empathize with Martha here. Been there, sister. Martha is operating from an either-or mindset of rivalry. She’s bought into her culture’s expectations of her. As a result, she sees an impassable obstacle in the situation. Either she can have what she wants, presumably to rest next to her sister at the feet of Jesus, or her guests can have what they want, a hot meal and a smiling hostess.

There’s no win-win in her imagination, and she’s opted to resolve the impasse by exiling herself and her own desires out of the equation. Jesus, though, is not having it. My beloved pastor Jami Fecher, said something I will remember forever, the last time he preached on this passage. He said, “The only time that grace for the undeserving doesn’t irritate us is when we are the ones receiving it.”

Martha is irritated that Jesus is allowing her sister to be this lazy layabout when there’s so much work to be done. And Jesus is just like, “Yeah, how about instead of asking her to speed up, you slow down for a bit and receive grace too. I promise the world will not end. I got that part covered.”

It’s worth noting that this isn’t a rebuke.

The New Testament has a word for rebuke. It’s epitimaō. It shows up around 30 times in the New Testament. Jesus rebukes demons, he rebukes storms. He rebukes James and John when they want to call down fire on an innocent village for not being properly reverent. He rebukes Peter when Peter tries to insist he won’t allow Jesus to be killed. Jesus does not rebuke Martha. He just invites her to slow down and receive.

But let’s be honest here, speaking up for oneself is not a conflict resolution strategy. It only resolves things if the other person is willing to hear our truth. Jesus says Martha has a right to simply be, but there’s a whole posse of hungry dudes in the next room who are probably not going to be so accommodating.

Martha’s perception of conflict with Jesus might be resolved, but there’s still a whole lot of conflict left to endure if she takes him up on his encouragement to rest, and we all know the disciples didn’t have the best track record at imitating their teacher’s kindness.

So this isn’t a way of getting out of conflict, not necessarily.

It’s a way of getting into integrity.

Integrity rescues us from the double bind of either-or. It opens our perceptions to additional options, and it makes space for us to create futures we couldn’t previously perceive. It doesn’t make conflict disappear. It restores our agency and creative freedom within it.

Martha still has to choose between serving and stillness, and there will be consequences either way. Some of them potentially unpleasant. But if she speaks for her truth rather than silencing it, then her integrity remains intact regardless of which action she ultimately chooses. Telling the truth restores us to wholeness when we’ve fallen into the trap of compliance.

Peace isn’t a lack of conflict. It’s the presence of integrity.

Later in Luke, in the Garden of Gethsemane, everything is falling apart. Judas has betrayed his friends. A crowd of soldiers has arrived to arrest Jesus. The remaining disciples are panicking, and Peter — ever impulsive — lashes out with a sword to defend Jesus, striking a servant and cutting off his ear. This is the Move Against instinct of antagonism.

When Peter feels cornered and betrayed, he tries to control the moment by overpowering it. He exerts his will. He tries to force the other party into conforming with his perspective in order to eliminate the conflict.

This crowd is poised on the precipice of complete mutual destruction. Tensions have peaked. The stakes couldn’t be higher. All it needs is a spark to erupt into a conflagration that wipes them all out, and Peter just struck a match.

But Jesus doesn’t react with force. He doesn’t use Peter’s loyalty as an excuse for violence. Instead, he says, no more of this, and touches the man’s ear to restore him.

Imagine that with me for a moment. Soldiers have come to drag you to your death and you’re healing their team. Kindness in this moment is anything but passive. It’s a patient, painful, and steadfast refusal to be run by rivalry.

Kindness breaks the cycle of retributive violence that’s about to erupt here. Kindness restores us to wholeness when we’ve fallen into the trap of antagonism.

Whatever else is about to happen — and we know how this ugly story ends! — Jesus remains true to his own nature. He acts with integrity. He’s not acting to control his adversaries or get something from them.

Nothing he does changes anyone’s mind. They still drag him off to a horrific impending death. He still gets crucified, but all the way to the cross and beyond it, he’s looking at us with the eyes of relationship and not the eyes of rivalry.

Peace isn’t the absence of conflict. It’s the presence of integrity.

The entire book of Job is an object lesson in our third conflict strategy. Job is introduced as a righteous man, blameless, faithful, deeply devoted to God.

He has a large family, great wealth, and a life that generally reflects the ancient world’s notions of divine blessing and favor. But the story shifts to a strange scene in a heavenly court. The prosecution suggests that Job is only faithful because life has gone so well for him. So God in this story permits Job to be tested by the accuser.

Not to see him fail, but to show that his love is real, not superficial. Suddenly, Job loses everything. His wealth, his children, eventually his health. Unlike the average human who’d be looking for booze or Netflix, or sex or overwork, or any other way to check out and get some distance from all this misery.

Job stays doggedly in relationship with reality. His wife thinks he’s bananas. In Job chapter two, verse nine, she says, Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die! In other words, check out, dissociate, leave reality. Move Away. His wife literally criticizes his wholeness and tells him to just give up and split.

Even if it kills him, it’d be better than this pain. Why put yourself through all this? Instead, Job stays present to his pain, to his questions, and to his God. He rants. He raves. He weeps. He demands answers. He begs for surcease, but he never stops talking to God. He speaks out loud, all the blasphemous things polite religion says he shouldn’t say. He doesn’t get the answers he wants, but he never lets go of the conversation. He never leaves the relationship. He stays relentlessly present.

His friends come to comfort him, but they end up offering theology that blames Job for his suffering, saying he must have sinned because surely God wouldn’t let a righteous man suffer. His friends, in other words, are trying to get him to use the Move Toward coping strategy, just like his wife tried to get him to Move Away. “You must have done something to piss God off,” they say. “Just own up to it and God will probably let you off the hook.”

But Job is absolutely certain of his own innocence. He’s not going to perjure himself by admitting to something he didn’t do, and he’s not gonna let his friends talk him into people pleasing or deity pleasing, just to escape the tension of the conflict. And in the end, his fidelity is honored. God says Job has spoken rightly not because his theology is correct, but because his integrity is intact.

His friends who tried to defend God instead of staying present to Job are the ones rebuked. His wife checks out of the story, and we never hear from her again. But by refusing to abandon himself or his relationship with God, Job hangs onto his wholeness. And the implication of the Book of Job is that, in the end, God uses that wholeness to bless us.

I’ve always found it interesting that, at the end of the Book of Job, his daughters are granted an equal inheritance with their brothers. For all that he’s suffered through — and make no mistake, Job has suffered, and so did the people around him — the result of staying present to reality and to himself through that suffering is that a counter-cultural justice has been born into the world.

Something’s been created. Not by Job’s achievement, but by the transformative power of staying present to what is, even when it wasn’t pleasant.

Now, if you’re feeling a little personally attacked here, take a breath.

Notice you’re okay. Please do not hear me to be saying that, if you’re being victimized by someone, you should just sit quietly and take it. That would be a form of compliance. That is the opposite of the argument I’m making here.

The statement I’m making isn’t a moral one. There are very explicitly no shoulds here. The three instincts we’ve explored: compliance, antagonism, and dissociation… they developed for a reason. They’re your body’s way of protecting you from what feels unbearable. If you’re in a situation where presence, truth, or kindness feels unsafe, please for God’s sake, trust yourself.

Because theology isn’t morality. It’s about our relationship with reality. You’re not here to find the way to do things or even a way to do things. You’re here to find your way to do things. Presence can restore your agency and creative freedom. And in that space, new creative options tend to appear, ones that don’t require you to disappear or destroy someone else to feel whole.

What I’m naming here are not rules to follow, but possibilities to notice — that peace comes from integrity. Job goes through a pretty literal hell. But like Jacob wrestling with the angel, Job hangs onto that relationship until it blesses him.

Truth, kindness, and presence are not tools for fixing other people. They’re practices that allow us to stay whole in the midst of rupture. They keep us rooted in relationship first with ourselves, then with others, and always with God. Each of them open space for something new to happen. Something beyond our usual binaries of win-lose, right-wrong, in-out.

They let us imagine peace not as the absence of tension but is the presence of love and strength within tension.

These postures don’t guarantee reconciliation. They don’t guarantee safety, but they do offer us something sacred. The chance to participate in the eternal life of Christ, a peace that refuses to exile or dominate, and instead creates a whole new way of being human.

So the point of Luke 12 isn’t that Jesus wanted to divide us. It’s that his presence in our lives exposes the places where we are already divided. And it does this for the sake of turning us toward repentance so that we can realize we’re out of integrity and come home to it.

We’re not creating peace instead of conflict. We’re creating peace within conflict. Jesus didn’t come to bring the peace of papering over our division. That’s the fastest way to make a wound fester.

He came to bring the peace of revealing our division so that those wounds can finally heal.

I’m curious — just based on some of the things that we’ve talked about for the last year, how would you define integrity in the sense that you think we’re using it?

[00:01:35] Andrew: Well, that’s sort of my first question I was gonna give you! So, uh, yeah. “I know you are, but what am I?” feels like what I’m about to do here.

I, I don’t know. So let me tell you what I’m tempted to say. Etymologically, the word integrity implies wholeness. If you think about integers in math, we call ‘em whole numbers. That is, you know, no fractions. And so a person who quote-unquote “has” integrity might be thought of as someone who isn’t fractional or segmented out in any way. And how do we square this with our IFS assumption that considers the mono-mind a myth?

And then I’m like, well, wait, maybe we don’t try and square it. Maybe we have integrity, but we never have integrity as individuals — that personal integrity is always about when, where, and how we become an integral part to the whole of creation. I’m kind of inclined in that direction. And I suspect that I jump past the, the importance of the individual, I just skip past that a lot quicker than I think you do, generally speaking.

And so I was curious with your reaction to my thoughts here, whether it would be like, wait, slow down. I wouldn’t expect you to disagree. That understanding ourselves as integral to creation, and that creation is a whole, I, I don’t expect any pushback from you there, but whether that says enough about what integrity is or not? I’m kind of inclined to say so.

Maybe I took too many math classes, but when you do calculus, you learn about infinitesimally small things, and you find the slope of a line that shoots off at a tangent from a curve, and then you learn about integrals, which is sort of the opposite. You don’t realize it’s the opposite at first, but basically you’re just adding up all these infinitesimally small shapes.

So imagine, you know, like I think MRI scans do this in a way — they just look at the body little bit by little bit by little bit. But if you just take anything and then just slice it up into a bunch of little slices, and

[00:04:02] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:02] Andrew: some complicated object, you’re like, how in the world could I ever measure the volume of that? Well, just slice it into all these little, you know, like a loaf of bread, or—

[00:04:03] January: 3D printer.

[00:04:03] Andrew: Exactly!

[00:04:03] January: Everything going down one layer at a time.

[00:04:03] Andrew: Exactly. And then you can do each layer, and then you add it all together. And that’s the integral, right?

[00:04:03] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:03] Andrew: And so I sort of started thinking of well, okay, so if you have all these individual layers, and we just number ‘em one to a million, or whatever, maybe as person being an integral part of creation I’m more than just one of the layers. Maybe I’ve got several parts, and so maybe I’m layer 105, 106, 108, 109, 112. You know what I mean?

[00:04:04] January: Uh-huh.

[00:04:04] Andrew: And my parts are integral to what’s going on. But if you look at them by themselves — the ones that are me — there isn’t exactly an integrity to find, but for the whole of creation. And maybe I don’t have to go that big. Maybe there’s a lower level, but what I’m saying is that in order me to have an integrity as an individual, maybe it requires some transcendent other that’s more than the sum of my parts.

[00:04:05] January: Hmm.

[00:04:05] Andrew: In which case, my integrity wouldn’t be the sum of my parts. I’d be integral to but not integrated in and of myself as a standalone. So I don’t know, I think that’s kind of where I lean toward understanding my integrity as a person. Personal integrity… meaning… yeah, it does bring all my parts together, but only because there’s something bigger and beyond.

I don’t know. How does that sound to you?

[00:04:05] January: I’m definitely on board with integrity requiring something bigger than us. That feels very true to me.

I do actually think that personal integrity is not only possible, but essential. I don’t think that we’re ever gonna be perfect at it, and I don’t think that that’s necessary. But doing that work and engaging in that practice of integrity within us is important, because there’s no way to get to the integrity that’s beyond us if we do not also have integrity within us.

[00:04:06] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:04:06] January: And that’s what I’m trying to get at with so much of the work that I’m talking about, is that we keep trying to focus on creating peace out there and we’re totally neglecting any experience of peace in here.

[00:04:06] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:07] January: But I don’t think we can create it out there until — like, we can impact it. We can shift it out there and we can shift it in here. There’s two points of access for change to happen and that’s great. But if we’re only trying to change one side of the equation, it’s gonna keep reverting.

[00:04:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:07] January: It’s gonna keep expressing what’s inside us.

[00:04:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:07] January: The metaphor that I have heard more than one person use at this point is this idea of an airplane. An airplane has God-only-knows how many parts to it. It’s got a lot of redundant systems so that if something does fail in midair, it’s still able to keep flying until things can be landed and that part can be fixed. So it’s not necessarily this giant emergency if parts of us are out of integrity

[00:04:08] Andrew: Mm.

[00:04:08] January: because like an airplane, we have a bunch of backup systems so that we don’t go completely off the rails. Yet at the same time, we exist in a human cultural context that is inherently fragmenting. So for the most part, I don’t think that any of us manage to achieve total personal integrity in this lifetime, although Martha Beck’s definitely takin’ a crack at it and more power to her!

I think of Jesus as a person who is fully integrated, even though he’s human. That absolutely does require God the Father. It is Jesus’s relationship to God as his father, as someone who loves him and loves us as humans, that is, I think, what makes it possible for Jesus to be in integrity in himself.

[00:04:09] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:04:09] January: So what that looks like for us, I think, on the larger scale, it does look like — like you said the other day — a sustainable system.

[00:04:09] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:09] January: And so what I think that looks like on the individual level is a person whose parts can engage in conflict, like we’ve been talking about, but without rivalry. They don’t try to kick each other out or collapse themselves in favor of the other person. They are able to just sit in the tension of, “Everything is not okay!” until something emerges and catches their attention as, “This is the way forward.”

But that’s something that they’re listening for; it’s not necessarily something that they’re trying to find or assert or make happen. And that goes a little bit back to the Being versus Doing.

So where I think that I see Christ modeling this most profoundly is in Gethsemane, where he is like, “I don’t like what’s coming down the pike. I don’t wanna die. This sucks. Everything is terrible and I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t.

[00:04:11] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:11] January: I don’t want to do this. If there is any other way that this can happen, please show me the other way.” And, “What I want most in the world is for your will to be done. And that’s the thing that’s gonna define what I do next.”

To me, that’s a picture of engaging in conflict without rivalry.

[00:04:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:12] January: You know, Jesus isn’t going in and going, “This is bullshit. I’m gonna go my own way!” But he’s also not going in and going, “What I want here doesn’t even matter, so I’m not even gonna bother admitting that I don’t wanna do this.”

[00:04:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:12] January: No! He’s real clear about it, and he trusts that God wants to hear about that. He prays about it in the garden at length, yet the decision that he makes ultimately comes out of that place of integrity. It comes from a place of relationship with the Father and what the Father wants is what Jesus wants.

So, yeah. Do I think any of the rest of us can ever quote-unquote “achieve” Jesus’ level of integrity? I don’t know that I think that that’s possible. But could we receive that degree of integrity, if we could slow down and put enough of our baggage down to receive what God is giving us? I, I think that’s possible for us.

[00:04:13] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:13] January: And as I think you’ve heard me say before, we’ll never know how far I could get along the road to that outcome unless I give it everything I’ve got. So I’m gonna give it everything I got, ‘cause I wanna go on that adventure.

[00:04:14] Andrew: Now I have the bad habit of hearing analogies and metaphors and pushing them to the point where fall apart, but I hear what you’re saying with regards to — and, and I appreciate how you’re defining integrity in a way that moves beyond just all the component parts, all the pieces, all the layers that get printed out by the 3D printer — when you use the airplane analogy, there’s some redundancy here. But at least for the airplane, we’re not concerned with totality so much, but we are concerned with whether or not the plane can fly.

[00:04:15] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:15] Andrew: And so if there’s a loss of integrity, structural integrity of the wings or something, you know, like to the point that it’s not flying, there’s a clear line there. It doesn’t have to be the all-or-nothing of integral calculus, but there is a clear point of, I don’t know, this or that, and it resides in the function of the plane. Plane’s supposed to fly.

So yeah, stuff’s going wrong. Okay. Can we still fly? Yeah? Okay. We got integrity.

No, we can’t fly. We’re, we’re going down. Uhhhh, uh oh. Yeah. Uh, need to tell the captain about this. Right?

And so does that part of the analogy, does that translate to humans? Do we have a function, a purpose through which we can define whether or not we have adequate integrity?

[00:04:16] January: Answering that question is above my pay grade. We’ll put it that way.

[00:04:16] Andrew: I didn’t tell you to say what it was! I just said if it’s there.

[00:04:16] January: Yeah, yeah. No, the question of whether it’s there or not — I mean, as a life coach, I’m probably supposed to say, “Yes, of course.”

[00:04:17] Andrew: Okay.

[00:04:17] January: But I still remain unconvinced. So here’s me sitting with my conflict. I’m just gonna model this in this conversation, I guess.

[00:04:17] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:22] January: I know so many people who are invested in finding their purpose in life, or who feel like they found it and are just so excited about the world and what adventure’s coming down the pike next because they have that sense of purpose. I don’t think that purpose is necessarily a bad thing, although that too can go off the rails ‘cause humans are good at that game.

And at the same time, I do feel like there is some role that my existence on this earth is meant to play in that larger system. Like you were talking about, I am a layer in what’s happening. I have a role to play in how the system is growing and developing, and I want to play that role. I trust God. I trust God’s picture. I trust what God is doing in the world. I want to do that.

And yet my personal experience of people searching for purpose is that they too often want something where they can slap a label on it and go: oh, okay, now I know who I am. And I never have to feel unstable about that ever again because this is my purpose and I can just ignore everything that’s not this.

[00:04:26] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:26] January: I’m having a hard time with this because I don’t necessarily think that that’s a bad thing, right? I have a central thing in my life now. Jesus is the central thing in my life now where I’m like, it’s not moving me closer to that, it can just go away.

And we’re, that, that’s fine and I can just let that shit go. So like, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

[00:04:27] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:27] January: But the question of what we’re looking for and why is an important one. If we have objectified purpose as something to be achieved, things are gonna go wrong somewhere. It’s gonna become an idol that we’re chasing because we think it’s gonna fix us or make us feel better in some way.

[00:04:27] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:27] January: My personal experience of whatever the heck my purpose is — and I don’t know! — is just go on the adventure of finding out what it is that you want in this world, and then make creative choices about how you’re gonna pursue it. Like, that’s it.

[00:04:28] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:28] January: That’s the only way that I know how to summarize that purpose. Every time I have encountered a question of what am I supposed to do here? The answer from God has always been, “What do you wanna do?”

[00:04:28] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:28] January: And obviously there are some answers to that question that are not healthy, and I should put them down because they’re not gonna move me closer to Jesus. But one of the things that I am most distressed that I think the church has lost connection with, at least in America, is the sense that purpose is something that is revealed in us rather than imposed on us.

[00:04:29] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:04:29] January: It’s not that we read the Bible and we know what everybody’s purpose is, and so this is the picture that you have to live down to. No! It’s, the purpose is in you. You go about living your life with your eyes on Jesus. That’s the model. What’s going to unfold in your life from there?

[00:04:30] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:30] January: And I, I will only know what my purpose is as I take my last breath. If then! But I don’t have a big enough perspective on the world and what’s unfolding to really know what I’m supposed to be doing or where I fit.

[00:04:30] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:30] January: My job is just to keep following joy, because I know that joy is of the Kingdom. And that’s not the same thing as temporary earthly satisfaction. I’m talking about bone deep joy. I don’t know how to explain that word other than a sense that everything fits.

[00:04:31] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:04:31] January: Just a radical acceptance of what is. Yeah, I would maybe define integrity as an absence of resistance to what is.

[00:04:31] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:31] January: Was any of that helpful or did it just muddle things even further?

[00:04:31] Andrew: No, my brain just keeps jumping to various stuff like engineering models of the bridge sticks together. It’s solid. It’s not against the gap that it’s spanning, but if it’s gonna stand up, there’s an internal tension. That’s kind of how it works. And so I was hearing some of that.

I was also, there’s this comic book series that I read with my students that an early theme that’s set out is like, oh, all the pieces fit. I like it when all the pieces fit. But it really bugs me because when they’re first introducing that line, “All the pieces fit,”

He’s put together this telescope, and the girl whose telescope it is, “Oh, you did that so fast! How did you do that? It takes my dad an hour to do it. He’s an engineer!”

And he’s like, “Oh yeah, I don’t know. I like it when all the pieces fit.” And he’s like, “Except these. You don’t need these.” And he has some.

And my heart just sinks! And I’m like, “No, Hilo! Don’t say that to Gina! All the pieces need to fit!” But it’s such a great book that, and I know it’s a throwaway line, it’s just ‘cause it’s funny. It doesn’t become a theme.

[00:04:33] January: Yeah.

[00:04:33] Andrew: There’s nobody that has to be expelled later on. But my heart always sinks when I have to read that first. I’m almost like, “I could scratch out that panel!” but then I’m like, eh, it’s, it’s funny. I’ll leave it in there. So anyway, I heard some of that when you were saying all the pieces fit, or yeah, completely okay with everything that’s there.

Except some stuff. We don’t need that.

No, no. I don’t think that’s integrity. I think that’s the archaic sacred, actually.

[00:04:34] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:34] Andrew: But then, when you were talking about purpose and when do we recognize our purpose, and it… I had a kind of a funny correlation in my head. I was like, maybe it’s like how we talk about sin? Like you don’t really see sin until it’s over and forgiven, and then you’re like, oh.

[00:04:35] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:35] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. That, that’s what that was.

[00:04:35] January: Yeah.

[00:04:35] Andrew: It, it’s not like you come up against it and you’re like: oh, sin, what do I do? What? Where’s forgiveness? Lemme go fix it. You know? Or find someone who can fix it.

And so maybe it’s the same with purpose. You’re not given a purpose so that, okay, I’m gonna go out and do it. That’s that fundamental split we’re talking about between Being and Doing where you’re trying to do so as to become.

[00:04:35] January: Yeah.

[00:04:35] Andrew: Like, if you have your purpose beforehand and then you’re gonna let that guide who you are, it’s just a misunderstanding. And that maybe it’s more like something that you can only recognize afterwards.

Yeah. I don’t know. What do you think about the idea of drawing a corollary between, between purpose and sin of like: oh, yeah, yeah, it’s there! Just don’t make a fuss about it until it, until it becomes clear.

[00:04:36] January: Yeah.

I mean. That reflects my experience of it 100%. Don’t make a fuss about it until it’s revealed to you, and then you can go do something creative with it.

[00:04:36] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:36] January: Yeah. Absolutely. It is an uncomfortable parallel to have those two next two each other.

[00:04:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:37] January: That does make me go, uhhhh,

[00:04:37] Andrew: Wait a second. Do we really—

[00:04:37] January: Well, what do I do with that?

[00:04:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:37] January: But yeah, no, the insistence that all of the parts really do fit. I really believe that. I really feel that. That’s my experience of being a Christian, is that in Christ there was room for all of me, and there is room for all of us.

[00:04:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:37] January: Everything belongs

[00:04:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:37] January: when that’s the puzzle piece I start with. We’re not here to achieve our potential, whatever the fuck that even is. We’re here to enjoy the experience of potential unfolding through us.

[00:04:38] Andrew: Yeah. No, we were close to a definition of integrity much more succinct than the rambling that I started with when you said — how did you put that?

[00:04:38] January: I think the way that I phrased it was the absence of resistance to what is.

[00:04:38] Andrew: That’s right! The absence of resistance to what is. If you have integrity, you don’t need to prop yourself up over and against what is.

[00:04:38] January: Yesssssssssss! Yes. Yes, exactly.

[00:04:38] Andrew: If you don’t have integrity, and you’re crumbling, you’re gonna look for something to be over and against.

[00:04:39] January: Exactly.

[00:04:39] Andrew: Yeah. An absence of resistance to what is.

[00:04:39] January: An absence of rivalry with what is.

[00:04:39] Andrew: Yeah. Because like the whole is-ought distinction — what should be, as opposed to what is — is kind of a big deal for religion

[00:04:39] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:39] Andrew: and morality. And we usually lump integrity and morality together. It sounds like your definition’s — I gotta be careful though, ‘cause it’s not like integrity’s over and against morality.

[00:04:39] January: And there’s a difference between morality that’s received from our human cultural context and morality that is how God wants us to relate to each other.

[00:04:39] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:39] January: Those are two different things.

[00:04:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:40] January: Cultural morality is the one that says: oh, this woman committed adultery, let’s stone her.

[00:04:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:40] January: And makes that seem like obviously that’s the thing to do!

... I have questions.

[00:04:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:40] January: So yeah, that idea that we know what ought to be — we have a non-zero capacity to recognize it, that’s true. But the idea that we have the whole picture is just, that does not land for me. We just don’t have a big enough imagination to see it truly, I don’t think.

But we can trust God to see it truly, and to tell us what’s going on in a given situation.

[00:04:41] Andrew: Yeah. Have, I floated my whole like heaven and earth thing as ways to refer to Is and Ought?

[00:04:41] January: No! Do tell.

[00:04:41] Andrew: Trying to make sense of biblical passages. I don’t know where I ran into this, but if earth is What Is and heaven is What Ought To Be,

[00:04:41] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:41] Andrew: then the Temple for the ancient Israelites was where heaven came to earth. And then of course in Christianity, it’s Christ. It’s where they come together. And then in Revelation, you read about a new heaven and a new earth.

[00:04:42] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:42] Andrew: Like they’re both new. What is is different than what was before, and what ought to be is different

[00:04:42] January: Yes.

[00:04:42] Andrew: than what used to be. Jesus is doing both of those things.

[00:04:42] January: Absolutely, absolutely.

[00:04:42] Andrew: And interestingly, there is no new ocean. And God is Maker of Heaven and Earth and Sea, according to Jonah. And they’re like, “What?! He’s the God of the sea and you ran away from him into the sea? Like what?” Yeah. Yeah. That wasn’t the best idea. But yeah, whoever wrote Revelation, there’s no new sea, because if sea generally is chaos, right?

[00:04:42] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:43] Andrew: And this miasma of — mleh! — anything, everything. Like, you know, the stuff that monsters rise from?

[00:04:43] January: How did that go again?

[00:04:43] Andrew: Yeah, that’s the Hebrew, a Hebrew word: Mleh!

Sorry. That’s not actually — that’s, I think that’s Count from Sesame Street. But anyway, sorry. Oh man, I’m — on the spectrum of, like, normalcy to Robin Williams, I’m leaning, leaning way, way toward the great, late Robin.

But yeah, there’s no new sea. Why would you need new chaos? Chaos is chaos. It’s not like,

[00:04:43] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:43] Andrew: it’s not like we need that to be renewed.

[00:04:43] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:43] Andrew: But yes, what is? Yeah, let’s get a new one of those. What ought to be? Revamp that. The things that used to ought to be, are not the things that ought to be now.

[00:04:44] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:44] Andrew: So I guess when you say an absence of resistance to what is — and I think you’re tracking with what I’m talking about when I say heaven and earth —

[00:04:44] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:44] Andrew: And when I say earth is what is, would you include in your phrase, lack of resistance to what is, is what is both what is, and also there is what ought to be. That’s an is too, in a way. And we need not to resist either the new is or the new ought?

[00:04:45] January: I think the only way to get to what ought to be is to relinquish our resistance to what is.

[00:04:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:45] January: I think we won’t have the capacity to even recognize what ought to be, until we are looking with eyes that are not distorted by rivalry.

[00:04:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:45] January: And this is — spoiler alert, I’m probably gonna have to rewrite the next episode because I caught myself scapegoating in the text.

[00:04:45] Andrew: Oh no!

[00:04:45] January: Where I was, I was talking about how comparison was doing all of these bad things and I was like, yeah, but — nnn. It can do those bad things. But comparing ourselves to somebody we admire is how we grow into new qualities that we don’t yet possess. Comparison itself is not bad.

[00:04:46] Andrew: Mm. Yeah.

[00:04:46] January: We need it as a decision-making faculty. So yeah, I have to figure out what I’m gonna do with that because I wanna go back to the Eve and the serpent scenario. There’s a way in which the whole thing hangs for me on what I think is the original misrecognition: the impression of God as withholding something that I need to be okay.

[00:04:47] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:47] January: That is a misrecognition of God.

[00:04:47] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:47] January: God has given us everything that we need.

We can get the idea that we need something that we don’t currently have. And we can have an experience of not having something that we need — there are people starving in the streets! They do not have what they need, demonstrably!

[00:04:47] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:47] January: But does what they need exist in the system? Yes, it does. It’s the rest of us not letting them have what they need. Somebody else is holding onto it unnecessarily.

[00:04:47] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:47] January: So God has given us what we need to be okay, and then we’ve done terrible, terrible things with it. We’ve done good things too, but we’ve done terrible, terrible things with it.

There’s just, there’s some way for me that all of that seems to come out of that initial distortion of our perception and thereby the distortion of our disgust and our desires. It’s the misrecognition, I think, that happens first. And it begins with a misrecognition of what is, which is that God is for us.

[00:04:48] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:04:48] January: God is never against us. And so if there’s something that I lack, well, then that lack is part of whatever’s happening and I can just receive that peacefully. I don’t have to fix it. I don’t have to fight it. I don’t have to exile it. I can just let it be there. And it might be uncomfortable. Might be really uncomfortable.

Embrace that suffering. Don’t kick our own discomfort to the curb, and something really interesting is gonna grow out of that.

[00:07:30] Andrew: Yeah, no, it tracks. Basically I heard you saying that it starts with what is, accepting what is, and only at that point could you even have access to entertain conceptions of what ought to be.

[00:07:30] January: Yeah. And that accepting what is includes grieving all of the stuff that we’re doing that’s violent. It includes accepting all of the places where we have not lived up to ought.

[00:07:30] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:07:30] January: And not resisting those parts of ourselves either. I don’t mean giving into them and letting them run the show. I mean, not resisting an identity of ourselves. Like, having a self image of, “I can’t possibly be a perpetrator!”

[00:07:31] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:07:31] January: If I resist that image of myself, I’m gonna do all kinds of things over and against it to prop up a wobbling identity.

[00:07:31] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:07:31] January: But if I can just go: oh, crap. Yep. Well, shit, that’s who I’ve been. Okay. You gotta help me out of this, God, it’s really uncomfortable. But here we are. This is reality.

[00:07:31] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

This Sunday I was going back to Isaiah 29 in our Sunday school class

[00:07:32] January: Mm.

[00:07:32] Andrew: and I decided to read the excerpt from Thomas Merton. If you remember, I shared that excerpt where he talks about his little brother.

One thing I’d say about my brother, John Paul, my most vivid memories of him in our childhood all fill me with poignant compunction at the thought of my own pride and hardheartedness, and his natural humility and love. I suppose it is usual for elder brothers, when they are still children, to feel themselves demeaned by the company of a brother four or five years younger, whom they regard as a baby and whom they tend to patronize look down upon.

So when Russ and I and Bill made huts in the woods out of boards and tar paper, which we collected around the foundation of the many cheap houses which the speculators were now putting up as fast as they could all over Douglaston, we severely prohibited John Paul and Russ’s little brother Tommy and their friends from coming anywhere near us. And if they did try to come get in our hut and even to look at it, we’d chase them away with stones.

When I think now that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: standing in a field, about a hundred yards away from the clump of sumacs where we’ve built our hut, is this little perplexed five-year-old kid in short pants and a kinda leather jacket standing quite still with his arms hanging down at his side and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow, and yet he does not go away.”

And I’m just gonna pause here, but like, which going away is Thomas Merton talking about here?

[00:10:33] January: Mm.

[00:10:33] Andrew: We were talking about those three approaches to conflict and the three antidotes to those approaches, and it occurred to me that we were talking about that presence is sort of a prerequisite for kindness and truth,

[00:10:33] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:33] Andrew: and that there was a logical priority, among the three. And so I was thinking about the younger brother when he’s standing just a little more than a stone’s-throw away, if Moving Toward, as opposed to Against, in that situation would actually be running away. Right? That I am somebody who’s measly and can be run off. They’re treating me like somebody who can be chased off.

And so if he had run away scared or sad or, I mean he was sad, but that sort of like, ‘Life isn’t fair! I’m so—” like, while physically he’s running away, that would’ve been Moving Toward in the Karen Horney sense. Is that right? Do you think?

[00:10:34] January: Yeah.

[00:10:34] Andrew: And so running away scared or frightened or outraged is Moving Toward,

[00:10:34] January: Or self-blaming.

[00:10:34] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Self-blaming. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Picking up the blame. If that was Moving Toward, Moving Against is pretty clear in this situation. Who are you gonna throw, I’ll throw rocks at you, or whatever. I mean, little brothers don’t have the wherewithal generally to win that fight, but they could try and fight it.

[00:10:35] January: Yeah.

[00:10:35] Andrew: It’s already clear. He’s not running away scared or picking up the self blame.

…he does not go away. We shout at him to get out of there, to beat it, and to go home and wing a couple more rocks in that direction, and he does not go away. We tell him to play in some other place. He does not move. And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad, and yet he is fascinated by what we’re doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away. The law written in his nature says that he must be with his elder brother and to do what he is doing, and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case.”

[00:10:36] January: Mm.

[00:10:36] Andrew: So to Move Away in the Karen Horney sense, would that be to not be angry, to not be unhappy, not be offended or tremendously sad? Would it be a numbness? Or I, I, I don’t know what, yeah, what would a Moving Away have looked like?

[00:10:37] January: Yeah, I would imagine that as an exiling the parts of me that want to be in this relationship with someone who doesn’t want me.

[00:10:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:10:37] January: Just checking out and not caring. Yeah, I would describe that as a numbness or a dissociation. It’s not necessarily internalizing any self blame because of Thomas’s behavior, but it is removing one’s presence from the relationship.

Does that track with how you’re reading it?

[00:10:38] Andrew: Yeah. No, but I’m just, I, I feel like we’ve got the picture of somebody who is being intensely present and not succumbing to the Move Away in the Karen Horney sense. So,

[00:10:38] January: Yeah.

[00:10:38] Andrew: I don’t know. If we were gonna write a short story about the same little boy who, who didn’t have that, what would it’ve looked like?

He describes it as his natural humility and love at the beginning.

[00:10:38] January: Hmm. Yeah. I think the three pictures that come to my mind are the little brother who internalizes the self blame and says, oh, if he’s throwing rocks at me, he must be right. I must be bad, and goes away in shame and disgrace and grief.

Or the little brother who is like, “This isn’t right!” and is constantly determined to invade his brother’s space and make himself part of his brother’s life.

[00:10:39] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:10:39] January: Or the little brother who just understands, “This is way too painful and I can’t handle these feelings. So I’m just gonna cut myself off from the whole thing, and I’m gonna quit caring about this relationship, and I’m not gonna go away grieved because I’m not even gonna feel the grief anymore.”

[00:10:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:10:40] January: I’m not going to be sorry to lose this relationship because I’m gonna stop caring about it out of self-protection.

[00:10:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:10:40] January: But instead he just sits in the tension, and he’s got that wild degree of presence because he is present to both what he’s feeling and to what his brother is doing. He’s got the kindness because he cares about his brother and he wants to be involved in his brother’s life, and he’s not invading his brother’s space

[00:10:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:10:40] January: and trying to force himself on his brother. And he’s got the truth telling. He’s not pretending that he’s feeling anything other than what he’s feeling. I am angry. I am insulted. I am so sad.

[00:10:41] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:10:41] January: And I’m not gonna let you pretend to yourself that I’m not.

[00:10:41] Andrew: Yeah. Story got referenced a few times later in the church service and as, as much as I tried, people couldn’t help but just like, “Yeah, we’re not always good big brothers, but we’ve got a great Big Brother in Heaven.” The idea of allowing God to be in that little boy’s position

[00:10:41] January: Mm.

[00:10:41] Andrew: and by choice in a way

[00:10:42] January: Yeah.

[00:10:42] Andrew: like I felt like that was sort of what was going on in Isaiah 29 with the, when you wake up from the dream and it just disappears. The Lord God was about to overwhelm with these ramparts and mounds and towers or whatever and just poof it’s gone.

It’s just like, no, that’s not. “The Lord strikes out with wonder upon—” you know, befuddlement is, is

[00:10:42] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:42] Andrew: is God’s weapon. And, and so God is in the position of that little boy and grieved and saddened. And by choice!

[00:10:42] January: Mm-hmm.

And that’s exactly what I see Jesus doing in that scene where he is like, “How long must I be with y’all?” Like how long do I have to hang out at the edge of the playground before y’all let me in?

[00:10:43] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:10:43] January: I’m not going to pretend to be any less sad and angry than I am, and I am sad and angry. I want to love you. Why won’t you let me?

That is very much where God is. God isn’t the big brother

[00:10:43] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:10:43] January: throwing stones. Or even choosing not to throw stones. God is the little brother asking to come in.

[00:10:44] Andrew: Yeah.

I was gonna talk about this too, because we’re gonna get into that split. Moment 1 in the Creative’s Journey — if anybody hasn’t heard the first episode yet — it’s a cycle. It’s 10 moments. And when I say Moment 1, I’m talking about an occasion in which there’s a split between Being and Doing.

Now I asked you in Episode One, when we get down to Moment 6, there’s an initiation that’s described as a descent, a going down, and I was like, is that a type of floating away? And we’ve uncovered a bit. There’s been some dream stuff that I’ve told you about that makes that thought carry on new meaning, which I don’t guess is part of my question, but I can’t help but recognize it.

But anyway, your response was, well, it certainly is disembodiment. Now, not that you aren’t always ready to emphasize embodiment as a theme. You are, I think! But I, I sort of primed your answer in the way I asked it about this sort of floating away.

But here we are weeks, uh, months later, and I’d like to hear your thoughts on this split between Being and Doing that ushers us toward creative action. Is this split disembodiment? Is this split disintegration? Yes, yes, of course. The answers to both those questions, they’re easy. It’s yes.

But the interesting question, I think, might be, do we shed light on different aspects of this ordeal when we call the split disembodiment, and when we call the split a lack of integration. Is there something there in the distinction between those two, or is it more or less synonymous?

[00:10:53] January: It’s a good question. I don’t think they’re quite synonymous. I think something really interesting that you pulled out there.

I think disintegration is the better word, in general, ‘cause that’s kind of the larger umbrella, if you will. Disembodiment and dissociation are a type of disintegration, but not all disintegration is necessarily disembodiment. Does that sound fair?

[00:11:19] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:19] January: So then, yeah, disintegration would be the better term there. And thank you for pulling that out. I do think that, if you had asked me that question when we were recording the first episode, I would’ve been able to see that and say yes. But like you said, in the way that you phrased the question my brain just kinda went a different direction with it, which was fine for the first episode, but I am glad for the chance to bring it back to that and just point out that, yeah, I think that that’s what’s going on there is that it’s a disintegration.

[00:11:21] Andrew: ‘Cause in the course of our discussion, I got a clear picture of Moment 1, the split that we’re talking about between Doing and Being, as Doing outpacing Being. As if by Doing, we could become essential.

And this, this Doing being out in front, it’s undone by the ordering of Moments 8 and 9. The Healing of Our Wounded Being is 8, which will precede the Healing of Our Wounded Doing, Moment 9. And I asked you if it would be at all possible to have an inverse image of that split.

Could Being outpace our Doing to such an extent that we lost sight of Doing anything at all? And you suggested that it’s not at all likely in our culture because we put such an emphasis on achieving and Doing, but it seems, you said, imaginable in say maybe a monastery, or a critique that maybe gets lobbed at mysticism, that maybe their Being goes too far to the point that there is a lack of Doing.

And I, I wanted to question if you feel like it’s something you still would stand to, and more generally, do we wanna make Being and Doing into a binary? Like specifically a pair of equals that get balanced?

Or — on the offhand chance that somebody’s doing this wrong. I hear people say, like, I forget who, it was probably Thomas Merton or somebody from Gethsemani, I don’t know but somebody’s like, oh, you just, you just stay there and pray all the—? And the response was like, can you imagine how much trouble the world would be in if we weren’t praying?!

[00:13:01] January: Mmm!

[00:13:03] Andrew: And I found it a very convincing— I, I mean, it’s a hypothetical argument. How do you have a test case?

But it’s just, yeah,

hold on a second. Why is our assumption that this intense and flourishing prayer life is ineffective. Like why, why is that the starting point?

So that, that’s not at all what I’m trying to do. But I’m just saying that in the event that there were somehow an occasion where someone was actually inactive in a way, are we open to the possibility of well, oh, maybe inaction is the result of too much emphasis on Being that they haven’t got around to Doing yet?

And I wanna say no, that’s not a possibility. If there’s an inactivity, it’s another symptom of a lack of Being. That’s where that inaction is gonna be sourced. Because actual Being in the world, not resisting what is, but Being, that can only lead to Doing. There is no other subsequent thing, to Being in the world.

‘Cause the Creative’s Journey circle, like, this is yours. This is January’s, right? So I’m not talking about the Heroine’s Journey or the

[00:34:32] January: Uh-huh,

[00:34:32] Andrew: Hero’s Journey. I’m just talking about the Creative’s Journey. You own that. I don’t

know if you got it copywrit yet, but anyway, Moment 10. Integration-slash-balance of Being and Doing.

[00:34:33] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:33] Andrew: Suppose some overly confident editor just swooped in with a red Sharpie and **squeaky marker sound** put a scratch through it and was like integration of Doing back into Being.

[00:34:33] January: Hmm.

[00:34:33] Andrew: It implies a hierarchy and an ordering. If you saw that edit to your circle, would you be like, I-I-I-I-I dunno , or would you be like, I-I-I-I-I dunno ?

[00:34:34] January: I think what jumps out to me when you hold up that dichotomy is that if someone looks like they are Being at the expense of Doing, that is a sign that they have objectified something. I think that that’s an indication of rivalry, to try to have one thing at the expense of another.

And you can objectify, you can idolize, peace and prayer just as much as you can idolize worldly achievement. But it still ends up being a form of Doing

[00:34:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:45] January: when you’re doing that. In a way, what you’re saying is absolutely true because we can’t do anything unless we have a body.

[00:34:46] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:46] January: That absolutely is the prerequisite.

[00:34:46] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of

[00:34:46] January: To do anything in the material world, we have to have a body. We have to be present.

And then there’s this extra layer where we are capable of acting in the world in a way that is disconnected from our Being, that is rivalrous, that is over and against, that has objectified things and is acquisitive instead of relational.

Demonstrably, we can do that. And we can do it in such a way that even our Being can become a form of Doing, which is another thing that we talked about in that first episode, that it’s so easy to even turn these, these practices of putting down our Doing can turn into ways of Doing

[00:34:47] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:47] January: if we make them an objective.

And yet at the same time, what you have pointed out is true — that in order to get to the healing of our Doing, we have to start with the healing of our Being. This one comes first and then the other happens. If our Doing gets disconnected from our Being, there’s that whole half of our experience that’s just been disowned and is now considered a rival

[00:34:48] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:48] January: by those parts of us.

[00:34:48] Andrew: If we understand God to be The Ground of All Being — that is, humans are and humans do, and before all of that, there’s God —

[00:34:48] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:48] Andrew: Effectively, that’s what we’re affirming. Problems ensue when the Doing and the Being — I wanna say problems ensue when the Doing and the Being are inverted.

But is that ever possible? Can they ever actually be inverted? No. I think we wanna say no. We just wanna say we can try, or we can convince ourselves, or be convinced, that the world is not something where Doing springs from Being, but where quite the opposite — that Doing can generate Being.

[00:34:49] January: Right. And that’s where we get a phrase like “the self-made man,”

[00:34:49] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:49] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:49] Andrew: And so when we convince ourselves of that, and are doing whatever it is we do to try and become whatever it is we think we ought to become, that’s a Doing that’s grounded by the same Being? Or a different Being?

[00:34:49] January: I think it’s doing that’s grounded by a disintegrated Being.

[00:34:49] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:49] January: The disintegration happens between our Being and our Doing. And that’s how those can seem to get out of order for us, is they’ve gotten disconnected.

[00:34:50] Andrew: I gotcha. So,

[00:34:50] January: So in the ultimate sense there is only one Being.

[00:34:50] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:50] January: When I use that word integration, I think I was not necessarily picturing two distinct things that were conveniently balanced on a scale. I was picturing oscillation

[00:34:50] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:50] January: back and forth through both of these states.

[00:34:50] Andrew: Gotcha. Yeah.

[00:34:50] January: And so balance in any given moment might look like 80% Being and 20% Doing, and that would be balance in that moment.

[00:34:50] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m with you. Yeah.

[00:34:50] January: So yeah, I’m okay with hierarchy, if we’re talking specifically about creativity that creates the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

[00:34:51] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:51] January: Which is what the Creative Journey is about, to me. That we’re learning to recognize when our creativity is creating something that is not that, we are coming home to reality, and then we are taking the steps that are necessary to get our creation pointed back in the right direction.

Was that enough of an answer?

[00:34:51] Andrew: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s good.

‘Cause the reason why I went back to Episode One wasn’t just to retread old material, but I felt like there was a possible connection between this and Jen Johnsen, who saw presence as having a logical priority with regards to kindness and truth.

[00:34:52] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:52] Andrew: And so I was kind of taking that and laying it on top of our Being/Doing split. So instead of seeing Being and Doing as two things, where either one could be out in front of the other, no. Being is first and primary and will be healed first, and Doing is subsequent and will be healed subsequently. And in so doing — yeah, “doing,” Okay. “In so being”!

Yeah, can we see Being as a logical precursor to Doing? Just as presence comes first, would we say the same thing with regards to Being, Being comes first?

I kind of wanna say yes and that, but for Being, there would be no Doing whatsoever. No aggressive Doing, no obsequious Doing, no kind and true Doing, just none at all. And so the upshot would be that the navel-gazing mystics, people are just so caught up in their own mind, they’re not actually Doing, that they aren’t a picture of excessive Being.

No, they’re actually disembodiment personified. They aren’t Being adequately enough to actually Do anything in the world. It’s a lack of Being, not an excess.

Or is that... yeah, I got more to this question, but I need to stop here and listen for a moment because I just said a lot.

[00:34:54] January: I am so grateful to you for bringing that out, because the way that you phrased it made me realize something about my own framework that I had not picked up until you said it. And that’s that what I’m calling Doing, in the Creative Journey sense, Doing IS our creativity! That is what I’m talking about! And I’m talking about it in both halves of the Creative Journey.

[00:34:55] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:55] January: Doing is our creativity on the whole thing all the way around.

[00:34:55] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:34:55] January: Our acting in material space is our creating. It is influencing and being influenced by our context. And then hopefully making progressively more conscious and aware choices about the influence that we’re accepting from our context and the influence that we are having on our context.

But that’s why it’s so important that what I called “living from our Being” does not exclude our Doing. ‘Cause a Being who never Does anything is a being who isn’t interacting with or having any effect on those around them. And a being who neither impacts nor is impacted by others is, first of all, impossible ‘cause humans are social animals. We’re mimetic critters.

[00:34:56] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:56] January: And then even if it was possible, that being would be impermeable and therefore not alive.

[00:34:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:56] January: Everything alive is semi-permeable and everything alive is both susceptible to and generating this creative influence.

[00:34:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:34:56] January: Does that sound more like what you were getting at?

[00:34:56] Andrew: No, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I appreciate what you were saying, that the Doing is creating all the way around, and that like you’re saying, we’re always creating. It’s just a matter of what. Is the Doing the ground of your Being, or is your Being the ground of your Doing, is what I’m getting at.

[00:34:57] January: Mmmmm!

[00:34:57] Andrew: And it seems like on the way around, the problem, the disintegration happens when this, I’ll just go ahead and say hierarchy because it’s not like being is above and beyond and domineering our Doing. It’s the ground.

[00:34:57] January: Yeah.

[00:34:57] Andrew: And as we’re going around the first half of the circle, it’s an attempt to ground our Being in our Doing that will disintegrate the self.

Unfortunately, like, I’m afraid we may be stumbling into a huge, rather sweeping critique of a giant philosophical tradition, because I’m pretty sure that’s what existentialism is. I think that’s what the existentialists are like, “Yeah, we do. And we become through our doing.” I think that’s what they all say. And so just to be like, “Nope, that can’t be right because our circle works better, it balances out better, if we see it this—” I, I don’t think I have the credentials to dismiss giant branches of philosophical history!

But it is how I feel and think,

[00:34:59] January: Yeah.

[00:34:59] Andrew: that in an attempt to create Being through Doing, we’re gonna disintegrate ourselves.

[00:34:59] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:59] Andrew: That’s what’s gonna happen. And when our Doing springs forth from our Being, which itself is, grounded and we — yeah, I’ll call that God, I know you call that God.

[00:34:59] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:59] Andrew: I think we both call it Jesus too, without much hesitation. But even if you’re not that far yet with regards to wanting to affirm Christianity, our Doing’s gonna be grounded in something. That’s our Being! And our Being is grounded in some other.

[00:34:59] January: Yep!

[00:34:59] Andrew: Like it’s something we’ve received. It’s necessary to see that twofold grounding or whatever, to sort of wrap our heads around how we can integrate our Doing, it’s gonna be a receptive activity, in a way. We’re doing the thing, but we’re receiving. And again, that’s where the pregnancy metaphor just is so perfect, I think.

[00:35:00] January: Yeah.

[00:35:00] Andrew: Yeah. So when we were talking through the various moments of the Creative Journey, I asked you if we could practice the moments or if we just wait on them to happen. I think I found a couple different ways to ask this question regarding agency. And you were really quick to not really worry about that distinction, in so much as you saw both of them as two instances of the same thin, that being objectification.

[00:35:01] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:01] Andrew: In the first, if you’re practicing at something, like, okay, it’s a thing out there that gets done and so you do it and so you make yourself a doer of this thing. Or, it’s a thing you wait to have done unto you, and in both cases it’s just a thing.

And you were saying it’s not a thing, it’s an experience. You phrased it as a question, as a means of understanding this experience. The exact question you gave me was, “What am I trying not to feel right now?”

[00:35:02] January: Mmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:35:02] Andrew: And if you ask yourself that question, it’s both you and the world. They’re both entailed in a full answer to that question.

[00:35:02] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:02] Andrew: It’s not, “What’s out there in the world right now?” without any self, and it’s not, “Oh, okay, how do I find myself?” In order to answer that question, “What am I trying not to feel right now?” I need both to acknowledge myself, and some other. ‘Cause presumably if, if I’m trying not to feel it, there’s the me trying, and there’s this reality that’s causing feelings that I’m tamping down.

[00:35:03] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:03] Andrew: And I need both of those. And so I felt like your question was the sort that you, you simply cannot ask it if you’re gonna eliminate one or the other.

[00:35:03] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:03] Andrew: I was struck by that. It was a nifty little trick that you did, and I was like, oh, wow! You can’t eliminate either the presence of the world or the relevancy of your unique self.

And I feel like Jesus does the same sort of trick at least a couple times when he says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” for example. As if you could be loving without affirming your own selfhood, right?

[00:35:04] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:04] Andrew: No, you can’t. It has to be both.

Or, “Do unto others —” whatever the law damn well tells you you should do, you just do it! And them, and them prophets too! Mind ‘em and obey!

Wait, wait, wait. That’s not what — that isn’t what Jesus said. Uh, my bad, my bad. Went off script there.

Yeah, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” That is the law and the prophets.

[00:35:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:05] Andrew: Right? That’s what he says. As if there could be any obligation put upon you by the very One who makes you uniquely you, and not take your uniqueness into account, right?

[00:35:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:05] Andrew: It just doesn’t compute. And so, I got to this point where these two instances of Jesus giving instruction that can’t be just about the self and can’t be just about the other.

[00:35:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:05] Andrew: And it has to be the both. Yeah. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.”

Are we getting at Being and Doing in a sense? What if love is integrated Being, and what if the golden rule is integrated Doing?

[00:35:06] January: I think you’re really well onto something there, because our Being is constituted by the gaze of the other, right? We’re mimetic creatures. So of course, gazing at people with a loving gaze is going to bring them into Being.

[00:35:06] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:35:06] January: It makes perfect sense to me that that would be a form of integrated Being. And that the outcome of that is treat others the way that you would want to be treated. Well, I want goodness. I want freedom. I want my needs to be met. I assume the other person wants that too.

How can I facilitate that for them alongside facilitating that for myself?

[00:35:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:07] January: Not facilitating it for them at the expense of facilitating it for myself and not facilitating it for myself at the expense of facilitating it for anyone else, which is mostly what we’re doing.

But the two of those held in tension and integrated, where we are oscillating back and forth between the other person’s perspective and our own, and not getting stagnated in either one of them.

[00:35:07] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:35:07] January: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s a really sharp observation and I’m grateful to you for making it. ‘cause I never would’ve spotted that myself. That would’ve been beyond me, so thank you.

Sorry, I didn’t have any arguments on that one. I thought you nailed it.

[00:35:08] Andrew: Yeah. So, and then to circle around to this priority that’s kind of been the thread through my questions here. Before we can get to the point of the golden rule — doing unto others as we’d have them do unto ourselves — before we get to integrated Doing, we would need a loving presence in the world. We would need to be a loving presence. We would need to be formed from a loving presence. We would need to be present through love.

[00:35:09] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:09] Andrew: And without that, how would you be able to ask the question? Oh, yeah. What, what would I want others to do unto me?

[00:35:09] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:09] Andrew: Like we wouldn’t,

[00:35:09] January: there wouldn’t be a me to ask that question.

[00:35:09] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:09] January: I’m just talking off the top of my head here, but it’s kind of the back and forth between formation and — I don’t know what the other word here is, like — manifestation.

[00:35:09] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:35:09] January: We have to be formed by love, if we’re going to manifest love in the material world. If we’re being formed by something else, then we’re going to form something else in the material world. The Being does have to come first because the Being will dictate what it is we’re creating.

[00:35:10] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:10] January: Well, I’m gonna throw one at you ‘cause I asked it a while ago and then we never got around to it, and you mentioned that there might be some untangling to do here, but the question of, when you overexplain things, what is it that you’re protecting?

[00:35:10] Andrew: Oh, yeah, wait, I had a—

[00:35:11] January: and you were like, “Oh man, my overexplaining comes in so many flavors!”

[00:35:11] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think I, I remember, I was like, oh, wow, that got an answer to that, that came way too fast.

But when I’m over explaining, it feels like an invitation to follow a train of thought.

[00:35:11] January: Mm.

[00:35:11] Andrew: I’m not actually that hung up on the conclusion. Most people, if they’re talking are trying to convey an idea, it’s “Oh, there’s a thought. I want you to get it, and here’s the point. Got it? Got it. Good.” No, that’s, that’s not what’s going on when I’m overexplaining.

[00:35:21] January: Mm.

[00:35:21] Andrew: I’m bringing somebody along on a journey, like, “This is what I thought. And then I thought this, and then it was this, and then it was this.” And usually somewhere along that line there is a thing that is onerous upon me and annoying in the world that’s being created in this story. It’s just this exacerbating, like, “Good grief! Can you believe that?!”

[00:35:24] January: Mm.

[00:35:24] Andrew: And I want people to get the frustration of, of not that I’ve overcome it but to appreciate. There’s usually some — and I don’t, think it’s usually people, but like yeah, can you scapegoat ideas? Or can you scapegoat thoughts? I don’t know, but it seems like that oftentimes when I’m repeating, I really want people to get the annoyance that I’ve been working with, and I want ‘em to share that with me. And

[00:35:30] January: Mmm.

[00:35:31] Andrew: that’s actually more important than any sort of conclusion or solution to the problem. Like usually those, those solutions are a dime a dozen. Anybody can come up with one of those. I don’t know.

But to really appreciate a problem — that’s worth communicating when you’re in a certain frame of mind. And, uh, yeah,

[00:36:20] January: Mm.

[00:36:20] Andrew: I think that might be more than occasionally what’s going on when I over explain things.

[00:36:20] January: So a kind of Move Against, but moving against the idea and trying to get other people on your side against the idea? Recruiting allies! Is that Stage 4 of the cycle? Yeah.

[00:36:20] Andrew: Yeah!

[00:36:20] January: Yeah.

[00:36:20] Andrew: Yeah. There’s a bit of allies being recruited. Yeah.

[00:36:20] January: Yeah. I got to thinking about it because I was noticing that if someone asked me what’s my go-to conflict strategy, I would probably have answered Move Toward, which is the self-collapse version.

[00:36:21] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:21] January: I will people please. I will eliminate myself in order to eliminate the conflict. But actually I don’t think that’s true because when I look at what I’m doing when I overexplain things, which is often, I do do exactly what you were saying, where I’m trying to get people on board with a particular idea or picture or whatever.

But even if that picture looks self-deprecating, I think I’m actually trying to get them to accept my picture of reality instead of theirs. So I think actually what I’m doing there is Moving Against and not Moving Toward. Even though it looks like I’m Moving Toward, what’s happening inside me is very much not

[00:37:17] Andrew: Oh, okay.

[00:37:17] January: a collapse!

[00:37:17] Andrew: Okay. You let them think

January:I think so.

Okay. It’s a fortification. Yeah. But it important that they perceive it as a Moving Toward? Is that what you’re after?

[00:37:18] January: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

[00:37:18] Andrew: You think? Yeah.

[00:37:18] January: But it’s a manipulation tactic. It’s not—

[00:37:18] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:37:18] January: Yeah. That’s totally just a way of getting them to give in.

[00:37:18] Andrew: Yeah, no, I think I feel like I do something very similar, although I feel like for me, I, I want people to think I’m Moving Toward, but I’m actually Moving Away.

[00:37:19] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[00:37:19] Andrew: And if they can’t tell the difference, that’s

too bad for them, and what do I care?

[00:45:20] January: Mm.

[00:45:20] Andrew: I mean, yeah. Just because you have a conflict strategy that you tend toward doesn’t mean you can’t do all three at different times. So

[00:45:21] January: Yeah.

[00:45:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:45:21] January: We definitely do do all three.

[00:45:21] Andrew: That’s funny. Yeah. But you can feint one thing, like make it look like

[00:45:21] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:21] Andrew: you’re going left, you’re really going right, or whatever.

[00:45:21] January: So that means when that happens and you’ve convinced yourself you’re Moving Toward, but you’re really Moving Against, then that cure, antidote, what do we do, it is not, it’s not gonna be truth, it’s gonna be kindness that you actually need, right?

Mm-hmm.

[00:45:21] Andrew: Yeah! ‘Cause if a person were needing to augment the kindness, but felt like they were in a position where they needed to augment the truth. There’s a certain sort of truth telling that is very, very unkind.

[00:45:22] January: Mm-hmm. Yep.

[00:45:22] Andrew: And the inverse, there’s definitely a kind of kindness that is very, very untruthful.

[00:45:22] January: Totally dishonest.

[00:45:22] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:45:22] January: Yeah. Absolutely.

I mean, that shows up in things as simple as oh, I’m gonna tell my friend that I’m gonna go to this party. I don’t actually wanna go to this party. No part of me wants to go to this party, but I’m gonna tell them that I’m gonna go to the party and then either I’m gonna go and I’m gonna be resentful ‘cause I shouldn’t have gone,

[00:45:23] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:23] January: and that’s where my truth should have been brought into the room. Or, I’m gonna be passive aggressive about it and call and cancel at the last minute and make up some total excuse and lie through my teeth that I can’t actually make it, even though I said I was gonna come.

Ultimately, truth and kindness are two flip sides of the same thing, so I need more truth in both of those instances, but I also need more kindness in both of those instances. One is unkind to me; if I go to the party anyway, it’s unkind to me.

[00:45:24] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:45:24] January: And if I cancel on them at the last second, it’s unkind to the other person.

[00:45:24] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:24] January: Both of those things are missing in both of those scenarios.

[00:45:24] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:45:24] January: But in terms of if I went to the party and just sat there in resentment, then the thing that I need to bring in is a little more truth. I need to be more honest about at least the resentment that I’m experiencing. Whereas I think if the scenario is canceling on the friend at the last second, there’s a different way to handle that that’s kinder.

[00:45:25] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:45:25] January: Integrity is the thing at the core of all of them. So I think that there can be more ways back in than we necessarily remember. We don’t have to feel like, oh, I have to figure it out in my head, which of these things is the thing that’s missing so that I can fix it. No.

[00:45:25] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:45:25] January: But just noticing which of those three things feels particularly absent in a given moment or context can give us multiple avenues back in.

Did any of that land for you?

[00:45:26] Andrew: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah.

[00:45:27] January: So all of that aside, if I look at these days, what does my life look like now? When do I know that I’m out of integrity? One of the first things I recognize is resentment.

[00:45:55] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:45:58] January: And that connects back to Girard stuff in a big way, that resentment is the beginning of that accusation. So to me, resentment is one of the first earliest cues that I’m out of integrity somewhere, that I have some need that isn’t being met, or some boundary that has been crossed, or something. I have collapsed somewhere, or I have attempted to collapse somebody else somewhere.

And then once I get past the resentment stage, if I ignore it and it continues to escalate, then I think it starts to turn into some really shitty passive aggressive — like, the most aggressive passivity you will ever encounter. The most aggressive passivity!

I just become this stubborn rock in the road that will not be moved, on whatever it is that I’ve gotten attached to. And not in a good way! In a very, very rivalrous way.

[00:46:56] Andrew: That’s funny.

Now, it’s funny that you say it starts with resentment and then you end up a rock in the road. Just that imagery. I know you were searching for something that matched the intensely aggressive passivity. But like, a rock in the road is a stumbling block.

[00:46:57] January: Yeah!

[00:46:57] Andrew: That is,

[00:46:57] January: Oh yeah.

[00:46:57] Andrew: That’s the King James translation of scandal for Girard, right? Like, that’s the word that they use. Yeah, it’s kind of funny that that imagery just really overlaps there.

All right. Yeah, I think we, we’ve had a good conversation.

Resentment, ah. Aggressive passivity, ugh, okay. Do we have something else? How do we get to integrity? Is it lurking behind all that all along? Or is it something we have to invite in? Is there something we could actually do to lead ourselves closer to integrity? I’m guessing you might have an idea.

[00:46:58] January: It’s more like a practice for observing where we are out of integrity and actually frequently using that resentment to flag in our brains that like, uh, oh, something’s off here.

[00:46:58] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:46:58] January: And instead of continuing to point that finger at other people and point at where they’re doing things wrong, learning to point that gaze back at ourselves and go, oh, where am I doing this exact thing that’s pissing me off?

[00:46:58] Andrew: Oh, okay. Yeah.

[00:46:58] January: Where am I guilty of this?

[00:46:58] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:46:58] January: so the practice this week is the Integrity Fractal, and this is something that I started doing accidentally on my own because I tend to be a systems thinker, and I really see those connections between the way that we are at the individual level and the way that we are at the collective level. But it turns out that Martha Beck also has this exercise in her Way of Integrity book. So if this is something that appeals, that’s a place to find it as well. But I’ve asked you to articulate a problem that you see at the collective level.

And then the exercise is, you make a list of what needs to happen to fix things at the collective level, and then you figure out how to apply that to your own behavior, which is that way of interrupting our pointing finger towards somebody else and pointing it back at ourself and going, okay, where am I participating in this exact dynamic that is irritating to me?

[00:47:00] Andrew: Yeah.

Yeah, I didn’t get very far with actually making the list. I was trying to think of something wrong with the world. And at first I was thinking world like cosmos. Like what Carl Sagan’s always talking about, you know, like asteroid belts and stardust and whatever. And I’m like, “‘Wrong’? What’s wrong with that?” Like, that’s, that’s, that’s great. Like, you know.

[00:47:01] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:01] Andrew: But there’s an ambiguity to that word that was revealed to me — by somebody, and I don’t remember who now, that was giving a closer reading to the prologue of John — where it’s talking about Jesus. It doesn’t say Jesus’ name, but Jesus is referred to as the Word, and the True Light who comes into the world. Okay. That could be the cosmos.

And this is literally the Greek word kosmos. That is where we get “cosmonaut” and “cosmology” and stuff. It’s from this word world, like that’s the Greek word, world. “Comes into the world.” Okay. That fits. “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him,” okay. And then it says, “but the world didn’t recognize him.” And at that point you’re like, wait a second, the world is something that can, or fail to, recognize someone and their importance?

Are we talking about asteroid belts and meteors right now? And black holes? Like is, is Jesus Son of God being like, “Man, I can’t believe that asteroid just flew by and gave me no attention! But does, does that asteroid not know who I am? They didn’t recognize me at all!”

Like, is, is Jesus gonna be indignant with that stuff?!

[00:47:03] January: The ice moons of Jupiter?

[00:47:03] Andrew: Yeah! No, those, I, they’re so frigid and do they not…? So. I think we need this to make sense of the prologue and maybe a few chapters later, when it talks about “For God so loved the world,” we’re talking about people, And yet it’s interesting ‘cause that verse, the True Light that shines on all humans was coming into the world.” We got both “all humans”

[00:47:04] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:04] Andrew: and “the world,” which is necessarily human. But... there’s what humans are caught up in, and then there’s humanity,

[00:47:04] January: Yeah.

[00:47:04] Andrew: and the True Light is shining on humanity. But what we’re caught up in is us, in some sense. And that is the world. And that’s what God loves, too!

[00:47:04] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:04] Andrew: For God so loved this mess of us- caught- up. He doesn’t just love what we could be. I, I really do

[00:47:04] January: Yeah.

[00:47:04] Andrew: think, yeah. Mr. Rogers had a point when he said he likes people just the way they are. Like, I think he picked that up from God. I really think that was, divinely inspired.

And so! At first I had to get through all of that, like, “something wrong with the world?” like nothing’s wrong with it except people, and I’m like, okay, but no, this is, this is what we’re talking about. The stuff that people do. And just one thing that’s wrong? And I wanted to do something that was big.

[00:47:05] January: Mm.

[00:47:05] Andrew: And not extremely like petty, which is most of my, my grumps.

So anyway, I started thinking about how there’s, in our world today, there are nation states. It would seem, for the most part that the nation states that are big enough and have the money to do it, vast majority of them just assume that having a standing army is what you do.

[00:47:09] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:09] Andrew: Am I gonna say that what’s wrong with the world is that there’s all these armies standing around? Like I, I mentioned the civil disobedience before. Thoreau talks about that at the beginning of that essay. Of course, he takes it to an extreme and he’s like, “Standing armies are just an arm of a standing government. And we need to stop having all these standing governments.” And I’m like, “Oh God, I know what happens to that in another 180 years. So no, Henry David Thoreau. As much as I love you, no, no, no.”

But! With a standing army, I feel like at least it could be debated, right? Does America need a standing army, or should they have to muster one when they need to? It seems like the fact that we can’t even debate that, it has to be taken for granted, is wrong.

[00:47:10] January: Mm.

[00:47:10] Andrew: That’s something that’s wrong in our world. It’s kind of big.

And so the exercise is to make a list of all that would need to change for that to be made right. So I’m not trying to abolish standing armies. I’m just trying to get politicians and government leaders to be willing to debate that.

[00:47:11] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:11] Andrew: And that seems so otherworldly. I feel like I’m closer to asteroid belts than I am to real life, living, breathing politicians that I see on my screens.

[00:47:11] January: Hmm.

[00:47:11] Andrew: So I don’t know. Do I have enough here to step into this exercise? I don’t feel like I have a list of all that needs to change. I just have a fear for — a fear? Yeah — of just how unchangeable it is.

[00:47:12] January: Mm-hmm. The rigidity.

[00:47:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:12] January: Oh, we can work with it. So I’ve asked you to articulate a problem that you see at the planet wide level,

[00:47:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:12] January: the big picture level. And what I’ve heard you say is that one of the big things that upsets you about the way that humans are existing at the collective level is the unquestionable nature of, “Do we even need a standing army?” The fact that nobody can even ask that question.

[00:47:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:12] January: because it is assumed to be a dire need

[00:47:13] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:13] January: to have a standing army, like a professional class of soldiers. Am I understanding that correctly?

[00:47:13] Andrew: Yeah. And it gets into the money, resources, training, and even the mythos that surround this. And this is sensitive, cause people join up and go and give their life and die.

[00:47:13] January: Yeah.

[00:47:13] Andrew: And it has to be meaningful. And I’m uncomfortable with all of that. What if all the same money, resources, training, and mythic gravitas, what if that went toward our, I don’t know, Department of Education instead of our Department of War?

So yeah, it’s not that we have this class of soldiers that worries me and that nobody questions them, and their service. I feel like I’m asking this question as much for their sake as, as anybody’s.

[00:47:54] January: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:47:54] Andrew: Why is that what we asked you to do for us? We asked everything of you. Everything.

[00:47:54] January: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:54] Andrew: Why was it readiness for war? Why was that what we asked when you were willing to give us everything?

That would be my question. Which isn’t about them, it’s about us and what we’ve done to them.

[00:47:54] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, no I, I think there’s plenty there to work with because then what we do is we take, well, what’s the problem at the collective level?

[00:47:55] Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

[00:47:55] January: And the fact that we can even recognize it suggests that it’s happening within us as well.

[00:47:55] Andrew: Mm.

[00:47:55] January: There’s some part of us that’s flagging that as painful because we’re experiencing it to some degree. There’s an awareness of it.

So if you had to reflect on that issue, how is that issue showing up in you, and the way that you relate to the world? Where have you invested in a standing army?

[00:47:55] Andrew: Yeah. So if I understand correctly, the fractal part of this, it’s not actually a how did I invest in an army with missile launchers and nuclear submarines, but what part of my internal landscape is analogous to armed forces?

[00:47:56] January: Right.

[00:47:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:56] January: Yeah. So if somebody looked at the collective level and said, well, the thing that’s really wrong with the world is pollution. But then they’re eating a bunch of junk food and smoking cigarettes all the time.

[00:47:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:56] January: Where is that collective issue reflected in what,

[00:47:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:56] January: what their behavior is doing?

So like if I say a word to you in a language that you don’t know,

[00:47:57] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:57] January: it’s a symbol that stands for a thing, but if you don’t have any knowledge of what that symbol stands for, what it means, you are not gonna have any response to it. It’s just gonna be a sound to you.

[00:47:57] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:47:57] January: I think the same thing is happening with fractal levels and our integrity, where the reason that I can recognize that war is wrong out there in the world is because there is an experience inside me of conflict that feels like pain.

[00:47:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:57] January: I can look out there in the world and maps to something in my experience

[00:47:58] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:58] January: that doesn’t actually feel good.

[00:47:58] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:58] January: And so I think that that’s something that’s happening there in this fractal integrity exercise where if we are even capable of recognizing it in the world as an issue, it’s only because it is happening somewhere inside us and it’s causing an experience that flags as, “Oh, I know this, I recognize this.”

[00:47:58] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:47:58] January: But tell me if you think I’m wrong.

[00:47:58] Andrew: No I, I, I really like that thought. I mean, how do you, how do you defend it? How do you argue for it? It just sounds right though. It just seems like, yeah. How else would you know?

[00:47:59] January: It’s a hypothesis. Go test it.

[00:47:59] Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

[00:47:59] January: Convince me that I’m wrong. Test it out.

[00:47:59] Andrew: Yeah. But yeah, no, the implication being that, well, among the implications that for the people that can make sense of this terrible stuff that’s going on in the world, then presumably they found some way to make sense of that terribleness in themself, and

[00:47:59] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:59] Andrew: that’s what enables them to quote-unquote “transgress,” is they’ve normalized it in their internal landscape, so it’s not a transgression for them.

[00:48:00] January: Some part of them has been burdened with that myth.

[00:48:00] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a neat idea.

And I know the, uh, The difficult part about the problem that I’ve brought up here is that it’s implied if you’ve got an army, it’s ‘cause somebody else has an army. Like, everybody that would say we need standing armies would say we need it because

[00:48:00] January: Those guys have it.

[00:48:00] Andrew: everybody else has one.

[00:48:00] January: Yeah.

[00:48:00] Andrew: And so, that means within me there are warring factions and there’s no one part that can set down its army because they know that the other parts have armies.

Yeah, I’ve been doing some IFS therapy and have been startled to learn that just how diametrically opposed — perfectly aligned in exact opposition! — some of my parts are. It’s really, like, how conflicted, how conflicted could a person be?! Like that’s, it’s, uh, yeah. So it’s happened twice now

I hadn’t thought about those parts having armies or needing to invest time, money, resources, training, and mythic gravitas. Yeah. Each of those parts have, they’d be training themselves to go to war with each other. They’d be taking up resources, which obviously could be spread around in other places.

I don’t know about money. Do our parts have currency? Oh God, I hope not! Uh, that would be so disappointing! Oh, no. I sure hope their economy is one of — oh, who was it Matthew Clarke talked about? An economy of mercy.

[00:48:08] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:48:08] Andrew: Hopefully they’ve got one closer to that than any sort of legal tender.

Yeah. No, that’s, that’s interesting. The intensely, directly oppositional internal parts, it seems like the simplest way to say that would be, I don’t like myself.

[00:48:08] January: Hmm.

[00:48:08] Andrew: And I don’t know if this is part of the exercise or not, but it’s like — I haven’t looked at the world that way before either. Living in a world that doesn’t like itself.

[00:48:09] January: Mm mm-hmm. So taking what’s going on with you and assuming it at the collective level as well?

[00:48:09] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:48:09] January: Reversing the fractal?

[00:48:09] Andrew: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s a part of the exercise, but that’s, that’s where my brain went.

[00:48:09] January: That’s part of how I do it.

[00:48:09] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:48:09] January: That’s sort of how I came to invent the exercise for myself, I think, was that after my ex’s arrest, I could see so clearly that the people around me had needed to scapegoat me because they needed something to be over and against. It was all just constantly reacting to other people. And I could immediately see that I was doing that too!

And so the problem that I saw in the world out there was we don’t have an identity apart from this over and against dynamic.

Well, how do we go about finding that? How do we go about creating that? And in order to figure out how we go about creating that, I had to discover it in myself, because I realized immediately that I didn’t have it either.

[00:49:01] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:49:02] January: And so that has sort of turned into my, for lack of a better word, ministry in the world is how do I help people discover, and or develop, a personality that doesn’t depend on being over and against? That’s my fractal, at least at the moment. But I mean, you and I have talked before about your tendency toward condescension. And I don’t think that you are only pointing that at other people. I think that you point it at yourself plenty as well.

[00:51:13] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:51:13] January: That’s what came to my mind when you started describing that dynamic of standing army. That’s what that feels like to me. Tell me where I’m wrong, ‘cause I’m not inside your experience.

[00:51:20] Andrew: So, yeah. Imagining that there are parts of myself that are just training themselves to outdo others at their own game.

[00:51:20] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:20] Andrew: And get the best of them. You’re saying that, that.

[00:51:20] January: I’m asking if the tendency toward condescension feels like part of that dynamic to you? ‘Cause it seems to me from the outside like it could be, but I don’t know. I’m asking.

[00:51:21] Andrew: Okay, I’m getting my fractal levels confused. Because the world has a multiplicity of nation states. If I project myself in the place of the world, then the multiplicity internal to me, like I, of course. We’re doing a podcast on IFS, so like that, that all fits.

But where is it that it seems like condescension might fit in? Where is it that you see a possible connection there?

[00:51:22] January: You and I have had conversations in the past about you experiencing a tendency toward condescension in the ways that you interact with other people.

[00:51:22] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:51:22] January: And that seems to me to be a way of being ready to argue with anything that anybody else brings to the table.

Being prepared to be against other people no matter what gets brought.

[00:51:23] Andrew: Yeah, I gotcha. I gotcha.

[00:51:23] January: And that sort of rang a bell for me with the idea of a standing army at the nation state level,

[00:51:23] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:51:23] January: of just being prepared to be against no matter what comes up. But tell me where I’m wrong?

[00:51:24] Andrew: Yes. No, no, no, no. I’m with you.

Yeah. I had switched to thinking through the actual conflict. Cause yeah, I’ve just recently been aware of what, these parts might actually say to each other. And that hadn’t happened before. So like, I was thinking of the actual conflict, but that wasn’t the problem that I put forward with the world. It wasn’t the actual war. It was that everybody’s ready to go to war, to the extent that they’re investing all this time and resources into having a standing army.

Okay. Yeah. And so that, preparation and like, being on war footing.

[00:51:25] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:25] Andrew: Yeah. That is, yeah, that does line up with condescension quite well. Because I mean, that, that is part of the posturing. Like when you’re not at war, you want your military to look as fearsome as possible.

That’s the reason why you have a standing army is — and I’m sure even military theorists would say — so you don’t have to use it. If you’ve got one that’s imposing enough and frightening enough, you won’t have to use it.

[00:51:27] January: So then if we take it back to what you feel like would solve the problem at the collective level?

[00:51:27] Andrew: I didn’t know.

[00:51:27] January: Mm.

[00:51:27] Andrew: I did think as far as like, well, maybe one nation state that was powerful would just need to try it.

It seems like that would have to happen. There’d have to be a first, it’s not like everybody would do it at once. So there’d have to be one nation state to go first. And then at that point it seems like, well, is it just luck?

I don’t know my history and social theory well enough to know if the very definition of being a nation state entails some sort of military or governing protectorate.

[00:51:28] January: Well, I think it sounds to me like what you’re describing that you have a better sense of it at the individual level and then you could kind of apply that to the collective level.

[00:51:32] Andrew: It’s easier to imagine in the internal level. If one of my parts was able to get over itself and not worry about training how to defend itself all the time, and coming up with crazy stories about how it’s always offering the ultimate sacrifice, I think I would trust my internal system not to annihilate that part, you know?

[00:51:34] January: Mm.

[00:51:34] Andrew: The world? Is that what would happen?

[00:51:34] January: Yeah. I’m curious if we can use the fractal exercise in the other direction? That because you have that experience of trust in your own inner system, can you imagine, can you trust that if it is possible within you, it is also possible at the collective level, even if you can’t see how it would happen yet?

[00:51:35] Andrew: No, I like you’re taking a positive bent.

I was. I was. I was flipping it around. It’s like if I can’t imagine it happening in the world, then probably there’s a part of me that can’t imagine it happening inside me. There must be a part that’s deeply, deeply frightened and certain that others are gonna annihilate it. And so

[00:51:48] January: That’s probably true.

[00:51:53] Andrew: yeah, so, so I was, I was ready to go the other way, but you’re like trying to be more positive with this. Okay. Um. Yeah. So say it again? ‘Cause I was already jumping the wrong direction. Which we can explore that too, but let’s explore your way first.

That help me if I got this right, so if, it’s not a big leap for me to imagine a part laying down its defenses, its standing army.And not

face immediate annihilation

[00:52:38] January: mm-hmm.

[00:53:03] Andrew: in the internal landscape then the implication would be it shouldn’t be that hard to conceptualize it happening in the world?

[00:55:04] January: I’m asking can you

[00:55:04] Andrew: Oh, just, can I imagine it?

[00:55:04] January: Can you just hold the space for the possibility

[00:55:04] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:04] January: that this is possible at the collective level, even if I can’t see how it would happen, because I can see how it would happen at my level.

[00:55:05] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:05] January: And anything that’s possible at my level is also gonna be possible at the collective level.

[00:55:05] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:05] January: I might not know how we’re gonna get there.

[00:55:05] Andrew: I mean, part of me can’t. Like I can, it’s, it’d be. I mean, ‘cause I’m American, I think of the United States and what it’ll be like. It would make a lot of people upset and cause a lot of strife, internal to the United States. There would be voices that would turn that into a rallying cry

[00:55:06] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:06] Andrew: Uh, that’s, it seems like that would be. Yeah. There’s gonna be intense internal strife within American government.

[00:55:06] January: Mm-hmm. It sounds like the answer to the question is no, you’re not really able to imagine it.

[00:55:06] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:06] January: Tell me where I’m wrong.

[00:55:06] Andrew: Well, but the thing being — we’re getting a fractal in a fractal here, because like, in myself, I had one part laying down its standing army and the others with standing armies don’t just attack it.

[00:55:06] January: Right.

[00:55:06] Andrew: And so on the level of the United States, if we defund the DOD I don’t think Russia’s gonna immediately shoot nukes at us. I can imagine that, but inside the United States? I can’t.

So it would be, to internalize it to myself — I can imagine a part, if it did lay down its standing army, not getting attacked by other parts. But can I imagine a part actually laying down its standing army and not be intensely conflicted about it to the point that it’s attacking itself?

[00:55:07] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:07] Andrew: And having its own need for parts work?

[00:55:07] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:07] Andrew: That’s what I can’t imagine.

[00:55:07] January: Mm.

[00:55:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:07] January: Well, I certainly know I’m in favor of the United States getting some parts work done.

But regardless of whether it happens at the collective level, I mean, it sounds to me like you’re already doing it at the individual level. You are engaged in IFS work at this point, even if you’re just at the beginning stages of it. You’re figuring out how to find a way to relate that doesn’t rely on being over and against.

[00:55:08] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:08] January: What happens when you notice that, that you’re already doing that work?

[00:55:08] Andrew: Uh, yeah. I know noticing is part of doing the work, but it doesn’t feel like it to me yet because it’s like I didn’t need IFS to tell me that, I can find myself thinking I don’t like myself. Like that, I’ve noticed that before. Right? So it’s like—

[00:55:09] January: Mm, mm-hmm..

[00:55:09] Andrew: It wasn’t that the internal conflict was there was surprising. It was just how extreme that it was.

[00:55:09] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:09] Andrew: So I felt like, yeah, I think the IFS stuff is helping me notice stuff. Part of me feels like there might be a quantitative difference, with regards to the amount of noticing. But it doesn’t feel like there’s been a qualitative change that I’ve been totally unaware or unobservant up to this point, and now I’m noticing things that I didn’t notice before. That doesn’t, that doesn’t feel true.

I’m noticing stuff. Cool. I’ve noticed stuff before, so it doesn’t feel like I’ve started anything new yet regarding the IFS work.

[00:55:10] January: Mm!

[00:55:10] Andrew: Not that I don’t think it’s coming. I, I think it is, but I don’t feel like it. I’ll concede that this is just my own ignorance probably, or lack of experience, that like, just how crucial and important noticing is to it.

[00:55:10] January: There’s a reason we’re talking about attention next episode.

[00:55:11] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. No, that was neat though. I enjoyed that. That was cool. I did not think I had enough put together to do whatever it is you have planned, but we totally did. That was, yeah. Yeah.

[00:55:11] January: What do you feel like you got out of it? What’s new for you on this side of doing that?

[00:55:11] Andrew: Toward the beginning of this. I had told you about that journal entry I made

[00:55:11] January: Yeah.

[00:55:11] Andrew: 20 years ago, and I looked for and couldn’t find, where I was talking about all the things I hated in, in people around me and realizing I was talking about myself.

[00:55:12] January: Yep.

[00:55:12] Andrew: So it felt very familiar, but I had not, it had never occurred to me to do it on a fractal scale, or you know, to switch levels from systemic to the individual. Like that had never occurred to me. So that was, kind of cool, to just be like, oh yeah, let’s, let’s do that. That makes good sense.

[00:55:12] January: The other thing that I wanna highlight about it is that it means that we always have agency. And you and I had a conversation recently about the mediation of subjectivity.

[00:55:12] Andrew: Mm hmm.

[00:55:13] January: And how the Divine shows up in the world in such a way that it can always be followed.

[00:55:13] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:55:13] January: We can always do what Jesus would do in any given situation.

[00:55:13] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:55:13] January: And this exercise helps me remember that. That when I start to feel really powerless about the massive size of the forces that are at work in our world, like the scale of the social challenges that face us,

[00:55:13] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:13] January: and the conflicts that our nations are engaged in, and the fact that I have no power at that level whatsoever. I can start to feel really overwhelmed. And when I remember this fractal exercise, and I can look at, “Okay, what’s happening on that scale? What do I not like about this? What do I not like about what’s going on in the world? Okay. How is that happening inside me?” I do have power at this scale.

[00:55:14] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:14] January: There’s always something I can do at the level of the individual, in my personal interactions with other humans

[00:55:14] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:14] January: that follows Christ and allows for that divine mediation.

[00:55:14] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:14] January: So it can really, really help to undo some of that powerlessness that we feel about how do I change the world?

And it’s hard to trust that just changing my own behavior, like, I’m one tiny human in this giant system. What influence do I think I have?

[00:55:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:55:21] January: And yet, what Girard tells us about the power of mediation is that the way that I show up in the world is gonna be contagious to others.

[00:56:44] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:56:44] January: And if I am showing up with greater care, with less conflict, with more courage, with more compassion, more attention, more presence... that’s gonna be contagious to other people, and it’s gonna escalate through the world.

And I personally read Scripture in such a way that makes that positive escalation much more exponential than the negative escalations that we get stuck in.

[00:56:45] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:56:45] January: Where it talks about, in the 10 Commandments, how I will punish the sins of the parents to the third or fourth generation of their children,” or however it’s phrased.

[00:56:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:56:45] January: I can’t remember off the top of my head, but

[00:56:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:56:45] January: but then, “I will bless the thousandth generation those who love me and keep my commandments.”

I mean, we can get really tangled in knots about what an asshole God is for visiting the sins of the parents on the children. That’s a dick move. But the way that I read it

[00:56:46] Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

[00:56:46] January: is that our negative, mimetic, conflictual activities have consequences to the third or fourth generation. I mean, they’ve measured that at the biological level. We have studies in epigenetics that trauma gets carried on to the

third or fourth generation.

[01:01:08] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:01:08] January: Those, those changes carry on to the third or fourth generation, just like scripture says. And so the consequences

of

those traumas last for three or four generations. But when you make the shift — when you show up with courage, when you show up with love — that has consequences to the thousandth generation.

[01:15:37] Andrew: Yeah, and it’s.

[01:15:37] January: It’s so big that it’s hard to get our heads around. Right? So like, of course we tend to focus on the, the stuff that’s easier to see.

[01:15:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:15:37] January: And it’s easier to see the things that are wrong than to see the things that are good. They feel more immediate a lot of the time.

[01:15:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:15:37] January: But if I can keep that bigger perspective, alongside the individual perspective, and if I can trust that changing the way that I show up is gonna have echoes in the world in ways that I will maybe never even be aware of — but that they’re still real, whether I’m aware of them or not — I’m left with a lot more agency.

[01:15:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:15:38] January: I’m left with a sense of my own capacity to show up, that is very, very different than the hopelessness that I feel when I’m only looking at the big picture where I have no power.

[01:15:38] Andrew: Yeah.

And as you’re talking about love being visited a thousand generations, I was, yeah. I couldn’t help but think about Christ at Gethsemane, being faced with a giant systemic thing that’s about to kill him.

And I’ve tried to make sense of his prayer before. But his, “Not my will, but yours be done” isn’t a reference, I don’t think, to like the events that are gonna happen in the next 12 to 24 hours, but may my desire be yours. Don’t let me respond in kind. Like,

[01:18:44] January: Yeah.

[01:18:44] Andrew: be indignant at the disciples that forsake me, and become rivalrous with the supposed rulers who are just being chased around by the people they pretend to rule. Not my will, but your will. That is, may I see them as you do.

[01:18:44] January: Yeah.

[01:18:44] Andrew: And that in a very real sense, while he was subjected to a death that was part of a large-scale event, his victory was an internal one. And Christians seem to believe that it’s carried on for a thousand generations already.

[01:18:45] January: Mm-hmm. I mean, I’m sitting here 2000 years later, and my life was changed by it.

[01:18:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:18:45] January: Sooo...

[01:18:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:18:45] January: somethin’ happened there.

[01:18:45] Andrew: Yeah. I suppose it might be worrisome to some to hear me say that it was actually an internal thing that Jesus did, there at that moment, that carried on.

And I guess what we’re saying here though is it doesn’t have to be an either-or.

[01:18:45] January: It is never an “either-or” in fact.

[01:18:45] Andrew: It doesn’t have to be either it was internal to him, or it was an external thing that had like societal impact. Like, biggest, fattest both-and.

[01:18:46] January: Yep. Exactly.

[01:18:46] Andrew: Yeah. Well, I think that brings us to the end of another episode. If I were to sum up everything that we’ve talked about today. It’d be hard, but I, yeah. Tell me what, I could start this way. I’d say not everything that resolves conflict is peaceful.

In fact, the radical nonviolence of God will, with regularity, excavate conflicts long buried. Even though before they were tucked away, and quite conveniently out of sight, peace doesn’t paper over conflict. It peels all the layers back to get a better look.

We tossed out a potential definition for integrity. That being an absence of resistance to what is. If you can find stability without having to fight against what is or fleeing from something that is, or just disassociating from what is, if you don’t have to do those things, it’s because of integrity. And we highlighted Thomas Merton’s little brother John Paul to serve as a depiction of kindness, truth, and presence all bundled up in one little five-year-old boy in short pants.

That was this week. What do we got coming up next week?

[01:20:02] January: Yeah, so next week we’re gonna get into the Girardian concept of misrecognition, and we’re gonna talk a bit about that as the root cause of our violence. That anytime we’re being violent, against either ourselves or someone else, it’s probably because we’re believing a lie. We’re believing something that isn’t true.

And so we’re gonna talk about how the Crucifixion exposes that misrecognition, that it’s not a legal transaction, but it is a revelation that exposes the places where those lies are hiding in our system so that we can start unpacking them and healing them.

And that leads us into a discussion of repentance. I think a lot of people talk about repentance as, you know, it’s supposed to be some kind shameful self castigation, but we’re gonna talk about repentance as a kind of remediated perception.

[01:20:05] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:20:06] January: So it’s a recognition of our own misrecognitions, if you will.

And we’re gonna talk about how lack and abundance are not equal opposites, but that abundance is the bigger reality within which all of our lack is held. And then we’re gonna extrapolate that even further and talk about life as the bigger reality than death

[01:20:10] Andrew: Mm.

[01:20:10] January: within which this process of change is held.

So ultimately I would say that it boils down to, lies don’t merely give us false information. They train our attention until we create violence in response to our misrecognitions. And that Christ saves us by entering that system of attention and mediation from within — not imposing things from outside, but entering into it and revealing the larger reality of love and teaching us how to see our misrecognition for what it is.

That’s what we got coming for you next time. Stay tuned.

[01:40:51] Andrew: Sounds good.

[01:47:02] 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 Jaxon and Andrew McRae, and season one was written and produced by January Jaxon.

[02:00:51] Andrew: Our theme music is Things To Do In a Day by Simon Lepine.

[02:00:56] 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/TheologyKillsPodcast. You can find everything we’re making at www.theologykills.com.

[02:01:15] Andrew: That’s everything we have for you today. Thanks for listening, take care of yourselves and each other,

[02:01:21] January: and we’ll see you next time.