[00:00:04] Speaker A: Isn't the real experience of human life that it is just endlessly puzzling that we don't have answers to the hardest questions?
[00:00:15] Speaker B: A mystery isn't something you can't know. A mystery is something you can know endlessly.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: It's less about you exerting your will on it and more about discovering. Discovering what it's supposed to be.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Well, hello, collective table podcast. Welcome to season nine, episode three. This is Janelle Coker, and I am here with Jason Kocher, a very special guest.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. I get to be on, like, two episodes in a row. How weird is that?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: I have a question for you, Jason. Do you remember when our kids went through the why phase when every question was why?
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I absolutely remember it. I mean, our kids are in their mid twenties to early thirties now, and I feel like sometimes they're still asking why.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: So I don't know if you remember, but, Judah, I think you will, was in a particularly, let's say, annoying why phase between about three and a half to four and a half.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: It was constant. Dad, why do you have hair on your face? Mom, why am I cold right now?
And like every good evangelical mom of the time, I took my parenting very seriously and just said, can you just ask God about it?
[00:01:58] Speaker A: I do remember this. It was sort of like we were tired of having to do the emotional labor of parenting, so we were, like, offloading it to God. We were outsourcing to God. The annoying part of parenting.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Yes. And Judah actually had enough of an imagination and a belief that she took that super seriously.
One of my favorite times within that year that she would go, hey, mom, why? I'll just ask God about it.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Right?
[00:02:29] Speaker B: And then she put her head down. She would put her head down. And she said one time, God, why do the grasshoppers in our backyard have wings and fly, but they also jump? And then she put her fingers on her temples and put her head down. And then, like, a little fortune teller popped her head up and opened her eyes wide and said, God said so that they could get around and have fun.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So I remember this very well because there were a couple things about it that were striking to me. The first was it was, like, such a dramatic bit that it occurred to me, like, she could be a guest on, like, a regular guest on Johnny Carson. And this is where I'm dating us, because, like, I actually remember growing up watching the Tonight show when Johnny Carson was the host, and he would do that whole bit with the, you know, where he would, like, predict what was in the envelope, and, you know, he would put the envelope to his forehead. And it seemed like Judah was doing something equally dramatic. Like, she'd put her hands to her forehead, and then she would use this very dramatic, like, dramatized voice, as if to punctuate that this was very serious business that she was doing. And then maybe the most bizarre or, like. Like, borderline creepy thing about it is she actually came up with great answers.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Great answers.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: So I was like, maybe God is answering her question. Like, she would come up with really good common sense, but sometimes very insightful answers to these, like, everyday puzzles, like, why do grasshoppers jump and have wings? That seems, I don't know, superfluous.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Yeah. I thought of this because we are going to be revisiting an episode from season three with Rob Bella, who I think many of us have read many of his books or listened to his podcast. And I pulled out a couple of themes in this discussion that he had with Dana and Chelsea around, asking meaningful questions, holding on to what is true, or just sitting in questions. And then how do we deal with the ebb and flows of our emotions, which I know we've talked about a bit in this season so far.
[00:04:56] Speaker C: Because of the conditioning of our world. People are like, yeah, but what about answers? Of course, if you ask questions, you will get answers. A question also begins with a humility. So a question. And a question has an energy to it. A question. He has, like, a lean to it in front of. Mine's a rabbi, and we were talking, this is a couple years ago. I was like, what do you do? What are you doing with your congregation? Like, what's the point?
What are you. And he said, like, what are you trying to get? Are you trying to get them to do something? I was kind of like. It was like, a funny conversation because I was like, what are you. Like, what's your point? Like, what are you trying to get out of? He's like, nothing.
I was like, what do you mean by like, but, like, you know, what they're supposed to. What you want them to believe? Or do you have, like, a. Do you have, like, ten things on a wall somewhere that you need the. He's like, no, we don't have anything like that. And he says, oh, wait, we do have one thing. Our. With our kids.
The only thing, the only thing that's interesting to us is that a kid learns how to ask meaningful questions. That's it.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: Rob asks this or talks about this rabbi friend of his, and I kind of thought. This was so interesting because, Jason, I want to ask you, where do you think that Christianity can make room or doesn't make room for the idea of asking meaningful questions? Do you think that we sometimes, as a faith tradition, kind of cut that off?
[00:06:27] Speaker A: So I love this clip partly because Rob Bell does this thing where he introduces an outside perspective from his rabbi friend, which I just find to be incredibly helpful because one of the things that I think is symptomatic of sort of dominant Christianity in the United States is that it's very myopic. Like, we just see things from that one perspective. So I think it's so helpful for him to say, I was talking to a Rabbi friend, and that rabbi actually said, they're not trying to do anything with their people, which just seems so counterintuitive. Right. And I think that what that exposes about maybe again, like, dominant expressions of Christianity in the United States is that even the questions that we do pose are often not genuine. We have such a pre determined script for the answers that the whole thing feels very performative. Right. So I think there is a place for questions in that kind of Christianity, but the questions are pre written and the answers are pre written. As Rob Bell, I think, very helpfully says in this episode, at one point, you know, there's no real humanity there, right? Because it, like, isn't the real experience of human life that it is just endlessly puzzling that we don't have answers to the hardest questions that maybe we can conjecture why grasshoppers have wings and jump. But the truth is, there's still so much left to discuss.
And so I think for me, in my own faith, growth and development, realizing that both the questions and the answers that had been scripted for me in evangelicalism was like a child's play.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: It reminds me of that Sunday school teacher who whatever question she asks, you have the one little kid, Jesus.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Jesus. Everybody knows the answer to every question in Sunday school.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: That's every answer. And we never get to the deeper side of why was this happening? What were people feeling?
[00:08:45] Speaker A: And how incredibly boring is that? That, like, by the time you're, what, you know, four or five years old, you've learned all that there is to know about the world and the cosmos and God and the Bible, because of course, the answer is Jesus. So of course, like, we just bore the hell out of children by the time they get to be old enough to be sort of doubters, like really good skeptics, right?
There's a time in our lives, in our early twenties when we uprooted the. From California and moved to the mountains of Utah, because I was trying to escape, you know, certain things in my life. And we landed in this kind of raging pentecostal church, very small church that was as wild and weird and woolly as you can possibly imagine. And that was like, it was an incredibly important.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: It was really good space of formation. It was really rough sometimes.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Yeah. It was both equally helpful and hurtful. And so after we had been in that space for a few years, we had heard about this, like, mythical figure who used to be a part of the church named Ron, who was still living in town, but hadn't had gone to, like, plant another church. We'd heard about Ron for a few years and what a great teacher he was, and everybody really liked him, but, you know, he had decided to go a different way. And then he ended up coming back to the church and becoming one of the leaders there and one of the teachers there. And he was like the palate cleanser for our bizarre pentecostal church. Right. Because he was very intellectual, he was very rational and reasonable, and yet at the same time exhibited this puzzling value for all the weird woo woo stuff that was going on. I remember one time on a Sunday, or maybe it was at a small group, we're at a small group at his house, I think a bunch of young adults. And we were all gathered around Ron, listening to him. He's a great teacher. And because he was jewish, he was raised jewish, practicing as a jewish person, but also jewish by ethnicity. He often brought that perspective, which was so helpful. And he told a story one time about the dream he had where he, in the dream, he was showing up at church along with everybody else. And we were all. And he said, you know, everybody's walking into the entryway and there's a wall with, like, coat hooks on the wall. And as people went up to the wall, he said instead of hanging their coats up in the lobby as they walked in, they all took their heads off and hung their heads on the coat hooks and then went into the sanctuary without their heads. And, you know, this. And for him, this bizarre dream was so, you know, it's obvious that people, when they walk into church, often remove their brains. Like they're not willing to use that part of their body, you know, the part of their body that was analytical and rational and would like, therefore, when they walked in, they would. They would be less whole in their experience of God, their experience of religion. It was a very disruptive story for me that I could embrace that part of myself even in the midst of this experience of Christianity that was very charismatic and pentecostal and spiritual.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Well, and I think just feeling that skepticism or looking at all sides of something or questioning was not necessarily the bad, scary thing that we had been taught. You listen to a sermon, you don't question it. You read a passage in the Bible, you don't contextualize it. You make it personal and about something that you're doing wrong and make sure that you get on the right path.
Do you think that not allowing people to ask questions or expecting people to take off their heads, that we've kind of like, they're done?
They're saying, this isn't intellectually allowing me to grow and think and be a faithful person and also be a thinking person?
[00:12:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's a big question because the growth of people who don't have affiliate with religion in the United States has been massive in the past 30 years. It goes back a little longer than that, but it's really taken off in the last 15 to 20 years.
And so for any huge group of people, and it is a huge group of people, basically a third of the people who live in the United States now consider themselves religiously unaffiliated, which doesn't necessarily mean that they don't believe in God. About a third of them still report belief in God or spiritual practice of some kind. And so the point, of course, is this is not a monolithic group, but there is, I think, really good reason to see evidence in that group for a rejection of very controlling narratives, very controlling stories. And I do think doubt and questioning plays a big, big part in that, because skepticism and doubt, or for many people, perhaps most people, as they enter into, like, especially early adolescence, but for some people, or even earlier than that, it's one of the first ways that we begin to express our agency, our freedom. And so when that's deprived of you, when you're told that this is the story you have to believe, you have to believe it in this way. And not only are these the questions you have to live with, but these are the answers that lead to those questions that you have to ask. And then that leads to highly controlling ways of being in relationship with other people, highly controlling ways of expressing your gender, your sexuality, highly controlling ways of coming under other people's authority. I do think that what we're seeing in terms of just this massive exodus of people from institutional religion is related to that, that we aren't given the freedom to really pursue this incredibly endlessly interesting journey into what it means to be human that we tend to call spirituality.
[00:15:06] Speaker C: A mystery isn't something you can't know. It's a mystery is something you can know endlessly.
So you'll notice oftentimes, when people are coming out of, like you said, like, coming out of situations, like Chelsea said, where here are the answers. We don't ask questions, really is. They'll then start asking questions and go the other direction. Be like, I don't know anything, Mandy. It's just all the great mystery, and that's just its own. That's just its own sort of immaturity, you know what I mean? Like, we're all just sitting in the questions. Yeah, well, if you do that long enough, you're gonna get answers. So, like, police brutality is wrong, and being generous is better, and you. You will. This way is better than that way. This story is rubbish. This story is actually quite lovely. Like, you will come up with some answers. But, yeah, I ask the questions because. Because that's a way of inviting people in.
Like, look at this.
Wanna explore this more?
[00:16:09] Speaker B: So, that clip, I think what I found really interesting about it is when we don't allow for doubt and skepticism and discussion and madras and looking at things in different ways, then we will say, which I love, like, well, then nothing can have an answer. I loved the way that he did that. And I think we're seeing a lot of people that you and I meet being part of this church very much in that space of, like, I just can't know anything. I just don't know. And I really loved that he talks about, because I'm all into the mystery. A mystery isn't something you can't know. A mystery is something you can know endlessly. So I want to get your thoughts on that and even ask, what mysteries have you worked endlessly to know?
[00:17:05] Speaker A: You mean besides you? Well, I'm constantly, like, working to understand the mystery of us.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: Absolutely right. That's relationship.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: Yes. But I do think, like, one of the ways that we do violence to our relationship, not just you and me, but, like, any relationship, is to believe that we have come to the end of answering all those questions. Right. Like, you and I really don't end right. You know, in so many ways, like, giving each other freedom to be who we are in our relationship with each other means giving each other the freedom to continue to grow and change and develop, which means I get to continue to learn who you're becoming.
And I think there's a temptation in marriage to be like, now I know who this person is, and I don't have to attend to that anymore.
I can just expect them to act in certain ways. I have, like, taught them to act in certain ways.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: And could you imagine me still acting like I did when I was 17 and we first met? Oh, my gosh, that might be something.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: I mean, you were. You were pretty great when you were 17. I was.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: I was nothing. You were amazing, too, but not amazing for a 52 year old. It would have been exactly concerning.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: One of the things I really loved about that bit is how bell talks about this as a kind of maturing, right? And I just so loved it that he said, you know, you have people who are like, well, you can never know. You can never know anything. And so just sitting with the unknowing is. Is its own, I think the way he said it is, if I'm remembering right, it's its own kind of immaturity. And I think that's so smart, that's so insightful of him, because I do think that this thing that we're talking about is just another way of us growing up and maturing. And we often, I think, in church, we do violence to each other, and especially to children by telling them the questions and the answers that we give them are the end of their growth in faith. In reality, I think it's just a lifelong process of change. For example, like James Fowler, who did research on faith development, he talks about faith growing and changing throughout our lives as a normal process. So just like you would grow and change in your life physically, you would grow and mature physically, just as you would grow and mature psychologically and emotionally. So our faith grows and matures, and we go through, Fowler would say we go through predictable stages of faith development, which he builds his theory on Piaget, who is sort of the seminal developmental psychologist. And I would say that's probably a weakness in Fowler's theory, because I think what we do know is that while people's faith does grow and change, oftentimes in very dramatic ways, it doesn't necessarily grow and change in predictable ways. And so there's not, like an end goal that we're all moving towards. Like, there's no tell us or, like ultimate end, because that, again, you might argue, is just another form of controlling the outcome for people. But we do know that people's ideas about spirituality and God do change, and that that's a healthy process. And what is predictable about it is this process of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. And if you're stuck in any one of those places, then that's unhealthy, right? Like, if you're stuck in whatever you have constructed and you refuse to move beyond that and allow your beliefs to be deconstructed appropriately when they come into conflict with the reality of the world around you, then you're probably not in a healthy place. But if you're stuck in a place of deconstruction where you can never, like, come to any kind of answers for yourself, then that can be equally unhealthy. You have to come to a place of reconstructing something for yourself.
And that, I think, is where doubt comes in. Right. Like, if we allow what we've constructed to be exposed to doubt and skepticism, it's this amazing opportunity for growth and creativity and health and wholeness. The trick is to not try to control people's outcomes. Like, to not try to control where people land in that cycle of doubt and questioning and certainty. And, you know, there's, like, a small cottage industry in Christian publishing around telling people how to deconstruct.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Sure. Sure. Well, and I've actually reframed for myself growing up in the christian eighties and early nineties of my young adulthood, the personal relationship with God. And for me, I think that the personal relationship is really that as I grow and have these thoughts and ideas and feelings and connections to this greater thing, to these greater ideas, that that's what becomes personalized. And so the relationship that you and I have is going to be different than a relationship that you have with anybody else. It is. We all have a different relationship with another person than anywhere else. We're only seeing it from our eyes, through our bodies. And I think that is the part where we get to co create this piece of connection with the divine, with Christ, with the Holy Spirit.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: I so appreciate that you use that word co creation, right? Because we talk about this often, this idea that our faith is a process of co creation with each other, with God, with our community, with our world. And I wonder if, like, there's room for me to ask you a question.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: Cause in the last episode, Claire and I talked about this idea of creativity in the opportunity for faith to become, like, changed and mutated and to become something hybrid. And I think it's related to this conversation of doubt. So, like, you're an artist. You're a creative person, right? Like, you throw pottery. You make pottery. Like, all the dishes we eat off at home at this point in our lives are dishes that you have made in your studio. All the coffee I drink out of.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: Coffee cups is from one of my mugs.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Is from one of your mugs right there.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Wonky mugs.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: So you're an artist. And so my question for you is, how does doubt play out as a part of your creative process? When you're at the wheel and throwing pottery, where does doubt enter in? In a way that is either unhelpful at times or at other times very helpful as a yemenite creative person, because.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: I am forever learning and self taught. When I go, I have an idea in my head of what I want to produce, and I thunk that clay on the wheel.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: You thunk it?
[00:24:05] Speaker B: I thunk it.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: You like it? Plop.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Yeah, plop it down. I know for sure that what comes out will not be what is exactly in my head. And I also know that I may like it better. And perhaps as I grow and get better, maybe I will be able to always do what I expect. I mean, I can almost always make a mug and expect it to come out a specific way. But I think I really love when I do something harder, when I do something bigger than I've done, when I'm trying to center more clay than I've ever centered before, it's going to be either a hot mess or something that I'm pretty proud of, but never totally exactly what I was like, oh, I'm gonna make this. It often comes out very differently than I thought. And so that doubt always hits me. And there's a critic in there, and there's all kinds of things that come.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: Around that there's this uncontrollability about it. And when it doesn't go the way you expect or the go the way that you want, it's a frustrating experience. And then you wrestle with self doubt, and it's part of the creative process to allow that doubt, I think, to propel you forward to find the form that needs to emerge on your wheel. Or, like, if I'm writing, which for me, is sort of how I am.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Creative, I wouldn't say sort of.
[00:25:35] Speaker A: It is how you're creative, then I, you know, it is an excruciating process in the middle, and that excruciating, like, doubt about this isn't going the way that I would want it to, or I'm not doing something good here. Right? Like that self critic. And that sense of doubt about what I'm writing or apprehending propels me forward to discover the thing. And I think when I'm, like, at my best as a writer, and I suspect for you, maybe when you feel like you're at your best as a potter. It's less about you exerting your will on it and more about discovering what it's supposed to be like, almost like you're discovering it while it's happening. And that experience that I think is hard to genuinely categorize as anything but a spiritual experience, like something has come to you from the outside.
[00:26:22] Speaker B: Well, and I think that takes us to the last clip that I wanted to discuss and share about this ebb and flow of doubt and conviction and the human experience.
[00:26:42] Speaker C: Doubt and conviction move hand in hand, and it's fine, it's fine. It's completely normal.
It's all part of what it means to be human.
Like when Jesus on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This is the day God becomes an atheist. This is the abyss. This is the feeling like nothing matters. This is the existential sense of the ground disappearing beneath your feet and you're in freefall. Well, that's just central to the human experience. This doesn't mean that you aren't a good person or all the things that people do. It just means that these are very normal experiences, experiences we have as human beings.
[00:27:28] Speaker B: After hearing that, this bit about we don't always allow ourselves to doubt or lament or struggle with emotions, I would say that I often think that the kind of Christianity that I sometimes encounter is this happy, sloppy Christianity, and that we don't go through the difficulties of sitting in the mystery and not having the answer and being willing to wait, the ability to tear our clothes and cry and grieve. We want to get past all of that and go back to looking like we're christian, so everything is perfect. So I want to ask you, the resident scholar, when did we get to that? Why do we do that? Because we have lamentations. But, you know, we don't really preach on that very often because it's a real downer. So how do we get to this breadth of emotion within our faith and allow for that without it just really rocking everything? Because it's a lot of work to sit in that, and sometimes we don't sit in it until we have had the ground shaken from underneath us. And then there's almost a guilt in sitting in that pain.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think like the, you know, the easy sort of shorthand answer is that as Christianity became a kind of industry, an institution that needed to protect its own survivability, that we learned over a millennia to emphasize a way of being Christian, that made it easier to control people. I think it's much harder to control people. And by controlling people, what I mean is making sure that they show up to the things you want them to show up to, making sure that they give money, making sure that they continue to give the answers that you want them to, making sure that they obey whatever it is that you want them to do. I think it's really hard to control people when you allow them to doubt. A person who is in the midst of doubt is uncontrollable. Now, if you find a person who's in the midst of doubt and you offer them a really easy, intoxicating answer, then they're yours. You've got them. But to the extent that you allow them to experience their own anguish and lament and frustration and pain and deconstruction, you are giving them the freedom to determine their own outcome in the future. And that is good work. It's allowing somebody to be and become what they really are. But what they become might be less useful to you as a church that is trying to bring in more money or build its empire, or plant satellite campuses or enlist Sunday school teachers. The list goes on. Sometimes we joke that this church, the oceanside sanctuary, is often a way station. People either come here because they're trying to figure out if they still want to be Christian, or they have decided that they want to continue to be Christian, and they just want a place where they can do it in good conscience. Right. And so the result of that is we get a lot of people here who work through that. Do I still want to be Christian? And some of them decide they do, and then they stay, and others of them decide they don't, and then they leave. And we often tell them, I hear you telling people this all the time, like, we don't have an agenda for you. You can work this out, and we can be a safe space for you to work this out, but we're not going to tell you where you have to land.
And so, like, when we give people the ability to doubt and be skeptical, what we're doing is we're letting go of control of them. And I think that's why dominant expressions of Christianity don't do that. We want to hold on to people.
We want to collect them like trinkets in a curio. We want to use people to elevate our status. The worst of us want to do that.
[00:31:38] Speaker B: Here are a few questions to consider after listening to this podcast.
In your life of faith, how has doubt been helpful or hurtful? For you?
Is there a mystery in your life that you've worked to know endlessly?
And then finally, what doubts and truths within faith are you sitting with now on your journey?
[00:32:27] Speaker D: Thank you so much for listening. The collective table is a progressive and affirming christian platform and a production of the Oceanside Sanctuary Church, a church community committed to inclusive, inspiring and impactful christian spirituality. We are rooted in the love, peace and justice of Christ. Check our show notes to find out more about our website and where you can follow us on social media.
And finally, we would love to hear from you, so send us an email at
[email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 760-722-8522 and you might be featured on a future episode. We can't wait to hear from you and we'll see you soon.
