[00:00:04] Speaker A: The best things in life are the things that don't have certainty.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Can this still be meaningful? Can it still be true? Without certainty, doubt is really just the experience of humility.
Well, welcome, collective table. This is Jason Kocher, and I am joined in our podcast studio by my co pastor, Janelle Coker. Welcome.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Hello.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: How are you?
[00:00:42] Speaker A: I'm good, I'm good. How are you?
[00:00:44] Speaker B: I'm good. I'm good, too. So up to this point in season nine, we've been talking about how fear is driving so much of our politics and religion and civil discourse and breaking apart relationships, even in our families. You and Claire talked about the importance of reckoning with our fear, even befriending fear in that first episode. And then Claire and I talked about encountering difference in the world and how that helps us grow by opening up new possibilities when we encounter those differences. And then in the last episode, you and I talked about Rob Bell and delving a bit into his comments about doubt and how doubt plays a role in that process. And it occurred to me in that conversation that this is where, like, for a faith driven podcast, for a podcast about Christianity, even progressive Christianity, this becomes a hard conversation for people when we talk about the importance of doubt and how doubt can be a good thing. And I remember in the last episode, Rob Bell making that particular comment that you pulled from that episode where he says, in reference to the cry of dereliction, Jesus cry of dereliction on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Rob Bell says, this is the moment that God becomes an atheist. And, of course, I love that quote.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: And also, it's a little. Ouch.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a little cringey.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: At the same time, and it occurs to me that this is a really vulnerable concept for people to expose themselves to, to allow themselves to experience. And so I'd kind of like to explore that just a little bit more today. And it reminds me a little, like, as I was reflecting on this, it reminds me of Jesus's comment in Matthew, chapter six, where he says, the eye is the lamp of the body.
And so if your eye is healthy, then your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eyes unhealthy, you'll be full of darkness. And if you're full of darkness, then how great is that darkness?
And I love that saying because it, I think, tends to point us this reality that if our way of seeing the world is off, then it forecloses all kinds of possibilities for us.
You know, this is sort of a contested thing that Jesus said. But what we know from the context, from the ancient Near east, is that for the hebrew tradition, there was this saying that if you have a good eye, then you are a kinder, more generous person, that you see opportunities in the world for doing good, for helping people, for making the world a better place, for repairing the world. But if you have a bad eye, if you see the world as a place of darkness, then it tends to fill you with darkness. And then you tend to be a person who isn't willing to be helpful. You tend to be mean and stingy, and all those things that we would say aren't a good way of being. And I think that there's a connection between these two things, this idea of allowing doubt to change us and shape us on the one hand, and on the other hand, how we see the world, and then how that's sort of exemplified by having an artistic eye. So I pulled my quote for this episode is from an episode we actually did on the collective table this year, back in January 2024. This is the episode where Dana and Chelsea featured the author Cole Arthur Riley, whose latest book is Black Liturgies. And in this clip, they actually are talking to Cole Arthur Riley about her experience of writing this book, Black Liturgies. And in this particular piece, she's talking about experiencing doubt while she's writing black liturgies. And I loved this part because she's just incredibly open and vulnerable about the reality of the doubt she's experiencing while she's writing a book about encountering God. Exactly.
[00:05:07] Speaker C: I like the word unwind, if I'm honest. I feel like I experience this opening, this expanding. I'm in a pretty.
A pretty serious season of doubt, I would say. And now I have to find a way to market this thing that I wrote to a God. While every morning I'm waking up with the news being what it is, with the state of the world being what it is. Of course, asking myself is, is any of this, is any of this real? Is there anyone on the other side of this conversation? Since writing, and as I was writing, I think I definitely experienced a kind of uncertainty.
And what I'm trying to do, I think in this season, more than anything else, is instead of trying to resolve that uncertainty or resolve that doubt is just ask myself, what does it mean to write a prayer book to a God that you don't know exists every.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: Day.
[00:06:08] Speaker C: That you wake up some days and you really question, and do these words have any merit? If that's the case, and I think I've come to a place where I think, yes, that even in the uncertainty of them, I think there's beauty and kind of the human desire to connect with the divine, to connect with God, even in the midst of like chaos and suffering and uncertainty. To just want to believe, to at least want to believe that there is a God, I think, goes a long way.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: To at least want to believe that there is a God goes a long way. And I think what Cole Arthur Riley is partly narrating for us there is how her way of seeing the world and God and her faith has really profoundly shifted. She doesn't describe it that way, but I feel like she is articulating for us the way that her vision of the world and her faith is really changing in a profound way. And I'm wondering sort of what that brings up for you as you listen to that quote.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: I think two things. I look at the scriptures, biblical scriptures of David, of our psalmists, and see that they often are dealing with doubt as they are writing. So I think, firstly, there is this. Well, of course, how can we write and commune with God and be in a world where it feels God less and not feel those two pressure points of, I'm sure, often having a profound feeling or experience as you're writing or learning about a liturgy, or picking, as she was picking her liturgies. And she talks about that further in the podcast, the profoundness of that, but then also waking up and seeing the news or looking at what's going on and the division of families.
She talks very much about her blackness. And when she was writing this book, what was going on with black deaths, how can we not look at those two things and wonder? And I just imagine that the fact that we try to cut that off from the human experience is part of what causes us to feel worse about our faith, because we are not willing to contend with that and say that there's room for that, or that it is throughout the Bible and throughout those contexts of really looking at how people meet with goddess and go through doubt and say, there's war all around me, that is just part of humanity.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: And also, I think she names very effectively kind of the pivot point where this transition happens, when she says something to the effect of, what does it mean for me to write a prayer book to a God that I'm not sure exists?
And then says something to the effect of, if there is no certainty, do these words even have meaning? And I love how she makes this shift to recognizing that that loss of certainty doesn't mean that there isn't faith and meaning and beauty, goodness in what she's writing. And so that shift, I think, is really profound, like, when she goes from hanging her faith and her identity and her beliefs on certainty to taking responsibility for even wanting there to be a God. To me, that signals this profound shift towards taking responsibility for your beliefs, taking responsibility for where you stand. In my own life, that shift was a marker of adulthood. It was a marker of maturity, of growing up, of saying, well, no, we can't be certain of all these things. And yes, the world is full of chaos and horror and violence and death, oftentimes perpetuated by religion. But I still stand in this place, right, in this tradition, in a very particular way, and I'm gonna own that.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: So why do you stand in that? If you can't be certain, why do you stand in that?
[00:10:49] Speaker B: You mean like me in particular?
[00:10:50] Speaker A: You in particular.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: I mean, I've talked about this before, like, sometimes in explaining this to people, because I went through my own very serious season of doubt and questioning, and this was like, 2010 to 2013 ish, somewhere in there. And for a period of time, really decided I would try on atheism to see how that felt, to see what that was like. But for me, what I really discovered is that letting go of any kind of religious tradition or belief structure was actually too comforting for me, that it was too easy. I found atheism to be like a warm blanket on a very cold night. But Jesus really discomforts me. Jesus really disquiets me. Jesus really disturbs me. And I'm just the kind of person who needs that. Like, I need to be disturbed. To be disturbed. I need to be disrupted.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: So, good, I'm glad we're married. Cause I need to be disturbing.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Because if I didn't have that, I think I would be genuinely less useful person in the world. I think it'd be.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: You'd have a bad eye.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Oh, I would have a very bad eye. Yes.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: So, for me, the best things in life are the things that don't have certainty. It's the unpredictability. It's the enjoying the sun today because it's June gloom, and I don't know that I'm going to have the sun tomorrow.
It's being in a relationship. That person has agency to leave on any day. And the vulnerability of that, of putting myself into something that doesn't have the certainty, doesn't allow me to control or predict it is the beauty of that. And so, really, for me, the best, best things in life are the things that bring surprise that I can't control, that I can't know for sure.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Maybe in a sense, what we're both talking about is having this thing outside ourselves that keeps us from defining ourselves and our world entirely on our own terms.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Exactly right.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Like, because if I continue to be open to the newness of possibility, the intrusion of God or the divine or the spirit in my life, if I continue to recognize and see and respond to those moments that are beyond explanation, then it saves me from myself, which.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: I definitely need saving from. Often I just can't know God fully myself.
I need to be open to the Holy Spirit. I need to be open to the experiences of others and the way that they experience the spirit. I need to hear from my dear friend who's a scientist and a mathematician, and she's like, you feel God?
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: I mean, I see that, like, math is God, you know, but. And I'm like, math is God.
So again, it's just about, I'd muck it up. I'd muck it up.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: And so it's just so obvious to me that when we're talking about this, when we're talking about having our own insular, self congratulatory or self reinforcing or self indulgent worldviews disrupted by external circumstances or the experience of something over and above and beyond us, that doubt is a part of that. Because doubt comes along and really is, you could argue, I think, that in this way, doubt is really just the experience of humility, like a very uncomfortable experience of humility, because it's humility piercing through your certainty. And we desperately need that. I'm reminded of the Anne Lamott quote that you can safely assume you've created God in your own image. When it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. Doubt then, is that moment of profound humility, when you entertain the possibility that you might be wrong, including whatever it is that was given to you to think or believe about God or Christianity or Jesus or religion, that when you just appropriate those things and then attach certainty to them, it's the spirit of God that comes along and brings doubt to break that open and expose you to the reality of the world that exists beyond yourself.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: And I think that Christianity has done in America, I will say, has done a real disservice, because there is a feeling that if I express that I'm having doubt, I, or I'm in the midst of severe pain. I had somebody once say to me, I don't know, maybe on the five year anniversary of my mom's death. I came in, and it was a church Sunday morning. And she said, how are you today? And I said, oh, you know what? I'm not doing great.
This is the anniversary of my mom's death. I lost my mom when I was young, and I. I'm, quite frankly, struggling. And she said, well, was she a Christian? And I said, yes. And she said, well, what are you upset about? She's in heaven.
I was flabbergasted, but honestly, I'm sure I've said stupid things like that before, but not realizing that it's okay for me to be upset. It's okay for me to wonder why others get to keep their moms until they're in their eighties or nineties. And my mom died in her fifties.
I think it's okay for me to lament, to struggle, to wrestle with God. Why did this happen? Are you even there and be in that moment and go to church?
This idea that we can never be sad, we can never wonder where God was is not biblical, nor is it honest. And then we walk around thinking that we have to be putting on happy faces and clothing that doesn't belong to us, and then God does not meet us when we are pretending.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: I think what sort of strikes me about that is that that person in your life represented, like, there's only one right way for you to think about this. Right?
[00:18:02] Speaker A: The christian way.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Yeah, those air quotes. So it was like a stifling perspective, like they were constraining your grief, which, why would you do that? Why would you try to constrain somebody's grief?
Grief is good and necessary and important, painful, terribly uncomfortable, but also a part of the healing process. And this person came along and said, no, you're doing this wrong.
And I think that brings me to this other question that I have for you, and that is, you were recently telling me about, like, as a spiritual director, something that you were taught to do, trained to do, and something that you often do with your directes is something that you, I think, called, like, a spiritual direction funnel. And so you were telling me about this, and it reminded me of this conversation we were going to have today. So I'm wondering if you can tell us, what is that? What is it that you're describing when you talk about that funnel?
[00:18:57] Speaker A: Well, I won't go through all of the intricacies of it, but what I will say is that when somebody comes and shares their story within a spiritual direction, time, a time that we're meeting, I was definitely taught to look at where their head is and then have them look as they go slowly down into the center of the funnel head heart systems. So what kind of systems are they living under? What kind of family unit? Where are they from? Are they a. A queer person, a transgendered person, that they have a system that has been oppressing them? Where does that fit with their head and their heart of what they know, what they feel?
How are those systems really changing that before we can get to this bottom part of the funnel where they can be free of that and sit within the mystery of coming through and meeting with God, we have to really look at all of the things that they're personally experiencing, they're personally feeling, and then how the systems in which they live have changed or constrained them to really meet with God and really commune with God, yoke their heart to God. They have to kind of get through all of that before they can get to a place where they're feeling the mystery.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: So I love when you share that because I heard it Cole Arthur Reilly in this episode, working through those layers that you just described. Right. Like, so when she talks about learning to let go of certainty, she is, I think, reckoning with her mental models that were given to her about God. Right. So that's like the top of the funnel that you're describing. We have to first deal with our head, what way of thinking about God, about our faith, about Christianity were we given to? That is constraining us. That's holding us back from experiencing a genuine connection with the presence of God.
And then the next layer is the heart, which I hear her talking about when she says, it's very helpful for me to come to the realization that I at least want there to be a God. She's reckoning with her desires, what it is that she really wants, what she longs for, and then beyond that, getting into systems, which she's going to talk about in this next clip that I'm going to play. And I think it relates to this idea of systems, family systems, sociopolitical systems that shape us. And so I want to share it because I think what she shares is incredibly helpful.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: You lean on these wisdom giants from James Baldwin to Toni Morrison.
What does that mean for you?
[00:21:55] Speaker C: Like, what is that, the cultivation of.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Those quotes and that wisdom?
[00:21:58] Speaker A: How does that kind of come together? And what does that mean for you.
[00:22:01] Speaker D: To kind of rely on that past wisdom?
[00:22:04] Speaker C: I've reached a point I don't know.
Well, I'll say I encountered, when I first started encountering Christianity. It was also the first time I was encountering a lot of black literature for the first time. This was in college, and I had never read Toni Morrison before, had never even heard of James Baldwin. I came into college very ignorant of kind of the black literary tradition. And so I was experiencing all this awakening, I think, in the classroom and in books. And simultaneously, it was the first time I was attending a church regularly, apart from a small. When I was young, growing up, it was the first time I'd seriously begun attending a christian church. And the whole of the college experience was so strange and new to me that it was very difficult for me to compartmentalize things, like it all was just this new world, the church, and the classroom. And so I feel like, as I was kind of interpreting what I was learning in church, I was also experiencing a black literary tradition that is very spiritual. I mean, the black novel you think about Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, even Richard Wright, you know, I think James Baldwin certainly all have something to say about the spiritual dimension of the human life. Of course, they're coming at it from a particular angle. They're not trying to tell you what to think or, you know, get you to profess any particular creed about what that means, but they're still a addressing it. And so I think those things have always been entangled in my mind, you know? And so when I thought about liturgy, that is, black liturgy that honors blackness, I think there have been plenty of liturgies that honor art and poems and the words of white ancestors, of a white intellectual tradition. And I wanted to kind of reclaim some of the black wisdom tradition and incorporate that in the liturgy. And I think it makes it come alive in a certain way and reminds people that nothing that I'm saying is really all that new. That certainly didn't begin with me, that I'm descending from a long line of people who are concerned with the spiritual or concerned with the space, the sacred, and haven't sacrificed their blackness because of it.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: What I love about this particular quote is that she identifies her wisdom giants, these people who, for her, create this context, or maybe, to use your words, a new sort of chosen structure or system that shapes her faith and her way of being in the world in a way that is more open, that is more able to have a good eye to see the possibilities that exist in the world. And the way that she has done this is she's attached her this sort of formation, this intentional spiritual formation around these literary giants, these black literary giants who exhibit a kind of creative way of seeing the world, or have an artist's eye. And I love this idea that the eye, the good eye that Jesus was talking about, having an eye that's full of light, seeing possibilities, leading us to be more generous and kind in the world, is similar to having a kind of artist's eye, because artists see creative possibilities in the world rather than limitations. Right. And it leads them to experience the world, I think, when it's done well, in a more generous, in more generative way.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: Good art is something that shows us an eye for a possibility, a fix to a problem, oftentimes that has been addressed. And I look at what she's done with black liturgies. And she said the system in which she was growing up in, where great books were written on liturgy, on art, were written by very intelligent and educated white people.
But what she saw with her art and living within a system that did not allow her to keep her blackness, was that there was a space that was open to be writing these beautiful liturgies, looking at these great wisdom giants in her life that she had not even been taught about before this awakening that she describes. And so coming through a system that was oppressing her, seeing that she could use her writing, her beautiful way of seeing things and making it right, is the way that there is healing it, is that going through that funnel. So just hearing that, I'm just very struck by her making a new reality, not only for herself, but others who come behind her. And she talks about wisdom giants, and then she also talks about ancestors. And she is creating herself to be a good ancestor because she's fixing a system that was oppressing her with her art. For me, I have a couple of wisdom giants, but for this context, and it's just one that I learned about when I was in school, was Julian of Norwich. And this is this person that was living as an anchorite in the church in the 13th century, was very catholic, and really believed that she needed to go through the pain that Jesus went through in order to really, truly understand Christ.
And so she became very ill. She really believed that that was an affliction that God was giving her a. And she had these series of what she called showings.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: She called them showings, showings, revelations.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: Revelations.
And what she found was that there was no wrath in God. And then she had this real struggle, because the experiences that she was having, these visions that she was having of God, were not quite what she had been taught by the church.
You hear in her writings after she has these afflictions, it's not my intention to go against the Catholic Church, the Holy Catholic Church, but this is what I experienced.
So for me, in my deconstruction, that has been very true. It's not my intention. It was never my intention to go against the church by becoming a pastor. I grew up being told that women were not to teach men, that women were not to be equal to men. And it was never my intention to go against the church, but my desire, my experience, what I felt, God was pulling me towards, the doors that were opening for me. The visions and time of prayer that I was experiencing were not what I had been taught. And it wasn't my intention to go against the church. But I felt a new truth, a new, more certain way of being within myself that I felt was fully God. And so therefore, the story is written in my spiritual life, that this is where God is. So that's why she's a wisdom giant for me.
[00:30:29] Speaker B: And how has that changed the way that you see the world around you? Having been shaped by Julianne of Norwich and then stepping into new possibilities for yourself, how has that changed your eye? The way that you perceive the world, how has that affected the way that you are in the the world?
[00:30:50] Speaker A: She was strong to begin with. She was in the church, and anchorites lived with these windows that looked out into the sanctuary, often the worship space, and people would come for their wisdom. She was already there. It was already true for her. So a woman at that time, she probably had means and gave up all that financial stability to live in poverty, but she already stood in her strength, and there was already a bit of knowing. I am imagining, by the way, in which she was there and was providing care to others and wisdom to others in a very patriarchal world. Seeing that person has gone before, that there are so many people that have gone before has provided courage for me to move forward.
[00:31:57] Speaker B: That's well said. Thank you.
We do have questions for our collective table groups who meet out in the community or for listeners who might be doing this on their own, anywhere they happen to be. So I thought maybe we could share a couple of these questions for folks to consider who happen to be listening. The first is, how are you learning to sit with the tension of doubt and uncertainty?
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Who are your wisdom giants that have opened your faith to new possibilities?
[00:32:39] Speaker B: And lastly, what identities, practices, and people give you a sense of rootedness?
[00:33:00] 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.
