[00:00:04] Speaker A: We have to read their memoirs. We have to hear their stories and believe them.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Those bodily type of practices are things.
[00:00:12] Speaker A: That really ground me to allow ourselves to heal, but not make ourselves the center of that story.
Hi, everybody. Welcome to season nine, episode five of Collective Table Podcast. Hello. Yeah, Claire and I are here, and we are excited to be talking about a past episode with Valerie Core, who, I just want to tell you, Claire, I did, like, a deep dive. She is an amazing person. For those of you who don't know who Valerie Core is, I'd like to introduce her reading from her own words from a TED talk that she did in 2017, which is really what started her on the scene. So she describes herself like this. She says, I am an American civil rights activist who has labored with communities of color since September 11, fighting unjust policies by the state and acts of hate in the street. And in our most painful moments, in the face of the fires of injustice, I have seen labors of love deliver us. My life on the front lines of fighting hate in America has been a study in what I've come to call revolutionary love.
In this era of enormous rage, when the fires are burning all around us, I believe that revolutionary love is the call of our times. Claire, she has so much to say in this episode that I had a really hard time finding just a couple of clips. As a sick woman from the Sikh community, I think that she gives us a great bit of information about how we can invite others to the table. So she says that revolutionary love is the choice to enter into labor for others who do not look like us, for our opponents who hurt us, and for ourselves. She goes on to say, love is more than a rush of feelings that happen to us if we are lucky. Love is sweet labor, fierce, bloody, imperfect life giving a choice we make over and over again. First, we are here. We don't have Jason here this time. Part of the reason why I really wanted to do this with you and have this conversation is I just want to say I love that Valerie Core chooses labor and the word revolution, this idea that we have of war. And she talks about the strength of female laboring in a place of world healing. She uses the term from the tomb to the womb as a way of moving from violence to birth of health.
I just felt incredibly. That was just incredibly powerful, you being in this last podcast. What did you take from that?
[00:03:34] Speaker B: I think that there's something to say not only about Valerie Core being a woman, excuse me, but us talking about this as women. You are someone who has children. You've given birth before? I don't have any children. I've never given birth. But I think that there is something about femininity, whether or not you have carried a child or labored, that is put on women or a role that women often take on that is this kind of laboring type work, whether it be expectations in the home, interpersonal expectations. And I think that I was really left with this idea of thinking about what does it mean that in terms of, like, my femininity, where is, like, where can I find, like, my power in that? Not that it is something put on me, but something, a role that I can take on. And we'll talk about roles later on a little bit.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: And labor is one of the most painful things a body can go through. And yet we often consider women the weaker vessel.
So her taking labor and saying, this is how we can labor through this is painful, this is difficult, this is bloody, this is hard work. But it also is this incredible act of love and life giving.
So we have chosen a couple of clips to highlight three concepts.
One of listening in wonder, one of laboring in a white liberal space. And the final, loving ourselves through the process of laboring in this idea of revolutionary love in healing a world that feels, that is oftentimes on fire. So I'd like to listen to the first clip about listening in wonder.
[00:05:36] Speaker C: So it's the spaces where we're already gathering, like in schools, in churches, houses of worship, companies, where we're already gathering with people who are different from us.
Can we create spaces of deep listening? And the primary goal, and this is how we otherwise wouldn't be disappointed, the primary goal is not to transform them in one conversation or to. Or to legitimize them or to compromise with them. Like, if the primary goal is to understand them, then you're on a journey.
And I have found that change has never happened in the course of one conversation. Like deep change. It requires sustainability, sustained listening, ongoing relationship.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Going into that clip, thinking about revolutionary love as a labor of love, it's also making me think about the kind of gestation process in the womb. Like, babies don't happen in like an instant. It takes nine months at least. Sometimes that's hard. Like, you go through your body changes. You know, sometimes it takes people a long time to conceive, even before that gestation period.
It's very difficult and challenging. But it's also a very beautiful, dare I say, transformational thing. And as she was talking about it not being this, like, one conversation, and it Just being this ongoing relationship that just struck me in that way for.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: The first time, really realizing that this is perilous. It's difficult, it's difficult work.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: It's dangerous and risky.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: It's dangerous. It's risky. And you're right, changing bodies do happen.
I don't think we can have conversations of deep listening where we're not changed in the listening. With core being a person of color, a person of a non dominant religion, I really wanted to hear her words and how she used deep listening. But as white women at this point, in a more group of power, perhaps being middle class, I wanted to listen to this not just from the perspective of maybe me being the one that is listening and in the right and hoping to change somebody's mind in a conversation, but how I might see another person and be affected and through listening, be affected by them. That looks different than I do because it's. One of her big points is how do we really come in contact in churches, in our businesses with people that are different from us, look different than us, have different worldviews than we do, and come to a place of understanding.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Carr talks about finding the courage to love and using wonder and listening to these stories and that being this dangerous almost labor of love and listening to stories. And it's not a one time conversation. It is a long process. And I'm curious, what stories have you heard that were so vastly different from you and did it change you? What was that like for you?
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Okay, so I'm gonna get a little bit real here. I have been on a long journey of understand my faith and being part of a faith as a child where there were definitely people in and definitely people out.
I was very much just part of a group of people that looked like I did, that talked like I did, and thought that the people who were in were in and I was one of those people and the people who were out were out. And they were pretty awful people.
And I'm going to just admit that the way that I was taught was that people who were LGBTQ + were people who were out.
It's a grief that I have struggled with knowing that I took that information given to me and believed it. And I think a lot of listeners who, whether they're in the queer community or not, this is a very familiar concept that we were given. And so I was in my early 20s and I don't know, Claire, that I would have been a safe person for someone different than myself. Someone from the queer community could have had just a regular conversation with me. And so I watched Oprah every day at 4:00. I was in my early 20s, I had my first child and was not. I was working early in the morning and we would watch Oprah. And there was a episode with one of her regulars, Nate Burkus. So Nate was her designer and she was always designing houses. And if you know me, you know I love design. And. And so I loved Nate and he was a designer, he was a gay man. I loved him. I loved him personally, although I still had my ideas about who he was, aside from faith. And this episode was about a tsunami that had hit where he was vacationing and his partner Fernando was killed in that tsunami. And so it wasn't about design. And I sat in front of the TV and I listened to his story and I sobbed because I realized that he was absolutely in love with Fernando, that they had a great love story.
And I was so absolutely moved in a new understanding of what it meant to be queer that I had never been given, I had never known through this space.
And from that moment on, I still went through a process of trying to deconstruct, apologize, grieve for my own beliefs.
But I started to become a safe space to hear personal stories, one on one stories from people in the queer community.
And then I was able to start to fight and vote and be an ally to queer Christians.
And it is part of why OSC is where OSC is today. But it actually took like a mediated listening. Sometimes we have to read books first. We don't have access to friends of color if we're white, or we don't have access if we're not a person with disabilities to those folks. And so we have to read their memoirs, we have to hear their stories and believe them and then become safe. So for me, that is one story that I just really took into myself and was incredibly changed by.
One of the questions within the podcast in 2022 was really you, Dana and Chelsea saying, hey, we represent a predominantly white church, we're a liberal church, we want to do the right thing. We don't always know what the right thing is to do when we are dealing with opponents and we want to stand in solidarity. I am struck by the verse in Matthew 5:44 that says, But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, but honestly, in a predominantly white middle class congregation, I don't know that we always can fully understand. I mean, in fact, I know that we can't always fully understand those that are persecuted for race. This kind of persecution that we're talking about, specifically around white nationalism, specifically around hatred of black and brown people, which is a lot of what Core talks about, is not something that we often see the mold, the majority of our church struggle with. So it made me think of Matthew 22 as a white liberal congregation. If we do take that we're supposed to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors.
I don't know that we can't add to love our neighbors as ourselves in Matthew 22 to that verse, because we need to take in these stories, believe them, and love them as ourselves. When we fight or labor for these just policies, that we labor for kindness and wholeness in a broken world where white supremacy is king.
I wanted to listen to what she tells us to do around being a liberal white church, what our role might be in this.
[00:15:51] Speaker C: That I think is the only hope for the country at large. There's no going back to before colonization and genocide and enslavement. There's only going forward in a way that acknowledges and reconciles with the past and finds a new way of being whole and together. And I think so many, especially in the progressive social justice spaces. I know that many white people tell me they think that their role right now is to be quiet and just let the people of color lead. And I appreciate that impulse because we have been marginalized for so long, but say, no, no, no. We actually need you. You have a very particular role to play that I think that this could be the generation where white people are redefining whiteness so that it's not just synonymous with domination or black blindness. But what if to be white was to be an accomplice, to be an ally, to co conspire to create that new whole.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: So our role. I'd love to hear what you found to be our role as two white women sitting here talking about this important issue, but one that we don't totally feel or get in the same way. How can we make her words part of us and love her as ourselves, love our neighbor as ourselves?
[00:17:20] Speaker B: As I listen to her, I'm taken back to 2020, when the black Lives Matter movement was gaining a lot of traction, especially on social media. We were all quarantined in our homes and people were wanting to show their support. And there was, I think it was called, like, the blackout movement, where you posted just like a black square on your Instagram or even a lot of more popular influencers or Celebrities were just handing their social media accounts off to people of color. And at the time it felt, I think it felt really good for white people. And, you know, that was almost five years ago. And looking back, a lot of these movements have gotten a lot of criticism from people now that we now that people have kind of been able to look back and think, oh, wow, Hindsight really is 2020 there. White people were kind of, in a sense, trying to do their best, but ended up taking the backseat and just saying, oh, we don't really need to do anything. We're just going to throw this black square up on our Instagram. We're just going to have people of color tell us what to do. And I think that it was really great that Valerie kind of spoke into that. Maybe not directly in that, but that's kind of the example that immediately comes to mind. I immediately think of Jesus and the Gospel of Luke and something. I'm always talking about the Gospel of Luke, if you know me. And one of the reasons why I love that is there is such a through line in that Gospel of Jesus, obviously being for the poor. He talks in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, blessed are the poor, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And that is not a prescriptive thing that he's saying. He's not saying, oh, you need to be poor and then you will get into the kingdom of heaven. He's saying, you who are poor, you who are weary, God is already with you. That is where God lives. And what that says to rich people when he says woe to you, he is saying that, you know, he later says in Luke 18 that how hard it is for a wealthy person to enter the kingdom of heaven, it's harder for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. He's not saying that rich people can't be a part of the kingdom of God. He's not saying that rich people can't follow Jesus and be a part of this movement. He's just saying it's going to be really hard. Like, you better like get to work. You can't just post your black square on Instagram and move on. And I think about that so much today in terms of us being these white, privileged, more middle class people, you know, we fit that description. It's so much harder for us to enter into that place of like where God is. And I'm thinking back to being with people who I grew up with, who I might disagree with now, but they're kind of the people who formed me and raised me with these very more like traditional, more conservative beliefs and a lot of these belief systems and people who are still very much in that are very much a part of my life still. You asked me about roles, I'm finally getting there. I really take my role as a white person who kind of has her feet in two worlds very seriously. It is not as if to say I am condoning any beliefs that I disagree with or think are harmful on that quote, unquote side. But it is to say that I feel like I have the capacity to sit and listen and look someone in the eye who I believe has different beliefs than me. Not only because I once believed that so that I can empathize, but I look like them. And so in a sense like me sitting there and listening to them is not a threat to them and they are not necessarily a threat to me.
[00:21:21] Speaker A: One of my other questions is what does grief work look like in a white liberal church? Because one of the things she's telling us is that one of our jobs as white people is not put the grief work of other white people on her, on people of color, but to actually do that grief work. Just as you are sharing, I look like them, so I can listen to them. So what do you think that can look like within the church context?
[00:21:54] Speaker B: I think that, I mean, Valerie Core talks about this, but when it comes to grief work, she talks a lot about, I don't want to use the word self care because that's thrown around so much, but she talks about this inner work, this caring for the self that has to be done before we can tend to others wounds. Because she also talks about listening to others stories as tending to their wounds. I think that, well, one, we have to tend to our wounds. We have to tend. When we're talking about the white liberal church here, we have to tend to the wounds within that and do that deep listening work there. That doesn't mean we're not doing deep listening work outside, but we're not able to do quality, healthy or even safe listening work if we're not doing it within ourselves. You even acknowledged in your beginning story about how you would say that you were not necessarily a safe person for a queer person to talk to at one point in your life because of your beliefs. But you, you did that internal work. And now you would say that you, you are. But that took some, some work within yourself first.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: I agree. I think it is deep listening. I am so proud of the Oceanside Sanctuary for picking books that center People that are different from us within this church context or within an American ideal and listen to their stories and believe them.
I am proud of the work that we have done for those who have struggled with deconstruction and do feel that they've had some trauma. I think tending to and believing the trauma that they have experienced within a church context and helping to unpack that and give grace for that is really important work. Fighting for justice within the city centering churches who are the historically black church of color within what we fight for or labor with them, try hard to allow ourselves to heal, but not make ourselves the center of that story.
Going before listening to those that have been doing this work for a long time and how they did it, I think those are all ways in which as a church we can help people grieve. And so going back to learning how to listen, to find the grief, to be a deep listener, a good listener, to remain in a very labor intensive relationship can be exhausting and difficult.
But she says it's our work. And I, and I believe her.
Going back to the black square on the Instagram, that is not labor. Labor is the crazy, craziest, most difficult experience I have ever been through.
And there is a moment, and Cora talks about this in her TED talk, you actually feel like you are going to die. When she encourages us to labor in this work of revolutionary love.
It is not easy. There is a literal hot ring of fire in labor. It is a shock to the system like nothing I've ever experienced. It is the most empowering, the most emotional and the hardest thing I've ever done. And so I love that. Again, she is taking that this isn't, this isn't like we can do this. And we're going to have this beautiful thing that happens. This is work. And it is absolute work for us to stand within our roles, wherever that is. And that's going to take discernment for each and every listener to discern. What's my role in this work? What is my role in this work of having a revolution of love?
And so I wanted to end with a clip, I think that an indirect bit about how we love ourselves.
[00:26:37] Speaker C: I firmly believe there is a voice of deep wisdom inside of each of us, that if we just take the stillness, the spaciousness to recover, to take a deep breath, to find the courage to say, I can stand in my humanity and affirm yours and imagine a way in which we will all have enough.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: So she talks about taking a deep breath, taking a moment to find the wisdom within Ourselves.
She starts with that. I would say from the Christian faith, to find the still, small voice to yoke our heart to the divine is the only way to remain with the vine, to go out and be able to over and over again do this labor. So I would love to hear from you. Is there a place where you are able to take stillness and spaciousness to recover from the good work that you do?
[00:27:47] Speaker B: I love what you said about union because I practice yoga. And the meaning of yoga is to yoke or union. It's all about integrating the body and the mind and integrating your bodily practice, the way that you are flowing and moving your body and breathing and taking that type of practice into your life. Sometimes yoga is this thing that is more restorative. Sometimes yoga can look more like pushing through something that's really, really difficult. Those bodily type of practices are things that really ground me and help me integrate those types of things into my daily life. I think of a practice that you introduced me to called contemplative listening, where I've done this with you in a more structured environment where someone has a chance to share for about five minutes, you hold that person in silent regard for a minute, and then you. You offer a blessing or an affirmation. I think that that is a beautiful thing to be done in a kind of structured, organized environment. But I have really learned so much from that that I've taken that practice into just how I listen to anyone. I'm a talker. I'm here, like, talking for a living, preaching and podcasting. I always have a response that I can say to someone, but that doesn't mean that I should respond or need to respond. And this practice of contemplative listening has really helped me to hold others in silent regard. I think that that's an opportunity that helps me to actually hear and listen to someone's stories. And it forces me in a really beautiful way to if I do say something and respond, I have time to think. I have time to offer them a blessing, an affirmation, rather than thinking about what I have to do with it. It allows me to listen and it allows them to be.
[00:30:08] Speaker A: In these past couple of episodes that I've been a part of, this one with Valerie Core and then before that, Cole Arthur Riley, they both talked about ancestors or wisdom giants as ways in which they were able to take care of themselves by looking at or being part of ritual or strength or self talk calls it the wise woman within herself that she has drawn from the mothers and grandmothers before her being someone that has learned that much of the way that I experience God is in rooted practice.
It occurred to me that making my Grandmother's Christmas fudge reading my mother's favorite Bible verse takes me to a place where I know that I belong in the world. I don't have to prove myself. I don't have to feel that I am losing ground because others are taking my spot. I can give them a spot because I belong, because my grandmother belonged, because my mother belonged.
And I can just share that. I can make that a bigger thing. Or I can make Christmas fudge and teach my daughters how to make Christmas fudge.
So going back to the grieving, one of the things that I have been thinking about as a church that perhaps we want to continue to provide and learn to provide better are rituals in which we can just remember that we are doing the embodied things that root us in a belonging of Christ.
And so we don't have to question, we don't have to be angry. We can walk in the peace of knowing that we're here, we have a role, and that doing these simple things remind us that we are connected to a grand table where we can all share our many things that we have together to make a beautiful meal, that we all have a place. As Carr says, we are at a table of abundance when we allow an open table.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: Some questions to consider has anyone with differing views listened to your story with empathy and wonder?
This episode discussed roles in the labor of revolutionary love.
Do you have a sense of your role in this work?
And finally, what practices help you to stay grounded and ready to engage with others stories compassionately?
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.
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