Sarah Bessey: Notes on an Evolving Faith

Written By Alexandra Brockman

Sarah Bessey is the author or editor of five books, including Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith. Sarah writes most prominently about leaving her evangelical upbringing and working through the deconstruction of her religious beliefs to create something that feels more true to her in its wake—as part of this, she co-founded the Evolving Faith community with some of her friends, including the wonderful and late Rachel Held Evans. Bessey writes prolifically about what it means to connect with her idea of God in a bigger and more expansive way—one that has moved from Simplicity, to Complexity, to Perplexity, to Harmony. In addition to Field Notes for the Wilderness, Sarah is also the editor of the New York Times bestseller A Rhythm of Prayer and Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women. In today’s conversation we talked about ideas and processes Sarah holds tenderly, including a shift from peace-keeping to peace-making and trying to articulate a vision of what she is for rather than who she is against. There is much in this conversation to which we can all relate.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: So is Evolving Faith, still an ongoing community?

SARAH BESSEY: Yeah. I'm still there. I'm still going.

ELISE: That what you do primarily?

SARAH: I would say that writing is probably primarily, but but evolving faith is definitely a huge aspect of it. In some ways I've actually really enjoyed being able to kind of step back a little bit and let everybody be With each other in the community, as opposed to like, I don't know...

ELISE: it be about you.

SARAH: right, I don't know. I've written enough words about my thoughts and feelings and spiritual formation, everybody else have a turn, you know?

ELISE: Well, and it's complicated. I feel like in any community that tends to be either religious, religious, adjacent, spiritual, like the instinct to guru ify people is strong. And so making sure it's about the container and the community rather than just like finding someone else to outsource your belief system to, or like how to cultivate your faith as a practice rather than being like, well, Sarah is just going to tell me what to think and feel.

SARAH: Yes. Well, and I think that that's a real temptation even, so I started evolving faith with Rachel Held Evans who was a really close friend. And I remember even when we were initially kind of starting out, we both had this like very lively horror of all those people who had like ministries or businesses named after themselves. And so we were like, please let this never be the Rachel and Sarah show. And then even, I think there was a tendency from a lot of folks after she passed away where I think even there was a temptation even in my own heart to make it into like a legacy project. Like, or a shrine, you know, even to Rachel. I think the thing that kept me from not doing that was knowing how much she would have hated it. Like, she would never in a million years have wanted to be anybody's guru or be up on the pedestal. It's a good check even for my own ego. I shouldn't be in charge of anybody. I should barely be in charge of my own self. So let's just do this together. Let's have more of a posture of being alongside of each other instead of being like. And now you can outsource everything you've ever wondered about to me.

ELISE: right. Well, I loved that part at the end of the book when you talk about being with a community, and instead of it being in a traditional sort of stage, congregate formation, it's like centered around the sacrament and communion and around each other, which is so different, right, than this idea of being spoken to from the pulpit, from someone who's on a higher level, right? I mean, I didn't grow up going to church. And I went to an Episcopalian high school where we sat in pews facing each other, which was very lovely, arc like. But I love this idea of community of spiritual seekers rather than...

SARAH: hmm.

ELISE: Congregant priest?

SARAH: Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think that that's something a lot of people have kind of found themselves at right now is saying, okay, well, if I don't feel, maybe it is just more of a sense of belonging in spaces where they may be used to feel like, well, this is the way you do it, or this is the only way towards God, or this is the narrow lane, you know, to kind of have that sort of experience. And so there's a lot of different ways that I think communities are rethinking that sort of model, the top down hierarchical, you know, we will just prepare the meal and then serve it to you kind of dynamic and moving it almost more towards like a potluck feel, everybody gets to bring the wisdom that they have. Everybody gets to bring their experiences, their perspective. And so, yeah, I find it freeing but more humane, and even in a lot of ways, it helps me love God better.

ELISE: Yeah. I have a lot of questions, if you don't mind, I'm sure many of these questions will sound naive, but in the evangelical tradition, which you have left, or evolved out of, or continue to have a shifting relationship to, or however you...

SARAH: of the above. Yeah, we can say it all.

ELISE: And all around. And thinking to, in my own work, looking at the way that rightly or wrongly with malintent or good intent, and I love where you and Jen Hatmaker talk about good fruit and bad fruit. But the way that the gospels, the way that these teachings, the way that these, often wisdom traditions, right, that are larger than Jesus or Buddha or Lao Tzu or any of these sort of ascended masters from various traditions. But the way that they're translated, and preached. And so I'm curious, like, as you engage with a church and someone who is giving sermons, sometimes I'm like, am I writing a sermon? but is that always an act of interpretation and an act of here is my position or perspective or sharing on this teaching? And that's what we rely on and then sometimes we take that as, fact, or we take that as gospel, but really it's been translated over time? Is that a silly question? I'm wondering, like, what does that priest do?

SARAH: Yeah, I think that's a fair question. From my perspective, and even my experience, it's interesting to me how often we almost want to outsource that work, right? Like we're looking for an expert or we're looking for someone to handle it for us at certain stages of our life. And I think some of the shifts maybe even that a lot of us have undergone, we've been living in a time. I mean, I don't know, here's some big, you know, religious language for it, maybe, but it feels apocalyptic, right? In that truer sense of like, there's a being a revelation or an unveiling. And so a lot of the institutions...

ELISE: revealing what's been hidden.

SARAH: Exactly. So when you have institutions, whether it's the church or, you know, political ones or other institutions that kind of have been a thing that has been a foundation or a source of stability or certainty in your life suddenly feel uncertain, yeah, you start wondering a lot of those questions. And I think that that's where a number of folks have found themselves. I think one of the things that I ended up realizing and I think maybe, I don't know if I'm really answering your question really super well, so if you need to, you know, take some of this with a grain of salt, but it almost reminds me of growing up in some ways.

ELISE: Yes.

SARAH: Right? How like when you're a kid, you're just so sure that the adults around you must know what they're doing and that there's going to be a point where you reach this threshold of certainty and grown up ness and then you kind of live into it a little bit longer and you're like, wait a minute, I think all of us are kind of figuring it out as we go and all of us are actually very human. And there's some very normal aspects of development that happen. And I think that one of the things maybe where we've missed it is thinking that somehow our spirituality isn't going to go through similar transformation or evolution, which means then looking at a lot of these spiritual teachers, even people who have brought goodness to you and saying, People. They're people. And almost all theology is autobiography at the end. We're all filtering everything that we know and hope about God or about the universe through our experiences, through what we know, through our place, our social location, all those things. They all inform it. So why would any other generation or any other leader be different?

ELISE: Yeah. Well, no, it's at the beginning of the book, and I wanted to actually talk about these stages and the way that it dovetails with I don't know if you've read Ken Wilber, but Richard Rohr talks about Ken Wilber and this idea of transcending and including. And there was someone who you mentioned who clearly is like a Ken Wilbury person and can you talk about these stages? Because when he when Ken Wilbur writes about growing up in these stages of psychological development, he can map them to sort of an evolution of faith, as well, where the faith feels like it might be falling apart, but it's really just getting bigger as it includes and transcends or transcends and includes. And so you had it as, is it like simple, complex? You had the four stages of faith. Is this ringing a bell?

SARAH: No, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that that's maybe one of the things that almost surprises me to this day that surprises people is that there's this almost...

You can't

ELISE: it when you're in it.

SARAH: Right? You almost...

ELISE: it's surprising. Yeah.

SARAH: And I think that sometimes that's almost the work that we're doing is almost normalizing these very normal things. And I remember like the first few times that I kind of ran into the wall of my own understanding and knowing, or my own certainty or answers even, a feeling like, well, I guess that's it. Like, I guess that means I'm done. You know, it's like it had never even entered my head that, you know, even that this could be an invitation, that your life could be an invitation that you would be living into these things. You know, Richard Rohr, like you said, talks about the transcendent include also the two halves of life. There's a number of other writers and philosophers and people who've looked at, I mean, you have Ricor's you know, First Nativity, Critical Distance, Second Nativity, James Fowler has these like six stages of faith. These things all exist kind of everywhere. I just never heard them in my actual life, right? Like they never trickled down. And so when I came across the four stages of faith formation that I referenced in the book, actually had their roots in Brian McLaren's work. And he talked about how these stages of simplicity, complexity, perplexity, and harmony are all part of our spirituality, and that nobody really gets to skip those without a lot of like emotional and spiritual dishonesty, or numbing almost. And neither is it linear, I think that's the other thing that maybe I thought for some time is just this idea of like, well there's always a strict progression, you know that you're going through and it's going to look very straightforward but instead I think even within these stages of faith formation whether you're in a stage of simplicity. When you're just building kind of the box that eventually you'll have to dismantle you know, or you find yourself in a stage of asking a lot of questions or thinking that things don't quite add up or your if this, then that equations aren't adding properly any longer. Or even those stages around harmony, a feeling like you've kind of integrated everything that was and everything that is and everything that could be and you have that level of openness. Those things are all cyclical. Nobody ever arrives fully and completely, which is both good news and bad news, right?

ELISE: it's so stunning when they start intersecting with other systems of psychological development, like Carol Gilligan, selfish, care, universal care, integral and then also, it's important for people to remember that these aren't givens, like, ideally, you move through these stages of psychological development, but as you know, coming from an evangelical tradition, some people get stuck at care, as in, I only care about and I guess the way it would dovetail, and tell me if this is accurate from your perspective, is it in that selfish phase or that simplicity phase, it's the magic and mythical, it is like my Jesus and then it moves into like, well, these are my people, this is my church the people who look like me and behave like me. It's care, but it's not universal care. Then you get into like, this is a universal world, religion, application for all of us, and these are the values, but it's still not quite there to this point where the integral stage where you're like, well, actually I can see that there maybe are many wisdom traditions, or many wisdom holders who have walked this earth pointing us towards something that's bigger than us. Which is hard to reconcile, I would imagine with any really fundamental school of religion, which is just by nature stuck in that second stage, right?

SARAH: No, absolutely. I think that's maybe one of the reasons why people run into that brick wall of organized religion at times is because, this is very generalized, but a lot of organized religion is set up to best function at that stage of the, if this, then that, or the good versus evil, or the, we're the insiders, these are the outsiders. And it's not even necessarily as intentional, but when you begin to feel that stretching past and beyond just care for me and mine, or that sense of like, I don't know, even literalism or fundamentalism or, that can kind of exist within those spaces, there's almost this sense of, well, now what? Right. And so I think that's what even where a lot of people find themselves struggling within institutional religion, because it does end up starting to feel that way. Right? It's all set up for this particular stage of faith. What does it look like when you move into another stage? And how do you refine belonging, refine community, or even recreate or imagine what it might look like to have a more generous posture.

ELISE: Yeah. And when you go to the psychological development models outside of faith, they would say, well, the Bible was written at a time when it was really only care only like the mythic magic like they're all these other levels of development hadn't started to occur yet And so I think a lot of faith is in being a relic of its time and when people get scared to let it, to your point, evolve, move, expand it can feel, I'm sure, terrifying. And yet, it's like, well, that through line of care is still there. So how do you just make it bigger? Like, how do you make that circle bigger, more inclusive, and more loving, which is sort of the theme of your whole book.

SARAH: What I'm hoping for, anyway.

ELISE: Yeah.

SARAH: Part of it, is just almost this sense of like it's a profoundly unshepherded season in our lives. And it can feel very lonely. And speaking from my own experience within particular versions of religion or evangelicalism or groups that are adjacent to that it can feel scary.

ELISE: Yeah.

SARAH: And really lonely. And so being able to come alongside people or just even reassure them like, Hey, look, you're not bad. You're not broken. You're exactly on the right sort of path. You know, and this is exactly, actually an invitation to begin to step into something new. I think that that's really underappreciated in posture. I think maybe because I remember those seasons of my life and how panicky it can make the people around you when you start peeking behind the curtain.

ELISE: Yeah. No. And it is terrifying. And I know you love Father Richard Roar, too. I mean, anything that he writes is I love but that his, the wisdom pattern and this idea of order, disorder, and reorder and like, and we are clearly, I think we can all agree in a period of disorder. We're tearing everything apart, rightly, wrongly, sometimes in a haphazard way sometimes in a way that feels, I'm sure, out of control, or maybe is too much, and in other ways is entirely necessary, but we're in that space or that exhale between the reorder. And it's scary.

SARAH: Yeah, it's profoundly unsettling, right? And so I think that's where moments like what you cultivate with Pulling the Thread and the conversations that are being had and even within the book, just even that normalization and that blessing of even the disorientation, right? Because I think for too long, maybe we've kind of assumed that there can be painless growth.

ELISE: Yes. It's true. Or that it's natural, or it's gonna happen, or Yeah.

SARAH: it's maybe a bit Disney fied, sometimes there's almost a sense of like you can buy your way to it, and there's not really a life hack for the wilderness. A lot of it is embodied, a lot of it is actually having to walk it out, a lot of it will look a little bit messy, but that's exactly it, to your point, it's that disorientation, you know, that ends up coming to us. But oftentimes when some of those things are stripped away, you almost have to unlearn some things about God or about the world or about the universe or about yourself in order to even have room for re imagining or learning something new or revisiting it.

ELISE: Yeah. No. Certainly. And it requires death. I mean, you write about that so beautifully, and it might not be Big D death, it might be death of relationships, death of jobs, death of community, and we're terrified. And I thought that the way that you wrote about the forest and the trees, and the regrowth was so beautiful. It's like, it's not about raising it all...

SARAH: yes.

ELISE: in order to create something new. It's like the pruning, the ongoing sort of push towards energy that's pushed towards growth, but that might come out of existing tree stumps.

SARAH: Yeah, that's one of my favorite stories, actually, in the book, because it surprised me, I think that you have a very similar experience growing up in Montana of just, you always feel a little bit on the doorstep of the wilderness.

ELISE: Yeah.

SARAH: And it never takes you very long to get somewhere where there's not any people if you really wanted to.

ELISE: Yeah.

SARAH: which does happen at times. And I remember coming across that article, I think it was in the Smithsonian magazine where they talked about this practice of coppicing of growing new trees out of the existing stumps of old trees. And one of the things that I remember being really struck by in that imagery or that metaphor is first of all, that idea of like, you get to bring along everything that you were too. There's this sense of you have to raise it to the ground and pour salt on the soil, like everything that formed you both positively and negatively gets to come along and inform what comes next, but then also the fact that that method of growing trees and then harvesting trees actually contributes to the ecological diversity of the forest floor and the strength and hardiness of the actual tree itself. And even that, kind of almost like a light turning on for me of just being like, okay, you know what, when you make some room in places that are rocky or not conducive to growth, or you would take one look at it and be like, well, this doesn't look like farmland, you know, or whatever else, or something that could possibly grow anything that's helpful or useful to people. There's this sense of even the places where you feel like you've been cut off, there's new growth there. And also it can bring greater depth and richness and goodness, not only to you, but to everything that's around you, which I find really interesting and beautiful to your point, even around the stages of faith formation, pardon me, or a fit of formation, this sense of care that extends beyond.

ELISE: Yeah.

SARAH: beyond just my own little stump or my own little tree that's being grown that it actually connects to my neighbor and it connects to the place where I stand, it connects to every single aspect of being a person.

ELISE: I like the way that you set some relationships up and I want to talk about this idea that so many of us are trained to be against something but not necessarily to articulate what we're for. And I want to talk about the difference between discipline and practice, which I thought was so beautiful. And then I want to talk about peace making versus peacekeeping, I just came back from a retreat and keeping the peace was a big theme for a lot of women in a very painful, self betraying way. So let's start with being for something, rather than against because I thought the way you walked us into how that's the construction of not this, some of us know that like that reflexive not this, I don't want this but we don't necessarily know how to stand for what we want.

SARAH: Yeah, well, I think that goes back to even then even the notions of desire, or of longing, or of knowing and discernment that a lot of us were almost, I don't know, there could be a lot of different factors of why that happens. I mean, I don't know that I really had a chance in hell of doing anything. You know, a nice white lady from Canada, we highly value politeness and manners. Right. And so this notion of saying, I think it's actually really important to name what I'm against.

ELISE: Mm

SARAH: That that's not a lesser, that it's important for us to even be able to name and articulate that to say, not this is can actually be quite revolutionary for a lot of us who have just been kind of sucking it up and moving along and taking what we get and not even daring to ask ourselves whether or not something is working or you know, or, or serving us. And so being able to name like, this is what I'm against is very, very valuable work. But not stopping there and being able to keep moving through that to find what you actually want to be for. And I think one of the places that kind of surprised me on that was in the early days, cause we have four kids, three of them are teenagers now. My eldest actually graduated from high school this very week.

ELISE: Oh god. Are you okay?

SARAH: You know what, I am like compartmentalized, I'm sure on some level it's not healthy, Elise, but this is how we are getting through the days. So this is all a big part of it, but I remember when they were little, the urgency and a lot of the narrative was to make a lot of my decisions as a mom from a posture of fear.

ELISE: Yeah.

SARAH: and instead wanting to say, well, what does it look like to mother out of what I'm hoping for, or what this might actually look like? And that began to shift me towards a more generative and less controlling even form of presence with my kids. And then I began to kind of think that way, almost in terms of all of the different invitations of our time and the moments of time that we find ourselves in, not just within our personal lives, but within the larger community. And this sense of like, well, it's really easy to point at all the things everyone's doing wrong and all the things that I would like to see, you know, end or change or whatever else, but then what does it look like to live into what we want to be for and even name some of those things. And I think that that then gave me a path towards something that was not just reactionary, but generative and creative.

ELISE: Hmm, and that's so important. I don't know if you know the work of Conscious leadership group but the key idea is that they coach and one of my dear friends is like a CLG person we just led this retreat together and But the it's about being above or below the line and most of us spend most of our lives below the line There's no shame and being below the line. That's where all of our growth happens. But when you are below the line you are at the mercy of fear, which you mentioned fear of loss of approval, fear of loss of control, fear of loss of safety and security. When you are below the line, the world is happening to you.

SARAH: It is.

ELISE: it's a place of victimhood ultimately, not to say that there aren't real victims, but it's a place of powerlessness and feeling unable to respond. And it's only when you can get above the line that the world happens through you and by you. And that requires like attending to your fear, right? But when you're above the line to what you, everything you're saying, it's like, that's when you can be curious. That's when you can be open. That's when you can start to think of. Okay, if I'm if the world is happening through me and by me, what am I creating? And it's really big and really hard. And one of those ideas that you have to work for the rest of your life. But it's one way of looking at activism in any form of, for example, as a feminist, am I doing feminism from below the line or above the line? And what are the distinctions? And again, I think it is part of that. It's moving from, I am against this. Of course I'm against this. Right? I'm against blatant misogyny. I don't love patriarchy, etc. But when I get above the line, what are we going to build in its place? What's the transitional movement to something that's more creative, more open, bigger, more inclusive, more diverse? So I loved that. Talk to us about discipline, which is a tough word, even though disciple is a beautiful word. And shifting or downshifting really to this idea of having practices and what that means for you.

SARAH: I love that word downshifting. That's a great one. I think that one of the reasons why is because any of your listeners who came of age, I think, especially in the wild stories of the 80s and the 90s in Christian evangelicalism, there was a heavy emphasis on spiritual disciplines on the things that you were supposed to do. Things like quiet time and, and prayer and witnessing and fasting and, you know, that sort of thing. And there was this sense of like structure to it. And so there would almost kind of develop these rhythms for a lot of us of failure and feeling like you weren't measuring up, you weren't living up to it. There was this high degree of expectation and demand almost, and not, I don't know, it just, it did end up feeling very heavy. And it ended up feeling almost like a burden you were bearing or another way you were failing almost all the time. And so one of the things I think initially, you know, even 20 years ago, when I began to question and push back on a lot of the religious environment of my life was like, well, you know what, I'm not doing this anymore. You know what I'm no more shame, no more you ought to, you know, whatever. And yet I found that I missed good rhythms in my life. And so that was where I began to actually explore that notion of practice, which I know is in a tremendous amount of religions outside of my own and actually has a really beautiful tradition within mine that I just wasn't aware of at the time. And so I think that there's a, there's this rhythm of practice that feels more accessible. It implies that I don't have it perfect yet, but it also expands those notions. I think one of the things about practices that I love, is this notion of it's not perfect. I haven't got it mastered, just by the very word, it's implied that I'm working it into my life and out of my life and through my life, almost like in my mind, I'm picturing like a woman who's like kneading it into bread dough. And so then there's the room. There's room to play. There's room to set it aside for a time. There's room to reimagine some of these practices. There's room to expand our notions of belonging and spirituality and faithfulness of our place in the world. And then that to me then opened up and almost reintroduced some of those things that maybe I had once rejected. And thought, well, there's no room for me here. And whether it's prayer or generosity or whatever else, it's like, no, I think that there's some good practices here. And I think there's a way to do this in a way that looks like being for things instead of just against things like we already talked about. But then what does it look like to have some room for mistakes and for learning and for humility? And even some play, I think.

ELISE: Yeah. And I think that this is, even when you go back to sort of that original definition of sin, which is what my book is about, but it's about missing that idea of missing the mark. It's not supposed to be perfect. I really don't think we're supposed to nail this, it's like target practice and over time You know, maybe we get closer and again thinking of even the idea of sin and all of those very human instincts and impulses as being what makes us human. And so it's not about pretending like we're not human or pretending like these aren't totally essential instincts and appetites, but becoming closer to ourselves as we figure out what that looks like in the world. I thought that was beautiful and I love that idea of practicing. It's all any of us can truly hope for. Okay. Peacemaking.

SARAH: Oh, this is the worst.

ELISE: I know, but I loved your honesty.

SARAH: This is the one that was the hardest for me, so I'm glad you brought it up.

ELISE: Oh, the price of peace. But yeah, this instinct that so many of us have, which I think is a beautiful impulse, by the way, I just want to name it like peace is an enviable goal. That is the goal, right? Peace on earth and harmony and integration. And yet so many of us don't know how to go for the thing, right? Don't know how to go for that bigger idea of peace. And so we maintain the status quo instead. Can you talk about bit about this?

SARAH: This is one of those practices within the book that is the one that I am most in process on. There's a few that come very easily to me. Or very naturally to me, and I think that's true for most of us, depending on kind of who we are. And there are some people who this one comes really easily to. That is not my story. And the notion of identifying the difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking meant that I had to learn how to be okay, with disruption, I think I've often made the mistake of confusing like an absence of active conflict for peace, or that I have kind of assumed that just if everybody was more nice, or if we all kind of got along a bit better or if we were just calm down. Which, I mean, I'll just save everybody a little bit of trouble and just let you know that's not peacemaking. Like, that is the definition of, like, just painting over something that's rotten, you know, at the core. By its very nature, light will disrupt the darkness. And so having to become okay with disruption and even transformation, I think is probably going to be a lot of the ongoing work of my life. I think that it's learning how to handle confrontation, but also learning how to handle conflict. It's learning how to be okay with discomfort. It's learning that you get to participate. I think that's one of the things that I've really loved about the life and ministry of Jesus, as I understand it, is this invitation to co create. That it's not a thing that is being imposed on us, but a thing we're being invited to participate in. And that's what I see peacemaking as now is this beautiful invitation to be included, that we get to be part of the work of making things right, and of making things good and of seeing justice come, of embodying the goodness that we really hope for. And I think that's one of the reasons maybe why the word practice matters so much to me on this one is because it can feel very small and it can feel a little futile and sometimes quite ridiculous to outside eyes. And yet that work that is being done in and through us is one that looks like embodied goodness. It looks like peacemaking. It looks like the interactions, not only within your own soul and with your own self, but also within your community or your neighbors, your family, to say, okay, what does it mean to actually engage instead of just hide and duck my head and silence myself or silence what I know is true, you know, within all of this. And so I think that those were the invitations that I had and I continue to have is to not settle for numbness and not settling for just going along to keep the peace, but instead bringing your full self. And your full longings and your full hopes, even for the world and not letting yourself be inoculated out of them.

ELISE: Yeah. And it's big. I mean, that's hitting again, one of those core fears, fear of loss of approval, which is related to obviously fear of safety and security, you know, being cast out, you've experienced this being cast out from your community losing your people losing that which makes you safe. And it can be incredibly difficult to stand apart and say, yeah, I can't keep this peace. I can't, I have to stand for something bigger something different.

SARAH: Me how often we almost want to assume that it's big and sexy too, that it's for the big activists or it's for the big movements, and we forget to integrate that notion of peacemaking into our actual lived lives, because then it does become something that actually is embodied in how we are moving through our lives. And it will look like a lot of things that maybe don't get a lot of traction or notice from other people around us, whether it's showing up for the school board meeting, where things are going off the rails, and you're going to be in that room in this particular community, right, whether it's engaging with your members of parliament, or it is showing up at the family dinner and being able to stand beside the person who's, you know, struggling in the midst of all of that. There's this sense of like, look, there's a way to choose hope in the actual daily interactions of our lives to try to make some peace in those moments and not be deceived into thinking that just an absence of conflict is the same thing.

ELISE: And that conflict inherently must look I want to say almost like this masculine idea of like raging and burning it down that there's a version of conflict and conflict negotiation and assertion that lives in the feminine values again that are not specifically only for women, right? Female does not equal feminine. But that are still grounded in relatedness, integration, and care. Where you aren't saying, I don't stand for this, you are expelled, you are ostracized, you are canceled, you are bad, you are wrong. But saying, no, I stand for something, and this that we are doing right here is not that.

SARAH: Well, I don't think it ever loses sight of the sacredness and personhood of the person with whom you're engaging, right, which is maybe what goes down to the some of those feminine notions of empathy...

ELISE: yeah.

SARAH: and of seeing each other. I mean, I know how much, I think especially at this moment in time, so many of us long for an enemy because it simplifies things. It simplifies that if you're on the outside and I'm on the inside, there has to be this scapegoat or this other, and so being able to reject that and say, no, I'm one of work from this position of belonging or from this position of compassion and empathy and connection and repair even. I think that's another word that I've really latched on to in a lot of peacemaking energy is around this notion of repair.

ELISE: Yeah. And this might be too heady or too out there. Will you please check me?

SARAH: The more out there in woo woo, the more I'm tracking with you, Elise. We're good.

ELISE: but even thinking about this idea, you just mentioned sort of the scapegoat and our desire for identifying the other and saying, we're good, you're bad, like, we will destroy you. And I don't know if you know the work of Rene Girard, who was this polymath, who was a big Christian, and but he talks about how this idea of scapegoating the mob, really and I think that this has to do with peacemaking, which is like part of it is the willingness or an ability to see the mob action or the unconscious mob action and stand apart from it. And he tells the story of how the Jesus story in some way turns what had been the mythical scapegoating structure of our culture and society on its head. And he offers an interpretation, he talks about how even when he is taken and Peter follows him and then stands with everyone else at the fire, and he's called out multiple times, like, aren't you with that man? And he renounces him three times. No, I don't know him. No, I don't know him, which I guess Jesus had predicted. You're way more of a Bible scholar than I...

SARAH: no, you got it.

ELISE: Okay. And then after the crucifixion essentially this idea when Jesus says, forgive them, they know not what they do, Gerard says is that what Jesus is suggesting is that this unconscious mechanism, the scapegoating mechanism is so big that they do not know what they do. It swept up Peter, right? Like the first apostle, he participated in the same mechanism. And so we might think that we're in pursuit of something righteous or good, and yet we're not able to see what we're up to and that that peacemaking, in a way is being able to say, no, actually, I'm not going to participate in this. I am not for this. This is not my values. Does that track?

SARAH: Mm hmm. Absolutely. It does. Absolutely. It does. I think that's one of the reasons why I ended up finding a home again within the faith is because of people like Rene Girard and other folks who taught me how to read the Bible from the underside.

ELISE: Mm.

SARAH: and taught me how to read the Bible through a lens other than my own or one that was like a dominator culture, which is a phrase that bell hooks uses a lot. There's this notion of almost reintroducing these stories for myself. And I think Rene Girard was one of them. And that idea of like, you know what, there's a lot of things that people think happened on the cross, but I think that's one of them. Right, is this idea of turning some of those things upside down and even exposing the things that drive us towards violence.

ELISE: Yeah. And that it can catch us all. I think so many of us are convinced that we've evolved past that. Yes, that can't be me. I'm above that.

SARAH: And yet we're still looking for the litmus test. We're still looking for the purity code. We're still looking for the who's in and who's out. Yeah, no, for sure.

ELISE: a hundred percent. I'd be curious as a person of faith, who's encountered scripture, I guess, at various stages of your own development, simplicity, complexity, perplexity, harmony, when you go back and as you've gone in and out of having Faith or a church or that church has moved from like maybe mega church to dining room table. I don't know but isn't that another thing about Jesus wasn't he a wandering person with 12 followers?

SARAH: Yeah.

ELISE: Like he wasn't in...

SARAH: no, absolutely. Well, I think that that's where even it kind of gets a lot of permission or room. I think sometimes we miss some of those things along the way because that's where it can almost become quite funny where you just begin to see like, Oh, there's, there's kind of this core thing here in the middle of it, but also we've attached and assigned and added a lot of things to this story that weren't there and then acted they are there. And I think that's one of the things that maybe I really loved about revisiting a sacred text like like the Bible later on in my life after having lived a little while and walking away from it for a time and then revisiting it and with holding hands of people who maybe read it differently or understood it differently, like Rene Girard, like we talked about. There was almost this sense of like, I think sometimes the scriptures are more honest than churchy people are.

ELISE: Mm

SARAH: about a lot of that mess and that complexity and the room even that we have within community or within how this is embodied or within how we look at it. I think that's one of the things I find really refreshing about the Bible is that they're more honest about how messed up all these people are than we are. And we have like most of the New Testament because these churches were wilding out and they were trying to get it figured out. Right. And so in a lot of ways, the hot mess of being a person is embodied there. And then you have room for all the different kinds of prayers that rise up to you and on the paths that are available to you and the ways that you can begin to see what this might actually look like to have that sort of goodness and hope and joy and love that looks on the other side of that.

ELISE: Well, and it goes back to how we started the conversation, which is then these become texts. And like, I think it's so important, which is always fascinating to me to remember, like, Jesus didn't write. He didn't write any of this down. So this is like, as heard, translated, and then translated from, Aramaic, Coptic, like all of these languages over time, and then preached. And I'm so guilty of this, of hearing the translation or looking for someone to explain, the source material is always difficult, right? I feel this way about Jung. Like, I struggle to read Jung and understand it, whereas I love reading a good Jungian translate him.

SARAH: Exactly.

ELISE: And the same as religion, with Jesus we take what we hear or what's told to us as the literal truth, but so much of this is like a an invitation to get closer to what was actually said and it's hard. It's harder. I would rather often be told.

SARAH: Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, I think a lot of us would, right? I think that maybe that's part of where we kind of find ourselves almost, you're allowed to say, I don't know.

ELISE: I don't know. It's my mantra.

SARAH: Right? That that can be one of, that can be a very sacred answer. To a lot of these things and I'm interested and I'm curious and I have some wonder about it and I have some doubts about it. And so let's lean into those instead of just numbing them or settling for despair.

ELISE: or Yeah before we started recording we were talking about this, but I feel like it's relevant Can you talk about the formation of evolving faith and what that community is? And then finding sort of the temperature at which you engage so that it stays a sacred container and not necessarily like a replication the same pattern in a way that you were trying to escape, can you talk a bit about that?

SARAH: for sure. So Evolving Faith started off kind of as honestly a bit of a weekend dream for Rachel Held Evans and I. We were both writers and we'd been friends for a number of years and we kind of had this idea, well, what if we put together this weekend and just let everybody who's exploring a lot of these questions, she had just come out with her book, Searching for Sunday. I think the subtitles loving leaving and finding the church again. And then I was writing in a similar lane. And so we were like, you know, let's have some fun one weekend. We were overwhelmed by the response of people to it. I think we severely underestimated it. I think we spent most of like that first weekend looking at each other with like equal parts of like delight and joy and complete terror, you know, so we came home from that weekend, and we're like, first of all, it was a mess, you know, logistically, in every way possible. 1500 came to a thing that was meant for 900. Like, the parking alone, was just, honestly, coffee ran out. It was grim. But we ended up coming out of that and building out what we kind of saw as like a three to five year plan of just being like, okay, you know what people want is community. And what they want is someone to talk to about these things. And even going back to some of the things we were talking about earlier, about how lonely this season of life can feel, I think for people who find themselves in particular communities, Because you know the stakes. When you start peeking behind the curtain, or you start pulling that thread there can be a lot of losses that come along with that. You don't just lose your certainty, your version of yourselves. There's a lot of people who lose their vocation, they lose their community, they lose every friend they had. And so, there was this drive towards community that kind of emerged. And so, that was the origin point for a lot of what we do now. Rachel passed away in 2019 and I spent a lot of time that summer with Jeff Chu and Jim Chafee who are alongside the work with us trying to decide, like, what do we do with this moving forward? And I kept revisiting that same thing that we talked about at the beginning of just like, Rachel and I never wanted this to be like Rachel and Sarah Ministries, or for it to be like a replica or a way of us saying, like, I don't know, even the finality of an evolved faith. Like, Hey, you lost all your lovely answers. Here's a nice new tidy set. Go ahead and take these and keep going. That's not actually what we're doing here. And so being able to say, I think the only way we can carry on with this after losing Rachel and in the aftermath of everything was to say, it's got to be about the people. It's got to be about the relationships that they have with one another, the conversations that they have with one another, the ways that they can find each other and explore things and learn things and read books together and develop affiliate groups where you get to hang out with other people who are neurodivergent or other people who are clergy, whose job depends on them upholding certain things. And yet they find themselves questioning it. You know, or BIPOC folks, the notion of Deconstructing evangelicalism looks super different. And so I think having spaces like that took the pressure off, I think, of me to have the answers for everybody. Lord knows I don't. And so being able to have room for friendship and for exploration and for questions, even for discomfort, I think has been really helpful the last five years. I'm excited to see where it keeps going.

ELISE: No. And I think that there's something really beautiful, again, in not replicating that sort of guru priest relationship where it's like, actually, how do we create a container? How do we share tools? How do we start to practice being with each other and being for each other without creating the same hierarchical relationships or where the hierarchy is like based on wisdom and knowledge and experience of life, where maybe you find an older female mentor, you know, like experienced the same losses as you. I think that's really beautiful and something that I've been thinking about a lot as just coming, being a little high off of this retreat this past weekend, but hearing from the women who came, like we're alone in our communities. We don't have people to talk to about spirituality or questions of faith or just the world or like being more progressive than our families potentially or our communities.

SARAH: Differently than how we were raised

ELISE: Or being more conservative than their groups. It's all over the place. And people are really need, need that. And my friend Courtney, who did the retreat with me as this coach that I had mentioned, I think this is really powerful, but she talks about how all the work she wants to do is group work for women, because she thinks it's so important for us to practice our growth and individuation within the construct of relationship and integration, without it being like, go out into the world and conquer.

SARAH: No hashtag Girlboss.

ELISE: Yeah, 100%.

SARAH: Absolutely. I think that there's a lot of agency to that, but it's an agency that is flipped maybe than how we've been taught to view power or how we've been taught to view even stability or strength which then leaves a lot of room for who you actually are.

ELISE: Yes. And it's a flip on this paradigm that I think we've all been bottle fed of, yeah, this is what it looks like to be a person in the world and to say, actually, can we assess like our contempt for these feminine values at collectively and center those because who are we if we aren't doing this together?

SARAH: absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's maybe one of the things that is so healing about embracing evolution, even as part of our birthright or how we're moving through the world. I think, I mean, I can't speak to everyone else's experience, but I know for a lot of us who came up in a particular version of even womanhood within evangelicalism, the notion of there not being a script. Or of a small cookie cutter, teeny tiny box of what womanhood will look like, or what what that might actually be in your life can be incredibly freeing. And yet it's so different than the narrative that you've often heard. And so that's where integration work like that, I think is so deeply important because it genuinely does feel like, oh, I'm going to have to learn a whole new way of being a person now, because I was given a very small script. And if I step outside of the lines on that, then what? And that's when the fun begins. Yeah.

ELISE: I meet a lot of readers and people who came from a really fund, fundamental faith background, Mormonism, whatever it may have been had that literal, come to Jesus, like had that breaking point, left the faith. And then as they come back into some sort of relationship, as it sounds like you have, where they're like, but I love Jesus or I love whatever their faith foundation might be. Like, that's also, I think, really beautiful. Like learning how to relate to those core truths from a different level or different vantage point can really feel like home.

SARAH: Mm hmm. Absolutely. I think that's one of the things I've kind of wondered, is it a form of faithfulness or stubbornness? But I'll go with either one. I'll take either one that I'm not that easy to get rid of. And to me, there's still something so good and core, you know, like that, to your point around fundamentalism or essentialism, there's something that I find incredibly compelling about this way of moving through the world and yet generous now in a way that it used to feel scarce and small and fearful. And now it feels like an adventure. Not that that means it's always easy, but to your point, I think even what you experienced on the retreat this weekend, right? It's just like, you can go into some of those intense, heavier corners in moments of our lives, and yet emerge with a lot of meaning and a lot of goodness and a lot of connection.

ELISE: Yeah, and the church may be wherever you happen to find yourself. It's not an external structure.

SARAH: God is hiding in plain sight throughout our entire lives.

ELISE: Well, Sarah, thank you. Thank you for your beautiful work and and all your peacemaking in the world.

Sarah’s latest book, Field Notes for the Wilderness, is beautiful and as you might have been able to tell she is a brilliant guide to the wilderness and she writes about the beginning of her own deconstruction: “A rueful smile for all of us who did everything right and yet everything went wrong because it turns out, life isn’t a recipe to follow and someon’e interpretation of the Bible isn’t a blueprint, and prayer isn’t a vending machine, an faith isn’t a synonym for control, and Scripture isn’t an answer book, and the scripts we were given fell flat.” And then, just to read you a little bit more so you clearly hear her voice: “Hello to all those who deeply regret their short-term mission trips; or broke up with a girlfriend because it was time to date Jesus; or whose parents gave them a purity ring; or who faithfully followed the probably-tax-eempt-status-disqualifying voter guie at the election; or who protested at an abortion clinic they later secretly visited. Some of us landed here because our heroes turned out to be more fallible and broken than we can bear. Welcome to all of us who have lost friends and family and every sense of belonging we ever had. It turned out that what we thought was love was actually mutually agreed upon likemindedness.”

I love conversations like this because I think it points to how so many of us are map-making and looking for ways forward to knit together communities to figure out what we stand for, not so much what we stand against. There’s so much against-ness, I think we’re exhausted, but finding communities and many of us feel scattered or far away from people who might share our values or the values we want to live, but keep looking, there are more of us then I think we know. I’ll see you next week.

Alexandra Brockman
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