Upending the Patriarchy with Carolyn Custis James / Transcript

Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.

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Carolyn 0:00

What I've come to understand from my study of the Bible is that we have taken patriarchy as the Bible's message. And I think, and I've written about this in a book called Maelstrom, that the Bible dismantles patriarchy and it starts early on by doing that. When you look at Genesis one and two, God creates male and female to rule creation, to rule and subdue all of creation. He's entrusting his creation to them, for them to be his agents as his image bearers, and he's calling them to do it together and he blesses this arrangement. And so the rule is outward toward creation for flourishing.

Seth Price 1:22

Hi, welcome back to the Can I Say This At Church podcast, I am Seth and I am excited that you're listening. So we have teetered off at 75 reviews on iTunes, as of recording this towards the central part of March but we need to bust that to 100. I don't know why but 75 just feels…ehh…so if you have not yet done so please rate and review the show on iTunes. I would appreciate it. I love reading those. It's it's one of the it's one of the many forms of feedback that I really like. Which leads me to my next point. If you have not yet leave me a comment on the show, on Facebook or on Twitter or by email at CanISayThisAtChurch@gmail.com, I really love reading those, even if I don't necessarily agree with them or when you don't necessarily agree with the content of the show, I really enjoy the intentionality behind that. And I would encourage more of you to do so just let me know what you think what you want to hear even quite a few of the future guests that are currently being booked are a direct result from recommendations from the Patreon community and so, so thankful for that. If you haven't supported the show in that way. I would encourage you to do so find the links to that at Can I Say This At Church.com just click the big support button in the top right.

These past few years have just been different for me. I as many of you that listen know I have three kids, but two of them are just you know, young women and I'm terrified to mess up. I'm terrified to embrace a roll of patriarchy that is unhelpful and that is not truthful and that perpetuates a system where my daughters aren't allowed to be something just because they were born female. I don't believe it in any way, shape or form. But that leaves a lot of questions for me, you know, what's the role of man? Is that a role that even matters? How do we deal with that with intersex, stuff like that? There's just so many questions there and so it is a huge nugget to tackle. And so I sat down with Carolyn Custis James, and we talked a bit about patriarchy, and manhood and womanhood, and what it looks like to live in partnership together. And what that should look like in community with one another. I love this conversation. Very much so. So I can't wait for you to hear it. Here we go. Carolyn custis James.

Seth Price 4:11

Carolyn Custis James, welcome to the show. I'm excited that we could make this work. I'm excited that you said yes. One of the big lacking things in all of last year was I just don't have enough female voices. But what I find often in my life is female voices sound a lot more like the God that I want to worship, then the dad voice in me. And so I'm glad to have you on and I'm glad that you're here. Welcome.

Carolyn 4:37

Thank you. Well, I'm really pleased to be on your program.

Seth Price 4:42

Well good. There will probably be a bunch of people that are unfamiliar with you. And so if you could just in a nutshell over the handful of minutes, say, you know this is what makes Carolyn…Carolyn, kind of your upbringing and kind of theologically how you got to where you're at today for some context?

Carolyn 4:59

Okay. Well, I'm a PK (pastors kid). My father was a pastor. So I grew up in the church, I grew up on the Bible, and had a very specific idea of who I was as a female and what God's plan was for me. That I would marry after college, that I would become a mom that I would build my life around my husband and God's calling on his life. And what happened to me after college was really, I think all of my work ultimately has come out of the decade that followed college because I didn't get married. There wasn't anyone I wanted to marry. And at first it was, well, this is maybe a lull in the plan, that when as it stretched on it became more and more of a struggle of you know has God abandoned me because I thought everybody else stories moving forward and mine was going nowhere. And it also became a struggle with what it means to be a woman and what is God's calling on me is this something I can miss? Or, you know, as the the longer I was in this, the bigger the questions got them, you know, because I would see women who's, who got married in and couldn't have kids or who got married and their family fell apart, there was a divorce or something their (like) husband died, you know, and just the contingencies of life we're hitting all kinds of, you know, changing all kinds of stories. So the questions got bigger and bigger for me, and I ended up going to seminary during those years. And just had a hunger to go deeper. I was very frustrated with a lot of things that were written for women because I felt like we need we need more meat in our stories. I mean, I was I was finding that my understanding of God was not enough, and that I had a lot of false things that I believed about him that, you know, he would abandon me. Or that, you know, my story wouldn't matter as much as somebody else's to him.

And so that's where my work came from, you know, going back to the Scriptures and saying, okay, what is the Bible's message for women? And is it big enough for all of us? And does it begin when we begin or is it just a certain season of life that it covers? And does it go the full stretch to our last breath? And does it include every woman everywhere in the world no matter who she is or what she sees in the rearview mirror, what her circumstances are-and will it hold up, is it indestructible?

So my work really came out of that. It's centered on Biblical Studies. I go, you know, that's the heart of what I do, I want to know what, you know, God has said, I want to know what the vision is for us. And it has been an amazing adventure for me. And I actually ended up doing the same thing for men because the more I studied women, the more I realized that men ask the same questions, you know, is God's calling for me as a man something I can lose or ruin or be stolen from me?

Seth Price 8:30

Well, I can say we definitely have the same questions. We're just not…a lot of us just aren't public about it. And I find that the view of manhood is entirely informed less by the Bible and less by religion and theology and more by capitalism, and a measurement of me versus the neighbor, or me versus Tom Brady, because I don't have that many Super Bowl rings, or you know, me versus someone else. As opposed to me just being what I'm supposed to be—the best version of me.

Carolyn 9:05

There's no freedom in that there's no freedom in that.

Seth Price 9:08

No because I'm never gonna play in the Superbowl ever.

Carolyn 9:11

Yeah, well are you know who only one guy gets the Sexiest Man Alive every year.

Seth Price 9:18

..and they gave it to Blake Shelton, which is just awful. Have you seen it…doesn't matter. This isn't about Blake, I saw that I was like, this is this is a joke.

Carolyn 9:25

(Laughter) Seriously

Seth Price 9:26

You said something. Well, he does sing. Well, you said something just in there. You said, you know, does God's calling for women begin when we do? What do you mean, when you say that does it begin when we do?

Carolyn 9:37

Are we born with it? Because we look at you know, for me as a call as a young woman. I saw God's purpose for me as something that was down the road. So you look at a little girl. And you think well, you know, I wonder what God's purpose is for us? We're all looking for God's purpose, you know, but it's something that is future. And you know, there are little girls that don't live to be adults. And they're a little girls who are doing awesome things, who have a sense of God's hand on them. And, you know, sometimes they open their mouths and say things that shake us up spiritually.

You know, God all in the Bible, he's working through children. And we don't think like that, you know, I didn't grow up thinking that. I knew I needed to live as a Christian. But as far as you know, purpose and calling, it was future, and it's dependent on somebody else showing up and not on that God called me as me and my whole journey as part of his purposes for me. So it became very big, it's very, I spent a lot of time in Genesis 1 and 2 it's very empowering for women, it's wonderful good news for men. It's not swinging the pendulum at all. It's about that, you know, what God's calling in, on all of us as individuals but also together.

So I think my books break new ground in terms of how we talk about who we are as God's children. And I mean, it's been life changing. For me, I'll say that.

Seth Price 11:32

I've never written a book but I can say just the process of doing this having to constantly engage in new ideas has been life changing. For me, if anything, having to constantly wrestle with new ideas, to be able to talk to people like yourself, stretches me in ways that I'm uncomfortable with but I will say this, I'm no longer concerned with being stretched and that's probably a bad metaphor. Not that I like the stretching. It just used to really be uncomfortable and now it's more of a status quo. Maybe I'm more, I don't know, that slime that the kids make maybe I'm getting to look more like that and less like a like a rigid mold.

So one of the things I like to do is ask smarter people than me for good questions to other people that are smarter than me. And so we'll put you on that list. So I asked someone this morning I said, Hey, if I'm talking with Carolyn Custis James, what would you ask? And so I want to verbatim read her question that this is someone that has very similar degrees with you.

So they have a degree in sociology and an Indian and they have divinity training and Biblical Studies training. And so she wanted to know,

how do you believe that your study in sociology influences the way that you understand God and the Bible?

Like how has that sociological training either changed or helped inform or help remove how you read Scripture?

Carolyn 12:49

You know, I think we have too narrow of a discussion of Scripture. That we need to bring people into the conversation from all different kinds of background we need to bring artists in, we need to bring medical people in, we need to bring laborers in, we need to bring people who are cooking meals. And you know, and for me, Sociology and Anthropology are huge in terms of understanding Scripture.

I think that one of the things that I always say and that I always remind myself of when I open the Bible is that I am not reading an American book. And if I only look at the Bible as an American, through an American Western lens, I'm going to abuse the text. I'm going to miss the message. I will at least diminish it. I may distort it completely. But I won't understand the power of that message. Because I am foreign to the world of the Bible.

So to understand the sociology, you know how the culture works, how men and women were viewed in the culture, what were the operational mores that govern their lives? I'm going to, I'm going to make a hash out of it. And we've done that out of so many stories. Let me give you a really simple example. You know, the story of Jesus and Mary of Bethany, where she's sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus, it's an expression that defines her as a Rabbinical student. And we hear sermons on that text that talk about we need to have quiet time, we need to not be so busy. You know it's hard to be impressed with what's going on in that text.

But after 9/11, we learned that in Afghanistan, girls celebrated their 8th birthday by having their education ended. And we hear stories of Malala from Pakistan, and how she was shot going to school, and being an advocate for education for girls. If you took the story of Jesus and Mary of Bethany into those cultures and told them that story, they would tell you what it means. And it would be completely different! I mean, they would absolutely love Jesus, because he is saying that women and girls need to learn. And above all, they need to learn about who God is and who Jesus is but they need to use their minds just the same as the man. She was in a room full of men when she was doing this and her sister comes in the room and you've got juxtapose the place that women belong in, which is preparing the meal for the man who are going to eat without the women in that culture. And her sister who is sitting there learning and I think what the interaction in that story is Jesus appealing to Martha to join her sister.

And there's evidence in conversations she has afterwards, Martha has afterwards with Jesus, that she did exactly that. But we don't get that, you know, because we're not in a culture, you know, our culture women are getting graduate degrees and becoming professors. So understanding the sociological anthropological context of that of that narrative, changes the whole story. And it does it over and over and over again in the Bible.

Seth Price 16:54

One of the biggest themes in a lot of your writing is the role of patriarchy and I don't want to say matriarchy, because I don't really know how to define either one of those. But patriarchy for me has always been just the implicit of, I'm the head of my house and so what I say, is the rules. But that may have just been the way that I was raised. And so I would be a fool. And I think I said this in the email, I'd be a fool not to discuss patriarchy with you, specifically, on ways that we have done it poorly.

I feel like there's a lot of resources on ways to do it well, but I felt like to talk about ways that we do it well, without making the status of you know, here's what we have done in the past will be hard to move forward or hard to at least agree upon. A here's what we do now. And here's why that is dangerous. I think dangerous is the right word. And I only say that because I have two small girls. And I'm really afraid, Carolyn, of doing it wrong. I'm afraid of modeling what a man should be. And do it wrong in a way that impacts you know, their marriages and their relationships. Their relationship with me their relationships with boys that they go to school with. So, how would you define patriarchy as a status quo now, how are we doing it wrong currently?

Carolyn 18:11

Let me dig deeper than that.

Seth Price 18:13

Okay.

Carolyn 18:15

Okay.

Because what I've come to understand from my study of the Bible is that we have taken patriarchy as the Bible's message. And I think and I've written about this in a book called Maelstrom, that the Bible dismantles patriarchy, and it starts early on by doing that, when you look at Genesis 1&2, God creates male and female to rule creation, to rule and subdue all creation. He's entrusting his creation to them, for them to be his agents as his imagebearers, and he's calling them to do it together. And he blesses this arrangement.

And so the rule is outward toward creation for flourishing. All right, it's not about power, the power is God's power and he's entrusting that to us to serve His purposes. You only have the rule over after the fall. After the fall, that's where I think patriarchy begins where, you know, in God's judgment and in the Curse, in the consequences of the fall. It is that the man who is typically stronger is going to rule rule over the woman. And that takes all sorts of all sorts of forms.

You know, in our culture, if we understand and this is how, the kinder, gentler, version of patriarchy is portrayed. That the man is the head of the home, that he's the leader in the home, that the woman's role is to submit to Him. And, you know, when you're a single woman like I was for 10 years, you have to step up, you know, you have to be able to be the breadwinner, you have to be able to protect yourself. You have to be able to make decisions and assert yourself in various situations. What the instinct is from that is that when you get married, you're going to pull back, you're going to pull back. What happened to me, I was single for 10 years and I thought that was the way things were supposed to work. So I felt like I didn't really have a story the story was supposed to show up in the form of a husband and we were going to do him.

And what happened when we were first married, I married a man who was raised by a single mom. And he didn't come at any sense of the traditional marriage, although he was, you know, Biblical scholar. He was in seminary, he's got two doctorates. So you know, he's not somebody who's just winging it. But when we were first married, he said to me, “You need to find out what your gifts are, and what God is calling you to do with your life. And I'm not the answer to that question”. And he has pushed me to find out what God wants me to do. And it has been life changing for me that I have a husband who is going to champion me and I'm going to invest in him with heart and soul everything about him and his career. I, you know, a lot of the work I did was to finance his education and we were a team in that. But it was an eye opener for me to not to feel like okay, now, what matter are his gifts and what God's called him to be and do because, you know, it happens to women all the time. A husband goes out jogging and drops dead in the road and where she? She's lost her story. She's, you know, who is she headless? What are we talking about?

You know, and for me, I think, you know, God's purposes for his sons and daughters, call us to be all in in what he is doing in the world, that each of us has responsibility for stewardship of the gifts that he's entrusted to us. And that it's not a competition. It's not, you know, which way is the pendulum gonna swing it’s that we're in it together. And I want to be the strongest champion for my husband, I want to be his strongest advocate, I want to watch his back I want to you know, I want him to walk with God and and if he's headed down the wrong path, I want to be the first roadblock he encounters. You know, because both of us are fully engaged in what God is doing. And it has been life saving for me because life has twists and turns.

You know, my husband has moved from different jobs that he's had. And it I haven't lost my identity, you know, because his job description changed. You know, so it's, for me, it's much bigger than we let it be. When we come up with these rules. I think what what patriarchy does to us is it makes us define ourselves horizontally, instead of defining ourselves by, you know, I'm God's image bear. And I'm going to live this out as a single woman, or I'm going to live this out as a single man, or I'm going to live this out as a child, or an elderly person with an empty nest and maybe widowed or, you know, who knows? That it's this way that Genesis 1&2 defines us, but it calls us to need each other in profound ways.

And so you know, I think the patriarchal model makes men look for women who will submit. They're not they're not looking for somebody who's going to be fully engaged with them, somebody who's going to be a strong spiritual influence in their life, a real sounding board for them, they're going to look for somebody who will lead who they can somebody they can lead. And there are times in a marriage relationship when you know, the woman will lead. And there are situations in the Bible where you have a woman stepping up and leading, and she's not breaking the rules and she's not feminizing a man or emasculating him. She's doing what God's calling her to do!

And so I think we make rules that limit what we're going to do in terms of stewarding the opportunities and the gifts that God has given us. You know, you have little girls and there are treasures inside of them that you God has placed there that you want to see flourish and you don’t want to see some guy come into their life that's going to make them shut that down. You'd like to see a man come into their lives who would say this is treasure that we need to release for God's purposes in the world and that will be blessed and empowered himself by having that kind of a life.

Seth Price 27:00

So I want to build on that. I feel well, I don’t really, usually get person on the show, but we're talking about my daughters. And so I will. So I have my oldest is a boy. And then the other two are daughters. And so I feel like I often do a very piss poor job of modeling what a good father should be. Because I, everybody loses their anger or everyone has an issue and I don't model it well. And so what are for people listening some practical ways. And I don't honestly even care because I know there are people that aren't Christian that listen as well. So what are some practical ways to model…What I don't want is this, what I don't want is in 40 years, my daughter decides to run for Congress, and we celebrate with the small handclap that there's now finally 35 new members of Congress and they happen to be women. I don't want that to be Let's celebrate that but because of new ideas, let's not celebrate it because of gender.

So I don't…I don't know how to model that well. I don't know how to connect with a part for me that can either display what they should be looking for, if that's even the right question to ask. And I also don't really know what to say, to foster conversation around it. Because it's not the inherent…it's not how I was taught to, quote unquote, do things, nothing against the way I was taught to do things. It made me what I am today, but I want to do better. And I know that I'm not. So how can I and other fathers and mothers listening do that? What are some practical ways to do it?

Carolyn 28:36

For their daughter?

Seth Price 28:38

Yeah, even for my son, because if I do it wrong, I'll exacerbate the problem for an entire other generation.

Carolyn 28:44

Yeah, well, and all of us do it wrong in some ways, you know, because a lot of the things I've learned subsequent to, you know, our daughter being a little girl. One of the things that I think is very powerful is when you look at Genesis 2 and the creation of the female. When we look at Genesis 2, we think in terms of marriage, that's what the sermons talk about, you know, this is the creation of marriage, but it's not it's the creation of male and female. And, and we sort of trivialize it and make jokes about it. But, you know, that's where I went to find out is this talking to me, I'm a single woman, you know, and the language that she used in there only talks about marriage at the very end of the of the chapter. God has created ADAM and he has just named the animals and you know, when we look at the creation of the man, the first human he's created at the climax of God's history of God's creative activity. So we're looking at a masterpiece. We're not looking at something that's there's something wrong with him, if God is teaching us about male female relationships, and he looks at the man and he says it's not good for him to be alone, and this is what he needs.

And he uses two words to describe the woman; it’s the Hebrew word Ezer which we just translated as “helper”. And the Hebrew word, kenegdô , which is to say she is his match.

The word Ezer, what scholars typically do when they come across a word like that, this is a word for the woman, the female. They do an inventory and see how it's used in the Bible and this word is use 21 times in the Old Testament, it's used twice for the woman in Genesis it's used three times for countries where Israel is asking them to send their armies. They're asking for military aid, because they're under attack and they're being overpowered; send your armies. The remaining 16 times it's used for God as the helper of his people. So when that was discovered, they upgraded helper to strong helper. And what I did is I went and looked up all of those verses and there started to be a pattern where it's military language is used all around the word Ezer. So you know, since your armies for the three nations, it's very clear what their wanting. When it's used for God in every single passage there’s military language God is better than chariots and horses. He's our shield and defense. He stands century watch over his people, he the kind of help he's bringing his people is monumental. Then we go back to the Garden of Eden, which we've talked about is paradise.

But when you look at it closely, Eden is a warzone. There's an enemy getting ready to attack. God commands the man to guard the garden and the male and female are created to rule and subdue, which means even in an unfallen world, there will be resistance to their efforts. And I believe that the Ezer is a warrior, that she brings her full strength to the purposes of God that she stands alongside the man that he needs everything she can bring to the battle. And that it's a battle for good, and it's a battle for God's purposes. Little girls are Ezers. I've met with little girls, there was a group of little girls here, they were middle school girls, and they had read through my book, Lost Women of the Bible, where I talked about the Ezer and I show how women in the Bible, live that out. And I wanted to meet them when I heard that they had gone through this book together.

And it was incredible to meet with these little sixth, seventh, eighth grade girls who were absolutely on fire. And they want to serve God and and they wanted to live him and everything matters about their story, it's not down the road, it's here and now, you know, so I think in parenting, we need to have a big vision. It's not to put pressure on them, but to open doors and let them explore, you know, what are their gifts? Is this child an artist is this child an athlete? Is this child interested in science or math or, you know, to cheer them on? And, you know, to see them blossom and give them a sense of God's purpose for you as now and you're out there with your friends. You're in situations nobody else is in how are you a light there? How are you bringing God's good purposes into your friendships?

You know, it's just, it's, it's very big. And, you know, I think we should have that kind of a vision instead of saying “You know, someday your prince will come, you know, someday somebody is going to come along who's going to support you”. You know that doesn't happen to everybody. And so and in our culture, you know, we have, we have more freedoms than women do in other cultures than women did in the cultures of the Biblical times. And so they, you know, our girls can go further and do more than girls can in other cultures and I think that we have responsibility for the opportunities that and the blessings that we have.

Seth Price 34:43

So as a father, if I do that, and I do it well, and I allow her, them, to either succeed or fail without stepping in and helicopter parenting, when I model that, it's usually I feel like I'm giving up a power that I had before. Really, I just assumed I didn't really have it. I just flexed it from birth and so it's mine. And so what a men do, what's a good what's a good posture for men as we're allowing females in our, in our realm of influence in our circle, to do things that may be in past generations, you'll see this a lot of Thanksgiving, you know, people judging whose wife does on what, and people judging, you know, my mom, you know, they always would bring me this, or they would do this or do that.

So as men begin to cede power, to allow females to actually be helpers to allow them to do what they're called to do for now. How do we sit with that tension? As a man, how would you advise someone as myself like, don't take it personal? Like it's, it's okay, you, I don't really know how to voice it. Well, hopefully, you know what I'm trying to say…

Carolyn 35:46

I mean, I think that's a great question to ask because a lot, a lot of men feel that way. I don't think you're ceding power. I think you're using your power. I mean, what my husband did for me he could do because he had power. And I, you know, I see, you know, male power and privilege are realities in our culture. And I don't see God calling you to become weak or less. I see him calling you to use that power. I mean, you have no idea what it means to a woman when a man speaks into her story and says, I believe in you. And you can do more or you have gifts and you need to find out what God wants you to do with those gifts.

The best example that I find in the Old Testament for this is the story of Ruth and Boaz. Because she comes into the story, in today's world we would call her an Arab, we would call her an immigrant, we would call her undocumented. You know, and she's on welfare, she goes on welfare to feed her mother in law and herself. And she has ideas because she's got a different point of view coming from that side of things.

And so she's on the hungry side of the law. And she makes these initiatives with him where they're discussing Mosaic law, and she's got a bigger vision of, you know the law says, “Let them gleam”, that's the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law says to feed them.

And she and Boaz have these conversations where, according to the culture, he shouldn't even talk to her. He should, you know, throw her out of his field for being so forward and in making a proposal like that which is actually can be understood as a critique of how he's doing things. But he's a big enough man to listen to her. And he uses his male power and privilege in the most extraordinary and sacrificial ways to empower her to succeed in what she's fighting to do for her mother in law. So he is not diminished at all by what he does; he's using his power not for himself. Although if it causes him to stand taller, I think way taller than he did even before, but he uses it to cause the flourishing of others. And what happens is that there is a ripple effect to what happens here that it impacts the whole village. It impacts the future of the nation it impacts the future of the world.m because ultimately it leads to Jesus. But I think it's a big mistake to say I'm called to be less, if I call my daughters or my wife to be more. And, I think, you know, it's if you've got somebody stronger by your side, you're going to be stronger in the battles of life.

You know, you don't have to solo this. You've got a team. You know, you're Tom Brady, you are, you know, you've got a team and the team, you can empower that team. And, you know, I feel like that's what my husband did for me. It was a shock. Because I thought, okay, now I know what the rules are here. You know, and so I headed for the kitchen and I knew I needed to get a job to help him finish his seminary education that might be plan was to stop. And, you know, that just was bewildering to him that I would, you know, back off once he got his degree. He wanted me to use all my gifts and to go beyond my comfort zone and he celebrates all of that. And we're not in a competition. You know, I want the same for him when he walks in the door at night. I want to know how his day went, I want to know if he's struggling. I want to know, if he's, you know, got a big opportunity and I want to be cheering him on. And that's, I think the mistake that we make. I think the vision in Genesis 1&2 is that we are better when we work together. And we are better when we bring our full strength.

One of the stories that I tell is that back in 2006, there was in the national news, a story about three climbers who were lost on Mount Hood in Oregon. And the story captivated the media for a solid week. And three of them were lost. There were terrible storms going on that week on the mountain and there were a lot of other climbers, rescue workers are headed for the mountain when this happened. One of those climbers was my husband's younger brother. And at the end of the week, they were all Christians, all three of these guys it was an incredible week. I mean, my husband was on all the networks being interviewed about what was going on and being the point person for the three families.

But I have to tell you, that as a member of the family, it did not matter to us who reached those climbers, whether it was a man or a woman, and there were male and female rescue workers, we just wanted them home alive. You know, and we lost all three of them in the end, but I'm just saying, you know, when we look at our mission, the mission that God has entrusted to his image bearers in the world, we can't afford for anybody to hold back. And, as a man, you are in a position to make a huge difference, to have a have a ripple effect by how you become a champion for all of your kids, your son, and your daughters, and your wife, and the people you encounter.

And I think that the patriarchal model forces men to look at themselves and “am I making the decisions” or “am I being strong enough” or isn't everybody looking to me for decision and leadership and provision and protection. You know, if something happened to you where you were disabled or you, you know, couldn't keep a job or, you know, the economy crashed or something. You you suffer as a man because you couldn't be and do the kinds of things that patriarchy tells you you should be doing. Instead of saying, here's a new battle, how are we going to engage this new battle together? And, you know, trusting God that he's sovereign over everything, and that he moves us into different circumstances, but that we are here to be for one another.

And, you know, the stories that come out of this, you know, I hear men talking about, you know, how this bless their lives and caused them to flourish more. But I've read books that, you know, say, you know, God is calling us to be weak as men, you know that as men, we need to…you can't shed your male power and privilege, you know, the culture gives it to you. It is what you do with it that matters, you know, if you do it to guard yourself in your own position, and to feel like somebody else's success is a threat, you know, then it's going to be a different story than if you have the freedom to say, you know, God has entrusted me with these gifts of power and privilege and what am I going to do?

Seth Price 44:39

Hmm, Carolyn, I had so many more questions, but that is a beautiful spot to end because it's a call to action, not just for men, it's called action, just period. I may if you're willing, sometime in the future, I'd like to have you back on because I want to talk about Ruth specifically because she continues to pop up over and over and over again recently-and either that's because I'm paying attention like I bought a Honda Odyssey and so now all I see is Honda Odysseys or it's something new, I don't know which so if you're willing, sometime in the future, I'd love to have you back on to talk about that. But I want to be respectful of both of our times. Thank you so much for coming on. I've thoroughly enjoyed this.

Carolyn 45:18

Oh you are welcome. You are welcome it’s a pleasure.

Seth Price 45:35

The music featured in today's episode is from artists Tina Boonstra. You can find more of her music in the show notes. And as always, you will find the tracks listed in today's show. On the Can I Say This At Church Spotify playlist.

Seth Price 46:06

This was so fun of a conversation to have. I'm so thankful to have so many brilliant minds come on the show, and Carolyn is among them. So after recording, she gave me a few books that I know my church has begun using. And my daughter came home after one Sunday evening of being engaged with it and was like, did you know about Miriam as they're going through the story of Moses? And I'll be honest, I didn't.

And the feedback that I've gotten just locally or from adults even and from, you know, the pastors that are church and whatnot has just been amazing. And so I will link some of the texts that she had said, Hey, for people like you Seth that are dealing with, you know, how do we talk about biblical women in the Bible in a way that has a different lens. And so after the fact she gave me some of that information, and I will share that with you and I will challenge you. Men and women alike, listening to this we can be better within the terms of a generation we can make the world something better, something more loving. And something that stretches us both equally and pushes everyone to succeed better.

I can't wait to see what that world looks like and I hope I'm still alive when we get some form of closer to it. I wish you all well, talk to you next week.

Beating Guns with Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin / Transcript

Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.

Back to the Audio Episode

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Shane 0:00

I always looked at Jesus, that's where Mike and I, we keep pointing back to Jesus in beating guns because at the end of the day, the question becomes, can we carry across in one hand and a gun in the other? Can we love our enemies and simultaneously prepare to kill them? And the early Christians were unequivocally clear on this that for Christ, we can die, but we cannot kill.

Seth Price 0:41

What's happening everybody, welcome back to the show. I'm Seth, your host. I'm probably going to get in trouble for this one this week. Yeah. So I just want to skip past, you know, the Patreon plug and the request for iTunes reviews, you know better if you haven't done it, you should have done it already. I really want to get into this conversation. I spoke with Michael Martin. And I spoke with Shane Claiborne. And I spoke about guns. And you're probably thinking, guns like we're here to talk about Jesus. But I just want to be very clear. If you don't watch the news, or if you have just been burying your head in the sand America has an idolatrous-an idolatrous- love affair with firearms. And the statistics show that I just don't, I don't know, I'm afraid that we don't care to change that doesn't seem to matter what happens, but all we get is thoughts and prayers.

And so I was able to speak with both Shane and Michael. And they've written a book called Beating Guns, Hope for People Who are Weary of Violence. And that's what we talk about. We talk about what it looks like for the church to be involved in changing the narrative and to be actually leaders towards bringing people away from a heart of violence and defensiveness and aggressive posturing in a heart instead of grace and shalom and community and patience, and maybe conversation and having to deal with all of the ramifications of hurt, because that's what we're talking about when we're talking about gun violence. We're talking about somebody hurt, hurting someone hurting themselves, responding to hurt, there's just so much nuance and this talk is uncomfortable. I mean, I was raised in a way that you know, guns are a part of life. guns have a purpose. I'll be honest, but I really wrestle with it. And so let's get into it. Here's this conversation with Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin.

Seth Price 3:07

Michael Martin, Shane Claiborne I'm excited to have both of you on the podcast. Thank you both for taking the time to come on today, Mike, for people that aren't familiar with you something I always like to do. And so I'll ask you both to do this. Just in brief kind of tell me a bit about yourself just so that as we begin to nuances conversation, people kind of have an idea of, you know, where you're coming from, you know, as a person, kind of a little bit of your upbringing and kind of what makes you tick today?

Michael 3:30

Yeah, I come from a Mennonite background faith and a Baptist faith. I grew up in a Mennonite family that attended an evangelical church, nondenominational church. So I have kind of one foot in either of those circles most of my life, and then I got my Biblical Studies degree from an evangelical school but the professor's really pushed me to get into my Anabaptist theology. And really, that's it kind of what spurred the initial beginnings of an idea of what RawTools would be turning swords into plowshares and what that might look like today. I was a youth pastor, young adult pastor at a Mennonite Church here in Colorado Springs for three years, and then burnt myself out there and then a year later started RawTools.

Seth Price 4:18

So RawTools is that specifically the work of breaking down weapons and making it turn into something else or do you do other metal works as well?

Michael 4:26

So RawTools. Raw is war spelled backwards. And we turn guns into garden tools, but we use that as a gateway to teach people and introduce them to non violent resources, de-escalation skills, things like that, restorative justice, as well as access to trauma, awareness, maybe victim support groups, so things kind of that see gun violence and how we're going to address the complex issue.

Seth Price 4:52

Nice. And then Shane, if you could do similar just tell it everyone listening a bit about you, and then we'll dive right into this and I will I'm excited to dive into this what the book that you've written is something that I'm excited for the topic but but a little bit about you?

Shane 5:07

Awesome, yeah man I'm a Tennessee boy grew up down south I actually you know we're be talking about guns so I'm I grew up with guns and we got country music down there in Tennessee you know this house is protected by the good Lord and a gun and if you come unwanted you'll meet them both son. You know that's the world I grew up in, fell in love with Jesus down there. And then I ended up you know, I kind of wanted to get outside the world I grew up in a little and that's why I came up to Philly and went to school here. And then we got to know a lot of folks that were waiting for housing and that we're living on the streets and that's our community started 20 years ago. A group of homeless moms were living in an abandoned church building. And we came alongside of them and join them in their struggle and then started renovating abandoned houses and stuff here and been building Little Village we've got murals and gardens and help kids with homework, share food with people and, and also, you know, we try to get involved in in challenging the principalities and powers as the Bible says you know the things that hold people down and squash people's dignity. And certainly one of those in our neighborhood is gun violence.

We've seen way too many people killed. So I'm honored to team up with Mike and we've done weapons conversions right here in our neighborhood and we'll be doing one as we kick off the tour here on my block.

Seth Price 6:36

Yeah, so are y'all both in in the same area then both up in Philadelphia?

Shane 6:43

No, no, no, he's out in Colorado now but he'll be coming out here in a week or two and then we're gonna start our 35 city tour right here in the City of Love. We're gonna launch out of here and and then we'll we'll be going all over the country

Seth Price 6:59

I’ll have to look at the tour and see if you're coming down in my neck of the woods. I live out here in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

What is the genesis of this book, like guns in America are like, well, I had a question from my child's doctor recently. And he asked me, you know that we're going to test her for gluten and see if she had an issue. We're just having some other issues. And the question he asked me was, “how often do you all eat wheat?” And my answer was, “well, we're American.” And he just started laughing. Like, that's a fantastic answer. And I feel like if you ask anyone about guns, and their relationship with them, you're going to get a similar answer. And so why write a book talking about guns and specifically gun violence?

Shane 7:36

Well, in some ways, we look at the United States, and we've got about 5% of the world's population, but we have almost half the world's guns. We've got almost five times more gun dealers than McDonald's restaurants. And you know, we're leading the industrialized world and gun deaths at about 105 a day, 38,000 a year. And so all of that, I think for me, and I think for Mike too, we just were champions of life. And the irony is that we so narrowly defined pro life to one issue of abortion, that you can be pro guns, pro death penalty, pro military, and still say you're pro life as long as you are against abortion. But what what Mike and I are really saying is we believe that we can save lives. Over half of the deaths every year are suicides, and so many of those are by gun. People that end up using other methods often survive and most of them don't die by suicide. They get a second shot at life, they often get help, so guns just make it a lot easier to take your own life and they make it a whole lot easier to kill a lot of people you know?

And it's true, in the UK folks tend to use knives. And if we got rid of all guns, we would still find ways to kill people. But, you know, things like assault rifles, they are designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible and that's what they keep getting used for as the weapon of choice and mass shootings. So I think there's a new conversation happening, and a lot of gun owners are against gun violence and they want to see some changes in our country. And that's one of the things we talk about in the book. We’ve had a lot of gun owners that don't think we should have have AR-15s on our streets. So one of them they had a great shirt that said, “a good hunter doesn’t need 10 rounds”.

Seth Price 9:58

Mike, I'm curious, so as you melt down, you know, an AR-15, or something similar that I have to think that that that people picket that or protests that are that I can just see you know, walking in, you know, to a Starbucks or something that you're grabbing a cup of coffee people like, oh, you're the guy that destroys you know, you got shorts going. So what is the feedback that you get from people when you tell them what you do?

Michael 10:21

There's a lot of raised eyebrows, but you still don't understand. Like if they're like, Oh, that's really cool or like what?! And it's mostly positive reaction, though. I think that's one of the things we want to get to in this book as well, is that a huge majority of American really is tired of this gun violence and is looking for a new way to address this issue. Instead of kind of getting stuck in either more guns or no guns or the answer to that you can't really have anywhere in between. We in the book. We say a lot that we have a gun problem in the heart. problem. We believe it's both of those. It's not either or, and that there's some combination of that involved in in each instance of gun violence. And so really we're looking to help restore those conversations. And see, really, that everybody really doesn't like gun violence in that whether you're on that gun problem or heart problem that we can all be accountable to ending it.

Seth Price 11:25

So I find and a lot by doing this podcast, if I appeal to people's logical side, the conversation goes nowhere. And if I appeal to people's heart side, you know their emotional side, at least the conversation is honest, and we may still not really ever agree. And so I'm curious and either one of you can tackle this. How do you approach this conversation in a way that actually fosters a conversation as opposed to “Shane you're just trying to take away my second amendment rights!” or “Mike, you know, you wouldn't think that if you'd ever been the victim of some kind of assault or abuse, you would want to protect yourself!” and so how do you begin to even have a conversation about guns in America in a way that breaks down barriers so that you can actually have the conversation and not just yell at each other like some live version of a Facebook comment thread.

Shane 12:13

One of the things that we do is emphasize the personal dynamic of this. Almost everywhere we go in our 35 city tour, we'll be having victims of gun violence share their stories. I think we've got to realize this has a name and a face and if you walk through my neighborhood, we can tell you the stories of almost every corner of our neighborhood of who was killed there. Even the house that I'm living in, had someone that was shot and killed here. So some of our lack of urgency comes from sort of a distance, where gun violence just ends up being one more thing that politicians debate around. Rather than the urgency that 105 lives are lost each day, every one of these children is a child of God made in the image of God. And, so we're trying to humanize that, you know, and there's something powerful about seeing it, especially the moms and dads that have lost their kids, as they take the hammer and they begin beating on that metal with tears rolling down their face. There's a visceral, you know, element to this and, and that's what we really believe is going to move people is not just statistics, but the tears and the pain and trauma of communities that have been devastated by gun violence.

Seth Price 13:41

Mike, you have anything to add? I know you started there at the beginning.

Michael 13:45

Yeah. Just to double down that we've got to be willing to listen to each other's stories, in that when we talk about approaching the issue of gun violence that we have to listen to the people who have lost their loved ones to guns. Because it's it's more than just that data, real lives are affected. And that ripple effect is huge. It's not just the immediate family or immediate friends or people who were present when it happened. That's grief that lasts a lifetime. We had one of our first events together, Shane and I, in Philadelphia, we had a mother who lost her son 20 years prior to that event. And she hit on the barrel of the gun in between every hit, she said, “This is for my son”. And usually when we're doing this, we tell people to to hit the barrel until the orange glow goes away. Well, she wasn't gonna stop until her arms were tired. And you need to allow space to get rid of that grief and then allow people to tell that story to their community and realize that this is something that lasts forever, and that it affects classmates it affects people who see that empty seat at church or at work or at school each week.

Seth Price 14:58

Yeah. So at recording this, this is like days after that Coast Guard Lieutenant, you know, was arrested or you know, got caught with that huge stockpile of guns. And you know, Shane, you started out with, you know, being in Tennessee and I'm from Western Texas and so I was raised in a culture of, you know, there's just guns, there's there's rifles, there's pistols, we just do this as a pastime. How do you speak to this conversation in a way to be respectful to the people that want to say that you're infringing on a second amendment? Right or privilege?

Shane 15:36

Sure, so for starters, the conversation that is very reasonable, and I think promising is a conversation that is not about taking away everybody's gun and making all guns illegal and, you know deleting the Second Amendment from the Constitution, but it's just going are there some things that…I mean we got to remember that some of the first words of the Second Amendment are “well regulated”. And the irony is that the gun industry is one of the least regulated (industries) in the entire country—toy guns have more restrictions on them than real guns. And in fact, there's total immunity from in the gun industry from lawsuits and stuff.

So if I shot you with a Nerf gun and put your eye out, you could sue Nerf, but the gun corporations have total immunity on that. So there's just I think some reasonable things that folks are coming to land with. But here's the thing is that two thirds, so there's, there's more guns than people in America, but two thirds of Americans don't have guns. So a third of Americans have guns and 3% (of that third) have half (of) the guns. So there's this small group of people that have a ton of guns.

There's one person, that we write about in Mike's hometown, that has like 4000 guns. So there's there comes a point where you realize that a lot of gun owners are not extremists in that sense of having 4000 guns. In fact, when the NRA says, “We represent 5 million people” even if we take that statistic to be true, that means 90% of gun owners are not a part of the NRA. And yet the NRA, which represents so few of the gun owners of America, they own most of the politicians, and that's part of our problem, you know. And it's, you know, not just about restricting things like assault rifles. But you know, there's there's real common sense laws like is there a limit to how many handguns that one person could purchase in a year, say maybe one a month? A one handgun a month restriction that would say one person can only have 12 handguns in one year. But this kind of extreme gun population has kind of held the whole conversation hostage saying no, we don't even want a limit like that.

But even outside of the laws, too, like there's things like technology, where fingerprint technology which we use to operate our phones, and you can even do security at your house, or ATMs now with a fingerprint, we totally have the capacity to have smart guns that operate with a fingerprint. So that would cut down accidents where a kid finds a gun at home and there's an accident or someone takes their own life with the family gun. So there's things like that then we haven't even explored because it kind of the uncompromising way that many of the kind of gun extremists have held the conversation hostage,

Seth Price 18:45

Mike, I'm curious. So being that you said you were Anabaptist, you know, and kind of in that vein, that's very normally non-violent version of Christianity, which is not the version necessarily that I was raised in. Not that I raised in a violent version, but I just wasn't raised that way. I was raised, you know, Southern Baptists let's do this thing. Curious as you were writing the book, what was one or two of the hardest things that you that as you came to grips with it, either researching it, or having to write about it or work through it, that you're like, you know what, I have to set this down for about 10 days, or whatever the amount of time is. And I really wasn't prepared to wrestle with this topic at this time. Even though I do need to write this book. I don't

Michael 19:23

I don’t think…I've been doing this for just over six years now, February 12, was our official start. Everything in the book is kind of something that we've dealt with or come across in the past. But what gets me every time and almost every time I tell the story is one of Charlotte Evans, who lost her three year old son to a random drive by shooting of some teens who wanted to impress a local gang, kind of at the height of gang violence in the late 90s in the Denver area. And every time I tell that story, I can't help but cry or I have to stop whether I'm I'm preaching or just at a coffee house telling the story to a college or a friend, I have to always collect myself because it's an amazing story of transformation of somebody who lost her son, and great story of forgiveness. And I'm just gonna, you know, make you get the book to find out what that story is.

Seth Price 20:14

(laughter) I was gonna ask you tell me about the story, but that's not gonna work now…

So recently, I don't think that the church should play any part in politics. But I don't know how to talk about guns and the church try to flex any form of moral muscle without playing part in politics. And so how do I tread that lightly?

One of the questions that I asked Mark Van Steenwyk, a few weeks ago was, you know, how do I be a prophetic voice for change that furthers the church in a good way without becoming the next version of institution that my children are going to have to speak out against? And so how do we ride that line?

Michael 20:50

Well, I think Shane and I say a lot that echo the words of the Karl Barth of “reading the newspaper in one hand in a Bible and the other” in that I think, especially in the last few years that we've realized the power that our commitment or our participation in public policy, whether that's our vote, or maybe we're on the local school board or whatever that level is that we have an opportunity to better the lives of those around us and cast those votes and make our opinions and statements heard for the better of our community and not just ourselves. As far as creating another system that our kids might have to change a little bit. I think that's okay, that they can continue to evolve the systems and create something better than what we created because we should be open to that we should be open to that evolution of change within the polity and policy that we make. Yeah,

Shane 21:43

Yeah, you know, I want to dive a little bit deeper into the the politics because I've certainly found that a lot of my life I was had some serious anarchistic tendencies and didn't get involved in politics and thought about Politicians where a lot of times like preachers, you know, they can talk to talk but talks pretty cheap at the end of the day. But I want to say that I think that the word politics shares the same Greek root polis, which means city, and the polítis, citizens, you know, so there's this, even like cosmopolitan is the world city and Metropolis, the mother city. So the core of politics is really about what it means to live together and to make sure that people flourish.

So I kind of want to take some of that back. Now, I don't think that being politically engaged means being partisan. I don't find a home on the left or right, but a lot of these issues are not left and right they're about right and wrong. And I really think that gun violence is one of those that folks can come together on and really make a difference when we're asking the question, how can we make sure that people flourish. And you think about, you know, cars. Cars have evolved over time (and) we have some, you know, you have to have a license, you’ve got to pass tests, there's kind of some standards of like a speed limits. And, you know, as new technology develops, you can't text and drive. Those are good laws. They're meant to, like protect people's lives, but guns are one of the least evolved things in our country where we basically and one of the most deadly so I, you know, I think that we can do better at protecting people's lives and especially those of us that love Jesus, we can be champions of life on this issue, too.

And whether that's suicide or guns that kill police officers, I mean, we literally have bullets that are designed to pierce through bulletproof vests and like those are allowed on our streets. So, you know, I don't think that laws are going to solve our heart problem. But I do think that we can change some laws that would save some lives and we would be really at a loss if we didn't do everything we can to protect life. So when people say, “all we can do is pray”, I think they're lying. I think we do need to pray, but we also need to get off our knees and we need to really take some actions that could protect people's lives.

Seth Price 24:53

I want to drill down onto the church part, I guess of the Can I Say This At Church? So if I brought this up at my church, I If I walked in on Sunday and then I was like, Hey, Mr. Person A or Hey, Mrs. Person B, we need to talk about your, I would argue, idolic worship of your guns that you are elevating against or above a posture of humility and a posture of wanting to love on people—even when it's uncomfortable. Because guns are innately aggressive, and also innately defensive and neither one of those look like Jesus. So I know that you've heard the proof texts, you know, you've got the verses on “go get yourself some swords”, we're doing this. And there's so many other verses throughout the Bible that people often quote from the pulpit, or that the NRA will bastardize to help rally the base around protecting our rights to have guns.

And so what are some of your answers to those proof texts because I feel like a lot of people listening hear them often; and often are woefully unprepared for that because we don't talk about it at church. We definitely don't talk about it in school. And most parents grew up in a different generation where we didn't really discuss it either. And so I often find myself lacking.

Michael 26:09

One of our one of our friends and someone we quote a lot in the book, Jim Atwood wrote a book America and its guns A Theological Expose and I had the chance to have lunch with him once and I asked him almost the same question. And he said, “it all starts with having to know that, whether it's your pastor doing this, or you're talking to somebody at your church, that you love them that you're asking this out of love, and they have to know that the relationship has to be there. It's not it's not happening in a vacuum”. And I think a lot of us can assume that. I mean, I know that my own church has several opinions on this issue. And it goes a variety of ways.

But if we start from a position of love, that we're going to be able to have these tough conversations if you want to get right into the proof text like when it says “Get your swords” right after that Jesus rebukes Peter for using the swords. And many people say that's when Jesus to disarmed the church. I've talked to many gun violence survivors who have been them in a mass shooting at a church, who now council church security teams and that introducing a gun in the midst of a mass shooting is one of the most confusing things you can do because now gunfire is coming from multiple directions and that in fact, the best thing you can do is essentially run in tackle that person from invisible to them angle.

There's other ways to solve those problems. Usually, you just can't start from the big what if questions were your only solution is the gun and the one bullet in that gun in your hand. And that really, it's it starts before that and that there's so many lines have been crossed before that person decided to use a gun to hurt people that we can engage that situation long before it ever becomes violent.

Shane 27:41

Yeah, I think the theological issues are really, really important, the spiritual dynamic of violence and fear. And so when you talk about pastors, I think it's so important that we're not just talking about guns we're also talking about a culture of fear. And the Scripture says that perfect love casts out fear. So what does it look like to to stand on the side of love rather than fear? And I'm convinced that fear and love are enemies, they cannot coexist. And we can see what happens to a country right now.

I think that as is really held captive to, to fear, the fact is that when we're conditioned to fear in certain ways we're conditioned to fear people that don't look like us, you know, and we hear a lot of that about immigrants or refugees coming to this country, but the Cato Institute they did this incredible study ( https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-crime-assessing-evidence )where they showed like 10 things that are more likely to kill you than a refugee or immigrant. And there are things like swing sets and lightning or falling down the steps, roller coasters, one of them was a vending machine falling on you, like these are all things more likely to kill us then then a refugee or immigrant. And when you look mass shootings you know, most of them are done by men and and most often mass shooters are white men, but we still, in our society, are conditioned to fear certain people or certain things.

So I think, as Christians, we've got to address this as a fear versus love thing. And we've also got to address some of the idolatry that I mean if you think of how we put our trust in guns and can you trust you know, is it Psalm says “some trust in chariots and horses, but we trust in the name of our God”, there's something about idolatry, I think is my friend Andy crouch says “all idols begin by offering great things for a very small price, and all idols fail more and more consistently to deliver on those promises and they keep ratcheting up their demands of us”.

So we think of all the promises of gun pledges, you know, power control, safety protection, and if a gun we're keeping of keeping all those promises we would be like God so these are like, really deeply spiritual things. And I always looked at Jesus that's where Mike and I, we keep pointing back to Jesus in Beating Guns because at the end of the day, the question becomes, can we carry a cross in one hand and a gun in the other? Can we love our enemies and simultaneously prepare to kill them?

And the early Christians were unequivocally clear on this that for Christ we can die, but we cannot kill and that text that Mike referred you, where Peter instinctively… and I like Peter because he's a lot like us, talks without thinking. He takes risks and jumps out of a boat trying to walk on water, you know, but at the end of the day, the soldiers come for Jesus and he picks up a sword and he picks up his weapon and he injures one of them. He cuts the guy's ear off and we cannot miss what Jesus did, he rebuked Peter and said, “Put your sword back, you pick up the sword, you die by the sword”. And then he heals the man that Peter wounded.

Tertullian, one of the great thinkers of the early church, he said, “When Jesus disarmed Peter, he disarmed every Christian”, because if ever there was a case for using violence, justified violence, to protect the innocent, Peter had that case; he had the strongest case in the world. But we see that this is not the way of Jesus Jesus teaches us a different way to interact with evil without mirroring that evil. And that Jesus is call to turn the other cheek stands in stark contrast to the nras command to stand our ground. And that doesn't mean that we don't take evil seriously, or that we don't resist evil, but I think we don't do it on its own terms, and we certainly don't use violence together. counter violence.

Michael 32:01

Actually, my favorite part of the sword to plow Scriptures is in Micah where he ends it by saying “we will all sit or sit under our own vine and fig tree in fear of no other” and even George Washington meditated over this. The the play Hamilton has a song that quotes into saying that, and that, you know, there's a longing in America, I think, for this time of peace, and at least a time where if we're afraid of each other, or we're afraid of what might happen, that we don't let that fear, make decisions for us. And I think Micah puts it so beautifully and puts it in this text it's seen elsewhere in the Bible too that the vine and the fig tree is like a representation of Christ's kingdom.

Seth Price 32:44

Aquestion that I asked of Dr. David Gushee down there at Mercer, I asked him about you know, if we overturned Roe v. Wade I don't think that our country or the people that live in it are prepared for the implications of that. So let's assume that everyone that reads this book, even the guy that has 4000 guns, he keeps that one that doesn't work because it was his great, great, great, great granddad's and it has some form of family significance, whatever. But he destroys the other 3999. And so does everyone else that reads the book or is engaged with the book. I don't know that America is prepared to live in a place that we don't have a necessary fallback on when you know, when we're scared and when we're afraid. So what would you say to those people? They're like, No, I need this! Like, I can't do this, what you're asking me to do! I am not equipped to handle that, you know, especially people that you know, live along the border, and they believe the narrative of these people are coming to hurt you, or this drug dealer is going to come in and he's going to rape and pillage, here we go. I'm curious, do you think that America, if they did what Jesus would ask, are we actually equipped and prepared to do that?

Shane 33:54

I don't think that we you know, we live in these absolute ideals of it's all or nothing. You know, I think that that as the kingdom comes, as Jesus says, you know we are to seek the kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven, those of us that are seeking first the Kingdom want to keep moving towards that. So if we know that in the end, the prophets are right that God says, “My people will beat their swords into plowshares, my spears into pruning hooks“. That's the trajectory of history. So that begins to change how we live and how we act in the world. So, you know, I think we can keep the momentum going.

But certainly before every social movement that has changed the world, everybody said it was impossible. And after every social movement, people said it was inevitable. And you think about slavery, you know, folks said, well, don't talk about this from the pulpit because this is a political issue. People said, we'll never be able to do away with slavery. I mean, this is the entire way our economy exists. So all of those things looked impossible, but now we look back and we go wow, that that makes sense. And I think that that, frankly, a generation or two from now we will look back at our gun violence and think, man, we should have done that so much sooner and how did Christians, you know, continue to justify that violence with the Bible. So I think we can do better.

And please, you know, I mean, we're not talking about all these radical shifts happening at one time, but we're talking about things like, hey, if you're on a no fly list, you're on the terrorist watch list, and you can't fly on airplanes, you shouldn't be able to buy a gun at a gun show. (Laughs sarcastically) We're not going like totally wild, right? We're just we're just kind of have some small things that we think and 80% of even gun owners agree on many of these these proposals that are out there that we could actually make some changes on, you know, so yeah.

Seth Price 35:52

Mike, how would you scale this up? So I want to de personalize it. So how would you scale it up for you know, America like how does it America live with a heart of beating, you know, weapons into plowshares. Because we are the biggest military superpower well, arguably one of the biggest military superpowers in existence?

Michael 36:12

Right yeah, and we have a section in the book talking about the big guns on that. And part of that is highlighting how some steel from the World Trade Center was made into three bow stems of new new Navy fleet. So there is certainly a national narrative that goes against not using violence to solve conflict, that violence to solve conflict is a pretty popular thing to do, not just in America, but worldwide as well. And so there's a lot to be said about the tools that we are under utilizing to solve conflict, whether that's interpersonal, whether that's from group to group or country to country. There's a lot of great things like Christian Peacemaker teams, and just basic conflict mediation.

We have a lot to learn from the Native Americans as far as dialogue circles and mediation skills that really make us stop and slow things down. That's a big part of swords to plowshares you take something like a sword that gives you what feels like immediate answer, whether that's stopping somebody from hurting you, or killing them so that they can never hurt you, to a plow share that requires you to have seasonal patience, you have to wait a season to see the fruit of that ploughshare. That we need to kind of change the way we think about conflict in our life. And that includes conflict within ourselves because suicide, like Shane said is two thirds of gun violence. So there's a there's a lot of conflict that we're dealing with. And it's very complex since gun violence speaks from other issues. When we talk about gun violence, we have to talk about suicide, we have to talk about gang violence and domestic violence. And then we also need to talk about the big guns. What is the National example being set for conflict resolution? And this is something that the church has an immense opportunity to set a new example. It's right there for for the church to step in, and be that example of non-violent conflict resolution. I forget who I spoke with in the past year, but someone said something similar.

Seth Price 38:05

I think it was on Muslim immigration and fear of the other. And I forget what he said exactly. But he basically said, the church historically always is playing catch up when if we were actually being the church, we would be the trendsetters and the people blazing the trail towards something that looks closer to shalom as opposed to something that looks closer to gradually being dragged in to a better version of humanity, which is really it's really sad. It's really sad.

What is the final hope then? Because we're wrapping down to the end of our time; if we do it well, what do you want people to visit very end to take home if they only heard one, one thing and say they've been listening to this for the last, you know, 30-40 minutes and they kind of checked out because they're uncomfortable with talking about an addiction to guns and an addiction to violence teally, what is the thing that you would say, Hey, stop what you're doing, pay attention and hear me when I say this.

Shane 39:00

I would say, we're going to keep going back to that core verse for us from Micah and Isaiah, that God's people will beat their swords into plows. And that beautiful vision ends by saying nation will not rise up against nation, and people will learn violence and war no more. What's so beautiful about the verse is that peace doesn't begin with the politicians and presidents and kings. It begins with the people of God, and they begin to transform their weapons and their hearts obviously are transformed, they refuse to kill, and they begin to repurpose the metal that was designed to kill into tools that can cultivate life.

So in the end, I think what's so powerful is that this is about God changing people's hearts. And then as God is healing our hearts we want to heal a broken world that is plagued by violence. So we're not going to legislate love, but we do believe that because this is a gun problem and a heart problem that God heals hearts and people make changes in our society that allow life to flourish a little better. And we can do that right now.

Seth Price 40:21

Mike anything that

Michael 40:22

Teah, I think that Shane hit it right on the head that if the end goal is that we begin to make less and less swords that if that is the prophetic vision and that's what we believe the kingdom especially as Christians is going to look like that it makes less and less sense to keep making swords if we know they're just gonna be made into plowshares. So to have a shift in our resources is a big part for myself and Rawtools. I know Shane, with his community development, that there's a new way to look at how we engage with our neighbors in our society.

Seth Price 41:00

This is quasi related, but it's more just logically I want to break that down. How many firearms on average if most people own pistols I'm assuming…I have no idea what the most commonly held firearm is, but I'm assuming it's got to be a pistol, their least expensive, most easily concealed…how many of those does it take to turn it into something that can till the earth like they can actually do something useful?

Michael 41:23

We can make an easy or simple garden hoe out of a pistol. We can make a several hand shovels out of shotguns and we can make three to four double sided tools out of rifles, the longer ones, so depending on the gun, we get different tools out of it. But we can at least one tool out of every gun.

Seth Price 41:42

So it's, at a minimum, one to one.

Michael 41:44

Yeah, at minimum and on average two to three.

Shane 41:48

And just in contrast to that, listen to this man, like right now in the US we are making one gun every three seconds, 18 guns a minute, over 1000 guns an hour, 25,000 guns a day…we are arming the world. And yet it stands in such contrast to that prophetic image of beating swords in the plows and Jesus saying, blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God. So that's who we want to be.

Seth Price 42:23

Well, the book is available. It comes out when March 5, its fifth. Yeah. And so that's gonna be available everywhere that books are sold.

Shane 42:32

You can pre order it now and register to get a plow that Mike makes so if people pre register they can get a plow, you may win one. We're gonna give away.

Seth Price 42:44

I’m on the website right now, where do you register for this plow? I'll do that while I'm on the phone with me.

Shane 42:50

(laughs) Awesome. And by the end, you know, like we said, we're going all over the country too. So folks can go to beatingguns.com and see what the nearest place that will be and we're live streaming a lot of these so yeah. And keep us in your prayers and we'll be traveling in our..,we got this school bus converted to a tiny house tour bus with solar panels and it has the forge and the anvil in the back of it that will be traveling on so it's gonna be a powerful trip.

Seth Price 43:25

What is the manpower for that because I have to think that that's going to be exhausting for whoever's running that forge every you know, every time you stop to a new city like that, that just the manpower involved. It's got to be exhausting.

Shane 43:37

We’ve got some woman power, it's about an hour drive. My wife's gonna be driving I had to get her a bus outfit. So she's got overalls, gloves, and a hat and sunglasses. But then Mike's doing the hard work and we've got some other blacksmiths don't we Mike, you should talk about that, you know, we're trying to actually set up kind of a network of blacksmiths around the country right bro?

Michael 44:00

So a big part of the Rawtools aspect of this is building a disarming network. And you can see that on our website at rawtools.org, where there's people across the country that are volunteering their time, and or their space, as well as their tools to help us disable the guns for folks who want to donate guns to us. And blacksmiths who want to help us process those guns and turn them into garden tools.

So we've got about half a dozen blacksmiths across the country, and about 30 to 40 people across the country, but we really want to double and triple that so that if you want to donate a gun to to us, there should be someone within an hour at most that can help you disable that if you don't have the tools. And then we make a free tool to anybody who donates a gun to us and then we keep the rest of those gun parts to make more things to support our work.

Seth Price 44:48

To get those tools they have to be hand delivered? Like I know you can't like mail a gun through the mail. So if they're not close, how do they get the firearm actually processed into you?

Michael 45:00

That's the necessity for that network. So if you're in West Texas and you want to donate a gun to us, you have to disable it before you can mail it to us. Otherwise, you'd have to mail it to a gun dealer who would perform a background check. But if you disable it by making three cuts through the receiver, we follow federal ATF guidelines for that, they basically tell us where to do that. And then it's no longer a gun anymore. You've just destroyed the firearm.

Seth Price 45:24

Your just shipping metal.

Michael 45:25

Right, you are just shipping metal and wood and plastic. And then we take that and make some garden tools and we send them one garden tool back to you.

Seth Price 45:34

Mike, where can they where can they engage with you and then Shane, how can they also engage with you, as they listen to this, and they read the book, and then they want to do more? You got beatingguns.com, you've got rawtools.org. How would they engage with you at a personal level, if they felt called to?

Michael 45:45

Yeah, like you said, rawtools.org, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram for us as well. And there's a lot of different ways you can engage on our website and as far as how do you want to plug in donate or be part of that disarming network, or have us come out for an event we're doing this kind of huge book tour. But we do that, Shane and I've been doing that together for almost five years now where we do a gun to garden tool demonstration that's alongside a worship service. And that's what the book tour is going to look a lot like, but that can take a lot of different forms. There's a lot of different ways you can engage with with RawTools.

Shane 46:17

Yeah, and then I'm on Twitter and Facebook at just my name, @ShaneClaiborne. And then we have Instagram for the tour @beatingguns. So yeah, keep in touch with us. And, you know, if folks like got excited about having a chop saw I've been calling some of these “chops saws churches” because they'll have a place where people can donate guns and have a chop saw on site at their church or community center.

So there's nothing right now that you know, if someone inherits like 12 guns from their grandfather, that they have a very easy way to get rid of them and have them repurposed. And so that's exactly what RawTools is up to, and we're pumped about. You know, 300 million guns in the country we can make a lot of beautiful things out of those (guns) that cultivate life.

Seth Price 47:04

Yeah. I like that like that. Well, thank you both for your time and for your willingness to be on the day. Thank you both.

Shane 47:12

Absolutely, man.

Michael 47:16

Thanks, Seth.

Seth Price 47:32

Close your eyes and picture what our planet, not your family, what our planet could actually look like if each and every single one of us could figure out how to deal with aggression in a way with humility, and not meet bullet for bullet, sword for sword. If we would genuinely let Jesus and the heart of the gospel change the way that we deal with violence because I think Shane and Michael are right we have a heart problem. We are addicted to violence. And I'll be honest, sometimes being angry feels good. We just have to realize that, myself included. Go to the website at beatingguns.com/tour and see where they're going to be. And if they're close to you go out there, even if you don't have a gun to trade and just go out there, see what it's all about. I find the cathartic stories that Michael talked about, and Shane talked about, of just people really working through that loss and that trauma in a physical way, but also deeply involving church and community and God. So I challenge you to sit with this. Sit with the uncomfortability let it stay there, don't push it away and do whatever you feel called to do.

The music for today was used with permission from Hills x Hills. definitely get more acquainted with them. Follow along in the show notes.

Talk to you next week.

Touched by God with Luigi Gioia / Transcript

Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.

Back to the Audio Episode

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Luigi 0:00

So we need to believe more and more deeply that our God is different. The God of Jesus Christ is never a God who's going to take vengeance is never a God of such crude retribution. And the whole of the history of salvation. The heart of the Bible is a testament to it. God took people where they were so at the point in which they believed that if you do wrong, you're going to be punished and if you are right, you're going to be rewardedand takes them progressively to Jesus with the message that whatever you do, wherever you are, I am with you. The only thing I want is you to be with me and there is no length I'm not prepared to go to rescue you and to bring you with me.

Seth Price 1:11

Hello, you beautiful, beautiful people. I'm glad that you're here. Glad that it's March. I'm glad that it's Lent, at least I think by the time this episode releases, it will be Lent. I am Seth, your host. So excited for the conversation today. One of my favorite things on this show is when I engage with thinkers and voices that are way outside of my normal sphere of influence. And today's guest is that so I spoke with Luigi Gioia, who is a lecturer of systematic theology. He currently is at the University of Cambridge. He is so fun to talk to and I'm glad that you get to hear it.

When I got Luigi his book, I didn't really know what to expect and you'll hear this as the conversation unfolds here in a few minutes, I had no idea that I needed to read what I was reading at the time that it was sent to me. And that is one of the most fascinating aspects of this show. And I tell people often in real life, doing this show is extremely helpful for me because it's cathartic, and it's tough, but it is a pleasure doing this show is, is changing me in ways that I was unexpected. And this conversation is no different.

So at the same time that last week's episode with James P. Danaher was being read and interviewed. I was reading Luigi’s book at the same time, called Touched by God. And between just the knowledge and the interweaving of contemplative prayer, and the Gospel of John, the parables, epistemology and truth, my world was like rocked! Like I don't even understand how to explain it to you. And you hear me allude to that in the show, but I'm gonna try to write it down, but I honestly don't know how to explain it. Before we get going on this episode, I wanted to just read you one of the parts of the books that I liked the most Luigi quotes, theologian El Meskeen and I love what he says on prayer. And so before we dive into this, I'd like to read that to you. And so he says that

prayer is the expression of a deep love between you and God. God's love attracts your heart to prayer, and to his presence and your love consists an offering to God the same love. Initially the manifestation of love in prayer, is shy, maturity in prayer, coincides with the maturity of love.

And so as we begin Lent, listen to this conversation on prayer, let's go.

Seth Price 4:13

Luigi Gioia, I'm thankful that you're on the show. I am excited to talk with you. I was thrilled when another name that I struggled to pronounce emailed me about about your book. I don't remember how to say her name, but I was excited to get it, excited to read it. And honestly, it was if I'm honest with you, Luigi it was what I needed to read at the time that I was reading it. So I read yours with another one at the same time about truth and prayer and how the words matter. And so the two just mix together well. And so thank you for writing it. And thanks for coming on to the show.

Luigi 4:49

It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Seth Price 4:52

Yeah, so a lot of my audience is either in New Zealand, the United States or Canada. There's a small subset there in the UK, and I know that I believe you're in the UK?

Luigi 5:01

I am in the UK. So Cambridge right now at my college.

Seth Price 5:06

I wanted to just briefly set the stage so that those that are listening as they hear you talk, they'll kind of know where you're coming from. And so kind of what is your upbringing, you know, theologically and personally that has made you the follower of Christ that you are today?

Luigi 5:20

Well, I grew up in the south of Italy in a family where my mother is deeply religious, and my father, as I often say, was and still is the most anti-clerical person I've ever met in my life. I was then we really just when I was a child, very religious, very practicing when I was a child. So I would go to church quite often, but it was not a personal faith. And I kind of had a major experience of conversion when I was 16 at a period of my life where I was rather under the influence of my father. I had become very anti-clerical (and) I reacted against the church. And I was trying to read and find arguments against Christianity. And one of the ways in which I decided to do it was by reading the Gospels or reading Scripture, and trying to find in Scripture arguments against Christianity. And that was really the greatest mistake of my life depending on how you say it, because I soon changed my approach to Scripture.

So I was reading it as a kind of story or a collection of myths and I was trying to find flaws or problems in it. And as I was reading it, it was the first time I was reading it, you know, gospels from beginning to end and seeing the continuity, seeing the story. I became first very interested, then moved, and then somehow I felt there was someone speaking to me through these words, it was not just me reading about something, but a feeling that someone was trying to tell me something through these texts.

And I still, to this day, cannot describe exactly what happened. But I know that in the course of that week, or 10 days in which I, every day, would spend some time reading scripture and becoming more and more engrossed in this reading, I started to pray, I started to talk to God. And by the end of that period, I can say that I believed. I had come to faith.

So it was a very personal journey that led me straightaway to want to give my life to God in the way available at the time the south of Italy, which was to join the Catholic Church as a monk, there was a small Benedictine community in southern Italy. I started to go to this community to have small retreats to have time times of prayer and to talk to people to monks there. And within a year, so when I was 18, I decided to join monastic life. And that led me to a long journey where I was, alternatively in Tuscany for three years, then in France for 19 years. And then I was again in Rome for another seven years in different monastic settings. And in the meantime, surprisingly, I didn't expect that but after 10 years of mastic life, my superiors decided to send me to Oxford to do my theological studies.

So I was exposed to a lot of Catholic, kind of very conservative doctrine, especially reading a lot of Thomas Aquinas who is really the major think of conservative Catholicism. Then in Oxford I worked a lot with people, Anglicans, there who introduced me to St. Augustine in particular. So Rowan Williams has been one of the most influential figures in my life. Then I was exposed to Calvinism to a form of Calvinism and then I became friends with evangelicals of angelical Anglicans, who kept inviting me to the meetings and to the gatherings, because they were very interested in Catholic teaching and Catholic spirituality.

And just to add another element to this idea about where I come from. After that, some 10 years ago, I was called to go to Rome to teach in one of the so called Pontifical universities. So these are the universities, the universities acknowledged by the Vatican as teaching in the name of the church. And I was training people or teaching to people from all over the world from over 90 countries, and there was teaching Trinity Christology, anthropology and spirituality, theology of history. But by and large, I was always interested in the spiritual aspects of theology. This has been my teaching.

And then three years ago, I was invited as a visiting scholar here in Cambridge, thanks to Rowan Williams, who has become a friend in the meantime. And since then, after that, they asked me to stay so I am still here at the moment.

Seth Price 10:40

You asked me before we started recording what denomination I called home and I gave a very vague but honest answer. And so I hear a lot of changes throughout, at least, the knowledge has been poured into your head. And so I'd asked you the same question. So what form of, I guess Christianity do you find that fits the best for you?

Luigi 11:03

Well, I mean, an Italian is a Catholic- is a Roman Catholic- (laughter) just you know, as a Catholic, you're born into it. But this gives you a great freedom. So it's not as identitarian the Italian form of Catholicism is not as identitarian as the one I discovered in UK, for instance, or in America. So I've always found very difficult to identify myself in a position to say, well that I'm Catholic means I'm not Protestant, or I’m not Baptist, or I'm not Anglican. On the contrary, I’ve been brought up into a form of Catholicism which really etymologically is really all embracing and honestly and sincerely interested.

When I went to Oxford for the first time in my life, and it was my 30s I started to meet Anglicans, evangelicals, Methodists, and I was fascinated I started to go to the to the services on Sunday I would go to three different places I would go to a Catholic Mads, I would go to a hard evangelical kind of almost Calvinist kind of service, where the preaching was very good, but quite hard. And then I would go to a charismatic in evening, a charismatic evangelical services. Well, yeah, just because I wanted to be exposed to these different denominations, not so much or not only from the viewpoint of doctrine, but from the viewpoint of spirituality. I really wanted to understand how they relate to God, how they understand the way God acts in their lives, how they understand Scripture. And I realized that the best way to do this is not so much by reading books about them about different information but by become friends, and by praying wave and by sharing religious kind of experiences with people from across the different denominations.

And this has been fascinating because when you pray with someone in a friendly context, you cannot judge them. And you are much more receptive to everything which is positive in his or her experience.

Seth Price 13:20

I'm gonna borrow because you're a professional like you actually speak for a living, you know, and you lecture for a living. So I'm gonna borrow that segue that was beautiful, into prayer. So yeah, so yeah, I'm man enough to know when you did it better than me. So, you if you've written a book that I guess…

Luigi 13:36

I won’t ask you for a copyright for that. (Laughter both)

Seth Price 13:41

Yeah, the way that you phrased spirituality and the way that the different denominations do it the way that the different forms of Christianity do it has really been a big part of my Christianity over the last few years, mostly because I read a book that made me question the way that I pray and then I read another book that was a different view on prayer, and then I read another book on contemplation. And then I spoke to, you know, a Christian that embraces mysticism in a more cosmic type of way. And we talked about prayer and intentionality and being present and like eye gazing. And either way, I'm always uncomfortable with it. But I find a lot of growth in that uncomfortability.

And so when I read your book, which is relatively short, although it took me longer than I expected to read a short book, because I would read a few pages, and then you would quote theologians that I'm not familiar with, like some of the names that you quote, and some of the things that as you were reading, you know, impacted you I was like I never heard this I was cheated out of something. Because I've never read this. And I wonder where I would be today had I had I had something years ago. So kind of why did you write Touched by God? Like, what's kind of the genesis of that and what are you trying to do?

Luigi 14:50

Really, it is the kind of urge that came from inside me, really. I've been blessed, I have to say by a desire or which at some points in my life was bordering on obsession about praying; about somehow welcoming God's presence in my life, acknowledging it. And, I remember very early at the moment of my conversion, starting to pray and yet questioning my prayer. But questioning, not judgmental, not anxiously, just saying to myself, okay, it's very important in prayer that that should talk to God and I started to do it straightaway.

But I was wondering, do I have to do all the talk? How is God actually talking to me? How and when am I listening to him? And I was reading as much as I could on this topic. I was questioning people and this has been a long journey, a very long journey. I mean, it's taken me years and years and years to find answers that really, I would say satisfied me because to this day, I'm still not satisfied.

I'm still kind of, and it would be really bad sign if I felt or I've reached the point where I don't have to question myself or question prayer anymore, or read more. But it is true that after a number of years, and reading a number of authors, and carrying on praying and growing as I hope in my life of prayer, I found that there was something in my experience that spoke to other people. So particularly in the past, well, starting some 20 years ago in the monastery where I was in France, we had many young people who came for day retreats, so we come in morning stay until the evening and they would share parts of our lives and the same time we would give to them small teachings on Christianity and particularly I was asked to give a teaching on prayer. So I really I can say that I've been speaking to prayer to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of young people. And this has been a very good school for me, it has forced me to hone, really, the way in which I can communicate this expense which is so central to my life. And then in the past 10 years, I've been invited to preach what was called retreat in Catholicism, kind of motivational give motivational talks to Christians all over the world, Philippines, Korea, China, Australia, Canada, in Syrian, and in States as well. And, and I realized that each time I was talking about prayer, even if I had the feeling that what I was talking about was quite simple, really. It spoke to people.

People really said to me that this helps them and so there you have a sense of responsibility. So you feel well probably if I've been so almost obsessed by prayer all of my life is because God wanted me to go a bit deeper into this experience or share it with other people and help other people with it. And this is really is the fundamental kind of reason behind both books Say it to God and Touched by God.

Seth Price 18:26

I find, talking about prayer is, as you said a minute ago, simple, but it's also deceptively hard to do it. What's the word I'm looking for? To say, I'm gonna go pray is fine. But then to come away, feeling like I've connected with God I find frustrating. Often, where I leave and I'm like, Man, that was, I don't know if that was a waste of my time or not. And it's probably not and in hindsight, it usually never is. But at the moment, I often find myself frustrated by how hard something so simple should be like I feel like it should be 2+2=4. And that's probably the logical part of my brain being like, just input these into the prayer bucket. And these results will be yielded. And that is never the case. And you talk well on that, you have a few chapters where you talk on feeling, and silence and how we often pray, and we don't feel anything and so we come away longing. And can you break that apart to get like, what do I do with that feeling when I pray, and I spent a week praying about something. And in that, and I feel nothing, I feel distant?

Luigi 19:33

The experience of what we can call the absence of God or not feeling anything is indeed one of the main obstacles to a life of prayer, I acknowledge that. And it is something that in one way or the other comes and goes. So you never reach a point in life of prayer where you sail through it, always motivated, always enthusiastic. Especially when you will lead a very busy life, which is happened to me in the past few years since I've been especially here in Cambridge. But even when I was in Rome, I remember that I had my time of prayer every day. But each time it was so difficult to stop doing what I was doing just to go, I mean, to take time for prayer.

And I remember at the beginning saying to myself, it's such a waste of time, this is such a waste of time. And yet it was not just that I wanted to do it. There was something that I would feel I was missing in my life if I was not praying, which was not exactly a feeling I felt as I was praying. So sometimes as I was praying, it might be very dry. It might be me saying things to God and me praying for other people or me just also, I mean, as I tried to describe my last book, trying to stay silent in God's presence. And yet at the end of it feeling, as you described, not special, nothing special.

And yet, I would see that when I did it, my life has a sense of fullness, which I missed immediately if I missed these times of prayer not once or twice, but you know, over a few days. So when I talk about the peace and the joy that comes from prayer, I'm describing really a range of feelings. So there is really a sense of joy that can fill us fill our hearts as we are praying, there is really consolation that we can receive as we are praying. And, you know, Jesus says, I've come to give you my joy, and if he has promised this to us is because he wants to give this to us. But there is also a much more subtle and pervasive sense of fulfillment and peace and joy almost unnoticeable, that fills our lives that we often take for granted as Christians, but which we miss immediately if we stop caring about cultivating a relation with God. And this is also something that we've noticed the difference that makes praying whether we feel it's something or not, whether we feel something or not, as we pray, is something that we notice when we talk to people who really have no belief and feel alone in their lives in the trials of their lives.

To me, whenever this happens, I feel what a huge difference makes for me whether I feel anything or not to know that I'm not alone, that God is with me. And this gives me a piece which might not be always felt that socially makes my life different.

Seth Price 23:05

Thinking about prayer, I was thinking about our conversation last night, or I was thinking about our conversation for today last night, and as I'm tucking my daughters into bed, and I'm thinking of all of the news today, specifically on the Catholic Church, but also out of the Baptist Church and all of these things of a touching-a physical embrace- unwarranted and unwanted and I'm worried that to have a concept of praying in a way that we can touch God is tainted in a way because of the way that touch has been abused physically. And so I'm curious how you would either break apart the difference between physical touch and the spiritual touch, or if they even can be broken apart? And I'm not even sure that I'm asking that the right way. But I'm hoping that you're hearing what I'm understanding because I'm trying to trying to be able to relate everything that I talked about on this show, I always try to relate back down to my children, and I struggled to be able to as I thought last night, communicate well in a way of protect yourself against unwanted touching, here's how we physically know what we want. Here's how we emotionally know what's safe and wholesome and fruitful.

Luigi 24:11

Yes, I mean, this is something that obviously can imagine. I've been asked already several times. And indeed, when I decided to call this book Touched by God, some of my friends started to make jokes about it, you know, and as you can imagine.

Seth Price 24:32

I definitely don't want to joke about it, because that is a very serious topic. Yeah, this is not a Super Bowl. I don't want to be flippant with it.

Luigi 24:41

Yes.

Well, my answer to this would be that many times, many, many times in my life, I had to realize and this has been really something that has been very hard, that in situations where I was really trying to help someone, someone I deeply loved, I would hurt this person. And it could be a friend, it could be a person with whom I have a member of my family. I don't have children so I can’t talk about children. But I know that a lot of parents without wanting it and really out of love for the children end up hurting them in one way or the other. And this is a very painful experience because how is it possible that with the best intentions and when you're really trying to love someone, you end up hurting him or her? The answer to this is that human love is wounded and that it is unavoidable that when we love we also hurt people. And jokingly, but since we're the same time, I say often that there is only one way we can be sure of never hurting anyone which is not loving anyone. If you never love anyone you will never hurt anyone.

But if you accept, to love and to be loved you accept the possibility of hurting or being hurt and thank God we have forgiveness. This is why forgiveness is such a fundamental element in love. There is no possibility of love in this life, in this heart, without forgiveness. So just in the same way, just as we cannot give up love just because we love comes hurt, just in the same way we cannot give up talking about touching and the importance of touching in our lives just because it is so abused and abused precisely by the people who should be trustworthy who should be able to to give protection and advice to people while in situations of vulnerability and so on and so forth.

Touching is the essential component of identity. We will not become the people we are unless we have been touched by parents in the most formative years of our lives, we would not be able to talk, we not be able to relate, we would not be able to feel emotions at home had we not been touched in the right way in the first years of our existence. As we grow, we become more and more selective and less than less dependent on physical touch. So we still have that level of intimacy with you know, our partner or our children, or some very, very good friends in certain situations. But touching remains just as important for us in a different way to the point that we use the word “touched” or being touched, most of the time, not physically but metaphorically.

So we say this word touched me, this story touched me, this example touched me. And I also found out, and this was quite surprising for me, that in neuroscience apparently metaphors of touch kind of awake, the same part of brain, which is involved in physical touch. So it is so similar, being touched emotionally or metaphorically to being touched physically that the same part of the brain is involved in this operation.

So when it comes to God and our relationship with God, there is something very similar to what happens in our daily lives. Just as in our daily lives the thing that becomes more formative, or keep kind of motivating and helping us, is being touched by this word, by this podcast, by this news, by this declaration from a friend whatever it is, so in relationship with God the way in which God reaches out and touches us is through his work from Scripture, through the stories he tells us.

This is why Scripture is not a treatise, it's not so much a book where we find explanations is a book where we find stories and fairly simple stories. Very, very good down to Earth Jesus talks through parables, Jesus does things so that by reading it, rather through these words through the Scripture, God tries to convey to us the extent to which we are important for him, the extent to which he loves us, descent which he wants to be part of our lives. And especially, that which is to me the absolute core of the Biblical message is that he is with us, and he cannot be other than being with us. This is really his name and He is a God who longs for speaking to us for talking to us. And is a God whose longing is to have an impact in our lives and to be in a covenantal relationship with us.

So in this sense, touching is just central and is absolutely fundamental. Now it is misused, abused and it is often the place where we are most hurt; and it is also the place where unfortunately Christians, Catholics, but you know, unfortunately I wasn’t aware of this time for the Baptist’s as well have, you know, for a variety of reasons, very complex reasons I've misused it. But at the same time, just as with love and hurt, you know, just because these realities can be misused or rather I would say this, the extent to which they can be misused and can hurt people is is directly proportional also to the way in which they can have a positive impact in people's lives and if they're used properly. And it is necessary to reflect and talk about and to learn how we can use them properly.

Seth Price 31:14

Say someone's listening and they hear that; a nd I will say, Luigi that's beautiful. And I agree that there is a direct tension with (touching). And I only say this because as a father, my son and I are almost identical in every way. And I'm always on a razor's edge of being in a loving manner or in a non-loving manner. And it really (is) much more different than my wife or my daughters, like just a razor's edge because it's like looking at a mirror. And I'm not usually prepared for that. And I don't mean a mirror physically, he does look like me. I mean, he's my son, but just emotionally logically the way that he processes things, and I've never realized how sensitive I was until I saw how sensitive I am. And I'm not saying that right, but that's the best way I'm going to say it.

Say as a child, I didn't have a “really loving relationship” and I'm not saying that this is the case for me? So for me touches something that I recoil from-emotional touch, physical touch-if I'm listening to a song on the radio, and it begins to touch a part of me that I'm not content with, I just turn it off. And I'm like, you know, I feel called to follow Christ. I want to pray. I want to do so. I hear you, Luigi, saying that as I do there's going to be touching happening here either emotionally, spiritually, and neurosciencely-that's not a word-in my brain, from what I'm hearing you say?

And I'll have to find that research, that's going to evict almost in a physical response from an emotional impulse and a brain impulse. And so if I'm not equipped to handle that, well, as a Christian, what can I do? Like how do I plug myself in safely and intentionally so that I can continue to practice prayer and begin to work through that outside of just throwing out the baby with the bathwater and much like that song on the radio that I didn't want to be touched by, just turn the power off and just disconnect?

Luigi 32:59

Yes.

Well, I don't want to be naive, nor absolutes about it. I know for a fact that I know people who stay away from Christianity, just as we stay away from many other things because they've been hurt because the messages come across to them in a way that has led them to feel kind of judged, excluded, or considered unworthy to be loved. And it is true that this might be an obstacle they will never overcome in their lives. And just in the same way, if someone has had a traumatic experience, in his or her relationship with his or her father, will struggle to be told when you pray you should say “our father“, so there is no magic kind of solution to this problem.

The only thing I can say is that I also know, and I remember this case very well, this woman many years ago from Asia who had had this very difficult relationship with her father, and who came after a teaching on prayer and on the Lord's Prayer came to see me and said, you know, you, you have no idea how hurtful it is to hear that, you know, the way we should praise “our father”.

And you know, I apologized to her for not being sensitive to this, and the conversation didn't end very well. And yet the same woman five years afterwards, I met her again. And she said to me, you know, as it happens, I really tried and the experience of a father with God being father has somehow healed me and I found consolation in it; and this has led even me to reconcile myself with my earthly father before he died. So I mean, these things can happen.

On the other hand, it is true that in Scripture, God bless himself as father, but also his brother, and his friend, and even his mother-someone that walks with us. And in all these cases, it is quite clear that we are dealing with images, because God is every of each one of these things and is beyond any of them. And he does that precisely because he wants us to have at our disposal and array of of images that can help us to find ways in which we can let him closer come closer to us.

But it is also true that some people will never be able to do this and not because of their faults but just because they've been to hurt in their lives. And then I really feel a sense of almost all and deep kind of respect for the way in which God has, I believe, remains present in the lives of people who seem to be completely impervious to his action or to his presence to His word. To me one of the core beliefs or the core sentences of Scriptures is that God wants everyone to be saved. And if this is true, and I believe it is true, I also believe that God has His ways of acting and being present in the life or the lives of everyone.

And I don't need anyone to be openly a believer or to welcome you know, Scripture, or to go to church. I don't need anything of this to believe that God is acting in people's lives. And I have to say that the thing that strikes me most when I talk to people, even people in great pain, in intensively tragic lives, is the extent to which my faith allows me to believe well, God is there, even if you don't know it. I wish you would know it because they would do this would bring your great consolation, but I know that God is present in your life anyway because weather is paid and suffering, is where the God is. In the end, there's going to be some ways in which this is going to be valid in the lives of everyone. I believe it even if I don't know how this belongs to God's ways.

Seth Price 37:14

I want to build off of where you were going there with with pain, and when you're praying and how you deal with that. So you have a chapter, and I referenced it before we started talking about the inner nagging and in it you touched on something that I hear a lot, especially over here and I don't want to call out you know, that “name it claim it” kind of Christianity of, if you have pain, if you have strife and struggles you just doing, you're just doing church wrong, like you're not being a good Christian, you're doing it wrong. And so you quote a sentence in Psalm 119, where it says, you know,

it was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.

And you kind of walk through that a bit. And then the part that got me is you say,

this travesty of Christian faith keeps such a stronghold on us because it is the core of the pagan sense of sacred that has plagued mankind ever since the first religious feeling dawned in the conscience of our early ancestors,

and so I'd like you to rip that apart a bit because I've never heard that, especially the part where you talk about the pagan sense of the sacred and how that relates to mankind. Like I just never really thought about it that way. Can you rip that apart a bit?

Luigi 38:17

Well, yeah, what we are talking about his guilt really. And guilt is something that belongs to anthropologically to who we are what we are, again, because human love human upbringing is wounded. And again, because the way our society works, the core is that as human beings, we have this sense that if evil happens to us it is because in one way or the other, we have done something wrong or we have upset some divinity, some spirit, some being out there, and we have to do something to satisfy or to pacify this, this being if you want to establish the order. And this is anthropological, you find this in all religions and one of the explanations that are many explanations of pagan sacrifices, especially blood sacrifices is this one.

So I've read some anthropological kind of studies of blood sacrifice in African kind of cultures, where blood is used as a token, is the only way of “How do I kind of get in touch to reach a being I cannot see a presence which is out there and can hurt me” other than by giving them something that can go from this world to that world and blood is one of the ways in that I give some life to them etc, etc.

This is why I took the I call about the pagan sense of sacred too. Every human being comes with this sense of a world inhabited by forces we cannot control. And by the fact that if something happens to us, it must be because we've upset one of these forces and it is taking vengeance on us. Now, I think that my understanding of Christianity is that it cuts through this pagan understanding of this spontaneous way we have to relate to reality and evil in particular, all the bad things that happened to us are left to their mystery. So there is no explanation for evil, there is no reason for evil. If there was a reason it will not be evil. Evil by definition is darkness, is absence of light.

So of course, there are times in which we we receive a damage because we do something wrong. So if I throw a stone in the air and I stay there, I mean, the stone is going to fall back on me and there is only me to blame. But if there's that tsunami, if an accident happens to me, if I got an illness, if you know in relationship there is something that goes wrong, this just belongs to the reality of our life on Earth; it's unavoidable. In the life of absolutely everyone there's going to be a number of these events, which thank God most of the time, in most lives, don't happen all the time. You know, in some lives are particularly plagued by the sufferings or populations in some areas really, just particularly kind of exposed to it. But in most lives, this doesn't happen every day. But it happens and what he's happens really it is a challenge to our faith. If we are Christian, I think it is a challenge to our faith, not to project this pagan understanding or this pagan explanation on to God. And believe that “if this is happening to me is because God is punishing me because I deserve it”. Because even if I had done something wrong, the God we believe in is not a God who takes vengeance, is not a God who if you've done something wrong, you're going to pay for it. No! He is a God who, on the contrary, only wants us to live and wants to change us not by punishing us, but by persuading us of the extent to which choosing good is something that makes us happier, more fulfilled.

And He will always try and attract us by persuasion, by love, and by coming to help whenever we put ourselves in situations which we are wrong. The problem is that most forms of Christianity today have very little reflection on these issues. There's too little spirituality this is what I constantly fighting. We do not realize the extent to which the forms of Christianity we preach or we live are contaminated by this anthropological, fundamental, pagan, universal way of apprehending divinity and apprehending relation between the bad things that happened to us and belief in a divinity or God. And this is a field in which more than any other we need conversion, we need constant conversion. To overcome guilt, we need a constant conversion. So we need to believe more and more deeply that our God is different. The God of Jesus Christ is never God was going to take vengeance, is never a God of such crude retribution. The whole of the history of salvation, the whole of the Bible is a testament to it. God took people where they were-so at the point in which they believed that if you do wrong, you're going to be punished (and) if you are right, you're going to be rewarded-and takes them progressively to Jesus with the message that whatever you do, wherever you are, I am with you. The only thing I want is you to be with me and there is no length I'm not prepared to go to rescue you and to bring you with me.

Why would you not believe in such a beautiful message you would think? Well, precisely because we are wired in the wrong way. Precisely because we are wired to not believe that and this is why I think the place where we need the greatest and the deepest conversion is precisely this one, the extent to which we are prepared to believe in God's love, in God's forgiveness, and in God's willingness to be with us, whatever happens.

Seth Price 45:10

So there's two things I want to ask you about as we must be coming close to the end of your time, two things that I want to ask you about-to rip apart. So you referenced images of prayer earlier. And so you have two images that you contrast in the book. One is rest and restlessness, and the other is mindfulness and responsiveness.

So before you get into that, I often conflate mindfulness with contemplative practices. And so what is the differences between you know contemplative prayer, and mindfulness? Especially because mindfulness is all the rage everywhere, every book in Barnes and Noble or wherever. And so what's the distinction, or the interplay, between those two and then how does that impact as we pray the images of you know, rest and restlessness and mindfulness and responsiveness?

Luigi 45:57

Yes, well, mindfulness, as I understand it, I'm not an expert on mindfulness by any stretch of imagination. But mindfulness is positive, insofar, as it helps people to slow down, to pay greater attention, to be less out there in the action, and more and more capable of staying somehow alone with oneself and not being afraid of silence not being afraid of emptiness. And discovering that what looks like emptiness at the beginning, in reality is filled by a sense of well being, and can be quite helpful to help us to go back to our daily activities, having some distance having some greater ability not to get completely swallowed by what we do. So essentially, mindfulness is paying attention, mindfulness is not to be afraid of silence.

Contemplation, as I understand it, also is the ability (that) we acquire to see things we do not normally see, or to perceive things we do not normally perceive; and particularly God's presence and actionin our lives, and God's voice in Scripture, and possibly God's presence within us. These things are related. And spiritual tradition is very good on this because it uses the image of spiritual senses. It says that just as we have eyes that allow us to see and ears that allows us to hear in the physical realm. So progressively we acquire spiritual eyes or spiritual ears that help us to see and discern God's action and presence.

And this is why, and incidentally, I think the healing of blind people or healing of deaf people that is so important in the Gospel. It is clearly an image of what revelation does, what God comes to do Christ comes to do on Earth, which is giving us eyes that enable us to see him or ears that enable us to hear him. This is said about them in the Gospel of Luke that their eyes were opened and they recognized him.

So contemplation really is what happens when God opens our eyes, the eyes of our heart, or our ears, and enables us to recognize as I was describing to you earlier, I was telling you earlier, sometimes recognizing God's presence in history in lives, it's very difficult. But I think that contemplative outlook on reality is capable of seeing God where his presence is not evident. When I read Scripture, a contemplative attitude is that which enables me to see not just information about God or about the people of Israel, but to hear a voice speaking to me through these stories. And in prayer it is really this ability which we acquire, and many, many spiritual authors talk about this, of discerning God's action and presence when I'm praying.

So it's not just a feeling, although feelings are part of it, but it is something that is very real, even if it is difficult to describe. And it is a sense that I'm here. I might not see anything. I might not feel anything, but I know that I'm not alone. I know that God is with me. And I know that God loves Me, yeah. And this knowledge becomes so pregnant, becomes so real, that this moment of prayer has an impact on my life and does transform it.

Seth Price 50:12

As your life is transformed, and I'd like to close with this, you have a chapter on identity. And so I want to give you the last word on that. So as we're doing contemplative prayer, we're seeing aspects of God that we didn't see prior. You know, I live literally in the Blue Ridge Mountains here in Central Virginia. And it's beautiful and I have an easy avenue to just look out and see at least splendor that I didn't see yesterday if I'll pay attention, or I can just get on the interstate and ride right past it, but also with my daughters and with my dog or with my job or you know, other things as well. And so as we form a new identity with God, and in God, what do we call it to look like?

Like, if we were to bring it all home of not the end results, but what is the end goal? need? What do we need to collect? Do as we as we reform an identity in God,

Luigi 51:03

The element that strikes me most and I think one of the signs that impresses me most in people who I think are Christians in the right way, is what I would call generosity. And when I talk about generosity, what I mean is not just which is all already something really very, very beautiful, the availability to give my time and to give my energies for other people and to be loving and to be patient, etc, etc. Generosity for me is, is I don't need to diminish other people to feel better. So as a Christian, I don't need to think that people who don't believe in God are worse than me. Because otherwise what would be the point of being a Christian or as a Catholic, I don't feel the need to think oh, Protestants must be less good than I am because otherwise what would be the point of being a Catholic? Generosity is, on the contrary, rejoicing in how much God is present, and beauty and truth is present, everywhere and sometimes even rejoicing in the fact that is more present in other places only in other lives or in other stories then it might be where I think I can find it.

So in my Christian denomination, this is a mystery. I don't know why. But this means that I am open and ready to learn from anyone from the viewpoint this view of my belief, in solidarity with my community. But that element of generosity I think, is what we like most in our world today. We are mired into identity conflicts, because identity has become defining oneself in opposition to others and becoming more and more entrenched in this polarized view of the world politics, of gender issues, so on and so forth.

Whereas we need freedom. All Christianity I think gives us a confidence that the more we come closer to God, I would say or the more we are given these eyes that are able to acknowledge God's action and presence in history and in lives, the more we become able to be open to let anyone contribute and work with everyone else in the building of our society today, in a way, which is, I hope, slightly more conciliatory that what we are seeing today.

Seth Price 53:36

Yeah, there's not a better spot, I think. Both in Europe, and in the West, there's so much non-conciliatory attitude and mindset and so I can't think of a better call than to end with that; that would be a goal that we would be more generous is a great word. And I will say as I've tried to intentionally with last few years become more generous, and it always feels so good. Even if it's small, like just tiny. It doesn't mean it's not like I need to be a millionaire and give away money. If I guess I could, but just time like, what's your mean time like what you're doing here? Has… I'm not saying that well, so it doesn't matter. So where would you? Where would you point people to Luigi to engage with you converse with you obviously, the book is everywhere fine books are sold, and I'll have links to that in the show notes. But where would you point people to for resources or to connect with you as they try to intentionally engage in a contemplative type of prayer as they wrestle through that?

Luigi 54:39

Well, I am on Twitter and I try on Twitter to put links to everything I do, the talks I give to podcasts and the interviews I give. So if anyone googled my name they will easily find my Twitter account.

And also I have a website where I also put information and links to everything and these are connected directly to me. So through these, anyone can write to me and I'll try and do my best to answer

Seth Price 55:09

Well, thank you for your time. And I know we've had to reschedule this and my dog has interrupted us a few times. Um, I don't believe any guests has ever actually seen the dog. I think you may be the first one. I think they've heard the dog thought. So there we go; but thank you for today and for your time. I'm greatly appreciative.

Luigi 55:29

This is wonderful. I really loved this interview. I loved the interaction. Thank you very much Seth.

Seth Price 55:54

I’m beginning to come to the realization that I can't fail at prayer. And if you you've listened over the past few months, you'll hear me saying that I get so frustrated with it. I'm beginning to see glimpses and facets of a faith and an understanding of prayer that says to me, Seth, you can't screw this up. I'm here with you. We're praying together. Just talk to me. And I'm finding that wholesome, and I'm finding it beautiful. And I'm also finding it a bit scary. But I'm really, really excited that I believe I'm turning the corner of living in some constant (in the fear of some) threat, that I don't do prayer right. I don't know that there's a wrong way to do it.

I hope and I pray that your Lent, as we lead into Easter is intentionally filled with the presence of the Divine. That each of you will grow over this season in ways that you didn't think possible.

Thank you so much for listening today. If you didn't, I'll ask you again. Tell your friends about the show, rate and review the show on iTunes but really just tell people about it. I love watching, you know, different countries pop up in the in the in the analytics and new conversations and emails from people the feedback is so encouraging, but more so I'm so happy that other people besides just me get something out of the show. So tell your friends, rate and review the show on iTunes. If you get anything out of any of these episodes, consider supporting the show on Patreon. You'll find links to all that in the show notes.

Special thanks to William Matthews, whose music you heard interwoven throughout this conversation today. his newest release is called Kosmos, hands down and it's one of the best albums that I've heard in some time. It's one of the few albums that I recommend that when people listen to it, they turn the lights off, close their eyes, and just listen with intention. Multiple times like huh, it's anyway, listen to that album, you'll find Links to the day's tracks on the Spotify playlist for the show. I'll talk with you all next week.

Be blessed.