Mike Petrow:

Hey friends, welcome back to the Everything Belongs podcast. We hope you’ve had a fantastic holiday season, we missed you. It’s great to be here with you again. Mr. Paul Swanson, it’s great to be here with you again, sir, I missed you as well.

Paul Swanson:

I missed you. Happy New Year. Good to be back together.

Mike Petrow:

Right on. What a chapter to come back to. For those of our listeners who might be new, this is the Everything Belongs podcast. This is a podcast where we get to live the teachings of Richard Rohr forward. What we do together is we go through one of Richard’s books this season. We’re looking at the book, Eager to Love, chapter by chapter. Get a chance to go talk to Richard about that and then talk to some guests that can help us illuminate the chapter that we’re looking at. But you absolutely do not have to be reading the book to listen along and probably to get quite a bit out of each episode. This week, we’re back after the holidays to look at chapter seven, The Franciscan Genius, The Integration of The Negative and goodness gracious, we have a great episode for you.

Paul Swanson:

It’s the combination of us first being in conversation with Richard and swirling around these ideas of what does it mean to integrate the negative and what does that to do with genius and how is this exemplified in the life of Francis and Clare? And of course Richard sneaks in some Therese of Lisieux into the chapter and as one of his favorite mystics, the conversation just I feel like explores territory that is natural to the everyday life and the foibles that we bump into by our own delicious and downright human way of interacting with the reality. What struck you about that conversation with Richard?

Mike Petrow:

First of all, what I appreciate and folks might not know, is when we record these conversations, there’s so much opportunity to deal with the fullness of reality, to integrate the negative by dealing with the technical challenges that we have or the people who come to the door and knock in the middle of a recording or hope be getting upset and barking at a duck or a bird or a car. It’s this constant reminder to come back to loving everything that is. And I feel like this is one of the best undercurrents of literally everything Richard has ever taught in his entire career. What a gift to do this while we talk about it with Richard.

Paul Swanson:

It really is the fertile grounds of contemplation is integrating the negative, everything that comes our way over the horizon, whether you first see it as good, positive, neutral, negative, but the welcoming of it, the allowing it to be in relationship with you is a way of embracing reality. And that is part of The Franciscan Genius is seeing wholeness and wanting to live into wholeness and not parcel up life into what we think is good, bad or ugly.

Mike Petrow:

It’s so true. And what better guests to follow that up than Adam Bucko and Kaira Jewel Lingo, who once again bring so much in their individual expertise, but there’s so much beauty in how they interact with each other. And in that recording, we also got the chance to deal with technical challenges and the foibles of, I think when it was all said and done, they were sharing a laptop and sharing a pair of earbuds, one bud in each ear. And it was just so beautiful to recognize not only the big boulder imperfections, injustices and challenges that face us, which are so real, but also the little friction points, the little challenges that show up every day and give us a chance to sit back and laugh at ourselves. And remember, as Richard says so well, the only perfection available to us is to embrace and love imperfection.

Paul Swanson:

And we were joking that it was Thérèse of Lisieux who was tangling cords and unplugging things as a way to remind us to follow the little way. Don’t let these persnickety thorns that we try to remove them to be there because it is part of the reality. There is no perfection that does not include imperfection. And I feel like she showed up and gave us an assist on that one.

Mike Petrow:

Those saints are sneaky. And we’d say to our listeners as you’re about to jump in the time machine and go back with us in time, a few weeks to Richard’s house and sit in this great conversation with us and then have this fantastic dialogue with Adam and Kaira to let everything going on in your life join the conversation. And in particular with the little frustrations, the little challenges, the technical difficulties, the mix-ups and mishaps that have been in your life today and this week, let them be a place of sacredness and an invitation to encounter and learning as you join us in that place. God knows we’re bringing our own into the room as well.

Paul Swanson:

Amen to that.

Mike Petrow:

From the Center for Action and Contemplation, I’m Mike Petrow.

Paul Swanson:

I’m Paul Swanson.

Mike Petrow:

And this is Everything Belongs.

Chapter seven, The Franciscan Genius: the Integration of The Negative is what we’re going to be talking about today. Richard, thank you yet again for inviting us back into your living room. Thrilled to be sitting here with you and OP who’s keeping a watchful eye outside just in case he needs to bark at anything. I have to tell you a story, Richard, this week there was a group visiting on campus and I had a wonderful conversation with a woman who told me that she was an Enneagram 1 and she’d struggled with being a perfectionist her entire life. And she said, “I know that Richard is an Enneagram 1, and I assume he’s struggled with that his entire life.” And she said, “Is there a book Richard has written for Enneagram 1s?” And I jokingly responded and said, “Probably everything Richard has ever written is for Enneagram 1s.

Richard Rohr:

Very good. Thank you.

Mike Petrow:

And maybe, maybe falling upward might be especially helpful. And what we’re talking about this chapter, The Integration of The Negative, Richard, has it been hard for you as an Enneagram 1 to wrestle with integrating and accepting the imperfect?

Richard Rohr:

It’s been the center of my life, inner struggle, always seeing the wrong of everything and not knowing how to erase it or eliminate it or not let it drive the show in myself and in almost everybody else and everything else, like these leaves I keep noticing in the cottonwood here in my front yard and this branch that reaches out most closely to my porch, so many of the leaves are already starting to be eaten up. It’s toward the end of the summer and these beautiful cottonwood leaves, there’s some little insect chewing on them, chewing on everything.

Mike Petrow:

And does that bother you?

Richard Rohr:

Yes. Why did they take away the perfect leaf? I want it to be perfect.

Mike Petrow:

It sounds like Jonah losing the vine at the end of the Jonah story.

Richard Rohr:

I want people to be perfect.

Mike Petrow:

You want it to be perfect and you want people to be perfect. I appreciate the honesty in that. I think one of my favorite sentences that you’ve ever written is that, “The only perfection available to us is our ability to embrace the imperfect.”

Richard Rohr:

Inclusion of the imperfect. That’s right.

Mike Petrow:

I think about this moment in the Life of Francis, that’s so moving to me where he’s really coming out of his rich, spoiled noble phase and stepping into becoming the Saint Francis that we will all know and love. And it’s that moment where he rushes up and embraces the leper, he’s been afraid of lepers his entire life. He’s looked away from them because they’re potentially contagious.

Richard Rohr:

Ugly and smelly.

Mike Petrow:

Ugly and smelly.

Richard Rohr:

He was a seven. He liked pretty things.

Mike Petrow:

Might’ve been a four, I don’t know.

Richard Rohr:

No, he wasn’t a four.

Mike Petrow:

But he rushes up and he grabs this leper and he hugs him and he kisses him, gives him some money, and that changes his life, I think.

Richard Rohr:

According to his own account in the testament, what before was hateful to me, became sweetness in light.

Mike Petrow:

And then he works with lepers, I think, for the rest of his life. Question, Richard, is what has it been like for you to embrace the leper in your journey? Has it been for you personally to really integrate the negative and embrace what has been hard and ugly or unpleasant?

Richard Rohr:

I don’t think I did it very well at all in the first half of my life. I kept seeing how we Franciscans were not living the life anymore, how the Catholic Church was not proclaiming the Gospel anymore. And that became my instinct toward reform, but it also became an instinct toward righteousness that I couldn’t have built New Jerusalem or this place if I didn’t have that holy dissatisfaction. Holy dissatisfaction just has chewed me up.

It’s not supposed to be that way. That isn’t it. That isn’t it. And then the other voice, “Who do you think you are if people much smarter than you and older than you?” Now the trouble is now I’m old. I used to defer to older people. Now I’m one of them. It was living in a holy tension constantly that showed itself as being very pious and conservative. And I found out only in later years, many of my guys who were in the seminary with me saw me as pious. I’d be in chapel at off hours of the day or walking in the cloister walk saying my rosary really above and beyond the call of duty. And yet I didn’t believe much that the community was emphasizing as important.

I didn’t rebel against it, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. And that lasted all my life. Probably why I live here in Hermitage now, the regular community life, forgive me brothers, but it just bores me to death, the things we talked about and are concerned about and the comforts we enjoy.

I enjoy plenty here. I’m in no position to deem superiority, but the present model of church and the present model of religious life both seemed to me unworthy of their magnanimous claims of us being the one true which you Protestants had to suffer from and religious life that we are a refined version of the gospel. Maybe. It produced a number of people. Inside of every community there’s a number of people who are a refined version of the gospel. And that attracted me to the whole theme of the remnant because even with us, it was never the whole, it was just scattered in each group were a few who got it, a few who lived it, a few who loved it, and when that became enough, when that became okay, I’m grateful for that and I don’t think I’m ever… OP.

Mike Petrow:

Thank you.

Richard Rohr:

Are you disagreeing with me?

Paul Swanson:

OP’s a Dominican.

Richard Rohr:

You’re getting enough of it.

Mike Petrow:

He’s identifying himself as one of the few who get it.

Richard Rohr:

What you can do is let him out. There’s a dog walking through the yard undoubtedly.

Mike Petrow:

Oh my gosh. OP, thank you for defending us.

Richard Rohr:

It doesn’t belong there. This is his yard.

Mike Petrow:

It’s imperfect.

Richard Rohr:

He’s still a one.

Mike Petrow:

He’s still a one.

Richard Rohr:

A barking dog.

Mike Petrow:

Don’t go get in a fight.

Richard Rohr:

Do you see a dog out there?

Paul Swanson:

He’s a tough guy.

Mike Petrow:

He’s just letting the world know that he’s defending the yard.

Richard Rohr:

This is his yard.

Mike Petrow:

He’s growling at those. Hear him? Growling at those ugly leaves.

Paul Swanson:

It’s a real motor he has got.

Mike Petrow:

It’s interesting in hearing you talk about, I can’t help but think of what we’re talking about in the last episode, which is paying attention to different things, that alternative orthodoxy. And at the end of that episode, you talked about focusing on the path of dissent and the little way.

Richard Rohr:

Did I?

Mike Petrow:

Yeah. And how that takes us out of perhaps getting distracted by the wrong things.

Richard Rohr:

That’s a good way to say it, “Distracted by the wrong things.” But it’s an allowing like when I could allow in my little schema, my little narrative of the meaning of life, when I could allow a remnant to be more than enough, I was free. I didn’t need every Franciscan to buy into my vision. I didn’t need every member of New Jerusalem to be turning in their paycheck on Friday nights. I didn’t need the staff at CAC to all be contemplatives or even interested in it. Then I was free. Remnant theology, yeast, to use Jesus’ word is very important for me, for my own liberation because if I’m going to wait for Christendom before I can be happy, I’m never going to be happy.

Paul Swanson:

This connects to something in the previous chapter, which I’m going to bring back to this chapter, but you talk about these three freedoms of Franciscan spirituality, of making sure that it helps keep God free to do what God will do without cornering God into a box.

Richard Rohr:

God free.

Paul Swanson:

And keeping oneself free from within the structure to not have to bend solely before the structures that be or an organization that there’s a freedom to operate. And then the third freedom-

Richard Rohr:

Freedom to make mistakes in other words.

Paul Swanson:

That’s it. Yes.

Richard Rohr:

Freedom to experiment, which my whole life has ended up being. Go ahead.

Paul Swanson:

Which feels like how it should be as someone on the Franciscan path. And then this third freedom of contemplative prayer to connect those to make sure that you’re keeping God free and how one relates and participates in God, that God is not bound, and also not to be bound to a structure and to allow the integration of the negative to be a place where God freely participates as well. And it takes the contemplative practice and mind and prayer to be able to see with God’s eyes into those freedoms. I love that passage.

Richard Rohr:

Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

And you’ve talked about Thérèse of Lisieux and for a book on Franciscanism, you talk about Thérèse a lot in this chapter.

Richard Rohr:

Carmelite.

Paul Swanson:

Yes, the Carmelite. And you’ve talked about her little way and I want to connect the two or ask you to connect the two between the little way and Francis, because you talk about how Francis teed her up seven centuries earlier.

Richard Rohr:

That’s it.

Paul Swanson:     

And she’s got this sweet little saying, and I struggle a little bit with her just because sometimes it does feel overly saccharine, but the sweetness holds such depth too that just because there’s so much honey in it, I don’t want to lose the work that’s been put into it. And she writes, “Whoever is willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to herself, that person is a pleasant place of shelter for Jesus.”

Richard Rohr:

God, that’s as contrarian as you can get. That’s the opposite of the cult of innocence version of Christianity. Bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself. How many of us can do that? I will be pleasing to myself by being liberal or being conservative. Both are the same trap.

Paul Swanson:

What I think about with this quote and what you’ve been saying is it de-centers what we think of ourselves as being the north star, good or bad.

Richard Rohr:

North star.

Paul Swanson:

And allows the negative to be integrated in a way where the invitation is fuller participation, not trying to pull the weeds and wheat and separate them, but allowing it all to grow and forgiving reality for what it is.

Richard Rohr:

Wow.

Paul Swanson:

Where do you see any further teasings out of how Francis set the ground for Thérèse to see with her own Carmelite spirituality, these Franciscan roots?

Richard Rohr:

If you read the book, not that you have to, it’s not necessary for salvation, but chapter seven is called The Franciscan Genius, The Integration of The Negative. There’s two quotes that I begin with that I’ve treasured for years. When I first did a critical study of Francis writings, one of his writings is The Letter to a Minister, and there’s a quote, “You can show your love to others by wishing that they should be better Christians. That’s the way it was given to us.” And the scholar who taught, he said, “It is universally agreed from the oldest text we have of that, there’s a knot in there, and it was blocked out.”

Paul Swanson:

Wow.

Richard Rohr:

“You want to show your love to others by not wishing that they should be better Christians.”

Paul Swanson:

Wow.

Richard Rohr:

Makes 10 times more sense. But to the pious observer, always show your love. I wish you were a better Christian, Mike.

Mike Petrow:

I know. I’m working on it, Richard. I’m working on it.

Richard Rohr:

How is that showing love to anybody? It’s just brilliant. Then Thomas of Celano was the great first biographer. In his second attempt at it, his second Life of Francis, he says, “We must bear patiently not being good and not even being thought good.” Now that, I don’t think they tried to change, but they just ignored. “We must bear patiently not being good.” I get great satisfaction at night when I lay on my pillow that I’ve helped somebody today and then I’ve had holy thoughts and didn’t commit adultery. “Bear patiently not being good,” that’s almost identical to that quote from Thérèse that you read. And I’m not aware that Thérèse had any great devotion to Francis, but she wouldn’t have had a critical life of him and not even being thought good. How consoling it is that everybody thinks you are good. Comfort, what codependent comfort that is. Everybody thinks I’m really good, but take both of those away, you’ve taken away most people’s ego structure.

Mike Petrow:

It sounds to me like you mentioned ego structure. This sounds to me a lot like Jungian Shadow Work.

Richard Rohr:

Of course. But that’s from Thomas of Celano’s earliest first Life of Francis not being good. I’m not that good. “Only God is good.” He quotes that in another place and not even being thought good, mind-blowing.

Paul Swanson:

I think about those quotes and how there’s a necessary healthy ego structure that needs to be in place before you cannot think of yourself as good. And I think about those who are in a place where they have a healthy ego structure. How would you, Richard, invite them to integrate the negative into their own lives, into living into a whole heart?

Richard Rohr:

If I were their spiritual director, I would tease out of them any experience of failure or falling or sinning. How do you deal with your own sin? How do you deal with your own failure? And there it’s all going to be encapsulated. Is your ego structure built on your own perfection, or God’s love of you? God doesn’t love you because you’re good. God loves you. God is good. That’s the big transfer that has to be made. And most of us think well of ourselves. I know I do because I feel I’ve done something good with my life. I became a priest. And to draw satisfaction from that is wrong, wrong, utterly wrong. That’s when you get into radical Christianity, when you can accept that switch.

Mike Petrow:

It’s been interesting for me the last few years, I’ve had a really hard, I can talk about imperfection till the cows come home, loving my imperfection. Sin’s been a real hard thing for me to talk about after I deconstructed my inherited faith tradition, it was used as such a weaponized way. And recently I’ve come around to thinking if my thought about my faults, my failures, my sins, and my imperfections is anchored in this counterbalancing sense of my being overwhelmingly beloved-

Richard Rohr:

There you go.

Mike Petrow:

Then why not?

Richard Rohr:

Keep going.

Mike Petrow:

Then it makes it safer to do the work and to see my imperfection.

Richard Rohr:

Your joy has a different foundation. You’ve switched to your satisfaction really does come from God and God’s goodness and not your own. And that very idea never even occurred to most Christians I’ve met. Not because they’re bad, because no one ever taught that to them. You got to be good. That’s first half of life, God has to insert in your life some areas where you just can’t be good. You’re inherently judgmental, critical, lustful, covetous.

Mike Petrow:

Arrogant.

Richard Rohr:

Arrogant.

Paul Swanson:

Thank you, Richard. You’ve given us, and I’m sure everyone listening a lot to chew on and walk away with.

Richard Rohr:

You asked it so well. I say it better than usual when you two ask it. Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

Thank you, Richard. It’s a pleasure.

Mike Petrow:

Everything Belongs will continue in a moment.

Friends, today we are joined by two profound spiritual teachers who also happen to be a married couple. And I have to say their relationship is a teaching in itself. First and foremost, we’re joined by Father Adam Bucko, who’s a committed voice in the movement for the renewal of Christian contemplative spirituality and the growing new monastic movement. He’s taught engaged Contemplative Spirituality in Europe and the United States. And his most recent book, which is fantastic, is Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide, Lessons in Engaged Contemplation. His work has been featured in major news outlets including Harper’s Magazine, New York Daily News and Sojourner Magazine. And he currently serves as a director for the Center for Spiritual Imagination and the Cathedral of the Incarnation serving Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island in New York.

Paul Swanson:

The other half of that relationship is Kaira Jewel Lingo, a much-loved Dharma teacher who has been practicing mindfulness since 1997. She lived as an ordained for 15 years during which time she trained closely with her teacher, Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh. Her teaching focuses on activists, educators, artists, youth and families, and black, indigenous and people of color, and includes the interweaving of art, play, nature, ecology, and embodied mindfulness practice. Kaira Jewel teaches in the Plum Village Zen tradition and in the Vipassana tradition, she lives in New York. Her most recent book co-authored with Valerie Brown and Marisela B. Gomez is Healing Our Way Home, Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation. Adam and Kaira Jewel, welcome to Everything Belongs. It’s a joy to have you here in conversation as we explore the themes of Richard’s book, Eager to Love and particularly focus on chapter seven, The Franciscan Genius, The Integration of The Negative. It’s so great to see you both. How are you guys doing today?

Adam Bucko:

We had some tech problems, as you may recall from few moments ago. We’re showing up in all of our imperfections.

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

Just perfect for this conversation.

Paul Swanson:

I couldn’t agree more.

Mike Petrow:

Oh gosh, it’s so great when we talk about the integration of the negative, I know there’s so many big things and so much suffering in the world, but it’s also the minor inconveniences and the challenges. I’m reminded of Carl Jung saying, “That everything that irritates us can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Thanks so much everyone for being in this space with us. I can’t wait for the conversation that’s about to unfold.

Adam Bucko:

Thank you for having us here.

Paul Swanson:

It’s a privilege and a pleasure, and a fun thing for us to begin off with whenever we have guests on, is just to find out origin stories around one’s first encounter with St. Francis or the Franciscan values. I would love to ask both of you, when did each of you come to discover St. Francis or Franciscan values in your own life experience?

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

I remember we would sing St. Francis’s song in the monastery in our Buddhist Plum Village monastery. And this song, “If you want to live life free, take your time, go slowly.” It might’ve been the song from the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon. I’m not sure, but I know we watched that film. As monastics, we were in love with that film, and we actually visited a Franciscan monastery in Italy when we traveled on a teaching tour with Thay.

And we were also happy to be in brown because our robes were brown, their robes were brown, and it was this lovely encounter and we were all so pleased with each other. And I remember being so impressed that the monks had a cappuccino machine. All of us. We didn’t have anything that luxurious in our Buddhist monastery. We just had tea. We were like, “Wow, they have a cappuccino machine.” It was Italy after all. But I do also want to share that Jim Forest in his book about Thich Nhat Hanh, Eyes of Compassion, talks about how when Thay was young, he loved hearing stories of St. Francis. That was a beautiful thing too, that Adam reminded me of.

Paul Swanson:

Wow. That’s so great. Adam, how about you? How did you first encounter St. Francis?

Adam Bucko:

Growing up in Poland, probably, I must have seen his paintings of St. Francis and statues of him, but I don’t really remember any of that. The first image that I remember is in 1980s, my parents and I went on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Black Madonna of Częstochowa, and at that time, it was still before the communist system collapsed, it was really going in a pilgrimage there was this act of resistance, and I remember being there and seeing all kinds of pilgrims walking into the city and approaching the Shrine of the Black Madonna. And I saw this group of Franciscan brothers who were walking barefoot and all of them had long beards and long hair, and I was just like, “Holy crap, what is that? Who are those guys?” And they just seemed so free and they were accompanied by a lot of young people.

And that for me was this striking image that really just stopped me and made me think, because on one hand there was this official church with all the clergy nicely dressed, beautifully polished sermons, on the other hand were those guys who just seemed like, I didn’t know what to make of them, but it was inspiring that someone could be so free in such a, I don’t know, holy place. But at the same time their freedom, it was fitting in very well, but it was so different and so counter-cultural. I think that was my first really encounter where I started wondering, “Who is this Francis of Assisi?” And later on, I remember my grandmother sent me a book in Polish, by then I was already living in the States, The Flowers of Saint Francis.

Mike Petrow:

I’m so excited to get to join this conversation with the two of you because one of the things appreciated in the last year is that in rebuilding the living school here at the CAC and in our Essentials of a Gauge Contemplation Course, you both show up and share two beautiful conversations with us. And I actually am going to have a question for each of you based on that. I can’t help but think as we’re starting off talking about the integration of the negative. And Adam, you’ve referenced your upbringing in one of those other conversations, you made a comment that intrigued me when you said that growing up in the culture that you grew up in, and we were talking about great love and great suffering in that conversation, you said growing up in the culture that you grew up in, you are actually more acclimated to finding the value in suffering and hardship than love and beauty. Would you share a little bit with our listening audience about that and how it acclimates you to the integration of the negative?

Adam Bucko:

My wife and I, she’s via positiva. I’m via negativa. I think that that’s how it works. And when we’re on our best, we help each other to stay balanced. I think when you look at Polish saints, all of them have been martyrs. There was this sense of that all of us, because Poland has such a troubled history, and just recently I saw some statistics that between 1939 and 1989 in the land between the two totalitarianisms, between what was Soviet Union and Germany during 1930s, almost 20 million people were killed. Think about it, that’s a lot. The land of my childhood was stained with blood, Polish blood, Jewish blood, Russian blood, German blood, and I think there was just this sense of trauma that lived in us, but there was also this sense of that pain can be sacred, that the pain that we feel is connected to the heart of God, the heart of God that is breaking because we’re in such pain and God is feeling that deeply as well.

For me, pain early on was just really a doorway to the sacred. I think later on when I worked with young people experiencing homelessness on the streets, I realized, and that was really when I learned the meaning of contemplative prayer, even though I studied contemplative prayer in other settings, it’s really by accompanying people into the depths of their pain, removing all the buffers and sometimes breaking with them, in that experience of suffering, I realized that when that happens, when our operating system cracks, there’s an inflow of the Holy Spirit that just flows in or arises in us, and we can consent to that because it always is interested in picking up the broken pieces of the world, of ourselves and reassembling all of that into something that in ask can become a gift that we can offer others. In that sense, I think via negativa or the negative has always been an entry point for me.

At the same time, when I think about my journey, especially being in therapy in my twenties, having a therapist who was both a Jungian analyst, but also a Zen teacher, I realized that on a spiritual journey, I was identifying with an ideal spiritual persona that was in me, and I always wanted seven steps to fix that persona so it could get enlightened.

And what he helped me to realize by essentially helping me to undermine my sense of all identity, is that within me, there are many different personas or persons floating around, and each of them was equally real and equally helpful and equally needed, if I can allow them all to speak to each other, the crowd within me that is competing for who’s going to get the mic and be in charge once they’re brought into a relationship, that crowd can be converted into a community, and all of a sudden things that we are afraid of, things that I wanted to push under and dismiss, become sources of empowerment and creativity and et cetera. That was also very helpful. I’m not quite sure how all of this connects to your question, but that’s what’s arising.

Mike Petrow:

That’s profoundly insightful, and as a fellow Jungian, I appreciate the insight that converting the crowd and the chaos inside of us into a community probably lends itself to us creating community around us, I would imagine in the midst of chaos and suffering. And I have appreciated the community that the two of you create together in your relationship and when you shared the gifts of that with us. Thank you.

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

Adam, something that you were just talking about, Ron, the brokenness is this entry point to deeper connection with prayer and the way that there was this persona of perfection that you were maybe idealizing and seeking to become. There’s so many ways in which that feels like one of those threads throughout this chapter of perfection and imperfection. And Richard brings up Thérèse of Lisieux around the little way. I’m wondering, how does Thérèse’s spirituality speak to both of you and your own distinct spiritual paths and the overlapping ways that you share in that essence of a spirituality of imperfection in that same spirit?

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

I really loved this part of the chapter. And actually the summer I first went to Plum Village, I went to Lisieux in France, and I visited the grotto dedicated to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and I read a little bit about her. There was Pilgrims welcome house and a library. Anyway, that was very meaningful to get to actually connect with her spirit there. I remember when I was about to ordain as a nun, I had just so idealized all of the monastics, and I was expecting to become this angelic, completely peaceful person as soon as I shaved my head and put on the robes, and in fact, the opposite happened, I found myself as a lay person living in Plum Village, we had the lay quarters and we had freedom. We could come and go, and suddenly I was a nun and I was in this much more tight quarters of the sisters, and there was a sister or two that I felt uncomfortable with, and you’d turn around in the bathroom and there they are.

You turn around in the common room and there they are, and then they’re in the dining room. And I just found myself so much more irritable and angry and frustrated, and I was like, “Wait a minute. This is not at all what I thought was going to happen when I became a nun.” And then I remember having this insight that this was exactly why I had ordained so that I could see all of these, we call them seeds in Buddhist psychology, when they arise, you see the seeds of suffering, so that if I can’t see them, I can’t transform them. It was like I had wanted to do this big spiritual bypass unknowingly by thinking I would just always be peaceful as a nun. And it was like, “Actually, no.” The whole purpose of becoming a nun, I realized very quickly, a month or two into this, I was like, “No, this is the whole reason is to see these things clearly, to see all the things that need to be transformed and held in humility and love and compassion and not judged.”

I realized none of this was wrong. I was exactly where I needed to be. And that’s just a really beautiful teaching in Buddhism, is that everyone has all the seeds. In Buddhist psychology, there’s 51 or 52, depending on which Buddhist school you’re talking about, everyone has all these seeds. They’re wholesome seeds, unwholesome seeds, and all of the unwholesome seeds can be transformed. All the seeds are organic, just like the wholesome seeds. They can get weaker if we don’t cultivate them. But the unwholesome seeds, the seed of violence, it can be transformed into compassion. And all of us have that capacity. Seeing this most beautiful teaching of Thay, that we need our suffering, we need our weakness, our unskillfulness, because that’s actually the fertilizer for our awakening.

It’s this sense of we need all these things that are in us, because that becomes the compost for the flowers. We don’t want to push out away our suffering. We don’t want to try to exile it, get rid of it. We actually need it. That is our very path of awakening. Another way that we often talk about it in the Plum Village community is no mud, no lotus. A lotus doesn’t grow on marble, on sandalwood, on beautiful things. It grows in mud. The lotus being the symbol of awakening in Buddhism, mud being all of our suffering. It’s really because of our suffering that we have the opportunity to awaken.

Mike Petrow:

It’s so good. No mud, no lotus is my favorite of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books. Adam, before you answer, this is great. Paul, this is a great chance to bring my other question in. Kaira Jewel, when we did The Essentials course, you shared this story and it was just a little story, but I found it so inspiring about talking to your mother when you chose to join the community, and she had some concerns, and you shared with her about the Bodhisattva path and what it really meant that you were stepping into this community to take the vow of the Bodhisattva. If that resonates, if you remember what I’m talking about, would you share a little bit with our audience about that?

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

Sure. When I wanted to become a nun, so my parents had taken Christian Bodhisattva vows. They lived in a community where they took vows of poverty and obedience, and we lived super simply and against the stream. That was her context. When I said I wanted to become a nun, she was like, “My only concern is that you’ll be hiding from the world, escaping the world.” And I said, “Actually, mom, it’s the opposite. This vow, this path to become a monastic is taking the Bodhisattva vow of cultivating our own mind of awakening and supporting all beings on their path to awakening. And it’s totally a path of service. It’s not one of abandoning the world. It’s actually one of giving ourselves to the world a hundred percent.” And when she heard me say that, she was like, “I’m totally behind you. Go for it.” That was all she needed, and we were on the same page from then on.

Mike Petrow:

That’s so great. I so appreciate that. And I appreciate what you’ve just shared about giving yourself to the long, slow path of seeing the seeds. And I remember just a little bit later in that same conversation that I referenced, you said in this Bodhisattva path, it will take countless lifetimes, and I think you said, to help folks cross the river from suffering. And in the face of looking at, we have so much growth to do on our own, and there’s so much suffering in the world, I so appreciate that long perspective of being willing to commit to the long game. Would you tell us a little bit more about that notion of taking countless lifetimes?

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

Really, it’s a teaching on not being attached to outcome and just not being attached. This whole spiritual endeavor is about letting go, letting go, letting go. That’s all what St. Francis, St. Clare and Thérèse all talk about. But there’s a beautiful poem in the Zen, Japanese Zen tradition saying, “The many beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Greed, hatred and ignorance are immeasurable, I vow to abandon them.”

It’s like saying these things will constantly keep arising. It’s almost an impossible thing what you’re saying, but it’s acknowledging the hugeness of the task, our smallness, and it’s really like letting go of the self in that moment to say, “It’s not about me. It’s not about a deadline, it’s not about a timeline. It’s not about success in any worldly sense.” It’s like, “As long as there’s suffering, I’m going to be there to support people and myself because there’s probably endless suffering in ourselves until we awaken.” And it’s just this boundless vow of wherever they’re suffering, I’ll keep coming back, I’ll keep being there, keep trying to be responsive, knowing that I’m not going to end it, but I’m going to keep giving my heart, giving my best to respond compassionately wherever there is suffering.

Mike Petrow:

That’s so good. Thank you so much. Gosh, I’m so moved by the encouragement to do my part in the healing work and also to let go of my own heroic notion that I’m going to fix it all or solve it all. Goodness gracious. Paul, I hijacked your question before you could ask Adam to respond. Back to you.

Paul Swanson:

Back to Adam. Adam, what do you think when it comes to this sense of perfection and imperfection and the little way of Thérèse, how has that been part of your own… That image, Kaira Jewel that you said about the composting of the persona and then how that even becomes food for the seed and how our projected perfection can actually be a part of our spirituality of imperfection, of letting go? How has that shown up in your life, Adam?

Adam Bucko:

St. Thérèse has been my family’s patron saint. I remember when my father was leaving the country, we all did the St. Thérèse Novena for like, I don’t know, 10 days on our knees every day. And it was all in secret because what if the government comes to confiscate his passport, he’s not going to be able to leave and all of that. At that time, St. Thérèse was this a lovely presence I’d imagined, or maybe we felt her in some way.

But the older I got, the more I actually appreciate her actual teaching, taking away the sentimental from her teaching. And I wanted to share this particular quote from her that has been really important to me. This is what she says, “Jesus said before me, The Book of Nature. And when I looked at it, I understood how all the flowers got created or beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away from the perfume of the violet or the simplicity of the daisy. If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its beauty and there would be no wild flowers to adorn in the meadows.”

And for me, this quote has been very beautiful because, and of course for St. Thérèse, it comes in a very specific context. She’s reading about St. Augustine. She’s reading The Imitation of Christ. She’s reading about St. Teresa of Ávila, and John of The Cross, and she too wants to become this great saint, like all of those ancestors of her. And she realizes that she’s powerless, that she’s not able to do some of the things that those other people were able to do. And that’s when she comes up with this beautiful teaching about the elevator. And she lived in 19th century, she says, “If you go to some homes of some wealthy people, you no longer have to take stairs. They have this thing called an elevator, and that can take you to second and third floor. And even if you don’t have the muscles to make it to the second or third floor, somehow this little device can take you there.”

And she said that that was her discovery of the little way that instead of striving and trying to become perfect, we can just accept our imperfections. We can just accept our powerlessness, and then God becomes the power in us. All we have to do is just consent to this motherly presence that can love us up and take us and transform us into who we need to be. And for me, that is very encouraging because I feel like every day I fail at some things. Every day things arise in me that are difficult to bear. Every day I see things in the world that just simply break my heart.

And there’s no way that I can change many of those things either within myself or in the world. But somehow, if I can come to terms with my inability, if I can come to terms with my powerlessness, all of a sudden I create space for God to be the power, for God to be the actor, for God to take over this little body of mind and use it in some way or form.

To me, that teaching has been very important. And I think the initial big lesson was, again, when I worked with young people struggling with homelessness. Initially, I wanted to be the expert who can help people fix their lives. And I was failing miserably. And it’s only when I understood that I needed to show up for every person in the same way that I show up for prayer, which is in this state of curious, not knowing, in the state of powerlessness, in this state of complete understanding that I am nothing really, that somehow the spirit of God can do something with this nothingness and turn it into somethingness in a way where it can be useful. That’s been a big teaching for me. And I feel that we’re so blessed to have St. Thérèse, and we also are so blessed to have Richard who really popularized her teachings to so many, even outside of the church circles.

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

And I wanted to just acknowledge another moment of imperfection of mine. I realized I didn’t go to Lisieux. I went to Lourdes that same summer.

Adam Bucko:

I totally knew that I was not there.

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

I was like, “Wait, what?”

Adam Bucko:

The moment you said grotto I’m like, “Okay, she’s talking about Virgin Mary.”

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

There you go, my imperfection revealed.

Paul Swanson:

That’s great. This reminds me of one of Richard’s things that he talks about how he seeks out a daily humiliation each day as a recognition of his own need to be reminded of the guideposts on the little way.

Adam Bucko:

Doesn’t this chapter say something how the only way to do is to just really accept our little maybe small and big humiliations every day.

Paul Swanson:

Every day, yeah.

Adam Bucko:

Give me more.

Mike Petrow:

I always tell Richard, “I don’t have enough ego strength to ask for a humiliation a day, but I’ll settle for asking for a chance to laugh at myself and have a moment of humor at least once a day.”

Adam Bucko:

That’s so lovely, actually. And I think so much easier too.

Mike Petrow:

Very true.

Adam Bucko:

Thank you for that, Mike.

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

It reminds me of a quote in my book, We Were Made for These Times, opening quote from a Tibetan prayer. I don’t have it exactly, but something like, “Grant that I may have the sufferings in right measure that I need to awaken to continue to be on this path of liberation.” It’s actually requesting that those things come to us because we know they mature us, they ripen us.

Paul Swanson:

The one theme in that that I keep hearing throughout this is just this return to humility, that spaciousness of littleness, limitation, inability, and none of those bar ability or power or possibility. But there’s a right sizing of ourselves within a larger community, a larger ecology. And Adam, when you were talking about your work with the young folks, I would love to hear a bit more if there’s any story that comes to mind around how from approaching your work with those young folks from this posture of humility and as you approach prayer, how did that change in how you were able to step into that role and step into that work from a different, you didn’t say savior complex before, but I almost heard you about to say that. I swear before you talked about how you first approaching it and how you later enfolded your way from a very humble transition.

Adam Bucko:

Yeah, I think it was Mother Teresa who said that you can become a pen with which God can write a love letter to the world. And I think that when we approach things with humility, coming to terms with our inabilities, with our powerlessness, something happens and the work that is being done happens through us, but also to us. And that was my experience once I came to terms that I have very little to offer. And that doesn’t mean that our skill sets are not helpful sometimes, it’s just that we need to somehow de-center them and put them aside and create enough space for that impulse of gut to arise in us so the right words, the right way of seeing the right interventions can just spontaneously happen through us. But the trick with that is that then if we work in that way, we can’t take too much credit for it because it’s not really clear who’s helping whom, because oftentimes I felt like I’ve received just as much if not more than what I was able to offer.

There’s this sense of mutuality that whatever this thing is, it’s also working on you. For me, that was a big shift in my work and also in my prayer because I understood then that to have a contemplative life, to have contemplative prayer, to live in a state of contemplative prayer is to be constantly living in that state of receptivity, curious, not knowing, bearing witness, and then also consent whenever the impulse of God, the presence of God is felt in our lives. And that was a beautiful lesson. Of course, it doesn’t mean that that’s something you learn once and for all. It’s a daily practice. And I think I know I have a tendency to keep on recreating myself and re-centering myself. And I think that that is the work, constantly, as Kaira Jewel said, what this chapter points to, the constant letting go.

Paul Swanson:

That constant letting go and the ways that we consent to it and slowly over time are sometimes able to see our own transformation or hear it reflected back in community. And something that the two of you helped me see, externals can help our internals, where you’ve mentioned the patchwork of Francis on his robes, that he had this done to reflect on what is it like on this inside and how the Buddha’s patchwork of his robes were taken from garbage heaps. How do you see those as instructive for how one might consider the pairing, the marrying, the integration of the external and the internal of how one goes through their own humble walk in this way of integrating the negative?

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

I love reading the stories of St. Francis and how much he emphasized not lifting himself up, not being lifted up. I just want to read this from the chapter, from St. Thérèse of Lisieux, “Whoever is willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to herself, that person is a pleasant place of shelter for Jesus.” And it made me think of how when I was a nun at the end of each three-month rains retreat, or sometimes we called it the winter retreat, which was the time in the year where, as monastics we didn’t travel and we made a vow of stability. We all stayed within the boundaries of the monastery except for the shopper and if you had a serious doctor’s appointment. And we really practiced more intensively together and studied. And at the end of that retreat, we always did the practice of shining light, which was where, as nuns in our little hamlet of say, 30, 40, 50 nuns, everyone gave everyone else feedback.

We sat in a circle, and when it was your turn, people had prepared, they had thought about what they felt were your strengths, what they felt were your weaknesses, and they told them to you. And someone took notes and you got a letter, a shining light letter at the ceremony that closed the winter retreat. Sometimes people didn’t see their positive qualities clearly, and it was very healing and helpful to have people point them out to you and to see what was appreciated also so you could know what to do more to make people happy. You got very concrete feedback. But then also, we always took it as a real gift to be shown our blind spots, and we would kneel in front of the community on our knees and palms join and say, “Please shine light on me. Please show me what I can’t see about myself.”

And the practice for everyone was, if you had a grudge against that person, this wasn’t the time to let them have it. We tried to really also be very discerning in what we would say. We would never say something to hurt someone. We would only say it if it was coming from compassion and care and love. And we really just wanted that person to be even more beautiful in the [foreign language 01:01:59], in the community, not because we wanted to straighten them out or something. But to get that from so many people every year, it was so profound. It was such a great support for each of us to see those areas that were in need of more attention and pruning as real blessings. Then it was really clear for the next year what our path of training needed to be.

When I read about the patches of St. Francis, it made me think of also the Buddha’s robes in the time of the Buddha, and many generations after that, which were all patchwork robes. The monks and nuns would take pieces of scrap cloth from garbage heaps and refuse piles, and they would sew them together into a patchwork robe. And what was also the beauty of that image was if you go up high in India and any of the rice cultivating countries and you see the rice paddies, they look like the patchwork robe of a monastic. It was this also another way to be humble, to be like the earth, to be close to the peasants and the farming people, that what I wear on my body is the way our culture and society our earth looks.

Paul Swanson:

It’s a marvelous, marvelous image. I think that it paints a vivid picture and to hear about your community’s practice, the holding of the external and the interior, and how those are gifts built on trust from that sense of stability. Adam, how about you? What comes to mind from the sense of the patchwork and the external and folding into the internal and vice versa?

Adam Bucko:

When I was training for priesthood, I was sent to a very old school, quasi-monastic community training place. It was that, and we were surrounded by just corn fields. And I remember this experience where I was… And I was a little bit older than most of the other people who were training. I’ve already had a life, I felt. I knew how to do certain things. I used to run an organization before that, and I remember the job that was assigned to me was to clean bathrooms in the library. And I was quite happy with that. I thought, “I’m going to be surrounded by books. It’s going to be very quiet.” And I loved it. And then this guy comes in who’s like his early twenties, and he’s telling me how to clean bathrooms. And then he’s standing there watching me, and I’m like, “Come on, dude. I know how to clean bathrooms. I’ve cleaned plenty of bathrooms in my lifetime. You can just go and relax, have tea or something like that.”

He’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Thank you, though. We have a very specific way of dealing with the and the floor.” And I was just like, “Are you kidding me? You’re a kid.” But it was learning humility by humiliation. But I think, again, the sense of getting you into a mindset that you were constantly being offered feedback. In my training for priesthood, every time I opened my mouth reading prayers in the chapel, I would receive a little slip, a little note in my mailbox, someone evaluating me. When I was assigned to ring the bell each day, especially the Angelus prayer, it’s a very specific way of doing it and everyone else would stop. The whole community would stop and pray in silence.

I would get feedback as to whether the way I rang the bell, whether it corresponded to the prayers everyone was saying, whether the rhythm was correct. And initially it was just crazy. I got very anxious. I felt that it wasn’t a very good thing. But after a while when I realized that a lot of that feedback was actually being offered with love, I got to a place where I was looking for feedback.

I was excited for people to show me things that I was not paying attention to. And in fact, I think that this is one of the difficulties with our spiritual journeys in this day and age, that so much of our journey is very individualistic and sometimes for the right reasons. We leave our churches, we leave our communities because some of them have been very toxic and not helpful at all, or maybe even harmful. But this is the beauty of being in community, that people can offer us both love and appreciation, but also speak truth to us when we need to hear it. And if we know that they’re doing that with integrity, it’s such a tremendous gift. Like Kaira Jewel said, it really directs your process of training. And we try to do that with ourselves. We are a community at home, and our home is a little ashram or something, at least with our doggy too, even though she practices with us too.

Mike Petrow:

Oh gosh. I love that so much. Friends, we could talk about this all day. We’re just about out of time. But I’d love to close with just one more question about what you’re sharing as we talk about community and talk about these patchwork robes that are sewn together from scraps. I can’t help but connect that to what you said at the top of the call, Adam, where you’ve talked about taking the crowd inside of us and the chaos inside of us, and turning that into a community and recognizing that some of the communities we find ourselves in require the same work. And seeing that you’re doing that work together in your relationship and in your marriage, what parting wisdom would you give our listeners for embracing the imperfection in themselves, and especially in bringing the community that they are to the communities around them, which are, I’m sure, profoundly imperfect and embracing the negative?

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

I think this smile is really important as a spiritual practice. When we see something arising in ourselves that may be painful or embarrassing or, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I said that,” or this smile of the Buddha, this smile of someone who we can relate to who is really not that caught up in the things that we’re caught up in, and just the gentleness of the smile to be like, “Whoops, I did it again.”

Adam Bucko:

That’s a Britney Spears song.

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

But just this acceptance and lightness. If we just start our day knowing we’re going to make mistakes today, we’re going to drop the ball. That’s just a fact. And rather than brace ourselves and stiffen up trying to prevent it to soften and loosen and just know, how can I learn from that? How can I grow from that? How can I give myself grace and give others grace knowing that we’re all doing our best? That’s one thing that a sister, our abbess. One time we were having a work me gathering to then go off and do work, and she just gave us this beautiful teaching, she said, “Everyone is always doing their best. A smile for ourselves, for others can really help us show up a little more gently, a little more flexibly for ourselves, but also with others in this yielding way.”

I like one of the guidelines we have in a lot of our communities is to assume good intentions rather than coming in with a lot of putting people in a box that they must be thinking this if they’re doing this, but to what would it mean to say, “What if I assumed…” If we know for sure that they don’t have good intentions and this doesn’t count, but if we don’t know then to just assume good intentions and notice how that shifts our own way of moving in the world, in our communities when everyone’s doing their best and we really don’t know what’s going on inside of someone. Half the time, we don’t know what’s going inside of ourselves. Just that spaciousness and willingness to be curious versus lead with judging or projecting things onto other people.

Mike Petrow:

That’s so good. Thank you. Oh my gosh, I love that, the smile. I had a mentor who always used to tell me, “Assume positive intent,” and it really does. It’s so helpful. Adam, anything to add to that as we draw our conversation to a close?

Adam Bucko:

I think what’s been helpful to me is a teaching that I received from an old mentor of mine who was this renegade rabbi who worked with a homeless youth on the streets of New York City for many decades. And he said, “Whenever difficult things arise in you, especially self-judgment, when you really just feel super down, just go for a walk and then especially going into the fields, stand by a tree and just speak out loud to God, voicing all the difficult feelings, but really vocalize it, give it to God, and then for the rest of the day, practice joy.” And then he said, “And again, after a while, those feelings will come back, do the same thing. Set up specific times to just really embrace them and vocalize them and really just give them a way to God and then the rest of the time practice joy.”

And I find that very helpful at times when I can remember to do that because every day waves of sorrow, waves of anxiety come our way, especially during, at this time when the world does not feel very stable, where there’s a lot of violence, a lot of conflict. It’s so common to feel those waves of sorrow. Just going into the fields. And he also said, and this was an old ascetic teaching, “When you are vocalizing all of that, imagine all the leaves and all the leaves of grass and all the plants saying it with you, assisting you to bring all of those feelings to God to lift them up.” I think that’s my parting.

Mike Petrow:

I appreciate all of that. I’m going to put all of those practices into effect this weekend. Thank you. Mr. Paul Swanson, would you like to bring us to a wise conclusion today?

Paul Swanson:

No pressure. I’m just so grateful for this time together that we could explore these themes and there’s so many routes and rabbit holes we could have gone down that would’ve been just as life-giving and just as fruitful. And I think it’s part of accepting our limitations and allowing what happened to be what happened, and celebrate that as we bring all the emotions of our daily lives to the beloved, to community and to the nature crying along with us on how we can show up in that humility, in that solidarity. I have nothing but gratitude for our time together. Thank you both, and thank you, Mike. It’s been a real joy. Thank you.

Mike Petrow:

Such a gift.

Adam Bucko:

Thank you so much.

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

Thank you. What a wonderful way to spend our life energy doing this. Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

Maybe we do it again sometime.

Kaira Jewel Lingo:

Yes.

Mike Petrow:

Amen to that.

Oh my gosh, Paul, rarely have I so enjoyed talking about embracing and integrating the negative and the challenging parts of our life.

Paul Swanson:

Those two are so great. It’s so fun for us to be in conversation with Kaira Jewel and Adam on this theme. Like we talked about starting that conversation, knowing we had just come over some hurdles with the technical issues and then pouring into the conversation, allowing that to be a part of how we showed up and some of the grist for the mill of that conversation. I think it couldn’t have gone better because the cracks allowed the grace to slip in and allow our own imperfections to be a part of that joyous conversation.

Mike Petrow:

Oh my gosh, it’s so true. Just coming through the holiday season and crossing into a new year, crossing over a birthday, I find myself always reflecting a little bit and getting a bit nostalgic. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the sweet spot between sentimentality and cynicism. And I feel like what I see with Adam and Kaira is eyes and hearts open to seeing and embracing all the reality of all the suffering in the world, and not flinching, not running away from any of it, but still a willingness to find and bring joy into the midst of it. And not a passive joy, a joy that rolls its sleeves up and gets to work. It’s such a gift to see how they embody that and invite us into it.

Paul Swanson:

They’re such wise teachers and soulful people, and they always bring the gravitas of the concrete and the practical about how does this impact one’s prayer life, one’s immediate situation? And I think that’s one thing that I take away from how they relate to one another, and then also how they offer their teachings to us, but also they pick up where each other leaves off. And there’s this wonderful recognition of not having to be everything to everyone, but to hold their own posts. And that to me is the beauty of what I think we call the mystical body of Christ. Everyone doing their peace and recognizing their own limitations and gifts. And I think sometimes we’re really good at recognizing our gifts are our limitations, but not both, and allowing that to be part of the tapestry of what we create in community.

Mike Petrow:

I love that. And as we draw this episode to a close and we send our listeners out with something to reflect on, I can’t help but just be so moved by what you said, Paul, “The gift of being willing to faithfully encounter our limitations to recognize that we can’t do everything.” We said it in the episode, I think a big help in that is to practice. Richard says he asked for one humiliation a day. I said, “I’m not strong enough to ask for one humiliation a day, but I do ask for one moment of humor, an opportunity to laugh at myself,” which seems to come more than once a day. And I so appreciated what Kaira Jewel said about the importance of smiling. I wonder if we can invite our listeners to pay attention to those moments where a frustration or a failure can be an opportunity to step back and smile and maybe chuckle at your own limitation and imperfections. What do you think, Paul?

Paul Swanson:

I love that invitation because both are seemingly small things to laugh at yourself and to bring a smile externally that hopefully will bring one internally. And this is not performative. This is just to bring smile into your life as a practice. And I think that invitation is the subtlety of this chapter as well, of integrating the negative by being proactive in how we show up with laughter towards our own foibles and smiles to her own significance and insignificance. I think that’s a wonderful invitation.

Mike Petrow:

Gosh, I love it. All this episode, I was thinking of our recently past teacher, a beloved memory Dr. Barbara Holmes, who always reminded us there’s a joy of naivete and spiritual bypassing, but there’s a joy that’s activism. Gosh, listeners, we invite you into that. We’ll see you again soon.

Corey Wayne:

Thanks for listening to this podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation, an educational nonprofit that introduces seekers to the contemplative Christian path of transformation. To learn more about our work, visit us at Cac.org. Everything Belongs is made possible, thanks to the generosity of our supporters and the shared work of…

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