Mike Petrow:

Welcome back to the Everything Belongs podcast with Father Richard Rohr. Each season, we’ve explored one of Richard’s books. Each episode, we travel over to Richard’s house to discuss a chapter with him, and then we’re joined by a guest who helps us live the teachings forward, to think about Richard’s teachings in new ways and ask new questions in a rapidly changing world.

But this season has been extra special because we’ve been exploring Richard’s brand new book, The Tears of Things. Now, what’s so great about this podcast is that you don’t actually have to read the book to follow along with us. Each episode of this podcast is a self-contained treasure chest of wisdom. So if you’re joining us for the first time, don’t feel like you need to go back and start the podcast from the beginning or pick up the book. Jump in.

And for those of you who’ve been with us in the book and in the journey, thank you so much. In this episode especially, we get a chance to look back on the journey we’ve taken as we look at Chapter Eight: The Three Isaiahs: The Heart of Prophecy.

In this chapter, Richard suggests that the Book of Isaiah takes us all the way through the journey he describes in The Tears of Things, from anger, to sadness, to love, all the way through the journey that he’s described throughout his entire career has us moving from a place of order to disorder to reorder.

And Richard reveals how this magnificent prophetic book of Isaiah gives us such a keen insight into what it means to let ourselves go through this process and to let our hearts consistently be broken open by love.

What comes out in this chapter and in the two conversations that follow is that in life, we so often create containers to help us make sense of the world. And what they really do is they help us figure out how to love each other safely and wisely.

But the trick, my friends, is that love is always outgrowing the containers that we push it into.

I’m so especially excited for our guests this episode. Carmen and I get to interview Cassidy Hall, the author of Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality.

And for those of you for whom that word might be a trigger, in a good way or a bad way, what we love about this conversation is recognizing, as Richard teaches us in this chapter, that it’s the folks who are pushed outside of the mainstream, the folks who have to live at the edges of the inside, that have the most insight into the energy of holy disorder.

That have the most experience at what it means to stretch beyond our containers and step into the wild, weird, and wonderful experience of letting love move us beyond previously known areas, what’s been safe, what’s been familiar, into the places that God wants us to grow.

So without further ado, let’s join Paul and Opie and Richard in his hermitage as we jump into the heart of prophecy.

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

Paul Swanson:

I’m Paul Swanson.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I’m Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

Drew Jackson:

And I’m Drew Jackson.

Mike Petrow:

And this is Everything Belongs.

Paul Swanson:

Well, gentlemen, it’s another beautiful day here in Albuquerque. Richard, thanks for letting us intrude and take up your space and your hermitage.

Richard Rohr:

Letting you. Delight to have you, thank you.

Paul Swanson:

We have eight core principles of the CAC, the very first of which is: The teaching of Jesus is our central reference point. Now, this has been the bedrock at the CAC.

And in preparation for this conversation on Isaiah, I was holding that core principle in tandem with a chapter from your book, What Do We Do with the Bible?, the chapter on the Jesus hermeneutic.

Now, hermeneutic is just a 50-cent word for saying a method or theory of interpretation. But in that chapter, in the Jesus hermeneutic, you note how Jesus highlights some texts, leaves off some endings, alludes to others in a very particular way.

Now, the reason I’m bringing this up is because Jesus quotes or alludes to Isaiah more than any other book in the Hebrew Bible.

Richard Rohr:

Yes.

Paul Swanson:

So starting with Jesus as our central reference point-

Richard Rohr:

Second Isaiah in particular.

Paul Swanson:

Yes.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah.

Paul Swanson:

Why do you think that is, that’s the text that Jesus alludes to or quotes the most?

Richard Rohr:

Well, I hope I’m not reading this into Isaiah, but as you see in the chapter, I try to overlay the three Isaiahs with my paradigm of order, disorder, and reorder.

And I think Jesus especially uses Second Isaiah, what I call Second Isaiah, chapters 40 to 55, to emphasize this breaking with a distant “Holy, holy, holy” God, to an incarnate, loving, intimate, feminine God.

That’s what he realizes Judaism has to get, because they aren’t there yet. They’re still largely in First Isaiah: “Holy, holy, holy.” Order, order, order. Purity, purity, purity. The emphasis upon transcendence.

It’s the first notion of God, and most religions have the Awesome One. But if you stay there, union, communion, intimacy is not possible. The distance is too great.

And Jesus is the one who overcomes the distance.

Paul Swanson:

So, so many begin with this transcendent God, this God that is out there, and what Jesus is doing is highlighting this God of Isaiah, Second Isaiah, that is pulling in the intimacy, pulling in the interiority of that relationship to something beyond the beyond.

Richard Rohr:

That’s right.

Mike Petrow:

There’s so much to unpack there.

Before we get into that too deeply, Richard, you allude all throughout this chapter, and what you just said, to the Three Isaias, right?

Richard Rohr:

Yes.

Mike Petrow:

And I love, I love, love, love how you point out that we can see order, disorder, reorder, anger, sadness, and love in them.

Richard Rohr:

It works for me.

Mike Petrow:

Yeah, it works for me too. You’re saying, though, that the Book of Isaiah has three different authors having three different experiences at three different times in history.

Richard Rohr:

Periods, yes.

Mike Petrow:

For some folks, that’s going to be a little shocking, and big news, or at least new news.

Why do you think it’s helpful to have a little bit of historical and scholarly context when we look at the Bible?

Richard Rohr:

Text apart from context is not really very convicting. It’s so amorphous that you can make it apply without applying at all, as if the Word hangs in midair. It’s not incarnate.

That’s been the downfall, the Achilles’ heel, if you will, of fundamentalism, old Catholicism before Vatican II, and Evangelicalism. It loves texts hanging in midair.

Once you recognize First Isaiah is before the exile, but he’s already putting down, “putting down” is the right word, false worship, temple theology.

So First Isaiah is a radical. It’s not entirely fair to make him order. He’s already making room for disorder.

But it still works, because his God is still in the temple. Put it that way.

Mike Petrow:

You probably could potentially be introducing a little bit of disorder for folks, just in changing the way they read the Bible, by telling them that it’s important to know the historical context of how to read the Bible.

Most people don’t realize how old that idea really is.

And it’s not going to shock you that I’m going to say something about Origen. But even in the second century, Origen was saying, he said, “When we look at Scripture, it has a body, a soul, and a spirit.”

And he said, “When we look at the body of the text, we should ask ourselves: What did it mean then, for the people who wrote it and the people that they wrote it to in their time?”

Richard Rohr:

That’s good.

Mike Petrow:

Then he says, “There’s the soul, or the psychological meaning of the text, when I ask, what does it mean for me now, in my own context, when I’m reading it?”

And then last, we have the spirit of the text, which is, “What does it mean for everybody for all time, and what does it show me about God?”

But what I appreciate about those types of questions is they’re all checks and balances for each other, right?

Richard Rohr:

Yes.

Mike Petrow:

They keep each other honest.

Richard Rohr:

Well put.

Mike Petrow:

I really, really… Like you say, when we take Scripture literally and uncritically without a bit of study, we can make it say whatever-

Richard Rohr:

Whatever we want.

Mike Petrow:

… we want.

Richard Rohr:

And that is proven.

Now, how did we end up not just allowing, but blessing, slavery, apartheid, almost every war that came along, totally missing the movement toward non-violence that we find in the prophets and in Jesus?

We didn’t know how to think developmentally. We made the very word “evolution” a bad word, that it was evil to think things could evolve.

Watch your little child grow from six months, to two years, to five years. Growth is everywhere.

Mike Petrow:

Well, and you’re giving us an evolutionary way to read the Bible.

Richard Rohr:

That’s right.

Mike Petrow:

You’re asking us to grow through it. One of my favorite sentences in this chapter, you talk about when we don’t bring these checks and balances to how we read, you say, “Rather than reading the Bible inside our own bubble, we must allow the Bible to read us.”

Richard Rohr:

Oh, very good.

Mike Petrow:

But we can’t do that if we don’t have these checks and balances.

How does all these different contexts, who am I, what’s my subjectivity, who was the author, when was the author reading, when was the author writing, who was the author writing to, how does that help us let the Bible read us?

Richard Rohr:

It gives it edges, it gives it grit instead of just sentimentality. It gives it historical, political, economic, social context and shows that Jesus and the prophets, we’re talking about very real sociopolitical settings. And you exclude it from them, you don’t have an incarnate word anymore. You don’t have a word that has become flesh.

Once you get it that the incarnation we had to allow in the word of God that we call Jesus, we have to allow that same incarnation in the word of God we call the Bible. Jesus is the personification of the verbal word, the enlightened stage of the verbal word.

So He represents, and this isn’t even hard to prove, the holding together of order. He respects temple Judaism, but He isn’t trapped inside of it. He leads us into feminine, forgiving, incarnate Judaism and thus reveals the universal capacity God has for love, that we’ll see just coming to its first formulations in Third Isaiah, which correlates to before the exile, how we grow through suffering during the exile, after the exile.

Once they’ve been purified by suffering, they’re almost disappointed to discover that God loves everybody as much as them. And you’re just the testing ground, Israel. Don’t think you’re really the only people that God loves. God isn’t that small. If God is God.

And every prophet comes to that: having God love non-Jews comes to its fullness in Jesus, where the hero of almost every story, and you can check me out on that, is an non-Jew. That’s an insult to temple Judaism.

Mike Petrow:

But you say in the chapter, and I love this, you say that, “Great love and great suffering are usually the wrecking ball that break us out of our small ideas and our self-absorption.”

Richard Rohr:

That’s right. If you remain in a glib, quaint, pious, enclosed, homogeneous world, you don’t know that yet. You’re able to live with your self-serving mythologies of chosenness. God loves whatever God has created.

Mike Petrow:

And then everyone is special.

Richard Rohr:

Once you get that, you can’t move back from it and have elitist religion. But it all starts there.

I have to know what it feels like to be chosen. Like when I was a little boy in Kansas, I was so lucky to be Catholic, and I felt so sorry for the poor Protestants. We could hear their Methodist hymns from our house. We were right across the street, but we knew God wasn’t listening.

Mike Petrow:

Too busy working on the Roman Catholic Church.

Richard Rohr:

The Catholic Church was a little farther away, but it was so convenient to think that way, and we all did it.

Specialness, the expansion of specialness to universal specialness, to the one who makes everything special, to love as it’s divinely defined.

Mike Petrow:

Oh, I love that.

Richard Rohr:

Universal love. Self-love, other love, universal love.

Paul Swanson:

And it takes the in-breaking of the other to make that evolutionary love continue.

How that impacted me is late junior high, early high school was, I’ve been thinking a lot about the music of Bob Dylan lately, but the song With God on Our Side, where he talks about how in wars, both sides feel like God is on their side. They’re not allowing that consideration for the other.

Richard Rohr:

Just don’t.

Paul Swanson:

But for me, in the 20th century thinking about that, it blew my young mind to think that the other also has God on their side. And so I had to move beyond my own circle, my own little evangelical world.

Richard Rohr:

It puts together the human journey with the divine journey, that we’ve got to grow up here and you got to get out of your bubble, as you put it. But if you live only in your own group, there’s a whole bunch of essential things you will never know.

I think that’s why Jesus travels so much with His disciples all the way up to Tyre and Sidon.

Richard, you say something in this chapter that kind of drops the hammer on a lot of what we’re talking about.

Paul Swanson:

You write that Isaiah says the pattern of anger to tearful lamentations to an evolving expansion of love, which we’ve been talking about here, and this pattern of order, disorder. And reorder. And you go as far as to call this thinking by Isaiah One a monumental advance in consciousness.

What can you tell me about Isaiah One’s lived reality and writings that point this monumental advance?

Richard Rohr:

Well, the fact that he’s just had his immense transcendent experience, “Holy, holy, holy” in the temple, it’s first of all a story that would seem to keep him enclosed. There’s overlapping between First Isaiah, Second, and third. He already recognizes this transcendence is so transcended, it can’t be limited, it can’t be enclosed, it can’t be boundaried. And he’s already critiquing the temple.

So First Isaiah, who idealizes transcendence, already overcomes it. That chapter, those early chapters where he says, “Your burning of your animals stinks. I’m holding my nose.” God is holding His nose at all their temple sacrifice. It’s an amazing leap forward. The one who loves it the most, deconstructs it the most.

Mike Petrow:

Not only do First, Second, and Third Isaiah show us order, disorder, and reorder, but they show us really healthy order, disorder, and reorder.

Richard Rohr:

That’s excellent.

Mike Petrow:

Like, the best version of it.

Richard Rohr:

That’s excellent.

Mike Petrow:

The order in first Isaiah is already… it’s an order that’s willing to introduce some disorder. That’s really profound.

So at First Isaiah, which, for anybody listening, First Isaiah is chapters one through 39, that shows us order in some of the classical Christian stages of life. A way that people would talk about order, Richard, was ethice, right? So they said it was a season of life where we learned ethics. We learned ideas about right and wrong and what’s fair. And so we often build a system that says, “If you do good, you’ll get good results, and if you do bad, you’ll get bad results.”

And it’s very often reward and punishment-based. It’s religion that’s about reward and punishment and predictability.

But you tell us: because of prophetic speech, the Jewish religion is about a gradual purification of not just action, but of motivation and intention. How does that help grow us up?

Richard Rohr:

Because it breaks down our tit-for-tat, quid pro quo, two plus two equals four, which is the way we want to think. It keeps us in control. We always know it’s going to work. Put in my two, God’s two, we got four. We put in our two, and God makes five out of it. That’s forgiveness, mercy, and compassion. Or God breaks God’s own rules, and it’s not God’s rule, it’s our interpretation of God’s rule.

Jesus doesn’t emphasize, scandalously, as this sounds, the 10 Commandments. He emphasizes the eight Beatitudes as an entire vision of life, which are all hard to put into any kind of codex or any kind of mathematical formula of the worthy and the unworthy. Blessed are the poor in spirit. I’m not there yet. You’re not there yet. We can’t divide the world into those who totally live the purity in spirit and those who don’t. It leaves us all gracefully out of control, and God’s mercy in control.

Mike Petrow:

It’s a good phrase, gracefully out of control, because also, as much as we should, and we want to, live good, ethical lives and make good choices, real-life experience often shows that just because you work hard doesn’t mean that you’re going to prosper, and just because you love well doesn’t mean that everyone else is going to treat you well. It’s just not that simple.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah, and that’s what the middle of life is supposed to teach you, where you see the good people don’t always live longer, don’t always have healthy, happy children. The world isn’t structured that way. Even here, forget heaven and hell, what Judaism did, and we imitated them, is what someone calls apocalyptic dualism. It all ends with them: absolute joy. We’re walking around with our harps on clouds, something we don’t even want to do, I don’t think, and absolute torture for all eternity. Whenever you see apocalyptic dualism, you have human logic still at work, not divine logic.

Mike Petrow:

It seems like in that order phase, we really want things to be fair. I want it to be that if I tell the truth and I follow the 10 Commandments, I’ll be blessed, then I’ll be prosperous. And then we drift into disorder when we interrogate that with lived experience, and we see this in books like Job and Ecclesiastes and the prophets who say, “Oh, sometimes righteous people suffer and wicked people prosper.”

Richard Rohr:

It’s obvious.

Mike Petrow:

You point this out in the book that in the early Jewish understanding of Sheol and Hades, it wasn’t about punishment and reward.

Richard Rohr:

It clearly wasn’t.

Mike Petrow:

But we evolved into this idea of heaven or hell…

… But we evolved into this idea of heaven or hell. Is that the ultimate play to make things fair? Well, it’s not going to happen in this life, but in the afterlife, it’s going to pay out?

Richard Rohr:

Fair by our definition.

Mike Petrow:

By our small understanding. Good people will get rewarded, bad people will suffer.

Richard Rohr:

When it’s clear that already in this world that isn’t true. Good people die young and have cancer, and old crotchety people live to 95. I hope I don’t. What makes us believe in this logic?

Mike Petrow:

Well, we sabotage our own experience of the God of love. You said in this chapter, in Jewish teaching, Sheol and Hades have no connotations in punishment and certainly not eternal punishment. These are early Jewish ideas of the afterlife.

Richard Rohr:

That’s true.

Mike Petrow:

But unfortunately, this desire for fairness, you say evolved over time in our religious imagination into the literal description of the unquenchable fire of Gehenna, and thus hell. But the metaphor of fire in the whole Bible is almost entirely a refiner’s fire of purification in this world, not a fire of torture in the next. What damage this has done to the hearing and trusting of the entire gospel message, you cannot follow much less imitate a God who revels in eternal punishments from the get-go. That makes God far too dangerous and ogre-like to work with, particularly if we want to move towards any kind of goal of loving union with God. And I’ll say this, I grew up on that theology.

Richard Rohr:

We all did.

Mike Petrow:

But when we start to love people who don’t fit into it, it’s almost impossible to believe. If God is love and we love the people around us, how could we believe that a loving God would want to torture people?

Richard Rohr:

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think you can believe that. And I’ve had so many sweet old ladies and sweet old men too, say that just with a soft voice, “Could God really do that?” You could tell their heart has grown bigger than their theology. Their experience is bigger than their glib explanations that were unfortunately fortified from the pulpit. I mean, this is the problem in one phrase. If God is vengeful, retributive, punishing, there’s no hope for humanity ever growing beyond that. There’s no hope. We’re going to elect leaders who are that way. We’re going to allow fathers and mothers to be that way. They’ll be motivated to be that way, because God is the exemplar of what we all should seek and what we all should imitate. This is no small dish. We can’t let, allow, believe that God is punitive.

Mike Petrow:

Before we move on, I just want to say thank you, because I think you’ve just given me my favorite definition ever of deconstruction, which I always think of as the failure of religion or ideology. But when you say that folks’ hearts have grown bigger than their theology, I’ll bet so many people listening resonate with that experience.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah.

Mike Petrow:

So good.

Richard Rohr:

And they’re made to feel like they’re heretical when they allow that to happen. The prophets and Jesus give us permission to operate that way, because that’s the way they operate.

Paul Swanson:

You quote Isaiah 6 of this chapter, I feel like connects to this where you say, or Yahweh says to Isaiah, “You must listen and listen again and not understand. See and see again, but not perceive, until you understand with your heart and are healed by me.” And this pattern is slow and much slower than we’d prefer to be in that confusing state of disorder. But in that middle passage of life, that this gradualism is the only honest way that one can know spiritual things without becoming ego inflated. Now, this seems entirely true for what we’re talking about right now. And then also to put some skin on it, it into this moment in time, what’s going on in our world, how is this true for right now as we’re three steps forward, now it seems like six steps backwards, the slowness, the gradualism of how we actually learn to hold the immediacy and the transcendence in our lived reality?

Richard Rohr:

What happens when you let vengeance dominate, we have a right to our rage, is hatred rules the world. My war against whoever has hurt me is a justified hatred and both sides lose. You have to first take the side of the victim. I’m sure people are being destroyed in Ukraine with hatred for Russians. That isn’t the answer either. They seem to have a right to their rage, but the full gospel is, “Be careful or you become with almost certitude the very thing you hate.” That’s the theology of nonviolence, where I know each group thinks it deserves its rage. “Their hatred is bad hatred, my hatred is good hatred.” That’s the lie.

Paul Swanson:

And it makes sense that the heart has to get there first before the theological mind. Well, maybe this is a good time to transition to Isaiah 2 a little bit more so, which you label as the chapters in Isaiah 40 to 55 often highlighted for The Songs of the Suffering Servant. And those are certainly parading a vulnerability of littleness, of powerlessness. And for this very reason you call Isaiah 2 the epitome of awakened, reorder prophecy. Just so folks get a taste of it, Richard, do you mind reading part of one of The Servant Songs on page 122 of Tears of Things, so those who haven’t read it yet kind of get a taste of what that is?

Richard Rohr:

“Here is the one I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights. I have given him my spirit, that he may bring true justice to the nations. He does not cry out or shout aloud or make his voice heard in the streets. He is not rageful.” In other words, “From the beginning, I have been silent, I have kept quiet, held myself in check. I have grown like a woman in labor, lamentation instead of rage.” You see? “I suffocate, I stifle.”

Paul Swanson:

These are unique and we know that a lot of these get alluded to in Jesus, in the life of Jesus. What do you think the thesis or guidance that we should be wrestling with coming from Isaiah 2 with these Songs of The Suffering Servant? They kind of hold an in-between place between Isaiah 1 and Isaiah 3.

Richard Rohr:

Yes. They’re an invitation to vulnerability. Brené Brown has developed this so well in recent years. It’s with good reason that her books and her teachings are having such influence, because they develop really Second Isaiah, that vulnerability will never admired by a patriarchal, macho, overly masculinized culture. I was disappointed. I thought I said when I wrote this book that many even assume, presumed that Second Isaiah must have been a woman, because it’s normally women who can admire vulnerability. Men are made fun of by other men if they do. They’re called soft, stupid, naive.

If you read Second Isaiah chapters 40 to 55, Second Isaiah loves weakness and praises it. And we projected Second Isaiah rightly onto Jesus. The cross is not a macho Jesus. Let’s just put it that way. How do you love your machismo and worship the crucified one, the victim who accepts the victim state as a state of enlightenment? Christianity doesn’t know what a revolutionary message it has. So we made it into a transactional theory that we called substitutionary atonement theory. Instead of gaze upon the one you have pierced, you have contributed to this worldview of justified violence. The Romans and the Jews who crucified Jesus were just thinking they were following the rules, and they were in a very real sense.

Mike Petrow:

Well, Jesus was dangerous. He threatened their order.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah, that they could be rule breakers, they were never told, who break the logic or recognize the cruelty of making a poor man suffer even more. And you look at American social policy at the top levels, we’re still crucifying. This is our country today. Forgive me.

Mike Petrow:

So appreciate with Second Isaiah as the voice of disorder, thinking of that as giving voice to the experience of our hearts, outgrowing our theology, outgrowing our religious containers, outgrowing our ideas of purity and self-righteousness.

Richard Rohr:

Let me give another phrase to that. You’ve said it right, letting our relationships surpass our reason. God lets his relationship with humanity in its wounded state be larger than so-called divine logic or divine reason. Every time God forgives, God is choosing relationship over reason. Without relationship, we just don’t grow up spiritually. Relationship makes room for nuance, for exception, for alternatives.

Mike Petrow:

That’s so helpful to think that those relationships can help us outgrow our righteousness, our containers, our reason. I love that, Richard.

Richard Rohr:

All relationships do. That’s why in religious life you weren’t allowed to be a hermit until you’d lived years in community.

Mike Petrow:

I mean, if we bring it all home with Third Isaiah, it’s crazy to think you see this pattern, I think in all of scripture, where it’s this two steps forward, three steps back, and it’s this brave branching out into the love of God and being like, “Maybe God loves people who are different than me. But God is still righteous, we’ve got to remember that. Maybe could God love everyone? But there’s still punishment in the afterlife.” And it just keeps nudging further and further forward.

And we see that in Third Isaiah in these beautiful, beautiful passages that show up in Third Isaiah. And then my favorite experience of where we see that is when Jesus quotes Third Isaiah, because he nudges it just a tiny step further. So to go back to what you were saying about the Jesus hermeneutic and this sort of three steps forward, two steps back, I love the scene where Jesus has his sort of public coming out as a prophetic teacher and he’s in the temple and he takes the scroll. And you can find this story in Luke chapter 4, and he reads a passage from Isaiah, Third Isaiah. What is it? I think Isaiah chapter 61 is where people would find it in their Bible.

Richard Rohr:

Yes. “The spirit of God has been given to me. He doesn’t doubt his anointing. Yahweh has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor. The powerless will understand this. Those who are seeking power will never understand it. To bind up hearts that are broken, to proclaim liberty to captives. His choice, we call this the preferential option for the poor. Freedom to those in prison, to proclaim the year of favor from the Lord.” Eliminating the final verse, “A day of judgment from our God,” Jesus does not quote.

Mike Petrow:

And that’s the most amazing parts. He stops at the year of the Lord’s favor. You point this out in the book, he finishes, he rolls up the scroll and hands it back and sits down. You said this, Paul, “What a mic drop moment.” He makes it so clear that it’s love, and the next verse would’ve been the vengeance of our God. He does not read that. He closes the scroll and makes it so clear that the final word is love-

Richard Rohr:

Can just see people waving hands.

Mike Petrow:

… And not judgment.

Richard Rohr:

“Hey, you cut the verse short.”

Mike Petrow:

Oh, yeah. And he really made some people angry, as I recall in the story. But how powerful is that, that Third Isaiah gets us there and still has that little, “Oh yeah, yeah, and maybe the vengeance of God too. I don’t know.”? And Jesus is just like, “Nope, not at all. It’s love, it’s not vengeance.” Richard, how do you think that’s a revelation that we’re still growing into in the Christian religion?

Richard Rohr:

We have to let our human journey inform our divine journey and vice versa. This is incarnate religion. You can’t have religion apart from human loving of people failing to love, disappointing one another, forgiving one another. You only come to understand divine love through human love, and you only come to understand human love through divine love. It’s all one now. And it becomes so simple, it becomes scary. This doesn’t have much to do with church services at all. In fact, too many church services will probably destroy you, because you’ll think there’s some pure world or divine love has nothing to do with human love, when in fact they’re one. The first commandment and the second is like it. And you can’t understand the first without the second. Love of neighbor. We’ve got such good material as the foundation to build on.

Paul Swanson:

I’m recognizing there’s a momentum and a recycling of that momentum that we are seeing in the three Isaias. This slow pattern of tears, sadness, love being kneaded like dough, and the prophets across time, almost just looking different depending upon the prophet. And the growing awareness in this pattern across the prophets is that the fidelity is always on God’s side.

Richard Rohr:

Always.

Paul Swanson:

Always. And this faithfulness by God is a little embarrassing, because it’s a conscious expanding availability to all, regardless of perceived goodness or standing or group identity.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah, we need it. It’s not just a path, it’s the path. To hold on to transcendent love, transcendent loveliness, while recognizing it only really works in a world of fallibility and failure. That’s where the exception to the rule proves the rule.

Paul Swanson:

The holy, holy, holy moments being conversant with the holy shit moments.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah.

Mike Petrow:

Yeah, that’s well said.

Richard Rohr:

You’re saying it.

Paul Swanson:

Do you have a word of blessing or prayer that you might want to offer to all those listening as they try to hold this and integrate this, the human and the divine path together in their own lives, in their own communities?

Richard Rohr:

Forgiveness is the big final word. God forgives everything, every stage, every certitude. And could live with it and allow it to open up, to flower, to show itself, not to be an end in itself. Forgiveness. To forgive reality for being reality. I love nature shows, but I hate it when big tigers attack a little wildebeest baby. God forgives that too. Who is this God? And God’s forgiveness is revealed in the allowing of it. The allowing. What does that wildebeest mother feel, think, if wildebeests think? I don’t know. But everything dies, everything has tears, as we say. And accepting that, allowing that, forgiving that with God has to be salvation, has to be liberation. Whenever I try to talk about this, it’s merely a trying, it’s not a full experiencing of how God must love.

Paul Swanson:

You can only attempt to talk about this, we can’t do it perfectly.

Richard Rohr:

No, you can’t.

Paul Swanson:

I think that’s where my learning comes in as well, is how do we… We’re creating the conditions to walk around the mystery and to do our best. And Richard, for being our teacher and elder showing us how to do this is such a gift. So thank you both.

Richard Rohr:

Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

Thank you.

Mike Petrow:

Everything Belongs will continue in a moment.

Reverent Cassidy Hall is an author, an award-winning filmmaker, a podcaster, and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and she’s also my very good and precious friend. Her book, Queering Contemplation, finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality, explores her own spiritual journey as a queer woman and gives us insight into everything that can be learned from the contemplative tradition when we expand our lens.

You can learn more about her in our show notes and at cassidyhall.com. And I’m so excited about how in this conversation she invites us to get out of our norm and look at life in a more expansive way, which I think is what the God of love is always asking us to do. So without further ado, let’s join Carmen and Cassidy in conversation.

Cassidy Hall, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, what a joy to sit in conversation with the two of you on the Everything Belongs podcast.

Cassidy Hall:

Oh, I have long admired the wisdom and the work of both of you, so it is great to join you today.

Mike Petrow:

What’s wild is that you are a part of the Everything Belongs team from behind the scenes, so I’m so thrilled. We’re going to talk about the Book of Isaiah. The Book of Isaiah, at this point in the book, Richard looks at as three interlocking conversations with three different authors that actually walk us through the path of the prophet, as he describes it, and what he elsewhere describes as the wisdom pattern of taking us from order to disorder to reorder.

Cassidy, I’m thinking back about the episode we did on Unfinished Prophets, and I’m realizing that this is always going to be an unfinished conversation, right? We can talk about this forever and find new layers of things that are missing and that’s an invitation. But when we looked at the Unfinished Prophets chapter, I got to have a conversation with Carmen after. And Carmen, you were so great at pointing out faces that were missing and voices that were missing in that conversation. And one of the biggest missing elements is women, and women prophets. We see these little moments that the Hebrew scriptures sneak them in, like Job naming his daughters, or the named women prophets. But those tiny little moments seem to point out how much women prophets don’t seem to be a part of the conversation. So Cassidy, you know a bit about this. In your studies, where were the women in this moment? Were there women prophets, and if so, why didn’t we hear about them? And what does the prophetic religion of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets have to offer women in this conversation? I apologize if that’s a really big question.

Cassidy Hall:

It is a huge question, but one, I think that we might have our own interpretations or our own experience of, our own readings of, and so first I think it’s important to acknowledge that, for every woman, for every queer person, for every human being, our experience is different and varying. So when we speak to things today, we’re speaking from our own experience, our own perspective. And yeah, I was so struck by that episode, when Carmen shared the names of all the women prophets in the biblical texts, because I couldn’t name all of them, and frankly, I still can’t. I didn’t rewind and memorize all of them like I wish I would have now in this moment. But historically, we can wonder if there were more women prophets. And while I’m quick to say yes, there absolutely were, we have to remember that the nature of being in a patriarchal society where men are given more power, there was significant erasure of these women and their stories, along with other people on the margins.

And we can say the same reason for why they were missing from the text, but I think we can have a little bit more fun with it. Maybe the women prophets were missing because they were primarily finished prophets, which don’t make for interesting stories. Maybe their movement into lamentation was more easily or quickly accomplished, and maybe even their journey from anger to compassion was a journey backwards, beginning in compassion. And I think that that’s an interesting thing to look at, the different experiences of how we move through those emotions and experiences. And while there’s no gift in erasure, and I think that’s really important to say, we can also accept it as an invitation to use our imagination and to read ourselves into the text, as Richard says. And I think when we look at the big picture of Jesus, the big picture of Christianity, we have to remember that Jesus wasn’t setting out to create a religion. He wasn’t looking to cultivate a system of structure, harm, domination, and in fact, all the pieces of power and domination that left women and others on the margins out, had and still have nothing to do with Jesus.

And so the prophetic way of Jesus is a way, and not a system or a structure. And I think it’s so important to remember to humanize Jesus in that way sometimes, and just crucial to remember just those one-on-one connections that Jesus held throughout the Scriptures, throughout the text, and how they were with every person we can imagine.

Mike Petrow:

I love how Richard writes at the top of this chapter, “When we take Scripture literally and uncritically without a bit of study, we can make it say whatever we want, even if it’s the justification of war, slavery, fabulous private wealth, gun culture, polygamy or genocide,” and I would add, or the erasure of women or any other people group that’s convenient for us to exclude. And Richard says, “All of this has been done without shame by people who read the Bible literally.” And later he says, “Rather than reading the Bible inside our own bubble, we must allow the Bible to read us.” I think about Origen who said, “When you read a Scripture, you want to ask what it meant then, in the time and place it was written, but also what does it mean now for me and what does it mean forever?” When I think about that, it invites us to notice the voices that are missing and prioritize listening to them. I think that’s the work of Scripture on us, don’t you think?

Cassidy Hall:

Absolutely. And how do we read Scripture responsibly, ethically? How do we take into consideration all of these things, right? And I think it can be a really exciting thing to look at together.

Mike Petrow:

Richard identifies three different authors, and a lot of scholars believe this in the book of Isaiah, that it’s actually three different books that are in conversation with each other, written at three different times. And it seems like he’s implying that first Isaiah talks to us a little bit about what Richard refers to as order, and shows us the limits of where order can take us, the limits of our best efforts to control things. And then second, Isaiah gives us a little bit of the wisdom of disorder, and also what happens when we start to pay attention to everything that’s excluded from our best attempts to control ourselves, and to control life. And then third, Isaiah shows us the wisdom of what happens when we include all of it. If we follow that pattern and we start at the beginning, how do you understand the notion of having a season of life that’s all about order?

Cassidy Hall:

In my experience, it seems that order can be kind of a complicated word, and I find that it can relate a little bit to perfectionism, which is complicated. And we know that perfectionism can be a friend of empire and control, and I think that my order has included some disorder along the way. So in one of my moments of disorder, I came to recognize what I had excluded in myself and my identity. I was working as a therapist in Iowa, and it was following this script that was set out for me. It all appeared beautifully as order. I had a full-time job as a therapist, I had health insurance, everything appeared to be going well. But I was lost and I was overworked, and I started having panic attacks on the job, it was my first experience of a panic attack. And for those who’ve experienced that, it’s a very terrifying experience.

But I was also reading Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation in between clients. Now to this day, I still don’t know where the book came from, but for some reason this book was on my desk, and I was reading this in between clients. And I came to this chapter titled Integrity, where he writes, “Many poets are not poets, for the same reason that many religious people are not saints. They never succeed in being themselves. They never become the person or the artist that is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts, to be some other poet, some other saint. They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else’s experiences, or write somebody else’s poems.” So that really shook me awake, it kind of rang like a bell in my body calling me to prayer, but I didn’t know where the prayer was or what the prayer was. I only knew that I was not moving towards my true self.

So amid this visual of looking like my life was in order, my internal life was in complete disorder. So I went to Merton’s Monastery in Kentucky, and visited for a long weekend, fell in love with the silence, the solitude, but didn’t really know why or how. But, as one does in times like this, I came back to my job and I put in my thirty-day notice, and I traveled to all 17 of these Trappist monasteries in the U.S, and there are now unfortunately only 14. But in this instance and in my desperation, I was looking to this atypical place, a place with a unique lifestyle of prayer and work, to help guide me out of my own disorder.

And I think it’s so important to also say here that the panic attacks didn’t stop. I still navigate those, those are real. The challenges don’t all disappear when we move our lives in the direction of our true self and the direction of more of who we are. But there’s definitely, I think a different sense of equilibrium. At that time I was also navigating my own sexuality more. I was out as a queer woman, but I was not living as fully out and open as I was meant to. And so I kind of saw that experience as also something leading me to more of that in my life.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I so appreciate that you’ve really complexified our understanding of order with disorder. And so order is an ongoing activity, that includes disorder and reorder. So actually we’re talking about a process, not so much a paradigm, and it just seems that we’re always moving in or out of one of these. They’re not really static, right? And then the other thing is, so Cassidy, you were saying, we were talking earlier, you were saying how you like the word messy. And that’s what I want to say too, is that everything I’ve ever done that I’ve really enjoyed has been messy, because I’m a recovering perfectionist. So there really is no binary clear cut, it’s all to do with abundance and messiness, and it really relates to our humanness.

Mike Petrow:

Gosh, y’all have said so much that’s touching some deep places in my heart. I think about Richard in Falling Upward, when he says, “Sooner or later if we’re on a classical spiritual schedule, something’s going to fail us or we’re going to fail at something.” But that sense of control, our desire to control life, I think is the DNA of that order, and when that fails, it’s terrifying.

Cassidy Hall:

You get desperate, you’re willing to try anything to close the gap, to make sense of life, to have an answer to a single question. It really makes us recognize that we have to relinquish our control, that we have to hold life open-handed, so to speak. But now there’s something else that I kind of want to say here, because I think when we look at the world at large, we think about the disorder maybe happening in the culture at large, or maybe the dominant culture or the normative culture, the culture where they’re always living in order so to speak, or they believe they’re always living in order. I think one thing that’s really interesting is it seems like it is not until disorder is struck, that that culture finally looks at the margins, and finally takes the time in that desperation for a way to get out, because we’re hungry for change.

And I say we, because all of us knowingly or unknowingly, participate in aspects of the dominant culture or the status quo. And another way we might say that is the normative culture. So when we finally look to where we haven’t looked, those on the margins know better than anyone, the way out or through disorder, but not because they live there, because they have witnessed and seen so much from this space. They have watched what has worked, what doesn’t work, and because they have a perspective that can only come from living on the margins.

And similarly, the prophets almost always come from those spaces. So when the world is in need, the margins become more than just their identities. They become these kind of desert elders for our lives, where we come crawling, begging for a word of life, and become these kind of vessels with a map of directions for the way out, because they spent their lives seeing beyond what is, for what could be. So, I think were wise to pause and look for who has the map.

Mike Petrow:

Richard says, each group or generation thinks it has the final and full answer, until the next major social movement or next philosophical genius comes along, or the Webb telescope discovers new boundaries. He also says, when we’re in our sense of order that it’s great love and great suffering are the two major wrecking balls. And when that shows us the limits of our order, there is something about looking to folks who find that territory more familiar terrain. Thank you for pointing out that it’s so often the folks on the margins, where the prophets come from and where the prophets point, who are so much more familiar, that passport is well stamped. Carmen, what do you think about that? I can feel you thinking and I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I am thinking I love all of this, because in conversation we meet our own thoughts and questions, and for me, I was just thinking, when I was in college, one day I was up on this second story on a sort of a patio area, and all of a sudden my heart started racing. I thought I was dying from a heart attack, but I was way too …19 … young for that. So I called my mother up, she was like, “Oh yeah, your Aunt Trixie and I always had those, whatever they are.” So panic attacks, but we didn’t know what it was or anything, and I was thinking how grateful I am to have had panic attacks, because I was pursuing this order of making good grades, passing all the tests, and my body said, “Whoa, I want to show you your inner map.” I love you brought up about maps.

But for me, it was all tied up with this background I wasn’t really even looking at, which was mostly … and I think a lot of people’s lives start in some kind of sadness, and so if I asked a lot of my students, “What do you think about order, disorder, reorder?” They’d be like, “Order? I don’t think I started in order.” They would say my beginning of life was one of great sadness that eventually, as a counselor told me when I shared some of this, I was like, “Does all of this anger I feel make me a bad person?” This was a couple of decades ago, and she said, “Carmen, it makes you normal.” Because I think in sharing our stories, and in taking these terms and holding them gently up to the light, we can progress together in more kindness. That’s my hope, is that people feel seen and heard.

Mike Petrow:

Yeah, it’s what gets me excited to talk about second Isaiah, which Richard, I think associates a little more with the voice of disorder. I’d love to ask both of you before we really unpack this, how do you understand the idea of disorder?

Cassidy Hall:

I think my pitch for disorder, is that feeling of loneliness, that no one is experiencing the pain you’re experiencing, or the challenge you’re experiencing, or the loss you’re experiencing. My pitch is that that is real, first of all, that pain is real. And I promise you, I promise you that there is someone else in the world right now in this very moment, that is feeling the same thing. I love the metaphor of the river of prayer, that the river of prayer is always moving, always ongoing, and so no matter when you pray, anytime of day, someone else somewhere in the world is praying with you.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

For me, it has to do a lot with, what is not love, also, yet, in me too. So it’s kind of like a growing.

Mike Petrow:

I think one of the things that I’ve come to realize, sitting with Richard’s teachings and with the Tears of Things this time around, and really appreciating how he turns disorder into holy disorder in this book. He says, what seems like disorder is the portal through which we move from what we think is lasting order to something genuinely new. Dr. B would remind us the path of descent is a crowded path, because you’re actually experiencing something almost everyone else who’s ever lived has experienced. So when you feel alone, you’re actually in solidarity with the entire human race, but it’s easy to miss that. And I think what’s interesting to me is the ways that when we go through a moment of disorder, and we realize the limits of our attempts to create order, there’s suddenly the opportunity to see everything that that order has excluded, everything that it’s shut out, that it’s cut out, that it’s ostracized. Everything in me that’s been silenced.

Cassidy, you had this insight earlier in the conversation that when we go through these moments of disorder, it’s disenfranchised and excluded people that often have the most wisdom to give, because they’re the most familiar with this territory. When we talk about second Isaiah, Richard points out in this book that a lot of scholars believe that second Isaiah was written by a woman. Cassidy, what do you think is the importance in the invitation of recognizing, one, the second Isaiah may very well have been written by a woman, and two, that it shows us that there is an absence of women’s voices in this conversation.

Cassidy Hall:

Richard says in this chapter, “Rather than reading the Bible from our own bubble, we must allow it to read us.” And so I love that because it gives us this permission of lens that can run two ways. As a woman, I can read this by a woman, but you know what? As a woman, I can read any of the texts as if they’re by a woman. I can utilize my own lens, I can read the texts as if they’re written by a queer person. I can look for the missing voices in every single thing I read. So hearing that the idea of second Isaiah being written by a woman is wonderful and great, and also a reminder of the permission we already have. I also think here about Dr. B and the ways that these stories matter even more, when we can find ourselves in them.

It’s a gift to say, “Okay, this is written by a woman, and it’s a little bit more permission to see myself more clearly in that text.” And Dr. B, in a past episode of Everything Belongs talked about this idea of soft prophecy, and explores this idea that being able to read one’s life is soft prophecy, that our very lives are a kind of sacred text in our midst. And again, so this interchange of my life, my lens, reading the biblical text with its lens, with its experience, and being able to permeate that in such a way that releases it from its permanency.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I just want to say Amen to that, because some of the best bits of second Isaiah are when we read, “I know I shall not be shamed. I am untouched by insults.” So there’s that inner, I know myself, and somehow I will be accompanied by the intimate love of God. Then there’s also, “I groan like a woman in labor. I suffocate, I stifle.” So in other words, this delivering of redemptive suffering. And I appreciate that Richard points out that it’s written in a highly evolved language of the nonviolent resistor, second Isaiah, that Jesus embodied, and he makes this really good point, he says, “Which we are all still pretty much unprepared for,” that nonviolent resistor, and the fact that God loves, as Greg Boyle says, everybody, everybody belongs, no exceptions. And I love that Richard says, “This is the language of vulnerability and powerlessness,” and he says, “Maybe not a bearded prophet, maybe it was written by a woman.” And I’m like, maybe it was written by a bearded prophet like Richard Rohr, or a bearded prophet like Mike Petrow, and I appreciate that because I think that the Bible, when read as a love letter, like an anthology, yes, different genres, yes, but essentially as a love letter written to me from God, that is subversive in the kindest of ways.

Cassidy Hall:

Preach Carmen, love it.

Mike Petrow:

 

 

 

So that it can connect us and it can awaken us, I would say also. It can shake us awake to the truth of what’s happening, elevating the experience of those in the margins. I came across also this book today that I wanted to just briefly share. This might not fit in well, but from Asian Feminist Theology book by Kwok Pui-lan, and in this she talks about the concept of Han, the Korean concept of Han. And it’s a word that expresses the deep feeling that arises out of the experience of injustice. And so, when folks are experiencing Han, Korean women seek the help of shamans, the majority of whom are women from the lower classes. The Korean shaman is the priest of Han. Through her powerful dances and rituals, she exercises Han and restores the person’s health, strength and hope.

The release of Han is called Han Puri, which usually involves three important steps, and I think this one, the first one is probably the most important in my opinion. Allowing the Han-ridden person to speak and be heard, naming the sources of oppression and actively changing the unjust situation so that the person can have peace. So, the reason I bring that up is, again, that was another lens, another perspective from a woman, from an Asian feminist theologian who helped me look at suffering in a new way and helped me to see the ways in which women are healers, are shamans in this suffering, in also the Christian tradition. It’s just such a beautiful way to shake my mind awake and to listen to the women prophets in our midst.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I love that question you opened up with, why don’t we listen today? Because, for me, I think that since I am a human and I am my own human only through other humans, that Ubuntu, then any voice that is missing is unhealthy for me as one human. So, any voice. So, if we’re looking at all the women voices that are around, but maybe we haven’t heard from them, I’m thinking, what would’ve happened if in the Southern Baptist Church of my childhood, a preacher, they were always male, but what if a preacher had got up there and said, “Today, I want y’all to see the octogenarian or the Nonagenarian, Miriam dancing and drumming and preaching across the sea of reeds.” Wow. What if I had grown up with an image that powerful? So, having those kinds of images and passing on the history of the women prophets seems to me super important.

It’s kind of like how Ivana Gabara and Yulanov and Valerie, saving Goldstein, how they’ve all asked us to look at theology having been passed down to us at least until most recently, almost exclusively by men, as Goldstein says. And so, I would think it’s best for all of us to have more stories told. And just, we’re much richer. Our imaginations are much richer, and then what we can live out and how we can include other people is much richer if we have this in our sphere, right? In our imagination, and it’s brought to us somehow in the teaching because also, it is harder to dehumanize when stories are being told.

Cassidy Hall:

It’s a widening incarnation, right? We get to see more of God if we really believe we’re made in God’s image. It’s just, it’s more of God. It’s a widening incarnation in our midst. And what a beautiful, beautiful site that is.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Exactly that.

Mike Petrow:

I so appreciate your book, Queering Contemplation, Cassidy, and the way that you’ve brought that perspective into our understanding of contemplation, and you’ve expanded my understanding of what it means, not just to engage in contemplation, but to think about being queer and queerness. What lens do you think that lends itself into our expansive understanding?

Cassidy Hall:

Yeah. I think, as we’ve been saying, we do a disservice to the contemplative tradition, the prophetic tradition by leaving anyone out. And I say anyone in the margins, but also any experience in the margins, right? And I think, when we listen and keep listening to these voices and experiences, we get more of the divine, and we’re wise to look to the origins of these traditions, right, to see how this lens was always there. It was already there. It’s a part of the origin story of Christianity.

The desert elders not only subverted empire by moving into the desert, they also subverted gender norms. Jesus himself pointed us to a queer strange or unique way of foregoing legalism healing people and ignoring purity laws, spending time with those on the margins. And I don’t think it’s just because people needed healing, because we also know people in the dominant culture, the people in the status quo also needed healing. But I believe Jesus hung out there because there was a particular sense of expanding God’s image for himself too.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I love that you say that, Cassidy. I’m wondering, could you say more about what the word queer itself means to you?

Cassidy Hall:

Yeah, thanks for that question. So, when I use the word queer, I’m not just talking about my sexuality, but I say it’s the way I tilt my head to look at the world. It is a perception, a way to see differently, a way to see from an angle, a way to explore the world in a new way and towards possibilities, towards liberation, towards justice, towards love. And so, I’d hate to mess with the etymological roots of this because I’m talking to an expert, Carmen. But my understanding is the origin of the word I think came, I think the 1500s, is that right? The 14th or 15th century, I believe. And it primarily meant things like oblique, strange, odd. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century when it started to relate to sexuality.

And so, what I love thinking about is the word for the majority of its life meant things like weird, strange oblique. And coming again from a family that embraces weird, it’s a word that I’ve really come to embrace in its wholeness and its past and its present meaning. So, it is related to my sexuality, but it’s also a lens, a way to perceive and explore the world, a lens for reading the Bible. It’s a lens for looking differently and seeing differently. And I do want to say, I just want to be clear that every queer person would give you a different answer, and that’s the beauty of it to me, right? That’s the beauty of it all.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

That’s what I was hoping you would say, because I think we sometimes take the word and make it into a category that has finite boundaries, or limited boundaries. And I’m always listening, right, to the person tell me, any person tell me what they mean by this.

Mike Petrow:

I think what I’m seeing in all of this and in this chapter is, first of all, that God really is in the inclusion business and that it’s inclusion for the purpose of wholeness, and that this is the beating heart of Richard’s teaching. It’s the only way to be non-dual is to be more than dual, to include what’s missing in our either or dichotomies. It’s everything belongs. You can only get to everything belongs if you recognize what’s missing and you bring it into the conversation. It’s transcending and including and it’s finding our way to wholeness. And I think for me, maybe that’s what this idea of reorder is, is stepping into a bigger and inclusive love that has a lot more space to be messy. That isn’t a punitive God who’s sending folks off to hell, but is creating more and more and more and more expanse.

Cassidy Hall:

I think for me, it’s been seeing spaces, places and people who have made a point to create safety for the full spectrum of identity markers on the margins, and experiences of trauma of these kinds of things. And I think that it’s only going to be safe when the permission of inclusion and acceptance is realized and it’s visible and it’s tangible and it’s clear. So, seeing this happen in real time has been such a gift because that’s beloved community, right? So, I see churches still pursuing, being open and affirming, or more recently there’s this group called Wise in the UCC Church, which is being welcoming, inclusive, supportive, and engaged for mental health.

We see places that strive to be more accessible for folks with disabilities. And I don’t see this spectrum of identity as linear, but more as this widening circle. This widening incarnation that we were talking about. The line of dualism or the binary I really think needs to be destroyed so that we can recognize we can’t capture the vastness, which is, again, an amazing gift, an amazing thing, the vastness of God’s image. So, I think this, again, just like we were talking about order and disorder is this perpetual journey, because this unfathomable nature that we can’t grasp, there’s always going to be more to learn more, to add more, to create safe spaces for, even in ourselves. Even for ourselves, as Carmen keeps reminding us also. And it’s one of those complicated gifts because it’s simultaneously frustrating that will never arrive. But it’s also wonderful to know it keeps getting more expansive, more colorful, more delightful.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I love that. So, I think of how Father Richard says, “There is no judgment of anybody. There is no judgment of anybody,” is a Cohen to sit with, at least for me. And then there’s Greg Boyle at Homeboy Industries, and he has this list in cherished belonging of, really to me, it’s a model for reorder. God is in the loving, God is inclusion. Demonizing is always untruth. We belong to each other, no exceptions. Separation is illusion. Tenderness is the highest form of spiritual maturity. Kindness is the only non-delusional response to everything. Love your neighbor as you love your child. We are all unshakably good, no exceptions. And a community of cherished belonging is God’s dream come true.

Mike Petrow:

I appreciate the reminder that it’s a journey to get there. When I look at 1 Isaiah, 2 Isaiah, 3 Isaiah, when I look at this whole journey we’ve taken into tears of things, Cassidy, when I listened to your story about how you started out on one life path and then you were willing to listen deeply when your body was telling you, no, this is not a fit, and do something different. And grow into the place where you can tell us now, queerness is the way I tilt my head to look at the world, and recognizing that maybe the path that Richard’s describing for us is a continual growing into that, like turning our head to look at the world in an expansiveness of love that doesn’t require you to be just like me, for me to want to learn from you and be in communion and community with you and so many others. What a gift. And may we all listening, be willing to pay a little more attention to what’s been excluded and is asking to be heard.

Cassidy Hall:

Thank you both. It’s been amazing to talk with you both.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Same here. Thank you, Cassidy. Thank you, Mike.

Mike Petrow:

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

 

Carmen. First of all, what a journey it has been these last few months to be at this chapter where Richard is telling us that the three Isaias take us through the beats of the wisdom pattern and the path of the prophet that he describes and the tears of things. Gosh, I feel like we’ve come so far and I’ve learned so much.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Me too, the conversations, and also the fact of it being an expansive and inclusive journey.

Mike Petrow:

Yeah.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I’ve loved it.

Mike Petrow:

Yeah, thanks for saying that. And I think what’s hitting me is that we have these experiences of disorder that break into our lives where they shake up our understanding of how we think things are or how things are supposed to be, and that is quite an invasion of our reality. But what I hear in this book that’s brand new for me is Richard telling me that I have the opportunity, when I’m experiencing disorder, to turn it into holy disorder by making a choice. I have a choice with agency to step into that disorder. I can stretch beyond my sense of safety and I can listen to those whose experiences are different than mine. And I heard that so clearly in our conversation with Cassidy today.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

So, for me, one of the great revelations of older age, so my fifties on was like wow, listening to myself.

And after so long of experiencing self-loathing because it was kind of in the water of the evangelical churches that I was brought up in, and actually hearing, you know how our friend Jim Finley says, “Only love has the power or the authority to name who you are or who we are. Only love does.” When that starts meaning something and trying to treat my own self the way I’d always tried to be kind to other people, wow. And becoming your own best friend? That, to me, is also another way to make sure I make it through disorder safely. So, like you’re saying, this deep listening to others, to our own selves within, and how tears are definitely a part of that.

Mike Petrow:

That’s so good, Carmen. And I think there’s so many reasons to feel those tears. The tears, first of all, of the world not corresponding to the way I think it’s supposed to be, and the anger that comes with that. And then the tears of grieving that order and being open to something new. And then, there’s another sense of tears that I experience when I do suddenly hear the gifts of listening to the voices of those whose experience is different than mine. And I realize so often, my God, all this wisdom, and even all these potential friendships were always there waiting for me. And I was keeping them outside of walls of order that I imposed myself. And then, having the tears to also be gentle with myself in that process. And let that invite me, as you said, to listen to the voices in myself that I’ve been ignoring because they’ve been off-limits and letting love push me past that.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I love this notion of being able to outgrow our containers, our hearts outgrowing as you were talking about, Mike, our theology. Thank goodness that can happen. Thank goodness we don’t have to live with our earlier thoughts about God and our earlier experiences. And I was thinking recently, when I faced the first day of class recently at school, and I looked at my students and thought, wow, what a great opportunity to listen to you across the decades and try to really hear you. Shouldn’t we say that it’s not easy to deeply listen. There’s some fear involved of my small ego thinking, what if I don’t do it right? But then I think the worst part would be not trying because I really want to. So try, and if I make a mistake in the effort, they usually see I’ve made the effort and then it all works out. So, I think it’s good for me anyway, to acknowledge there is some fear involved of trying this new thing and being open. And I think somehow when we enter that space, words come in the listening.

Mike Petrow:

I have a little mantra that I picked up when we built the Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course together, and I bring myself back to it a lot, and that’s this idea that contemplation is deep listening, not deep ignoring. I think when we get into our practice, sometimes we try so hard to close down and find our way to peace and shut down all the voices and the distractions. And I think that’s only one side of the coin. I think being still and open and getting to a place where we can say, “How can I listen deeply to what I’ve been trying not to hear? Or what the world, in its unhealthy expressions, has been asking me not to hear.” Perhaps the invitation for our listeners is to say, this month, how can engage contemplative practice as listening deeply to those whose experience is different than yours?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I think the prayer that goes before that of like, “Hey, God, I don’t know what to do. How do I listen to my students? Or how do I listen to this person?” So for me, it’s saying, “Help. Please help me know how to do this.” Being honest enough to say, “I need your help.” And then it happens. It’s mysterious to me, Mike, honestly. But I love you keep bringing us back to deep listening. We need the reminder. So, thank you.

Mike Petrow:

I’m going to leave you with the words of one of my favorite prayers from Thomas Merton, and it’s a prayer that can guide all of us into going into unfamiliar territory. Merton says, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I’m going. I do not see the road ahead of me, I cannot know for certain where it will end, nor do I really know myself. And the fact that I think I’m following your will does not mean that I’m actually doing so. But I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I’m doing. I hope that I’ll never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it, therefore will I trust you always. Though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

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…

Mike Petrow:

Mike Petrow.

Paul Swanson:

Paul Swanson.

Drew Jackson:

Drew Jackson.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

Jenna Keiper:

Jenna Keiper.

Izzy Spitz:

Izzy Spitz.

Megan Hare:

Megan Hare.

Sara Palmer:

Sara Palmer.

Dorothy Abrahams:

Dorothy Abrahams.

Brandon Strange:

Brandon Strange.

Vanessa Yee:

Vanessa Yee.

Cassidy Hall:

Cassidy Hall.

Corey Wayne:

And me, Corey Wayne. The music you hear is composed and provided by our friends, Hammock. And we’d also like to thank Sound On Studios for all of their work in post-production. From the high desert of New Mexico, we wish you peace and every good.