Welcome, everyone, to this episode. I am so excited to have the pleasure of speaking with Stephanie Malia Krauss today. She is a mom and has also recently written a book that is very relevant to this season’s topic of “Radical Family,” where families are making bold choices to live out their faith.

And I think one of the ways that we can define “bold” is by really thinking intentionally about how we live our family lives. So, I’m so excited to be here with Stephanie, [00:01:00] and if you’d like to introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are personally, as a mother, as a professional, and kind of what led you to this writing journey.

Stephanie Malia Krauss: Thanks, Christina. Yeah, I’m so excited to be in conversation with you. And for folks who are listening, this is such a sweet connection. Christina and my husband went to college together, and she reached out to me after learning about my journey through him, and I’m so grateful and touched.

And I feel like if we had gone to college together, we would have been friends. And so, I hope folks feel the intimacy and ease of that kind of quick connection while we’re talking.

So I am the mama of a tween and a teen. So my boys are 13 and 15. And if we think about the context of their childhoods, just to put it in historic perspective, they were [00:02:00] in third and first grade when the pandemic happened, and now they are going into eighth and tenth grade. And so their whole lives have really been defined by a level of volatility and disruption, and then also innovation and acceleration that I just don’t have the experience with when I think back to my own childhood.

And we’ll dig into what it means to parent intentionally and create stability out of our beliefs and values when you have kids who are so deeply influenced by so many variable, rapidly changing forces. My husband and I have been married for a number of years that he could tell you. I can’t quite remember, but we’re coming up on 20 at some point in the next couple.

So, around 20 years we’ve been together, and live in the St. Louis area, which is wild [00:03:00] for me. I grew up in New Jersey and lived all around the country and never imagined myself a Midwesterner, but my background is blended. It is in education and social work, in human development, and then I also spent a number of years professionally thinking about workforce development and higher education.

And so the big questions of my life and work, kind of my vocation, have been: What do we need to be both ready for a world that is changing and challenging, and well? Because if you’re ready for all of these things that are so complex and hard, but you’re not enjoying life, like you’re only enduring it, that’s not a good life.

And so what do we need so we can thrive, and what does thriving really look like? And as a mom and somebody [00:04:00] who has been a teacher and a social worker and a coach and all of these kind of youth-serving roles, most of my professional work is thinking about that in the context of our kids and how we really protect and defend their childhoods so that they can not just endure life, but enjoy it, and then also the grown-ups who are taking care of kids.

While I have Catholicism by affiliation and ancestry, it’s not the direct faith that I practice every day, although we talked about a shared love for the Jesuits and a lot of other incredible Catholic thinkers and activists and doers. But all that to say, I’m really excited about this idea, thinking about radical family and shaping a family in a shifting landscape.

Christina Gebel: Absolutely. And I really [00:05:00] enjoyed in our pre-conversation just hearing about, yes, this connection that you have to the Catholic world and also just the faith-filled threads that have weaved their way into your family’s lineage, and maybe we’ll get to talk a little bit more about that as well.

In terms of our conversation today, one thing that struck me in a previous episode’s conversation with two wonderful theologians was that while the Church has incredible teaching on Catholic social teaching, it also has teaching about the family. There hasn’t yet been as much done on a parish community level about, okay, how do you really live family life with intentionality?

One of the hard things about calling this season Radical [00:06:00] Family is that we tend to go to the extremes of these big, bold choices, incredible things, which we’ve talked about on various episodes. But really, the other incredible thing that families do is just live their day-to-day life navigating this modern world.

Just so many parents are asking a lot of deep questions and appealing to their faith, their values, their fellow communities, and really asking, How do I wanna live out our family’s mission and vocation on a daily basis in this ever-changing, and you used a great word, “accelerating landscape?”

What were the maybe moments, years, experiences that led up to the start of writing the book?

Stephanie Malia Krauss: Yeah, it’s a really good question, and it does take us back to COVID to really understand what my writing and work life has been, which has really been patterned off of what I’m hearing from adults who are caring for kids all across the country, and then what I’m experiencing in my bones myself as a mom as my kids are getting older.

Back in the height of COVID, at the time when we were still sterilizing our groceries with masks on, when we really didn’t know anything and it was the scariest point, I had my first book come out, and it’s called Making It: What Today’s Kids Need for Tomorrow’s World. So here at this kind of moment of crisis, I come out with a book that is talking about the future, and I go on a basement book tour because, of course, nobody was going anywhere.

And so I’m connecting with people only via screen to talk about the world that is to come, and a couple of things happened in those conversations. The first was that people would see my background was in social work, not just education, and invariably somebody would text or chat and say, “Hey, I know we’re talking about the future, but I’m afraid that our kids or I am going to burn out or give up before I get there. What do we need to be well right now?”

So there was an absolute struggle for kids and adults to be thinking about the future when the kind of weather, the storm that we were in, just made the visibility impossible. And then the second thing that happened was I really wanted to get to know what was happening in the lives of these people who I wasn’t with. I wasn’t in their communities. I couldn’t fly or drive to be with them.

And so I began to live poll them, and every single time that I would log in, I would ask, “How are your kids? How are your families? And how are you?” And Christina, I ended up continuing to do this poll. I still do this poll every single time that I talk to any group. So across six years, what I have found is that every single community, no matter where they are, no matter what their demographics are, kids and adults are overwhelmed, overloaded, stressed, and tired. And so my work focused on what do young people need to be ready, then transitioned into what do they need to be well.

I wrote my second book called Whole Child, Whole Life that really was attending to the child and youth mental health issues that we were seeing just crop up and figuring out what do we as adults need to know, as parents need to know about pediatric health, about developmental science, about how kids learn, how they’re supposed to play, how they’re supposed to grow.

All these things. Sometimes we learn more about our cars or computers than these kids that we’re charged with raising, right? There’s no good manual. So that was Whole Child, Whole Life, but there was still something missing because—the family, the unit, the parish, the community—there was this need for collective care, because it wasn’t just kids who were overwhelmed, overloaded, stressed, and tired.

It was also their parents, and their teachers, and their counselors, and their pastors, and their grandparents, and, collectively, universally, we were all depleted. And so that led to the writing of this last book, How We Thrive, because what I understood was that our normal is not natural.

We are far from home. We are far from how we are made to live and learn and work. So if you want to think about this from a spiritual component, the very ways that God has designed us to be living, and loving, and playing, and growing, and sleeping, and moving, and creating—all these things, what I think about as our human essentials or our evolutionary endowments, these kind of primal birthrights—they’re harder to do right now.

And when we can’t tap into them, we actually can’t tap into the very things God gave us to keep us healthy, and happy, and whole, and to help us learn and live and work. And so How We Thrive ended up becoming a deeply personal and provocative journey for me as a parent and as a person, about this deep need, this radical need, to rehumanize my kids’ childhoods, rehumanize how I worked, how I lived, and to work to do that professionally as well, because we have these beautifully, again, God-given capacities that are of our body, and our mind, and our heart, and our spirit that are the very things that are supposed to be helping us evolve and also endure the really hard things and enjoy the really good things.

When we’re tapping into community and belonging, or celebration and contribution, or good sleep and good food, or play and wonder, the hard stuff is easier. It doesn’t remove it, but it’s more endurable, and we carve out really precious, wonderful moments of life.

So all of that to say, I think the radical move we can make for our families right now, more than anything else, is that if we do not want to live chronically depleted, the way we replenish and the way that we protect and defend our kids is the practice of rehumanizing our lives, of protecting those capacities, those God-given capacities, so that our kids can grow up living the way that they were made to live.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, this is an incredible start to our conversation, and already my head is buzzing with so many thoughts and questions. But one vision I had while you were talking, and being a data geek, I’m so glad that you have six years of data on this. The Church just went through this whole process of polling the congregations and the families, and this season we’ve talked a lot about the Synod on the Family.

And I don’t quite remember the survey that was passed out in the pews, but I bet it didn’t ask the question that you asked that grew very organically from your conversations, which was, “How are you really feeling on a human level right now?” Yeah. And I’d be willing to bet that many people in the pews would respond the exact same way.

So what a disconnect, right? That so many people are struggling with this, and the place where we find community and support, and also we find these beautiful values which you summarized so clearly and cut across several world religions—what a place to find help with that. And that’s what really drew me in to wanting to talk to you, because I really feel until we can get better about making that connection on the faith level, we need to go out and highlight the gifts of people like you who are thinking about this, and then take it into our lives and understand how to integrate it.

And given that, that leads me to my next question. So, what is re-humaning? What do you, from a 30,000-foot view, say in the book in response to everything that you learned?

Stephanie Malia Krauss: Yeah, so I’ll say something here on your podcast from a faith perspective that I don’t talk about in the book, and that is that there is an ecumenical lens to this. If we think theologically about this idea of the upside-down kingdom, how are we bringing down to Earth, down to our everyday lived lives, what God intended?

And importantly, with a sort of upside-down kingdom orientation for neighboring, for the other people around us.

Re-humaning really can situate itself well into that, because the idea is that every single person—we are born primed and knowing how to do certain essential things for our thriving.

People can have failure to thrive. And so we have to have sort of an environment, conditions that make it possible for us to really activate these natural superpowers that we’re born with.

So when we look across human history, we can see that from the research, from the science, there are 14 what I call essentials, 14 capacities that across time and culture and context. These were things that were as important 50,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, five years ago, five minutes ago that we have always tapped into that have a profoundly outsized impact on our health, happiness, and well-being, but also on our ability to grow, learn, and work. And so these essentials are worth knowing and worth committing to memory. In the book, I break them down by body, mind, heart, and spirit, just because it’s easier to remember them that way.

But the essentials of the body are our capacities to become healthier and happier when we eat good food, fresh food, get good sleep, regulate (we feel safe), and move (so movement), move our bodies the way we need to. On the mind side, when we play, wonder, find flow doing things for the sheer pleasure of it, and focus, and create, tap into creativity.

On the heart side, it’s our capacities for human connection, love, and belonging. And on the spirit side, it’s our capacities for celebration, and contribution, and belief. Belief in something bigger, so our faith, and belief in something better, hope. And so across time, humans have relied on these things to replenish themselves when they are depleted, and also to enjoy life.

The thing that’s so powerful about these essentials is that they come to life in really natural, organic ways when we make space for them, when they’re protected and prioritized. For example, if I go to a potluck at my church, I might all at once be waking up my capacities for eating good food, feeling very regulated because it feels like a safe space for me, and it feels like being at home. I am activating my mind. There’s the playfulness of the kids running around, and you’re telling stories. There’s wonder out of the curiosity of checking in on people’s lives and deep conversation. Absolutely flow. If the conversations are vibrant, suddenly, “Oh my God, it’s 2:00 already?” There’s a creativity. We were a part of a Mennonite congregation for a long time, and there was always who was gonna make the best bread or the best chili or whatever else. On the heart side, full, deep connection and love and belonging, just an abundance. And on the spirit side, a real sense of contribution. Everybody’s kind of taking care of each other’s kids. There’s a sense of celebrating events that have happened or birthdays. Sometimes congregations will celebrate anniversaries or birthdays if they’re getting together and certainly belief. It’s re-establishing your sense of faith connection.

So what’s so powerful about that is modern life, we can blow past it. I have a 13 and 15-year-old, so I might not go to church because they have a soccer game, or we have four other competing requirements, but the spaciousness, the slowness of enjoying that potluck lunch will often be eclipsed by all of these demands, this sense of being over-tapped or overworked.

And so I miss out on a natural opportunity that’s going to activate 13 out of 14 of the essentials that promote the health and happiness of me and my kids because we just don’t have time, because there’s so much to do. And so re-humaning is the intentional [00:21:00] awareness and action of allowing yourselves to prioritize and protect those spaces.

And when you’re not getting the sleep you need, or the play that you need, or the space for celebration, really paying attention to that…You’ve named this season Radical Family. I think about this as there’s reflexive re-humaning. What’s the sort of in-the-moment decision of, “No, we’re gonna go,” or, “I’m gonna grab this fresh food over this fake food”?

What are the things that we just do in the moment? There’s routine re-humaning.

What are we planning when we’re thinking about our week, or our weekend, or a summer trip, or other things that are gonna happen anyway? Routine re-humaning for me and my husband is sometimes we just sit down, and we literally go through, like, “How’s your body?

How’s your mind? How’s your heart?” We call it the daily download.

Then there is rapid re-humaning, when you feel like you are [00:22:00] in crisis or you are burning out, and you’re like, “I need sleep. Please, dear God, help me get sleep this week,” right? Or, “I need connection. I feel really isolated.”

And so it’s the intense kind of refilling of a particular essential or a few essentials. And then there’s the radical re-humaning. It’s, “I don’t want us to live our life like this. I don’t want my kids to live their whole lives feeling depleted, like they can’t possibly get through a to-do list.

The calendar is so crowded. The world is so scary, and what do I do now?”

Christina Gebel: Yeah. You again just laid out so beautifully not only the challenge, but also what we’re called to in these 14 things, and I actually really enjoy how you grouped them because I think it’s very holistic. It speaks to every side of ourself that needs nurturing and care.

And as you were talking about the [00:23:00] potluck, just the simple example of the potluck, right? And how something like that can feed and re-human us on so many of the levels that you brought up. I’m thinking of the fish fries that so many churches have. And one thing that I thought was really interesting was [during the COVID pandemic], some fish fries moved to a grab-and-go model, right? It was like a drive-through, and you could still raise money and eat good fish, but it was like the Chick-fil-A line, right? Going through the drive-through for the fish fry.

And I got to thinking that’s just such a simple example, but how little time we have in our churches, synagogues, places of worship and recreation—how little time we have to have these unstructured or maybe semi-structured encounters with [00:24:00] each other.

I see so much of parish life following along with the frenzy. Kids are playing three sports, and there’s not as much hanging out and mingling after church because the people for the next service are coming in, and we’ve got to get to Grandma’s house because Sunday’s the only time that we can see them. And the frenetic-ness has really embedded itself there too.

And a lot of parents joke about May-cember, right? Every sports thing is ending, every choral concert is happening, every dance recital, you know. And it’s—and I see the frenzy, and you can almost feel the level of depletion not only on the family, but also on the staff and the teachers—that’s right—and pastors or whomever.

And so I think you’re really onto something. And my next question is, [00:25:00] how do we, on a community or individual level, move towards this? And I can’t speak for all families, but I could see myself in that position thinking, “Okay, if I really want to move in this direction, it’s going to be a bit of a counter-cultural move.”

Stephanie Malia Krauss: Yeah, that’s right.

Christina Gebel: And how do I talk to my kids about this, who might say, “But I want to be in scouts, and sports, and choir,” or whatever it is? That must be a really hard challenge for parents when the world has taken on a momentum of its own, and you’re wanting to shift the focus to maybe slowing down a little bit more, maybe doing a little bit less.

Yeah. Like, how do we, at a community or family level, really approach this when so much of it might come down to going against the grain a bit?

Stephanie Malia Krauss: So I want to answer this in a couple of different [00:26:00] ways. Brevity is not my strength, so we’ll see where this lands. The first is, I wonder if we have an upcoming group of will-be parents, so emerging adults who will actually do that work on their own.

There is a movement that I’ve been tracking of young adults who are in their mid-20s who are practicing something called slow living. And online, on social media, they’re calling this “Nonna maxing,” which means, like, living like an Italian grandma. And what’s so interesting about this to me is that if you are 25, you were born right after, soon after, or right before 9/11.

So you are coming into the world around 9/11, and then starting kindergarten right when the Great Recession happened and when smart technologies came online. So when these young adults started elementary school, two things were happening. The world was in a frenzy and in a panic, and all of the things that would become social media, smartphones, all of that, were rapidly developing, and so they were really a generation that became both digital and disruption natives.

Now they’re finally hitting a developmental milestone. We now know from brain science that adolescence is a lot longer than we expected, so you’re still technically in adolescence all the way through 25. So they’re hitting neurologically independent adulthood, and they’re starting to make these really bold counter-cultural moves, saying, “I don’t wanna work like this.

I don’t want to work one and a half to two times more than I actually have to. I don’t want advertisers telling me what I like.” These are young people who are beginning to go back to record shops and buy band shirts or music posters. “This is who I like, and it’s not going to change in the next three minutes based on what the algorithm tells me.” They’re picking up hobbies like knitting and sewing. And so I think that’s worth watching. Now, I’m not in that group. My godchildren, some nieces and nephews are, but I don’t relate to that. So now I wanna talk about kind of us.

The reality is where we started, when I went out and I polled, it’s now tens of thousands of adults caring for kids personally and professionally, and we’re all depleted.

We’re all overwhelmed, overloaded, stressed, and tired. And there are, from the research and work that I’ve done, two core root causes why, and they’re related. The first is that this way that we’re living modern life really restricts and sometimes even rejects the essentials. You don’t need that much sleep. We don’t have time to play. Celebration, we can do it later. There’s a postponing or a getting rid of these things that biologically and psychologically we need to thrive. But the second is we’re navigating in weather conditions that are literally weathering us.

There’s a wear and tear to modern life, and there are more forces at play in combination. A lot of people right now wanna just blame technology, and I do also blame addictive technology for quite a lot. I think about this as toxic tech—any kind of technology that kind of brings us further away from the essentials.

But there’s also being so over-tapped, not having the time and money that we need, being so overworked, that chronic busyness you just described of the families on a Sunday. Like, why do my kids have to have soccer games on Sunday? But there’s so much pressure, they can’t miss these games, or baseball games, so now we have two. Like, why can’t we just have a Sabbath day? God needed it; we all need it, too. We, on the one hand, have to be clear-sighted about what is depleting us, what we have to navigate, and the realities of our lives.

And then, on the other hand, I do think that principally it is about sharing care. This does get back to the parish or the congregation. If you’re listening to this and you feel depleted, it’s not a personal failure. It is the weather that we are in, and it is pulling and pushing us in [00:31:00] so many different directions, so that it feels impossible to get out of it.

But storms don’t last forever. They never do. And so we do need to learn to navigate those realities, but then really, collectively caring for ourselves becomes the important part.

So, going back to re-humaning, we have to be aware of what we even need as humans to thrive, and we don’t naturally know that. Our bodies do, but we have to learn that so that we can be actively protecting. There are many major actions we can take to do that protection. So you take sleep, for example, as an essential.

A mini-move is going to bed five minutes earlier, and then 10 minutes earlier. It’s closing the blinds. It’s putting your phone on sleep mode. It’s telling your kids, if you have older kids, “You know what? As a family, no more [00:32:00] devices in the bedroom,” or, “Here’s the one device in case Grandma needs to reach us.”

But then there are major moves. “You know what? It’s time to move closer to family,” or, “I can’t be in this job. It’s time to start looking for something else,” or, “Maybe we should homeschool our kids.” But what the assessment has to be is not just the ambiguity of feeling off, because we all feel off.

It’s because normal isn’t natural. The assessment has to be the presence or absence of these essentials. Where can we be? What can our schedule look like where we can practice re-humaning? And the reason why it’s a practice is because we’re still living in the world. We can’t remove ourselves fully from it.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, and that assessment piece, I think, is so much where the journey really starts to unfold. [00:33:00] And before I ask you what are some tools for assessing besides reading the incredible book, I want to also raise the idea that, I think a lot of these things could be better done in communities.

So, like the book, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, he not only laid out the problem, which we have here as well, and offered solutions and what we need to go back towards, which we’ve also done here as well, but really how whole communities can come together and start to value some of these things.

And in my mind, I’m thinking hopefully that’ll make it easier in some ways for parents and families to live this out. One childhood friend of mine, who has kids, mentioned a meeting called at the school about the book [The Anxious Generation] because so many parents were starting [00:34:00] to worry about screen time and stuff like that.

What resulted was a lot of the kids didn’t have cell phones till the end of eighth grade, and I’m thinking, like, how much easier would it be if your kid is not the only one trying to do some of this? And then I’m thinking on the parish, on the school, on the community level, how do we build in the support for that?

So yeah, just wondering if you have thoughts on how to do that, both the assessment piece on the personal level, but also, you mentioned the 25-year-olds who have found community in what they’re doing. Yeah. Have you seen any really good models for this?

Stephanie Malia Krauss: So this is why I coined the term “re-humaning.” As often as I was hearing stories of how overwhelmed and overloaded people were, I was also hearing stories of people who were [00:35:00] making changes in their lives or trying to, but they didn’t have language for it. They didn’t have community for it, and it felt like isolated work. So I would hear about a family, a dad who’d been so hooked on social media, and he’s like, “You know what? I’m gonna go completely off social media. Maybe I’ll even get a flip phone.” And the stigma of how the extended family was responding to that, or a family who decided to stay in public school, or a family who decided to homeschool, or whatever it might be.

But without language to say, “This is what I am doing,” it’s tricky. And so by being able even to have the clarity of saying, “We are trying to re-human our life-” If you’re a new parent or an expecting parent, saying, “I wanna re-human our lives so our kid’s childhood, that we can defend it and protect it.”

There is an active protecting [00:36:00] here. If you think about the weather, if you’re protecting your kids in wind or hail or snow, we have to prepare, and we have to protect. And so that’s real.

And where the essentials become so important is sometimes in parenting, we don’t know what’s worth taking action on, or if we’re overreacting or underreacting. And so what I would say is, if your kid is in a school or in a classroom or with a teacher where you’re actively seeing the restriction or rejection of their essentials, that gives you the clarity of, “Oh, no, this is worth acting on.”

And sometimes it’s individual action, and sometimes it’s collective action and advocacy. That’s the third level. So we move from awareness to personal action to collective advocacy and action.

So, for example, if we go back to [00:37:00] sleep, schools everywhere—parochial, public, and other private schools—overwhelmingly start middle and high school hours earlier than kids should be awake. So when our kids hit puberty, their body clocks shift. This is an ancestral thing. Way back in hunter-gatherer days, the older teenagers would stay awake to protect the babies and the elders, and this is a vestige of the past. We don’t evolve fast enough to get out of it. So our teenagers are falling asleep at 11 o’clock instead of at 9 o’clock, but they’re being asked to wake up really early.

My kids wake up at 6:00 AM, and scientists have said unequivocally that nothing should start for tweens and teens before 8:30 AM. So I can only take so much individual action with my kids in a school [00:38:00] district where they have to wake up at 6:00 AM. And so at some point, I have a decision point, which is I can do everything that I can to try and force my kids to go to bed earlier, but biologically it’s going to be hard.

And at some point, I have to rely on other people to advocate and ask for change, and to work with the leaders in the school district for that change. Now, let me be clear to anybody listening, I haven’t made that change, and I am conflicted every day that my kids have to wake up, knowing what I know about the science of development and health, and the risks of them waking up so early.

But the radical next action for me is either I pull these kids out of this school district, or I continue to press. In the world of figuring out where do I take action and where do I not, this [00:39:00] is an action to take. Can we start school later? Other districts are doing it. Other states are doing it.

This is what it looks like. And so it gives us a little bit of a roadmap of where it’s worth the time.

Christina Gebel: I really liked how you named the progression in kind of moving towards this advocacy, which, let’s be honest, is really hard to do. But I liked that you brought it up because it actually came up in a previous conversation with the two theologians who were on a prior episode, and that was—there’s this idea out there, at least there was when I worked on policy, that families are hard to mobilize because they’re so tapped out and depleted.

But working in the realm of family policy, I actually saw a lot of families come out and advocate for a variety of causes, and I think what’s so hopeful about what you’ve laid out is that people are pretty ubiquitously feeling this way.

And they feel strongly about it, and they feel conflicted about it, like you’re saying.

That next step on how we come together, how we collectively re-human our communities, our schools, houses of worship, wherever it is, that is what really excites me, and I think many theologies across many religions would support that because it is really about collective care.

It’s not just if one family’s thriving; it’s that the whole community has made thriving a value, a collective value. And what a beautiful goal, and it’s hard. I think this would take quite a lot of time and effort, but if everybody is feeling the problem so deeply, there’s so much fuel there to launch and drive some of these things forward.

Stephanie Malia Krauss: The one thing to just understand is that re-humaning for us really is a daily decision and a daily practice. There’s so much that we can do that takes little to no work and costs nothing. It is just the protecting of going to the potluck, having the family dinner, taking time to play family games.

It’s creating the conditions where our bodies and our families can naturally come together and replenish in ways that we’re meant to. And because we’re meant to, it happens on its own if the conditions are right. And then there is the collective action of where structures are suppressing our ability to do that.

We do have to advocate, because we’ve designed what should be systems of care or systems of learning or systems of working in ways that just keep restricting and rejecting our ability to do it. So that does take action. But we can still re-human every single day, and because our bodies crave it, we actually benefit quite quickly.

We feel quite restored after an incredible potluck or a really fun family game night or... I just went swimming with my kid in the middle of the workday today for half an hour. It was just a half an hour, and what that did to our relationship. He’s 13, and he held my hand on the way home. Just grabbed it, and we sang out loud to a song on the radio. It just completely restored balance, and it’s this moment of “Ah, this is what it’s meant to be.” And it didn’t take a lot of time, and it didn’t take buying something new or doing something new. So sometimes the radical is the routine, and sometimes the radical is the advocacy.

But I think the rallying call for all of us is, “Who said we have to live like this?” Because if we actually look back across human history, we’ve only been living this kind of frantic frenzy for 1% of 1% of human history. It’s really just been the last few years that it’s been accelerated so intensely with those weather conditions that I talked about: the over-tapped, overworked, overstimulated, the role of tech in particular, and overwrought, the real fear for our lives, all of those coming together at one time.

So that means the reason why this works across faith communities is that historically we know other ways of living. We know other ways of gathering. We know other ways of caring. We know other ways of celebrating, contributing, connecting, and belonging.

And so really, re-humaning is a getting back to our roots. It’s a reclaiming of the gifts God’s already given us, and God can’t re-gift us things that we already have, right? It’s up to us to create those conditions. In the end of How We Thrive, I talk about I’m Native Hawaiian, and in Hawaii historically, the Native Hawaiians would take the island, and they would cut it up into sections, from mauka to makai, “from the mountain to the sea.”

And each set of extended families would get a slice called an ahupuaʻa. And the idea was that you had everything you needed from the mountain to the sea. You had your food, you had your farming, everything. It was a perfect ecosystem. If you were in a more verdant place, more rainforest-y, your slice was thinner.

And if you were in a more arid area, with fewer resources, your slice was wider because you needed more space. And then if something happened, like a fire or a hurricane or something like that, people in the other ahupuaʻa would come and help you replenish what you needed.

And so, I think about thriving and collective care in our parishes and our congregations and our communities like an ahupuaʻa. We have everything that we need, but it is up to us to cultivate, to create the conditions that really bring forth all of that nourishing stuff that’s going to help us be healthy and happy, and we need to know what to do. We need to know how to cultivate it. And then sometimes the weather happens, and we cannot control it, and at that point, we need each other, and that’s when other people, other families, other communities have to step in and show up and share care.

But we’re all on this island in the universe together. I, myself, as a person and a parent doing the research on thriving, thinking historically and biologically and psychologically and theologically about it, I keep coming back to this question of, “Who said we have to live like this?”

And that we’re not made to live like this, and that our kids don’t have to live like this, but that it’s not just going to happen. Again, the reason for the precision of the language, of a verb—what are you doing? I’m re-humaning—is because it takes active practice. And sometimes we’ll do it well, and sometimes it will feel impossible, but it is the regular moving toward reclaiming these essentials, these God-given capacities.

Christina Gebel: Wow.

I know our conversation’s winding down, but what an incredible point to end on, especially the example you gave of the native Hawaiians. That just makes so much sense, and I really appreciate you bringing in those examples, because I think if we can do this in our own families too, in our communities, to know that we’ve done it in our communities for thousands of years, it’ll light a spark.

And that’s what I say at the end of every episode: the goal of these conversations is not to add to the overwhelm of “oh my gosh, how I should be living or what I should be doing,” and the anxiety. The idea of these episodes is to inspire and to feel on a soul and a heart level when something really resonates with you.

Stephanie Malia Krauss: Yeah.

Christina Gebel: And to explore that, maybe as a family, maybe in prayer, maybe on your drive in the morning. To really daydream about what was it about that piece that you just said that really resonated, and out of that might grow some action or some change or some intentionality. So, I just want to thank you for laying it out so beautifully, and if you have any last words to share with us, then please tell us how we can find How We Thrive so we can keep reading, we can lean into all these 14 things, and we can learn so much more on top of the conversation we’ve had today.

Stephanie Malia Krauss: I think what I would just come back to is I have stopped talking about how we’re feeling as burnout, and I’ve really reframed it to talk about being depleted or being deprived. We are depleted, which means we can be replenished. We are deprived of the things that we should have, which means that we can defend and protect and go find those things. And the good news of depletion is that replenishing doesn’t feel like adding, it feels like gifting. You’re giving back, you’re getting back what you deserve and what your kids deserve.

And that’s going to feel, it should feel good. When you wake up and you feel rested, when you’ve had a day where you haven’t had to grab vending machine food, where you got wonderful meals and got to sit down, when you played or did something playful or creative, these are things that give back to us.

They replenish what we are deprived of what we’re needing. As a woman of faith, again, my books, they’re written by me, and so now anyone listening will know I have a faith background. But I would contemplate, I would pray about what does re-humaning look like for me, and am I living and learning and working and raising my kids in the ways that I’m made to and meant to?

And are my kids living and learning and developing in the ways that they are made to and meant to? And if not, what are the changes that I would be willing to make that I could start making even just today? And that’s worth praying about, because we have this set of gifts, these 14 incredible gifts that every single one of us, no matter our abilities, we all [00:51:00] have. We’re all given. And we should benefit from them. We were given them for a reason.

Christina Gebel: Amazing. And where can we find the book, or where can we find out more about you and what you’re doing? And just stay connected, because I think the conversation that’s started here will have many sparks that come out of it. Yeah.

Stephanie Malia Krauss: So, you can find me just by going to rehumaning.com. And if you go to rehumaning.com, there are free resources. I’m going to be starting a Substack really soon with regular re-humaning reflections. I’m going to keep them short. We’re busy people, so think about it as, “Okay, I just have a moment, and I can read,” like a daily meditation kind of thing.

And that’ll include research and thinking about applications. So, you can sign up. You can find me on Substack by my name, Stephanie Malia Krauss, or Re-humaning. But rehumaning.com is going to be kind of the place where you can find anything. You [00:52:00] can find the books. You can find me. If you are listening and you run a school or a parenting group and you want to do a book study of How We Thrive or think about professional development related to well-being, all of that information is there as well.

Christina Gebel: I will definitely be visiting. And thank you so much for this visit. I agree with you. We really clicked and sparked from the get-go, I think for many reasons. And it’s been such a gift to not only have your expertise and your brilliance, but also your vulnerability and your honesty and your authenticity throughout this whole conversation.

So, Stephanie, thank you very much for gifting us the gift of yourself and the gift of your work.

Stephanie Malia Krauss: Oh, thank you so much, Christina. Yeah, I think the last word would be- Re-humaning is hard because humaning is hard right now. But God, it’s worth it. This is our one precious life, [00:53:00] and we’re responsible for these beautiful babies, and it’s our job to protect that.

So it’s hard to human. It’s going to be hard to re-human. But re-humaning is endlessly worth it because it gives back to us.

So, welcome everyone.

Welcome back to season two. I know that we have talked about adoption already on season two, and now we’re going to take it in a slightly new direction with Shauna and Sankalp, who are here today.

Also, very good friends of mine, near and dear to my heart.

People I look up to, both as friends and as faith-filled people that try to discern their path in life.

And I’m so pleased to have them here for this conversation to talk about how they made the decision to adopt internationally. So, with that, [00:01:00] Shauna and Sankalp, would you like to introduce yourselves?

Shauna Morin: Yes. Thank you, Christina. We’re so happy to be here. My name is Shauna Morin.

Sankalp Ranji: My name is Sankalp Ranji.

Shauna Morin: We’ve been together now for almost nine years and met actually through your prior guests, the Currans. So, there’s a connection, too. My background professionally has been for a long time in higher education. That’s actually what brought me down to the research triangle in North Carolina. I was here to pursue my doctorate in higher education.

My work there led me into a nonprofit space focusing on interfaith engagement and pluralism in our democracy. And I am very recently a stay-at-home mom with our 2-year-old, almost two-and-a-half-year-old son, Kiran.

Sankalp Ranji: I moved to the U.S. about 12 years ago now, or it’s been a long time, and came here to study at UNC.

I [00:02:00] work in the tech sector. I work as a product manager, and I’m just loving every minute of the last one year, specifically that 2-year-old. Yeah.

Christina Gebel: Absolutely. Thank you both for making the time, and perhaps we’ll get right to our conversation. I know that I already said that you internationally adopted your son, but perhaps you could take us back to the beginning.

Tell us about that time in your life when you were discerning whether to adopt and what those conversations were like as a couple. Were there any elements of faith or spirituality that came up? What kind of reservations or hopes did you have?

Shauna Morin: I think, pretty soon after Sankalp and I met, we both felt pretty quickly that this relationship was going somewhere permanent. We were both a little bit older, and we had a lot of these conversations on the front end of dating. At that time, [00:03:00] I shared with Sankalp that I had actually never been too certain that I wanted to be a parent.

I have a very distinct memory, actually, of being around 12 years old and telling my dad that I wasn’t going to have kids because there was too much wrong with the world, and I didn’t want to bring a child into a world that was so broken, something along those lines.

My family will tell you, I was never really a child. I’ve been an old soul, and maybe that is reflective of that truth. But I remember very vividly my dad’s response being that we make the world better by raising good humans as parents. So that was always in my mind. Fast forward to the two of us having these conversations, and I wanted to be honest and upfront that this is something I was never really certain of.

And also that a path forward that seemed viable to me was adoption and having the opportunity to care for somebody who [00:04:00] was already in the world. So that was not my hard and fast only way, but that’s where I had historically been and was bringing sort of those leanings into our relationship.

Sankalp Ranji: Yeah. And I’m from India. As any Indian person would say or tell you, you have pretty big pressure from your family, extended family. Everyone wants you to have a child. And also, I think, I never imagined a scenario where I would not have a child of our own.

So having a family, it just was like, yeah, that is definitely a thing for me. And when I met Shauna, that was one of the first things that we discussed. Yes, I am interested in having children.

Whether it should be our own child, whether it should be an adopted child, was not a point in my head, but I knew that I wanted to have a family with Shauna. Eventually, once we got married, once we started, we obviously wanted to have a little bit of freedom in the beginning, taking her parents all the way to India and did a lot of different things.

But once the dust settled down, [00:05:00] like we did realize, oh, the clock is turning really fast and we are almost like running out of time. So, we started having discussions about having children, and that’s where, okay, do we want to have our own or adoption?

For me, personally, I’m Hindu. Not really practicing Hindu per se, throughout Hindu mythology and all, there have been plenty of examples where people have had adoption and stuff. And so it’s not really an alien thing. Once I started having the conversation with Shauna, that’s where I like, okay, this is this is it.

This is an important conversation, and I’m glad we landed on this.

Shauna Morin: To fast forward a little bit to the conversation point Sankalp is talking about, so at this point, we’re married, we’re really thinking about like our lives potentially changing and growing our family.

And by that point, I’ll echo Sankalp in saying that I really felt this is something I want to do with Sankalp. So this is an interesting learning for me. It’s one thing to have feelings about parenthood when you’re on your own, and it’s another thing when you’re part of a couple and you see how the two of you function together.

I had this growing instinct that this is something we would do well together and that I wanted to do with him. So I think that was a big part of the conversation. We talked about having a biological child versus adoption.

I think, although I wanted to be open to that, I had a lot of reservations, some practical, related to my age and what it might require of us to try to go down that path. So, the reservations I had were not inconsistent with the sort of thought process I named earlier. So I was really grateful that Sankalp was so open to that being a path we could pursue and it could be a chosen path for us. And that’s ultimately where we landed.

Christina Gebel: Thank you so much for sharing that. And as you all were doing your intros and talking about these early stages, I kept thinking about all the things that Raman and I have in common with you both, of course, Indian culture being in our interreligious or intercultural marriage.

But there’s also, Shauna, you and I have talked a lot about feelings going into parenthood. And I personally have had feelings where I wasn’t always sure. I was also an old soul growing up, but my reservations stemmed from probably really a lot of bad babysitting experiences. So, I didn’t have younger siblings, but when I went to babysit, I remember having a lot of anxiety about that.

And just also being older and getting married, slightly older than maybe other peers and wanting to have that time where you are child-free at the beginning of your marriage and you can be married and go on the trips and be unencumbered in those ways. So yeah, there’s so much there that I resonate with in my own personal journey, and I’m grateful for the both of you in sharing that.

Moving along to the choice to adopt internationally, I’d like to hear about how you intentionally chose international adoption as opposed to other routes that people come to adoption.

Shauna Morin: I think I was the first person to propose adopting from India, and retrospectively I don’t know if this ended up mattering as much as I thought it might. Sankalp’s whole family, extended family, nuclear family, they’re all in India. My thinking was we live here in the US; by default, my family will be very involved in this child’s life in the process of us bringing this child home.

And I thought that if we went through the process in India, that would facilitate Sankalp’s [00:09:00] family also getting to be intimately part of the process because it would require us to go there. And that would actually be our first meeting point someday. Also, there will be a lot of cultural connections, and we might talk about this more when we explain the process to you, but there’s a lot of focus, rightfully so, on when you adopt internationally, how you’re going to help that child understand the culture of origin.

And so those connections are baked into our family. So, in some ways, it’s almost like it’s not a strictly international adoption for us. It will be for Kiran, right? He lives here; he was born somewhere else. And so surely it is an international adoption. But we’ve talked with folks who have gone through this process when no one in the couple is from the adopting country.

And for them, it’s very different; like, you swoop in, you swoop out, you’re probably only in that country a few times. There’s a lot [00:10:00] more work that needs to be done to fulfill that role of cultural stewardship for your child. And this felt more possible and feasible for us. We were familiar with traveling there. We knew we had a home base, and we knew we would be able to provide some supports pretty readily even though it was a quote unquote international adoption.

Sankalp Ranji: Shauna has answered that question very nicely, as nicely as she could, but there’s no other way to acknowledge the fact that within the Indian culture, adoption is still not a very acceptable thing.

As we were going through the process, we learned that, yes, domestic adoption in India has increased significantly, and that actually has led to a sharp decline in international adoption from India, which is great. That means that children are getting a loving home.

And so that’s awesome all over. No doubt about that. But in the end, the fact remains that my family [00:11:00] and my parents’ acceptance was a lot easier to have that because Kiran is from India.

Shauna Morin: I want to give due credit to all of our family members who have been remarkably supportive of this, even in moments when I think there was maybe a lack of understanding or a desire to understand.

I recall coming to understand some reservations on Sankalp’s parents’ part to be mostly about worry for us. Are you choosing a harder path unnecessarily, which I think is actually quite generous and parental concern. So yes, in the early days, there was some anxiety around how this will be received that this is something we want to do? And will there ultimately be comfort around bringing a child into the fold that has an unknown background that is not related to us by blood? This child is beloved by every person he has touched. But I think there the concern was as much for us as anything, and was this going to be a really hard journey for us?

Christina Gebel: Yeah. And I actually really appreciate you all speaking frankly about this because I think a lot of times when we hear stories about adoption, some of the thoughts that just naturally enter into it purely from our human nature don’t always get said. But even if all things being equal, or all things being similar, what little I know about adoption on the surface level is that a lot of families, even if they are from the same culture, country, even religion, whatever it is, there are some parts of it that perhaps the previous generation grew up thinking their children were going to have their biological children, so a lot of people, I don’t know if the right word is expectations, but they have ideas in their head of how their lives and the generations after them are going to go, and I think with anything, being able to speak frankly, it’s very honest and authentic.

And I want to go back to the part that you said, Shauna, about international adoption and I even want to go farther back and say that when people our age were being adopted internationally, I gather, looked different than it does now, and we learned a lot of things about that. And so can you walk us through what adopting internationally was like for you, knowing that it’s a country specific experience, but also maybe some things that surprised you about the process for better, for worse.

Shauna Morin: I’ve blacked it out. Like mothers who give birth, talk about how they don’t remember the pain. I don’t remember the pain of all of the years of paperwork.

Christina Gebel: As somebody who deals with mothers giving birth, I can tell you amnesia can be a great God-given gift.

Sankalp Ranji: First of all, yes, you’re right. International adoption is very country specific. What we went through with India is not going to be an experience for someone going to any other country. But some of the commonalities between all the adoption, most countries, they all are now part of something called the Hague Convention.

Where there have been very specific rules, procedures, and processes set up for how this international option will take place. Gone are the days where you could just show up at an orphanage and say, “Hey, we are here to adopt a child,” and someone would bring children for and you to pick from a lineup.

So there’s no other way to describe that process, but that is what the process was up until very recently. Not sure when exactly this changed, but now you have to work through an adoption agency here in the US who will have a particular program for the particular country you are trying to adopt from.

For us, for India, they took us through the process of, “Hey, this is all the paperwork you need; this is what the process is going to be. This is how long the process is going to take for us.”

They said it could take anywhere from three to four years. A lot of that depends on how fast you do your paperwork. There are a lot of background checks, a lot of filling out the same form or the same information multiple times, and you feel, “Haven’t I already—didn’t we already answer this last year?”

Like, how, or even last month? The answer hasn’t changed, but you still have to go through all that stuff. So, one thing I learned was patience, but we acknowledge that this bureaucracy is needed. This has come out of multiple years of experience of people abusing the adoption process.

Every time we got that sense of frustration, we reminded ourselves, “No, they are doing this so that every child who gets adopted goes to a genuine person, a genuine family. This is all worth it.” So just to highlight a few things for the India program alone, when you start the process, they say it’s going to take you three to four years. They give you a very high-level description of what each step is going to look like, but they don’t go into details of what that individual step is going to look like. That individual step could be made up of 20 more steps, which at the end of the process we were very glad they did not show us all the 600 steps that needed to be taken. Because it is scary. It’s like a sine wave curve. There are a lot of highs and a lot of lows because we have a bunch of paperwork that needs to be finished by a particular date.

You’re doing a lot of stuff, and then you submit everything, and then there’s radio silence for three months. Nothing happens, nothing moves. You’ll keep trying to check in with them. They said, “We have sent your paperwork forward, but we just have to sit and wait.” And then suddenly there’ll be a flurry of events like, “Oh, we heard back from them. Now you need to finish the next 10 steps within the next three weeks.” I’m like, you could have told us that you needed to do this in three weeks so that we could have mentally prepared. Again, you just have to be prepared for that start-and-stop kind of experience.

It is a costly process, although there are a lot of ways you can get support for it. Check with your employer, you can apply for certain grants, and then obviously there are some really significant tax credits that you get after the adoption process is complete. But you need to have a good amount of financial resources just to even prove that you are a good family to actually adopt, where you can support this child.

They said three to four years. We started ours in 2022. Roughly 2022 is when we were like, okay, we are finally putting in our thing. And we got matched in 2024. We went and we finally went to India to pick Karen up in February 2025. So just a shade over three years is what it took us.

Shauna Morin: I think one other nuance that we came to understand as time went on was we knew we wanted to adopt from India specifically, which meant we needed to work with a domestic agency that works with India. But a lot of the home study, which is the clearances Sankalp was describing, you have home visits, there is a lot of work that has to be done locally, which means we were actually working with two different adoption agencies that were communicating with each other to support our case. And this posed its own additional complexity, right? Because sometimes you’re wondering who do I talk to about this issue or that question?

You’re primarily working with, in our case, the North Carolina-based agency in the beginning, but then that all shifts when the match process gets underway. In our case, the agency was based in Minnesota, and that adds another layer to all the different people involved.

Sankalp Ranji: And the last thing I wanted to add was for anyone thinking about adopting from India, or this might be true for other countries as well, every state in India has its own process to do the same thing, which is slightly different from another state within India.

So, a lot depends on how experienced is the adoption agency that you’re working with here in the US is. How much do they know about a particular state’s processes? So just again, be patient. It might look scary, certainly, but there are people to help you out with that. At the end of the day, we realized that when we met a lot of these people in India, the orphanage, they all wanted this thing to happen. No one is against you.

Christina Gebel: Yeah. Thank you for that. And Raman and I have sat with you both and had numerous [00:20:00] conversations about the actual process as you went through it. And even just hearing today the abridged version, I still learned some things that I didn’t know. And it goes into the depth and the complexity that you all highlighted.

And I think about filling out a government form here and getting it sent back because you didn’t dot your I or cross your T. Imagine multiple agencies being involved, multiple legal things being involved, the hyperlocal piece of the agency here, or the province in India. Wow, like this is really incredible.

And I think unless you have someone in your life who’s going through international adoption or is kind enough to talk about it, you don’t really appreciate just how much is there.

And before we get to your match, the very adorable son that you have, [00:21:00] and your emotions and feelings around seeing him for the first time, and all those good things, is there anything else you want to say about the process that was a discernment moment for you, or maybe even just a milestone moment for you?

Shauna Morin: Part of the challenge and benefit of the rigor is you really have to document financial stability, mental stability, physical fitness, family support, all of these things, and it can feel really burdensome in the moment.

But actually, there are two particular points in that process that I’m so grateful for. One was there was a set of documents we needed to complete that asked about medical and therapeutic and other sorts of resources like that available to us. Like we had to demonstrate that we were aware of where we would go if we [00:22:00] had needs that we needed to address for the child we adopted.

And that exercise just really brought home to me that we are so blessed to live someplace where we have ready access to basically any service that we might need to meet the unique needs of an adopted child. So, I think that sort of built a sense of security and gratitude.

And then relatedly, there are a lot of narrative questions you need to answer around, as I mentioned, family support, your community, and so on and so forth. And reflecting on that, as well, as daunting as this felt in certain moments, I just thought if we’re not equipped to do this, who is? Like we have friends who themselves have adopted, we have family members who have been adopted. We have parents and siblings who are excited to be part of this child-rearing with us. We have a faith community, multiple faith communities, where we can draw [00:23:00] strength from. And so I was really appreciative of those steps in the process, because rightfully these adoption agencies they want you to go into this with your eyes open, and there can be a lot of really challenging things that you are facing, whether those are medical or behavioral or attachment-oriented. And so when you are confronted with all of that in rapid fire, it can feel like, “Can we do this? Are we really going to be able to do this?”

But I was appreciative that they set us up to build confidence through the process.

Sankalp Ranji: My example is that of the psychological evaluation that we had to do. So as part of this process, I think India requires it. I don’t know if any other country does it or not, but the adoptive couple has to go through a psychological evaluation individually, and what they’re trying to discern or identify is, “How are we as an individual?” Why it was remarkable for me was like, a lot of people never actually go and have this kind of conversation with anyone, with a therapist, right?

You don’t have those kind of conversations, especially in today’s day and age where everything is moving so fast. Everyone is so busy. You don’t get time to sit and reflect over the simplest things that you should be focusing on in your life.

Like just your own health. How do you deal with things? How do you deal with your spouse? How was your childhood? How do you think you were brought up as a child? Do you have any thoughts about it? And all those are like, okay, how many people actually think about those things?

So that particular moment during that interview, I was able to stop and reflect over my life in that one hour, and that definitely gave me an opportunity to just be thankful for a lot of the things that have happened in my life.

And also be grateful for everything that is happening.

Christina Gebel: Yeah. One thought that came to me while you were talking was, not every parent gets asked those questions before they become a parent. And Raman and I, coming from different faith traditions, have talked a lot about Pre-Cana because in our relationship that’s really when the differing faith backgrounds came to practicality.

And I remember they took Raman and I apart and asked us each separate questions like, “Is this person mentally stable? Do they have an addiction issue?” And like for me as a Catholic, it was like I didn’t know what was going to be asked. And then debriefing that with him, hey, but in retrospect, I was like, “Wow, I think the Church in that particular process is trying to do some due diligence that...”

Some of these things are brought to the fore, and some people might say maybe it wasn’t fair that you were asked all those questions, ‘cause not everybody gets asked those questions before they become parents. And then on the other hand, it’s, wow, [00:26:00] how intentionally and carefully people have thought about this, and they want so badly to make a good family come out of it, and the intentionality. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Sankalp Ranji: Going back to before our marriage also, we were asked the same questions. But at that point in time, we discussed, in our debrief we agreed that a lot of those things we had already discussed ourselves.

So it was like, oh yeah, they didn’t come as a complete surprise. But in this particular case, because we were also discerning or answering some of these questions from the perspective of this third individual who was going to be a part of our lives, it was a lot more, “Are you ready to take that responsibility? Have you thought about A, B, C, D and all those things?” And I completely agree, if only every young couple just goes through this adoption, just the paperwork or the questionnaire that is asked for the adoption process, it’ll set them up for success because the kind of [00:27:00] questions that get asked and the number of times those questions get asked, makes you really think about those things intentionally. And it’s not a simple yes or no kind of a thing.

Shauna Morin: Yeah, I agree. I think both individually and together, I did a lot of reflecting independently. Sankalp mentioned these questions about your childhood. It includes those family relationships early on, but also how you were disciplined and then questions currently about how that might inform the way you think about parenting now.

So, there is an element that’s individual. And also we are doing this together now. So, there were also conversations about what are each of us taking from our respective family of origin experiences and bringing to the table now, and what might we want to do differently? For both of us, that was really meaningful. And as Sankalp said, you get asked these things at multiple points on the journey, too. So, they’re [00:28:00] forefront in your mind for quite a while before you actually come together as a new family.

Sankalp Ranji: It reminded me of how those detective shows say you keep asking the same question ten different times and if your story doesn’t change, that means you’re telling the truth.

So if our response doesn’t change from one form to the other, we know that yes, this is what we truly believe. We are not just writing it or saying it just for the sake of getting this completed.

Christina Gebel: I love it. I love it.

Okay, so we’ve gotten through the inquiries, the processes. Tell me a little bit about the moment that you found out that Kiran is Kiran, and that Kiran is going to be in your life.

Whether you saw it on paper or you saw an image, from an emotional standpoint, from a parenting standpoint, what was that like?

Sankalp Ranji: Shauna will describe our emotional state of mind. I’ll just [00:29:00] use this opportunity to talk about another piece of the process. Even getting the first glimpse of Kiran and knowing about his existence to the time when we actually brought him home, that span was almost seven months, and those were some of the most excruciating seven months in our lives, actually.

Because, yeah, we know he’s there. We don’t know what he’s doing, and all that stuff. But the first time we heard about him or saw his picture was in June of 2024.

Shauna Morin: I think it’s relevant to mention one more process piece that actually is very critical for people to understand. And that is not all countries, but some countries, international adoption is exclusively or primarily for special needs children. That’s their language. So, children have some sort of medical or other need.

And so, there’s a pretty rigorous process you need to go through to say, these are the needs I’m comfortable with. [00:30:00] And it’s critical because you need to be brutally honest with yourself about what you can handle because it’s obviously utterly unfair to say, I think I could handle this, or I want to be able to handle this, and therefore I’ll say yes to a potential match with a child who has a particular medical need.

So, we had gone through that whole process, really reflecting on consulting a pediatrician, and you are immersed in a laundry list of very intimidating conditions, challenges, et cetera. I really expected myself when the match came along to have a lot of anxiety about what I didn’t know, whether I felt confident in saying yes to the match.

They give you time to reflect on the materials that they send you. They want you to be really honest. And that in itself, the idea of quote unquote rejecting a match, there is that sort of discomfort of we have to feel really solid about this.

And also, this is a human life [00:31:00] that we are being invited to consider as a child. So, I was excited and ready for us to move forward in the adoption process. And also, I had a sense of what my reaction would be when we were sent a match, and I thought it would be one of anxiety and reservation or nervousness at the very least.

And in fact, it was quite the opposite, which you asked at the outset. And I know this conversation is really framed in, “How is this related to our faith?” This is really the moment when I felt like God is in this, because first of all, we had been sort of connected with the match specialist, the person who basically talks with us, reads our file, and then gets into this portal of all the potential children up for adoption in India. And she decides this is the fit that I think is right for you. So, we had met with her. She had told us it was three to six, three to

Sankalp Ranji: …six months.

Shauna Morin: Three to six months that we might have to wait before we got a match.

[00:32:00] And then she sent us an email within a month with a potential match. And so, it was very unexpected, and I remember seeing her name in my inbox and seeing the attachments. The first attachment was named Kiran. And I was confused because Kiran is Sankalp’s mother’s name.

And before opening the attachments, I was thinking, “What is this about, and why is this document named after my mother-in-law, right?” So, it felt like a sign. I don’t know if that’s the right language, but I just was so overwhelmed. And the photo named Kiran was just this joyful baby, right?

Like this beautiful, joyful, smiling baby. And we were both still working at home at this point. I go running over to where Sankalp is working, assuming he’s already opened this email. And I’m like, “Did you see it? Did you see it?” He has no idea what I’m talking about.

So yeah, but it just immediately felt like, yes, like this happened and it’s the right one, right? [00:33:00] So that was unexpected for me.

Sankalp Ranji: Yeah. And I was equally shocked. I was like, “Oh, the name and how my mom has the same name.” So, the thought that went to both hearts, at the heads at the same time, was like, “Yes, this is meant to be.”

There was obviously, as Shauna mentioned, all the things that we were worried about, like, “Hey, will we be able to handle any special needs that he has or not, and everything?” So yes, there were a few medical things that we needed to take care of, all that. But all that was going to come later. At that particular

moment, one thought that I got was like, as I say, like God only provides you something that you can actually handle, or gives you something that you can handle. You still have a doubt. You’re still not sure whether that is true or not, whether you are ready to do that or not.

I remember saying that to myself, “Yeah, we can do this now. We have a name, we have a face, we have this lovely face.” He’s happy; he’s already happy. We just want to preserve that. If he’s already happy, then it’s far easier to keep him happy.

Our job is half done.

Shauna Morin: Yeah.

Christina Gebel: Incredible. And he is such a happy kid and just a bright soul. And I remember seeing the picture when you first got it, and I just remember this kid is adorable. He’s so cute. So, he’s a charmer from the get-go, he is really cute. And if we were doing all this on video, maybe we could have his image in the background or something.

But anywho, I want to talk about when you were making preparations to go to India and not having children on Earth, I don’t know firsthand, but have heard that being on a plane ride with a child—again, maybe this is my babysitting dramas—like all I could think about was, “Oh my gosh, they’re going to have this plane ride back!”

It’s like all these things. That’s where my mind immediately went, but your mind must have been in a thousand places. What was it like in the months leading up to planning to go to India, and what was it like going?

Sankalp Ranji: So, the preparation to go to India was actually pretty straightforward because I’m from India. I was managing that interaction.

So, nothing was alien to me. Nothing was unknown to me. I just wanted to make sure we got all the right dates and stuff. Again, that’s part of the process where you have to work with the orphanage to identify what is date you need to be there, how long you need to be there.

For India only, you have to get to the embassy in Delhi. So, you have to travel from wherever you are, wherever the child is. Everyone has to travel to Delhi to get the final stamping done for their visa, for travel, and all that stuff. So yeah, it’s a logistics of traveling within India.

They are a little complicated but not impossible to handle.

Shauna Morin: Yeah, we talked about how long this process takes, and there were moments along the way where it felt like it would never be over, and then we got the match, and as Sankalp said, it was really difficult to have this time go by where we knew who he was and were sent very few updates.

Understandably, these orphanages are very busy, and we want their primary focus to be on caretaking. And also, you’re like, send me more pictures. What’s going on? So, despite all of that—the eagerness and the standstills—we found out on Christmas Eve that we were cleared to travel, and I had a meltdown, like, “I’m not ready. It’s too fast.”

I was so overwhelmed at the prospect that in a month from that date, we were going to change our lives forever and travel halfway around the world, a family of two, and come back a family of three. So, there was that.

And I think what I just mentioned was really mind-boggling to me. I know in some ways we had much more time than a couple having a biological child to acclimate to this idea, right? We were in this for three years; we’re thinking about this change, we’re making these conscientious choices. And yet, I’ve come to realize that because the processes start and stop, hurry up and wait, that I would have a period of months where I would mentally go through what it is that we’re doing. What am I signing up for? How is our life going to change? And then we’d get to the wait part, and our lives would just go back to how they always were.

And I’d have to just do it all over again. So that happened at least three times—this sort of quote-unquote pregnancy and awaiting, but then no change. And so now here we were at the moment where it was going to change. And I just remember getting on the flight, being on the flight to go there, and feeling, “I cannot process that we are flying here,” the two people that we know, the life that we know, and quite literally, we went to the orphanage the morning after we landed in India. So, it was like, “Yeah, that’s it.”

There’s no sort of easing in. That was wild. That was really wild. And what is also wild—and this varies wildly from agency to agency and country to country—but the orphanage that we were working with, their process was, You come, you meet us for 30 minutes, we introduce you to your child, and you leave with the child.

So that also feels abrupt for us, but also, I was at that point maybe shifting into my mother mind of, “Is this okay for him? Can we come and go for a few days so he gets used to who we are, and then the transition is a little easier?” And I think practically speaking, that’s just difficult for a lot of places to manage.

So yeah, it was ripping off a Band-Aid or whatever the metaphor is; there was no easing into anything.

Sankalp Ranji: He was only 15 months old when we went to the orphanage to pick him up, and I’m so glad that he is so adjusting and so adaptable.

He’s, yeah, adaptable, and he’s just so comfortable in people’s presence that he’s not scared of people. So, I think we got really lucky with that part. There were no problems. First day at the hotel, second day, third day, I was like, I was holding my breath, okay, at some point in time this dam is going to break and he’s going to suddenly realize that he’s not going back to that orphanage, not going to see the same people again and again, but that never happened, and he just very smoothly transitioned to us, and every day we remember saying a little prayer and thanking God, “Oh, this day, this day went really well. This day went really well.”

However, the first time we got on the plane with him was from Bombay to Delhi. And that was the day where he really lost it for the first time, which [00:40:00] is understandable. I think, as any new parent or any grandparent will tell you, having some sort of a schedule is critical for kids. And if their schedule is not followed, if they’re not comfortable doing the same thing, then that is when they get, again, that’s exactly what happened.

You have to get on a flight. You have to get on a flight. And he doesn’t like to sleep when you are holding him; he wants to sleep in his own bed. So how do you do that when you are on a flight?

That was the day when Shauna was crying because I’m pretty sure she felt like she was an inept mother, but it was both of us, number one, but we did get a lot of support from some of the other passengers. There was one lady specifically who came during the flight because he wouldn’t stop crying for 45 straight minutes. And she came in; she tried her best to soothe him. And she basically took him from my hands as if a grandmother was like, “Just, you stop doing whatever you’re doing, let me handle it.”

Shauna Morin: And I’ve heard those stories from other adoptive [00:41:00] parents of people on the plane just being so lovely and helpful and understanding, and I think that was also part of the weight of this moment. We hadn’t yet had a really hard moment like this with him. And then when you do, an entire plane full of people are witnessing it.

And in my mind, I’m thinking they’re wondering, like, why can’t we calm down our own child without them knowing, of course? He doesn’t know us, right? Like he’s just, he’s trying to figure out where he is and what’s going on.

Two sort of related but tangential things I just want to share. One is, I think, some mentioned, and we were very fortunate that Kiran was so adaptable to us taking care of him right out of the gate.

And also, it was interesting because it felt like he was just connecting with us right away and immediately, “I’ll go where you go” thing. But there was actually a clear sort of shift about three weeks in, I’d say, when we were with Sankalp’s family. And then there were a lot more people around. Because we didn’t have a comparison point, I don’t think we could have realized this earlier, but we started to recognize…

And maybe this is the case for a lot of kids who grow up in group care that he recognized us out of the gate as, “You’re now feeding me. You’re now clothing me. You’re doing the things that I need,” which is different than attaching to you. And that attachment process is evolutionary, of course, and goes on for a long time.

But it began, I think, in its early stages in Chandigarh when we were with my in-laws. And we could see this shift of, “Oh, now he’s actually understanding us as distinct from other adults who are also caring for him.” And that was really moving and powerful.

And also just, again, blew my mind, the complexity of his experience as this small child on some biological level, having to figure out who’s taking care of me, but also who’s loving me and who is going to be around day in and day out.

And there are just these continuous moments of revelation and humility of, there’s so much I don’t know. There’s so much in this child already before he even came into our lives. And so, I wanted to share that.

And then you asked about the plane ride. So that was the first, that was the maiden voyage, but it was a short plane ride. So after that experience, we were like, what is this going to be like when we come home? And actually, another benefit of us being able to have family there and stay longer, I think that because that attachment started to take root and he got to adjust to us in country, it paid dividends. Again, gratitude because this is not possible for people who are having to stay in a hotel or what have you.

We were very lucky that he was pretty chill on that long road home and did very well and slept a lot and was glad that we were there in [00:44:00] proximity. So that was all great.

But something I remember, especially on the second leg from Paris to Raleigh, I started to have these very, I don’t know, I was really wrestling with some feelings about taking him out of India and that that was his home.

And even though we hope and pray, and I think know, this is for the good, I just felt tremendous guilt and sadness on his behalf. That place that was his home is now, we’re literally on the other side of the world, and his life is going to be very different in this environment.

So yeah, I didn’t expect those feelings either. And I just remember looking out the window on the tarmac after we had landed and feeling, oh my God, like we have plucked you out of India and brought you here, and we better live up to, better live up to this. We better do right by you. Yeah.

Christina Gebel: Wow.

There’s just, there’s so many things that I’m just brimming with as you both are [00:45:00] talking, and so many beautiful moments, too, and so many, like introspective moments that you’ve talked about so beautifully in your vulnerability, and so many things, too, of just becoming a parent, and those moments that stick in your head, that one memory of him picking you out of all the people, knowing that you are his people, is just such a cool thing.

On a feels level, on a heart level, on a spiritual level, like that is a really, that’s a really cool thing. And so y’all left India and Paris, respectively. Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like in the early months to what it was like now over a year later?

Sankalp Ranji: I’ll start off by saying the early months were very exciting [00:46:00] because we had our family come and visit us. Everyone wanted to meet him as early as possible. They were very respectful about the fact that, hey, we don’t want to burden you with our presence as well because you are in this moment right now where you’re trying to establish this attachment, this bonding with this child who doesn’t know anything right now.

He’s completely in a new environment, new people, new home, everything. But all that lasted for about 10 days. And then they were like, we are coming on the 11th day. And we were excited to have them all because we wanted him, Kiran, to meet all his extended family as early as possible.

From that point onward, that first moment onward, there was this constant rotation of people coming in and out and meeting, which felt really amazing for the first two or three months. But then I think by the time the sixth month arrived, when my parents were here from India, they stayed with us for almost three months.

I think both of us were like, okay, no, this is great. He knows is dada, dadi, who the other grandparents are, which set of grandparents stays where, lives where, and all that. He knows everything. But we do need to establish a new norm or a new baseline for us, for ourselves, for our family.

We were still afraid of this. We had had this help for so many months. It almost felt like, hence, we are able to cope with all the responsibilities seven months into this adoption. We still have not taken care of him and ourselves and our jobs and everything else that we need to do to live.

Oh, we haven’t done that on our own. So it was, I think, inducing some anxiety in ourselves. Okay, when will we be able to do things on our own? Which actually started just this January.

Shauna Morin: I’d say yes, there was some anxiety there and also some excitement. I’ve come to the conclusion since this year has passed that for the rest of my life, I will not have a straightforward, emotional reaction to anything. There have been just layers of emotion to everything we’ve experienced. And I think this is a great example of that. I’ve joked with people, we basically had roommates for a year, right?

We lived with Kiran for a month in India with our in-laws, and then we had a series of relatives of mine coming and going here. But then my mom stayed with us for a few months, and then Sankalp’s parents came for several months and so on and so forth. So the benefits of that for us and for Kiran are just innumerable.

The moments that occurred because we were living all together—I don’t think we would’ve had those moments otherwise. And all of these people are ingrained in his mind now. And also, it meant we were a little delayed in finding our rhythm and our identity as his parents.

Quite frankly, there were moments when I’d be in the room and observe, okay, there are four adults here and one kid. We don’t all need to be attending to him. So, I’ll just step back, even though I’m the mom, right? I’ll just step back because I want that for him. But then I start to feel disconnected or unsure of what is my way of navigating this situation because I’m not engaging it right now.

So, the opportunity that we’ve had in the last few months has been challenging because of less bandwidth, like it’s just the two of us, so there’s always a handoff or a shuffle. But also, it has felt really internally solidifying that this is our family unit and this is how we operate together.

So that’s been a blessing. Yeah.

Christina Gebel: That’s so well said. And working with a lot of families who go through childbirth and are in that postpartum period, I think having the community that supports you and is so eager, like you said, so eager to start this new chapter with you.

I think so many parents have this moment of, okay, so what is our unique identity as a family unit in this plethora of love and support? And you spoke so beautifully about that transition, and I think that can’t be overstated enough, honestly.

Shauna Morin: I think, Christina, one other thing Sankalp and I both have felt really hesitant to share some of these particular experiences that we’re talking about right now because they have felt so atypical to what we were told to expect.

And we don’t want to convey, oh yeah. Like they tell you that there’s this concept of “cocooning” that’s really highly recommended when you bring a child home, especially international adoption, because they’re typically a little older and more cognizant of what’s going on.

And so that attachment process can be really challenging. And so, this idea of cocooning is do not let a lot of other people into the space right away, build your unit. And so, we tried to communicate to everybody that this might be necessary, right? And we were prepared to do it. And then Kiran was Kiran, and I think it was partly he was on the younger end for an international adoption, but also it’s his nature.

So quickly we realized that’s not really necessary for us. But I wanna say tremendous respect and awe for people who need to do it a different way. It’s for the good of their child. Can’t imagine how difficult it is to have those eager people in the wings and say, you need to wait.

But also, I think it could probably be very lonely because you can’t have that sort of tight community around you right away in the same way that we did. So, I just wanna put out there that this homecoming can look very different than what experience we had.

Christina Gebel: I’m really glad you said that.

All of this is like in the beginning we talked about country specific. All of this is family specific and child specific. And I appreciate you both naming the diversity of ways that this can happen. And I think people listening who are discerning this choice are really going to be appreciative of that.

And just hearing your experience, and there are pieces that are going to really resonate, and there are pieces that are going to be very different.

We’re getting close to our final questions here, and one of the final questions is related to that. What would you tell somebody who’s discerning this piece specifically international adoption and building a family with international adoption?

Shauna Morin: I think the theme of patience has been named already.

I would reiterate what I just shared in terms of the larger lesson being for all of the preparation, your experience will be unique, and so [00:53:00] being prepared to be unprepared, which is really hard for everybody. And as someone who really likes to be prepared, it was especially hard for me to just be open to things evolving and be willing to be flexible, right? To say, yeah. We were told we should do this sort of close family unit, and we shouldn’t invite too many people in too soon. To just hold to that because we were told that, and to not use our intuition and read the situation and come to agreement that maybe that’s not even best for us. So being willing to be reflective and adapt.

But the thing that comes to mind for me the most is just you will have moments of fear. You will have moments of, what am I doing? Was this the right choice? And you’re in it, right? Like you’re neck deep in it and it feels I can’t get out now.

But those feelings are okay. Those are normal. This is, this is a life- [00:54:00] altering and lifelong decision and change that you’re making. And of course that will come with moments of insecurity, moments of uncertainty. I think for me, looking for those signs again, that like God is with us, this was the match God intended for us, and we have been gifted with this privilege of caring for this human being. Like returning to that truth has been helpful.

Sankalp Ranji: And this is like what Shauna said. God has chosen this all, God has given this gift to us. I’m not a very religious man. I’m probably more like a spiritual person, but I do believe in the concept of destiny.

I think this was destined to happen. And if there is a God, then they have taken this decision for our lives and for his life and, all we can do is just do our best to do our thing.

Shauna Morin: Yeah. Yeah. [00:55:00] And this might feel a little out of left field, but I think both of us find ourselves often thinking about his birth parents, that there is a mother and a father out there connected to him in a way that we are not, and we are stewarding this life that began with someone else. I think that feels like an incredible responsibility and, of course, a blessing, but I feel the weight of that quite a lot.

Someday Kiran will ask us these questions, and we will talk through those difficult conversations with him and share what we know and own what we don’t know.

But even before that comes along, you have to believe God is in this, because to make sense of it all otherwise just feels impossible.

Christina Gebel: So well said. You’ve talked a lot about faith and spirituality along the way, and the theme [00:56:00] of this season is radical family. Radical means really to get to the root of something, to get to the root of faith or spirituality, or even just your core beliefs and values.

That’s what radical means in its Latin roots. So, I want to ask both of you: Is international adoption a radical choice for a family?

Sankalp Ranji: Absolutely. It is a radical choice because, first of all, it is a leap of faith, right? Some people might say that, “Hey, you are doing God’s work by taking care of a child who is in need of help.”

But what we have also realized is that we feel blessed that this child came into our lives, came into the life of everyone around us, and is bringing so much joy to everyone around us. He has given joy to so many people already that his output is [00:57:00] far surpassing whatever he might be getting in return.

If God is not in that, then I don’t know where he or she is.

Shauna Morin: Over the holidays, it was our first Christmas with Kiran. We usually watch It’s a Wonderful Life together, which we did again this year. And I got to thinking about Kiran as our Clarence.

Clarence is the guardian angel of Jimmy Stewart’s character who helps him see rightly all the blessings in his life. And he has just been that for us. I think to Sankalp’s point about, I see the joy that he’s bringing to all of these people who matter to us and also he’s helping us bring that back into focus.

Like we are so blessed with this community. So, I think it has had a radical impact. I think him being in our life has had a radical impact. It has extended beyond our direct friends and family to actually people who heard through our friends and family that we were doing this and were moved to such an extent that they reached out to us or sent gifts or [00:58:00] prayers or, just so incredibly humbling to know that this network exists, this network of love around him. So I think that is really radical. Yeah.

Christina Gebel: How has this deepened your love for each other?

Sankalp Ranji: Oh, in innumerable ways. Going back to the concept of patience, we have to dive back or go back to that concept of patience again and again as we are navigating this thing together. I think for me personally, it has reinforced the conversation that we had when we met each other for the first time and realized individually that this is the person I want to have a family with.

That particular thought has been reinforced over the last one year. Yes, these are all the reasons why this felt right seven years ago, and I’m glad that it has worked out that way.

Shauna Morin: Yeah, I think there’s something really special about seeing somebody you already know, love, and [00:59:00] respect, love a child, parent a child—

that deepens your own love for that person. Kiran is in many ways the center of our lives now, and we’re both individually and together devoting a lot of our love and attention to him. But it has not diminished the relationship between the two of us. It has not put that in the backseat, so to speak.

I think it has just brought that into focus, too. Yeah, to second what Sankalp said, I think it’s reinforcing the instincts I had that, yes, I think Sankalp will be a wonderful father and that we would complement each other on this adventure of a lifetime. But you still are unexpectedly confronted with the many ways in which that is true, and those moments are gold.

Sankalp Ranji: Yeah, I’ve bought her more flowers in the last one year than I did in the previous six.

Christina Gebel: Oh my gosh. Gold and flowers. I can’t think of a better image [01:00:00] to leave us with. So, Shauna and Sankalp, I will just say that it is apparent to me how much you love each other, and as somebody who knows you personally, how much you have loved each other even more as you’ve grown into these roles as parents, how much you love your son, how much you love God, and how much you love your community, who has been so profoundly and graciously impacted by the choice that you’ve made to grow your family.

And I just want to thank you. And I really do feel in my heart of hearts, someone’s going to hear this out there and that spark of emotion or maybe a sign or a feeling, hearts are going to move in directions that we can’t even begin to know.

I just want to thank you [01:01:00] for sharing so authentically, honestly, and vulnerably because there are so many people that are going to resonate with this, and be helped by your story on their own journey. So, thank you.

Shauna Morin: Thanks for giving us the opportunity. This was a real gift to us; you’re in it from a year, really just taking it a day at a time, and I think it was really good for both of us to be able to look back, remember some of the moments, and be grateful for those and how they’ve helped us to grow and shaped us to the point we are at now.

Welcome, everyone. We have two very special guests today, both of whom I deeply admire for their work in the field of theology. We have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Julie Rubio and Dr. Jake Kohlhaas. They have done much work in the field of theology as it relates to family.

As we know, season two is focusing on the family. It’s called Radical Family, and it’s about families making bold choices to live out their faith. I thought, what a great [00:01:00] time in the season to zoom out a little bit and see what the Catholic Church has to say about families living out their faith.

I couldn’t ask for two better people to talk to about this topic. So, with that, Dr. Rubio and Dr. Kohlhaas, would you mind introducing yourselves?

Julie Rubio: I am currently a professor at the Jesuit School of Theology, which is part of Santa Clara University, but currently in Berkeley, California.

I’ve been here for about eight years, and before that, I was at St. Louis University for about 20 years. Family has been central to my work from the very beginning, even as I define myself as a social ethicist. It was really in planning my own wedding liturgy and my wedding that I first started developing an interest in marriage and family.

It was the liturgy that really [00:02:00] opened that up for me, and ever since then, I’ve just been fascinated with this tradition and excited about the possibilities for families in Catholic social ethics.

Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah, and I’m Jake Kohlhaas. I am a professor of moral theology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa.

I’ve been here for 12 years and have a couple books and edited volumes on family. It’s been what I’ve been doing since my dissertation back at Duquesne University, particularly around parenthood and trying to think about a theology of parenthood. More recently, that’s taken me—yeah—a bit more into social ethics and definitely into history, which is an endless investigation that you can keep going forever if you want.

So that’s where I’m at now.

Christina Gebel: Yes, thank you. And that’s a great segue to the first question I wanted to talk to you all about today. So, I put two and two together when I cracked open one of the edited [00:03:00] volumes about church teaching on the family, and I met Julie when I was a theology student at SLU. I don’t think theology has ever truly left my brain, and I was so thrilled to see that volume, and it definitely scratched a theology itch that I’ve been missing for a really long time.

You both contributed. Jake, I believe you were one of the editors of the volume. And what I liked about it was the commentary on different encyclicals or church teaching on the family, but it went quite far back, and it goes pretty far into the present too. So I was just wondering if you could start us off by distilling that volume into kind of where the arc of theology has been in the church.

[00:04:00] What has the Church focused on in its messaging, in its theology on the family?

Jake Kohlhaas: I can start. So I was co-editor with Mary Doyle Roche on this volume. The idea of Catholic family teaching is something that kind of came up in my book, Beyond Biology. It’s in the later chapter of thinking about teaching on marriage and family in the parallel way that we think about Catholic social teaching as a developing body of doctrine that grows and expands over time.

The challenge is that the documents around marriage and family, you have to read them against their own protesting that they do not in fact change. But if you read them like social documents, there is quite a bit of movement and development going on through their history.

So that’s what I set out to do, and it was just so great to be in a field where we found lots of collaborators who were excited about the project and wanted to do it. The way it’s structured, it starts back in 1880 with Arcanum [Divinae Sapientiae], which was by Leo XIII, and then moves forward [00:05:00] throughout time.

And one of the things that’s obvious right at the start is if you start stacking up the documents on marriage and family alongside Catholic social teaching documents, it’s the same popes, roughly the same years writing them. They really fall pretty neatly in order. It gets a little more complicated in more recent history, but I would say just the overall short summary arc is that when you start in the late 19th century, most of the concern is really the papacy attempting to assert itself in the face of new liberal democracies that have spread throughout the world.

And so, a lot of the concerns are political. They’re trying to really stake their claim in education, stake their claim around marriage and divorce, and insist that these are the purview of the Catholic Church, and that secular states have other legitimate areas, but not these. And so you get a lot of that in the early documents around the place of [00:06:00] education, marriage, and regulation of divorce.

And quite a bit around women’s particular place connected to children and home life. By the 1930s, though, you get more interest in actual love in marriage, and the relationship of marriage, and that’s really the part that grows into the 1960s and Vatican II. You get some really remarkable changes with marriage as no longer a hierarchical relationship, but as a more mutual relationship.

You move from a Pope Leo, who says that women’s place within the home is part of divine law, to John XXIII, who says women have discovered their own dignity, and it’s different than what the popes had thought. So, there are some really interesting developments. And then as you move towards the present, one of the things I pick up is I think in the 1960s things really take a sharp turn towards reproductive moral issues with Humanae vitae and artificial contraception and things like that.

So, family becomes much more concerned with reproductive ethics than it had been. Then more recently it becomes more about sexuality and gender issues, and then as we know at the present, issues of same-sex relationships and how that affects parenthood and inclusivity in the church.

And that’s really up to the present, where these questions of who’s included and how are they included and what counts and why remain pretty significant issues for the church today.

Julie Rubio: Yeah, and ... The volume is a great contribution. It’s just wonderful to even have the words “the Catholic family teaching” that we didn’t have before.

And there are so many great people writing in the volume. I wrote on Familiaris Consortio, so, Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation from 1981. But I largely agree with the trends. One thing I would start with is that what to me is really unique about Catholic social teaching, Catholic family teaching, is that family is always seen as a part of what is called the social order or society.

So it’s never understood as this private, nuclear, romantic, whatever all of that is. That’s just not our teaching. So it’s always seen as one of the many intermediary associations, is the word, in society similar to, or like churches and schools and clubs and nonprofits and that kind of stuff.

And it’s prior to government, or the state has its own reality, which means it has its own rights that government has to protect and its own responsibilities. So I think that’s constant, and yet what grows is the sense that not only is it just an important part of the social order, but it has a social mission, and that particularly comes to the fore with John Paul II. It’s not enough just to love and procreate.

That’s just the beginning. And he’s really explicit about that, and I find that’s even surprising to people who think they’re JP II Catholics, right? And because they’re used to reading Theology of the Body. No, he really underlines that, and then that just carried [00:09:00] forward with Francis and beyond.

And the other part Jake already alluded to this, is about love. I think you can always from the beginning see this idea of mutual support and growth and holiness. So I think sometimes people will say, Oh, Catholic teaching on family is only about procreation. That’s never been true either.

It’s always had something else there. But love, th- this was actually a debate. - Is love necessary for a legitimate marriage? Before, no it wasn’t. But it becomes essential, and then we have the, that beautiful language of the intimate partnership of life and love, and I feel like we’re still exploring, honestly, what that intimate partnership is and what it means.

This to me is something that we say but, beyond the language of self-gift, which I think is both helpful and not helpful what does that look like over a lifetime? I think we’re still figuring that out and we’re figuring out a new way only really since the 1980s have we had married theologians who can speak to this with experience.

And then the [00:10:00] other part is the growing egalitarianism, that’s just really clear. Sometimes I hear younger traditionalist Catholics citing Casti Connubii, and it’s yeah, you can’t do that. That is just not our teaching anymore. Male headship is not our teaching.

There is a real egalitarianism which is really actually evident in the marriage rite, which I would argue is less gendered than a lot of our social marriage rituals, including engagement rituals and things like that. You have to read that stuff and put it into the liturgy ‘cause it’s not there except for in few little places.

But I would also agree that especially since the 1990s and concern over same-sex marriage, and more recently gender identity, there has been an assertion about gender difference. I would say yes and. Yes, there are differences. What those are I think is very vague. Whether you can map trad wives and real Catholic men onto that, I think that’s a big stretch.

I often will ask my students where do you see, laundry [00:11:00] or, house cleaning or, yeah, the these role divisions just really aren’t there. We read them in. But there is an insistence that there is a difference and it matters, right? And that’s been doubled down on the more that others are saying, No, there isn’t. No, it doesn’t.

Christina Gebel: Wow. We have really started out strong here. My brain is really humming. The fact about JP II and how he really brought about that understanding of the family, I’m going to use that, I think, in a future Facebook debate. I am very grateful for that tidbit. But to go back to that, and you both actually touched on it immediately, which was this interaction with Catholic social teaching, and I’ll be honest with you, having studied both theology about the family and Catholic social teaching, I never really noticed [00:12:00] the bridge.

It’s there in my mind as a person because I feel like I can’t separate Catholic social teaching from any part of my identity, but it seems like it’s been there or been concurrent with a lot of this, and that might come as a surprise to some people who are listening, including myself.

So, can you say a little bit more about how those two have interacted and possibly where we are now with that interaction?

Julie Rubio: I would just say it is unique, perhaps, to our social teaching that you just can’t separate family from it. Family is a crucial part of it.

From what Jake was saying earlier about family being along with schools and the church as a way the church asserts its rights, but more broadly, the idea that a good society is one with a robust set of [00:13:00] associations including family, so that families matter to society.

And that’s just always been there. I think also the idea that families have rights, and they’re broad-ranging, right? From the right to raise their children the way they want to and educate them and all of that, but also to the things that make their life possible like housing and just wages.

Those are a crucial part of the way that Catholicism views society. What you said is exactly right. Like, how can you separate Catholic social teaching from any part of your identity? You live in a family. How could it be irrelevant? It’s that kind of question which really spurred my own desire to think more about family ethics because I always had loved Catholic social teaching, and when I was getting married, I’m like, the bridge wasn’t evident, right?

And yet it should be, so how am I supposed to live this? Because it can’t be that only the Dorothy Days and the Dan Berrigans, these [00:14:00] are the heroes in my house. It can’t be that they’re the only ones who live Catholic social teaching. There’s got to be a way for families to do this. So, what would that look like?”

And I found both popular literature and role models from ordinary Catholic families who were living this out, but also teaching that was perhaps less emphasized on either side—either from people talking about family or people talking about social justice. I found that there was actually way more interaction than I realized, and a lot to build on.

Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah, I’d agree. I think one of the issues with framing this idea of Catholic family teaching that’s highlighted in the volume is what is its relationship to Catholic social teaching, because Catholic social teaching very clearly includes families as part of society. They’re fundamental to society.

So Catholic social teaching has to cover families. The way it defines society, it’s required to do that. But then there are also these other documents that speak specifically to families, often mostly about marriage, not necessarily about parenthood, which are both dimensions of family life.

And so it becomes a question: Is Catholic family teaching simply a subset of Catholic social teaching that gets some unique emphasis, or is it its own thing that runs parallel? Then how do you account for that interaction? So I think it’s very much an excellent and open question right now in the field: trying to figure out what is the relationship between these bodies of literature that claim to be united, and yet there are some distinctions.

For example, Catholic social teaching seems to work really well on principles when they’re facing outward towards explaining what a just society ought to be—principles like respect for human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity. But where I think as a church community it can start to stumble is when we turn those principles back inside, either to the church itself, the way things are structured within the church, or to families themselves, because then you start running into these tensions between, and Julie was talking about this earlier, these specific roles that are supposed to be responsible for specific things because of the identity that goes with it.

But then you say, “But the principle of subsidiarity,” you say, “The man’s in charge of this.” Solidarity with your wife might mean that maybe it’s time for you to do this. Or subsidiarity, the mom’s in charge of this. But in this instance, the dad’s closer to it because he’s more engaged with the child. So, the issue is an egalitarian marriage based in love is about mutuality, and it’s about negotiating individual events and situations in thoughtful, respectful ways that principles can guide you through. So I think a lot of the language of Catholic social teaching very much applies to family dynamics.

The issue there is that though we [00:17:00] have some ideas about roles and places and things like that people feel like they have to be in, that makes it hard to apply the principle because of these other pieces getting in the way. And so I think in terms of the interaction between the two, I think there is some tension there in Catholic social teaching.

We’ve known this for decades. This isn’t brand new. But Catholic social teaching, when you turn it back on the structure of the church, raises some interesting questions. And I think when you turn it to families and you say, “Okay, you’re the most fundamental cell of society, so let’s apply social ethics,” it raises some real questions about a lot of traditional norms and expectations that people bring into families and marriages that I think are very good questions.

It just means there’s a lot unsettled there.

Julie Rubio: But I think also it’s just such a great opportunity to say, if this is an institution in society and part of Catholic social teaching, then these principles should apply, do apply. It’s just that we haven’t— ...thought it through yet. One of the chapters in my dissertation was [00:18:00] taking justice and applying that to housework, right?

As some feminist theologians have done. But of course it applies, and we don’t have precise guidelines about housework in Catholic family teaching, only the vaguest of suggestions, even though people bring their ideas about that. But if you bring a justice lens, then I think you get some good guidance.

Jake Kohlhaas: ... Yeah. I would add so in my research, one of the things I keep an eye on, which is difficult as a male theologian working in this field, I always want to know how dads are included. But, historically, I know dads have had the better end of the deal when it comes to marriage, so it’s hard to work on the side of the privileged group and make sure we’re not left out.

But—prior to Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’s document—the image of a man as a primary caregiver or capable of nurture, as far as I know, had only come up at one time in one document from the US Catholic [00:19:00] bishops. So Catholic teaching on the family, all the way through past the turn of the millennium, the idea that men can actually nurture their children is just not there.

And for me, that was a big part of having kids because I was more or less primary caregiver to one of our daughters when she was very young. And I think that’s a piece of the puzzle there, is just to think about how a lot of these traditional roles and things that are assumed about families certainly work a lot better when you bring the lens of Catholic social teaching to it to say, “This is about the common good.”

“This is about negotiating what’s best for our family in this situation.” That, yeah, can get more difficult when you think in very set ways about who does what and why. So, it’s not so much, as Julie was saying, that the church has articulated specific gender roles.

But there are some really interesting silences that tell us a lot about what’s not being considered.

Christina Gebel: As you’re talking, I’m thinking of my own career path. [00:20:00] After I spent time studying theology, I volunteered, and that kind of put me on a trajectory of working on public health and particularly public policies. Almost my entire career in public health has been policies that help mothers and families. It’s interesting because when I was in public health school, there were a lot of concepts around, “We should write policy as if we’re thinking about the people who could be most affected by it or who are most vulnerable to the changes that we’re proposing.”

I had so many flashbacks to Catholic social teaching and thinking about things like the preferential option for the poor, just things like that. And it’s like I’m making so many parallels as you’re talking because it’s like—to have a family, you also have to have [00:21:00] Catholic social teaching. And in public health, we would say to have health, you also have to have good systems and policies, and the two are intertwined. And Julie, I want to go back to what you had looked into, which are some figures, and certainly the Dan Berrigans and the Dorothy Days and all those things. All those exist, and I have friends who have pictures of Dorothy Day in their house, and they teach their kids about Dan Berrigan.

To me, that’s very normal in our friend group. But I am interested in this question about how does this all jump off the shelves of theology? If a family really wanted to make Catholic social teaching a focus of living out their faith, where would they go today to get some guidance or some support from the wider world—not even maybe necessarily [00:22:00] the wider Catholic world, but where would they go to find like-minded people or resources or people to look up to, things to read?

Is the church kind of meeting that interest?

Julie Rubio: Oh, that’s interesting. When I first heard the question, I was thinking about official documents. But I think there is a problem of resources, because if one looked at what’s available for families, one wouldn’t necessarily find much about Catholic social thought.

So I think that those traditions remain fairly separate at the level of the parish or the diocese. Organizationally, it’s difficult to find. The Christian Family Movement, which was important in the mid-20th century, especially in the Midwest, and it still has some global purchase, was in that See, Judge, Act model as part of the Catholic Action movement. And it was a place where people would come together with like-minded people and think about, “What are we going to do in the world?” First of all, it’s not as popular in the U.S., and I don’t know that that’s the focus today.

I think in terms of what you might read, you might read Familiaris Consortio, especially the center of the document on the four tasks of the family, and especially the task about going into society and making an impact in the world. I think you could read Amoris Laetitia, especially the chapter on parenting, which is ignored. Everybody reads the controversial Chapter 8, but the parenting stuff is really quite good.

And so, I think there is some guidance. In some ways, the papal stuff hasn’t filtered down organizationally. But then I wish that parents and people with families would be really invited into the social justice groups in the parish, and what that would look like is different than what it looks like now, because maybe those groups meet at 11:00 in the morning or at 8:00 at night, and it just doesn’t work.

Models I’ve seen for that, like parishes that would have one topic, and they would offer some food, and then maybe a talk, and then some prayer, all of this in an hour and a half for parents, but then provide not just babysitting, but a parallel program for kids. And so, then when they got home, they could all talk about environmental justice or something like that.

But that made it realistic for parents to go to, and it sent the message from the parish that we don’t think that social justice is just for single people without kids and responsibilities.

Christina Gebel: Yeah. That reminds me a lot, too, of my career in public policy, because when I started out in the field, I was told families are the hardest group of the population to mobilize.

And I don’t know where that came from. I don’t even remember who said it. I don’t know how true it is. I have no idea. But it was interesting for me because I was in a realm of public policy that was family policies, so I actually saw a lot of families mobilize, and I think sometimes there’s an idea out there that families are just too full, too tapped out, and you even see this sometimes in some of the traditionalists’ thinking around family, like you’ve got to take care of your own family first; that’s your calling. And every day you’ve got to wake up and fulfill that. And I’ve had people say, “I just got to focus on that. I can’t think about all these other things.” And also, the privileges that come with being able to go to, like you said, an 11:00 meeting at a parish, is going to draw a certain demographic of people, and so I think about this a lot. I think about, are we creating opportunities?

Are we creating resources? Has the beauty of the teaching really trickled down into programming and maybe more accessible resources on some of the encyclicals and things like that? I was very eager to comment on that because it’s so interesting on so many levels.

Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah. Families, I think, are hard to mobilize because they are projects in themselves. Part of the calling to be a parent and have a family is to take special responsibility for caring for these people, but on the other hand, if you’re going to parent well, part of it is also raising them to be socially responsible people.

And you want to give them those experiences. So, I do think a lot of it is just the challenge of, yeah, if you can get a single retiree out after hours, that’s one thing. If you can mobilize four to six people and get them in the same room at one time, that can be really challenging.

So, I think there are just a lot of practical dynamics that are really challenging with this. On the other hand, I think a lot of people who are doing good work for society are doing it in part because they have professional abilities and things like that that they’re sharing with the community.

Just because my whole family can’t come with me to some of the boards and things I’m on doesn’t mean I can’t talk to the kids about it when I get home, and so I think there are ways in which, when family members individually participate in certain capacities, you can bring that home.

You’re modeling responsibility to your kids even if they’re not there. I did, mistakenly, about a year ago, bring one of my daughters to a commission meeting, and she was bored out of her mind. I feel like she might never volunteer to be a part of that thing again. Maybe it’s better if they don’t come sometimes.

Julie Rubio: And I think it can work the other way too, right? Mary Doyle Roche’s work has been so good at pointing this out, that [00:28:00] sometimes it’s the kids that are leading the parents. And she has a good little book, Schools of Solidarity, that I think would be helpful. But yeah, sometimes it can be the kids coming home and saying, “This is what we are doing through school,” or through their own activism, and then that evangelizes or expands the family’s horizons.

It can also happen like that. I have one model of an ideal model in my head that’s like the family version of Dorothy Day, but there’s a lot more that can happen.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, and it’s so relevant to this season because this season is about families making bold choices to live out their faith.

And it was interesting when I was recruiting people for this season. I asked a lot of people actually if I just said, “A family making bold choices to live out their faith,” like who would come to mind? And the reactions were so interesting. One was, a lot of people I asked were like, “We don’t really have a faith identity [00:29:00] anymore.”

So that was one thing. And then the other thing was, either really, it was in some ways maybe challenging to conjure up somebody. And I don’t know if I had used language that made the bar feel really high. I have no idea. But what was interesting was like seeing people wrestle with that question.

What was interesting also was sometimes the people they recommended were like, “No really, you should be talking to the person that recommended me because I see them as fulfilling this.” So yeah, I think it is happening, and maybe we don’t name it as such or think ourselves to be doing it, but it is happening, and some of the stories that have come out in this season are just incredible things that people are doing on a daily basis or decisions they’ve discerned and the like.

So, with that, I want to shift a little bit to Jake, and you’ve mentioned [00:30:00] briefly about this kind of theology of parenting. That was a phrase that jumped out at me when I read the edited volume, ‘cause I was like, “Oh, what’s that?” And “Where is this?” So can you say a little bit about how you’ve engaged with that, and where you got to, and where you hope we might be going?

Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah, so as I said earlier, I’m really interested in parenting as the angle that I want to take in my research. I’m so glad Julie mentioned Mary’s book too, ‘cause that is a good recommendation. It’s very accessible. But through my dissertation and things like that, it just became clear to me that the official Catholic teaching on the family is missing some of the practical dimensions of what’s actually involved in child-rearing and marital life.

A lot of emphasis on marriage, the permanence of marriage, the sacrament of marriage, and the value of children, the value of procreation for society, for marriages. [00:31:00] But then when it comes to but what is the day-to-day of actual caregiving and raising children? It doesn’t have a lot to say.

It has some visions of where that goes, and it uses the word “education” oftentimes as a placeholder to mean just a universe of realities. I’m trying to remember this. There was a document from way back that I was reading recently. I don’t know, it was the 1920s or something. It was a bishop saying, “Education for the Catholic Church, it means everything.”

And I think, “Geez, we’ve known this for 100 years. Maybe we should start actually articulating a little more clearly what we mean by that.” Yeah, there was so much under that idea that parents’ charge is to procreate and educate is clearly the much larger task of parenthood.

So, I have been working on that for a while to flesh out what this looks like. For me, I think it gets really complicated because you’re dealing with interpersonal relationships, you’re dealing with relationships that are never the same. No two families are alike. No two [00:32:00] parent-child relationships are alike.

No two sibling relationships are alike. So, everything just gets really messy when you try to speak in a way that makes sense for a very massive, complicated reality. But my basic ideas at this point are that parenthood is based in caregiving. Caregiving is a common human ability that most people have the capacity to care for other people.

Attending to their needs over time. Parenthood is complex because in some ways it’s given, and in some ways it’s chosen. But out of that, it’s sacramental. It’s an experience of grace in the world. And so really what parents are doing is being there to be present for God in their lives through the life of their children.

And so that’s where I’m working now is to figure out, how would I articulate a little bit more practical, a little bit more broader audience way of explaining some of these things? I think Catholic sacramental theology is an excellent place to [00:33:00] start for thinking about what the family is.

All the things we represent in the Church are the realities we live in our family lives: the incarnation, grace, and sacramentality coming through in family dynamics. So that’s where I’m headed with that currently. And then the whole other challenge is, what do you do when things don’t go well?

When there’s pain in a family, I remember my first book; I was writing arguments about how many parents you need, what gender parents have to be—all that stuff that’s occupied Catholics for a lot of time. When most of the social science research says stability is really the key thing, stable relationships are what people need to grow into maturity—stable, loving relationships, ideally.

And then I had a friend of mine, who’s a gay theologian, who said, “You know what? Some families are very stable and very harmful.” And so stability isn’t necessarily a good thing if that stability is negative, if the stable message you’re receiving is that certain people aren’t included and [00:34:00] things like that.

So again, you can take something that seems like it should be common. Okay, stable families, that’s great, but then there’s the counterexample. So, it just gets really challenging to speak in a way that’s inclusive of all the different dimensions that family can be and yet has some sort of common thread to it that’s also understandable.

Christina Gebel: Yeah. The challenge therein is really vast. And I think, like you said, to speak to the diversity of experiences but still come up with some tenets would be really challenging, but I admire that you have asked—that question, I think, in my ideal world, that would be a question the church really leans into in the next few decades.

And speaking of questions the church is leaning into, Pope Francis called for the Synod on the Family, and at this point in the season, we’ve already had a great [00:35:00] discussion with Casey Stanton from Discerning Deacons, who told us all about what a synod is. So we’re up to speed on what a synod is, and a synod on synodality, and all that great stuff.

But this question is about the Synod on the Family, and I’d like to hear from each of you, what came out of the Synod on the Family, and do you feel like it was representative of what people in the pews are wrestling with every day? Did the average family kind of get guidance on how to live out their family life?

And where do you feel the conversation needs to go after the synod?

Julie Rubio: Let’s see. So, I think the synods on the family were really important in the beginning of Francis’ papacy. My own sense is that he knew that family and sexuality are places of pain for a lot of people in the Catholic Church, and that if he wanted to ask a lot of people, he would have to first convince them that they belonged.

And that’s really what I think those synods were about: sending out all those surveys and getting people to say what they thought the church taught and what their experience was, what they needed from the church, and then having the bishops talk and argue together.

Not a whole lot changed. People were upset that a lot of the hot-button issues, of course, did not change, but there was that dialogue. So, I think their significance is in the desire to include and to listen, and to accompany. That was our first concretization of what this accompaniment is, and to be a church that’s walking together.

I think that they were representative in terms of the stuff that went to Rome, if you looked at all the surveys. Not very representative in terms of experts, for instance. I mean, no experts or theologians on the family that I know of were there.

So that was disappointing in that sense. This was before women’s participation in synods, so yeah. And no, there wasn’t more guidance for everyday life. I think it was really just about Francis repeating, “You are welcome. Nobody can be excluded forever.” All of that was important. I don’t see families being very involved in the current synod on synodality dialogue.

Honestly, most people I’ve seen involved in those kind of dialogues are single people, a lot of older people. So yeah, I think that we probably need to bring back synodal kind of conversations in parishes and among families, getting beyond the “about synodality” piece to “what are our actual problems?

What do we need to do?”

Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah. I think Francis’ documents, Amoris Laetitia, that came out afterwards, is almost more representative of the state of the church than it really changed anything. One of the things I think is so interesting is in the early chapter it really insists on the importance of gender distinction within marriage and for parenting.

And as Julie and I talked about the chapter on parenthood, you could just insert the word “parent” instead of “mother and father.” There’s no gender distinction. So, this one-time insistence that something’s really important, and then when you talk about the application, the inability to connect why it’s important really represents where we’re at.

And so, I think Amoris Laetitia is like, it’s just a good representation. But again, its tone was important. Its openness was important. It didn’t really change much. I will say, I think some of the processes of the synod that are now getting more common as Leo has taken on the same trajectory, I think, we might look back and say, “Oh, Francis started that.”

For example, when they did the preliminary meetings and the Vatican released the vote counts on some of the paragraphs in the preliminary documents, just the admission that there was disagreement among the bishops about some of these things was something that we had never done publicly before, right?

That was always behind closed doors, and you just get the final document which says, “All the bishops agree to this.” It caused some controversy. I think the bishops didn’t love it and it hasn’t happened since. But now we’re more comfortable with the idea that globally the bishops don’t agree on everything.

And the German bishops are doing one thing and other bishops and that’s just become our sense of what the dynamics of the church are. So, there’s a lot involved in the process that Francis did that really opened the door for some of the things that we’re experiencing now in the Synod on Synodality and the processes of Synodality that I think looking back we’ll say, “Oh, that’s where it started.”

So it didn’t lead to a really groundbreaking document, but it did lead to some communal practices that I think are becoming more common and are frankly more healthy for the life of the church. And on some of these issues that for generations we’re basically told these can’t change, they won’t change, they’re too essential to change, now they’re saying development happens and there’s reasons to think about this.

And if we’re going to get a real theology of family it has to get to the experience of families. And I think we are gradually opening ourselves to that. Of course, we’ll find it super complicated and really hard to do anything consistent with, but...

Christina Gebel: Yeah. It almost makes me think about, while you were talking, if there was an edited compilation of Family Teaching Volume 2 that came out 150 years from now and what would those documents say, and I appreciate the candidness about what the Synod on the Families did and didn’t do. And I think, this is one of my struggles as a Catholic, as a Facebook commentator on Catholicism is that every time there is this kind of flurry of activity around something, I think, the secular world expects there to be a big change at the end.

But as Catholics, like you said, just some of the basic things that activity accomplished, while not necessarily breaking news that’s going to show up on your phone, really did start some openness to things that haven’t previously been open. So it is interesting, just like you said, to admit that not all the bishops see this the same way is a big step.

So I do appreciate that. We’re coming down to our last couple of questions. One of them I sent earlier for you to muse on, and then the other one’s going to be a total wild card that you’ve never seen before. But let’s start with, again, going back to the theme of the season, families making bold choices to live out their faith.

I talk about in the first part of the season that this idea of radical—I think colloquially we think radical extremes, but really I heard it in a homily, and it really talks about getting to the root of something. And I talk about, it’s almost like a little bit of circular logic.

When you get to the root of Christianity and what it’s really saying, it actually is quite radical, right? So I wanted to ask you both, when you think of the phrase “radical family,” who are some families that come to mind in your own spheres personally, or any families making bold choices in the faith realm?

Jake Kohlhaas: When I looked at this, when I think of what the Gospel asks of us, I think, “Boy, that’s scary,” even thinking of it as an individual. And then when I think about my family, I think, “Oh, no, that’s too much.”

I think I do have a bit of a protectionism. I like my life to be a little bit predictable. The families I really admire are the ones who are more open to that, the people who can really bring people into relationships with their families, who are the kind of people that have a lot of chaos in their lives. Something as simple as a good family in town who does a lot of foster parenting.

And it’s not just the raising kids, but also where the kids’ parents then become a piece of that puzzle. We try to be a very open family, a place where all the kids come to hang out, which is getting scarier and scarier as there are more teenagers and they stay up really late.

But it’s controlled chaos. And I think the people who can really look at other people’s needs and say, “Our family can respond to that. We don’t know where it’s going to go”—those are the kind of people that I really admire, who can, yeah, really have relationships with people whose lives are chaotic and manage that with their own families.

I just think there’s so much that, sort of whatever social class you’re in, sticks you in that, and then you can pretty much not have to think about other things because you’re just dealing with people who are like you. And the people who have both the compassion and insight to move beyond that, I think, are the people I admire most.

People who put up with helping people in relational ways that I would find really terrifying are the people I admire.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, and actually we’ve had a family who fosters on the season, and I immediately thought of that too, actually, Jake, because it certainly isn’t uncommon to foster. And in my kind of Catholic social justice-y group of friends, people talk really openly about, “Oh, we’ve thought about it,” or things like that.

But it actually is a very radical opening up of your home, of your family. I deeply admire people who make that choice. So yeah, Julie, who would come to mind when you think of that question?

Julie Rubio: I think of it first, okay, so what do I mean by radical?

And I think that the most serious ethical choices of an ordinary person’s life are about work, time, and money. Most of us aren’t dealing with choices that have to do with war or things like that. Of course, in other places, yes.

But those are the key choices. Why are we working? What are we doing with our work? What about the rest of our time? How are we spending our money? And then for a family, it’s also about how do we use our home? And that’s why, I think I and others in the field have been influenced a lot by David McCarthy’s book on Sex and Love in the Home, and the portrait he draws of the open home.

And I think my answer in this way parallels Jake’s. How do you open your home and your life? How do you practice the universal destination of material goods and the social aspect of your goods and your property with your home? Really thinking of it that way.

It was one of the things that attracted me to St. Louis, actually, in some ways, that there were definitely a group of families and Jim and Kathleen McGinnis, who wrote Parenting for Peace and Justice, were originally a part of that, who lived in the city in a place that was somewhat dangerous.

And lived simplicity and opened their homes and were deeply involved in social justice work, and they were remarkable. I think about them. I also think about families that I met when I was in Nicaragua and El Salvador who were so much more radical and open than middle-class families

who, presumably, had a lot more bandwidth. Great stories in Mev Puleo’s book, The Struggle is One. I think we sometimes think that this is something only privileged families can be super radical, and I actually think that the real role models are often people who have less and somehow find ways to share what they have.

But I guess I don’t want it to be the radical. As much as I want to say, yeah, there are these radical role models, we need the saintly families. I also want to think about the smaller choices that people make that are also significant. Families who open their homes and that there’s always a gathering on a Friday night, or they just are that house in the neighborhood where everybody feels safe and everybody feels welcome.

Or there are some people who can’t handle that in their house, and so they go out. But they have a regular commitment to the soup kitchen at their parish or something like that. So I just want to lift up all of those choices too. Or the parents who make big sacrifices to send their kids to Catholic school not because they want them to get into the best college, but because they want them to be formed.

Yeah. So I think there are a lot of ways that families can do these things once they just start asking those questions. I think about, yeah, work, time, money, and this resource we have in our relationships in our home.

Christina Gebel: And something that you both touched on that speaks to me in your answers to that question is just the role of community in that.

Again, my Catholic social justice-y group of friends, most of whom have children at this stage, are always talking about, “When do we actually move to the commune or take over a cul-de-sac or something?” And I think it just speaks to this feeling that a lot of times some of those choices are easier when you have other people around you choosing those things, and you have other people to wrestle with when those choices get hard and complicated, and you at least have somebody to go to to ask that question, because I think as a Catholic trying to live out your faith in so many ways, you think about sometimes, “Who’s the friend that I can really go and pick their brain on this?” I feel very lucky personally to have friends that I know I could tap and say, “Can you wrestle with this faith-filled question with me?” And it makes me really want for those spaces in our church, it makes me really want for more places like that in our church to gather, and maybe it’s not even formal or programmatic, but just to know that you have other people out there.

Because I think Catholics in my generation, having moved to several different cities, church shop a lot, right? And there are some parishes where you can tell there are other people there who are really interested in questions like these, and there are other parishes that just seem kind of, for lack of a better word, flat. So that’s one of my hopes for the future. I do agree, Julie, that even just the smaller, more intentional choices are so big. I see my friends with kids say, “What are you guys doing about cell phones? What are you guys doing about tablets, and what are you guys doing about screen time?”

And modern parents have so much to think about, and my Catholic friends are not only thinking about it from a parenting angle or whatever child development says you should do, but they’re really thinking about it on a faith level. And I will say, if I may answer that question, I actually think of your family, Julie, that I was privileged to witness in my undergrad years and growing up.

I came to the inspiration for this season because I wanted people to think about somebody’s home that you go into. And Jake, I haven’t been in your home, but I have a feeling I’d have the same feeling, that you just go in and in little ways, something different is going on, and something really intentional is going on.

And it doesn’t have to be the big, huge choices. It’s really a level of intentionality about who we are as a family unit and who we are as a family of faith, or how we think about the harder questions of the world. And I get that vibe too when I go into a lot of friends’ homes that are really thinking about this.

There’s something different there that people are really making an earnest effort to discern. So any thoughts on that before we move to our final question?

Jake Kohlhaas: For the whole spring semester, I was in Ireland, so I was living in a little apartment, and my family was there for most of the time. But I just got back the other day, and I walked in our house, and you’d think I’d be like, “Oh, it’s so great to be home.” My first thought was, “There is so much dog hair in here.”

So yeah, my home’s very inclusive of pets as well.

Julie Rubio: I was just thinking about a wedding of a former student, a former JST student I went to a few weeks ago, and it was presided over and preached by two of the student’s classmates here.

And people were so moved by it, and I think it’s precisely what you’re talking about, Christina, because there was a clear intentionality here that was evident in all the choices about the readings, which were not [00:52:00] readings anybody typically chooses, and the s- and the songs and everything. And it did have much more of this social justice focus.

And it was just clear. And it was clear in the preaching, and it was clear in the way that they welcomed everyone and the priorities that were evident. And people just felt it. And that was new, and that was different, and it was exciting. Yeah. A wedding is a particular kind of power or occasion where a lot can happen because it’s a ritual.

But also in your family life, in intentional choices, there’s a lot that can happen.

Christina Gebel: Absolutely.

Jake Kohlhaas: I don’t know if... I don’t think of it as radical, but I really do admire people who can build intentionality and structure into their... I don’t know. My family dynamic is just not like... We’re a bit too chaotic, and I think my wife and I are much more dreamers than follow-through kind of people.

So, we’re more ideas than actual structure. But I do, and I do just know some families who really have intentional practices, and I just think it can be really powerful. I know as [00:53:00] kids grow to have those things to come back to.

Christina Gebel: So, onto our last question. I’d like to hear from each of you, how would you answer the question: What is the modern Catholic family called to today?

Jake Kohlhaas: Love. The more I get complicated in this, the more I come back to God is love, and that’s what the Catholic tradition is showing us that God’s love permeates reality. And the most important things in our lives are the things that are the most important to God as well, that those loving relationships are where you find the divine.

So for me, I think that’s the bottom line. It’s all about love because all of creation is about love. And so if you’re gonna invest your life in something, you better make sure it’s a loving enterprise. So I think that’s where we’re at. I think we’re at a unique point in history where we’ve decided that egalitarian marriage, a mutual loving relationship in which people aren’t just mutual in the sense that they respect each other, but are mutual in the sense that they really understand [00:54:00] each other as equal persons with equal rights and responsibilities, is not the way most of human history marriage has worked.

It’s wonderful that we’re embracing this, and I think from a Christian perspective, it’s the trajectory that is best for us to discover. I think Julie had mentioned this earlier, but I just wonder how much we’re still working out the implications of things that were said 100 years ago around what marriage is because it just raises so many new questions, I think.

Egalitarian marriage based on love is a wonderful experiment that has a rich Christian dimension to it, but is also something pretty new in human history. And it’s kind of cool to be a part of exploring where theology goes in this new sphere.

Julie Rubio: Yeah, and I would just say that I don’t know that we can answer the question fully without knowing the “where”—that it depends on your context. What’s most important to me about Catholic [00:55:00] family is that it is a vocation. Marriage is a vocation that is a vocation of discipleship.

And so just as a person who devotes their life to religious life—a sister or brother or a priest—you’re living out a vocation of discipleship. And so what you are called to depends on what’s going on in your neck of the woods. And the family is going to look different in every context.

I love Rick Gaillardetz‘s language of marriage as a daring adventure. And I worry that we’re losing some of that idea today. Some people, I think, are cynical about marriage. Others are scared of it. I just hope that we can embrace it as a daring adventure that I think Jake is right.

It’s a new kind of adventure right now—this loving, egalitarian partnership, intimacy, all of that, is huge. And then also in Catholic teaching with this deeper sense of [00:56:00] social mission. But in your context, right? But it is a lot. It is a lot. And I guess what I hope for is that people see that it’s adventurous and worth committing to.

Christina Gebel: I think that’s a great gem to leave our conversation on. And I do want to say you both have mentioned really good, interesting reads and resources, and I will try my best to compile those in the show notes, but this has been a really enriching time together.

I can’t say enough how highly I think of both of you, not only as theologians, but as ones that are coming to these questions at this unique time and place in history. And my hope with each episode in the season is that it stirs something in people listening, and maybe it’s not this [00:57:00] earth-shattering conclusion, but maybe it’s a whisper or a flame of something that was said here that gets people to crack open one of those resources, or think more about an open home, or think more deeply about our call to love and discipleship.

And I really just want to thank you both for leading us on this journey of discussion, and hopefully the adventure that awaits. So thank you.

Julie Rubio: Thank you. And for me, you are my favorite Facebook theologian, Christina, and I’m grateful for what you do. Oh, I really am grateful.

Christina Gebel: Oh, man.

I’m going to add that to my CV.

Thank you. It’s a rough, it’s a rough time out there.

Julie Rubio: I know. I know. But you hang in there.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, I’m trying to hang in.

Julie Rubio: Great talking to you both.

Christina Gebel: Thank you.

Both are medical doctors, Dr. Anne Berry and Dr. George Stablein. And while that is their professional title, I affectionately know them as Anne and George, and we have a lot of really cool overlaps in our life. But I’m going to let them introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about who you are in the here and now, who your kids are, how old are [00:01:00] they, and then we’ll jump into this amazing choice that you made as a family.

Anne Berry: Thanks, Christina. It’s very exciting to be here with you, too. I’m Anne. I am a family doctor and also have a second specialty in preventive medicine. Our kids are Susanna and Louisa. Susanna is 15 and a freshman in high school, and Louisa is 12 and she is in sixth grade.

George Stablein: And I am George Stablein. I am a community pediatrician in the area, and that’s my only specialty.

Christina Gebel: It’s good. It’s a good specialty. So,

George Stablein: thank you.

Christina Gebel: Having it is great. So we have had some interesting overlaps, and I officially met Anne and George at the commissioning ceremony for [00:02:00] Maryknoll Lay Missioners.

And could one of you start us off by just telling us a 10,000-foot view? What is Maryknoll?

Anne Berry: Maryknoll is a hill in New York in Westchester County, named after Mary on the Knoll. And that is where the Maryknoll priests and Maryknoll sisters both have their headquarters.

Those are orders of Catholic priests and sisters that they’re kind of focus is service in different countries. And then Maryknoll Lay Missioners grew out of both the Maryknoll priests and Maryknoll sisters. It started off that they invited lay people to come in service alongside them in different countries where they were serving.

And then over time, that grew into a formal lay service program. And then that, over time, grew into its own separate organization, which is [00:03:00] still very closely affiliated with, always partnering together with both the Maryknoll priests and the Maryknoll sisters in New York and all over the world.

But it is its own separate organization where lay Catholics like us can serve in different countries.

Christina Gebel: Awesome. Yeah, I actually didn’t know the fact about the hill, so that is something I learned today. I didn’t know that it was actually a knoll, so that’s good. Mary on the Knoll.

Okay.

Anne Berry: Yeah.

Christina Gebel: I love that. So we met at this commissioning ceremony in Ossining, New York, and I didn’t officially know you before that, despite the fact that Anne did the same residency program as my husband, although prior to his being there. Tell me a little bit about your lives before you officially got to Maryknoll Missioners.

Like, what was happening in your life? What were some things that led you to that path?

Anne Berry: [00:04:00] It really started before I even met George when I was a volunteer with Jesuit Volunteers International at the time, JVI, in Managua, Nicaragua.

And I did that after I graduated from college, before I went to medical school. And while I was there, it was when I first learned about Maryknoll. There was a community of Maryknoll sisters. My Jesuit volunteer community made a retreat one time at the Maryknoll sisters’ community. And they were wonderful and lovely. And while I was there during the two years, I was in Managua through the Ben Linder community of like international volunteers and like faith-based volunteers and people working in faith-based organizations.

I met a married couple who had young children and they had also previously been with Maryknoll. They weren’t at the time when I met them, but that’s how I first learned about that. And I also met another family that was not with Maryknoll, but I think they were with the Mennonite Central Committee, but they were also from the US and they also had [00:05:00] young children and were living in Nicaragua and living there with their young children.

So, it was really those two families, especially, that I always really admired them. I just thought, “Wow, that’s such a great thing that they’re here.” Not just like me, “Oh, I’m just here for two years.” I’m before I then go back to my regular life kind of thing.” But they were doing this as like their regular life and

their kids were there and they were living there and growing up there. So that kind of planted that idea in my mind. And from that time, I always had a dream to one day be a Maryknoll lay missioner. And especially I thought if I ever do end up having a family and having kids, I would definitely want to do that.

George Stablein: And Anne and I met in medical school in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Penn State. When we were early on in dating, we had a conversation one night and Anne said, “If you are interested in us being a long-term couple, just know that I’m going to be living internationally again someday.”

And so, consider yourself [00:06:00] forewarned. I was going to be the small-town pediatrician, going back to my home area where I grew up. Just what I had always envisioned for myself. And so, yeah, there was a part of me that was, “Oh, maybe she’ll forget about that.”

And then there was a part of me that was just that kind of could be interesting. But I don’t know, I couldn’t see myself doing that. I don’t know. And, fast forward quite a while, we did get married. It was about 10 years after we had gotten married, and she reminded me of that warning that she had given me. And that’s how it unfolded. I honestly do give her a lot of credit for me being a part of that experience, for me having that experience, because it wasn’t something that I had really ever envisioned for myself. But I can say on this side, and even while I was there, I was very glad that I did do it and that we did do it as a family.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s incredible. That’s bringing up for me not only some things I laid on the table very early on when I met my husband, which is maybe a topic for another episode, but also just we have an overlap with Nicaragua [00:07:00], too, and I have spent time in both Managua and León.

And León is such a beautiful city. So that’s really cool. And so, as you’re telling this, I’m drawing up vivid images of when I was there and was also there in the capacity of Catholicism and faith. So y’all made this first big commitment, what was it about that particular point that made you say, Okay, now’s the time, now’s the right time to pursue this in earnest.

Anne Berry: I had been waiting a long time, and so I really wanted to do it as soon as possible. One of the things I wanted to do most was bring our kids and have this be an experience as a family with our kids, so we had to have kids first. So, we had them. That took a couple years, because then we had one, we had to wait a couple years.

So basically that was it. It was like, okay. Now after our second child was born, we decided to wait until she was a little bit older, I guess for different reasons. But one of the biggest [00:08:00] reasons for me was I knew, Maryknoll’s a three-and-a-half-year commitment, and I knew that that may be as long as we would do it. I wanted both of our kids to be old enough to literally remember it. I didn’t want it just to be like something that Louisa kind of thought, yeah, that happened when I was a baby. I don’t really remember any. So when we arrived in Tanzania, she was three.

Christina Gebel: Anne, you really had these examples that you had encountered earlier on in your life of families that had done this with kids. I’m curious for George. Obviously, you said yes in a very big way to what had been brewing in Anne for quite some years, but who did you really look to or draw from as you approached that period?

George Stablein: That’s a great question. Honestly, that was a bit of a challenging time for me. I didn’t really have any other examples of this in my own life other than Anne. And I knew Anne had done it. I saw how clearly it affected her and how [00:09:00] deeply moving for her the experience was in Nicaragua. And so that was inspiring to me, but it was quite different for me, such a radical change in my plans. I was baptized Catholic, but didn’t really attend church at all except for weddings and funerals and baptisms, essentially, until I was in college.

And so, when Anne and I were planning on getting married, I decided to go through the RCIA, or I guess OCIA now, program. It was important to me to be able to take Communion at my own wedding, so I do feel like, as a younger adult and kind of through our early marriage and time together, I would say I was inspired by my church community as well.

We went to a small kind of mission parish in central West Virginia. That’s where we were living when we decided to go to Maryknoll. And there were some families that were very devoted Catholics; their children were very much involved in the church. And when we told them about our consideration for [00:10:00] Maryknoll, they were very supportive.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s great. Even if this was like writ on your hearts, and as part of your mission as a family, I imagine that it was a little bit daunting during that time period, too, because something that you were saying Anne earlier about your youngest, Louisa, being able to remember it, so some people say, I’m going to delay going to the national parks till my kids remember it, but this was a, this was a bigger journey, so to speak.

How did you approach this with the kids and your own families and your own professions also that you had worked so hard to get to? What were the logistics of telling people and preparing to go as both faithful persons but also professional people and parents?

Anne Berry: I think for me, because I not only did I live in Nicaragua as a [00:11:00] young adult by myself, but also I grew up living internationally with my own family, with my own parents, not in a volunteer service capacity.

So, in that way, it was very different. But I did remember that. And so, I think for me that was easier. I was like, “Yeah, of course, people move to other countries.” In fact, even my dad grew up living internationally with his parents. So, I actually remember talking to my grandmother, who had moved to Libya with my dad and his two younger siblings by herself, because my grandfather was already over there doing his work a long time ago before there was any internet or even international phone calls and all kinds of things. And when they first moved there, I don’t know, they didn’t have electricity.

So, I remember talking to my grandma on the phone; it was great because it was like she knew what that was like. And I was telling her we could only bring two suitcases, which was very different, because when I moved as a child, my dad was working for a big international company so we could bring a whole shipping container full of stuff. And I remember my grandma saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s how it was when we moved to Libya, too. I remember trying to pack all that stuff in.” And so that was nice for me.

And just the logistics of, yeah, the two suitcases and trying to fit everything in. I remember going through all the kids’ things and the toys and things and like finding all the smallest little toys to have different options and going through their books. Our kids have always loved books.

I love books. So, I went through all the books and found all the smaller paperbacks, picture books, so we could fit as many as possible. Yeah, so that was like a challenge, but a fun challenge to pack all that stuff up. It was just exciting for me.

And professionally, it did end up being a challenge for me once we were there, actually. But preparing again, I always wanted to do international service. When I decided to go to medical school, it was to become a doctor so I could go work in places where doctors were really needed all over the world. Preparing for it honestly was just so exciting for me. So many of my dreams were coming true.

For George, it was much harder in many ways, but that was the part that was hard for me—that it was hard for George.

George Stablein: Yeah. Again, as I mentioned earlier, my plan that my family was very well aware of was that I was going to be coming back to my home area or somewhere close to that.

And where we were in West Virginia was only a few hours from there. That was actually the closest we’ve lived since we’ve been together. And the idea of us moving to a different country was quite challenging for me to figure out how to approach talking about with my parents.

And it was a bit of a stressful time. It was just not understood why I would be doing something like this. And there were some family health struggles that were going on at that same time. And having that conversation during that time was definitely difficult. Over time, it gradually got better. When we first had the conversation, we didn’t know what country we were going to.

We had actually ranked two different countries in Central or South America higher than Tanzania. In part, for me, I wanted to be able to have more Spanish exposure and improve my Spanish, since Anne’s already fluent. And I wanted our children to have that exposure as well.

We subsequently learned that Tanzania was the only place that we had ranked that we would be able to get reciprocal medical licensure through and be able to practice medicine there.

But I would say professionally for me, it was also a bit challenging at first. I really enjoy my work with my patients. I really enjoy doing what I get to do every day that I work. And I had really bonded with my patients over the span of the five years that we were there.

And so having that conversation with my coworkers and my patients—I remember there was a child one day I had been seeing her for five years and I told her that I was going to be leaving. I was going to be doing work in a different country.

And she said, “But Dr. George, they have diseases there. Are you going to be safe?” I said, “They have diseases here, too. That’s why you’re here to see me today. And I’m safe here, it’s okay.” But yeah, it was a challenge, but fast forwarding, it was definitely worth the challenges.

Christina Gebel: That’s incredible. And what were your own kids saying? What was coming up from your kids as you were starting to talk about this in earnest?

Anne Berry: I think that probably is one of the good things about them still being pretty young because Louisa didn’t really—she was so young, she didn’t really have—much to say that I remember, I guess Susanna was, and she was a little bit sad.

Like she was in school, she was in kindergarten, and she was sad to leave her friends and stuff. But like I was saying before, I was so happy. I was so excited. That it was such a wonderful thing for me that I think she was excited, too, and doing this service as part of Maryknoll Missioners. That, that was why we chose Maryknoll Missioners, because they’ve always welcomed families and they have a very strong formation program. And so, before we went to Tanzania, we went to the Knoll in New York. We were there for the whole orientation.

Our family actually went a little bit early so our kids could start school there. They went to a lovely Catholic Montessori, like preschool and kindergarten, called Holy Name of Mary Montessori in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. They were so nice and so welcoming.

That was a great experience for the kids. They loved it. They went to that school together and there was another family in our orientation class who also had two girls who were a little younger than ours. But, that was really nice. They played together, and I think it was a really positive experience for our kids getting ready.

And then when we got to Tanzania, too, our Maryknoll community there, that was very welcoming. The things that were stressful for us too were probably stressful for them, like saying goodbye to our families.

And even my parents, they weren’t exactly, they weren’t happy about it. They obviously were sad that we were going very far, so that part was hard for all of us.

George Stablein: Yeah. Taking away the grandkids.

Anne Berry: Yeah.

George Stablein: Yes. Although we brought them back.

And we visited several times. Yes. I do remember the day that we found out that we were going to Mwanza to Tanzania. Susanna had a very kind of intense initial reaction. I think maybe because we had talked about going to a Spanish-speaking country. I’m not sure. It was also the same day that we had a massive flood in our town, and there was a bunch of people up in our driveway as we lived up on a hill. And we had no power or water, and we were all standing out in the driveway talking when we got the phone call that we were being sent to East Africa, to Tanzania.

And so it was a surreal experience, seeing the river running in front of our house where we didn’t have waterfront property before. And seeing all of our neighbors, all the stuff going on in our town, the uncertainties of a big flood and then learning such a big, life-changing thing at that same time.

It was an emotional day for sure. But that was like the only day I think that there was like the, huh, experience. And then it was, yeah. Then we knew where we were going and that took the uncertainty out of it. Then the question for me, anyway, became more, how am I gonna practice medicine in Swahili?

Christina Gebel: I am interested to get to that. So, you went through the kind of formation process before you left and had all the hard goodbyes, and had the excitement of going, and then you finally land in Tanzania.

There’s probably so much you could say about those first weeks, but what has stayed with you in terms of the challenging and the surprising or the positive, what has stayed with you about those first weeks of transition?

Anne Berry: I remember very clearly when we arrived in Mwanza airport after like several different flights and layovers and like a very long time of [00:19:00] travel with our two quite young children.

I remember this image so clearly of we had the whole pile of our suitcases, ‘cause we had eight suitcases for the four of us. And we had the car booster seat for Louisa and we were all just exhausted. And then we were like standing in this kind of like small kind of room that we had walked in from the tarmac, and it was hot.

George and I were sitting there trying to figure out like how to get like our entry visa and there was just, it was just like very small airport, very, like a little window. People were speaking Swahili and I just looked at the big pile of bags and our two kids that were just both like slumped over, tired, like sleeping on top of the bags, and I do remember having a sense like, oh no, what have we gotten ourselves into? But then after that, that was the hardest part because we had to do that part on our own. But then once we got through and we could go out the airport, then our Maryknoll community was there to welcome us.

And from that [00:20:00] on then they were always there to support and help us. But it was just that moment, it was like, oh my gosh, what do we do?

George Stablein: We do have a couple pictures that periodically pop up on my phone, one of the airports, we were on a layover and the girls were sitting on each side of me.

And by that point we had already been traveling, I don’t know, something like 15, 18 hours and we all had these like very tired looks on our faces. I share that that kind of initial sentiment that Anne just painted very nicely.

There was this feeling of wow. This is an airport surrounded by dirt, and I don’t understand what people are saying to me. And one of the kids was like sitting on the booster seat, like half awake. And we were like pulling them along.

But once we got out, we had some conversations with some of our fellow Tanzania, Lay Missioners. We knew them a little bit, so getting to actually see them and having them grab our bags, load things up into the pickup truck, and drive us to where we were going to be staying. We stayed with another family who had two young children, actually very close to our children’s ages, at their home for I guess, about a week or 10 days. They showed us the ins and outs of what life is like and what you do.

The kids actually took it really in stride. I remember we were there a total of, I think, two, maybe three days. The young woman who helped care for this family’s children was helping us with our kids a bit as we were trying to figure things out.

Louisa, in her little three-year-old self, just toddled over to the woman and reached up for her to pick her up and hugged her right away. I was like, “Oh, okay. Maybe this is going to be okay.” It was just something that stuck with me. It was a really sweet moment.

Christina Gebel: Louisa, the little diplomat. I love it. Yeah. So, you had what sounds like people who acted as a bridge and really welcomed you with open arms and received you and just let you be for a little bit. How was living on your own? I can’t recall if you started your work right away or what daily life was like with kids and schools and all that good stuff?

Anne Berry: One of the things that I just value so much about Maryknoll Lay Missioners is, like I was saying, the formation beforehand and also the language training. All Maryknoll Lay Missioners spend the first three to four months in the country in full-time language training.

So that was our full-time work at that time. George and I did four months of full-time Swahili studies. There was a Swahili language school in another community where some other lay missioners lived that usually people went to for language school.

But so our kids could be in school, and the only international school was in Mwanza. There wasn’t an international school in that other place. The community, before we came, arranged for a teacher who was retired from that language school to come and teach us, just me and George together.

So that was really fun. She came to our house, actually, and we sat out on the porch and had a table and had our books and our things we were studying.

And she came and taught us every day. And that was great. She was wonderful, and that was one of the highlights for me of the beginning of our time there, because I love languages. I was so excited. I was so excited to get to learn a totally new language and Swahili, It’s such a different language. It was so much fun for me to learn it, and our teacher was just lovely. The language school where she had previously taught had been run, I think maybe by Maryknoll in the past. Anyway, it was like a Catholic language school, and so she herself was a devout Catholic.

And so that was fun too because she taught us from the book, the curriculum from the school, but actually even that had some different Catholic things in it. She’d bring her missal in Swahili and things to us and teach us how to say things.

And she even used examples. I remember she would say, for example, in the parable where Jesus says this and this. So it was fun. I’d never learned language through the Catholic prism before.

So that was really fun. She was just a lovely teacher. So that was certainly a highlight for me, and that was our everyday life for the first four months for me and George.

George Stablein: Yeah. Magdalena, our teacher, is really a special person. She was also very, very sweet with our kids whenever they would come home from school or whatever. “Bebe” is grandmother in Swahili, and she was Bebe Magdalena. “Come greet Bebe,” she would say to them, and we had lunch with her every day that she was with us. The language training was really that, the training with her and then also the lived training when you’re going out to the market. That ended up being one of my tasks, was often going to the market and learning.

So I got really good very early on with market Swahili, but the rest of it took a lot more time. We fell into a little bit of the other expat community too. Once we were there, we learned about a significant number of other families who were in missions of various sorts that had their kids there as well.

And we got to know a lot of families. That was a nice experience as well. I think that was good for us with our kids as well. The story about how long it took to start practicing was a bit more protracted. We had a bunch of rather significant difficulty with getting our medical licensure and our documents. The internet infrastructure is sometimes good and sometimes less, and there were definitely times where, you know, like we actually had to go and meet with people in various places to follow up on things that theoretically would’ve been done electronically.

The culmination of that was me taking a 10-hour bus ride to another section of the country to where the medical offices were. In the meantime, I unfortunately had my phone stolen and some other things happened, leading me to hire somebody to drive me to where they thought my phone was.

It was a bit of a fiasco. I survived. I got my phone back in the end. But I left that day with the documents, and then we were able to start practicing. It wasn’t for lack of trying that it took about nine months for us to get all of our documentation so we could practice.

Christina Gebel: That’s like a journey inside of a journey. Wow, that’s incredible. What was practicing like in Tanzania? Can you talk a little bit about what your project goals were or things that you found interesting in terms of the differences, obviously a different-resourced environment? What were some of the things that have stayed with you about your medical practice while you were there?

Anne Berry: For me, that was probably the most difficult thing about being there because I didn’t have a really clear role in my job. A lot of the time, I didn’t feel useful at all. George and I both worked for our main jobs three days a week. We traveled together; we drove about an hour outside of the city of Mwanza, where we lived, to a small Catholic hospital of the Archdiocese of Mwanza in a small fishing village right on the shore of Lake Victoria. George was asked to run the children’s ward. So he was pretty busy running the children’s ward.

I was asked to be the doctor for the reproductive and child health center, which was like an outpatient clinic that was part of the hospital for pregnancy care, prenatal checkups, and checkups for children under five.

The routine prenatal checkups and the routine children’s checkups, vaccines, and weight checks were all done by the nurse midwives. So, they didn’t need me to do any of that routine care, which was fine.

They had a system for that. But the medical director of the hospital told me that by national standard or the requirements for the reproductive and child health center standards, they were supposed to have a doctor or a clinical officer there on-site to do consults for any of the patients who had any problems if they were sick when they came in, or a child wasn’t gaining weight right.

Or if a pregnant mother had high blood pressure or anything like that, that was abnormal. So that was supposed to be my job, and I did that. Part of the challenge was the funding, the way care was funded, because this is a private hospital, owned by the Catholic diocese, so it wasn’t part of the Tanzanian National Health System.

So for most services, patients had to pay fees, but some of the services were funded through the government and Ministry of Health. So, the prenatal checkups and prenatal vitamins and things like that, the routine medicines and things were paid for by government funding.

And also the vaccines and the weight checkups for children under five. All of that was paid for so patients could get that for free. So, everybody could come for those. And people did come; they were pretty busy. But then if a pregnant person had high blood pressure, for example, they could see me and they wouldn’t be charged a doctor visit fee, but for medicine or lab tests they would have to pay for those. Or if a child came in for their weight checkup, but they were also having a fever, then they could see me. I could do the appointment and examine them, but then if I ordered a malaria test, they’d have to pay for that.

And then if they had malaria, they’d have to pay for the medicine. So that side of things was much less busy because a lot of the people in that community were either fishermen or subsistence farmers. As far as I could tell, most of the people who lived in that town called Bukumbi, the majority were subsistence farmers.

So they didn’t have any money. So they couldn’t pay even a small amount. So some days I would see very few or no patients, and maybe not because there weren’t people who needed a consult, but there was nobody who could pay for the medicine and the tests. And people don’t really want to come if they can’t get the medicine and the tests.

So then I felt very frustrated because I knew there were people who needed care, but I couldn’t give it to them because I was in this system where they couldn’t afford it. So that was, yeah, that was very hard.

But I think part of my spiritual growth during that time was to feel like I wasn’t able to be useful. And people that I met, too, that were so patient. So many people in Tanzania just seemed to wait so patiently. And George and I were so frustrated waiting for so long for our license, but then we were seeing people coming for their appointment with their sick child, maybe waiting hours to be seen or something, and not seeming to be impatient about it at all.

So yeah, I think it was definitely [00:31:00] part of my spiritual growth. It was a big challenge for me.

Christina Gebel: Yeah. And before we go to George and how his practice was going, one question I had come up: With tests and medications they couldn’t afford, was there any financial relief there through the Catholic system?

Anne Berry: Yes, they did do some donated care, but it was limited because what was explained to me was that the hospital’s funding was limited—a funding shortfall for some reason that I’m not sure what it was.

And for a couple of months, like the hospital staff didn’t get paid, which was horrible. It was a real strain for all of the other hospital staff. Almost all of them were Tanzanian: the Tanzanian nurses, nurses’ aides, and like the cleaners, and they weren’t getting a paycheck.

Our coworkers were really in a difficult situation there. Yeah, so the hospital really depended on a lot of the money to run the [00:32:00] hospital and to pay—it’s mainly to pay their salaries, which is the biggest cost—on patient fees. So, they limited the kind of donated care to like very extreme situations.

People who were really living in like desperate poverty and had a desperate need for the care, they would give free care in those kind of situations. But like I said, so many of the people living there were subsistence farmers. So there were a lot of people who, yeah, didn’t really have much cash on hand.

And I think the hospital couldn’t necessarily afford to give out free care to all the people.

It was very—it was a hard situation.

Christina Gebel: Yeah. George, turning direction to you, it sounds like you were quite busy. Is that because a lot of the care you provided was covered by that government safety net?

George Stablein: There was some government funding. It was still quite challenging. One of the things that I struggled with, I think the most, working in that [00:33:00] hospital was not being able to care for the patients the way that I wanted to. Sometimes before they could leave the hospital, they had to pay their bill.

And if they couldn’t pay one day, they would then have to stay another night and have to pay another night’s hospital bed. And so what we found was people were very nervous about being admitted and were very keen to leave early, if possible, so that they could afford to leave before their bill got too high.

And because of the small amount of resources that our hospital had, I guess is one way to put it, we didn’t have any sort of intensive care coverage. And so we would send kids or send patients to the city, the city of Mwanza, about an hour away from us for stepping up the care.

But that was very frequently cost-prohibitive for the families. And so I definitely saw several children die because they couldn’t make the trip. They couldn’t afford the trip. Or by the time they got the funding to make the trip, it was too late. So that was a very difficult thing for me to swallow, a different way of experiencing what Anne said, like not feeling as useful. I’m like, I’m here, I’m trying to do this, and it still feels like I’m not able to do what I came to do or what I wanted to do. So that was challenging. One thing that was a lifeline for us.

There was an Italian woman who worked at the hospital, running the HIV care and treatment center, who existed primarily on donations. She had a huge support system back in Italy, or at least it seemed that way. And so when we were stuck and it’s okay, the family cannot afford this, or the hospital is out of this medication and we really need this for the kid, do you have it?

She had a huge heart and was very willing to be supportive and help us out and help the kids out. I felt like she was a bit of a lifeline for us, for me at least, in care of the kids when things got really tough sometimes. We talk about the hospital being a resource in a resource poor setting. Being able to get testing depended on if the machines were working that day and if the lab reagents were in date, or did the power fail and they got too warm?

And they’re no good anymore because we frequently had minimal power. Some days we didn’t have water in the hospital. The water system would fail. Over time you take it in stride. You’re doing this for a prolonged period of time, but it was still just so humbling to me to watch the hospital staff and the patients just kind of, okay, yeah, that’s what’s going on today.

Yeah. We don’t have water today. This is what we do. And they just rolled with it. And in the US, if the water failed in a system where I was working, they closed the building for the day and that just wasn’t an option where we were.

It just kept going. Yeah. So that was intense.

Christina Gebel: I appreciated everything you’ve said about the medical system because my public health brain is geeking out hard on these challenges. But my spiritual brain is also latching onto a theme that I feel like comes up a lot when you commit yourself to service and solidarity.

And for me, I did two years of postgraduate service in teaching, and while it wasn’t the same contextual, limited-resourced environment that you’re talking about, those feelings of, “Am I really being helpful? Am I really being useful?” is something that I think reverberates a lot through people that make bold decisions.

At least for me, and I can only speak for myself, when you make a bold decision, you oftentimes imagine yourself having this commensurate, bold impact. Or you have this idea in your head of what all this effort, all this effort to get there, to have some idea in my head of the change that I had hoped to make.

And you used that word “humbling,” George, and you both talked about just watching families have patience and watching staff have resourcefulness, and how powerful that was for you. What do you think that speaks to spiritually? Or do you remember anything spiritually that helped you? Do you ever feel like you really ever fully turned the corner on that? Or where were the moments of wisdom?

Anne Berry: Yes, that’s a good point, Christina. I had never really thought about it like that, that it’s a huge undertaking to go somewhere and prepare to be able to do the service, and then maybe that makes one think, “I must do something huge when I’m there.” And certainly people talk about that. I’d ask, “Is it really worth it?” That’s a lot of resources. It goes into you and your family getting there.

And did I ever really turn the corner on that? I don’t think I still have because even though I work in a hospital now with lots of resources, I’m still powerless to help a lot of my patients with a lot of their struggles as you with your public health expertise well know in the US as well.

A couple of things for me that were helpful. One, I think, was my formation as a Jesuit volunteer because a lot of the Jesuit spirituality when I did my Jesuit volunteer formation was about that accompaniment is powerful, the spirituality of accompaniment.

I think I’ve seen that in my own experience and heard from other people, too, that a lot of times what touches people or is meaningful to people, it’s not necessarily just what specific thing I can do for them or that any of us can do, but the fact that we cared enough to just go be there.

I’ve learned about that kind of intellectually and then I’ve really seen it. I’ve heard people say, “Wow, you came all the way here.” That is meaningful. And I guess it makes sense, it’s like when someone comes to your birthday party, it’s meaningful that they came for you, not that they’re bringing you a nice present.

I guess we all really know that just another human showing up for us, being there or coming, making the effort to come, is really meaningful. So that kind of spirituality of accompaniment for people like us from a very wealthy, privileged country and our own wealthy, privileged background as doctors, having all the resources and comforts—we still had plenty of resources and comforts in Mwanza, but not all the same ones.

I think choosing to go, like the wonderful Pope Francis called us to go to the margins, right? And in our own small way, we were trying to do that. And the other thing that really helped me also during that whole time.

I always felt so lucky to be part of a faith-based community like Maryknoll. As George said, we knew other foreigners who were there in different capacities, and friends I knew there or knew from other places who were doing international global work or service or development work and sometimes found it really depressing.

So hard to see the point sometimes and felt like, “What’s the point of what we’re doing? We’re not really helping anyone. Sometimes we might be making things worse. This is horrible!” So I just felt so lucky because I had always had this, and still have this, kind of connection to something deeper.

The ultimate thing that’s important is not what we’re doing, but there’s a deeper meaning and a deeper thing that ties us all together as parts of God’s creation. All humans, even the people in Tanzania that I never understood, they never understood me. I felt like there was this chasm between me and people I was meeting there so many times, but on a different level, I still knew that we had that connection, and when I forgot that, our Maryknoll community would also bring us back to that in different ways.

I think that’s just invaluable to have that deeper level of meaning and reason for being there. It’s like it didn’t have to have a logical explanation for being there because I had a different kind of explanation for being there.

George Stablein: I think for me it was that moment of the time where I felt honestly the most useless or paralyzed by a system, trying to do what I wanted to do and not being able to do it, and having this feeling like we moved here and I can’t even practice medicine because I can’t get my license. And I just remember having these conversations with Anne. And Anne was a tremendous support for me at that time, encouraging me to allow myself to be open to the accompaniment part of it, and while she talks about that being a challenge for her as well.

I honestly feel like she didn’t show it nearly as much as I did. She was very supportive of me and getting me through that. For me, there were a few things: While we were learning our language and learning Swahili and waiting for the documentation to come through for us to practice, I had been placed in a group that was started by a Maryknoll-affiliated organization. One of the priests from Maryknoll started the parent group, but it was a group for kids with families of children with special needs. And so it was children with cerebral palsy and spina bifida and hydrocephalus, and some of them were very neurologically impaired.

But this organization [00:43:00] brought them together to do a support group for the parents and do some therapy for the children—physical therapy in particular. And they brought me on initially to learn healthcare-based Swahili, but then they also had me be a part of the group.

So I would just sit there and listen in the support group and just hear the parents talk about the challenges they were facing and the things that they were doing and the stigma that they faced having a special needs child and the difficulties in a terrain that was definitely not easily navigable by foot, let alone by wheelchair.

And how they just welcomed me in, and I had tea and treats with them every day that I went. And I was another part of the group. And then another group that I was a part of was a group for kids with spina bifida and cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus specifically.

When I showed up at the house where they were staying for any kind of care and any kind of support for them, they were [00:44:00] always so grateful and so kind and so sweet. I would leave there thinking, did I really change anything? Did I really provide any medical care?

But it was just the accompaniment piece, really. And a lot of the time I felt like they were being listened to and somebody really cared that they were struggling and needed help.

When I really was struggling at times, I feel incredibly blessed to have had the opportunity to go on retreat there a few different times. There was a priest and a Maryknoll lay missioner who started something called the Lake House of Prayer that was built around silent meditation and bringing quiet to your day-to-day life and contemplative retreat.

And they established the Lake House of Prayer for all-comers. And so they would have workers in the community who needed to get away, just for a day. Their idea was to provide retreat for anybody. And so we had several times as lay missioners that we went there as a group for a weekend [00:45:00] retreat.

And for me, that was one of the most kind of recharging, amazing things that just really brought me back to the realization that it didn’t really matter why I was there, but more that I was there. And I am really grateful for that.

Anne Berry: And also we got to do spiritual direction.

George Stablein: Yeah.

Anne Berry: At the Lake House of Prayer too. George and I were able to start doing that like once a month. That was also a really good support, I think, for both of us. We were able to set up where we would go up together and then that was really helpful, too.

Christina Gebel: Really hearing you both talk about this, again, it’s bringing me back to my own examples of service. And when I was in Nicaragua, I was in a home with kids with special needs. And a lot of them were in wheelchairs, and I remember they gave me a rag and just told me to swat flies when they landed on the kids.

And I remember thinking like, oh man, do you wanna ask me to do anything else? But they were like, [00:46:00] no, this is what we need you to do.

Or I think of Jim O’Connell, who did the medical care with homeless folks in Boston. And he showed up very well-versed in medicine and so many things, and they gave him a bowl and said, start washing people’s feet. Like foot care among the homeless is where it all starts. And here’s your bowl and here’s your rag. And he talks about that moment for him, and I love that you tie that into what you had available to you on a faith level.

Because as someone who’s also very concerned about social justice, without my faith, I think for me it would be a lot harder to get to those places of realization and wisdom about our common humanity and why we are there and all those things.

I wanna switch gears a little bit ‘cause I know our time is not limitless, which I regret. Two other questions I wanted to ask you were, what were the kids doing during this time, what were [00:47:00] they doing and what was it like to go to church and what was your faith like as a family?

Anne Berry: Oh yeah, going to church. That was fun because at first I thought I wanna go to Mass in Swahili. That will help me learn Swahili because I know what the Mass is. Occasionally we did go to some Masses in Swahili, but we found out that masses in Tanzania, the Swahili Masses are really long and I guess the homily is like super, super long.

And I thought our kids already don’t necessarily love going to Mass, so now I’m going to tell them they have to come to the two-and-a-half-hour Mass and sit through the homily, which will be like an hour, and they won’t understand it at all.

They may leave the Catholic church and never come back. So, we then found out there was a Mass in English. It was a Jesuit parish in the city of Mwanza and a pretty good-sized Jesuit community, meaning I think there were like six or eight Jesuits. And most of them were African Jesuits from different African countries.

But one was this wonderful Jesuit from Boston who had lived many years in Indonesia and also in the Middle East. And he’s an amazing guy. And then he was teaching at the Jesuit University outside of Mwanza. And he lived in that community, and he celebrated Mass in English every Sunday.

So, we started going to his Mass, and I mean there were some other people from the U.S. and other countries that went, but most of the people who went were Tanzanians. We got to know him very well because then we’d be like, “Hey!” And he was very friendly.

He was very friendly to everyone. He was such a nice guy. And I’m still in touch with him. He’s wonderful. So that was great. Even that Mass was different than other Masses, but it was in English. Our kids understood it. It was also cool because Susanna got to make her First Communion when we were there.

And there was another family that joined Maryknoll while we were there. And they had three kids, and their younger child was Susanna’s age, so they were both going to celebrate their First Communion.

And Father Jim, the Jesuit, we asked him about it, like if he would, could they do a first communion in English and preparation in English. And I said, “I’ll help out if you need help or whatever.” So, he put this thing together and he basically taught most of the prep. He was enthusiastic about it. And I think it was like maybe six or eight kids.

And they had their First Communion. They planned the whole thing. And it was great. It was like a very special and unique experience.

I think for Susanna and our family, a very different way to celebrate her First Communion than if we had just stayed in West Virginia for sure.

George Stablein: I too enjoyed the Mass at Nyakahoja, the church that we went to. And Father Jim is a very entertaining guy.

He was a good friend. So your other question about what the kids were doing. They went to a school called the Isamilo International School. It was an international school on the Cambridge curriculum.

While we were there, it was virtual learning because of COVID. But most of the time when we were there, we would drive them there in the morning. And one of the other families would carpool with us in addition to their classes.

They also would tell stories about the monkeys stealing their sandwiches or their lunches, and they thought it was great that they had to have monkey-proof trash cans on the school campus. And Susanna got into the choir. They briefly had a choir teacher there, and Susanna got excited about that and joined that.

Anne Berry: And they got to swim.

George Stablein: And they, yeah. And that actually is, that’s nice. One of the things that

Anne Berry: Really well,

George Stablein: they learned to swim very well because where we were in Tanzania, it was nearly 75 to 85 degrees year-round. And there were a few different coaches.

And one of the people who directed it was an expat from the U.S. It was called the Mwanza Swim Club. And our kids got very good, and that was their big extracurricular activity. And they got quite fit, quite good in the water and actually continued that a fair amount after we got back to the U.S. for a while.

Anne Berry: And that was at their school. That was one of the advantages because their school had this swimming pool, which was an outdoor, it’s pretty basic, the swimming pool is not fancy, so even like Louisa, when she started preschool there, even the preschool kids went one day a week. They would go and like in the shallow end they would teach ‘em swimming.

It was great. I’ve always felt really happy. That was an extra perk. Yeah. Our kids got to be really good swimmers because then I never had to worry about them if we were at the beach or something.

I was really happy for them to get to go to an international school because I got to go to an international school when I was growing up, and I always thought that was such a wonderful experience, and I wish more kids could have that, to get to go to school with other kids from all over the world.

And teachers from all over the world, too. Our kids had teachers from lots of different places, both in Africa and Europe and the U.S. I think that’s really special. It reminded me in some ways of my childhood, although this school was very different from the school I went to, but some things were the same, like kids in different places.

And like the school lunch option at the school canteen, the lunch lady who ran the canteen was Indian because there was an Indian community in Mwanza, Indian Tanzanians who had been there for generations. She was a really good cook, so it was delicious Indian food. Susanna really loved it, especially since she’d always get the school lunch, and she was like, “Oh, I love Miss Darcy’s lentil dahl. It’s so great!” Much better than the cafeteria food in Durham.

George Stablein: What did you have for lunch today? Oh, I had biryani.

Anne Berry: We’re jealous

Christina Gebel: I love that. Oh my gosh. Yeah, way better than I think what commonly gets served here. I know we’re closing our conversation, and the talk about swimming actually reminds me of what I hope we can end on, which is, besides swimming prowess and high expectations for school lunch, what did you as a family unit really leave with that you think has contributed to your ongoing faith formation?

Anne Berry: One of the things that I value so much about our time as Maryknoll Lay Missioners is that we as a family were part, and actually are still part, of this incredible group of people who all share a commitment to service based on faith and are living that out in all different ways and are from all different backgrounds and of all different ages in particular.

I really loved that, and I think that is something really unique that our family otherwise didn’t have a chance to be part of, definitely the fact that we’re still part of that community. Last year, we got to go and be part of the Jubilee celebration of Maryknoll Lay Missioners and meet with people that we knew from our time in mission and other people that we hadn’t met before who had done mission service in different times and places and with our kids as well.

I feel so, so happy that we were able to give our kids that experience to see people of different ages, different professions, but choosing to live their life in service, in faith-based service. I think our kids will be able to carry that with them for their lives.

George Stablein: Two things, and this is largely around the kids, but I think it was eye-opening for me as well. One was, we were cautioned to be careful not to give out money and things like that.

Because the needs were endless, and we were there to help meet needs but in other ways. So, one day, we were leaving church, and somebody asked us for money. And I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t.” And we left, and one of the children said, “But Daddy, we can help them. We can afford it.” And so there were these little, small, I guess, equivalent of a 10-cent bag of little roasted peanuts that you could get at the market.

They were along the sides of the road everywhere; people were selling them. And so, we would stock up our peanut bags in the glove box of our car, and when we would leave every [00:55:00] Sunday from Mass, the kids would roll down the windows and hand out the bags of peanuts to all the people who were waiting.

And they really wanted to do something. They saw a need and wanted to do it in their own little way. And I loved that. And I still see that kind of in them now, like how they want to help other people who are in need.

Again, that kind of desire for service and that kind of drive to do it. And I also see my kids, and I see myself this way as well. Now, I’m so grateful that my children got to be raised for three years in a completely different culture.

Something completely different than their own. They were the outsiders coming in, and while it wasn’t always perfect, feeling the acceptance of being an outsider coming in, I see them now so much more just willing to accept people for who they are, and for many of us, there’s the human tendency to judge whether we should or not.

They’re so much more willing and so much more able [00:56:00] to, I feel like, meet people where they are or see people for who they are and accept them. And I’m really grateful that they got that lesson early on.

Christina Gebel: Wow. That is powerful.

And what a beautiful note to conclude with. And my hope in doing this series is that not everybody will move abroad and do service as a family, but you talking about how these experiences were formative, and I think families can seek experiences like that even in their own neighborhood.

And it will continue to form them as this has formed you, and what a gift your example of doing this will be to, I think, many who are listening and who will say, “Maybe I can do something like that. Maybe we can be outsiders somewhere and learn some of the humility and love and acceptance of community,” [00:57:00] so I really want to thank you all, and if you have any final words, please do share.

Anne Berry: This is my final word: there are some things I really love about being Catholic, and one of the things is that special place in our faith, I think, that we have for mystery because the spirituality of accompaniment and just going and being with people, that is enough and that is worth it.

But then on the other hand, like you were talking about, Christina, there’s social justice and public health, and so many of our patients and the people that we met there are suffering injustices.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and we want to change them. And I’m saying one thing, but then how can those things both be true? I’m just there to accompany people, but these things are wrong and they have to change. People are suffering.

And then I think it’s okay because those are both true. And so I’m like, oh, I’m so glad I’m Catholic, because we can just be like, maybe it’s a mystery. I don’t understand how [00:58:00] they can both be true, and that’s okay.

Christina Gebel: And what a better thing to learn, especially early on and in the family, than to be able to sit with that and to learn how to navigate it in the context of faith. Anne and George, thank you so much for sharing so intimately the details of your journey and how it affected your family and your faith. And I know that many people will appreciate these moments and these bits of wisdom for many days to come.

George Stablein: Thank you, Christina.

Anne Berry: Thank you very much.

I have a good friend here, Casey Stanton, who wears many incredible hats, but I will let her talk about all the incredible things that she does, and she was so kind to come on the podcast today to talk about not only just the work she does, but how it relates specifically to her family life. So, with that, Casey, welcome.

Would you like to introduce yourself?

Casey Stanton: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited. I’m Casey Stanton, Co-director and Co-founder of Discerning Deacons, which is an [00:01:00] organization seeking to serve the discernment in the Church about women in the diaconate. So, we’re trying to grow the imagination and serve this question, which has been alive and studied in the church for the last 50 plus years.

Christina Gebel: Amazing, and we could have a whole episode series archive of audio, just discussing the tremendous efforts that are going on with Discerning Deacons right now, which if you haven’t gotten in touch with them, you absolutely should.

But we’re actually here today to talk about that work in light of a decision that you made, and it directly relates to the Synods that were happening globally. And so maybe you could just start us off, first of all, what is a Synod? And then in true Church language awesomeness, what is a Synod on Synodality? [00:02:00] And tell me how you came to be involved.

Casey Stanton: Great question. So, this was very much at the heart of Pope Francis’ vision for how the Church was being called to live its mission in the world today, to try to invite the Holy Spirit to be heard through every corner of Church life and out in the world, and to ask the question afresh:

What does it mean for the church to journey with you in your life wherever you are, whoever you are, whether you’re in the Church or not, if you’re outside of it? So, it was a process and a path to try to open up a space for renewal in the Spirit. The first Synod is in the Acts of the Apostles.

It’s really constitutive of the church. It’s saying, okay, once Jesus left, how do we continue to discern together what is the will of the Spirit for the community of those seeking to follow the way of [00:03:00] Jesus? And so, a Synod is a path of gathering, discerning together, and trying to find the way forward.

So, in the Council of Jerusalem, there’s this debate about will new members have to be circumcised. And it’s really a crisis of identity for the community. And the miracle of it is, they come to this kind of middle way, they’re negotiating their life together. What are we gonna do? And what’s funny is that in the next chapter, they do something very different.

It just shows that Church politics has always been messy. Doing life together has always been messy. But the beautiful part about doing life together, inspired by and grounded in the witness of Jesus and the Gospels, is that we do trust that we’re not doing it alone, and that it’s not a purely human endeavor.

And so, I think what was pretty bold and faith-filled was when Pope Francis called for a global Synod on this theme of Synodality. It was really rolling the dice on the Holy Spirit and the people of God and saying a Church structure that has a lot of distance between bishops and those who make decisions and the people of God in their daily lives and their struggles isn’t a Church that’s walking together.

And so, it was really a journey that, you know, in the wake of abuse scandals, in the wake of so many challenges facing our world and humanity, was an invitation for bishops, especially, to turn their attention towards an intentional exercise of listening to ground their own leadership.

And as Pope Francis would often talk about, he wanted bishops to smell like their sheep.

And so, as Pope Francis has since passed, I think one of the miraculous things about the election of Pope Leo the 14th is that Pope Leo in his previous role as the head of the Dicastery of Bishops, was deeply involved in the Synod. He participated in all the sessions, and there was a sense that Cardinals had elected someone who was going to continue on this path of Synodality. Pope Francis is onto something.

This is the way the Church is called to move in the world, that it can’t just be bishops in diocesan offices making decisions that then people follow, but that actually, there’s this more complex dynamic of how we are discerning how we are living the mission today. So that was the Synod and Synodality, and Pope Francis called for it in 2021.

It kicked it off, but he had been on a steady path of this, transforming this entity of the Synod. It had been a Synod of bishops, and he was encouraging it to be more participatory all the way up to the Synod on Synodality, where he was really saying we need to reflect on this as the way we move in the world so that we can hold difficult topics.

We could learn to have conversations without canceling each other or resorting to enemy camps. I think it’s an invitation for the Church to be a model for humanity, for [00:06:00] how to live with conflict and how to move as a global community in all its complexity. I think the Synod I could talk about all day, which is part of what we’re talking about today, but I could just see the imagination of that, like what Pope Francis was doing throughout his papacy as I was following it.

And it felt like a thing worth trying to trust in. And we’re at a time where it’s hard to trust in institutions. It’s definitely hard to trust in people that have power and in our leaders. And part of what was remarkable as the Synod began was that it was truly an invitation to everyone.

Everyone was invited to try to find a way to participate, to initiate participation, and to participate. That, to me, rings of the Gospel: this radical welcome and invitation to meet everybody where they are and hear where they are and figure out how we’re connected. And that’s a good use of our time to try to do that.

And I [00:07:00] think in the US, there’s skepticism. I think some people felt that this was going to lead to changes that we want. And other people were afraid, oh, this is just some Trojan horse kind of process that’s going to make the Church wildly more progressive and change all these rules and stuff.

And it was neither of those things. Instead, it really is an invitation to try to become the people of God and try to learn in this generation what that means. So, I was deeply compelled by the vision and just went all in. As we were just getting started with Discerning Deacons, we went to the opening mass of the Synod around October ‘21.

And we were journeying with women who had participated in the Synod on the Amazon, and that really was like them starting to carve the new path of deeply participatory processes that surface what are the needs and hungers of the people of God that need to be [00:08:00] addressed and prioritized for us to move forward.

And so, meeting these women who’d led the process across the Amazon and who’d participated in the Amazon Synod as observers—non-voting members, but part of this experience—I just really felt, “Oh, this feels like a way to let the Spirit in.” And it invites us to think of ourselves more as a people on the way, as a pilgrim people as opposed to a people that have all the answers or as just part of an all-knowing church that already knows where we need to go and what we need to do.

Christina Gebel: Yeah. Yeah, that’s huge. And thank you for laying the groundwork for explaining that because as somebody who wasn’t as closely involved or even, I think I was aware that it was going on, but the Synod on Synodality piece, I could see my Catholic nun elementary school teacher being like, “You can’t define a word with using the word!” I was stuck on this, what does it mean. I love the part when you brought up that Pope Leo was in attendance. I remember Father Jim Martin saying, Oh, Pope Leo was at my table at the Synod. At the time, he was a Cardinal. Wow, what a great person to have at your table, because he then became Pope! Great seating arrangements. So,

Casey Stanton: Yes. [laughs]

Christina Gebel: So you, Casey, were just really onboard with what the vision was, but then you made a decision to be a part of it in a really tangible way. And that also involved your family, which is what this series is about. Many families just sat in the pews and said, Okay, what do we need to do? Sure. Great. Maybe they had an opinion, but your family is special. And that’s what I would love to hear about from you in your own words.

Casey Stanton: Yeah. So, in terms of our family in this season, my kids were eight and 10. So my husband and I had often dreamt of could we do a missionary season in our family life? We both want to root our own family life deeply in the heart of the Church, and we want our kids to see that the Church is bigger than our local parish, as much as we love and are anchored in our local parish. I think we both were deeply shaped by immersive experiences abroad.

My husband spent some time in El Salvador when he was pretty young. And it really deeply shaped his whole worldview and his understanding of the urgency of the Gospel around people’s material needs. And the work of peacebuilding is not abstract. So, it was a dream in the heart of our marriage, and we just weren’t ever sure when the time would be and when to disrupt your life. You’re raising your kids, you’re doing your jobs, you’re trying to do right. And, actually, I was on a retreat with a group of women—it’s a dangerous time—just with some dear, close, old friends. And at the same time, one of my oldest friends from childhood was towards the end of a losing battle with cancer.

Walking with a friend as they die, you have to ask yourself, like, what am I doing with my life? And if I weren’t afraid and took risks, what would it look like? And so, in this time of retreat and in this season of accompanying a friend in this sort of tragic and beautiful, untimely end of her life.

I just had this sense of call to go: what if you went all in? What would it mean to try to trust and lean into the fullness of what you think the Church really is and what it [00:12:00] means to be following in the Spirit that’s actually the one holding it all together? And so, I came home and proposed this to Phillipe, my husband, and I had just dreamed this sort of whirlwind of a world tour.

I don’t know what it would be, but there are these points that had called to us in the world in Chiapas, which is one of the southernmost states in Mexico. There’s this remote community. It’s a Jesuit mission. And I had heard for years about the deacons there, and how there are hundreds of deacons, and how deacons’ wives are integral to the ministry that they carry out, and how the deacon ordination liturgies are these gorgeous celebrations where both a husband and wife are kneeling together in this sort of sacred circle, and the ordination looks like it is [00:13:00] bestowing a blessing on both of them.

And I just had this image and this curiosity and knew some folks who had done some work there. And it also happened that my husband works with the Economy of Francesco, which is this community of faith-driven, Catholic-driven entrepreneurs and folks who are trying to figure out what it means to really do social and ecological good through the private sector. And so, he is very interested in cooperatives, worker-owned cooperatives. So, it just so happens that in this remote community, in Chiapas, there’s this super rad coffee-growing cooperative.

It’s all these deacons who are coffee growers, but it was this ministry that started by the Jesuits: an indigenous-led community cooperative that owns every part of the means of production.

So, it’s not just fair trade where they’re selling it at a fair market, but they actually own it. And you buy Capeltic coffee in a coffee shop in Mexico City, and anything [00:14:00] in that profit train is going back into the community. So, this was a dream that Phillipe and I had of what it would be to journey to this place that feels like this Venn diagram of our lives and our marriage, and so that was some of the dream. And then I could just keep thinking of other places, and we decided to lead Discerning Deacons members. Instead of having a conference together at the end of this sort of first phase of the Synod, we thought, What if we went on a pilgrimage to Mexico City to Our Lady of Guadalupe?

And we worked with the women from the Amazon to plan this really remarkable pilgrimage together to really be offering up the work that we’re doing and seeking Our Lady of Guadalupe’s intercession and her prayer for the Americas, and to ask for her wisdom and her blessing on this journey that we were finding ourselves on, this beginning of a Synodal journey.

So I think it was a time to enter into a pilgrimage and a spirit of pilgrimage. And I wasn’t going to do that away from my family. I was going to do it with them. So we proposed this to our children [00:15:00] eight and ten (years old). And one of the ways, when we were proposing it, was that we guaranteed that in every place we went, we would make sure that we tried the local frozen novelty.

So, whatever it was, whether it was gelato in Italy or what kinds of frozen treats we could find anywhere on the streets of Mexico. And that became a bit of sweetening the deal for them as we told them we were going to leave our home for six to 12 months. And yeah,

Christina Gebel: That was going to be one of my questions. What sweetened the deal for the kiddos?

Casey Stanton: Yes.

Christina Gebel: Eight and ten. Putting myself back in that timeframe as much as I can remember. Your routine is everything: your school friends, your activities. So, were they just, Hey, if we get gelato, we’re in?

Casey Stanton: Yeah.

I think they were normal kids about it. I think we felt that we were at a time in their life where they [00:16:00] weren’t so entirely peer-driven that they weren’t open to it. And so, I think it did feel like this opportunity to go on a family adventure. I remember being in the backseat of the taxi when we had landed at the airport in Chiapas and we were taking the road to San Cristóbal, which is a fairly long drive. And there weren’t seat belts in the back. And my son, the 8-year-old, turned to me and he was like,

“The pilgrimage is really starting now, Mom!” It was just because it hadn’t gotten real to him. And we were bobbing and weaving around these trucks on these tiny two-lane roads up in the mountains, and they realized, Okay, yeah. We are somewhere else.

We got to go to Palenque, which is, The side of an ancient civilization, and the fruits of it we’re seeing now a couple of years later, as they are more confident in their Spanish class. They’re better Spanish speakers than I am at this point, and their interest in ancient civilizations and their openness to the world.

At the [00:17:00] time, I think like any kid, there was a discomfort and wrestling and little bits of complaining. And they would roll their eyes because we were talking church stuff all the time a little bit. But I think they did get to take it in.

Because we received so much hospitality on the journey, and I think that’s what the final document of the Synod talks about. The church is relationships and pathways, and that’s what it felt like. Really, the living Church on earth is a set of relationships.

And so we would be with one woman in Mexico City, and then she was telling us, Okay, if you’re going to Europe, are you thinking of going to Paris? Because I have people I could connect you with there. And we’re like, “We weren’t really thinking of that, but if you’re going to connect us with people who want to receive us, like, sure, why not?”

So it was just being open to where the journey was going to go. It was marvelous. So we spent the first leg in Mexico, and then the second leg was in Europe. And we were in Rome for a good long time. So it was a beautiful opportunity to connect with people who are part of [00:18:00] the Synod process. It really is where all the roads lead to in the church.

Yeah. Leaders of religious orders who are based there and folks doing all kinds of work in the church. But then we did go to France, and I am a product of the Sacred Heart Schools, so the Society of the Sacred Heart, which was founded by St. Madeleine Sophie Barat. And so, the only thing I knew I would want to do in Paris...I’m not someone who studies a lot about French life and Parisian culture or anything like that. I knew her remains were at a church in Paris. And so we were hosted in this amazing apartment, and just this incredible hospitality and generosity when people heard what we were trying to do.

And we go to this church that just happens to be the church next door, and we go there. It’s a rainy Saturday evening vigil mass. And we’re walking around this gorgeous, huge cathedral at the end, and Philippe says, “You’re not going to believe this.” “What?” He says, “Get over here.”

And there’s St. Madeleine Sophie Barat! Of all the churches in France and all the apartments we could [00:19:00] stay in. So, I was like, okay, here we go. This was the point. We were following the threads. And along the way, we were connecting with people who were involved in the Synod. So, we were just trying to ask religious orders: What does this mean for you? What does it mean in your context? What is Synodality here and in Mexico Especially in Chiapas, it was just the way of doing church. This was what had been deeply rooted in terms of “See. Judge. Act.” and responding to the needs.

And so, seeing the way this was already lived in a way that felt different from the way I had experienced church growing up as a kid in Boston or in my adult years, it was really encouraging. I thought, oh, this is not new. This is not some newfangled thing. This is a deeply Vatican II methodology that is trying to be reinvigorated.

And then similarly, there was a Jesuit parish in Madrid, and they really had gone all in on Synodality and the process. And so I was just sitting with the pastor reflecting on it, asking what came up? And part of it is that, at its surface, there are conflicts; you have to be willing to stomach some conflicts.

And it calls forth a certain maturation of the faith because we have to acknowledge what we are resistant to about changing because it’s the way it was when we were kids and we like it that way, versus how we are really having an active faith with God now.

What does that mean? And at that point, I mean, they were shifting around the way they did the homily. It was becoming more dialogical. And I mean, they were really taking to heart this invitation to think about how to become a more participatory church. What does that mean, liturgically?

What does that mean in terms of the ministries we do? What does that mean at all these levels? So, I was holding the questions of the Synod everywhere I went. And then we were just following where relationships pointed us along the way.

Christina Gebel: Wow. That’s incredible. What Spirit and also what courage! Actually, as you were painting the picture of y’all in the taxi, I got this [00:21:00] flashback to Miss Frizzle in the Magic School bus.

This is like the magic Synod Taxi. It’s like, “Kids, we’re not just gonna read about this, we’re gonna get in and we are gonna go.”

Casey Stanton: Exactly. That’s a great image. Yes.

Christina Gebel: Yeah.

Casey Stanton: Yeah. I was probably more like Ms. Frazzle on a lot of it.

Christina Gebel: Yeah. I want to ask you about that.

Making any trip as a family, whether by plane, train, bus, or automobile, can involve a lot of trepidation and worries. People might get sick, or kids might not be feeling it, or whatever. And one thing that I’ve always just admired about you and the fact that you made this decision is you really went for it.

Were there any times that it landed, “Oh, this is tough”?

And what did you do with that?

Casey Stanton: Yeah. So I think, like any pilgrimage—and I think this is true about the Synod, too—when you set forth to [00:22:00] make a journey, you might have an idea about what it’s going to be about, but all the inner work ends up being often the real work and what it really is about. Me and my family going on a Synod pilgrimage didn’t change the Synod, but it changed us.

There was a book that someone had recommended that I started reading on this journey that was really about intimacy and relationships and family. And as we were on it, I just found myself wanting to read it.

Because in some ways, we were taken away from all the distractions and all the busyness, so we didn’t have all the activities and social commitments and all this other stuff. It was like we were figuring out what we were going to do together, and we were just spending more time together than ever.

It was really an opportunity, I think, for me to see how I was being the mom that my actual human children needed me to be, and what were [00:23:00] the stories and scripts inside my own head that I needed to acknowledge were active, and I needed to set aside so that I could really be present to my kids.

There was a day in Rome, I think my husband and I will never forget. It was like my daughter just really fell apart, she was done. She had fallen apart. She was maxed all the way out. She’s 11 at this point, I think, on the journey.

And she just wouldn’t move; she was just having a full scene in the street.

It was just a full scene; it was like she was not to be moved. She was so upset. She just had a torrent of emotion coming out of her. And I think I just had some old scripts in me that were like she needs to act this way, or she’s not going to make it in the world; you need to correct her about this—all this stuff. The impact of the stories in my head were just leading her to feel judged by me and not [00:24:00] loved infinitely. She just, I think, felt judged and not really seen and not really heard and not really understood.

So, I think her falling apart and me realizing I want to be a different parent, I want to have a different relationship with my kids—that is honest and real, where they can trust me, where they actually know I’m on their side.

I don’t just say that and they’re empty words. So I think there was some healing to do in our own family system, in what had kept me from feeling like I could be as intimate and present as I wanted to be. Yeah. And so, I think the journey was as much about that, too; it was about our own family deepening and me having space to acknowledge the places where I was still in need of conversion.

Christina Gebel: Wow. That’s powerful on so many [00:25:00] levels, both as a mom and as a pilgrim and as a person of faith. When I think of family trips, I think this could go one of two ways: we could all come out closer or we could all come out a little spicier, right?

While you were describing that, when I was on the Camino—and granted it was just me, myself, and I—But the way that a pilgrimage strips away everything and forces you to confront those scripts is so powerful. For me, it was like, I’m going to go on the Camino. I’m going to be Reese Witherspoon on Wild. And I’m going to have this triumphant journey. It was at a really rough point in my life, and I struggled so hard. Like, I spun the Camino Wheel of Challenges and I hit every one. Oh no. And that’s what I [00:26:00] realized while I was convalescing for a week I don’t even know what. Yeah. I was like, wow. I really had an idea of how I thought this was going to go and what the lesson was going to be.

But actually, God was like, I need you to focus right now on what is real, and you need to confront these parts of yourself. What’s amazing is that you all did that as a family. Like, what a powerful opportunity to be on pilgrimage together! Do you see the fruits of that? Even now, how has that shaped your family identity since you’ve returned?

Casey Stanton: In so many ways. In so many ways. My best friend died in May that year, and then we set off in July, and it was a real shattering for my family of origin. Our families are very intertwined, and you know how at these threshold [00:27:00] moments, if you’re a person who follows family systems or anything like that, everything gets renegotiated on those thresholds. And it was a pretty rough renegotiation. And so, I think both my own family of origin was in a time of real breakage and then I was on this journey to try to reckon with that.

And try to figure out how I wanted to be a more loving mother and life partner. And the gift of the pilgrimage was it was this space to, like you said, be stripped down and confronted with that. We did discern that we weren’t sure if we were going to go for a whole year.

And then the Synod itself extended by a year, the process. Pope Francis extended the process, and after about six months, as we were hitting December, I thought our kids needed to go home. I think it’s time. I think that the graces of this have been real and received, and that the kids should [00:28:00] go back to school.

So, we had done some homeschooling over here on the road, but we discerned that it felt like this is at its end. And there was a little sense of loss or failure, like if we were supposed to keep going? But again, there was no script for this.

We were discerning it as we went. And so I think as we returned, it was not an uncomplicated reentry back into life. But I do think that over the next one to two years, I think one of the biggest pieces I saw, especially with my relationship with my eldest daughter, was her really believing I was on her team. We had weathered something together, and now she’s almost 14; she’s going to start high school this fall. And I feel that she really trusts me, and she’ll come to me with real stuff. And I also know more clearly what’s fine to do and [00:29:00] what’s fine to let go of. So, I think those are some of the fruits of that time.

We came back and we were open to a new season in our family life, and I pretty quickly got pregnant. And so now we have Oscar. There’s a big gap in those kids, but it feels like an extension of the pilgrimage.

It was like a whole saying yes to our family life together and doubling down on it. Sometimes you just want to escape your family life. You’re like, This is a lot. I can’t wait until they’re grown and gone and we can get my freedom back.

But I think through the pilgrimage, I really felt, No, these are the people I want to love more than anything in the world. And I felt that I was on a journey to learn how to love them more. And the fruit of that was openness to receiving more children, which I think before then I had been reluctant about, because I thought, I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I have it in me.

I don’t know. And I think it’s because my own understanding of love and intimacy needed healing. So we went on a wild ride, and they became siblings to a little baby.

Christina Gebel: Yeah.

Casey Stanton: Yeah.

Christina Gebel: I can’t wait until Oscar’s older. [00:30:00] And he’s like, “You all did what?”

Casey Stanton: Yeah.

Christina Gebel: He’ll know. I was like, That’s incredible. And honestly, obviously being a birth doula, the timing of all that is not lost on me. It is just like this new life, right? This re-creation, this generative energy. And something that came to me while you were speaking was that we really are pilgrims as a family on the life journey.

Casey Stanton: Yes,

Christina Gebel: You all went on a pilgrimage, but this is kind of the big Pilgrimage with the capital P.

And I know our time is winding down, and I just have a couple more questions for you. One is, the point of this series with Radical Family is not for somebody to sit here and listen and say, “Oh my gosh, that’s amazing, but I could never do that.”

The point is to hear stories like yours, from your family, from your work, and say, “That stirs something in me.” And it might even just be like a little wisp of a flame, [00:31:00] and it inspires. These are topics that deepen faith and inspire action on this podcast. So, what would you say to somebody that’s listening to you, that’s listening to other episodes, hearing families talk about these incredible journeys of faith. How would you encourage them or what wisdom would you impart to them if they’re just starting to get these whispers of an idea or a direction to go in?

Casey Stanton: I think I’d say, trust the whisper. I caught this vision in March, and we didn’t leave until July. There was lots of discerning and considering, and talking to folks and asking questions. There was a book that someone handed me; it was called like Family Sabbaticals. Oh, great, someone has written a book on this!

I’m not the first one. And of course there are a ton of people who’ve done stuff like this and all kinds of research on how to pack really light. Everyone’s just gonna have a backpack. What are we taking with us? [00:32:00] Don’t take a lot for the journey, but I think whatever we’re called to, it’s not that everybody’s called to make that particular journey, but I do think we’re all called to learn to trust and follow the whisper and to allow ourselves to be surprised and to not be so afraid to risk. That’s the gift of the invitation. You kind of risk walking on water, right? You risk doing something that you can’t quite imagine doing without faith. And that happens, I think, in so many settings, like whether it’s discerning can walls can expand in our house so we could take in people that need a place to stay right now, or where we can stretch to make the food go farther that we need to steward for those who need it. I feel like there are so many people who are filled up with generosity and kindness, and I think what was humbling on this trip for us was that [00:33:00] we were on the receiving end of hospitality.

We got to Spain, and it had become winter and we had started out in July in Mexico. And so, we didn’t have winter gear, and we met this marvelous family through these different Jesuit networks and connections, and they just literally pulled these two coats out of the closet to hand to my kids.

It’s just being ready to give and give freely and then also to name when you have needs and to receive them. And so it was that kind of exchange of gifts that I think also is inside the whisper, that we all have things to give and we all have needs that we need to ask for help to meet and to receive from others. Sometimes we just keep all that to ourselves. And so, I think sometimes the whisper is to speak some of it out loud. Speak the vulnerabilities out loud, speak the wildest dreams out loud, write the book, start the band like

Christina Gebel: yeah.

Casey Stanton: Yeah.

Christina Gebel: That’s,

Casey Stanton: do the podcast.

Christina Gebel: This really was my whisper. Yeah. Yeah. To be frank. And the first [00:34:00] series was on Acedia and how the False Spirit starts saying: Who are you to start a podcast? And our call is to push back against that and say, I’m a created child of God.

And to discern our way through those doubts and those fears. So, I’d like to end our conversation with where we started, which was back on the Synod piece of all of this. You all as a family participated in a really real way. But many families experienced the Synod through news articles, the internet, in the pews, or whatever messages were told to them about the Synod from the pulpit. So, having done what you’ve done and been so deeply moved by the Synod process, what specifically for families do you see as a role and a [00:35:00] call to participation in the process?

Casey Stanton: That’s a great question, Christina.

I would encourage spending time reading the final document. There’s a lot out there about methodology, like how we do communal discernment and the implementation. The ongoing process is really about how do we become synodal at every level in the life of the Church.

And so what does it mean in our domestic church to adopt practices of communal discernment? I think that’s a live place where this can touch down in people’s lives. One of my colleagues, who’s also super involved in the Synod, last year for Lent, she had her teenagers. They sat around the table and they did a conversation in the Spirit, which is one of these Synod methods where you speak in rounds and speak to the center, and you’re noticing what convergences are.

But they used this method to discern what their Lenten practices were going to be and what they were going to do as a family. And she said, “I didn’t think it would work. I thought it was totally going to fail, but it was amazing.” And [00:36:00] they came up with stuff that I never would’ve come up with and it was so good.

And so part of it is honoring that our kids and each one of us is a vessel of the Spirit. Some of the methods around the Synod are inviting us into practices that make that real in our lives. And so how can we do that? How do we practice communal discernment? What are some of those ways in our own homes and lives where we can actually discern together?

And so that would be one, and that’s a fun thing to think about trying to develop out a little more, I think the Synod really is about our public life together. I did have some various people say, “Oh, Synodality starts in the home.”

And I said, “Not really.” As someone who went out of a Synodal pilgrimage, I think Synod’s actually about our collective life and our life together and how we are distributing resources, setting priorities, and deciding what really needs attention and must be addressed. That’s about our shared life together and so many of us are underdeveloped in participating in [00:37:00] that.

We don’t know how to do it. We aren’t invited to. The next thing I would say is, okay, we actually don’t need more permission to try to initiate processes inside of our own local communities. So looking at the Synod document and seeing where the opportunities are in our own parish, when was the last time we did a robust listening campaign to ask what the needs of the people are right now? What are the pressures on people’s lives these days, especially in these times that we’re in right now? Have we stopped to listen to that and been intentional about it? Because part of what you’re listening for is what are the convergences, what is shared that we had no idea about, because we’re mostly just friendly and we’re making small talk and being polite and wishing each other well and praying for one another. So it’s cracking open some relational space to then say, oh, actually, a lot of people here are sharing some key concerns, and what are we called to do in response to that? So read the final document and then take it to prayer and think about how this would strengthen our own community to have a communal discernment process that would invigorate our local life together.

And no one has to carry that on their back alone. It’s meant to be a shared endeavor. But those would be a couple places. In our own households, how can we actually invite more communal discernment? And then in our communities, how can we be catalysts or animators of these processes, which are not aimed at a singular reform in the Church. They’re aimed at renewing every part of the Church’s life through spirit-filled participation and discernment together.

Christina Gebel: Wow, that’s incredible. I need the mind blown emoji right now. But it also speaks to, for me, the way that families were back in the day was like parents would decide this and then everybody would follow suit; or, take care of your own family, and that’s your first priority.

Whereas this Synodality thinking is communal and opens up the family [00:39:00] to the wider world. That’s an aha moment for me, wow. Thank you so much, Casey. You are a woman of faith and just an inspiration on a number of levels, and thank you for letting us into your family life to hear about how your work intersects with that.

It was so inspiring, and I think there’s going to be a lot of whispers of flames that come out of hearing your words.

Casey Stanton: Thank you so much for the invitation and for your curiosity. It was fun to reflect on this very formative time in life, and prayers for all those who hear and are discerning what it is they’re called to do to kind of love their own people a little harder.

Christina Gebel: Amen.

Casey Stanton: Amen. Thank you. All right.

Welcome back, everyone. I am really excited to be here with you today, still in our second season called Radical Family, where families are making bold choices to live out their faith, and I am so pleased today to have two dear friends, local to where I am in North Carolina, who have made the faith filled decision to grow their family, and I think you will really love to hear their story, hear them reflect on that time in their life. So with that, I will hand it over to Heather and Patrick Curran. Would y’all like to introduce yourselves?

Heather Curran: I’m Heather and I [00:01:00] am a nurse and a lifelong Catholic. I was raised in Southern California. I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick in college when we were both at the Jesuit University of Loyola University Chicago.

Woo. And then we married and moved to North Carolina where we have been for a long while now. And we have been married creeping up on 20 years, but about 17 time really flies. I’ll pass it on to Patrick.

Patrick Curran: Thank you, Dear. Christina, yeah, it’s great to be doing this with you. I’m Patrick Curran. By way of introduction I’m Heather’s husband and in the foster care journey. I have to say she’s definitely been the leader, but I’m certainly an avid and willing participant so glad to be doing that. As she mentioned, we’ve been married for almost 20 years. And I think for this context, it’s relevant to say that our faith is maybe part of what brought us [00:02:00] together. And our faith is what led us to our faith community here in North Carolina when we moved here in 2020 and our

Heather Curran: In 2010.

Patrick Curran: Thank you. In 2010, too many zeros. Our decision to become foster parents and the journey through all of that has been supported by that faith community in incredible ways and continues to be so I’m grateful for all of that.

And I’m sure we’ll obviously unpack that more and a little bit about our background and how we came to that.

Christina Gebel: Yes. And absolutely we will unpack it ‘cause I know personally, just by the pleasure and honor of knowing both of you, that there’s a real discernment journey there and a great story.

And I would say a very happy, not ending, but a very happy present that we will get to, certainly

Patrick Curran: Ongoing.

Christina Gebel: Yes. A very happy ongoing presence. But perhaps you could take us [00:03:00] back to the beginning. I knew you all when you were. In one of the 17 years, and you were think thinking about growing your family and you were attempting to do that.

Can you tell us about those years and share as much or as little as you’d like to about your journey to starting a family?

Heather Curran: I think from the beginning, both Patrick and I were very interested in having family. That was always a part of our conversations when we were dating. Our way of dating, I think, was always thinking about the future and I don’t think either of us were good at being casual daters. From the time that we were growing in our relationship, what would a family look like if we were to marry, was always a part of the conversation. I knew beginning in college that there was potential that it would be a challenge for me to get pregnant.

[00:04:00] So that actually was a conversation that we started having before we were even married. And if that were to be a reality, what would that be like for you, Patrick. And would that be something we could maneuver together? In our marriage at the time, both of us very easily said yes, adoption would be a very reasonable choice for us.

And something that even if we were able to have our own kids, we would be open to talking about. And I think that really helped when later on down the line, that became a reality. At least for me, it was very comforting to know that this is something that we had been in alignment on, from the get-go.

Fast forward, we’re married, we were open to having kids from the beginning. It was just something both of us had always wanted and imagined for our lives. And it was not happening. And not happening. So the first year, nothing, but that’s okay ‘cause we’re trying to figure [00:05:00] out how to be married, and that’s its own challenge with its own ups and downs.

And fast forward probably five years we had settled in North Carolina and we were really in a place where we felt stable as adults. We had a home and well before we had hoped for a family, it was fine that we weren’t, ‘cause maybe we weren’t totally prepared, but now we felt we were in a place where we really were ready to be moving forward with that and it wasn’t happening and we were ready to investigate the next steps are there things that we can be doing to make it happen.

So, we went to a fertility specialist and did some workup. And for women out there that have been through this, that piece has its own emotional journey. I think for me, I went through HSG ultrasound. It’s a very vulnerable experience, and I feel [00:06:00] comfortable sharing that here because I know for other women, this is also a point at which a reality you’re afraid of can become very real.

And for me, while I was in the ultrasound, I just, I knew based on what was happening with the people around us and the healthcare professionals, that there definitely was a challenge. It didn’t even feel right for me while it was happening. And I was like, okay, this is this is a reality.

And I think I had that nagging feeling for a long time, but it was in that moment on the table, and I started to sob during that experience and Patrick was right there, and I could see it in his eyes that he could see the pain. For me, I’ll say it was grief.

There was a lot of grief in that moment. And then it completed. We didn’t talk about results. And Patrick and I just went to lunch together in Chapel Hill, and he just created space for me to be grieving and listened and received that. And I will always [00:07:00] be grateful to him that through this whole process, he has had his own things to process, but has always let me have my space and listened and been patient and asked first what it was and I needed what I needed in those moments and what was it that I felt comfortable with or was hoping to do next.

In a relationship, that has given me lots of peace and made it, I think, a much easier, hard journey than it could have been. When we got the results, we had a great physician who is an expert in his field. But he started talking about IVF and for me, it has just been a gut feeling for me that was not a route that I wanted to take.

And in that conversation I had said that, and he immediately said, is this a [00:08:00] religious thing? Because it doesn’t need to be. And I really bristled at that. Because for me it was a faith piece. It wasn’t [that] my religion has this rule. It wasn’t about I can’t do this as a Catholic. For me it was, I spiritually, feel, my gifts need to be used in a different way and our resources and how I want to move forward, I want to put in a different direction. So it was a negative experience for me in that moment. And again, Patrick, let me lead in how we moved forward from that, which was a wonderful gift. And maybe I should give him some space now that he offered all of that to me in those moments.

But that was the point at which the conversation about moving forward with adoption [00:09:00] or foster care became very real, and we had to start making decisions about what that journey forward would look like.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, Patrick, before you jump in on your reaction to that, I just wanna first thank you, Heather, for your vulnerability and sharing that, and for folks who know me personally, I can relate to a lot of what you’ve said. Just being on the fertility journey myself with my spouse, and also opting to not do IVF, not simply because it’s a rule, but just because it wasn’t for me, and having a supportive partner in that is just everything on that journey.

Patrick, I’d love to hear what all that was like for you from your perspective. Not only accompanying, but witnessing everything that was happening and for me at least, in a very bodily way, [00:10:00] it’s happening to one spouse. But in your case, what was going on in your mind and in your faith conversation?

Patrick Curran: Yeah. Thank you for that, Christina. There’s a number of things there that I’ve want to maybe touch on, and I appreciate you recognizing as a spouse, as a partner as someone who tries to live as a faithful person, I believe that God calls us to honor other people, right?

And particularly in a Christian marriage, there’s a way of doing that. I think it’s very easy for the husband, for the male partner to be lost in that conversation. And to say I’m doing all this for my wife, or I’m like Christ calls us to sacrifice yourself for your bride.

And I think it’s important that we not overlook the fact that men come to their marriages with dreams and ideas and [00:11:00] what all that is. So, maybe I can share a little bit of that. Going all the way back, as Heather mentioned, we had talked about this when we were dating and just the one little piece of color I would add there is that we both had at least in conversation, talked about wanting to have a big family.

And, Christina, you know me well, you know that I love things that are big and chaotic. Yes, I can take things that are small and make them large very quickly. And I have 19 first cousins, and I love each of them in strange and unique ways, and always had dreamed that we would have a large family. And, in my own discernment process of my life and my career, that was a big component. I love the idea of big family and so as Heather mentioned, as our marriage progressed and we were trying to get pregnant and being unsuccessful with that, and then eventually going through the fertility workup, I’m not a medical professional, [and] I was in an adjacent space while they were doing the HSG procedure and I [00:12:00] also knew that something wasn’t right.

I was like watching this grainy image on a monitor, and I just had this feeling that like this part of the conversation was not going to be smooth or easy or go the way that we wanted it to. I think Heather, when we were dating, had invited me to offer up those ideas that I had about family.

We had a joke at one point we would have 37 kids. Obviously no reasonable person expects their wife to naturally have 37 kids. We were always talking about adoption. But I think we had carried the idea that we would have some natural children and then have some kids through adoption.

And we were always curious what would our genetic mashup look like? That part of the dream, I think, we had to surrender. I don’t want to say that it died because it didn’t die, we chose to offer that up.

We had always had this idea that we would have a big family and as we were getting [00:13:00] those test results, it became obvious to me that the ways that we had talked about doing that was not gonna happen.

I could tell in the way like the physician was talking about what was gonna happen surgically and medically. I was like, we’re not on the same page here. The way that she thinks about her body and the way that I wanted our decisions to be respected in that process. We were just misaligned with how that was all gonna happen.

But the assumption that we weren’t going to move forward with IVF we’re following what our religion tells us to do because that’s what the religion says, right? It’s like a non-thinking action. I would say [that] is very distasteful and off-putting to me in any conversation and for any person of any faith.

And I think part of why you’ve started this whole effort is to help bring together that space that we’re faithful people with our entire selves. And so then the decision to look into [00:14:00] adoption and kind of what route would that be it was a natural continuation of where we had been, but it also required the opportunity to lay down at the foot of the Cross what’s, yeah, this is coming back raw… [getting emotional]

What were the things that we were gonna let go of? What were the dreams that we had dreamed? What were the prayers that we had prayed as young people as independent people before we ever knew each other as a young couple who was dating as a young married couple? Who do we feel called to be?

And to allow space for that grief to be there and to believe that there’s purpose and intention. And all of the things that come on Easter Sunday. And on Easter Monday. What you mentioned before it’s not just about accompanying maybe that’s not even the right word, because I think for as much as I was holding space for Heather, she was also holding space for me.

And so really [00:15:00] that’s marriage; that’s journeying together.

Christina Gebel: Oh, my nose and my eyes keep running over here. [getting emotional] I think one, because I can feel it, right? I can feel it in your words. And I know you as beloved friends, and it hits so close to home for me, too. I really appreciate, Patrick, that you said out loud that sometimes partners don’t always get the full, I don’t even know what the right word is, in this journey because on the one hand we focus so much on the bodily things that are going on or not happening. And if you really love your spouse, which you do in the way that Christ loved the Church, how can you not have your own grief and reaction and journey, simultaneously?

I don’t know that there’s many spaces out there that name that so gracefully. So I appreciate you sharing that vulnerably ‘cause I can imagine that there’s [00:16:00] people out there that are like, yeah, I can totally relate.

Patrick Curran: And I think it was present to me also that the way that we, as Catholics talk about family, we talk about the woman’s role talk about the spouse’s role and this idea that we’re going through these medical conversations.

And as much as I very much have longing to have my own biological children, it’s her body. Like, I’m in no position to tell her what to do with her body. Yeah, I don’t know where that lands for other people who might be listening or how they would integrate that with their faith perspectives.

But if there was any space to hold for Heather, I think I wanted to make sure that she knew that whatever choice she felt she wanted to make or needed to make or felt called to make she wasn’t doing that alone. And she wasn’t doing that either in spite of me or that she was gonna have to fight with me [00:17:00] that I was in this with her.

She was making decisions for both of us. And I think she was aware of that and I wanted her to know that she was fully supported in doing that.

Heather Curran: And I don’t know how you feel about this, Christina, but I think one of the things that was challenging at this point is you don’t realize the expectations that you’ve created in your mind until they’re not met, or you realize that they’re not gonna come to be.

And that’s anything in our lives that we become disappointed by. You grow up thinking, I’m going to finish high school and then I’m gonna do this piece, and then I will meet the person that I want to spend my life with. And then we move on to having a family. You do this piece and then you check this box and then you do this box.

And the reality for many is that it doesn’t happen quite like that. And suddenly we’re at this point where we have to make intentional choices about [00:18:00] how to pursue this or that, or realize that some pieces are just not going to be.

And in the Catholic setting, there were a whole lot of people that had a lot of suggestions, how we might make this happen, and the miracle that is coming to be and hold out faith and with all kinds of well-intentioned loving thoughts and prayers. And they were very hard for me to receive and very hard for me to intellectually and spiritually grapple with. Then I also feel terribly ungrateful because sometimes I’m mad about what someone has offered or I just am sad about it. But where is my spiritual joy? There’s just so many layers. And I remember a conversation with my mom where I was [00:19:00] really just bothered by the idea that I should just be waiting for a miracle.

And I’m like, miracles don’t happen for everyone, or they’re not what we expect them to be. I just really had a hard time with that idea and was like, I’m not gonna sit here and just say, my miracle is coming. And the reality is now I look back and I have two miracles in my house. They did not come in the way that I envisioned them.

And it was a decade of grappling with lots of different things before that was our reality. And I am so grateful for them with all of that in mind. And for anyone going through this, that 10 years is long, and it feels like forever, and you don’t know when it’s gonna end or what the other side is gonna look like.

And now that we are where we are, I [00:20:00] can’t imagine our now being any different than it is. But all of that time before was very hard. And there were many tears and moments where Patrick found me curled up in a ball in our room. Just sad. So there is a miracle in that. And I also am very careful with how I talk to other people that are in that place about it because they have to have room for pain.

Like I had room for pain ‘cause it is hard and it hurts. And we hear so many messages about all of it every person’s journey is different. And it’s a lot to hold. So

Patrick Curran: I think maybe just three pieces of color about this that are coming to mind for me. I’m thinking about your question what was your journey like prior to starting this? First and foremost, I wanna say that both Heather and I come from very loving and [00:21:00] supportive families. So our desire to have a family. This entire journey from our fertility journey into adoption and then deciding to foster and then adopting from foster care.

All of that has been very well supported by our immediate families and our extended families. I actually hope we can unpack some of that a little bit later and we’ll talk more about the influence of that. And…

Heather Curran: a lot of pins on things, honey. [laugh]

Patrick Curran: I know. It’s a short podcast [laugh] yeah. So I think that it matters a lot, right?

And we experienced God’s love in family throughout our entire lives and with the challenges that come with families as well. So that helps support us. And then, as we said before, our faith community within our parish was a big part of that. And it was 10 years of knowing people in that community from the time that we moved to North Carolina before we moved forward with becoming foster parents of people saying, [00:22:00] oh, my gosh, you would be great parents.

Yes. Thank you. And then as Heather mentioned, sometimes people make comments that they’re intended to be helpful, but they end up being very hard and difficult to hold. But all of that time, we were being supported by our community in that space. And so then when we did finally have children placed with us in foster care and then adopt them, like that community was ready to receive them and they were excited for us, and they were joyful for that.

Christina Gebel: This has been such an emotional journey for me just sitting here listening to you and knowing a lot of these things. I didn’t know about the 37 kids. [laugh]

I will say that is the first time I’m hearing this [part], but, just all the emotions and grief, I think for me hits really hard. And also this navigating of people trying to help in the best way they can and trying to rationalize the situation [00:23:00] and their faith angle.

And eventually you all started the process of fostering, adopting, I heard you say, that the grief never really fully just disappears. But what were those early days like of starting that process? Because I know for other people I’ve talked to, it’s a very daunting process in the beginning, and one doesn’t necessarily just turn on a dime and start the next path.

So what were those early days like when you were just starting to get acquainted with fostering?

Patrick Curran: The kind of initial posture from us was like, do we want to move forward? And what are the paths, right? Like we had talked about adoption as a concept. This was now suddenly a thing and we wanted to understand it better.

What could this look like? We knew through hearsay that adoption could be very expensive. That was part of the choice not to do IVF was like, we could spend a lot of money [00:24:00] doing IVF or we could spend a lot of money adopting a kid that needs a family then of course you have decisions like international or domestic. There’s an entire forest of decision trees to be navigated. And Heather really took that on for me at that point.

And then fast forwarding, we actually ended up starting the process twice.

Heather Curran: For me, I have always, for better or worse, made decisions based on my gut I have realized through relationships and conversations with other people, that I sometimes make big decisions in a way that’s different from others.

I don’t make long lists and do lots of big planning, and there was just something that kept bringing me back to the idea of foster care. I was very overwhelmed by the [00:25:00] number of different pathways for adoption, the international versus domestic question, the how do you maneuver, what organization manages this in an ethical way?

There was just so much to me, and I just kept coming back to, if there is a need in my community and my desire and want is to fill our home with love of a child, why don’t I use that to meet this need? Some of that comes from the Jesuit way of talking about my greatest desire meets the world’s need.

And that just clicked for me in this idea and this thought I couldn’t really look away from that once it seeded itself for me. And I knew that was a big ask because [00:26:00] foster care doesn’t automatically come with permanency. And for us, we knew that we wanted the ultimate piece of adoption.

And that is not what foster care is per se. And I think we knew that intellectually, but then as we were doing the training, they really made sure that hit home for us. And we had to talk about that a lot. And I think we felt open to that. But it also had to be something that we continually revisited and talked to each other about and thought about.

And it’s the piece that people really have a hard time understanding when we talk about foster care to other people because there is that desire for permanency and people want permanency for us, and they want permanency for the child. And the idea of why a child is in foster care sometimes is the extreme [00:27:00] reason for why kids are in foster care.

And there’s an automatic assumption. I think sometimes parents of children in foster care become villainized and there are a lot of different ways that people come into care or hit rock bottom, so when we were going through training, they talk about the number one goal of foster care is reunification.

And when that cannot be, that is when we move forward with other options for permanency, including adoption. And again, I think we could intellectualize that both of us felt like we could commit to that and spiritually that would be challenging, but that we understood that was the reality. And that also.

Comes with its own many challenges and the reality of that is harder sometimes than you think [00:28:00] it’s going to be. Or not harder than you think it’s going to be ‘cause it is hard. But like Patrick was saying, we decided to go through our local county foster care system and we started the training and we were getting to the part where they were getting ready to license us.

And we had some shifts happening in our home professionally and realized that we weren’t stable enough for us to bring in that instability that would come with foster care. And so we had put it on hold until we were in a better place. And so we got to go through the training twice and we got to think about all of these pieces twice and really get them rooted in our minds.

What do you have to add to that, Patrick?

Patrick Curran: So many things. Yeah, I was just reflecting, maybe going back. All of the Ignatian methods of discernment Heather’s is follow the spirit faithfully off the edge of a [00:29:00] cliff and

Christina Gebel: what a great cliff it is and

Patrick Curran: or the great cliff.

Christina Gebel: Great cliff.

Patrick Curran: It’s so true. There’s a couple of threads there about like, where is Catholicism living in all of this? And again, it goes back to the roots that we have in our families. I could tell you very explicit moments when my dad, who is not outspoken, and as a young person growing up, he was not like, oh, Catholicism first.

That’s not my dad. He was a father and a husband, and somebody just tried to do right by his family. But there were a couple of key moments where he was like, we need to live the Beatitudes right now. And I’m like, I don’t, okay. I’m seven. What does that mean?

I think about like all of our experiences at Loyola and the environment that we were in. Specifically the quote that Heather just mentioned, this idea of vocation being, where our deepest desires meet the world’s deepest need. That theme as an expression of our [00:30:00] faith was something that was not by accident in our training, in our formation, and, resonated with both of us and has resonated in our professional lives.

And so here we are at this kind of key crossroads of who do we feel called to be as adults, as individuals, and as a married couple, and the decision to lean into foster care because it is a need in our world.

Now that said, we’ve interacted with many people who have thought about and discerned becoming foster parents because there’s a great need. It’s clearly not the thing that they’re called to. I think there’s an important part of discernment and I don’t wanna claim or make it sound like we went through some very intentional structured discernment process. There is a process there, and we did approach it [00:31:00] faithfully, meaning that in the way that we live our everyday faith, we continue to ask God, where are you in this and where are you calling us?

And I think Heather is very free about following God through any door that God opens in front of her. Which I guess I’m a very resistant sheep lost on the mountainside like that. But that ended up taking us into our local community, foster care. And that’s a beautiful thing and has been a tremendous gift.

So, there is a structured discernment process. And I wanna say that to give credit to our trainers and the people who run our county led foster care program, I think do a really good job with the parental training and a part of that, and they tell you straight up is A, we’re trying to scare you out of this. B, the purpose of foster care is reunification. So we are asking you to give your entire heart to these children, and we are promising you that we are going to break it because their goal is to keep those kids [00:32:00] with their birth family, and that’s what’s best for the kid.

So again, if we’re approaching this as Christians and we’re saying, God, you’re inviting me to die to myself for someone else’s sake, then without trying to be a martyr, the invitation is to lay down your own desires and do what is best for the child.

And I genuinely believe that every true parent does that. I don’t think you have to be a foster parent. I don’t think you have to wear a red cape or be some kind of superhero or magic Christian. I think if you have children in your home and you love them as a true parent, you put their needs in front of yours every single day.

And the call of a foster parent is to do that and to recognize that means potentially giving up the gift of the child. And again, I think as Christians there’s a part of our spirituality and our theology that says the children in our home, whether they’re biological or not, are a [00:33:00] gift from God and whatever they’re called to in their lives, God calls us to give them up and to trust God’s will for them. Let God make the miracle out of them that they are. So I think we have simply tried to do that.

And so, then there have been real moments where we have had to grapple with the desire for adoption and that desire for permanency. And as Heather mentioned in 2014, we had gone through the training the first time, and part of that discernment process the trainers actually said to us, there’s some resistance here. It doesn’t feel like you are ready. And that was their part of the discernment, right? And we had to sit with that and figure out what that was.

And it was four years before we came back and did that again. And I remember at that point we were coming up on our 10th anniversary for our marriage. And I had said to Heather I feel like I’m getting old and crotchety and a little stuck in my ways. And if we’re going to do this, then let’s really do it.

And if not, [00:34:00] then I think we need to mutually discern if we’re going to be a couple that doesn’t have children, we have a lot of gifts and a lot of bandwidth, and how are we gonna be using that? And so we determined at that point that we were still very interested in pursuing this journey. We went again, back through the training, completed the licensure, and it was not an easy process for getting placements in our home, which was strange.

But then after about seven months from the time that we finally got our license to when we had our first placement [who] was a young five week, baby boy who was blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and if you know anything about foster care, that is the exact opposite of what they tell you to expect, right?

It’s the whole thing is if you’re, you should expect to have school children usually of either mixed race or minority race in your home and the idea that you would have an infant, baby boy, blonde hair, blue eyed is just a random thing.

What I think was most [00:35:00] striking and potentially difficult at the time was he looked like he could have been our natural child. It’s the Advent season, by the way, when the boy gets placed with us. So our church is filled with all the stories of Mary and the coming of children and this whole like elevation of the family in our Christian narrative and what does that look like?

And all of a sudden, we show up at church with a baby carrier. And people are like, oh, my gosh, we didn’t even know you were pregnant. And so our whole community who had been on this journey with us and were wanting so much to see, the love that we had for each other in our marriage, pour out into the gifts of family, just felt, oh, this is incredible.

And we were surrounded and uplifted in so many ways by that. And then fortunately for that baby boy one of his biological family members, was able to eventually adopt him. So he was placed with us for only six weeks. We had initially been told upfront that we should expect to adopt him because the case was a little complicated and they weren’t sure what was gonna happen.

But they [00:36:00] started out by asking us, are you prepared to care for this child for the long term? And not just in the term of a long-term foster placement, which might be one to two years, but actually adopting him. By all means, yes. And I specifically remember holding him in the hospital, like looking at his face and saying I’m committing myself to you.

And having these spiritual reflections and praying prayers of thanksgiving to God that somehow our first foster placement is someone that they’re asking us, will you adopt? And then in a very quick turn of events, a good thing for him, but a hard Cross for us to bear was that he was placed with his aunt.

And that, as far as we know, has been a very successful placement, and he is thriving and doing well. But it caused a lot of pain for us. It clarified for us how much our hearts were desiring for adoption.

And we [00:37:00] didn’t realize how much us having a child would bring out other aspects of our community. And they were so excited for us. Our family members were like, we’re finally grandparents.

The aunts and uncles are getting all excited, there’s all this stuff going on. And then all of a sudden, he was gone. And so it wasn’t just our pain, it was pain for the community, and we didn’t feel like that was fair and we both still had this desire to be parents.

So, fast forward, what ends up happening? Through a process of healing and conversation in a quick short few weeks, we had decided let’s move forward with adoption. For anyone who doesn’t know, adopt us kids.gov.org.com, dot something. Go look it up, go find it. Christina will put it in the show notes. [yes, I did and it’s https://adoptuskids.org]

There are thousands of kids available for adoption in the United States that need a loving home. They’re broken just like you and me. They need great parents, so [00:38:00] go adopt them. But we were looking on this website and we found a few different sibling sets and other children who were available for adoption that we had been talking with our social worker. The next first step for us that seems to make sense is to move down this path of adoption; we still wanted to do foster care, but it wasn’t fair to a child in foster placement who was going to be reunified with their family, hopefully, that they would have all these expectations from us or from our community and whatnot.

And literally, I kid you not, this is three weeks after that baby boy was placed with his aunt. We’ve gone through, made these decisions. We’re supposed to meet with our social worker to review this list of children that we’ve identified as ‘we’d like to learn more’ and possibly see if we would be a good fit for an as an adoptive family for them

So, we’re scheduled to meet in the afternoon with our social worker. That morning we got a call from the placement worker about another five week old baby boy. She called me, [00:39:00] Heather was at work and I was available, and so I was like. I’m feeling like I’m gonna say yes to this, and that’s ridiculous.

We are grieving so much right now, and my wife is going to be like, what is wrong with you? Why would you even say yes to this? And so I told the placement worker, I was like we’ll have to call you back, but I’ll let you know. So I called Heather and she said, are you gonna say I’m nuts if I wanna say yes to this that’s how I do discernment.

God, you are present when I’m surprised and when everything kind of lines up the way that we think it should. And it felt like God was saying to me, you’re missing everything I have prepared you for a young child. Even when our first placement came the way that our friends filled in the gaps with here’s the crib here’s all the baby supplies that you need.

‘Cause we were ready for school age kids ‘cause that’s what they told us to be ready for. And so we had all these things for a baby and then we were looking [00:40:00] at older kids who needed a family. And then here comes this call for another five-week-old boy who today is our 6-year-old adopted son.

And he’s awesome, like, just lots of surprises. But, the journey’s not straight. And I think the interaction of faith and the everyday parenting decisions and adult human decisions they go together. They go together in ways that require the tension of hope and sacrifice all in the same moment.

Christina Gebel: Wow. I have so many faith parallels coming up, and I keep going back to your words, Patrick, about laying everything at the foot of the Cross. How many times you guys did that? Like having gone through everything you had with fertility biologically the uncertainty of [00:41:00] that and the non permanency of that process.

You could have easily said, okay, we’re gonna go with a slam dunk path this next time around. But you kept laying yourselves at the foot of the cross.

Patrick Curran: Oh, let’s be clear. I wanted the slam dunk. You wanted the slam dunk.

Heather Curran: Like normal adoption paths…

Patrick Curran: …Are not a slam,

Heather Curran: ….Are not a slam dunk.

True. And there’s, there isn’t a promise of permanence. And you can get so close and have these same experiences of so near to something…

Patrick Curran: Yeah.

Heather Curran: And then it’s not, and there is grief there. That path is not straight or easy either. And I see that in our friends that have taken that journey or reading different experiences.

I think things come back to expectations and you create this expectations of what it’s gonna look like in your head or for me, like what will look like as parents and how people tell you’re to make a great [00:42:00] parent, then you have a child and your house and you are exhausted. So yeah, I think especially with that first placement Patrick shared, just there was such an emotional release of this has finally happened. After all of this time and talk and desire, we have this infant that we didn’t expect. What a beautiful gift.

It’s Advent. People are excited and we’re trying to hold in our heads, this is foster care. This is not a straight path. We are holding this tightly but loosely. And at the same time, your mind still travels 30 years down the road. Yeah. And when that all shifted, it happened in a week. When family was identified, people were telling us they’re gonna have to do background checks and yeah, it’ll take four months, it’s gonna take months.

And they identified this family on a [00:43:00] Thursday. I met them on the Friday. We were meeting to talk about relocation on Monday. It happened so fast, and I had whiplash. And when we initially met them, Patrick was out of town. And I knew in that meeting again, it was like when we were in the the ultrasound I knew as soon as they were in the room, this was not gonna go the way that my heart had anticipated.

And I knew that wasn’t the wrong thing for the child. It just wasn’t what I had hoped for or wanted. And those feelings. Again, hard to manage ‘cause you want to be grateful for the gift and the reality of what that meant for him. And then thinking about having to share this with all of the people that have been so excited for us.

And those people have all still [00:44:00] been present through everything and wonderful. When we decided to do foster care, I realize now that we made that decision not only for us, but for all the people around us and for our parents, for our siblings and their kids.

They are a part of this journey and they are riding these waves with us also. And I have been buoyed by their resilience in these times and their ability to support us in their own grief. And even the preschool teachers where our kids go are like, you are setting an example of love and spiritual journeying that is good for our community.

And in that coming and going and saying goodbye, that is our spiritual faith. There’s many times where I think it’s not fair to do this to the people around [00:45:00] us, but the reality is that this is life and we are allowing people to journey it with us and they are supporting us.

It’s mutual. And that’s not a bad thing. And to be grateful for taking those steps together and to have those people with us present and witnessing and caring for us in those times,

Patrick Curran: We believe in the God of the Ordinary. I think what’s coming up for me right now, Christina, I’m looking at the questions that you had sent us earlier and this idea of radical and radical family.

Again, I don’t know that I would consider what we do radical, but in the world of Ignatian discernment, I think part of, what Ignatius’s gift to the Church was challenging us and inviting us to reflect on where do our own attachments keep us from God? And I think in this journey we are continuously challenged to [00:46:00] recognize what are the things that we are holding onto.

What are the things that God is inviting us to and when are those things not the same thing? And so like Heather said, how do we hold on tightly but loosely and then have the freedom, have the faith to let go? I was talking with a friend of ours earlier, I don’t know if this is true or not, so somebody can fact check it, but he was thinking that the word radical shares a root with the word “rooted.”

And when I think about how we were able to make those decisions, it comes back to being rooted in our faith tradition in our families who nurtured that faith tradition in our community. Where we live, breathe, and express that faith. And ultimately in our individual relationships

Yes, I have a [00:47:00] relationship with Jesus Christ, and I love him, and I’m very mad at him frequently, and I don’t know what He thinks of me all the time because I don’t hear enough when He says, I love you, right? And as a father, that’s the message I want my son to hear.

As a foster parent, you have to be rooted in that kind of radical love, to have a kid in your home who is gonna need you in ways that you can’t imagine. Again, I’m not sure it’s different from the way any other true parent parents their child, but if there’s anything radical about it today, it’s that our American culture, the society that we live in, even the broken, polarized Church that we live in, I don’t think invites us to let go of our attachments.

But instead, has this message of how you can have more of what you want, more of how things should be easy. More, more bigger [00:48:00] family. 37 kids started out as 36 and then it got to 37. And I think in our rootedness, ultimately, we’re hoping to find freedom. And it is a gift to be able to share that with the two children that have been entrusted to us.

And we love them both radically,

Christina Gebel: Whoever you spoke to, I wanna go back to that. Whoever you spoke to was correct in their interpretation of radical and rooted, and I talk a lot about this in the teaser for the season.

That radical came to me in a homily by one of my favorite priests in Boston. He was talking about we need to be radical. And, for me, I’m like, yeah, radical, progressive chain ourselves to the building or something, and he was talking about how there’s this interesting play on the word here and that’s how we usually use [the word] radical colloquially, but radical, which also I think of [00:49:00] radish, which grows in the soil, is really actually to get to the root of something. And he talked about when you actually get to the root of Christianity, Jesus, our Lord and Savior, Christianity is actually quite radical.

So there’s almost this circular logic there in that, really, if we really sat down and really spelled out what it means to be a Christian in our modern world, and you put flesh on those bones, Patrick, when you said to not have everything fall into place, like we expect so much of our lives to do in the modern sense is quite radical.

That’s what’s also coming up for me as y’all are talking. You mentioned earlier in the conversation, a lot of people come to foster care, through the sense of need.

And I think on a cognitive level, especially for people who are committed to social justice, like that’s very [00:50:00] clear, and that might be the doorway that people enter through, right? That might be what the whisper is, but whether or not it’s a call.

And a call takes you through all the ups and downs and joys and challenges that you’ve shown us so beautifully in this conversation. That sense of call I’m getting from you the roots were very deep. They were like intergenerational roots. You spoke so beautifully about your families.

It’s like the roots were there back then…

Patrick Curran: And I didn’t even mention, I have adopted cousins that I didn’t even know were adopted. And not because it was a secret, but simply because the way that our family has loved them over years and yeah, roots. Lots of roots.

Christina Gebel: So, I know we’re winding down our conversation, which means we’re saving all the best wisdom for last. This last question is, if you [00:51:00] were to encounter someone who’s just starting to think about this path, obviously there’s a lot of, a lot of information out there, a lot of good people, good trainers out there and people in your parish and there’s a lot of that. But what I’m hoping you can answer is what are some things that you would suggest praying about spiritually as you approach this path? What are some of the spiritual questions or even just a framework?

Or a mosaic of discernment for somebody who’s about to seriously consider this, and people discern in so many different ways. Just you both, the sheep, the cliff, I’m somewhere in, I’m somewhere in between those, and I’m not sure which when I am, there’s gonna be some cliff people out there listening and there’s gonna be some sheep people out there listening, so I’d love to hear from each of you in your own unique flavor of discernment, [00:52:00] what spiritual things would you point them to?

Heather Curran: I don’t know about spiritual things, and maybe I’m just discounting the spirituality of my thoughts right now. But there are some very practical things that I have encountered in conversations with people.

And their understanding of foster care that you have to think about before you jump into the process or discern. And one is your own biases. What are the things that you believe about foster care, children in foster care, parents of children in foster care, and the reality about reunification? I think people tend to…They hear that, but even for us, I think in the beginning we are hearing it. We were committed to it. But we had a need for permanence. And that time between the first [00:53:00] time we took the class and the second time we went in and actually got our license, I think it took all of that time for us to get into a place where we had processed our grief, about our ability to have biological children, and we’re actually in a place where we could receive a child that may or may not stay with us.

And then the reality of that actually happening is a whole nother level. And if you are coming into this because you have a desire for children that hasn’t been met because of infertility or whatever, you do have to process that before you come into it because it is not fair for the child you receive to receive all of that emotional desire.

The other piece is for me, what has become very apparent and important and I struggle with is biological families are important and we [00:54:00] do have to engage them. And it is because that’s the best thing for the child. There is also making sure that there are boundaries in place to keep your child safe and being open and aware of the realities that are happening.

It’s multilayered, there’s lots of things going on, but I very often encounter people who say, I would love to do foster care, but I hear that you have to interact with their families. And I just can’t do that. Or the idea of them going back I just can’t do that.

And this is where, for me, the realities of our Gospel and our faith and the ideas of forgiveness and openness and caring for others where the rubber really hits the road. If I believe in those things, this is where I need to put that into action for my child. And it’s hard. [00:55:00] It’s really hard. When I went into this, I think I had all these visions of worst case scenarios and how hard it was gonna be to deal with families and how difficult visitations would be and how they were gonna treat me and just being worried and concerned about that.

And we’ve had some really great scenarios, and I’ve been very surprised. And we also need to stay aware and wise and create boundaries, but it has been beneficial to our children to know their families, to understand where they come from. I am in contact with my daughter’s grandmother on a weekly basis, and she is loving and wonderful and sends gifts to both of our children. That is where our family is growing and it has been a gift.

And I see people very resistant and [00:56:00] afraid of that. And if this is a direction you’re going to go, you really need to grapple with how are you going to be open to those connections, and what is it that you are going to bring to those relationships? It’s not just the child. The child is coming with a whole set of people.

I do not do that perfectly. I have a lot of opportunity for growth, and I want people coming into foster care to be really open to the potential of those relationships and their benefit to their child, but also their benefit to them.

And God is good and relationships can be healing if we allow them to be. It’s another place where you have to hold all the tensions.

Christina Gebel: Those are great ideas. I think that [00:57:00] piece is really important I haven’t heard that highlighted as often as probably it should be.

Yeah. Patrick, what are you thinking in terms of practical or spiritual things you might offer someone at the beginning stages of this path?

Patrick Curran: Sure. First I want to underscore. Plus one and give credit where credit is due to what Heather just said. You made the statement that you struggle with this.

The reality is that we have relationships with our children’s birth families because Heather has taken that up. And our path through foster care to adoption for them has been made smooth because you leaned into those relationships. I think I’ve also taken for granted how much people don’t talk about that.

And what I would add on the spiritual side, and if you’re discerning that is we are people who place a very high value on community. And so it has [00:58:00] actually been a struggle for us to try to balance our own family needs with their family needs and holding in a place of importance, what we believe will be good for them in the long run, which is having those ties back to their birth families and the days that they have questions about their identity and what is that gonna mean.

And then everything that Heather said about this gets to the heart of the Gospel. What do we believe about redemption and God’s action for humans, and foster care is a world filled with broken people. So, I think my own set of what would I be discerning about at the beginning of this, first and foremost, as much as you can get your own house in order.

And I think what I mean by that is try to get clear on why do I feel motivated or called to do this. What are the [00:59:00] things that are moving in me or around me? And many people come to foster care because they are a kinship placement for someone in need in their biological family.

So, it’s not something that they’re desiring or looking out for, but they courageously said yes. And that’s its own kind of faith. And so I think at the beginning, if it is something that you’re thinking about, get clear on why and bring that to prayer and ask God to help you know yourself.

Heather Curran: Yeah.

Patrick Curran: And to know where is the Spirit moving in you? I would also say for the folks who are planners and like to be very prepared they’re now deciding I will get my house in order to be a good foster parent. There’s no such thing in foster care, right? And so I think one of the very practical things to discern and begin to plan for is how will you navigate the unplanned?

How can you be more flexible in your life? Where is God [01:00:00] inviting you to do something that’s outside of your comfort zone that you otherwise might never do? And do you have time to reflect on that and find the grace in those things? And I, for some reason as Heather was talking, the Scripture coming into my head is the, the story of Ruth, right?

“Your people will be my people and your God will be my God.” (Ruth 1:16) When you bring a foster child into your home, they need from you and you need from them, and you have to be able to elevate their needs. And so you can’t plan for that. You can’t predict it. Things come out of nowhere all the time. I think there’s a lot of very practical things that any good foster training program will help you think about.

I think maybe another thing was just what is your experience with trauma and what kind of training do you have or would you be willing to get around supporting people that have traumatic experience? And there’s a lot to that.

Christina Gebel: Great things there to [01:01:00] look into and every time we come to a close in this conversation, and the other ones I’ve had I’m envisioning people out there listening to this and just thinking like, there’s gonna be a spark in someone somewhere, or maybe it’s gonna fan the flame of something the Spirit is putting on someone’s heart. And even if somebody wasn’t, completely, ready to discern this issue, there were so many gems here just about faith and discernment that I think there’s gonna be a plethora of sparks that are lit by this conversation.

And I just wanna thank you both so much. I have endless gratitude for this conversation for you as friends, for you as parents, for you as fellow Catholics. I just wanna say thank you because this [01:02:00] conversation…the Spirit’s gonna take it to places that I feel in my heart we can’t even imagine.

So thank you.

Heather Curran: Thank you, Christina, for doing this podcast and opening the door for these conversations for other people to hear them and add them to their discernment and their contemplation. And you have a lot of depth to you, your questions and your seeking and your spiritual life, and it’s a gift to the people around you.

Christina Gebel: All right. With that, the Curran family,

Patrick Curran: Yeah, thank you, Christina. Yeah, what a joy to talk with you today.

And I teased the topic a little bit earlier, but it is radical family, and the topic, radical family, is about families making bold choices to live out their faith. And I’m so excited to kick off this season with four very dear friends of mine whom I met at a stage in my life and continue to be inspired by.

And they’re going to talk to us today about what it means to live in intentional community with others. So, with [00:01:00] that, let’s get right down to it. My dear friend Jonathan will introduce himself and his wife, and then we’ll pass it to Carla.

Jonathan Wittig: Good morning. Thanks for having us here. I’m Jonathan, and this is my wife, Lisa. And we have three children: Caroline, who’s 11, Ben, who’s nine, and Katherine, who’s seven. We were longtime Chicagoans and are now new residents in Minnesota in the past couple of years. So, I’m excited to be here today.

Carla Lents: Hello. Thanks, Christina. We are Ryan and Carla; we actually grew up together in Indiana and then moved to Chicago and have lived here for over 20 years. We have two sons, Caleb, who is 15, and Micah, who’s 10. Yeah, really excited to be here and talk about this.

Christina Gebel: I am really excited to have you here. So, the reason that I know these folks, these awesome folks, is through a program that I continue to hold near and dear to my heart, which is Amate House program in Chicago. It’s a [00:02:00] faith-based service program where folks who graduate college can decide to dedicate a year or more as a fellow in service at a job in Chicago.

And I was blessed to do that between the years 2007–2009, and that’s how I got to know Lisa as one of my house coordinators and eventually Ryan came on as program staff. I’m really glad that our faith connected us in this way, and what a better launching pad to discuss the topic of living in community.

So, the first thing we’re gonna talk about is just how y’all came together. How did you get to know each other? What time period in your life? What were you doing? Enlighten us into how this all came to be.

Lisa Wittig: Yeah. So, as Christina mentioned, I was working at Amate House back in 2007 when she was a fellow with the program. I had recently graduated from the program myself as a volunteer. That’s actually where Jonathan and I met.

We both volunteered [00:03:00] together for a year, and I was working at Amate House. And then a few years into that, there was a staff transition. Ryan actually came on staff and started working at Amate House. We were in the same role, working with the program, supporting the volunteers. Ryan quickly became a good friend, and Jonathan and I met Carla and hung out with Ryan and Carla a few times.

And at one point, Ryan came to me, and he had this crazy idea. Would you be interested in living in intentional community again? Certainly, a unique situation because we were married, and Ryan, I believe at that time, you had Caleb, who was a baby. And so just thinking about that idea, I was like, oh my gosh, you’re crazy.

I wasn’t completely opposed to it, but I was like, you know who you should talk to? Jonathan has actually mentioned this before in our relationship to me as something he is interested in, and he’s also the dreamer and the doer in our relationship, and I am like the planner and

executor, so I was like, Ryan, you need to connect with Jonathan. You two need to talk because I don’t think I’m the one to carry this dream to fruition, but it sounds exciting.

Ryan Lents: Maybe I can pick up from there. I would say, for me, I think part of the curiosity of this was that a big part of our role at Amate House, Lisa and I, was being these house coordinators, and so it’s a very unique role. It’s like being a campus minister and an RA, although we didn’t live with the fellows.

But we were a primary point of contact for them and would do things like office hours, community nights, retreats. So, we really accompanied them throughout their experience, and I would say vicariously lived through their experience of community, all the ups and downs.

And it made it very rewarding and very challenging, and as Lisa mentioned, we had transitioned from a life stage of being right out of college where we had lived in community. I had not done Amate House as a fellow. I had been at a different program called Nazareth Farm in West Virginia, and that was a deeply formative time in my life.

And I would also say I was pretty immature. There were a lot of things I needed to learn about life and about living with other people and about just how to grow up, and community was so deeply shaping in that way. I came to really realize how much I had missed it by being in this role where I was walking with people that were experiencing those ups and downs.

Initially, I thought this is just something that you do when you’re not tethered to marriage and children and mortgages and things, but then I interrupted that presumption and said, what would it look like to actually go on this type of journey?

And to think about this stage of life. And so that was the launching point of some conversations with Jonathan. We became fast friends, bonded around a lot of things that we had common interests around, but I think that idea of saying, hey, what would it look like for us to discern together and to think about how we could live out our faiths and our commitments as husbands, as wives, as friends in this unique stage of life as we’re starting family where there are a lot of just really big pressures and challenges and difficulties.

It’s hard to live in the modern world. There can be a lot of really unhealthy messages that we get about individualism and doing things on our own. I got those messages really loud as a twenty-two, twenty-three-year-old. And those messages are just as powerful when you’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, especially as you’re thinking about some of the real adult things that come on at that stage of life.

I think we found a lot of common challenges and ideas that really started to make this thing seem like it could be real.

Jonathan Wittig: Yeah. Just adding on to that, when I was in college, I was involved with a lot of intentionality within the campus ministry department at my university. And so, my roommates and I would try to live out community together in our own ways, even counting the toilet paper squares to see how much of stewardship we were living out on a day-to-day basis. A little crazy. But my year of Amate House was a challenging year where our sense of community was difficult. The service in the community was wonderful. Amate as a whole was wonderful, but I had a very [00:07:00] challenging year. But the concept of community living—I believed in it strongly.

My simple explanation is Jesus lived in community. He was with these other guys, and they just went around together. And I’m sure that some of the disciples were frustrating to live with on a day-to-day basis. But they found the goodness in it.

And they probably rose higher from the challenges that they faced on a day-to-day basis. And that’s how I hold community living, even when we chose to do it, or even in college or in Amate House, like there were a lot of hard days. But I think that those, like, you learned patience, and you learned kindness, and you learned self-reflection.

And you hopefully are growing and not just so self-involved all the time. And I share that perspective with Ryan. I think that’s one of the many challenges we face right now in our common societies, that we’re all kind of self-involved in.

But yeah, that made me want to continue to live this beyond this ate volunteer year because it makes total sense. I wanted to be able to have that community as we raise our kids. And there’s more to that, but I’ll share that [00:08:00] later.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, so I really love what you all have been saying, and Ryan, I was like, you and I did Amate House. I can relate to thinking like this is something you do in your mid-twenties, and then you do other things and include other people and even little people and bills and all that stuff.

And as we were talking, I’m realizing that we were kicking around this phrase “intentional community,” and the five of us have an idea of what that is, but to anybody new to the concept, maybe just a few reflections from you all on how you would define that. We use this phrase, “intentional community,” in conversation, but what is it?

And in this pre-decision period of making the bold choice, how were you thinking about that? What kind of values were coming up for you?

Ryan Lents: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that phrase, “intentional,” is really important because I think with so many things in life, we can have a lot of hopes and dreams for things. But for me, the piece about intentional is, what are the routinized kind of ongoing daily practices that reflect a commitment?

And I think the same is true in marriage. It’s like you could talk about intentional marriage. Just because you make a commitment on one day doesn’t mean that on day 1725, that it’s gonna be as easy. It takes an intentional effort and commitment to say, yes, today I will love my spouse and animate those commitments that we made on the day that we exchanged rings.

I think the same is true in community. Our experience was one of a lot of active discernment where we would do a good job of framing big questions that we were living into with our lives. We didn’t just say yes one day and then cut a check for a deposit for the house that we ended up living in for two years.

We actually spent a whole year meeting on an ongoing basis. I think at one point we were meeting every two weeks. Part of that was just to build relationships together. The four of us had come to become good friends, but there are different conversations you have when you’re going out for pizza and beer versus, hey, what would it look like to share a mortgage together or share the cost of groceries or cook meals and that sort of thing.

We really went through a whole process of asking questions like, what kind of living arrangement would we want? We had a chance to visit a community of two families that were living together where they had a two flat. So, they actually had two separate spaces, but then they made active efforts to do meals together or have hospitality.

We talked about what would a commitment to cooking meals together look like. How do we want to commingle resources around finances and things like that? We realized that there were so many of those questions, then begat like a lot of other questions and this is where it was helpful, where we had a good mix of gifts.

We had high level thinking of what we’d like this to do, how might some of these things be a reflection of our values? And then to Lisa’s point around logistics, like how are we gonna keep track of things? How are we gonna balance a checkbook? How are we gonna keep track of receipts?

How are we going to make sure that we are following through with things? And so, it took a mixture of our collective gifts to really sort that out.

Lisa Wittig: Yeah, and another like important piece of intentional community is really understanding what it means to be intentional. Working at Amate House and certainly many of us having lived in community before, had a little bit of a basis of understanding of what it means to be intentional when you’re living with a group of people.

But I think it’s not like we’re just choosing our best friends and living in an apartment together for a couple years and taking turns making dinner and hanging out at night, playing games. That did happen and that was one of the great parts of living in community with the Lenz family.

But also, it was about living with people who you would maybe be irritated with or have a pet peeve that would rub you the wrong way. And then you were in a place where you had to make a decision, like, how am I gonna handle this feeling I’m currently having? Am I gonna [00:12:00] brush it off and ignore it?

Is it something that I can ignore and it won’t be an issue? Or is it something that’s gonna fester and get harder and harder? And Carla, I don’t know for you, like, where your head space was going into it. You all had a child. We went into it as just a couple. We didn’t have children yet, but, like, knowing when you become a parent, like you are now, you have so much more to consider in your decisions, in how you wanna be intentional, especially in raising a child. For me, trying to be really intentional about how we were approaching relationships and what decisions we were making was a really important piece of it.

But I don’t know, in parenting, if you feel like when you came into it, you had that whole extra thing to consider in terms of what it meant to bring your child into a house with these other people.

Carla Lents: Yeah, when I think back at the discerning time, that was the thing that loomed largest in my mind the whole time, like, do I feel comfortable moving into a place with my child and these people? It was like this balance [00:13:00] of having the values conversation—what are our shared values? —then also the nitty-gritty of all the finances and the day-to-day stuff. We spent almost a year meeting together, talking about these things. So, by the time we were getting to the point where we were making the decision and saying, yeah, let’s figure out where we can live together, I actually felt pretty comfortable with it. People have talked about this idea of naivete of moving into an intentional community and learning what the word “intentional” means as you’re living that out. And that was really the case for me because I had not lived in community prior to this experience.

I had lived with roommates and things like that, but it was not a community situation. I think there was a big learning curve for me personally, in terms of what that meant, but also, as Lisa alluded to, I didn’t really know what—I didn’t know about what parenting in front of other people would be like.

Also, I had one child, and so everything [00:14:00] that we were encountering with our child was new to us as we were going along. So, we were just like, okay, I don’t know if this is normal in front of these other people or anything like that. It was very raw and real that first year.

Ryan Lents: Just saying what most parents know, right, is that the first child is the test child. So, like, for better or for worse, we were able to figure a lot of stuff out with us.

Carla Lents: Yeah, it was also a very grace-filled time in that I think hopefully Lisa and Jonathan benefited from seeing us fumbling through dealing with a toddler once we moved in together.

I know it was very grace-filled for us to at least talk about, like hanging out together and stuff. But one of the most amazing things of having a young child in community was, like, you put them to bed and then you can be like, “Hey, we’re gonna go for a walk.”

And there’s people in the house. That’s not a thing that, like the majority of parents who live in a single-family [00:15:00] home and have little kids, you’re, like, stuck. That was just one little thing that I remember as being, like, amazing.

Jonathan Wittig: I just wanted to jump in on some of the pre-decision formation that I recall. And even if you meet for a year, you can’t go through every scenario and answer every question. And so, there’s stuff you’re gonna realize the first day, the first week, first month, first year that you’re living in a community that you just couldn’t have planned for.

And so, one of the things that I always think of our formation period was being very intentional about, what do we do when we come upon conflict? And just thinking it through, we don’t have to know the answer. Let’s figure out the method by which we’re gonna approach this.

So, we can all feel heard and respected and hopefully find a good resolution. I think that was a critical part of our formation, just figuring that out. And then likewise, on the joyful side, if we want to bring something forward, what’s our approach for doing that?

We had monthly meetings that were focused in terms of planning and stuff like that. And then I won’t say we had weekly prayer that would be a space for kind of connection. And then [00:16:00] there’s probably space in between for how we bring up new ideas and we can talk through those. And so, there are different spaces for each of those. We could figure out those ideas together. I think that was critical for having a sustainable community.

Christina Gebel: Wow, there’s so many gems coming up. Like, my mind is buzzing with all of the things that y’all just said. What a beautiful way to reflect on all of it. And Carla, I was really struck by what you said. Bringing parenting into this, the first child, the quote, unquote, test child. And I’m assuming that child turned out really well if I know you two.

So, it’s just special. What a unique coming together at that moment. And you’ve been talking really beautifully about just the balance between values and logistics and what stood out to you as concerns, and what were some of the things that you thought might happen and how to anticipate [00:17:00] those. At what point did you feel like a decision had been made?

Did y’all set, like, that one-year timeframe, or did the spirit come down and tell you, “Hey, it’s time?” How did y’all arrive at the actual decision point and to use parenting language, did you have any big feelings about that as you went in?

Carla Lents: My memory of, I think it was in the springtime or, like, late winter after we had been meeting for several months, I remember someone asking the question at one of our gatherings and just said, “All right, we’ve been talking about this for a while now. Are we ready to take the next step?”

I think there was definitely a consensus around, “Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s try it out.” We stepped into it, but we still left our outs. We didn’t sell our condos. We were renting. We had a one-year rental lease of the place we were gonna live in together.

It was like, “We’re gonna try this for a year and see how it goes.” And so, it felt like a natural and appropriately sized step to start trying things out. It didn’t feel like, “Oh, we’re getting married right now.”

It felt like this is just a natural step forward. My memory of it was like kind of excitement, the feeling that I remember.

Ryan Lents: Yeah, once we, I think, found that there was a lot of alignment around some of the big things that we were discussing, it was like, “Okay, we can admire this from a distance for a while, but what would it look like to actually start to work towards a plan?”

And so, as we started to zero in on neighborhoods that might make sense, I think that was part of the challenges. Geographically, we were pretty far-flung when it came to our jobs, and then adding in childcare, where Caleb was going during the week, there was no one place that checked all the boxes, and we were sensitive to wanting to be in a place where we felt like we could thrive in community. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t a place where gentrification was going crazy, and we wanted it to be a place that we felt like, yeah, we could really live this out. That ended up being uptown for us.

We ended up renting there for two years, and yeah, it was a house that really worked great, I think, as we were getting started for this kind of experiment that we had entered into.

Christina Gebel: Awesome. And y’all have touched on this in your different responses and even bringing up, “Hey, Jesus lived in community,” but even with Jesus’ kind of being the example with his 12 disciples, a lot of people still don’t make this decision. So, I’m curious, what was it about your faith that spoke to you and really was the underpinning of making this choice?

Ryan Lents: Yeah, so I think all of us had been formed in Catholic social teaching in some way, shape, or form. I think as we were talking about it, I see Catholic social teaching as ways that we actually make the kind of big idea of faith like practical and real.

Like what are the commitments? What are the things that we actually walk in our daily practice that reflect that faith in Jesus? I think that it was a way for us to put our values into action together. There’s lots of ways that you can live your life, but I think, for example, as we were starting to surface some of the values that were important to us, we named things like sustainability.

We wanted to make sure that we were being responsible with the resources that we had, a lot of things around stewardship and connectedness. Jonathan pointed to simplicity. What were ways that we could be, yeah, just be more responsible with resources? We were all Catholic, all of us came from a Catholic background and perspective, but we talked about how we didn’t necessarily want to be exclusive in that way.

If there were other people who were to come into our orbit who would want to join us, we wanted to figure out a way that would necessarily be a prerequisite. And that ended up being helpful, especially as we offered hospitality, which was another big value.

One of the things I remember most about our first two years is we had this incredible first floor that was great for hosting people. And so, there were these meals and dinners that we would host, where at times we would have over 30 people in the house, and it would be like a potluck, and it would just be this beautiful place to start the evening in prayer, but really just to encounter one another.

And many were neighbors. Some were folks that we had met through other circles. And it was just a really beautiful way to put that into practice. For the first two years, we also lived with somebody that Jonathan had met at Loyola who had a real devotion to a monastic kind of tradition.

And so, for him, morning prayer was really important. That was something that I remember from my experience at Nazareth Farm. We struggled with that a little bit; the 6:00 AM or 6:30 AM start, whatever it was, became a little bit more difficult. So that was a place we struggled a little bit; we all valued this practice of prayer, but in terms of making that a tangible commitment, that was one that we had to do a little bit of testing around.

We did a few in-house retreats during our time together that were powerful; we would either be self-directed or find something that we could go to together and then discuss. I think that we were trying to be active and accompanying one another in our own faith journeys at various points.

Jonathan Wittig: I would say also at this stage of our lives, we were younger and eager and searching and trying to live out our faith without as many distractions as there are now at this stage of life. And having other people who live out their faith in different ways was so empowering, like, oh, I’m gonna sit down and meditate.

Do you wanna join me? And I wasn’t thinking of doing that, but sure, I guess I will, or all of us worked in some type of service-focused job, or we were involved in some way in the community, so there were just a lot of opportunities to push ourselves in a positive way that came organically from living together. And it paid a lot of dividends to our children. Ryan’s a talented guitarist. And we would do worship sometimes in the house, and Ryan would just jam, and I can’t play anything.

And so, it was great for my kids to see that and just be exposed to that, and Carla was just very artsy, and our youngest kid, that’s all she does. And I don’t know, I like to believe that Carla had an impact on her. And so that exposure is one of the many joys that I had from community.

But the faith component of that is something I wanted at that time, and it was definitely a major benefit from living together.

Lisa Wittig: I would say too that spontaneous exposure was definitely a huge benefit and something we valued and appreciated. But I also want to say that another piece of that intentional community aspect is the accountability piece, where it was great to have exposure to new and different things so that we could learn and grow ourselves.

But also, just being with other people all the time is a form of accountability that not everyone experiences in that kind of intentional way. And so I think that was another piece of it that was really helpful to us in this very formative part of our lives, where we could say faith was important to us, or that stewardship or simplicity was important to us, but we actually had [00:24:00] these four other adults that we were living with that were like, “Oh, now I gotta prove to them that it’s important to me, I gotta walk the walk,” which is an important piece of growing. I really value having that kind of accountability that we provided to each other.

Christina Gebel: Yeah. What better way to practice accountability than to live with other people? That’s such a key point. It’s not only about your inward actions, but also about your communal actions, and those actions are in, of, and around each other. I loved the piece about sustainability because that’s something I think a lot about too, and just how we are on autopilot in the US. We’re all kind of living in our respective dwellings, and maybe there are intergenerational households, but we all have, you know, a kitchen mixer, or there’s a proliferation of things [00:25:00], and to really be intentional is counter-cultural in that sense.

So I’m very curious as to what people in your lives thought about these decisions—loved ones, friends, random people next door to you, whoever was observing, because, as you were saying, this is more than roommates, and I’m wondering what the people around you thought and how you explained to them that this is more than just living together or simply living together with roommates.

Lisa Wittig: Yeah, such a great question. We had the benefit of coming from social circles in Chicago that had heard of or seen or even experienced intentional community, so that certainly made it a little easier in some instances to explain or to share about. Although even people who had lived in intentional community before were like, “Wait, you’re gonna do this with children? Are you crazy?” Or like with a husband or [00:26:00] with a partner. It was definitely a shock to a lot of people, like when I think about explaining it to my family in another state who had never really had that kind of exposure to the idea before.

I remember having to talk them through it and explain it. And like with my family, I was like, “It’s like roommates. We’re just gonna be living with roommates.” I got to the point where they couldn’t exactly understand it, and so I had to just default to that.

But I definitely remember trying to be like, “Look, here are the good things about it. We don’t have to buy as many things because now, we’re in a house with people who have some of those things. I only have to do half the chores because we can split up chores among four adults.”

For my family and my side of it, who hadn’t really been exposed to those ideas, it was a little easier to default to the more simplistic ideas behind it, because they just didn’t quite grasp or understand what it meant to do something that was this spiritually challenging or emotionally investing.

It was just such a farfetched and new idea to my family.

Jonathan Wittig: For me, my family is a little bit more understanding. Three of my siblings had done volunteer programs, and so they lived in community, and so they at least understood the concept as adults. They were like, that’s cool.

I would never do that, kind of thing. I think that was a common reaction. My parents were very excited and supportive, and that was good for me.

Carla Lents: It’s funny, I can’t remember in the beginning how we explained this to people. I think what Lisa said, around people can understand the economic benefits very easily, so if you lead with that, then they’re like, oh yeah.

So, anything that’s weird, you’re just gonna put up with, because you’re getting so many economic, I think that’s the language that our society kind of understands. The countercultural aspect of it, people just shrug off. They’re like, that’s good for you. I know now in hindsight, our parents, really, over the years as they interacted with us and came to visit and got to know Lisa and Jonathan and the kids, just experiencing it and seeing how it was different. So, I think there’s that. As you explain it to people in your life, then you start hearing about other people, oh, I know somebody else who does that. I feel like we did get connected to a few other intentional communities in the Chicago area where people that we knew who knew someone else and that sort of thing.

Ryan Lents: I think, yeah, with my parents there was this, oh, that’s nice. And there was this, I don’t understand it.

I just think about how the last couple of generations before our generation, there was such an investment in independence. Those were the first generations where you saw this widespread phenomenon of people moving across the country. A lot of that was seen as economic mobility and independence, and it was often lauded as this like thing of progress, but there was a lot that was given up in that process, right? Like, I think about how for most of human history, families lived intergenerationally together.

Part of it was an economic necessity, but there was a lot of bonding and mutual support that was just part of that deal that became very easy to see as replaceable, and so I think in this time where we are experiencing so much loneliness and isolation, for many people as they really start to think of it, they would maybe say, yeah, I like having my own space, or I like having my own privacy. And I would say, yeah, like there are things you give up, right?

Like you don’t get to just pretend like you have the whole house to yourself, but then I would quickly name off eight things—here are all the things that we gain that make life meaningful and rich and supportive. Those are things that are hard to quantify, but they make life so much more livable, and what can be a really hard time to live in these days, most people, I think at least, even if they said, I could never see myself doing that, most people we encountered were able to be like, oh, okay, I can understand.

Lisa Wittig: Yeah, and just to put an example to what Ryan was just saying about the benefits, I sometimes think about the COVID times, and I reflect on that time as literally like maybe the best three months of my life.

Some of my favorite memories come from those, like that March through June. Society across the world was just sheltered off from everybody in their lives, and us included. But because we lived in community, we had this built-in support and trust and emotional stability for each other where we were able to say, all right, this is a weird, strange, difficult thing that’s happening, but let’s make the most of it.

There’s so many memories I have from that time period I just think about and laugh and smile because we had such an amazing benefit of being together and being able to support each other during that time that a lot of other people didn’t have.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s such a great point about COVID, and talk about two unique situations, COVID-19 and living together. What an interesting time to be in intentional community, and my heart just warmed up when you said those were some of your best memories.

We all who were more isolated at the time started to miss that connection, and you had that really built into your life. And I’m gonna insert a little curious question here. Y’all have talked about receiving the thoughts and reactions about what you did from people, saying, “Great, or that’s great for you and not me.” And when I’ve talked about this, even when I’ve talked about you to other people, because again, you really are my heroes in this, a lot of people have said, “I could never do that because I’m an introvert,” or “I could not do that because I need privacy.”

And the people in my life who I think I would want to do that with are probably smiling, because I have some dear loved ones with some strong introvert energy in my life, whereas for me, it’s like, oh my gosh, I get to be around my friends all day. This is great. I could go on in perpetuity, obviously with challenges, of course. Did any of you have that concern around introversion or even privacy?

Did you encounter that?

Lisa Wittig: I don’t know. I’m introverted, and I loved it because as a parent, you have certain obligations to ensure that your children stay alive, and in order to do that, you need to be present. But when you have other adults in the house, okay, now I get to go for a walk because I have three other people that are here and can make sure the children stay alive.

I don’t know. I don’t think that argument stands very well because I feel like I was given a lot of opportunities to be introverted in that communal space.

Jonathan Wittig: I think it strengthened our marriage because, as we were still young in our marriage, we were trying to

navigate differences in how we communicate, which we’re still doing. So, I think it’ll be a lifelong journey, but I was able to seek Ryan or Carla or Tony for different needs, and I didn’t place all that on Lisa, which I think would’ve been what I would’ve done had we continued living together.

So, it gave us more time to grow in our marriage together and navigate just these things that are difficult. I think that having those outlets probably freed Lisa up. I’m an extrovert, and I like to chitchat, and so I think it ultimately benefited us, I would say.

Ryan Lents: Yeah, I think where I land on this is I, as I’ve gotten older, I think I come to appreciate introversion. Extroversion is not a binary for me, like going to a cocktail party where I have to do a lot of small talk and go up and introduce myself to people, I don’t know is like the worst thing I could ever imagine.

When I have to do that for jobs or other things, I’m like, what’s the earliest I can leave, and I come home and I just want to be in a quiet room by myself, right? If you are in a dynamic where you’re with people who you have been vulnerable with and there’s like a mutual sense of trust, that’s a very different thing, and it can still hold intention, like with what Lisa said, like even in a nuclear family, you have to have boundaries. There are times that, yeah, I’m raw right now and in a bad mood, or I need some space, and those boundaries are important no matter what kind of arrangement you’re in.

To be in a place where you can be radically loved and accepted for yourself, for all of your warts and shortcomings, and know that people are not gonna throw you away. Yeah, I hope everybody has an experience of that in their life, whether it’s intentional community or not.

Like that’s, I think, a precious thing that we have the opportunity to cultivate together in community.

Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s incredible. We talk about spousal love as a type of radical love of accepting each other at all times—the good, the bad, the interesting—and to bring that type of love, which is, I think, the way God loves us, to bring that type into the fold with more people. I can’t say it enough that that choice is just so profound and interesting and really powerful in its vulnerability.

Switching back to those early days, was there anything else you realized maybe once you had made the decision and were finally in it, that you might have overlooked or underestimated or overestimated, or just anything else from those early days of creating norms and habits and flow?

Carla Lents: Caleb was two when we moved in together, and we were moving in with people who had never really lived with a toddler. I do remember feeling self-conscious about, like, how.

He [00:36:00] was acting, even though he was just being a 2-year-old in general. But also, as we mentioned before, I didn’t know that. But there were a lot of graces, and I think people also recognized that this is what it is. We’re living together.

That’s definitely something I remember. But also, in hindsight, you just recognize that that’s life, and he would’ve been a two-year-old wherever we had been living with him. I don’t know, Lisa and Jonathan’s memory of that early time, the first two months probably, of living with Caleb and what that was like.

That was probably the biggest thing for me as we moved in together. It was like, okay, how do I manage this?

Jonathan Wittig: I definitely watched a lot more Cars, the Pixar movie, than I ever would’ve watched on my own. That’s for sure.

But I would give Caleb chocolates before bedtime as revenge, so it’s all good. No, I mean, I agree. I think the parenting aspect of community living was probably the hardest, just ‘cause we have different parenting styles and approaches. And so, like you, you see [00:37:00] something and you’re like, your judgmental side wants to come out, but I think that was part of what I liked about community, is the challenge of living community and just, okay.

What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? And how do I react to that feeling? And then that was an opportunity to grow or not to grow, depending on what we wanted to hold there. And I agree that it was challenging many times, but it was also like, I loved it.

Like, I loved Caleb, and I loved hanging out with him, and I had the maturity of a 2-year-old sometimes, so it was perfect for me. I just wanted to play with him, and it was so much fun because I didn’t have any kids at the time, and I loved his energy.

Lisa Wittig: Yeah, it was a bit of a parenting warmup for us, ‘cause we got to live with Caleb for a year before Caroline was born, and we got to see, like, the challenges that parents face in their home with their child, and start to fast forward our thinking to be like, oh, okay, like what are we gonna do when we’re parents? And oh man, they have to deal with this toddler throwing a tantrum right now. Let’s just go for a walk. And we still had the freedom to be like really appreciative of that freedom, so it was [00:38:00] nice to be able to have that exposure, have that learning, and be able to learn from the wise parents that Ryan and Carla were. Once our kids came along, there was a lot more that we were able to understand and knew a little bit better how to approach, ‘cause we had that early exposure.

Christina Gebel: Did you ever, like when your kids came along, kind of eat the humble pie and say, oh, this is toddlerhood, or did you have any of those humble pie moments?

Jonathan Wittig: It’s delicious pie. So, for sure.

Lisa Wittig: Yeah. I’m sure there definitely were some of those moments, but I’m really grateful for the experience of being able to co-parent during that time because I feel like parenting can be really hard.

Anyone who’s a parent knows the challenges that come along with it. And to be able to have that kind of support from people who are there in it with you who can see when you’re reaching your limit and maybe step in now that we’re just a single family, not living in intentional community anymore.

If we have a night where I hit my limit and like just need to walk away and Jonathan’s doing something else, like the dishes don’t get done. They just are there for whenever we pull ourselves back together and can come back to the kitchen. But when we lived in a community, we had an amazing, like, dish fairy who would come in, and it would be something we wouldn’t have to worry about or a stress that wouldn’t be on us later because we were able to support each other in those times when things were really challenging and hard. It was great to have that support.

Christina Gebel: Yes, definitely. Honestly, I think about my line of work being a doula and a childbirth educator. I’ve always felt that families that do the best in the postpartum period, especially with your first, are the ones who have a lot of support in close proximity. And something I’ve thought a lot about in our modern context was what you mentioned earlier: upward mobility is becoming synonymous.

With [00:40:00] darting around the country and getting the next big job, that pushes you a little bit further and farther. And so, there’s this interesting time in humanity where grandparents aren’t always living down the street, and I support so many families who are trying to make it work. And maybe that means the grandparents make a move to where they are.

Or you hire a postpartum doula to get through those really tough nights. The loneliness of those early days with your first, and you’re constantly questioning, “Am I doing this right?” Am I doing right by this child? Am I feeding them? Are they okay? Lisa, as you’re talking, I’m thinking what a gift it is to have had another mom so close to you who can tell you, Hey, you’re doing good.

Maybe try this and try that. Like to me, that is so crucial. If we are going to stay in this being, we are in different places from our immediate families. The village that we had in maybe the first part of our lives lives a lot farther away than maybe we thought it might.

I like this phrase that I saw on a meme, like you can build the village, but you still have to be the villager. You know, you can have people around, but people still have to show up and do things amid their own stuff. Living in a community, the village is really proximal during that vulnerable time.

Carla Lents: Thinking back like I had my first child when we were just living on our own. And then our younger child was born while we were in community. We also had some pretty difficult like medical issues with the second child.

And yet thinking back to my mental health through both of those experiences, first child, no matter what happens medically or anything, it’s a big transition. Your brain is totally changing and all that. But I think back to [00:42:00] my mental health space in both of those experiences, and it was like, hands down much better the second time.

There were challenges with both maternity leave times. The first biggest challenge for me was loneliness because I went from working full-time to just hanging out in a little apartment in December in Chicago when it felt like it was dark all the time.

And then, the first month with Micah, I talked about some health challenges, and basically, I was in, like, this breastfeeding/pumping cycle that felt never-ending and not getting a lot of sleep.

Every time after I fed him, I just needed somebody to hold him, and I would just wander around and be like, “Who’s holding this baby?” And Lisa, 90% of the time, was like, I’ll hold that baby. And that was just amazing. I think Lisa and Micah have a little bit of a special bond from that early time, not even just the first month, but the first six months of his life, which is interesting ‘cause Micah is a personality that I would be like, “That personality [00:43:00] does not match with Lisa’s personality.”

But yeah, just from that experience, she understands him and he understands her on a level, so that’s something that I think is like a little miracle from the whole experience.

Lisa Wittig: Yeah. I think back to our nights, Carla, where we’d put the kids to bed and we would go watch Call the Midwife.

Carla Lents: Yeah.

Lisa Wittig: Very happy memory for me.

Christina Gebel: Oh, I have so much love now that you brought in. Call the midwife to the conversation. I’m just effusive in my giddiness in this conversation. I love that you all had kids and still turned on. Call the midwife. That’s amazing. So, just sitting here listening to you talk about that, Carla, I’m thinking of so many moms that I’ve worked with who have felt similar and would love to have a loving person like Lisa say, Yes, give me the baby.

That’s amazing. So, we talked a lot about the joys and challenges at some point, and eventually this all [00:44:00] came to an end, and I’m really curious about how it came to an end. And also, what it’s been like since. So maybe you could start by telling us how this came to a close.

Jonathan Wittig: I’ll take responsibility for that one. Lisa and I enjoyed living and experiencing culture, and that was one of the things that united us in our relationship. And one of my desires, or our desires, was to live abroad with the children and expose them to another culture and to another language and be the minority in that space and feel the comfort and discomfort of that.

We were living in a community, and we had bought a house together, and it was the perfect house for us. And we lived there for five years.

But we all stayed roughly the same size, but the kids kept getting bigger. And we were approaching the end of life for that house. We probably could have gone another year or two.

We were approaching a space where we had to make the decision. And that plus the urge of desiring to live abroad was something that I was like, oh, maybe this is the time. We ultimately made that decision in concert with Ryan and Carla, and they were supportive of that.

And so that’s what kind of ended that time there. In terms of how I feel now, I’m grateful for our time abroad and for where we are now, but I miss community living dearly. I miss living with the Lents. I desire to live in a community again for all the benefits and the challenges that brings.

That’s something I desire for my future life, even at 40.

Carla Lents: Yeah, I think a predominant thing that I remember right after we moved out of the community and we were living in our own house is that the first six months after we did that, Caleb kept asking, like, are we ever going to move into the community again? And.

As he’s gotten older and he’s become a teenager, that’s waned a little bit, but I believe there’s a little seed inside him that, when the time comes that it could be reinvigorated in his life, he will look for that.

I’m a happy crier. I’m sorry.

Ryan Lents: Yeah. It’s crazy to think about, like, in 2020, that four out of the five [00:46:00] kids that two couples have, like, all three of Lisa and Jonathan’s kids and then yeah. Like our younger son Micah, we’re all born in community. I just think about how formative that was for them; up until 2020, when we did go our separate ways, like four of them had known nothing else.

Yeah. The beautiful thing is, we’ve remained very close friends. We were just together last weekend. We’ve seen each other three times, I think, in the last three months, with just a little bit of a rarity because we are six hours apart now.

But just the way that things have worked out, it’s been a lovely happenstance. When our families get together, it’s like cousins; they’re more than just friends. There’s a dynamic that they just pick right up together.

And that bond is something that I think we’ll carry forward for the rest of our lives, which is a really beautiful thing. Actually, you should interview them. That would be really good. One of these days, maybe you could interview the kids and see what they have to say about this.

I don’t think Caleb would actually agree to that, but I’m just saying hypothetically, it would be really interesting to hear their insights about this because they, even though it’s been over five years now, like, so [00:47:00] many of those core memories are there with them. So yeah.

Lisa Wittig: I think one of the things I’m most grateful for is having given that gift to our children, because I think in the way children grow up in our society, they have to deal with the struggles and challenges of figuring out how to live with siblings, but also when you add in siblings who aren’t siblings, it’s a new dynamic.

And there were special friendships there and special pieces to those relationships that I’m so grateful that they have. When we moved out, I think it was even like two years after we had moved out, and Ben was like, “When are we going to move back in with Micah again?” Just ‘cause he values that relationship, and every time we meet together with the Lents, he’s always so excited to see Micah, who was his best buddy when we were all living together.

Jonathan Wittig: Still is his best buddy.

Yeah. And he still holds him in that regard. It is also something that builds me with joy every time. And then Katherine, who was two when we left the community, so she really wasn’t able to experience [00:48:00] it. She doesn’t skip a beat. I think she loves every member here as the same as though she did live it.

Like she just maybe just realizes that Caleb has a special bond with her and takes care of her like a little sister. And I don’t know. I love the kids’ dynamic together.

Carla Lents: For several times when we saw the wigs after we moved out of the community, but Katherine was still really young.

Then Caleb would always be like, “When are you going to make me a little sister?” So yeah. When we had Micah, he really wanted a little brother, and then he was like, why didn’t I get a little sister?

Christina Gebel: I love that so much. So, we’re winding down. I’d like to offer one question before my final question to each of you. So, the second-to-last question is for someone considering this. Maybe people aren’t ready to take the plunge like you did, but what would you recommend to read or think about or people to talk to?

Is there a world in which you can kind of do a [00:49:00] community light, if you will, and start trialing some of these things? What would you say to someone who’s just in the beginning stages of discerning something like this?

Lisa Wittig: I think one of the most important things is to probably outline what your end goals would be or like what your priorities would be. I think for us that piece was pretty easy, I think. It took that year of discernment to come together and all voice them.

Figuring out what that is, I think, was a really important piece because you obviously don’t want to go into something that high of a commitment without making sure that you’re at least on the same page with the other people that are going to be there doing it with you. Whether it’s like trying to live more simply, trying to build intentional community, or whatever those goals are, try to make sure that you have them written down and focus on them.

Carla Lents: Just to elevate what Lisa just said. It’s like both the high-level values and goals behind it, making sure you’re aligned [00:50:00] there and then creating the structure, the containers, for coming back together on a regular basis, rechecking in on a regular basis. I think those were the two things that made us successful because we always had those values to remember the why, but then also you had the structure for keeping things on track on a daily and weekly basis.

Ryan Lents: I think in the process of discerning, coming to understand like what our non-negotiables were. Like, what were the things that were absolutely essential. What were the things that there could be flexibility around? It’s interesting; we didn’t necessarily come up with an exit strategy specifically.

And that could have bit us bad if we had not come to agreement about how to part ways. I think that the first two years we had a good experiment because we knew we were just doing this for a year, and then the first year went really well.

So quickly we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to do a second year.” When you get to the level of sharing a mortgage and your lives are really, truly intermingled, it just requires that ongoing communication and cultivation of trust to make sure that, yeah, we’re seeing eye to eye about our vision and future together.

It really just takes ongoing communication to really make it work. And that would be true even if there were arrangements or agreements in place that weren’t as commingled as what we ended up doing. That piece around communication really helps quite a bit with addressing things as they come up, as opposed to letting things fester and getting to a place where then things completely unravel.

It’s often when people just don’t share their needs in a healthy way that all kinds of things can happen that can cause a lot of harm.

Jonathan Wittig: I’ll add that there are a lot of types of intentional communities that have a full range of values that they live by and how they live.

And so, a resource, I think it was [The Foundation for Intentional Community] ic.org or something like that. But Chicago has a ton of intentional communities, and I recall most of the ones I was aware of or was drawn to [00:52:00] had hospitality as a value. And so, they would have an open dinner, and you can just come as an individual or as a family or whatnot and just be exposed.

And so, you could just slowly get your feet wet without having to find five people to live with or anything like that. You can just get there, and a lot of ‘em have opportunities to enter into existing communities, so you don’t have to, like, go through the full process, and you can just see what’s already set up and opt in versus having to start from scratch.

Lisa Wittig: I’ll just point out that, like, we chose to live in an intentional community with another family, and I don’t think there’s anything in the definition of intentional community that says it has to be someone that you’re not related to. So, there are plenty of ways that you can try to live out intentional community with the people you’re currently living with.

I think that’s a great first step to figuring out what you want your journey to be and look like. Again, sitting down and thinking through, what are my goals? What am I hoping to get out of this? Like in what ways am I willing to make a sacrifice and be intentional about something?

And just taking those kinds of [00:53:00] smaller steps. Like Jonathan said, there are a lot of great examples of different communities that we got to see and experience. People who maybe just lived next to each other or in the same neighborhood and made intentional choices to come together every once in a while or do certain things.

In the same way or together, there are a lot of different ways to do it. But again, just sitting down at the beginning and deciding, where do I want to be? Where do I want to go? And what am I willing to really give to the experience?

Ryan Lents: And you had asked Christina about resources.

There were two books that were helpful in terms of some of the framings that we used for some of our own discernment. One is a book called [Building Community: Christian, Caring, Vital] by Loughlan Sofield, Rosine Hammett, and Carroll Juliano. It’s about a 30-year-old book now, but it’s one that I think we used at Amate House and incorporated some of the conversations that happened during orientation for those communities.

And it was helpful for us. Then there’s a book called [Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities] by Diana Leafe Christian. She’s spent most of her adult life living in ecovillages; it’s like people that want to go off the grid and want to form their own community, buy land, raise livestock, and have gardens and things like that.

There are people that kind of take it to a whole other level. She has a book that talks about a lot of things that didn’t really relate to our reality around purchasing land and those things, but some of the things around agreements and ongoing practices were helpful for us to look at and just to open our minds to the range of decisions that we might need to consider.

So, both of those resources were helpful for us.

Christina Gebel: Those are some really great suggestions, and I don’t think those were actually on my radar up to this point, so I appreciate you offering them. And again, the theme of this season is radical family, making bold choices to live out faith. And certainly, I think many would agree that the decision that y’all made to live together in this community was bold.

And we’ve talked a lot about faith and all of that. [00:55:00] But to bring it back to faith, where has this choice that you made deep into your faith been, or has your faith grown deeper in the years since as a result of making this decision?

Carla Lents: For me it is, recognizing that God puts other people in our lives that act as God that are God’s hands and God’s heart; conversely, it makes you recognize how much the culture of individualism has affected you.

And it’s something that still exists even after living in community for seven years. It definitely still exists in me, but also you were talking about before the idea of it. Wanting to be a part of the village and having to be a villager wanting to see God’s promise enacted on earth.

You have to be God’s hands.

Ryan Lents: Yeah. Yeah. I think that community offers amazing opportunities to [00:56:00] deepen one’s faith and spirituality. Because in the daily things that you encounter, you get a mirror of both your own giftedness and the divinity that lives within you and the ways that hopefully a community affirms that.

But also, yeah, seeing the divinity and the godliness of others that we get to walk with. A community that just is focusing on itself is one that is going to suffocate; it needs oxygen. Communities that are healthy and vital are the ones that are engaged out in the world, that give a damn about what’s happening on the block in the city.

And we’ve talked very little about our commitments to justice in this conversation, but the organizing work that I do now and, like, living in community, just like my own clarity around my own vocation, and much of the work that I’ve done over the last 10, 15 years has really been shaped by that opportunity to live in community.

And that’s been, I think, a really important part of it as well.

Jonathan Wittig: For me, it was and has continued to be the challenge and example that each member of our community has given. I was sharing with Ryan when I was in Chicago with him, just [00:57:00] how I’m inspired by his work and I’m challenged by his work that he’s living out the example that he’s setting right now.

I use that as an opportunity for me. How am I living out justice in my faith? And with Carla, it was her kindness and her peace that she carried with her all the time. And with Tony, it was his spirituality and his self-reflection. And Lisa brought us all together in terms of just keeping our house cohesive.

And so, all of those were opportunities for me to witness other people living out their faith. And then also. Either be challenged by it or learn from it or grow from it. I believe in faith in action and each of those components as an opportunity for me to grow in my faith.

And I appreciated it then, and I still appreciate it now.

Lisa Wittig: I don’t know that I’ll add anything new to all of that great wisdom, but I think my summation is we are called to live in community. We’re called to be together and be with one another. The actual physical presence of having one another in your proximity just provides that extra accountability to [00:58:00] acknowledge that yes, you are here, I am here, and we are doing this together.

We’re living this life together. And hopefully, being a positive influence on each other, hoping to enact change or make an impact in some way that’s possibly greater than if we were just by ourselves.

Christina Gebel: Wow. I don’t even know how I can follow that because I am just awed by the wisdom of this conversation and probably will be for the rest of the day and the week. I just want to say I feel incredible. Lucky to know the four of you as people. And regardless if we had been talking about this topic and there were so many other directions we could have gone with, I admire each of you and the social justice that you commit yourselves to every day.

And what a gift it’s been for me to be your friend in my own formation. I hope that this conversation will spark something [00:59:00] for other people, so that even if they’re not living under the same roof, maybe they’re just thinking more intentionally about life and how we live it and how it impacts other people around us in our immediate household but also in our community at large.

So, I just again want to thank you all. It has been an honor, a joy, and a pleasure.

Jonathan Wittig: A joy being here. Christina, thank you for having us.

Ryan Lents: Thanks for the invitation. It’s been lovely to, yeah, Revisit this time of our lives.

I am tuning into today with some exciting news, and that is that Moderate Catholic has officially wrapped its first season on acedia! I hope y’all had a good time listening to the episodes and exploring the bonuses. And believe it or not, it is now actually time to move on to season two.

So, what started at a sub podcast, which was kind of like, yeah, we’ll see where things go, has now grown up into toddlerhood, and hopefully it won’t be the terrible twos! So, we are approaching season two, and I’m just dropping a quick note to let you know that the theme of season two will be…Radical Family! [drum roll sound effect followed by applause sound effect][00:01:00]

Now, you might be saying, okay, what is that? “Radical Family” is a phrase that came to me as I was starting to think about season two, and it was inspired by a homily that I heard when I was living in Boston with one of my favorite priests there, and he was talking about how radical means “roots.”

And so, if you think of like a radish, right? Radish…grows underground. It has roots, soil, earth, that sort of thing. That’s the extent of my Latin connecting the dots. So radical means to get to the root of something.

And he was saying that, on its face, radical seems like extreme, right? Like we usually use radical as someone or something that’s like way [00:02:00] over on one end of the spectrum or defies all the typical paradigms when really. Radical means to get to the essence of something if we’re looking at those Latin underpinnings, and I got to thinking about that. What I realized was our faith is radical in both ways, right?

What does it mean to be a radical Catholic? One, it could mean those big, huge bold ideas that we use when we talk about being radical secularly, the big ideas, breaking the norms, all those things. But it also could mean, like, getting down to the essence of our faith, and if we really distill down to the root of our faith, what emerges is ironically actually something quite radical

To follow Jesus, [00:03:00] really in a true way, the essence of what He taught, upending what had been taught up until then to get to the root of Jesus’s message is actually to live a radical life.

So, I started kind of playing with that double meaning of radical, both bold, but also foundational essence, and I started thinking, you know, what would it mean to be a radical family in today’s world? And I’ve always had an interest in family since I am a birth doula, and have studied a lot of marriage and family ethics and theology, and I started to think about what would it mean if a family was radically living out their faith?

On the one hand, it would be families that are making really bold choices. So maybe it’s they’re living [00:04:00] their home life a different way, or maybe the way that their family comes together is different, or the service or the mission or the social justice that they’re committing themselves to as a family looks a little different than your average family in society, but also, if we’re talking about the faith aspect of all of it, it also means like how is this family really embodying the essence of what Jesus was calling all of us to do, but in this case, as a family unit.

When I put those two together, that phrase “radical family,” I started to think about families who I know who I would point to, to say, hey, they’re doing something a little different. They’re not just doing the norm. Not that the norm is necessarily bad or lacking, but they’re inspiring. They’re trying to do things with intentionality.

And when I [00:05:00] was an undergrad and really into marriage and family ethics, I really looked up to my theology advisor and how she was intentionally living out faith in her family, and when you walked into their house, you kind of knew in little and big ways that this family had something that they were really committed to. So, using that inspiration, I started to think about other people in my life who were doing similar exemplary things, inspirational things, faith-filled things.

And I started coming up with a short list of people I knew I wanted to interview, but then I started talking to people and asked, hey, if you were to pick a radical family, and this is what that kind of sort of means in my head, who would you think of? And it was really inspiring honestly, to hear from people as to who comes to mind when they think of that phrase what resulted was [00:06:00] just a lot of really cool, interesting conversations. I have somehow whittled down all those amazing conversations to the episodes that you’re going to hear in this season.

But I hope that you’ll hear it and not think of it as like, oh my gosh, that is so amazing, [but] there’s no way me or my family could ever do that. That’s not the point! It’s not to make it seem impossible, but maybe what they’re saying or how they’re saying it will spark something in you to allow you to dream bigger or dream a little bit farther or nudge yourself a little bit more on how you can intentionally live out your faith with the people who are closest to you, your loved ones, however you would choose to define your family.

So, that is where we’re heading. And I think you’re gonna be really just inspired by these [00:07:00] stories of faith. A lot of times we hear stories of faith about the individuals: saints, exemplary people, et cetera, et cetera.

But to do it in family life, I think, personally, is an above and beyond commitment because it involves other people in such a deep and intimate way. And like individuals in our modern-day world, families also have a lot going on when it comes to wrestling with the modern-day kind of autopilot, and it takes a little bit to break out of that and think really intentionally, especially when it comes to faith.

So, if any of that was like, huh, that sort of makes sense, or that might be interesting, I hope you’ll join me in season two. We have a lot of really great people and excellent conversations ahead!

Welcome to the Examen on Acedia, produced for you by Christina Gebel with The Moderate Catholic. As we enter into this time together, think about how you might want to use this Examen. You could use it with a retreat, after a month’s time in your life, during a Church season - like Advent or Lent - but for the purposes of our time here, we will be using it to reflect on a week that has passed in our life.

Reflection Part I

So, with that, I invite you to sit and rest, find a comfortable spot, perhaps have a pen or paper nearby in case you want to write down a [00:01:00] thought.

And very gently invite yourself to settle your spirit and try to just turn down the volume of your mind. As you’re turning down the volume of your mind, try and turn up the awareness of everything presently around you, of the body that you’re in, the touch, the sound, the feelings around you, and slowly quiet the mind and become fully present.[00:02:00]

To open our reflection, we’ll use the quote from Psalm 46, verse 10. We’ll repeat this quote a few times, slowly, so that we can invite God into this space with us. Invite the Holy Spirit, invite Jesus to be with us in our time today:

“Be still and know that I am God.”

This next time, try taking a series of deep [00:03:00] breaths and we’ll read again from Psalm 46, verse 10:

“Be still and know that I am God.”

“Be still and know that I am God.”

Now that you’ve gotten to a still place, think about the last week or whatever time period that you want to reflect on today. [00:04:00]

Think about all the ordinary or special things that might have happened in that time.

Think about the ordinary ways you might have spent your weekdays. Think about the evenings. Think about the weekend

Recall the people, places, and things that came up in that normal progression of your day, [00:05:00] of your week.

And now kind of float above those memories. Kind of be a mindful, neutral observer of everything that’s coming to mind and ask yourself, what was your energy feeling like?

Was it energetic? Did you feel excited about something?

Maybe you felt bored or a little bit like autopilot?

Were there [00:06:00] times when you might’ve been lethargic or maybe tired?

Not feeling very motivated,

Or perhaps you are a little jittery, maybe a little bit distracted, feeling like you’re going from one thing to the next with barely a pause.

Or maybe you had times when you felt weary. Maybe you had a hard time feeling hope. Maybe some despair crept in.

Maybe the time or hours seem to drag on in parts of your day. [00:07:00] Parts of your week or maybe time just kind of felt like it stopped altogether.

So, take a moment and just think: how was your energy?

Jot down some thoughts or take some mental notes about all the variations in your energy.

Keep holding those thoughts in your head, those feelings, those memories, and ask yourself, did you doubt yourself at all?

Did you have doubts about what you’re doing in [00:08:00] life?

Did any questions come up as to what you are meant to do?

Did you have a time when you might have felt unworthy?

Did you have a time when you wanted to escape or get away or evade something?

Did you find your mind wandering, daydreaming, wondering if there was something better, maybe a better job, a better place to live, [00:09:00] a better program, a better path?

Did you seek the stimulus of something new?

Did you neglect something that maybe you said you’ve committed to?

Or perhaps push off something that you’ve been meaning to do to another day? Another time?[00:10:00]

Did you sit down to do something and maybe felt overwhelmed?

Maybe you decided to stop before you even tried?

Now, think of times that you were totally alone.

What were those small moments of silence or small windows of time when you were just with yourself?

Did that feel uncomfortable?

Did you [00:11:00] find yourself reaching for something to occupy your mind?

Maybe it was your phone. Scrolling, shopping, social media, turning to the news, playing a game, texting someone…

Did you find yourself seeking comfort in distraction?

Were there times that you were alone, but maybe you were multitasking?[00:12:00]

Eating while working?

Talking while driving?

Now, think about your body.

Were there times when you became, maybe, frustrated or impatient with your health?

Impatient, maybe, with the limitations of your body.

Did you have that feeling of there’s just not enough hours in the day?[00:13:00]

Did you have a time when you found yourself drifting back to the past?

Did you find yourself with a sense of longing for days when you were younger, felt differently, life was simpler, you felt more happy, maybe more free to do what you chose?[00:14:00]

Was there a time this week that you tried to talk yourself out of something?

Maybe you had the thought that you were “too” something to try.

Maybe you felt too young, maybe too old.

Too inexperienced,

Too far along down [00:15:00] one road already.

In too deep already.

Too busy.

Or maybe it was that you felt that you just have too many people depending on you in the current situation.

Take a moment now and pause and just let those thoughts, those feelings, those memories kind of bubble up to the surface and just simply sit with them.

Sit [00:16:00] with them like you would find yourself sitting across from someone at a table, on a bench.

Hold those memories, those moments, those scenes, those feelings.

And accept them as part of your story…

Without judgment.

[00:17:00] Without feelings of less than, or unworthiness or screwing something up…

Just accept them for what they are without judgment in a space of peace and neutrality.

Reflection Part II

Now once you’ve sat there with all of that, [00:18:00] I want you to just sit up, reposition yourself wherever you are, and just start taking some deep breaths in and out.

Deep breaths in and out.

And on these next breaths, breathe in and out with a spirit of openness.

Now I want you to go back to that same time period that you’ve been [00:19:00] recalling the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, and now we’re going to turn to a different set of questions.

Was there a time that you felt joy?

Was there a time that you saw yourself laughing authentically?

Was there a moment in there that you felt your load lighten?

Did someone or something [00:20:00] make you feel really excited?

Did something spark your curiosity?

Did something come up and you questioned was that a coincidence or was it a sign?

Did someone say something to you that really stuck with you?[00:21:00]

Did you have moments when you felt like you were in “flow”, when all your systems were firing in the best kind of way?

And you felt this kind of energy, even if the task was mundane or simple,

Did you have a moment when you felt fully present or immersed in something?

Did you feel like you never wanted it to end?[00:22:00]

You could have sat there, stood there, listened, or learned all day feeling totally absorbed.

Did you have periods of gratitude for where you were, where you are in your life, or who you are?

Did you experience a profound or surprising moment of clarity?[00:23:00]

Did you feel the depth of an unquestionable commitment to something, even if it was hard?

Did you find yourself dreaming?

Daydreaming?

Wondering?

Even if you or someone said it was impossible and probable or could never happen, did you find yourself wondering if maybe it could?[00:24:00]

Did you have a time when you felt like you were tempted to flee or distract yourself, but instead you just stopped and stayed?

Did you stop worrying or dwelling on something and choose to trust God instead?

Did you sit with discomfort or not having an answer?[00:25:00]

Did you persevere in prayer or making it to church or showing up at a church event, even when you didn’t feel like it?

Even when it might’ve felt impossible or that nothing seemed to be going your way to get there?

Did you have any moment when you remembered why you felt called to do something?

Why you felt called this job, this vocation?[00:26:00]

Did you remind yourself why you love doing something so much?

Did you relish in something that you’ve really missed?

Did you persist in hope, even if everyone and everything around you said otherwise?

Did you do any of these things and find peace and joy on the other side?[00:27:00]

Maybe you found a renewed commitment,

A fond reminder,

A surprising curiosity,

A deeper gratitude,

A clear vision,

A greater sense of trust [00:28:00] in God,

A greater comfort with who you are,

A belief in your own unique gifts, your fundamental worthiness.

And now I want you to gently rest a hand on your shoulder and bring yourself back. [00:29:00]

Gently, slowly return to the present moment.

Be aware of your breathing.

Be aware of your body.

And take these last moments to just sit with a question.

What stayed with me, what’s still lingering there?

Nudging you stay with that whisper, stay with that nudge, and let it speak [00:30:00] directly to you.

Maybe you want to stay there and be with the quiet of those feelings, those messages, those Divine [00:31:00] revelations.

Or, if you want to gently bring yourself back, slowly open your eyes and reenter the world that God has given you.

Clearly, we were meant to know [00:01:00] each other, hang out, and our Catholic faith was one of the gems of how we both came to know each other and also valued each other’s friendship. So, Carly, welcome.

Carly Caminiti: Thank you. Happy to be here. And you forgot that we also have the same alma mater college, even though we didn’t know each other.

Christina: Yes.

Carly Caminiti: We probably passed each other down the hallways, down the sidewalks…

Christina: Yes, yes, yes. I did forget that because. We didn’t know each other at the time, and we only made that realization, but we have the same beloved Jesuit University alma mater for our undergrad, so

Carly Caminiti: Woo-hoo!

Christina: The similarities are endless. So, Carly, thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule today to sit here and be with us. You and I have talked a little bit outside of this episode [00:02:00] about acedia and kind of what we’re trying to do and the topic that we’re gonna talk about today with you is so appropriate to overcoming Acedia.

Before we get into that, I just want to ask you a little bit about how you’ve taken the work that you do as an executive coach and integrated faith and spirituality into that.

Carly Caminiti: Honestly, it kind of integrates itself because when people have views about themselves or things about themselves that they wanna change, it almost certainly comes down to who they are and how they wanna be.

So, if that person has any sort of spiritual life whatsoever, then it comes up and out during our sessions together. I don’t necessarily market myself as a Catholic executive coach per se, but I would say that it’s very, very interesting how many times it comes up with folks that I work with about how connected their faith is to how they feel about [00:03:00] themselves.

It’s a very easy combination when you’re working with people who are trying to reach their goals, and then they are the ones who make the connection to God, to their faith, and to how they wanna live their lives.

Christina: That’s, that’s incredible. And just hearing you speak I did have a curious question. Does it usually come up in a positive sense in terms of how they feel about themselves?

Carly Caminiti: I would say that more often than not, it’s just people mention that they believe in God and/or they tell me what kind of faith that they have. Part of the things that we’re gonna talk about today are really how do does our faith relate to how we view ourselves, and how are we shaped by those views. And, how then, can we show up better in the world today based on exactly who we wanna be and what kind of example we wanna follow. So, yes and no.

Christina: Beautiful. Beautiful.

Carly Caminiti: And Christina, I wanna ask you if you could read a prayer that I [00:04:00] adapted that’s gonna sound familiar to you, because it’s adapted from the prayer of St. Francis. But, I would like just for you to read it and then kind of think about how it feels as you read it.

Christina: Sure. I would love to. All right.

Prayer of St. Francis (Adapted by Carly Caminiti)

Make me a channel of your peace,

Where there is self-hatred,

Let me bring your love.

Where there is self-injury,

Your pardon, Lord.

And where there’s self-doubt,

True faith in you.

Make me a channel of your peace.

Where there is self-despair in life,

Let me bring hope.

Where there is darkness,

Only light.

Where there’s sadness,

Ever joy.

Make me a channel of your peace.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.

In giving of [00:05:00] ourselves that we receive,

And in dying, that we’re born to eternal life.

Oh, Master grant that I may never seek,

So much to be consoled as to console,

To be understood as to understand,

To be loved as to love with all my soul.

Wow.

Carly Caminiti: So, clearly there were just a few adaptations by adding the word “self” in there. How did that land for you?

Christina: It is incredible because I think it flowed so seamlessly that it was almost like it was meant to be there.

Carly Caminiti: Mm.

Christina: You know, I’ve never said this prayer and thought to myself, oh, when I say where there is hatred, that also includes self-hatred, where I say there’s [00:06:00] injury, self-injury, self-doubt…I’ve never thought of that, hearing the prayer prior to now, but it fits so easily into it.

Carly Caminiti: Yeah, it’s easy when we listen to that prayer to externalize it, but we don’t often, in my case, at least, look at this prayer as something that has to do with ourselves. Even something as simple as self-doubt and how can we change that.

And this is where to kind of answer your question from earlier and connect it to what I’m doing now. When I think about coaching, it has to do with how people are viewing their own being. So, our being comes from God, and yet imposter syndrome and burnout and self-doubt and self-hatred and all these things tend to get in the way of how we see ourselves. There’s a disconnect between what people are feeling versus what our faith is telling us.

Christina: [00:07:00] Yes, yes. That is why I was so excited for you to come on the show and talk about this.

Because one of the insidious ways that acedia works, is by telling us lies about ourselves as created and beloved children of God. And if we have a calling put on our heart, like a true calling, a true purpose that God put us here to do, one of the ways the False Spirit tries to thwart that is by telling us that we’re not good enough. By instilling self-doubt.

So, we start to think to ourselves, oh, well who am I to be a great person? Or who am I to be the one to fulfill this mission, this God given calling here on earth? The false spirit loves that because it gets us off [00:08:00] track.

I really think the point you’re making is salient, and it fits right into the strategies that we need to overcome this idea of acedia. And actually, you have a really interesting story about how you came to feel this in your own life. Do you mind sharing that?

Carly Caminiti: Sure. Yeah. So, there was this place called Georgetown Cupcake in Boston, and it was on Newbury Street for many, many years.

I don’t know how long it was there, but one of their main things is that they gave away 400 free cupcakes a day. And in order for you to know the passcode for the free cupcake of the day, you had to go to Twitter in the morning at 10 o’clock or whatever time it was in order to get that code, and all you had to do is go up to the cashier and say the code.

So, I went one day with my friend Paul, and on the way there I realized I had [00:09:00] forgotten to look at the Twitter passcode. And so, I asked him what the code was and he said it’s, “I am awesome.” And I laughed and I was like, oh, that’s a funny one. And so, then we got inside the store, went up to the cash register and I said to the cashier, “Hey, I’m awesome,” and the cashier just kind of smiled at me and I thought he didn’t hear me, and so I just said it a little bit louder.

“Hey, I’m awesome,” I said, and still he was like, okay, can I help you? You know, he just kind of gave me this look. And so, then for a third time, because you have to have them hear you say, what this passcode is, so for a third time I said, “Hey, I’m awesome!” Like very intentionally.

And at that point, my friend Paul starts cracking up, the cashier starts cracking up. And that’s when I realized that that was not the passcode. That was just something that my friend had told me was the passcode. So why am I telling you this story and why does it relate to what you just said?

It’s because those three words are words [00:10:00] that people have a hard time with to be able to say, “Hey, I’m awesome.” It causes us to laugh. Because when we start to think about ourselves as awesome, that means that we are good enough. That means that we don’t need to be more or do more or say more.

That means that we’re already awesome. Especially people who don’t feel that way about themselves. To be able to verbalize that they’re awesome is something that is actually really difficult for them. To me, in my work, feels like we’re doing a disservice to ourselves and to our Creator.

Because if we are getting into this mindset of saying, “I’m not good enough,” how do we move past it?

Christina: Yeah, that is the question. And I love that story because it’s both funny, because I think we could all see ourselves having a similar reaction and it’s also very kind of [00:11:00] humbling, you know? Like to really sit there and unpack, well, why do I think this is so funny to say?

And it really, again, goes back to those feelings of acedia and those tactics of the False Spirit that to really know our worth, to really sit there and say, yes, I am awesome, without laughing, without making a joke or whatever, is really to connect with God because, as the song goes, “Our God is an awesome God.”

So, if God’s awesome, and we’re made in God’s own image, then we must be too, right? I would love to cue that song if I had the rights to it, but maybe another day. So, I really love that because it was a small moment, but it was so formative and profound for you.

Carly Caminiti: Yeah, it was, and I think that it just speaks to exactly what you’re saying, like, why is it funny? And if we truly believe that we [00:12:00] have the Divine inside of us, then why can we not say we’re awesome? Not from a place of ego, but from a place of just facts.

Christina: Yeah.

Carly Caminiti: You know?

Christina: Yeah. Absolutely. I love that. And you have taken this even further and said, okay, well if we’re created in His image and we’re awesome, then we have the things available to us to overcome this False Spirit type-mentality. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Carly Caminiti: Well, if you think about when Jesus was roaming around, it’s not like He had a whole bunch of smart technology to do things with, right? Like, it was pretty simple back then. And so that was our example, is somebody who was living in a completely different time with not the same type of resources, not the same technology, and He somehow figured it out how with His own body, I mean, He came here, Ge was [00:13:00] sent here to be like us, to be fully human, to be fully divine. That, to me, and this is me just saying my own conclusion of that, is that that is enough.

Christina: Mm.

Carly Caminiti: He didn’t have some sort of rule book textbook say, this is how you survive as a human. He used what he had, and he did things with that, a.k.a., doing things with His own body. So, I’ll introduce a couple different kind of methodologies today, but one of the things I wanted to talk about was our breath.

Our breath is the most basic thing that we have. We can go days without food. We can go days without water, but we cannot go days without breathing. So, this is a tool. We might not think about it like that, but it is a tool to be able to regulate how we’re breathing. Normally, we’re just completely not conscious of it, but what happens when we slow things down or speed things up with our breath [00:14:00] is we’re sending other signals to our brain to help our nervous system calm down.

One of the types of breathing is called fire breathing. If you’ve done yoga, you might have heard of fire breath before. That’s where I’ve seen it before, in practicing it for long periods of time, something changes. We’re gonna just do it. I’m gonna ask you, Christina, to do it with me for a minute that I’ll put on the clock and figure out if this is something that changes your energy or not,

The way that fire breathing works is all you need to do is breathe in through your nose and out through your nose, and it’s about a half a second each. So let me see if you can hear this when I’m doing it, it’s fast.

[sound of fire breathing]

[00:15:00] Okay. So, it’s fast. It’s in through your nose and out through your nose, and it’s about half a second each. So why don’t you try it with me now? Ready in 3, 2, 1…Alright, do you get the hang of it?

Christina: Yes. Yes. I think I got it. Okay,

Carly Caminiti: Great. Let’s put a minute on the clock, and we’re gonna just try this together. It will feel like a long time, so if you start to feel like you can’t do it anymore, it’s okay.

Just return to your regular breathing and breathe normally and just kind of sit there. If you feel like you can do it, then keep pushing through it. If it’s uncomfortable, keep doing it. If it hurts, then stop. That’s really kind of the rules with this. You got it.

Christina: I got it. I’m ready.

Carly Caminiti: All right, let’s go.[00:16:00] [fire breathing exercises begins]

And while you’re doing this, keep your eyes closed and really just focus on your abdomen while you breathe. You can even put your hand on your abs while you’re moving in and out and kind of pull your belly button towards your spine every time you exhale. And each time that you inhale and exhale, you should be putting about the same amount of force into that.

So really just give it your all. Keep going. We’re almost there. And see how it feels inside of your body. See if you can feel some tension releasing or some sort of sensation moving around. Whatever that thing is, you’ve got this. Keep going. All right, and that’s a minute. Go ahead and stop. Return to your normal breathing.

Christina: Woo. Woo. I feel like I just went to a spin class, but I actually wasn’t spinning.

Carly Caminiti: Those are the best [00:17:00] kind, right?

Yeah. So, tell me what, just close your eyes for a second, and tell me what kind of sensations you’re feeling inside of your body.

Christina: Well, I definitely feel way more alert. I feel a little bit of a jittery energy, but not necessarily in a bad way. I think just really alert, like really present.

Like when I was putting my hand on the belly and really feeling how the breath was going in and out, like you were saying with the belly button. That’s all I could think about was just breathing, you know.

Carly Caminiti: Yes. What you just said is actually the biggest point is that that’s all you could think about.

So, we, our minds, really can’t think about two things at the same time fully. So if you are experiencing a negative situation at work [00:18:00] or if you are about ready to go into a meeting that you aren’t excited about going into, or if your partner says something that ticks you off or your kids didn’t do something that they were supposed to do, instead of giving your energy to that negative thing, you could take this minute and do fire breathing.

And if it’s more than a minute, even better. If it’s 15 minutes, amazing. If you can dance while you do it, if you can move around the room, if you can close your eyes, if you can use something to cover your eyes, all of that will add to the experience because when we shut off our visual stimulation of what we can see around us, then it’s true, what you just said is that all you could think about was the breathing.

So, that’s not accidental and it is a tool that I think is totally underused by people who really wanna regulate their own nervous systems. So, when we think about regulating stress and people can’t see straight, they can’t think [00:19:00] straight.

This is a tool to just bring you back to yourself, which again, you don’t need to be more, do more, anything like that. You just need to focus on using the tool that you have, in this case, your lungs.

Christina: Wow. Yeah, I’m thinking about just like you said, in terms of Jesus, right? Like, so simple that we were given the things we need to get through this life because we have these intentionally created bodies to help us, and I could see this helping to kind of stop the negative cycle.

Part of acedia is you are getting messages either from the external world or maybe they’re coming up internally that says you are not enough. You’re not awesome. You can’t really do the thing. You can’t make these big life changes for your call. And I could really see this kind of just being a tool [00:20:00] to shut down that negative cycle talk.

Carly Caminiti: Yes. And it’s really about shifting perspective, too, which is a totally different tool that we can talk about now, which is what kind of adjectives are we using to talk about ourselves? I remember my roommate at the time, she was about ready to start a new job and I said, oh, how are you feeling about tomorrow?

And she said, “I’m terrified.” And I said, “You’re terrified?” She said, “Yeah, I’m terrified. I’m not gonna know what I’m doing. I don’t know that I’ll get along with everybody. It’s all new equipment.” She was an ultrasound tech.

So, we sat down at the kitchen table, and I said, okay, can you think of another time when you’ve started a job that you felt similarly about that you then worked through? And she was like, “Oh, yeah, my last job. Like, I was also terrified before I started that job, but I loved that job. I didn’t wanna leave. It was so great and I loved the people and I loved what I was doing.”

And so, as she was talking about this, her [00:21:00] energy changed because instead of, again, putting her energy into the negative, she had time to stop, reflect, and put energy into the positive about how she was in a different setting, where she was able to overcome her fear of starting the new job.

And so, at the end of it, I said to her, ‘cause I definitely was in coaching mode, and I said, “Okay, you know, how do you feel now?” And she’s like, “Well, I feel way more confident, like I can do this tomorrow.”

Long story short, I’ll tell you, she’s been working there for a long time now, and she loves the job. She doesn’t wanna leave and she’s doing great. So how can we, with the power of our minds, shift what we’re thinking, and again, go to what’s good inside of us, what’s worthy inside of us. What God has already given us is our gifts and talents and be able to give ourselves the positive affirmations that we really need in those situations.

Christina: I love that. Yeah, and I’m also thinking [00:22:00] that’s another bodily thing God gave us was our memories, right? And surely, we have our negative memories, but we also have our memories of when we’ve overcome the negative talk. I can almost see her energy changing as you’re describing it because she’s talking about how much she loved her job and the people, and it just feels like God’s like, hey, nudge, nudge, uh, go back in your memory and recall all the tremendous things. And that was another really, honestly, positive way to get out of the negative spiral.

Carly Caminiti: Totally. And even if she had never had another job that she could compare it to, she could go back to memories from childhood. When was the time that she was confident? You know, 85% of people say they struggle with confidence.

Christina: Wow.

Carly Caminiti: So, if we can go back into our minds and even just say that sentence, which would be a positive affirmation of, I am confident, if you can say that over and over [00:23:00] and over again, that will help you. But if you can match it with a story from how you were confident in the past with something that you did or accomplish or something that you didn’t know that you were gonna be able to do, and it resulted in the way that you wanted it to be, that is so much more powerful to be able to put those things together because your body, again, going to what you’re talking about with memories, it understands it in a different way and it digests it to say, oh, I did that once. I was confident once so I can be confident again.

Or I was reliable once so I can do it again. Or I didn’t procrastinate in that one time and so I don’t need to procrastinate now. Again, our minds going back to previous experiences of us and the stories of us being that adjective can really help.

Christina: I love that. And something that’s coming up for me as you’re describing this is [00:24:00] I recently went on a walk with a dear friend who has been listening to the podcast and hopefully is also listening to this episode, who’s also an executive coach, by the way, and we were just talking about how God puts people in our lives to remind us of some of those things like to remind us how good we are at certain things. Like our faith is so communal and there’s people in our lives who see our gifts so clearly, even when we might talk ourselves out of them a little bit.

Carly Caminiti: Absolutely. And something that you said about your friend is that he really was taking time to reflect. And so that’s another thing that I think we get so busy and so tied up in our own lives and how much is going on that we don’t stop to think, hey, what am I really good at?

What are the things that people have pointed out [00:25:00] to me in the past that they say you are just amazing at this. And when we can’t find it within ourselves, a lot of times, we can find it by asking other people. That’s a coaching exercise. When I first meet somebody, or when I’ve also had people ask me to do this where we would go to five friends and say, what are five adjectives that you would use to describe me?

And sometimes people say things that you don’t necessarily think of yourself because we are so just drowning in the negative thoughts that go inside of our head all the time that we don’t take the time to reflect. But if I asked most people how they feel about themselves, truly in their heart of hearts, there’s gonna be something good there.

Christina: Yeah.

Carly Caminiti: Even if they aren’t doing great at work or in the relationship or whatever the case is, most people can drill back down to who they are. And I think that that’s when they’re talking about their soul; they’re talking about their essence.

Christina: Yeah.

Carly Caminiti: [00:26:00] And nobody can really take that away from them. So even if they got a bad performance review, they still know who they are. Or even if somebody broke up with them, they still know who they are. So, it’s kind of like this protected bubble where we need to think about how do we drown out the noise and just have time to reflect.

Christina: You have a salient experience with that, when you did that in a really big way.

Carly Caminiti: I did. I don’t think I would’ve had it if I had some of the tools that I have now, but I did take a six-month sabbatical off of my job that I’d been at over 10 years. And I flew to Argentina because I really didn’t know where else to go and somebody told me it was pretty, and so I decided to hop a plane and go there. When I got there, I sent an email to all my friends in the U.S. and I said, I am not gonna share my Argentine phone [00:27:00] number with you. If you need me, then email me and I need some time just to make friends here, experience a different way of life and to really shut out everything that I was burnt out about back in the U.S.

And so that’s what I did. I did that for four months. I was in Argentina for that whole time before I hiked for four days and climbed Machu Picchu, and that was also amazing. But in that whole time, my whole M.O. was really to be alone, to see what it felt like to be alone, to go eat dinner by myself alone, to go to a park and sit there alone, to read alone, to do all the things that one does during the day when they’re not working.

I had nobody, and I remember when I first got to Argentina, I was thinking, what did I do? This is a very strange move to come [00:28:00] across the world and not know a single person and what do I do now?

But I think going back to pulling a Jesus move there, when He was alone in the desert, He didn’t bring all of his friends. What did He do there? He went by himself to pray. And he shut away all of the noise and showed us that it’s okay to be alone. And so many people don’t know that. I will tell you from my own experience, it was very uncomfortable, even with as confident as I am as a person. It was not a pleasant experience for the first several weeks.

But then once I got into the rhythm of accepting myself for who I am and being able to appreciate my own company, and realizing that I have everything I need and I am good enough, then I really didn’t need other people.

Christina: Yeah. Wow. I mean, the courage it took to take that step, first of all, and I don’t know if you know this about me, but I also [00:29:00] climbed Machu Picchu in four days.

Carly Caminiti: Nice. No, we haven’t talked about that.

Christina: But it would be probably more proper for a standup comedy set than, um, what we’re talking about right now, because there were some really interesting moments on that trip for another day.

But yeah, I’m just swelling up with so much pride in the fact that you made that choice. Again, to take it back to acedia, one of the ways that acedia in the False Spirit tries to distract us is by all those kind of scary on one end, uncomfortable on the other, feelings of being alone. Acedia causes us to really loathe quiet and really loathe solitude because we see what is there and what [00:30:00] is coming up.

It’s incredible that Jesus gave this example to us, especially if I’m remembering the Bible correctly, before he started his public ministry, you know? We see him so many times like Garden of Gethsemane just needing to go off and be alone.

When I was researching about acedia, one of the things that came up in the books, was that you can’t play a role when you’re by yourself, you know, you can’t be the what people think I am, what I think I am, what the world thinks I am. It’s like you can only be yourself and there’s no mask, there’s no charade, there’s no pretend. It’s like you are you.

Carly Caminiti: Yeah. Because it is true. It’s like a learning process. We don’t usually get the chance to be by ourselves for [00:31:00] that amount of time.

And so in my case, I was lucky to be able to focus on myself, but I’ve started to incorporate that in a different way through meditation in the morning that I really focus on prayer in a lot of those times that I meditate. Meditation is not something that Catholics talk about but that again, is another resource that we can use in order to calm ourselves down.

There’s so much research about meditation. If you think about all of the things that we could really bring to Jesus in meditation while we’re in this state of mind that is peaceful and calm and really tranquil, what would that do for our spiritual life? It’s like a twofer where we’re calming our nervous system down and we’re praying at the same time.

So, I’m gonna invite you, Christina, to do a meditation with me right now. Okay. If you’re up for it.

Christina: Yeah,

Carly Caminiti: Where I’ll [00:32:00] just walk you through it. Really use your imagination to fill in all the blanks, and everybody who’s listening will have a different experience if they also are able to do this with us right now.

Meditation with Jesus for Overcoming Acedia

So, with that, I’ll invite you to close your eyes and really just start to take some deep breaths, and as you do that. See if you can relax every single part of your body closer down to the floor.

As you start to breathe, really make sure you’re filling all of your lung capacity from the very top of your lungs to the very bottom. With each breath that you take, make them longer than the last breath that you had.[00:33:00]

You might even start to feel heavy on your chair wherever the kind of main pressure points are of where your body has contact with something else. See if you can find where those pressure points are and even them out if they feel uneven or lopsided.

All of this you can do still with your eyes closed and breathing deeply and focusing more and more on your breath.

That with each inhale, you breathe in peace, and with each exhale, you breathe out [00:34:00] love.

As you start to bring yourself into this more quiet place, this place of being alone and being okay with being alone, really start to notice any sort of sensations that you might be feeling in your body. The body that was given to you by God, in His image and likeness.

See what it feels like to tell yourself that you’re good enough.

Hear yourself saying it.

Maybe envision a younger version of yourself saying it to you as well,[00:35:00] that you’re good enough, that you’re worthy enough, that you’re perfect just the way that you are.

I am good enough. I’m worthy enough. I’m perfect just the way that I am.

Using that same set of mantras or affirmations, imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror with the age that you are now telling yourself those three things.[00:36:00]

I’m good enough. I’m worthy enough. I’m perfect just the way that I am.

Imagine what kind of facial expression would be looking back at you as you said that to yourself in the mirror, while still focusing on your breathing and letting go of any tension that might have come up in your body since we started.

Now finally, imagine that Jesus was looking over your shoulder as you just said these things to yourself in that mirror.

You see Him standing behind you. What kind of facial [00:37:00] expression would He have hearing you say those three things?

What kind of reaction would He have?

Can you imagine Him saying those three things to you?

You are good enough. You are worthy enough. You’re perfect exactly as you are.

Now imagine you embracing Him and [00:38:00] thanking Him for the reminder of your own worth and your own value.

That even though you might forget about it sometimes, that there He was to remind you.

Now you turn back into the mirror one final time as you tell yourself that you love yourself, and that you’re awesome.

Continue to take three more deep breaths in[00:39:00] as you inhale. Peace. And exhale, love

One last time. Take a deep breath in, and exhale out as you start to remember where you’re sitting, what you’re experiencing. Remembering your physical body in this time and place and really giving yourself gratitude for trying something different and trying something to help you remember exactly who you are and how you want to be.[00:40:00]

When you’re ready, you can open your eyes.

Christina: Wow. That that, that was powerful.

Carly Caminiti: That was powerful.

Christina: Yes. Yes. Very powerful.

Carly Caminiti: Tell me more.

Christina: You know what came up for me…In the beginning when I was just, looking in the mirror is in my own life. For those who know me personally, my body has changed a lot from the time that you and I were in Boston or so many years ago, and with that I’ve gone through a lot of medical things parallel to that with fertility and pregnancy loss and so many doctors, so many tests. I just [00:41:00] recently had a second surgery, and about a year ago I got to this place of most of the self-talk about my body was about how it wasn’t working the way that maybe everybody else’s bodies were.

And why was it so hard? I felt very out of control of the changes that I was going through. Like it was something happening to me and I was just a little bit helpless to change it. Things started turning around for me when I did yoga therapy with someone I know through the birth world who has since moved to Ireland.

But she needed a practicum student for her yoga therapy. And I said, uh, I would love to be that. I think I started out as a class project, but I very quickly ascended to practicum project. [00:42:00]

Carly Caminiti: Nice.

Christina: For the first time in many years, I started having positive feelings about my body again, and honestly those memories are what came up for me toward the end of the meditation was through doing this yoga therapy, which was so gentle, I mean the whole goal was feeling like I can do this, as opposed to sitting in some yoga classes.

I’ve been where I feel like I’m like woefully behind everybody else, you know? That’s the same feeling that I had towards the end of this reflection, honestly. And this is my first time doing it here with you and those warm feelings and those reconnections. To the body, almost like going back into the body and being like, yes, this is my home.

This is my created home. And then when Jesus came up behind me kind of like, yes, [00:43:00] yes, like happy, like, yeah, this is exactly what I want you to know, you know? And wow, what a powerful thing to move through in just moments, I think that speaks to the depth of the reflection. Also like the depth of faith.

Carly Caminiti: Well, thank you for sharing all of that, Christina. That’s a beautiful reflection on your part, too, in that you were allowing yourself to get there and really embody, if you will, what that was. And so you used your imagination, you used the power of visualization and of meditation to be able to connect all of those things that you felt to an experience in your past, which goes exactly to what we were talking about before if you can feel those positive things about your body once, then you can also get back there. And this was not rehearsed; this was just something that came up for you during this time.[00:44:00]

That is because the body is so wise. Why is that? Because we’re not just inhabiting it by ourselves. It’s also that we go to communion every Sunday, and we also have Jesus. We have God. God’s got our back. That’s what that means.

Christina: Mm.

Carly Caminiti: And so, you were able to connect to that, and by giving yourself the time in the five or so minutes that that meditation lasted, your body knew exactly what it needed to do in order to get you to that place of peace.

Christina: I love what you’re saying, and I love that you brought Communion into it because one of the remedies that the books talk about to overcome acedia is actually to meditate on the Incarnation. And when I first read that, I was kind of like, okay, [00:45:00] yeah, Incarnation, I know what it is. Feels very churchy to me, you know?

But what you’re talking about, too, is like transubstantiation. Like, we literally go and we as Catholics believe we’re receiving the body and the blood of Christ, and that is something that’s so unique about our faith. There are so many faiths out there that the deity that is being adored or worshiped doesn’t always cross the bridge.

So, pontifex means bridge maker, doesn’t always cross the bridge into human experience and dwell among us. And we have this incredible mystery in, in some ways of how Jesus did that and why it was so important to do that. Jesus has been telling us throughout our faith this is not a like pie [00:46:00] in the sky unreachable thing, like, I am coming to you literally so I can fully be here on Earth, be embodied, and know what the human experience is.

When I started thinking about those things and learning about acedia, I was like, hmm, yeah, I probably haven’t thought about that enough, but honestly, our conversation here has made me feel it even more because it is so bodily, you know? And do we think enough about our body when it comes to faith?

That’s the beautiful connection you’ve just made for me.

Carly Caminiti: Well, and I think you also made it for yourself. Like again, you’re using the power of your mind there to put two and two together for how that is for you. Thank you so much for sharing it, and I think that just really speaks to making time for these things.

It’s a practice, just like you mentioned yoga. People are happy to practice yoga two, three, four times a [00:47:00] week for an hour. How often do we practice breathing? How often do we practice doing a visualization where we can see God and bring our problems to Him and also be able to connect to our faith in that way that is using nothing else but what we’ve already got.

The body gives back what you’re giving to it, but you have to be the one to make the effort for that.

Christina: Wow. Well, Carly, honestly, your gifts and your skills and what I feel like I’m sitting here with your calling, has helped us to do that. I mean, it’s really given us a set of tools here today. I know I’ve benefited from it.

I wanna thank you so much for sharing that with us and one final question for you before we wrap up. What would you tell someone that’s just starting to kind of tiptoe into this place and feels maybe a bit [00:48:00] overwhelmed by it because I imagine until you get into that habit that you’re talking about practicing those first tries might feel a little inundating.

How would you approach that as a coach and as a person of faith?

Carly Caminiti: As a coach, I would always ask somebody what feels like the smallest action step they could take in order to practice what they wanna practice. So I’m gonna ask you that in a second.

Christina: Okay.

Carly Caminiti: But I’ll give you, I’ll give you a couple of other things in the meantime, especially for something like prayer, meditation, even setting your alarm for five minutes earlier a day and making that five minutes about that thing is a great place to start. I know it can seem small, but the thing with small things and small wins is that the more you do them, the more they snowball into bigger things and people then get the confidence that they need to be able to extend it to 10 minutes or maybe 15 or maybe an hour. So, it [00:49:00] really comes with time though.

One of those tools too is really tracking your small wins. So especially before you go to bed, if you have a journal next to you, and you can write a couple of things that you really feel like were the wins of the day. It could be two, it could be five, it could be 10, whatever those things are. But it’s going back to the idea of reflecting, not just getting into your bed and turning out the light and having the day be over, but actually stopping and thinking, hey, what actually went well here?

Because like we discussed before, the more you focus on the positive aspects of it, the easier it will be for you to continue to kind of build on those things as opposed to letting yourself spiral into things that aren’t inside of your control, into things that are rather negative. If people are also curious and wanna learn more about this, I sometimes do workshops. For free and they’re always posted on my website, which is www.carlycam.com, and people can sign up for [00:50:00] those and get the basics and really practice with a group of people, which could be helpful.

And I think that is the place to start. I would ask you, though, based on today’s conversation, Christina, what’s one small action that you are willing to take to practice? One of the things that we went through.

Christina: I think I could start with just looking in the mirror in the morning and just pausing and saying, I’m worthy and I’m perfect as I am.

I think a lot of people put little things around the mirror, and I’m always thinking like quotes and stuff like that, but I don’t think I’ve spent a lot of time saying something to myself that comes from myself. So, yeah,

Carly Caminiti: What you said is beautiful, too, because it’s coming from you.

So again, going back to the fact that you know what’s best for you. So, I could give you a list of 20 different things that you could try, and I just gave you a couple of ideas, but truly [00:51:00] anybody who’s listening to this will probably have something different that comes up that they’re willing to do.

Our bodies are wise. We need to listen to what they’re saying. The intuition is strong. So, if that’s what’s going to be your action step, then that’s a beautiful action step to take, and I would love to hear how it goes for you.

Christina: Yes. I fully expect a text in a couple months, um, especially as we’re going into Lent, right?

Like this would be a really great time to commit to adding something into our lives. So, thank you again, Carly. This has been such a pleasure, such a joy. I’m so glad that God put us in each other’s lives, and even though it’s been a minute since we’ve lived in the same place together, I think reconnecting with you around this episode has only made me miss you more, love you more, appreciate you more, and I just thank you for being here.

Carly Caminiti: Well, thank you so much for having [00:52:00] me, and I wish you the best of luck in upcoming episodes and would obviously love to keep in touch and you need to come visit.

Christina: Yes, yes, I do. And speaking of upcoming episodes, so there is one final bonus that is going to be offered as part of this first season, and that is the next episode.

And that episode is going to be an adaptation of the Examen to help us understand where acedia came up for us that day.

I feel even better about this bonus now that we have these incredible tools that Carly has given us. So, when acedia comes up, we have the tools within our body, within ourselves to overcome it.

Welcome back. So, this is episode seven. It is a bonus episode because we have, as I mentioned in the last episode, formally concluded our study of acedia, but there will be some bonus episodes because if you like me, [and] resonated with this topic, you might want to learn more. In wanting to learn more, you might be wondering whatever happened to acedia. You know, this is not a word that is part of our everyday vernacular, much like some of the other seven deadly sins [00:01:00] are, if you choose to talk about that, or you just might be wondering, why has it taking me till now to learn about acedia? Why did I never come across this until later in life?

And that was something that really piqued my interest because it took me a while to learn about Acedia. So, this episode is for those diehard acedia enthusiasts who have to know the quote ‘end of the story.’ And to do so, we will be going back to one of our primary texts, The Noonday Devil, by Jean Charles Nault, and around page 96, he starts to tell the story of how this all came to be.

So, the story starts with actually a Franciscan Friar William Ham Ockham, who lived around [00:02:00] 1300 to 1350 AD. If you know anything about Franciscan Friars, there are obviously a lot of very good people. Although I will say Friar Ockham was not the best person in the story we’re about to tell because he actually helped to influence the idea of acedia kind of falling out of favor, but I’m sure he was a great dude otherwise. So, we’re gonna cut him some slack.

So Franciscan Friar William Ockham sparked kind of a quote ‘revolution,’ if you will, because at the time, he was countering the theological understanding of freedom, which up until that point had primarily been articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas. So Ockham [00:03:00] proposed a new concept of freedom, which essentially differed from Aquinas’s concept of freedom, and he called this new freedom concept, quote, the “liberty of indifference.” End quote.

Jean Charles Nault describes this on page 96 as “human beings are totally indeterminate, totally indifferent with regard to good or evil’ end quote, and I said human beings, because again, a lot of these things just refer to ‘man,’ and I prefer to make it more gender neutral. So indeterminate, totally indifferent with regard to good or evil.

Actually, this is how we largely conceive of freedom today. We see freedom as the idea that you can [00:04:00] choose between two contrary things. You have that choice. However, at the time, this was a bit of a quote ‘revolution,’ to what was considered a classical understanding of freedom, and that view, that classical understanding Jean Charles Nault describes as quote, “Freedom is the ability that human beings have an ability belonging jointly to the intellect and will to perform virtuous actions, good actions, excellent actions, perfect actions when he or she wants, and as he or she wants. Humankind’s freedom is therefore the capacity to accomplish good acts easily, joyously and lastingly. This freedom is defined by the attraction [00:05:00] of the good.” Okay, so let’s unpack that a little bit.

In this more classical understanding of freedom, prior to Ockham, mostly delineated by Aquinas, the idea is that we have the freedom to do good. Okay, and we are attracted to doing that good innately as human beings. How is it that we have that innately? Well, we believe that we are human beings with a soul, and we’re not simply animals who kind of just act on impulse and their basic needs. Right?

But Ockham kind of deviated from all of this because he made freedom live in the moment prior [00:06:00] to our intellect and will. So, man or woman are no longer attracted to the good, as Aquinas had said. Instead, they kind of have a indifference to good and evil.

Okay, so total indifference and it’s that time period before the intellect and will kick in. Ockham, being a Franciscan friar, being a religious person, was still somewhat concerned with people doing good things. Okay? He wasn’t like a relativist, let’s just say. But he believed there had to be some sort of an external element or something extrinsic, which points human beings to the good, and he described that as the law, and it points to [00:07:00] what the good action might be.

Around that time, this was really kind of picking up steam and the idea that what is good is defined by obedience to the law. On page 97, Jean Charles Nault points out that eventually this leads to this concept of legalism, and legalism is quote, “The law alone is the criterion for good.”

So, because this is externally motivated, human beings no longer have what Aquinas called, quote “natural inclinations.” And those natural inclinations were dependent upon really the spiritual nature of humankind, so the soul, and he bases his teaching about natural law on the idea that we are [00:08:00] created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore to determine whether you know something is good, we can look inwardly to ourselves because we are created with God dwelling within us.

Jean Charles Nault explains Aquinas on page 98, “Human beings are free not despite their natural inclinations, but on the contrary because of them.” Okay, so again, let’s unpack it. Some people might say, well, you know, if this is innately within me and was put there by my Creator, am I actually free because I didn’t choose to be created this way? Or some people might say, oh, well, if this is how I was created, am I in some ways predestined to think a certain way, you know? [00:09:00] So those are all good questions, to ponder. Folks today might feel like that restricts consent or freedom of choice.

And Ockham kind of agrees with it, that if humankind was made naturally oriented towards the good, then that means that humankind is no longer essentially free. Going back to Aquinas, one has to ask the question, okay, if we’re naturally inclined this way, what about sin? And Aquinas would say, people sin, not because they’re attracted to evil, but because evil appears to them as good. And in that way, sin is very deceptive.

If you’ve been following along in this first season, you’ll know that that is one of the primary strategies [00:10:00] of the False Spirit. The False Spirit might know that we are attracted to good, naturally inclined to good, or just simply want to be good. So evil can’t always look like an outright evil. It has to have some trickery in it, and it can be deceiving, right?

At this point in reading about it, I’ll be honest with y’all, I was like, I kind of get it, but I’m not sure what Aquinas means because he’s so like Aquinas-y. So, there’s an example in The Noonday Devil on page 99, that kind of started to make sense for me and actually is perfectly timed because I just went to the symphony with a very good friend and we saw Carmina Burana.

So, the violin, right? Envision in your head [00:11:00] a master violinist. Somebody who is an aficionado, who does the 10,000 hours of practice thing and continues to hone their craft, until they’re this expert of their skill. So Aquinas would look at that and say, okay, as the violinist goes, through his or her life, they are always trying to be better, and being better means playing the right notes at the right moments in the right harmonies or whatever is being asked of the musician. But in playing the right notes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re no longer free. Actually, they are free to do the most good thing, which is to play the right notes and play beautiful masterpieces.

So, Jean [00:12:00] Charles Nault writes, is the possibility of playing wrong notes what makes the violinist free? Or from another perspective, does the fact that the violinist no longer plays wrong notes really impair their freedom? Or on the contrary, is it not the pinnacle of freedom to be capable of no longer playing wrong notes? That really stayed with me. Is freedom, like Ockham would say, the ability to play a good note or a bad note? Is that where we wanna start the concept of freedom? Or is it really that because we are these divinely created beings who are inclined to the good, and I would say also beauty, is true freedom, really, to move closer to the good and to beauty as created human [00:13:00] beings with the divine within us? Something to think about.

So back to Ockham. As I mentioned earlier, Ockham feels we need this extrinsic thing to point us towards the good because he’s still, you know, he’s still concerned about doing good, but he just sees it a little differently.

So, he feels that we need the law. Okay, what law, Ockham? Well, Ockham says God’s law. So, Jean Charles Nault explains this on page 100, quote, “Human beings act in terms of a law that is no longer inscribed within them, but is totally external and foreign to them. A law that is totally arbitrary, which humankind can carry out only by God’s decree.”

So, notice the kind of spatiality of how he explains that this law [00:14:00] is no longer the law that you could say is written on our heart. It is this external thing. And yes, it could be God’s law, it could also be civil law. You know, it could be anything external to us. And at first, it might seem like nothing changes, right? Because if it really is God’s law, let’s say the 10 Commandments, and the Ten Commandments are good, right? So really are we just like pulling apart hairs at this point?

But, Aquinas and Jean Charles Nault go on to say, no, this is really a big change because it changes the reason why we do things. We do things not because there’s an intrinsic goodness there, but because God says so or someone says so. Right? And the issue with this [00:15:00] is that a number of things can go wrong. One, God’s authority could be called into question. So, let’s say it really is this external God’s law. Well, what if people start doubting God or undermining God or disbelieving in God? The whole thing falls apart.

Then what they have to turn to is human-made law, which we know is fraught with a lot of issues. So human law, civil law, while it seeks to do good, let’s just say blanketly, although that is kind of hard to believe lately, if human law can be fraught with issues, it’s kind of unstable in that sense. And Jean Charles Nault points out that this is a breeding ground for the concept or reality of authoritarianism. [00:16:00] So on page 100, he writes, “Every authority will be tempted to think that whatever it requires is good by reason of the very fact that it requires it. The authority will then have great difficulty in calling itself into question. The risk of sectarian or dictatorial trend is significant if the law of the strongest is the criterion for the good. Dictatorship is practically inevitable and any questioning of the law in terms of a superior law is considered by the authority to be a threat or even a crime.”

Woo. Okay, mic drop. So, when I read this, I was like, wow, that makes total sense. When you start to ground your actions, your idea of [00:17:00] good, in an external source and not the ultimate Truth with a capital T, which, Aquinas would argue is, written into our being as humans, well then the law is quote unquote, ‘the law of the land,’ right? And something becomes moral if the law says that’s what everybody should be doing. And we can see how unstable and slippery this is, because then you start to wonder, well, who’s making the law? And if the law has the final say, what if that person’s not being a good person?

And of course, I would be remiss to say that when I read this, I really thought of Trump because this idea that might is right and that any questioning of the policies or the law is considered to be a threat or even a [00:18:00] crime, that’s authoritarianism, right? And that’s why leaders like Trump are so, so, so dangerous. And part of the reason I think that we’ve allowed Trump to become what he is in yielding that power is, is exactly what we’re talking about here.

We as human beings have kind of steered clear of these questions of morality. We’ve moved out of the seat of the soul, and instead moved into everything being this extrinsic source of truth or something that we can figure out on our own. Not because we’re looking inwardly, but because we have intellect and reason and blah, blah, blah, blah.

So, we’ve as a society, I think, drifted away from deep conversations about where does truth come from? Where does good come [00:19:00] from? What is morality? What is our inner essence? And certainly, as we’ve become more secularized, we’ve also drifted away from us as created beings by God or by a divine Creator. If we let go of God, if we let go of that integration of humanity and God dwelling within one another. Then we have to revert to the extrinsic, which is law. And then again, we go on that slippery slope.

So, we lean into this freedom, almost to a fault. And in some ways, we do what Ockham kind of predicted in a way: we become indifferent to good and evil. We don’t wanna be told who and what we are and how we were made, and what we were made for. The modern day [00:20:00] kind of thinking is, you aren’t gonna tell me any of that. Instead, I have true freedom. I will choose what the answers to those things are. And I think largely because of that, we’ve just drifted away from God. We don’t look at ourselves or even our soul to plumb the depths of these questions like, hey, is this moral, is it not? And we instead think of extrinsic, flawed sources.

And again, I would be remiss not to bring up another example of how this is all playing out. And right now, it’s highly relevant because as I’m recording this, everything that’s happening in Minnesota with ICE and a lot of people right now are scratching their heads and saying, well, I don’t understand how Christians, or I would say Catholics, can support what they’re seeing I mean, how, how can anybody stay [00:21:00] silent or even get behind the atrocities that we’re seeing?

What we’re hearing and is coming out of this from conservative Christians, conservative Catholics, is this dominant narrative of, well, those immigrants broke the law, so they have to pay for their actions. So, they must be punished, right? What is the primary source of truth and goodness in that reasoning? The law, right? But there’s other people, Christians, Catholics, and you know, even folks who don’t identify with the religion, who I think are aligning more with Aquinas, though they might never describe it that way.

And that is when you look at this level of suffering, when you watch the news and you see the level of suffering that these immigration [00:22:00] policies are inflicting, a mother being dragged from her crying children, tear gas being put under a car with children, people being shot…There’s a part of people that says, intrinsically, I know that this is not right. This is not God. And this is not an understanding of goodness that was divinely created and put on our hearts.

In fact, it is because we’re divinely created that we can look at that and be so repulsed by it. What we’re seeing now is a quote, ‘moral law’ that humankind has created, and instead of seeing an immigrant as another created child of God, conservatives see them as either, hey, you are with us and of [00:23:00] us because you obeyed the law and you became a citizen, or you are nothing to us because you did not do it in that way. And again, where does that reasoning rest? On civil law, that somebody’s worth and their ability to be treated with dignity, rest on how in conformity or not they are with the law.

We who feel that what is going on is repulsive and immoral…We don’t base that knowing and understanding on the law. We base it on what we know to be true deep inside of us: that we are all connected because we were all created by God and thus we are brothers and sisters, in, for Catholics we would say, Christ.

So, in case you think I am ragging on conservatives a little bit too [00:24:00] much, and maybe I’ve just lost all my conservative listeners, who knows. John Charles Nault says, it also applies to an issue that I’m sure I will lose a lot of liberal listeners on, and he says it is that of abortion. He uses abortion as kind of an illustration of all of this. In saying that when most people talk about abortion, they don’t talk about, again, inwardly what their gut is telling them about this developing life. Instead, people are really more concerned with the legality of it or not versus the question of whether or not this is a human life and who has a right to end that life. Okay, so we’re not gonna get fully into abortion now because I think there’s a lot more complexity there on both [00:25:00] sides, but I think he uses it as an example to say, where is the discourse right now? Well, the discourse on issues like abortion is on legality. There’s not as much really coming together to really wrestle with the question of how we define life. Right?

Okay. So, take a breath. Time to recap. So, John Charles Nault helps us to keep these things straight in our head, and he uses these terms called third person or first person moralities. Third person, he writes on page 102 is quote, “The morality of the external observer who considers the act from the outside is something isolated and sees the goodness or malice of the act in terms of the law, in terms of whether or not it conforms to the [00:26:00] law.” He starts talking about conscience, as well, in that section. And that’s where I think it gets even more interesting.

So, when you have this third person or extrinsically-motivated morality, conscience here is still relevant. But conscience, in this case, means how do I use my conscience to allude the law? And the reason that conscious plays a role here is because even with civil law, we know that it’s incomplete and it’s up to interpretation, and therefore it cannot be applied to all cases. So conscious kicks in and fills in those gaps. If this law is really interpretable, or if it doesn’t explicitly say every single situation that it could, I consult my conscience.

First person morality, on the other hand, is more the [00:27:00] Aquinas morality, and quote, “What matters is the subject who develops himself in this activity.”

So, the embodied person that is engaging in this activity or not is really the heart of the matter, and John Charles Nault explains on page 102 that St. Thomas Aquinas then sees conscience as quote “the voice that we hear saying to us in the depths of our being, do good, avoid evil.” End quote.

So that’s kind of more the understanding of conscience that we hear about in church, right? Well, what is your conscience telling you? You know, what is your, your gut, your spirit, your soul, what’s coming up for you during your prayer? And this is actually the version of conscience that JP II [00:28:00] upholds in his encyclical Veritas Splendor, and this is also the type of conscience that the saints use.

So, when you think about how we deem someone a saint, it’s not necessarily like, hey, we wanna make this person a saint because they follow the law. You know, yeah, they, they did it, so we’re gonna make them a saint. Um, that would be interesting, and at the same time, kind of boring.

We instead tend to make people saints because they inspire us, because they followed the Holy Spirit in ways that challenged them and guided them that are truly extraordinary. I’ve learned a lot about [Mother] Cabrini. Cabrini became a saint because of this tireless spirit that she had, this connection to God that she had. That said, even if, well, let’s be candid, even if all the men around [00:29:00] you are saying, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, and even if they hold positions of power like the Mayor of New York, like the bishop, like the Pope, even if they are telling you this, God is telling you need to do this, and I’ve [God] written this vocation and this call for you on your heart, and you see her be so connected to that, that she defies even the religious hierarchy and what they say she should be doing because their quote unquote ‘laws’ that they’ve created are that women, and religious women especially, should not be doing such things, right?

So, when we think of sainthood, we think of people who really were so connected to that inner source of God, that inner sense of calling that they inspire us despite everything [00:30:00] extrinsic to them telling them otherwise. Woo. We’re getting to the end here.

But you might be wondering, at this stage, how does this all relate then to what became of acedia?

So, the reason we went through all of this, and Jean Charles Nault takes us through all of this is because that helps us understand how acedia slowly lost its place in moral theology.

So, Jean Charles Nault named some folks who were great commentators on St. Thomas. I won’t list all their names here, but they essentially lived from the mid 1400s to the mid 1600s. What they did was position acedia as no longer within the context of action. So, acedia kind of gets extracted, if you will, and it largely [00:31:00] disappears from Church discourse until the Second Vatican Council, where eventually it appears transformed in the works of spirituality.

So, it’s not the acedia that we’ve been like really leaning into in this series. It’s transformed and kind of given a more spirituality angle. So, Jean Charles Nault talks about this on page 105, [and] two things start to happen.

One, it appears as sloth. And that is mostly what people will refer to today instead of acedia is the sin of sloth, right? He writes, quote, “It is simply on the order of distraction,” end quote. Basically, acedia is not this you have a calling, the False Spirits trying to get you away from that calling. It’s not all of that. It’s simply sloth. [00:32:00] In other words, you’re just this distracted slothful being.

The other way it starts to show up is in the writings of Petrarch and Aire, and that is in for Petrarch, the early 1300s and for Baudelaire from 1821 to 1867, that moves into melancholy, and you’ll see acedia be lumped in with melancholy, as well, just as it was with sloth. And here the key words of this melancholy focus are “complacency” and a kind of quote “ill being.”

So, Jean Charles Nault summarizes on page 106, quote, “If you take the two definitions of acedia that we mentioned in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the sadness about spiritual good, and the [00:33:00] disgust with action, and you abandon the unified concept of Christian action in which the Holy Spirit and Christ are at the very heart of every action, you will see that sadness becomes melancholy and paralysis becomes sloth.” End quote.

Okay, if you take acedia out of a discussion and an understanding of the essence of who we are as God-created beings attracted to the good, and that makes us free, and instead bring it into this indifference about good and evil and this freedom that is motivated by the extrinsic law, then we name and describe how we are behaving or acting, [00:34:00] not by what we know to be true inwardly, but instead how we behave and act outwardly. Acedia, then, is no longer a spiritual issue, but more so a behavioral one.

So, it’s where we ground ourselves. What understanding do we have of human beings and why they act the way they do if it’s an extrinsically-motivated source? Then we look at how that person behaves, and we can call them melancholic; we can call them slothful. If we think of human beings as divinely-created and God dwelling within them, intrinsically motivated, then we can see things in the complexity of acedia and what’s happening in terms of the wrestling of the soul.

All this is to say [00:35:00] whenever you feel prone to despair, which I think is really easy right now, and you’re feeling like, okay, everyone is just so individualistic, and it’s all like ‘you do you’- and ‘I do me’-type culture, I just want you to remember that these things aren’t new, right?

We aren’t the first generation of human beings to wrestle with these questions, , and we’ve wrestled with it time and time again because this raises essential questions about what it means to be human and who created us and where we came from. We’ve been here before, and if we’ve been here before, we can look to what helped us before and then take that and let it help us in this moment.

And that friends to me [00:36:00] is the concept of acedia. What is it about who I am and who I am uniquely called to be that is precipitating these feelings, these actions, or these inactions, what is driving this? What is keeping me from that call? And honestly, to me, the reason I did acedia is the inaugural series of this podcast is because the way that we get out of this has a spiritual answer. I think we can start by recognizing acedia in our own life and work to overcome it.

So, this concludes this bonus episode. I hope you got the answer to your question. What happened to acedia? Well, it’s undergirded by these really interesting and somewhat conflicting understandings of morality.

But the hope is that because we’ve wrestled with these [00:37:00] questions before, we’ve also wrestled with the answers, and one of those answers. Acedia is something that we’ve been talking about here all along, and I hope that for you, you can take it into your life, continue to wrestle with it, and know that the answers are within you as a created child of God.

Welcome. So, you might be thinking, finally, we have gotten to the point where we are actually sun-setting our discussion about acedia and talking about how to actually overcome it, and this whole time, just to recap, we’ve been discussing how acedia shows up for us, how it shows up in the world, [00:01:00] and how it’s mainly driven by the false spirit and the false spirit wanting to get us off track from doing the most good in the world and from living out our true calling.

The way that we can push back against all the things that we’ve been talking about is by actually overcoming acedia. Before we begin. If you’re still a little bit fuzzy on what acedia is and you’ve been following along, just please know that’s okay, and it takes time, like I’ve said in previous episodes, to ingest all of this and wrap your mind around it.

Maybe you understand it a little bit on the personal level and maybe not as much on the society level. That’s all okay. And for that reason, because it can be a difficult topic to grasp, I have a [00:02:00] special treat for you, and that is as a bonus to the conclusion of the acedia series on Moderate Catholic. I will be including an adaptation of the Ignatian examine, and when I say Examen, E-X-A-M-E-N.

So, for those of you who are familiar, the Examen is a tool in Ignatian spirituality that many Jesuits do and encourage others to do every single day. It’s usually part of the Spiritual Exercises. It’s kind of like the culmination, if you will, of those Exercises. And it’s an inventory of your day where you look back to everything you did, people you saw what you read, watched, who you interacted with, and you pay special attention to how the Spirit is moving within you that day.

And this is very [00:03:00] Ignatian because Ignatius believes that we can seek God and all of the ordinary experiences of life. So, by reviewing our day as a part of our daily prayer, we can actually see where God is at work. So, notice that I use the phrase that the Examen helps us understand where the Spirit is moving throughout the day. In the Examen that I’m gonna include as a bonus to this series, it’s also gonna help us understand where the false spirit might be moving, and in that sense, how acedia has shown up throughout our day. So, stay tuned. This will be a great bonus for all of you, and hopefully something that you can play for yourself as you’re reflecting in daily prayer.

So, once you find the acedia in your life day to [00:04:00] day, you will likely want to overcome it, and that’s where the topic today comes in. So, I’m going to start the topic with a huge spoiler. If you overcome acedia, you will know that you’ve overcome it because there is a great gift awaiting you on the other side.

So that’s the spoiler, and I’m even gonna tell you what that gift is. But first we’re gonna point back to Evagrius, our desert monk, our main dude who describes the feeling of overcoming acedia as a quote, “state of peace and an ineffable joy ensues in the soul after the struggle.” When I read that, I was like, well, I would like a state of peace and ineffable joy, so obviously it’s very attractive.

I [00:05:00] did actually experience some of this once I simply named acedia. I talked about that in the earliest episodes - I believe episode two - where just knowing what was going on with me spiritually and being able to point to it was peace-giving for me. It brought me some relief. If just naming it can give you that positive emotion like it did for me, imagine what overcoming it could feel like.

Today we’re gonna talk about that and we’ll use the same two texts that I’ve been referring to all along The Noonday Devil by Jean Charles Nault and Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. And because we’re nearing the end of this acedia series, you might be thinking, if you’ve hung around this long, I’d really like to learn more about this acedia thing, as I mentioned [00:06:00] earlier, I would recommend starting with Kathleen Norris’s book, Acedia and Me the New York Times bestseller, because it is a lot more accessibly written. But if you want a good theological itch and you’re kind of used to scratching theological itches, then I would say The Noonday Devil is another great option.

Okay, so let’s dive in and start with where Jean Charles Nault takes us and the first remedy that he starts to talk about on page 85 is meditating on the Incarnation.

So Incarnation, again, is God becoming human in Jesus Christ. He references Saint Thomas Aquinas a lot and [00:07:00] in becoming human, he talks about God actually built a bridge between the abyss of the divine and human nature and God, in that sense, through Jesus acted as a bridge maker. And actually that’s what the word pontifex literally translates to: “the bridge maker.”

So on page 87, Jean Charles Nault goes on to talk about Aquinas’s reasoning, where he writes, quote, “The Incarnation comes to restore to man or women, or humankind the possibility once again of walking toward true beatitude. The Incarnation thus allows humanity to rediscover [00:08:00] our proper dignity.”

And I did make that a little bit more gender neutral, but the important piece here is by Jesus becoming human, we, unlike any other event in human history, are able to now have that bridge to the divine and therefore deeply understand our dignity.

Aquinas goes on to argue that the Incarnation allows us to love God even more. Aquinas writes quote, “Nothing, of course, so induces us to love one as the experience of His love for us, but God’s love for me could be demonstrated to humanity and no more effective way than this. He wills to [00:09:00] be united to humanity in person for it is proper to love, to unite the Lover with the beloved as far as possible.”

Okay, so Aquinas isn’t exactly known for simple sentences, but essentially what he’s saying here is there’s no more powerful gesture of love than to be united between the love and the Lover. If you truly love someone, you want to be as close or in union with them as you can. So, our responsibility in this is actually to receive this, okay?

And I don’t, I don’t mean that flippantly, to receive this, to really actually meditate on how much God loves us, that He became [00:10:00] human, in the human and divine nature of Jesus Christ. Then, went on to sacrifice greatly for all of us despite our sins and despite our imperfection. So, we receive this and we are called to participate in that love.

I think that John Charles Nault puts it really beautifully when he writes on page 88, “God does not save us without us.” So, this is a participatory love. This is not just simply we are these fallen creatures running around and, you know, we just need somebody to come down and swoop us up. This is not a passive salvation. This is us actively participating in the Salvation. That is meant for us.

And what do we have to [00:11:00] help us with that? Guess what? We have the Holy Spirit and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. If it’s been a minute since you’ve read about the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, or had Confirmation or had a child who’s going through Confirmation, you’ll remember that they’re things like wisdom to see things as God sees them. Prudence to choose what is most in conformity with the good.

So, the Holy Spirit and its gifts are not this thing that we need to just memorize for Confirmation class, but they’re actually like tools in our tool belt to participate in this divine love. And we can draw on them, pray for them, pray to be strengthened in them, in order to reach that achievement.

John Charles Nault writes on page 95, quote, “The encounter with [00:12:00] Christ becomes a friendship that delivers us from self-centeredness. The Holy Spirit makes Christ the contemporary of every person. And makes each of us another Christ” end quote. That last part I was like, Ooh, I don’t know if I’m worthy of being even in relation to the idea of another Christ, but I do love this choice of words in friendship. A friendship that delivers us from self-centeredness. Because what more does love do, and what more does a good friend who loves their friend do than to get out of their own head and be in communion and caring about the needs and wants and desires of their beloved [00:13:00] friend? Okay, so that is. Remedy number one, if you will, meditating on the Incarnation.

The other one is called joyful perseverance. It can also be referred to as standing fast. So Evagrius and the Desert Fathers traced all the remedies to acedia back to one concept. Okay, so let’s just distill it down to one, and they distilled it down to perseverance. In other words, we must focus our efforts. Because the false spirit’s trying to pull us in a million different directions, y’all. So we gotta focus. Jean Charles Nault writes that we must resist, [00:14:00] stand fast, persevere, and remain faithful. And he writes about the temptation that we’re up against.

In doing so, at the bottom of page 1 45, he writes, quote “Acedia is the temptation to withdraw from the narrowness of the present so as to take refuge in what is imaginary. It is the temptation to quit the battle so as to become a simple spectator of the controversy that is unfolding in the world.” End quote. Woo. Acedia never stops getting intense, y’all.

So, we have this temptation to withdraw and to take refuge and what is imaginary. And if you remember from last time, the Signs of the Times, one of the ways that [00:15:00] acedia tempts us to do this is by creating this unhealthy nostalgia for the past and that selective nostalgia that we come up with in our brains is, is really imaginary because it is a subset or a selective remembrance of what was actually in the past. And it also tempts us to quit the battle. And that’s what that nostalgia falsehood told us to do. It was like, hey, don’t worry about what’s going on in the present ‘cause the solution here is actually just a retreat to the past. Because that seemed to work so well and we need to recreate that. So, in that sense, we become, as Jean Charles Nault, writes a simple spectator of the controversy that is unfolding in the world.

So, we need to persevere and our call then is to remain in [00:16:00] our dwelling place. Remember how I talked about the dwelling place of the monks where these little austere cells out in the desert and they’re always tempted to flee and not pray and do something else but convince themselves that it was a good intention? But really the false spirit was twisting it. But dwelling place for us, particularly us that don’t live in monasteries is a bit broader.

And Angelini writes in the book the Noonday Devil quote “Our dwelling place is also the place that God assigned to our life and that we ourselves have recognized and chosen at the moments of greatest clarity in our life. In other words, our own vocation, our specific calling.” [00:17:00] End quote. That right there to me is like, boom, drop the mic. Okay. If we are called to persevere and remain in a place, it is to remain in conversation and commitment to the God-given purpose that we have been gifted.

It could be a vocation in the strictest sense, like the Church talks about vocation. It can be a calling that is put on our hearts. And what I love about this quote is that Angelini says that we ourselves have recognized and chosen at the moments of greatest clarity in our life. I love this because what is on the other side of overcoming acedia? Peace. And have you ever chosen something like maybe you thought you were gonna do one thing in life and you did this 180 and you [00:18:00] did another?

When I was in college, I really thought that I was gonna go on and get a PhD in theology at the age of 22. And thankfully I had a mentor who was like, yeah, I don’t know, maybe take some time off and think about that one. And I was devastated at first. And I think, my dad in particular, who is now deceased, he was really wanting me to go to graduate school. I don’t think he cared necessarily what it was for, but he was really looking forward to this plan. Right?

But when I made this decision to kind of pivot, and look into a year of service, faith-based service, I started to grow in peace. And I felt this idea of these moments of clarity, and I’m not saying that every call comes across in a clear way like that, but [00:19:00] it kind of built over time. And these little ways and these conversations like the one that actually stopped me in my tracks and pointed me there, I gained more and more clarity over time and more and more assurances that this really was a good thing for me to do. And that is basically Ignatian discernment in a nutshell. We start to get consolation that we’re on the right path.

So back to remaining in this dwelling place of our call, Jean Charles Nault writes on page 137 not to be wooed by “the unreachable utopia,” and he notes that utopia literally means “finding oneself nowhere.” So, not to be wooed by the imaginary past, [00:20:00] not to be wooed by this false idea of a utopia. Remember, we also talked about these attachments to life will be better when...No. We need to anchor ourself in what God is calling us to do. The quote, “abode of fidelity.”

So fidelity to this call, Balthasar writes, quoted in the Noonday Devil quote “is not somewhere else. On the contrary, it is precisely here where I find myself, at this moment, faith in a God who calls me by my name and who leads me himself if I do not refuse to entrust my life to Him.”

We can sometimes forget why we started listening to [00:21:00] the call that Jesus or God is giving to us. And another remedy that he talks about under this umbrella of perseverance is this kind of remembering, it’s almost like a holy remembering, if you will.

Jean Charles Nault writes, quote, “If the Christian is tempted to abandon his or her own place, the place of his or her specific calling, it is because he or she no longer remembers the quality of the motives that led him or her earlier to make this or that fundamental choice it is. In this sense, no doubt we can speak about Acedia as a sin against memory” end quote.

So that is the false spirit at [00:22:00] work, right? The false spirit is a mastermind of distraction. And some days when we have a hard time with our calling, what better way to persevere and stand fast than to try to tap back into those moments of clarity or those earliest whispers of what led us to go in this direction?

And we will have bad days, right? We might feel like, well, what the heck is this calling anyways? This is not what I signed up for, or it’s not what I thought I was going to do. And in the book he writes, quote, “The fact that I no longer feel anything today. In no way calls into question the commitment that I made yesterday.” End quote.

Even though we’re living in this call, it’s again, not this [00:23:00] utopia, right? It might even be the most challenging thing we’ve ever done, and we might wanna quit several times. But remember that the false spirit is trying to get us to quit. And St. Paul reiterates this in his letter in two Timothy chapter two, verse 13. Paul writes, “If we are faithless, He remains faithful for He cannot deny Himself.” So even when we’re wavering, even when we’re doubting, we trust in God who will stand by us through all of that, because He is also in us. God is also in us, and God’s not gonna deny us because God does not deny Oneself.

All right, so moving on to the next remedy. This [00:24:00] one might be a little hard for some of you, and the remedy is to remain in the Church. So, we just talked about remaining in our dwelling place, our calling, but there’s another place that we should stand fast and persevere in, and that is the Church. And y’all, man, that is a hard thing to do.

I can speak specifically from Catholicism. Not everybody listening might be Catholic, but it is real hard some days to remain in the Church. And for some of you out there who might be listening it might be bringing up a lot of legitimate harms that have been done while being in the Church or being in some organized religion, and I wanna validate that those are real and [00:25:00] serious harms and, and it takes a lot; it might seem insurmountable. But also, it can also feel like maybe a thousand paper cuts that’s bleeding us. You know, either way, I just, I think it’s hard to do this. And in our struggle, I think we need to not only look at the Church and what the Church has or hasn’t done well, but I also think we need to look at ourselves, right?

I can’t say for sure, but I would suspect that we ourselves have also messed up in some really big ways, and when I think about the Church messing up in really big ways, I think about it coming down to a person or a lot of people or a system of people that has really facilitated those harms.[00:26:00]

But I don’t think that necessarily takes us off the hook of also understanding what our part in it may have been. And Father Jim Martin, when he writes his book, Building a Bridge about the church being in conversation with LGBTQ Catholics, he doesn’t just write it from the, hey Catholic Church, here’s what you need to do, which I think a lot of us could write that part of the book quite easily. But he also says, hey, LGBTQ Catholics or those who had possibly, you know, maybe left the Church, here’s also what you need to do. And I think that was a little bold of him because we rarely go to that second place of what do some of the victims of these harms also need to think about.

So, I’m not trying to be necessarily prescriptive here, but Jean Charles Nault [00:27:00] does talk about this as a remedy to acedia. Looking at our own place in all of this with the Church, he writes on page 139, “If the Christian finds oneself too constrained in the church, is it not because ultimately he or she is too constrained in their own heart?”

And I think about that a lot. So maybe you will also think about that. Maybe you are like, no, I can’t even go there, but we’re just gonna put it out there. We’re gonna see how it lands. I like this quote that he includes in this section from Augustine, and maybe this might resonate a little bit more. Augustine says, quote, “Do not go looking for a liberation which will lead you far from the house of your Liberator.” Whoa. [00:28:00]

And I think that is what I try to find rest in whenever I’m really struggling with the Church is while I have a lot of criticisms for the Church as it is today, and how it’s acted throughout history, I also know that, for me at least, true liberation, true spiritual freedom has also been found there. While the house might not be totally in order, it is where my Liberator lives, and I mean that with like a capital L, right?

He also goes on to talk about just this forgiveness. This was actually in the homily this week at the church I go to, which was a Franciscan Friar giving the homily. And he talked about in it that you know, to sin is also to [00:29:00] know what it means to be redeemed, right? And to be given forgiveness helps us to understand our salvation and God’s mercy. I don’t think he was saying like, hey, go sin so you can understand this, but like in some ways, like, don’t beat yourself up too much, is what I took from it, because they is still learning and love in all of that. And maybe we need to forgive the Church somewhat in our lives, or forgive members in the Church who have done us wrong.

Our next remedy we’ll talk about is joy, so this one will be a little bit more uplifting, Jean Charles Knault writes that joy is quote, “The spiritual barometer that directs us concerning our spiritual life.”

The spiritual barometer. So, if you [00:30:00] are finding joy, not simply happiness, but true joy, that is a good sign. That is a good barometer that you’re going in the right direction. And he quotes on page 143 as saying, “Sadness is looking at oneself. Joy is looking at God.” I love that.

I have been a gratitude journaler since I was 16, and I saw the idea on Oprah, which a lot of brilliant things have come into my life from Oprah, and I’ve realized that my gratitude journaling is in some ways like a cousin of the Examen, because I keep looking for what happened that day and joy is something I’m trying to be more aware of, and if I have a really hard time [00:31:00] finding joy, like that kind of tells me something, too. And furthermore, we also find joy in each other. So, he quotes a passage from the book, The Meaning of Man, and it says, quote, “The communion of living persons with each other, that love is the unparalleled force. And a source of a joy that does not pass.” End quote.

So, talking about this communion with each other, being with each other, what does that sound like? Well, it sounds like the Eucharist or Mass, you know, it’s like we can find joy in being with each other. And that is why our communal feast, if you will, that we do every week is not in isolation. And [Pope] Francis also talks about Joy. Francis says, quote, “Do not be men [00:32:00] and women of sadness. A Christian can never be sad, never give way to discouragement. Please do not let yourselves be robbed of hope. Do not let hope be stolen.” End quote.

Francis is pretty vehement about the Christian’s call to hope and this idea that if we snuff that out entirely, we are missing out on some of the fundamental aspects of what it means to be a Christian in today’s world. So, I am trying to do this as best I can, and I think a lot about what can we as Christians do to remain hopeful and also the topic here, joyful.

I think for me, the learning in this area has come from my work in public health specifically. In [00:33:00] public health, we are always trying to rally people around certain causes for the better health and wellbeing of communities. And for a long time, I think the teaching and ethos in the public health world was to present people with a lot of really depressing data and to say, oh my gosh, this is so terrible. Look at these data, and then everybody would kind of hop to it and rally and do the right thing.

But as I’ve gone on in my public health career, and especially presenting these types of data to communities of color, which see these data, and I think feel despair in seeing these data, but also know people whose lives and stories are embedded within those data, that this idea of rallying people [00:34:00] around the problem has probably run its course, at least I feel like maybe it has in public health, or it should, and instead, what is equally powerful is to rally people around joy. And vision.

And when I think about that approach, I think about, for instance, a lot of the work that’s being done around independent birth centers. There’s one in Boston, there’s others that are coming up across the country and they are really trying to rally people around a joyful vision that’s very affirming of people’s dignity, and that is really powerful. And I might even go so far as to say more powerful than some of the statistics around maternal health that we see in our world today.

So, I think there’s a way [00:35:00] that we can seek this joy and it doesn’t have to be Pollyanna, doesn’t have to be dismissive of people’s real suffering and experiences. And we, as Christians, are particularly called to that. And it even happens in other world religions, too.

I remember reading a book about Gandhi and Gandhi’s wife, and they were on the ashram, and there was this kind of quote or command, if you will, about cleaning the latrines, and the ashram because the idea was that anybody that came to be at the ashram, had to contribute. And they had this saying, I don’t know if it was him or his wife, that to clean the latrines, do it with joy or not at all.

And that has stuck with me in the many years since I’ve read the book [00:36:00] because I think it’s what we’re talking about here, right? Like we have to find sources of joy in our everyday lives and the small things that we do every day. But certainly in this calling and in this work that we’re doing towards this calling.

One of the last and final remedies we’re gonna talk about, and certainly there are others, but these are just the ones we’re talking about here today in this episode, is one that I kind of added in there and it came from a very funny anecdote in the beginning of the Noonday Devil, and that was when Jean Charles Nault on page 33 was talking about how acedia can show up as an aversion to manual labor.

Okay, so maybe we’re going back to the latrines. I don’t know. But acedia can be an aversion to work, and that [00:37:00] might be one of the reasons why it eventually got lumped in with sloth, but Jean Charles Nault talks about, for the Desert Fathers, work was not always enjoyable because again, they led very austere lives. They had to grow, you know, whatever they needed, make whatever they needed. And when they needed income, like cold, hard cash, they would make or weave baskets, and they would go to sell them in Alexandria. He writes that if they did not need to sell the baskets that they had made, they would do as Penelope [from Greek mythology] did. They would unmake the baskets at night that they had made during the day.

And I just thought this was somewhat hilarious, but also kind of maddening because can you imagine weaving a basket and [00:38:00] then unweaving it only to probably weave it again later? Talk about spiritual discipline. Right? And this stuck with me and really got me kind of excited about the book itself.

I think why it resonated with me is because he was trying to make a point that in the monk’s lifestyle, their calling, their vocation, simple, repetitive work was done to leave the mind free to devote itself to the Lord. And I think in our current modern day context, we are always trying to do as few simple, repetitive task as possible. We have technology and appliances and all the things, the progress of the modern age to try to get us out of this, but they really saw a value in it. And I think [00:39:00] this applies to overcoming acedia, because when you feel stuck spiritually, and you don’t know where to go next, it might be a good time to tap into something creative, repetitive, minute.

Like for me, doing crafts, just like getting my brain out of my head for a little bit and focusing on creative development of a very small thing. Lately I’ve been painting ornaments, that quiets the noise in my brain and it leaves my mind free to explore. That’s kind of similar to how we always say the best ideas come up while we’re taking a shower. A shower is a simple, repetitive task that we do regularly, [00:40:00] but it frees us to actually sit and focus and remember focus is one of the things that we’re trying to do here as a remedy.

But I want to leave you and I want to leave this series about learning about acedia with perhaps one of the most powerful things that has come out of all of this for me, and that is the need to have an abandonment to God’s plan for me.

And in exchange, I hope, an abandonment to God’s plan for you. Jean Charles Nault writes on page 137, and Balthasar writes that everything that we’ve been talking about, quote “Is not somewhere else. On the contrary, it is here where I find myself at this moment, faith in a God who calls [00:41:00] me by name and who leads me himself. If I do not refuse to entrust my life to him.”

So, this is about a radical abandonment of oneself and in the positive sense, a radical trust of God’s love for us and also the call that He has for us in our respective lives. This is what helped me to move closer to overcoming acedia in my own life.

If you remember way back to the first episode, I was telling you that I was having this feeling, and then I met Becky, my spiritual director, and I started doing the spiritual exercises. And what I realized was that I was feeling this [00:42:00] unsettledness because I had not really truly opened myself up to what God could be calling me to do. And the big spoiler alert of all of this is what came outta that for me is God is actually calling me to do more of what I’m doing with you here and now, which is reflecting on faith in a really personal way.

And it made me realize that I missed the theology that I had studied in undergrad and talking about it and digging into it and hopefully making it a little bit more accessible to like the everyday person. ‘cause some of these topics can get quite heady. But in order to do that and get to that place of living into that call, which I still struggle and I’m trying to do in real life, I needed [00:43:00] to move away from some of the other things, some of the other autopilot things that I had been doing in my life, which were not, again, bad things, but we’re not me living into the fullness of what God wanted me to do, or at least God wanted me to do in this next chapter of my life. So Becky kind of helped me through the Exercises, helped me to really put words to what I’m putting words to right now.

I don’t even think I could have put words to it while I was doing the Exercises, and she talked about the Sucipe prayer. And that prayer is very well known. It is a part of Ignatian spirituality. It is a part of the Spiritual Exercises, and it comes more at the end of the Exercises because I think one needs to go through a lot of those steps in order to really [00:44:00] understand the power of this prayer. And when Becky talked about the prayer to me, of course, my first reaction was, oh yeah, Becky, I know about that prayer. I went to a Jesuit school, prayed it, been there, done that. I get it. And Becky was like, no, this is a really powerful prayer, and if you want to say this prayer, you need to be ready for what might change about your life after saying it, and truly meaning what you’re saying.

And that really caused me to sit up a little straighter. I’m not gonna lie. And I was like, oh, not that the prayer was like dangerous, but it was in some ways it was a threat to the dissatisfaction, the uneasiness, the distraction, the autopilot [00:45:00] that I had put my energy and given into for so long, and if I really, truly wanted to get out of that, if I really wanted to overcome acedia and get to a place where I lived, into my God-given calling, yes, I could say the words that I wanna do that, but what does it mean to get to the other side of that, the courage that is needed, the perseverance that is needed, the challenges that I would encounter, and that might mean my life looking a lot differently. It might mean pivoting. Remember how we talked about acedia as a midlife crisis? Kind of a close companion, right? And the fear that comes into changing one’s life, especially after working so hard and diligently in one direction and other people depending on you, and all the doubts and fears that go into that. But [00:46:00] this prayer is essential to all these remedies that we’ve talked about. It is the prayer for perseverance.

Going back to what the monks say this all comes down to, and the retreatant who’s doing the Spiritual Exercises, it says from www.ignatianspirituality.com, has opened oneself to the reality of who God is and what God’s purpose is for humanity and what God has done for him or her in a particularly intense way. The website goes on to say the Sucipe prayer “is a radical prayer of total self-giving. It is not a formula for easy decision making that we can adopt one morning after a lifetime of making decisions based on other, more prosaic or even selfish reasoning. It’s the fruit of [00:47:00] self-reflection and of openness to God’s love.”

Wow. So I had known this prayer, seen this prayer. I’ve even told people in the past, it’s my favorite prayer, but I don’t think until I’d really gone through the Exercises and leaned into acedia, I don’t think I really saw it as powerful as it really is. And what that would ask of me if I were to genuinely and authentically request this from God.

So, I’m going to pray the prayer here with you, and I wanna say, when I started praying it after the Exercises, I was kind of praying it with one eye open because I was like I definitely want to pray this prayer, but now I’m a little worried about what happens if I [00:48:00] do.

And I remember a quick story from when I went to confession one day with a priest and I remember saying like, I don’t even know if I’m really sorry about what I just said. And you know, he kinda laughed because, probably he’s heard that before. And he said, pray to want to feel sorry about it, and that was like a balm for me because I wasn’t quite there yet spiritually to feel repentant about whatever it was I was talking about. But praying to want to feel that way seemed like a manageable step.

So even if this prayer is not one that you’re ready to fully put your gusto into, I want you to just pray to want to [00:49:00] truly mean the words that are in it. So with that, I will recite the Sucipe prayer here:

“Take Lord and receive. All my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All that I have and pose us thou has given all to me to the, oh Lord, I return it all is thine dispose of it wholly according to thy will. Give me thy love and thy grace for this is sufficient for me.”

What a better way to end this series of learning about acedia and to radically give ourselves [00:50:00] over to want to be in relationship with God and his call for us in the best possible way.

So, thank you for learning about it with me. We do have a few other topics and bonuses coming up after this, but this is really the conclusion of learning about acedia and my hope for you is that whatever we discussed here, whatever you lingered on or thought about will be the seeds that will grow into courageous, beautiful new things that God is asking you to do in your own life.

[00:51:00]

[00:00:00]

Christina Gebel: Welcome to the Moderate Catholic. I am your host, Christina Gable, and this is Episode five, Acedia and Interreligious Dialogue. I am so honored today to have a guest with us. Our very first guest on the show, Dr. Balu Natarajan. We are gonna have a really robust discussion today about acedia and how it shows up in world religions, particularly with a focus on Hinduism.

So, Balu, if you are ready to get started, I would love to.

Dr. Natarajan: Yeah, let’s do this. This is, it’s all about exploration, so we’ll see where we go.

Christina: I love it. So why don’t we start [00:01:00] off with you just introducing yourself. I know you do a lot professionally and have done a lot throughout your career, and also perhaps a little bit about your spiritual journey.

Dr. Natarajan: I went to an event last month and this young man, he is not that young, but he’s probably only in his thirties; he talked about how we tend to introduce ourselves. He said, why do we always lead with what we do? And he made us take away all of that.

I can’t remember exactly what I sent you, but I think I sent something along the lines of I am husband, parent, son, friend, educator, lifelong learner. And I happen to be a physician. I also happen to have been CEO of an educational nonprofit for until very recently, the majority of the last five years.

But the real key is the lifelong learning part of it. I’m a practicing physician. I still see patients, but I’m also chief medical officer of a large post-acute healthcare company. So, we do home health hospice. We’re in 31 states. So, I’m [00:02:00] responsible for the clinical quality of thousands of patients every day.

So that’s pretty daunting to make sure that we are doing the things possible to get that right. So, today’s topic is really important because as a physician, we’re responsible for taking the Hippocratic Oath of not doing harm. But if you stand still, that’s also going to do harm in certain cases.

This topic is meaningful to me as an individual and professionally. And then when we talk about the spiritual journey, I was raised in the United States in the 1970s as a Hindu and it was very different at that time, both being a person of color and being a Hindu because nobody really knew what to do with most of us. For all the rage of plant-based over the last many years, you couldn’t get most things plant-based in most parts of the country.

Christina: That’s so [00:03:00] true.

Dr. Natarajan: The journey has been interesting, and the Catholic influence here is super cool because like when I went to scouts our scout troop was based at Saint Scholastica, so

Christina: Oh wow.

Dr. Natarajan: I prayed with my scout mates and, years and years later, one of those scout mates, his brother-in-law is the contractor who did this house from where I do this podcast and that scout friend’s mom still makes me Milky Way cookies on my birthday, so

Chrsitina: I wish that was also formally a part of Catholicism Milky Way cookies.

Dr. Natarajan: But I, if you try them. It, we might just make it happen. Like right after communion, you have the military cookies.

Christina: Oh, perfect.

Dr. Natarajan: I think people would be drawn in increasing numbers back at the church.

Christina: Yes. Thankfully we’ve solved that as well in this conversation from the first minutes of our [00:04:00] conversation.

I love it. Yeah. So, you talked, have talked about how you grew up and how it was to be in that time period, a Hindu growing up, doing scouts, obviously having some interreligious experiences early on. Where did that leave you after that and where did you go from there spiritually?

Dr. Natarajan: Yeah, so we, at the same time in the seventies, established Hindu temple here in Chicago.

If we rewind to back then. In the late seventies, even early eighties, there were not many Hindu temples. It was hard to find them. And in a metro area like Chicago, it didn’t exist. And so, in 1981, one of our friends in the community, their daughter was getting engaged, and so, there are formal ceremonies that need to be done for the engagement.

I think close to 30 of us, whoever could fit in two [00:05:00] big Ford Club Wagon Vans, with the benches, we took two of these vans from Chicago to Pittsburgh, because that’s where the nearest temple was. I think there was one in Houston, one in New York, one in Pittsburgh. And so, we had to go in 1981 to Pittsburgh for that ceremony, because that’s where the temple was.

So, in parallel, in the late seventies, a group here in Chicago decided to establish a temple that involved raising funds, buying land, learning about nonprofit status, all those sorts of things. I got a front row seat to the whole journey in a couple of ways. My dad was the first treasurer, so as a CPA, he got tagged to be the first treasurer.

And so, he got that post in 1977. And the whole journey to actually opening this big temple took eight years, eight or nine years. Part one, part of the building, eight years, and then the main part, nine years. And then along the way I [00:06:00] got a front row seat in terms of actual prayer ceremony because there are certain things before you formally open a temple. There are certain procedures that have to be followed prior. So, we began those ceremonies in 1983 in preparation for this big temple being built. And again, there’s no priest. So, we have all this, these ceremonies we have to do, and we have a cassette tape.

And then those who are qualified, there’s something along the lines of a confirmation ceremony in that particular class that you get and it requires a bunch of vigorous practice on a daily basis, which my boys do and I do with them.

And so, I happened to, at the age of 10, go through that ceremony. And then this body of religious work was handed to us as a community when I was 11. So [00:07:00] I got to go with my dad and the other elders in the community and participate in this. And, even if I grew up in India, such a chance would not be given.

And here not anymore, right? Because priests are readily available. But from 1983 to 1985 we had this work. We had two depictions of Ganesh. Ganesh is essentially the remover of obstacles. And so, we had these responsibilities to perform these daily ceremonies to Ganesh, and I got to be part of it.

And then the holidays, like Christmas holidays, for me were great. Partly because they’re Christmas holidays, but partly because lots of people were on vacation, which means I got to do more at the age of 11 and 12.

Christina: I love that.

Dr. Natarajan: And these are just chances that like, my boys won’t get right. Like people now in most places in the world won’t get because priests, Hindu priests are readily available to do these things.

Then that parlayed into establishing the youth group of that temple. And then [00:08:00] eventually that turned into a Hindu study group in college and lots of exploration with peers. And then over time establishing or consolidating it into a high school group, which then gave me eventually about 30 years of experience teaching that age group, which at a very vulnerable time, being able to apply religious texts, stories, scripture is pretty amazing to be able to do and to look through their lens. And what I’ve always told that age group and their parents is everything we are teaching here is about when you are 19 and you have a decision to make at one o’clock in the morning, are you gonna do the right thing or not?

Chrsitina: Wow.

Dr. Natarajan: That’s the reason we are doing all this. Because you’ll be at that crossroads, and you can decide the right thing versus not, and it could be reversible or not. So hopefully I’m giving you the tools to make that decision at one o’clock in the morning [00:09:00] so that gives you that 53 years of spiritual journey and two minutes or less.

Christina: Wow. So much of what you just said, I had all these great light bulbs and fireworks going off in my head because it’s not only just a privilege to discuss this topic with you from your spiritual standpoint, but also to know that. You came of age in such a pivotal moment for Hinduism in the United States, like how much it has, had more of a local presence throughout the years and has grown in that way.

So, I think just you spanning that timeframe and developing spiritually that you mentioned both as a child and eventually as a teacher of religion is just such a cherished perspective that we can learn from. So thank you. So we are going to [00:10:00] pivot to our topic today, which is Acedia. And it has been the topic of the first series for this inaugural podcast.

And as the inaugural guest, we will continue to talk about Acedia and as little background for the listeners. So Balu and I and our respective families were guests at a wedding and we were just catching up because my husband is one of the youth who benefited from the mentorship and religious instruction that Balu just described.

And we just caught up about how things were going. And I said I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic acedia. And that was a timeframe when I was thinking about this podcast and thinking about how to take a spiritual topic like this and not only make it relevant to today but also share it with a wide variety of people and get a conversation going.

And one [00:11:00] of the perspectives I’ve always wanted to bring in is how world religions, and especially Hinduism, because it’s so intimate and personal to my own marriage, how Hinduism views it. We have gone through the broad strokes, if you will, of Acedia, and I’d love to hear from you how you see concepts that overlap with Acedia showing up in Hinduism and what Hinduism says about that.

Dr. Natarajan: Yeah. So, you referenced your husband who is, in the hall of fame of students I’ve taught, really, and is a dear friend that group. He was part of a group of a bunch of then kids, but that group produced, one gal who got a perfect score on the SAT, a couple of people that went to Harvard, many whom have just done well professionally. [00:12:00] I will deeply appreciate and brag on Raman [Christina’s husband] here a little bit, but, many of those kids came and worked in my practice.

Christina: Yes.

Dr. Natarajan: And Raman did, and Raman actually helped me to establish in 2006, an electronic medical record in my office.

Christina: Wow.

Dr. Natarajan: And I was calling people and willing to pay, $40,000 to get this thing, and I couldn’t get someone to do it. And Raman helped me, establish this, downloaded EMR and establish a network. And, he would try things, we would try things, then he would go home and ask his parents, and we would come back and we would iterate and we just, we learned so much and that carried me for I think a year and a half until I could actually establish a more permanent space and find a techie who could do this. And

Christina: Wow.

Dr. Natarajan: It’s, it’s really special. And of course, he’s a practicing physician now, which is super amazing and cool.

Chrsitina: I never knew that, and actually I will be pleased to tell you that still today he is tapped for his IT savvy in this household because he downloads [00:13:00] many helpful things on my computer and shows me how to use them.

Dr. Natarajan: Yeah, but that group was a very curious, trustworthy group and they were open-minded, more than anything else. And so that group I would teach at the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago in Lamont, Illinois.

And there are a few different spots where I would do the teaching, but the majority were in one of two rooms. So you walk upstairs where the main Rama Vigraha[1] is, right? And you can walk to the left and that room is Balaji[2]. And you walk to the right and that room is Krishna[3]. And where Krishna is, you have some teachings from the Bhagavad Gita[4], and one of them is from the second chapter.

It’s like the chapter in the [Bhagavad] Gita that almost everybody knows by heart if they know anything at all about the Gita, that’s the verse that they know. It’s in chapter two, it’s verse 47. [00:14:00] And it talks about essentially you must do your duty right. And so it, it very clearly says you have the right to perform your duty.

You do not have the right to. The actions of those duties. And if you read the whole thing, the book, it’s basically in a battlefield, a lecture from Krishna to Arjuna[5], who is in a really tough spot. He’s about to embark on a war, and the war is with family. And Arjuna is should I even do this?

And Krishna, it’s basically 18 chapters of Krishna explaining why he has to do this.

Chrsitina: Wow.

Dr. Natarajan: And Arjuna is basically okay I guess I have to, right? This is my responsibility as a warrior. I must do this right. And if there are unintended or even intended consequences, people will die.

That’s not for me to think about at this moment. And just think about it. We [00:15:00] have right now plenty of our own. American soldiers are representing us. We’re recording this right after Veterans Day. And they can’t be sitting there and wondering about the moral distress or the ethics of bearing that weapon.

When they enlist, they’re making that decision, right? And afterwards, they can’t be thinking about it. They have to do what they have to do. A fighter pilot that’s dropping a bomb has to do what they have to do. There’s no questioning, right? That’s it, they have to follow a chain of command. And so that’s the story or that is the message that Krishna delivers, right? When we think about not doing right, this is one of the most famous verses.

Interestingly recently, the Fed[eral Reserve] chair Jerome Powell was speaking at Princeton. What he says, the most powerful part of what he says to whom much is given much is required. And so the thrust is if you’ve been given gifts, whatever [00:16:00] that is, monetarily, brain power, opportunity, maybe we can even just say food or water, shelter, you are responsible for doing something with it.

Christina: Yeah. I resonate with that and I think in terms of the language throughout Acedia. I talk a lot about, in the first few episodes how each of us has this God-given purpose. And I think it can be interchangeable with gifts or your calling or just what you’re meant to do in this life.

And those gifts can stay under wraps if you so choose and not be given freely. And I really like the story that you noted from the second chapter because I imagine, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, that he was faced [00:17:00] with this decision point and he could have very easily talked himself out of it for a wide variety of reasons.

And actually that comes up in acedia too, acedia is not necessarily, here’s the really good thing and here’s the really bad thing. It’s here’s a good thing and here’s also a good thing that can get manipulated a little bit and can get you off track. It’s not that it’s inherently bad, but it’s not necessarily what you are meant to do.

I talk a lot about the false spirit and how the false spirit kind of comes in and plays those mind games to get you distracted and off the course, so would that kind of sense of purpose or gifts resonate with what was going on in the story at that point.

Dr. Natarajan: Yeah, absolutely. The way that most of Hindu [00:18:00] scripture is written, it talks mostly about beauty. So it talks about calling. And, this has been misused or misinterpreted, right? But folks are divided often into classes[6], priest class, warrior class merchant class, whatever. But a different way of thinking about it is job or responsibility, so if your priest is responsible for being vegetarian and scholarly and sharp and being a beacon of wisdom and guidance, your warrior is expected to be strong and passionate and wanting to win. If your warrior goes plant-based and does intermittent fasting 20 hours a day, and then your priest is, having food that brings out the passion in them, this is not gonna [00:19:00] go well, right?

Each has their own responsibility and each has to have their head in their game, period. And so that’s really what , everything talks about duty. It’s actually about that. So if we take the old scripture and then advance it to today, it’s less about class and more about the responsibility that we have signed up for and that we have taken.

And then we have to, I think, contextualize this too, which is. If I have a responsibility as a parent and I have a responsibility as a physician, it would be easy. And I actually think acedia can get in the way here or be involved. It would be easy to overindex on one.

Christina: Of course.

Dr. Natarajan: While shirking the responsibilities in another and that’s something that I have, had to sort out frequently I’ll get the perfect balance for five minutes and then I lose it. I think anybody who tries to do many things and do them well and leave their positive mark on society, that’s a [00:20:00] constant battle and a constant struggle.

Christina: Yeah. And going back to the Jerome Powell comment, a struggle for somebody who’s given many gifts, right, Is how to nurture each of those in a sort of harmony so that they can produce the best effect. I’m wondering, as you’re describing that, what tools does Hinduism give for having that spiritual discernment, what kind of exercises, scripture guidance would one look to?

Dr. Natarajan: So it’s interesting because it’s probably not prescriptive enough,. Lots and lots of options are given and yet not that much prescribing. It’s fascinating. You go to India and most Hindus would say I’m not very religious. That’s what they’ll say. But yet [00:21:00] there is a belief.

Okay, what are the things that you do? For some, they might go to a temple. A lot of people are carnivores, but they’ll only eat meat on Sundays. And so they’re like, huh. That kind of sounds like Lent, which you’ve written about.

Christina: Yeah.

Dr. Natarajan: There, there’s, so essentially a lot of these things are about just order and discipline, but Hinduism prescribes three yogas, three paths to God.

One is bhakti yoga, which is through devotion. That can be through singing, that can be through prayer, rituals, going to temple, et cetera, et cetera. The second is karma yoga, which is basically selfless action, you have chronicled the nonprofit and charity work that you have done. And if done with full faith and true detachment that’s another path, and then finally, jnana yoga, which is the through path of knowledge, and through reading of scripture and exploration, et cetera.

Christina: I was wondering if we could [00:22:00] linger on the second one the sense of detachment is something that comes up a lot in Acedia. And quite frankly, I think Eastern religions do a lot better than Western religions. In one of the episodes I talk about, there’s this idea of always wanting to run away from one’s current life circumstances and this attachment to the idea that change is always best.

The monks, when they were living in their cell - and really their primary job goal purpose was to pray - but they were tempted and really attached to these ideas of maybe I could do better in the world if I taught at the school in the village, and they were always questioning whether they should sit in that room and pray all day.

And what sort of like an impact that was really having. What I like about it acedia is it says [00:23:00] sure, being a teacher at a school in the village is not a bad path, but one needs to examine if it’s pulling you from your true path or distracting you from your true path. And if you have an attachment to this idea of change, and is it really that you should leave and go do that?

Or are you overly attached to the idea that would be more interesting, more exciting, or more fulfilling? So, can you say a little bit about that second path and how yeah, you engage with that?

Dr. Natarajan: Well, in Hinduism, a lot of what is prescribed is repetition, right? So the prayers that I do with my kids, the same prayers that allowed me to function as interim priest, a priest’s assistant at the temple, we do the same thing every day, and it’s prescribed to be done three times a day.

Now we do it once a day, and there are [00:24:00] people that do it once a year, we do it once a day. And so, we’ve landed there, that’s gonna be the way that we deliver on this responsibility. But it’s prescribed to do three times a day, right? If you keep reading, the guidance is, look, if you do it once a day, do it well once a day. Don’t do it three times a day where you’re distracted the whole time when you do it three times a day. And I think the reason that Hinduism gives you these various paths is okay, yeah, if you have these anchors it can be in music, you’re singing spiritual devotional songs, you sing them over and over again. As you get better at doing it you lose yourself in it. If you lose yourself in it now, maybe you feel good. Okay, now you go do work at the charity,

Nothing worth doing is easy. True giving has to hurt. So now you’re doing this stuff, and then somebody’s giving you a hard time even though you’re trying to do the right thing. Okay? Then what do you do? Maybe [00:25:00] the music that you engaged in earlier, or the religious rituals or practice that you engaged in earlier. Give you that sense of calm, that you can handle it. And then maybe you learn from it. And then when you learn from it, now you go home and you do the Jnana yoga, you’re reading from scripture, right? And you’re like, oh, okay, I understand why this happened to me earlier today. And so the same thing that Jerome Powell said, he’s saying to a bunch of 20 somethings as they’re graduating from Princeton. I don’t know if that’s powerful to them or not, but I’ll tell you, for me, that was powerful. And I have shared this now with so many people and many of whom are Christian or Catholic, and they’re like, oh my God, send that to me. And what he was really doing, he was sending a message to people in Washington DC as much as he was sending a message

Christina: Yes.

Dr. Natarajan: To people at Princeton, but if your mind is not open to it, you’re not gonna hear the message and the power behind that message. And so I, I think that the real answer to that, [00:26:00] that multiple religions will share is, there are a lot of things that we must all do. The world would not go around if all of us only did Jnana yoga, if all of us only sat and meditated and prayed. In fact, the world would end because we would not procreate if that were the case. And so there must be some balance in a lot of things.

And what’s fascinating is if you have read Arthur Brooks, he actually teaches about happiness. That’s what his doctorate is in. He teaches about happiness but he’s also a daily communicant. So, he goes to church every day and he’s published his routine, his daily routine that begins with waking up, exercising, meditation, prayer, the diet that he has, the writing that he does in the morning, the teaching that he does in the afternoon.

And it’s incredibly regimented. He has studied happiness and he writes about it and he speaks about it. And I found it [00:27:00] fascinating because he actually explores not just Catholicism, but other religions

Christina: Wow. That’s gonna go on my list. I could see myself really enjoying that. I wanna go back to what you were saying about the practices giving you the foundation and the ability to weather some of those more challenging situations where you’re living out your charity or whatever it is that you’re doing. I think that’s really in line with Acedia because Acedia talks about how we have a temptation to flee when things get hard, and it talks a lot about self-sacrifice.

And it also talks about, if you’re attached again to this idea of fleeing, it might be because you’re uncomfortable with how hard things are presently, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to leave. I like what you said there, because similarly, [00:28:00] I think the monks would look at their prayer and rhythmic spiritual practices throughout the day as something that helps them to weather those times of challenge and of temptation or just sitting with a discomfort of the challenge itself. So I think that’s really relevant.

Dr. Natarajan: Good things come through rigor. Really.

Chrsitina: Yes.

Dr. Natarajan: And this came up about a month ago. And I’m big into sports. Your husband Raman knows this. And this is well chronicled on social media. Max Scherzer was pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays in the for the American League. 41 years old. And then the same night, Joe Flacco was a quarterback playing against Aaron Rogers.

And the [00:29:00] three of them that night, the three of them were running circles, statistically, circles around people half their age now, we can like them as individuals or not for various reasons. The bottom line is they were there delivering at that age on the same night because they had been disciplined in their approach to their craft period.

They had methodically been disciplined and so they were able to maintain a high level at this age because the habits they had developed more than 25 years ago, they had maintained those habits.

Christina: And I know about Joe Flacco because I’m from Cincinnati, so yeah. But that’s such a great point and example, and that’s a reason why, I tend to lean toward Ignatian spirituality, and he uses the term spiritual exercises [00:30:00] and to me it’s like a strengthening, a repeated strengthening of a spiritual muscle. So that’s a great point and correlation. I wanted to also talk about kind of two energies that Acedia has, and I talked a lot about in the first episodes about how it can feel very paradoxical, but it’s actually related because it has a similar purpose.

And one of those energies is more of a lethargy or just sloth, just not being able to rouse oneself, like a spiritual tepidness. And the other energy is like a restlessness distraction fidgety, and. They’re on different ends of the spectrum, but they both serve to keep you from the right path and purpose.

You either fall into sloth or it even talks about [00:31:00] a belief that you know, who are you to do this thing? Maybe you’re not worth the purpose, and that starts to deter you. And then also it talks about distraction. And, I resonated a lot with that because this nervous energy, I think, is fed by a lot of opportunity for distraction that we have in the modern day world.

So my mind immediately went to things like meditation, which again, I think Eastern religions excel at in many ways. How does Hinduism wrestle with those two poles of energy and help a person to stay grounded or stay on their true path?

Dr. Natarajan: Hinduism talks about three kinds of energy[7] with regard to food, for example, so they, they reflect on sattvic food, which is [00:32:00] balanced and not extreme in any way, rajasic, which essentially agitates you. And then tamasic food, which really slows you down, so rajasic food would be really spicy stuff, and then tamasic food would be like hard liquor, and so you’re supposed to have sattvic food again.

Do you want your warriors only to have sattvic food? No, but this whole notion of truly being plant-based or vegetarian is partly because the priest class is responsible for having their head on straight, right? And so sattvic food is what they need. You don’t want them to be agitated or wound up because you want them to have calm mind, to be able to give good advice.

Think about it the priest who’s speaking at our parish, right? For them to really give good advice or even just, to handle confession with equanimity. They can’t be having heartburn in the middle of that.

Like it’s a distraction, right? It’s interesting, as I’m now thinking about one of my [00:33:00] patients, is a priest and his cholesterol was up and he is oh yeah, I know. The food that I’ve been fed that got me that number doc during Easter we’re all being fed the following things

Chrsitina: Oh, yes.

Dr. Natarajan: There is reference to that in Hinduism. And so, then, if I carry that too, okay, great. What do we do with that? What we’re really talking about is mind, body, and spirit. We optimally want our mind, body, and spirit to be in balance.

And we want them to be in balance without each being zero. So, you could arguably be in balance in your mind, body, and spirit, but doing nothing. Then you’re not really doing your duty in any way, shape, or form. And you don’t want one of those three things to be way off.

So, they need to be in balance. So, to me [00:34:00] the way to get there is you need calisthenics for each one of those things. So, you need exercise for the mind and fuel for the mind. You need exercise for the body and fuel for the body. You need exercise for the spirit and fuel for the spirit.

I will tell you as I look at my patients and as so much is chronicled about mental health in the last five years, an integral ingredient in all this is love. And probably the most important among those among is self-love. That means in a situation of acedia or in a situation of lethargy or just inaction or no desire to do, often that is accompanied by a lack of self-love.

I didn’t do anything. I don’t feel so good that I didn’t do anything. Now I don’t feel good about myself that I didn’t do anything. I had all these plans for [00:35:00] myself. I didn’t do it then. The false spirit is second guessing everything. Now you have self-hate. Now you don’t wanna do anything. So, to me, one of the necessary, we’ll say antidotes to this has to be grace. [You] have to give yourself grace. To get out of this cycle.

Chrsitina: Wow. That’s really powerful. I’m gonna pause here, because it shows up in Acedia exactly as you described, it goes into this idea of, what’s the point of my existence?

If you don’t love yourself, then you start to question why you’re even here. And it can go to a very dark place. If you don’t love yourself and therefore don’t see meaning in your existence, you start to question living.

Dr. Natarajan: Yeah. [00:36:00]

Christina: And I really like that because love is brought up again and again throughout the framework as one of the antidotes to that, and so that actually is a one-to-one overlap, I would say with what we’re talking about.

Dr. Natarajan: Yeah. And I will tell you that I have seen this, I’ve seen this in multiple domains. I’ve seen it in my private practice where I take care of people trying to run a marathon. I have seen it among the dying.

So, I have, for 25 years I have taken care of, directly and indirectly, terminal patients across the country. And the things that keep coming up are: I’m sorry, I forgive you, I love you, thank you, and please forgive me. Those are the things that keep coming up.

Again, well-documented chronicled. [00:37:00] But the people who have self-love, they have the best ability to then engage in the discipline that then gives them the endurance to get through the hard things. And the only way you get out of it is to basically decide to have some self-love that, in my opinion, that’s grace. And then you have to practice mind exercise, body exercise, spiritual exercise.

Christina: Yes. That’s all the threads coming together. I appreciate that you brought up end of life because one, I made a mental note of that when you were introducing yourself. For acedia, it doesn’t talk as much about end of life, but it does talk about midlife, and I think it’s relatable to end of life because midlife is a point of reflection for a lot of people.

Just like end of life would be a point of [00:38:00] reflection. Acedia talks about how in the midlife, or maybe even when someone’s facing a terminal illness towards the end of their life, there’s a temptation to say I’ve already gone this far on this path, so better to play it safe and just continue.

Or maybe I should just go on autopilot and ride this out. Or is it selfish of me to switch gears at this point? Or who am I to really start a career in X when all I’ve been doing is Y and some of those questions would come up as people reflect back on their life, too.

Did I do what I wanted to do? Did I have certain decision points where I could have gone in another direction and I didn’t? And acedia warns us about this, like autopilot just drifting through life. Never really maybe even asking these questions. We [00:39:00] just stay content with what it calls mediocrity, that if the false spirit can keep you at a mediocre level, then you’re not doing all the other good things, you’re just getting from point A to B. So, I’m wondering if you have a thought on that, either from your time working in end of life care or through Hinduism and spirituality.

Dr. Natarajan: It’s all of the above, it is natural. It happens naturally. Hinduism prescribes four stages of life.[8] There’s the Brahmacharya, or student phase, and then there’s the Grihastha, or housekeeper or householder phase.

Then there’s Vanaprastha, which is exploration, meditation, giving things away. And then there’s Sannyasa, which is basically like you are renouncing the world and worldly things. Once you’ve married your children off, like you’ve [00:40:00] educated them, you’ve got them settled in their own houses then you are really supposed to stop chasing the American dream. By then, you should have gotten your financial affairs in order that you don’t, you can work. It’s not saying you can’t work. But you don’t need to grind to work to make ends meet. You’re not chasing, I gotta go make this much money to survive or you’re not chasing material things.

And so now the door is open where, okay, I’m not chasing after a kid. And I’m not grinding to pay for tuition. Now I can explore, now I can take my life’s experiences and I can, actually do that Janan yoga, that pursuit of spiritual knowledge, so Hinduism prescribes that at midlife when you’re burning out that you have this new exploration, or you have time for exploration. So that’s one thought process.

But then if in parallel, you look at some of [00:41:00] Maslow’s work, there are, in the past six or seven years, some reinterpretations of Maslow’s work. When you take a look at those reinterpretations, they’re not in a pyramid.

There’s one guy who has written that it’s more like a sailboat. And so, the basics, right? The foundational stuff of financial security and love and self-esteem and all those things that’s the boat. Then all the rest of it. That eventually gets you to transcendence. That’s the sail.

And so, it starts with exploration and all of these things that eventually gets you to transcendence. And then if you juxtapose that with what some of the things that Arthur Brooks has written, what he basically says is, once you get to a certain age, you’re not necessarily supposed to be doing new things, but you’re supposed to become a mentor and you’re supposed to help others to do new things.

Now take all of that and then look at what’s happening in the United States. And you’ve got a bunch of 60-somethings and 70-somethings still involved in 80-hour work weeks. And then nobody’s getting [00:42:00] mentorship because everybody’s working remote. Then you got a group of people that don’t feel like they’re advanced. So, you got another group of people that past midlife are still grinding this whole notion of ambition, achievement, and then settling down and starting to let go. But actively letting go through exploration and through knowledge.

That playbook is dead in the US. And what we are left with, right, is probably a widening rich/poor gap depending on who you talk to, but certainly mediocrity, right? Like ambition. Ambition overall is down in the United States. Small business not doing what it used to.

The religion has definitely prescribed things to do so that while human nature would get caught or stuck in that midlife crisis, the prescription is actually, there are new things to do after that point.

Christina: Yeah. That is something I really appreciate [00:43:00] about Hinduism, especially my in-laws who are approaching a new phase of life after that work phase.

They described this to me, and Raman has described this to me, and I really love that because we don’t really have something similar to that in Catholicism, at least that I’m aware of. And in fact, one of the things that I’ve always struggled with is we do so much faith formation at the beginning of life, and we don’t do a lot of adult faith formation, like most of our formal programming is for youth and young adults. And then after that, I don’t wanna say you’re on your own because you have your priest and your community and all that, but it’s much harder to point to something and say, this is still a fruitful time when you need to grow spiritually.

I’ve always really appreciated that about Hinduism. I think it’s a really beautiful concept. So last thing about [00:44:00] acedia and then I’ll ask you an interesting soul-searching question to end us out.

But the last thing about Acedia that I wanted to bring up was that Acedia can manifest itself inwardly in all the ways that we’ve talked about, but it also talks about how it manifests outwardly.

For me, the importance of talking about this inward spiritual topic right now is because a lot of people are wrestling with what they’re seeing out in the world right now and trying to make sense of it. And I talk about in the first few episodes that if you understand acedia and what the false spirit is trying to do, then you can look at the world and say actually, it is still a acedia, but it’s like really scaled up.

There’s a lot of people who, like you said, aren’t being ambitious, settling for mediocrity. There’s a lot of distraction. [00:45:00] The media’s very sensational. Our head [is in] whiplash all the time, and everybody seems to want a better world, and there’s a lot of good people that are working to do it, but we’re all trying to make sense of what we see happening.

So, I know that Hinduism is practiced a lot on an individual level, what does Hinduism have to say about the world versus the work you do internally?

Dr. Natarajan: Yeah it’s…I don’t feel necessarily that it’s great at it, but if we go back to the duty concept, so you take my line of work, I work in a large company that does hospice, home health, palliative care, private duty services, we are private equity backed. Now, everybody thinks that, oh, you’re private equity-backed. So, something must be bad or somebody, something must be…the intent [00:46:00] must not be positive.

But what is the responsibility of every one of my clinicians to number one, to inform that patient and family when they’re gonna be there, [and] number two, to be available. And then number three, when they are there to bring the best version of themselves.

And then document everything the way that they’re supposed to, according to both ethical standards and, quite frankly, government standards. That’s the responsibility. And if everybody did that, like, we’d be fine. There would be no discussion anymore about who our sponsor is, our owner is, but that doesn’t happen, individuals make decisions not to do those things, we can argue is it skill or is it will, right? There are any number of arguments there. But if everybody actually just did that part that they actually, in good faith, worked on those things, we wouldn’t have these discussions.

But some people cut corners. That’s the reality of it. And some of that comes from they cut corners when they were in training, so now they have bad habits, but then in my seat, what’s my [00:47:00] responsibility? My responsibility is number one, to just help support, create an environment that supports our clinicians to be the best version of themselves, keeps them educated, gives them the tools that they need, keeps them motivated, keeps them inspired. But then my other responsibility is to make sure that the patient and family are front and center in the conversations with our sponsors.

One of the ways that I’ve been able to do that along with the rest of my leadership team, there are many non-clinicians; I’m the only clinician in the room in my executive team. But collectively, we have made a commitment that every meeting we have. We begin with a patient story. So, the whole meeting might be financial, but at the highest levels, when we’re in front of the board of directors, we begin with a patient story. Our expectation is that we are always striving to be better and we’re always striving for top quality.

So that’s my [00:48:00] responsibility. I could easily say we’re in this world and all this is happening and private equity this, and the almighty dollar, et cetera, et cetera. Or I can say it’s my responsibility to keep the main thing. And that means that I am creating structure that allows, that I’m capturing stories when we do the right thing, I’m learning from it and making sure we are studying when we don’t do the right thing for whatever reason.

And that on a human level, I am in touch with our leaders and I’m in touch with our sponsors. And I actually have a wonderful working relationship with many of our board members and our private equity sponsors. Not everyone in my position does that. I’m more active in that regard than most people in my position.

That said, most people in my position do not have the voice at the table in addition to the seat at the table that I do. [00:49:00] And I think it’s because ultimately when you do get in front of human beings and you say and do the right thing, and they recognize that you’re acting in good faith they want you to succeed.

And that has been my experience. And so, it would be easy for me to take this fatalistic approach, acedia, and be like the world’s going to hell. There’s nothing I can do about it, or [that] I can say. It’s like recycling. Or it’s not littering. We make that decision. Am I gonna throw this on the street or not? Am I gonna recycle this or not? And if every one of us makes that decision multiple times a day, it’s a clean neighborhood versus not.

Christina: I’m really glad you brought that up, because that’s a message that I’ve been trying to communicate in why it’s important to look at acedia right now.

Because there’s some folks out there in the public discourse who would say, now’s not the time to focus on the individual [00:50:00] level. We gotta work on the systems. We gotta do big, out loud, proud things, and they shy away from this individual focus of how you live out your day, and I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable with that approach because as a person of faith, I don’t see focusing inwardly as at odds with everything else. If I was out there doing those things and only focusing on those things, but I didn’t have the inward journey, yeah, it would also fall apart.

Dr. Natarajan: It encompasses mind, body, and spirit, and it captures self love really. Yeah.

Christina: Yeah. And to your point about fatalism, I think it helps people right now because a lot of people are so overwhelmed and they just think I have no power. I can’t change any of this. Whereas focusing on bettering [00:51:00] yourself on the individual level spiritually, maybe feels a little bit more manageable and I think has profound effects. So, I’m in agreement.

So, we’ll move to our last question today, and I have so appreciated and just really enjoyed everything we’ve been talking about.

So from your experiences, which are so diverse, how would you approach someone right now in our current day who feels very spiritually stuck? And maybe it’s acedia or maybe it’s some other thing happening to them, but they are in this autopilot mode and their spiritual life is not fruitful for whatever reasons.

Dr. Natarajan: Yeah.

Christina: How would you personally, or, as a Hindu in any of the hats you’ve worn, honestly. What kind of spiritual guidance would you impart to them?

Dr. Natarajan: It’s [00:52:00] interesting. It comes up in practice. It comes up as a boss. It comes up as a spouse; we talk about this a lot. We’ve learned some new things, as one child went off to college, and so our roles changed, right? The younger one is now driving, and so some of the things that defined us, which is just running around and taking the kids places, like that part we don’t have to do anymore. Okay.

So now what do I do with my time? These are questions that come up. I think one of the ways that I approach this with patients routinely is what are some things that just feed your soul and so if that is visiting old churches, okay, make a plan to do that, over the next year, I’m gonna pick ten old churches that I want to visit. They don’t have to be far. If it’s reading, okay, then what is it that we’re gonna read and what are you gonna do about it?

Figure out some things that feed your soul. I think that creating a prescription [00:53:00] and some milestones around developing the mind. Cleansing or developing the body, developing the spirit. What are those things that are going to begin the journey of self-love and increasing it?

Sometimes it could be addition by subtraction. In other words, if there are people or things in your life that reduce your self love. What are we gonna do to remove those elements? You know it, it’s not just false spirits. There are bad spirits sometimes in our lives. They’re not necessarily bad people, but they’re not a good fit for us. Okay, then. So, I’m going to lower the dosing of that individual in my life. That’s okay. That’s okay.

Christina: Turn down the volume on some things and maybe turn up the volume on those other things, [00:54:00] yeah.

Dr. Natarajan: And again, giving ourselves grace because there are things that, over time, we get good at and there are things that we don’t get good at, and there are other things that we just avoid. I’m still learning some of those things that I have to confront, that I have avoided successfully. And, if I avoid them forever, then I feel great, but maybe I don’t actually complete the exploration that I need to.

Christina: Oh, I love that. I love that a lot. And this response to me is also similar to what Ignatius talks about when he says, look for consolation and discernment.

Like things that maybe give you some spiritual reassurance that you’re moving toward the goal. I like what you said about starting with things that have resonated with you or give you joy or energy or spark curiosity or creativity, maybe, because that’s different for all of us.

Like I think of it as we all have all the piano keys, but [00:55:00] we’re all feeling a song out throughout this journey. And when we play a certain key, we can tell if that’s making the song go forward or it doesn’t fit at all, and I really love that because, again, it points us to that inward level of it’s been in you, it’s been there, so how can we get more in touch with it and be more curious, about it? So, I, I really love that answer.

Balu, thank you. It has been a true pleasure and honor a privilege to speak with you about these things. For you to share vulnerably about your own path, your own journey to represent and interpret some of the ways of Hinduism that I think everybody can benefit from and I’m just deeply grateful for our discussion.

Dr. Natarajan: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Christina: Yes.

[00:56:00]

[1] Rama Vigraha is a sacred statue or idol representing Lord Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu, worshipped as the ideal man (Maryada Purushottama) and embodiment of dharma (righteous duty).

[2] Balaji is a popular name for the Hindu deity Lord Venkateswara, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, who presides over the famous Tirumala Temple in India, known as the “Lord of the Seven Hills” and the protector of humanity in the current age (Kaliyuga)

[3] Krishna is a central, beloved deity in Hinduism, revered as an avatar of Vishnu, known for his divine love, playful childhood as a cowherd, wisdom (especially in the Bhagavad Gita), and role in inspiring the Bhakti (devotional) movement, celebrated with festivals like Janmashtami, and worshipped across India in various forms, embodying joy, protection, and profound spiritual guidance.

[4] The Bhagavad Gita, meaning “Song of God,” is a pivotal Hindu scripture within the epic Mahabharata, a 700-verse dialogue where Lord Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu) teaches Prince Arjuna about duty (Dharma), devotion (Bhakti), action (Karma), and liberation (Moksha), offering timeless wisdom on spiritual paths like knowledge (Jnana) and selfless action, becoming a central text for understanding Hindu philosophy, ethics, and the nature of the Self and the Divine.

[5] Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita is a supreme Pandava warrior who faces a profound moral crisis on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, overwhelmed by the prospect of fighting his own kin, leading him to question his duty (dharma)

[6] The Hindu class system, known as Varna, traditionally divides society into four broad categories based on duty and occupation: Brahmins (priests/teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors/rulers), Vaishyas (merchants/farmers), and Shudras (laborers/service providers)

[7] Sattvic, Rajasic, and Tamasic are the three fundamental qualities (gunas) of nature in Ayurveda and yogic philosophy, describing energy, consciousness, and matter, often applied to diet to influence mind and body: Sattvic is pure, harmonious, and calming (fresh fruits, whole grains); Rajasic is stimulating, active, and passionate (spices, caffeine, meat); and Tamasic is heavy, dull, and inert (processed foods, leftovers, excessive fats). These qualities aren’t just about food but also actions and states, influencing everything from mental clarity to physical energy.

[8] Hinduism outlines four stages of life, or Ashramas, guiding a person’s journey from student to spiritual liberation: Brahmacharya (student/celibate), Grihastha (householder/family), Vanaprastha (forest-dweller/retiree), and Sannyasa (renunciate/ascetic), each with specific duties and goals leading toward spiritual fulfillment (moksha).

And last time in episode three, we something called the Signs of the Times in Catholicism. And if you remember from episode three, the Signs of the Times are essentially our way of looking at what’s happening out in the world and interpreting it in the light of the Gospel.

I wanted to do a two-parter, and this is [00:01:00] part two on the Signs of the Times because I think it takes a little bit to sink in, and I hope that you will get more of that in this episode.

So why are we talking about acedia, and the Signs of the Times? Or in other words, why should we care about this intersection specifically? We talked about, early on in this series, acedia manifesting on a personal level and how that shows up acedia manifesting on a societal level is how the Signs of the Times come to be.

I want to offer a reason to go to the societal level, even though acedia is a deeply personal spiritual topic. And that is because the Signs of the Times have really been with us throughout all of human history. The Signs [00:02:00] of the Times, even though it’s a Vatican II-type phrase, is really about how do we look out into the world and see a lot of suffering and injustice and make sense of that in light of our faith.

When I go about the world today, which is rampant with injustice, I personally can feel really overwhelmed and really powerless. And this intersection of acedia and the Signs of the Times actually helps me to make a little bit of sense of it, although certainly not all of it does make sense. But also, to temper my reaction in the wider arc of human history. Something I like to tell myself is that we really aren’t that special right now. A lot of times you hear people say, [00:03:00] oh my gosh, this is the worst it’s ever been, or never in my lifetime can I remember a time when we’re so divided and it’s been this terrible. And certainly, that could be true, especially in the course of a lifetime. But I think what’s on the flip side of that type of thinking is this idea that we are perhaps in the worst part of human history, or we’re dealing with the worst humans that have ever existed.

And that can lead to a lot of hopelessness and also a lot of despair. And as Christians, we have to push through that and get to what we are meant to do and called to do in light of the teachings of Jesus Christ. So, it helps us to make sense of what we’re seeing, to know that the Signs of the Times have always been with us and so has our faith [00:04:00] and we’re alive here and now in this particular moment using those tools to try to navigate all of this and live as Christ would intend us to live.

It also helps, I think, to know how the false spirit, or in other words, the devil, or in other words, evil, operates in the world. I hear a lot of people saying right now, I just can’t believe the amount of good people that are doing awful things or supporting awful things, and again, it’s hard to make sense of that as Christians, especially people who say they’re Christians.

But when you look at it through the lens of acedia and the false spirit, the goal of the false spirit is to get as many people off track as possible, and that is how acedia operates on a [00:05:00] larger scale. So, when I see all these things happening and I see otherwise good people supporting really bad things, I tend to not let myself drown in despair.

Although I would be lying if I said I had succeeded in that at times, but I instead try to think about how is this false spirit moving in this and what does the false spirit want us to do? It helps me to see humanity really struggling with evil, and that makes it more manageable in my brain more towards action as opposed to despair.

So just as a recap, we know the false spirit has two goals: one, to keep us from living out our God-given vocation, and two, from allowing us to do the most right that we [00:06:00] can do in the world.

And when you think of it that way, in the framework of those two goals, what we’re seeing right now is a lot of people who are straying from their God-given vocation and a lot of people who are not living into the most right or justice that they can do in the world.

Think about the world that we would live in: Everybody living into their God-given vocation, trying to do good. We would live in a very different world than what we find ourselves right now. That’s where we’re heading, right? That’s the Kingdom. That’s heaven. That’s the world where everybody finally gets it right and we live in this peace and harmony and love of God. We as Christians, and I think specifically as Catholics, are called to work to bring about the [00:07:00] Kingdom here on Earth. It doesn’t say to accomplish it necessarily with some finality, but our goal is to not dwell on the when and the how and the where, because Jesus says nobody knows the day or the hour anyway, but to try to bring about the work of the Kingdom in the here and now.

So today we will be again, primarily drawing from the two books the Edia and Me by Kathleen Norris and the Noonday Devil by Jean Child Malt. And we will review right now the four signs that we brought up in this last episode, and we’re gonna continue on. With more signs today. So just as a review, the four signs from last time that we’re [00:08:00] seeing, is number one, many people not having a closeness with God or drifting away from God.

Number two, the sensationalization of everything from media to sex to violence, like the most evocative thing, the most graphic thing, the most wow factor. Number three, thinking that it might be better to not exist.

And if that’s a little too much, too heavy, too extreme, think about questioning our own worth and our existence here and now. And finally, number four the one that I resonate with personally is this idea of instability and restlessness and how we kind of flee from the depths of what we’re called to and we busy ourselves with a lot of other [00:09:00] things the false spirit needs this in order to thrive because the false spirit doesn’t want us to live into our calling or do the most good in the world because that’s quite frankly how evil in the false spirit are overcome.

I think of it a lot of time, too, of just like the false spirit is always trying to make us spin our wheels like you go over there in the corner and run on the hamster wheel, and that will gimme a lot of time to focus on carrying out my false spirit plan because you’re gonna be distracted on your little hamster wheel Peloton that you’re doing, nothing against Peloton. I just am picturing a little hamster on a wheel with a Peloton.

The other thing the false spirit is doing, while we’re so distracted, is making division among us. The false spirit knows that the soil of all of this is a divisive world, and that’s something [00:10:00] we’re feeling so much right now. It’s like putting all of us on our own little respective hamster wheels in different corners of the house, and what happens? One, we get really absorbed in our little hamster wheel, Peloton. Two, we aren’t communicating with each other, we’re making assumptions about each other. We’re exaggerating what we think the other person may or may not be doing because we’re not in connection and we’re not having a healthy encounter with each other. What better way to keep us divided than to keep us all restless away from God questioning life and getting whiplash from every sensational thing coming our way on our screens, right? The false spirit in that sense keeps us in a holding pattern, and that is exactly by design.

And our job is to say, as [00:11:00] Becky, my wonderful spiritual director told me, our job is to say, I see you little punk. And yes, she did use the word punk, and I love her for that. You are not going to do that to me. I believe in what is good and right and compassionate and true, and you won’t fool me.

You won’t keep me town. And it’s important to remember that it’s a hamster wheel, but it’s not a cage with a lock on it. We have free will. We can exit the wheel at any time and we can step off of it and say, hey, false spirit, I get what you’re doing now. I’m getting off the hamster wheel. I’m gonna go find my friends and we’re gonna work together to put you in your own corner.

So that my friends is a prayer right now, if there ever was one. And with that, I will talk to you [00:12:00] about the remaining Signs now we’re going to move on to number five. All right, so signs of the time, number five: struggling with being alone, and in the Noonday Devil on page 116, Evagrius, remember our like main dude here, calls acedia, a flight from oneself, it’s not just the temptation to flee what you’re called to do, but it’s actually to escape your true self.

And that might show up as no longer knowing how to be alone or perhaps being afraid to be alone. And this is not the kind of afraid to be alone, like in COVID when you know we craved social interaction because we’re social beings and all that stuff. It’s more [00:13:00] so that in solitude, he writes, what’s scary about it is that we discover what we are really. Like who we really are and we start to face our own demons. And Jean Charles Nault writes: “I do not play a role for long when I am alone, since there is no one to observe me except myself.”

I love that quote. He’s essentially saying, we all kind of role play when we’re out being our social creatures. Maybe some of that is our true, authentic selves that we show others. But there’s a lot bearing down on us in a social environment, whether it’s how we look as a parent, how we look as a coworker, how we look as a neighbor, whatever it is.

But when you’re alone, there are no roles to play. So, we’re left with our [00:14:00] authenticity, which might be a little scary. As Christians, we also believe that if we tend to flee ourselves like our inner being, that in its essence is also fleeing God because God dwells within us. So, there’s also a quote on page 131-132, and it says, quote, “No one thinks of anything but getting away. But wherever he goes, he takes himself along. Now, if emptiness, anxiety, boredom, dwell within a being, this emptiness, anxiety, and boredom will follow him to the ends of the earth. The tenacious illusion of always being better off somewhere else does not abandon the individual. [00:15:00] Anything seems preferable to self-awareness and diffuse pain.” Woo. Okay.

What I appreciate about this quote is when we flee ourselves. We always have these kind of false attachments to this idea that we will get somewhere and that’s when we will finally resolve the things that we’re unhappy about.

And part of that might be true, right? Like I said in previous episodes, you know, the goal is not to sit in misery, right? But sometimes we have an attachment to a false promise that if we flee ourselves or circumstances, we can somehow make it better. And some of it might be better, but we also might acquire new problems.

But what I like about this quote is it says it [00:16:00] will follow us. And that’s what I’m trying to get at in those earlier episodes when we talk about this: it’s not about punishing yourself and sticking around. It’s essentially to say, be careful when you’re thinking that way, because what you’re actually unhappy about might be something internal. That circumstances and whatnot is not going to change because it will follow you and it’ll follow you into the new bright, shiny, right? So I really love this. So again, sign number five.

Struggling with being alone because it really turns the mirror on ourselves and we have to look honestly at what we see now. Sign number six, not having the courage to live into our own [00:17:00] greatness. You guys, I love this one so much. I’m gonna have to say it again. Not having the courage to live into our own greatness, to reject one’s own greatness.

Jean Charles Nault, page 117 says, “It is the inability to believe in the greatness of the vocation to which God is calling us.” When you first read this, you might think, I don’t know if that’s actually true, because who would not wanna be great? Of course, yes. We all wanna get there, but if we are talking about a true vocation, a calling from God, it could be like the coolest, best, happiest thing we’ve ever done with our lives. But chances are what I’ve discovered is [00:18:00] it might be some of that and also a lot of other really hard, difficult things, and that can engender a lot of fear. And that’s why when we talk about vocation, we talk about the need for courage. Because when we say yes to God. It is not yes to simply the good parts of what we wanna do, but also the extremely hard parts of what He’s calling us to do. Future Pope Benedict is also quoted in the book and he talks about, “A false humility that has become so common today. Man does not want to believe that God is concerned about him, knows him, loves him, watches over him is close to him.”

So, if we don’t think very highly ourselves, which can look like [00:19:00] humility, but it’s again a false humility. We can on the outside look very humble, but maybe on the inside what we’re actually doing is running away from what we’re being called to do by almost like downplaying ourselves. If we really lean into, like he says, a God who’s concerned about us, knows us, loves us, watches over us is close to us, like that actually takes courage because what you find when you finally get to that space might be the most fulfilling, yet challenging thing that you can do in your life.

We also might be struggling with guilt or shame, or we feel that God has wronged us in some way or told us that God doesn’t love us or pretend that we don’t need God, or we’ll just be fine without God. Those are all [00:20:00] ways, again, that we run from this. So, we tell ourselves, oh, I can’t go there because God wronged me in some way and I’m gonna hide behind that instead of living into my purpose. Or maybe, sadly, tragically, somebody belittled us, maybe even a religious person told us that we were small instead of the big fullness that God has created us to be.

Or maybe we tell ourselves stories about how we don’t need God’s calling. We don’t need that vocation, and we will just be fine without God. When I think about this, I think back to a time on Facebook, and usually these stories go the way of all stories when I think about a time on Facebook. But I was in this group, and I don’t remember the exact [00:21:00] situation that it was brought up, but the question was, what is the hardest thing to accept about God do and what do people struggle with more?

Do they struggle more with the idea that God is angry with them for not following all the God rules. Or something else. And a lot of people were saying, oh, people are so egotistical, they’re so self-absorbed. Like they can’t accept a God that’s like about the Truth, they run away from it and all their vanity and all this stuff.

I was looking at it and I was like, eh, I don’t actually think that’s what’s plaguing our modern world. I think a lot of conservatives like to hold that up is like all these godless, vain, ego-driven people, narcissistic, running around. We’ve all strayed from the path. That’s how we got to this place, and I’m like, no, I think it’s actually [00:22:00] the opposite. And I argued on Facebook with strangers that what is actually hard to accept for people nowadays is that God is so in love with them unconditionally. Not that He is angry at them for not following all his God rules and this, that, and the other, but actually the harder thing is to accept this unconditional abundance of love that God has for us.

Of course, the commenters, were like, what? That’s nonsense. But to me it makes total sense because I actually think we live in a world where we get a lot of negative messages already. Either about ourselves, our worth, our inabilities, how we measure up or don’t, we’re almost constantly [00:23:00] surrounded by that criticism, and we can get really down on ourselves and say, oh man, I’m just like screwing up, or I failed, or I didn’t rise to the challenge, whatever it is. But actually, I think what is counter-cultural right now is to accept that at least one Being out there will love us no matter how tremendously flawed we are. No matter how tremendously, we miss the mark, like what is actually quite radical is God’s unconditional love for us.

And we might even run from it because we don’t think we’re worthy of it. But God is constantly there. I always say trying to woo us. God is always trying to tell us how absolutely in love with us He really is. And I think to [00:24:00] sit with that, talk about being alone and sitting with things is actually what we’re struggling with the most.

So, another way to think about this, sign number six, not having the courage to live into our own greatness, is to say things like, who am I to be? ... That’s the way that I most understand the sign it’s not that. We don’t want to be whatever this vision is of our vocation, but we have doubt in ourselves that we are actually worthy of such a call. And again, I struggled with this when I first read it because I was like, no, if God’s calling you, you know you’re worthy of it ‘cause God’s saying it, or I don’t know what I was thinking.

But then I [00:25:00] started to think back and I was like, no, I actually do this a lot in my life, especially in the years that I did spiritual direction, one thing I wrestled with was I just kept staying the course, even though it wasn’t my calling, or maybe it wasn’t my calling anymore, and when we hear ourselves say things like I’ve always thought about doing… Those are the whispers, but we tend to drown them out with our sense of stability for one, which is of course, legitimate. But two, we drown them out by thinking maybe there is no way we could ever do that. We start to talk ourselves out of it. I talk myself out of a lot of things and one of them is actually what I’m doing right now, which is [00:26:00] reflecting and talking to you all on this very public platform, in spiritual direction. What came up for me is [that] I need to write more. I need to reflect more in a public way. A lot of times I would look at other Catholic, Christian, female writers out there and say they have all these followers, they have all these books, they have all these connections. There’s no way I could get to that level. Or who am I to speak messages into the world that resonate with people, and I talked myself out of it because that was easier than actually living into it.

Alongside that as a parallel is internalizing messages from society that tell us that we’re not good enough. Like when I look at my Instagram or my Substack, I look at that number of followers and I say I did put [00:27:00] myself out there and four people liked it, we’re always getting these messages from society as whether or not what we’re doing is being deemed acceptable. It’s essentially being told by the external world, you’re not good enough, or who are you to think you’re going to make this impact, whatever it is.

The good thing is that God is there for all of us, and He’s in there with us in all of it. Whatever the self-doubt is, whatever the comparison that we’re making between ourselves and someone or something else is God is always in our corner because He is literally inside of us.

Trying to call us into a greater sense of being, in that sense, it is revolutionary, and I think resistance [00:28:00] to accept not only how much God loves us unconditionally. But also, to see how wonderfully God has made all of us with all the talents and skills and beautiful gifts that He put upon our hearts.

What are our gifts? What might He be whispering to us and calling us to do? And for the false spirit, what a better way to keep us down than to trick us into denying our own greatness. The false spirits wants us to walk around with our heads hung down low, not held up high.

Not proud of who we are as a created child of God with a meaningful purpose in this life. So, for you, dear listener, the next time you are talking yourself out of doing something great or even just daydreaming about it, think about how acedia is showing up and acting on you.

[00:29:00] In the books it talks about how this particular problem can be really inherent in the midlife. Or the midlife crisis years. Not believing our own greatness, when we get to a certain age or as we get older, we start to convince ourselves that it’s quote too late to do our lives over or to take our lives in a different direction.

So Jean Charles Nault on page 129. “So it is that acedia is above all the devil who causes us to regret the decision that we have made. This is the sense in which it is the devil of maturity. Even though one may still be young, whereas there is one devil who keeps man from making a commitment, from taking a step, acedia makes him regret having taken it. So, we see the paradox of [00:30:00] flight. While it seems to be in advance, it is instead a genuine regression.”

Wow, that’s really deep. What I like about it and what resonated for me was [that] one of the ways we can talk ourselves out of our own greatness, is by saying, it’s too late for me. Or who am I to switch gears or pivot and all the people that it might affect, which again, legitimate concerns, but what does it mean also to radically trust in God and to say, okay, God, if you really want me to do this, help me help me find the way. St. Thomas Aquinas says, “The reason that acedia is so pernicious is that it is a response to good and not a response to evil. We tend to deny or hate [00:31:00] our own goodness.” So that’s really powerful too, because, it is a response to our own goodness that is false. Think about the false spirit. The false spirit does not want us to see that truth and instead clutters our lies with all the acedia.

What if we take it to the level then of never living our purpose in the world because we take up too much space. Who are we to speak our truths or our voice in the world? This is how the false spirit, again, purposely keeps us down, but also from realizing how truly wonderful we are in the eyes of God.

So, I want you to reach for the stars, and when I say reach for the stars, what I really mean is reach for the Heavens, which is God. Our stars are to truly be in the service of our calling and [00:32:00] to do the most good in the world and to not sink into mediocrity, which is one of the synonyms for acedia.

Remember, mediocrity autopilot hamster wheel when it seems too late to do one’s life over. The decision on the other side of that is to go on living in mediocrity. To sit on the conveyor belt of life to turn on the autopilot.

I think that’s why Thoreau pointed out that a lot of people live these quiet lives of desperation, right? When they maybe have rumblings of their greatness and what they’re meant to do in the world, and they’re desperate to get there, but they just hold it all in, put the light under the bushel basket and live this quiet life of desperation. [00:33:00] Jean Charles Nault writes on page 130, “When someone no longer dares to do what is essential and great one must be content with what is secondary and mediocre.”

Again, on page 131, “The devil’s tactic is to propose what is reasonable. Yes, he is the prince of lukewarmness, the king of compromise. His goal is not to make us fall into specific errors, but on the contrary to leave us in uncertainty. To submerge truth and uncertainty because it is impossible to stake one’s life on vague ideas and consequently to become a saint under those conditions.”

Wow. So the prince of lukewarmness, the king of [00:34:00] compromise to submerge truth in uncertainty because it’s impossible to stake one’s life on vague ideas. That says it the best.

And that brings us to sign number seven if you’re falling along with the numbering. And there are actually eight, so we are almost there. Sign number seven is what’s called ideological optimism. This is a sign of the time that John Charles Nault talks about it on page 124 and describes it as, quote, “A boundless confidence in the progress of humanity and science. Therefore, it is necessary to accept nothing that cannot be verified, demonstrated, or experienced by reason.”

Okay, so you might be thinking. [00:35:00] No, actually we’re not trying to go into this territory where we reject science, and that sort of thing. That’s led us to some really bad situations, but it’s not necessarily that they’re talking about a rejection of science outright. It’s an idolization of science and this idea that logic and reason is the end all be all, and that’s what will save us. It’s basically humanity saying to God, we don’t need you because we have science. We don’t see science as an enemy, God gave us reason and we have science because God so beautifully and intricately created the world.

I think if done in the right framework, the study of science is actually a way to come closer to the awe [00:36:00] of God and not the rejection of God. So that’s sign number seven. This idea that we have it all figured out by ourselves with science, our own ego, we start to drift away from God, which we talked about earlier.

Again, the false spirit, and we start to lose the mystery of life itself. And mystery is something that Catholicism specifically calls us to embrace and meditate upon that. There’s just some things that we might not fully be able to prove or understand about our faith, but we take it upon ourselves to sit in the mystery and want more and more every day to deepen our belief.

And finally, the last sign, sign number eight, is something that I think is really applicable to what we’re seeing right now [00:37:00] on a societal level, and that is excessive nostalgia for the past. So this is really happening right now. Okay. And I think you know where I’m gonna go with this, but before I go there, Jean Charles Nault on page 125 says, “As a reaction to the gloominess of the present, there may indeed be a tendency to cultivate an excessive nostalgia for the successful, well-spent moments of the past to embellish it, to delight in it, to tell stories about it. When nothing goes well anymore in the present, it is so reassuring to become attached to the past. When one quote ‘did so many good things,’ end quote, then one tells the stories to oneself or to [00:38:00] others.” So again, I think you know where I’m gonna go with this.

This is exactly the strategy that Trump and the Make America Great Again, folks use to woo people. And I use the word woo because there’s a lot of romanticism involved. So going back to the false spirit who wants to keep us spinning our wheels and distracted. This fits in with that because this attachment to the past is a really great way to keep us down because it takes our focus off the present and our God-given calling and how to react to it.

When we get wooed by this mentality, we think that the solution is to recreate the past. Make America Great Again is this [00:39:00] illusion that back in the day was better today is, gone to blazes. And so, what we need to do is go back to where we were and it preys on people’s one selective memory of the past.

And when I think about this. I think about my friend Chris, and he is someone I met in college and became friends with, and he is a Black man. And one day we were talking and I told him how much I loved the movie Pleasantville, which for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is this magical surrealism film about going back in time to like the 1950s. And at that point in my life, I was really enamored with the 1950s, I think, because like my dad loved a lot of the music [00:40:00] from the 1950s. And I just had this idea in my head that it was just like this awesome idyllic time with like poodle skirts and stuff like that.

And I was talking to Chris about this, and he stopped me and he said, it wouldn’t have been for me. And what he was saying was, as a Black man in the mid-20th century, his life would’ve been vastly different than the Pleasantville movie, right? It was the time of Jim Crow and a lot of rampant, overt racism, which still exists today, but I think this idea of Pleasantville, the attachment to the past, the idolization of the past, is a strategy to keep us down because we tend to live in the romance of it and distract ourselves from the work that is in the here and now and what we’re called [00:41:00] to do.

Another example I wanna give, in addition to the conversation I had with my friend Chris, is this movement, or this fervor around Traditionalism within Catholicism right now. Or maybe within an orthodoxy. It’s been talked about in the New York Times and so on and so forth. I’ll just stick to Traditionalism and Catholicism because that’s something that I am more aware of and grew up in, for at least some of my life in that part of my extended family, really embraced this. And while our immediate family was not part of that, I was around it a lot growing up because family functions like funerals and weddings and so on and so forth would occur within this kind of radical traditional [00:42:00] Catholic setting.

Traditionalism similar to MAGA, they use the same tactic of idealizing things so as to distract from the present moment. And one thing that really troubles me about Traditionalism, especially in raising families, is the call is to actually, one, regress to the past and build that again if that can ever truly be, or two, to live in a bubble, this kind of protective bubble, which sounds like a good intention, but remember the false spirit twist those good intentions, right? It manipulates it, so it might sound like you’re doing a good thing to protect your children, to raise them in this kind of insular environment where you can control like what they [00:43:00] consume and who they interact with whatever it is, it might seem like a true good intention parenting act. But instead, the false spirit twists that and keeps the holding pattern for this viewpoint as one of constantly looking in the past, idealizing the past, being nostalgic for the past, and not being in and of the world and doing God’s work in the here and now.

And the Catholic church warns us about this. The Catholic Church in so many documents, stresses to us that we are meant to engage with society. We are meant to be in and of this world. We are to wrestle with modern-day ethics and challenges. We are not to retreat and hide or create a false narrative in order to comfort [00:44:00] ourselves or flee, which would allow us to avoid our calling again and the call to engage and to do good. So, you can see how this is really attractive right now because the false spirit is using this nostalgia, this romanticism, this us versus them, so protect yourself to bring us farther and farther out of the world and back into a time that doesn’t even exist anymore.

When I think about growing up, I sometimes slip into this mentality because sometimes I say to myself, life used to be a lot easier before there wasn’t smartphones, there wasn’t constantly the screens, but when I think about it, when I was a kid, there were a lot of bad things happening then too. That is [00:45:00] still present here today. But I was either being appropriately guarded from it or. I was not yet having the mental acuity to notice and understand it.

What’s worrisome to me about this last sign of the time is I think the false spirit tries to distract us back to the past so that we give up on the present. It makes the present seem so exceptionally bad that it feels like it is forever irredeemable, and all we can do is yearn for this idyllic time in the past. And again, I think the MAGA movement has capitalized on this. They know that people are discontent and overwhelmed with the way things are. I’m definitely not arguing [00:46:00] that, and they use the false spirit tactic to say, we’re gonna make it great again. But it’s really a smoke and mirrors in the name of this false vision. Again, a false vision by the false spirit to keep us distracted from the present moment and from doing the most good. So, in that sense, to overcome it, we need to name it if we are ever to get out of it in our current context.

So those are the full eight Signs of the Times. I hope it gave you something to chew on. I am really happy to have prepared these episodes to share them with you, even if you don’t agree with all of the content, I hope that there’s something there that allows you to go a little bit deeper in your own personal life or how you see the world and make sense of it. [00:47:00]

In the next episode, we have a really special treat. It will be the inaugural interview of the moderate Catholic, and it is going to be about how Acedia has dialogue with other world religions or as we say interreligious dialogue.

So, stay tuned and I can’t wait to meet you there.

So, if you’ve been following along these first two episodes, you’ll know that we’re here to talk about acedia. Acedia is, in brief, what used to be one of the seven deadly sins, but got lumped in with sloth and has kind of fallen out of favor of our modern spiritual discourse. In episode one, I talked a lot about how I knew that acedia was showing up in my life, but I didn’t quite know what the name [of it] was yet.

And in episode two, I start to describe acedia using two [00:01:00] books, The Noonday Devil by Jean Charles Nault and another one called Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. You may have been tuning in so far and thought a lot about the episodes, I’m sure, and still be wondering what is acedia. I wanted to pause before we get to today’s topic and just say that if you aren’t sure what acedia is still, that is okay.

It takes a while to wrap your head around it. And really, it’s goals and its symptoms and how it moves in the world is actually quite simple. But at least, for me, getting to naming it and understanding it was a little more complex. So, I just wanna tell you, if you’re [00:02:00] like, is she gonna keep talking about that acedia thing? Because I’m thoroughly lost. The answer is yes for now. I’m gonna keep talking about the acedia thing, and it’s totally okay if you’re lost.

I was thinking this week a little bit about how to better describe acedia, just in my own words, and I thought a lot about something we discussed in episode two, which was how is acedia different from depression?

I think depression is something that we all either have experienced or maybe we have experienced it by proxy as showing up in someone’s life whom we love. So I wanna talk a little bit about that difference there, because I think most people have a fair enough understanding of depression, and that can be a launching point to understand more [00:03:00] about acedia. The way that I would describe it is if you were to exist in the world, and you were to exist free of depression, let’s just say, normal mental health, depression has been treated.

Maybe it’s not even an issue, maybe it never was, and yet you still feel something that is nagging at you or seems to bother you, but you can’t quite figure out why, because nothing seems apparently wrong. That even if you have the most sound, mental health at that point in your life or maybe your entire life, if you’re really lucky, you still feel this unsettledness in your spirit.

And that’s where I think depression and [00:04:00] acedia can start to diverge is, as I explained in episode two, depression can be a very true clinical issue that has clinical therapies and medications designed to overcome it, thank God. But acedia creeps into the realm of spirituality, and it affects our spirit.

While it might show up looking like what we’re familiar with as signs of depression, it really at its root comes from the depression of the spirit, if you will. I hope that helps you to delineate a little bit better, and it will begin to make more sense as we go along.

The second thing I wanna talk about, and I did mention a little bit before, is the false spirit. So the false spirit is [00:05:00] what I will refer to as the devil. I think I might have explained that I’m not usually a person that goes around talking about the devil. So, the false spirit for me is a much more palatable version of how to talk about it. I like the phrase, the false spirit, which comes from St. Ignatius of Loyola because it literally describes what I think, evil or the devil is the spirit, which is good, obviously, but the false spirit, which is kind of the antithesis of the good spirit, right?

So, I wanna talk about the false spirit a lot in the next two episodes, including today and to understand and try to make sense of what’s going on right now, which is completely overwhelming if you’ve been following along [00:06:00] in the world. We need to understand how evil is at work through a spiritual lens. The false spirit, in other words, the devil, is acting in the world. Even if you’re not okay with the phrase, the false spirit or the devil, you can just call it evil, whatever spiritual tradition you come from, there probably is some conception of evil.

So how does the false spirit operate, especially today, and I’d like to give you two goals that it has. The first goal of the false spirit is to keep us from living our God given vocation. And when I say vocation, I don’t necessarily mean like becoming a nun or becoming a firefighter. I really just mean what is it [00:07:00] that you are meant to do in this world? You specifically, a beloved child of God. Some people might call that, you know, living your best self, living your best life, living into God’s calling for you. Living into your purpose.

There’s a lot of ways to describe that, and God wants us to live in that space, to live in that authentic being that we were created to be. However, the false spirit being false wants to keep us from getting there as best that he can. Okay? He wants to deter us from what is good and what is ultimately the purpose and fulfillment of our lives.

The second thing, the false spirit does is keep us from doing [00:08:00] the most good that we can in the world. And I say the most because I do think, especially right now, there are a lot of good people out there, and they are doing otherwise seemingly good things, and maybe not outrightly bad things, although some people are doing outrightly bad things, but let’s just talk about a normal person, just kind of existing.

They might not be doing bad, but they might not be doing the most good that they can do, even for myself, and I do consider myself someone who cares about doing good in the world. That is the growth point for me, always spiritually, am I doing the most good that I can do? Because if I kind of sit with [00:09:00] contentment and say, well, I’m doing good enough, I don’t really know if I’m going to reach the point that God wants me to be at, but also that the world needs, so again, the false spirit, two goals. One, keeping us from our God-given vocation or calling in life. And two, keeping us from doing the most good that we can in the world.

The false spirit is really clever and really smart. I think back to the theology I had growing up which was like, the devil is bad and he tells you to do bad stuff. And if you do the bad stuff, it means you listen to him. As I’ve gotten older, I will say I have never truly abandoned that thinking.

I realized, much to my shame, I still have a part of [00:10:00] me that thinks that the devil is like this little person that sits on your ear and says like, take the candy, do it. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that understanding of the devil or evil, or the false spirit served me well in childhood because that was kind of the extent of my moral thinking at the time, but I really have graduated instead to this idea that the devil is not necessarily the thing that’s sitting on your shoulder every day telling you to do the bad thing that’s in front of you. The devil is clever and smart and way more manipulative than at least I was told growing up.

And one way that the false spirit shows up for me and my life is by actually. preying [00:11:00] on my good intentions and twisting it the devil knows that trying to get a good person off track is going to be really, really hard because that person has already, let’s say, made a commitment to goodness in their life. So the devil or the false spirit being clever thinks okay, well, how can I get that person to reneg on that? And one of the ways the false spirit does it is by using our inclinations, even sometimes our good inclinations and twisting and manipulating them towards evil or towards not doing enough good in the world or towards not going to the fullness of our God-given vocation.[00:12:00]

So how does this all relate back to acedia? Acedia is one of the tools that the false spirit uses to keep us away from those two things. Living out our vocation, doing the most right in the world.

And that’s what really was one of those things that clicked for me when I was doing spiritual direction, which I talked about in episode two. My intention has always been to listen to God, to do the most right in the world, to do what God is asking me to do. I’ve always tried to center my life around that.

When I kept feeling these feelings of acedia, I was like, well, if I’m trying, trying, trying, why am I still feeling this unsettledness or this nagging or [00:13:00] this inertia or this restlessness? I keep at it every single day and I’m not trying to outrightly do something bad, so what is going on inside of me spiritually and naming acedia and realizing how it can affect people that are trying to work for the good it can really show up in that way.

So, today what we’re gonna do is talk about acedia showing up in the world today, and I actually think that the false spirit is pounding us with acedia right now because there is so much evil going on and the false spirit knows that an order for that evil to survive, he’s gotta kind of mess with the goodness and the [00:14:00] good intentions of so many people out there. I think today is one of the most critical moments to talk about acedia because I think understanding it and being able to recognize it in society is what’s gonna actually help us to get out.

I’m operating from a belief that we are right now in a time of great upheaval and very, very severe division. That is kind of the foundation that I’m going to talk about acedia in the modern context. It is feeling very, very overwhelming in every corner of the world, to be honest with you, and how pervasive these things are becoming, the false spirit in order to keep perpetrating evil in the world counts on this division.

I [00:15:00] know we say it all the time, and it sounds super cliche, but think how much stronger we are when we’re together and we have all these people being alongside one another, towards a common goal or a common good. The devil knows that there’s strength in that and. If the devil wants to try to stop that or suppress it, sowing the seeds of division is a way to get at that strong force.

The fact that we are experiencing so much evil and it’s so divisive, to me, are two really strong clues that the false spirit is waging some really good tactics to keep us away from the good. Another question that I think helps to confirm this is one that I’ve been seeing a lot [00:16:00] online in social media, but also in conversations that I’ve had with people about this, and many are just really scratching their head and asking the question, why are so many good people doing X, Y, and Z right now?

Insert whatever example you like, and that is a conundrum. It is very unnerving to try to figure out the answer to that question, and I’ll even take it one step further and say, for me, I’ve asked how can two good people, otherwise good people, generally good people, even people that are Christians or even Catholics, have such opposing views about X, Y, or Z?

On the one hand there’s people that are saying, we’re doing X, Y, and Z in the name of God, and [00:17:00] there’s other people who believe in God saying that is directly against God. That’s like not at all what Jesus was talking about. Hopefully, I have your attention now because I have a suspicion that some of that might resonate with you and your experience of life right now.

And instead of feeling really overwhelmed and discouraged by the contradictory nature of all of it, I’m hoping that explaining acedia to you will help you look at it, still see the same things, perhaps still draw the same conclusions, but understand that what is happening right now is a tactic of the false spirit, and it’s by design of the false spirit that we keep finding ourselves here. What I’m asking you to [00:18:00] do along with me in this podcast is to name that and to do what we need to do personally to spiritually know how to push against that.

What I’m trying to provide to you in this podcast is a personal spiritual outlet toward it, I do believe that it is not truly acting alone to look at this spiritually. I do believe, when you’re on the right spiritual path towards goodness, it knows no boundaries in this world. It will emanate from you. It will infuse everything you do and it’ll touch everybody around you.

So I wanna pause and talk a little bit about a phrase in Catholicism that’ll, set the stage for. How we frame this. In [00:19:00] Catholicism we have this phrase, called the signs of the times.

I Googled a quick, what are the signs of the times in Catholicism, and the internet came up with a really good. Definition, the internet says signs of the times, a phrase popularized by the Second Vatican Council to describe events and trends in contemporary history that the church must try to interpret in light of the gospel, in other words, Jesus’ teaching. It is a theological method for the church to engage with the world by understanding cultural and social phenomena to discern how those phenomena relate to God’s plan this includes scrutinizing current events, social ideas, and cultural trends to [00:20:00] see where they align with or contradict the teachings of Christ. Okay, so TLDR or too long didn’t listen. TLDL, if that’s a thing, basically the signs of the times are looking out into the world and doing what a lot of us are trying to do right now, which is try to make sense of it in light of what we know to be good. And for Catholics and Christians, what we know to be the life ministry teaching example and legacy of Jesus Christ.

In the Noonday Devil, Jean Charles Nault talks about [how] acedia is perhaps one of the most forgotten topics of modern morality. And on the other hand, it is perhaps the root cause of the greatest crisis in the church. I would [00:21:00] use also the world today. So, what we’ll do the rest of this episode is go through four signs that Acedia is showing up.

So, the first sign is that a lot of people are drifting away from God or not having a closeness with God. I wanna say that this is without judgment from me certainly, a lot of folks might be struggling with the concept of God, maybe be open to it, but not willing to really dig in or just not even know what to make of it. Because especially when things are so evil in the world, we can really start to doubt who God is and how God shows up in our life. [00:22:00] So on page 18 in the Noonday Devil, I’d like to read a quote from Cardinal Schoenborn from 1996, and he says, “it seems to me that the deepest crisis in the church today is that we no longer dare to believe and what God can do for the good and those who love him. The spiritual masters traditionally call this torpor of mind and heart, or acedia.” I think this idea of we have lessened our belief in what God can do for us does resonate in the feelings of hopelessness that are really pervasive.

The second quote is from Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Aquinas is a Doctor of the Church, [00:23:00] and we will talk a lot more about him when we get to how acedia and Aquinas intersected. But for now, I just wanna read a quote from him that I think, again, fits into this not having closeness with God. He says, “We possess everything, but we do not have God. We have power, but we have lost meaning. Our society, which is oozing with anxiety, is going to disappear.” Again, very powerful. Little bit foreboding, but obviously anxiety is quite rampant in our modern times, and I think he’s just basically saying that we’ve drifted away, right, from God, from true meaning. Even from truth as we believe it to be like actual truth, right? [00:24:00]

So the second sign is a kind of sensationalization of everything, and I think this shows up in a lot of places, especially the media. But I’m gonna again read a quote from the Noonday Devil from then Joseph Ratzinger and in it he says, “We are beginning to understand afresh the saying about the quote, sorrow of the world. The forbidden joys lose their attraction the moment they’re no longer forbidden. They had and have to be radicalized. The pitch increasingly raised and nevertheless seem finally flat and stale because they are all finite while the hunger is for the infinite.” [00:25:00] Woo. That’s a sentence or two, that has a lot going on in it.

I think what he’s saying here is that when we have this unparalleled, let’s say, access to everything and this idea of freedom that we have in our world today of being able to do or be or exist in whatever way we want to, this idea of something being off of limits for us is met with this way of upping the ante, if you will. So, it’s this idea that we’re chasing something that can truly never be caught and getting lost along the way. [00:26:00]

For instance, something that was unthinkable in movies or unthinkable as an act of violence several decades ago is now something that we might see regularly on the television. I think about this a lot when I watch modern television, which I still watch, and I’m not saying, to just never watch TV again or whatever, but some of the things that happen in television and with these characters is like really deep and distressing and unsettling, and I don’t know that would’ve been so explicit so many decades ago.

And you might think that I’m sounding like an old fogey, but I think there’s a point in there which is we keep amping it up because we have to be the next kind of shock and awe factor in the society that we’ve built. And [00:27:00] I think we do it with movies. I think it happens with violence. I think it happens with sex and explicitness, to give you another example. I’ve stopped looking at my phone when it says breaking because everything’s breaking news nowadays. And I literally just stopped and I’m just like, it’s probably not that breaking or that surprising, and it’ll probably change by the end of the day, so why even look at it? That’s what he’s talking about. We keep trying to raise the pitch, but we just fall flat and stale every time because the next new sensational aspect of it is right around the corner. And then that’s where we throw all of our attention. So again, that’s the second sign of the time.

The third sign is a sad one, and that is thinking that it’s better not to [00:28:00] exist, and this shows up in a lot of suicide and depression, which our society is really struggling with right now. I was just reminded the other day by a priest who was giving the homily here that at a local university, nine students within the course of I think a year, had committed suicide. Troubling, troubling statistics of young adults and teenagers are happening with rates of suicide or attempts at suicide, and I don’t wanna talk about suicide specifically because that in and of itself requires its own due treatment, but I wanna focus on this idea of existence. And whether or not it’s worth it, right?

So,in the Noonday Devil, they talk about acedia is a lack of love. [00:29:00] “The lack of the Great Love. It shatters the impulse of hope and threatens to lead to the rejection of life itself. It is a real flirtation with death.” So, acedia is then essentially the absence of love, the absence of hope. And when you have the absence of love and hope, one begins to question existence itself.

There’s another quote that goes on to say, “acedia is at the source of despair. Of our contemporaries who think it would be better not to exist.” So, this feeling, which I think again, we can associate with like suicide, depression, euthanasia, and other big ones. And that has certainly picked up [00:30:00] steam. Those are the outright, huge manifestations of it, but I also think that it shows up in subtler ways, even if those things aren’t on our mind. Is it a burden to exist? Is it a burden to someone else to exist? What is really the point of being here? And that is a way that acedia can show up and it’s a very dark way. But I think, again, there’s more explicit and subtler ways that we experience it.

The fourth sign that we’ll talk about, and this is the last one for this episode, and we’re gonna continue on in the next episode, is this feeling of instability. And if the first three didn’t quite make sense, I have a gut sense that this one will be more relatable.

So, the fourth [00:31:00] sign is this attachment to instability. So, let’s remember where the framework of acedia really took hold. I talk about it in episode two, and that is out in the desert with these Christian monks who were living among each other, maybe in an intentional community like a monastery, living very austere lives, very simple lives, and their whole goal was to concentrate on spirituality and the interior life and pray, and certainly to do chores and cook and have all their basic needs so they lived in these little cells.

Think about it as a very tiny room with not much in it. Maybe a bed, a table, a [00:32:00] chair, a candle, a Bible and monk-like paraphernalia. These monks were living a very countercultural life. That was the point, but it didn’t mean that they weren’t continually tempted to leave that life and be in society again. The monks experienced acedia by these feelings of restlessness and instability.

Their calling was to stay in a very circumspect space and pray and grow in relationship with God. But they had temptations through acedia to reject all of that and do other things. I remember reading in one of the books about acedia they were always thinking about maybe I need to go into town, or maybe I have [00:33:00] this unfinished chore outside and instead of sitting here praying today, I need to go do that. Or wouldn’t it be better if I was like a teacher in the town, like, what purpose is it that I’m serving just sitting here by myself praying. So these were like real temptations, and it made them want to flee their God-given purpose and their vocation.

Okay. To go back to that, so it might seem a little unrelatable to us because we certainly aren’t living in the same circumstances that they [were], but I think it shows up really convincingly another way that it’s described in the Noonday Devil is the perpetual need for change. This instability is manifested, first of all by “a constant need to [00:34:00] move to change one’s locality, work situation, institution, occupation, spouse and friends.”

So that’s where I think we can relate is that the sign of the time that we’re experiencing right now is this idea of constantly being attached to change and movement, which can show up as restlessness, and it might mean moving cities, changing jobs, changing our situation, changing our friends. It says in the quote, changing our spouse. I hope not. That doesn’t sound good, but this idea that we will be better off if we were to do X, Y, Z. Okay? And there’s a quote in there from a 12th century author, Galand de Reigny [00:35:00] . And that author says, quote, “For everything that last horrifies me.”

So, it’s this aversion to lasting, staying put going, the distance, completing the thing. We really struggle with that nowadays. The book goes on to say we are witnessing, therefore, “a frenzy of novelty and ipso facto, a horror of anything lasting, of everything that stays in one place. Both are the signs of general dissatisfaction. As soon as someone has obtained what he desires, he wants something else. Just as children do.”

So, it’s almost like this childlike fidgetiness, if you will, going from one thing to another because you’re [00:36:00] constantly some level of dissatisfied with the thing present before you.

I think switching jobs and careers is one of the ways that it really shows up. We don’t have those long-lasting careers anymore that perhaps our parents’ generation may have had. There’s a lot of things we don’t like about our current job, so we apply to a different job thinking that will finally be better. But it might be in some ways, but then not in other ways. Then there’s like the throwaway culture, the fast fashion, the dollar aisle at Target. Guilty as charged. And also, I think channel surfing and doom scrolling are a version of this. Like we’re always just looking for the next video. Everything’s three seconds long to keep our attention. Just like this restlessness and instability are everywhere. The book [00:37:00] goes on to say, “One could say that acedia is the temptation to reject passing beyond and to stick with passing through, thus losing sight of the dynamic of desire, which is the dynamic of love.”

I really like the first part of that quote, this temptation to reject passing beyond, so maybe staying in that place, feeling all those feelings of wanting to flee and change and escape, but instead staying the course and passing beyond that, whereas we tend to value passing through something.

If I am sitting here and I reach my boiling point, I can pass through and change and experience something else. Even if it’s not like a career, we don’t have as [00:38:00] many major life projects anymore, maybe even outside of our work. Even if we’re [not] discontent with our jobs, we’re frenetically running around doing all the other things and all the other hours of the day we have this attachment to being stressed and busy and we don’t have as many hobbyists, things that people sink themselves deep into. And instead we’re just constantly trying to do a little bit of everything. Definitely guilty of that.

We also don’t have as many commitments to things that require our own gift of self and sacrifice, and I think a lot of people trying to do good still do try to do that, but I think what they’re talking about here is not just like instances of gift and sacrifice, but in it for the long haul type thing.

There’s a quote in the book from [00:39:00] someone whose first initial is C. and then last name Flipo, and it has a French title, which I won’t even dare to pronounce. But it says, “The end of the will coincides with the era of pure indifference, with the disappearance of the major goals and great enterprises for which life deserves to be sacrificed.” I like this juxtaposition of the phrase: the era of pure indifference because what do you have when you tend to stay away from going deep? Oftentimes what remains is indifference.

I think another way to give another example to bring it back down is like this idea of fear of missing out. An example I can use from my own life is this kind of craze around traveling. And I love to travel, so [00:40:00] those of you who know me are gonna be like, Christina, this is so hypocritical ‘cause you travel all the time. And I’m like, yes I do. And here are some things I’ve learned about that. Traveling I think is good, right, at its base foundation. Experiencing different places, different cultures, different ways of being, has really opened my eyes up to how to do more good in the world and how to be in the world in a good way, and also the beauty of the diversity of what God has created in every human being and every topography and land on the planet, so I’m not saying, don’t travel because you’re seized by instability, so you gotta stay put. I think instead what it is an attachment to that.

So, I’ll give you an example. A lot of people might travel for enrichment purposes, but then I also [00:41:00] think there’s people out there who travel because they feel like they’re gonna miss out or not see something or not experience something it’s like they’re constantly trying to escape their normal life by leaving it and going away. And I think that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about acedia, right? It’s the modern, a person who’s sitting in front of their computer and they’re at work and they hate work, and they’re like, let me plan my next trip to be away from work in my life. And again, guilty as charged, right?

It’s this attachment to the idea that I will be happier and better off if I’m not in my current situation. I wanna also pause here and just say, it’s not that I am trying to say, or that acedia is trying to say, you know what, you should probably just chill there and be like real miserable. Okay? That’s not [00:42:00] necessarily it either. What it’s trying to say is that it’s our attachment to leaving and changing, that can be the source of the problem.

So, I’ll give the example in my own life of my parents who both worked 40 years at their job, which again, we know just doesn’t even exist anymore, but they didn’t really particularly care for the work that they were doing. They loved the people at the work and the customers but if you were to say, hey, do you absolutely love being a customer service rep, or do you absolutely love grinding tools? I don’t know what they would really say.

I actually think like in our parents’ generation till now, it was like, oh, now my kids can have the opportunity to have the “It” career that I didn’t [00:43:00] have. And at least for my parents, they didn’t really travel a whole lot, and my desire to travel was almost like a rejection of that. Just to be like if you’re not gonna travel, or we didn’t travel as a family, I’m gonna go everywhere and anywhere I can be, but what I’ve realized, I think, as I’ve gotten older, is, yes, I’m glad I went and saw and did all the things that they dreamed about doing in retirement.

But the biggest thing that has struck me about my parents lives day to day is that they really were content. And that is what has almost stopped me in my tracks a little bit because. They led such different lives than what I lead today. They worked nine to five. Again, not at the most “it” of all jobs. They traveled maybe once during the summer, we never went [00:44:00] abroad. No national parks. No Disney World, not doing any of that. But I can honestly say, like, I had a very content childhood, and my parents were very content with their lives and very much in love with each other.

And so, when I think of my life today and this fourth sign of instability, do I think I need to stay in a job for 40 years? Not necessarily. I don’t think I’ve discerned that that’s what I feel called to do. I don’t even know what that job would be. But do I need to learn the lesson of where I am right now might not be the bee’s knees for me, but I have a choice. Do I stay the course? And learn and sit [00:45:00] with the 75% satisfaction, let’s say, or do I constantly flee and jump from thing to thing, chasing that other 25%, but in essence really spinning my wheels. And that’s what I think Aedi is trying to say is. We have this temptation to flee, to escape, to change, to undo, to hop around. And it’s not motivated by bad reasons, but it’s chasing a false destination nation.

Maybe what we need to do is look deeply inward and stay the course and try to figure out where that source of dissatisfaction is coming from. Part of it might truly be the situation we’re in, and part of it honestly might be within [00:46:00] ourselves. That’s what I think is really powerful. I think the proof of this for me is that my parents really didn’t and couldn’t because of their educational attainment, they couldn’t, hop around from job to job or. Like they had good study work, and they were just very happy to exist, and by virtue of them being happy, I was also happy growing up. I certainly give thanks to them for setting the example of how to be content in one’s own life, in one’s own shoes.

So just to recap, today we focused on the Signs of the Times. We went through four of them, and the signs of the times are ways that acedia is showing [00:47:00] up and our concept of the signs of the times and Catholicism is to look at what’s showing up and interpret it in light of the gospel and the teachings of Jesus Christ. So, I choose to do that with the lens of acedia. I think it helps us to make sense a little bit of why we’re seeing what we’re seeing, and also why we’re feeling what we’re feeling, and finally why we feel tempted to do the things we do.

Because this is all coming at us so strongly right now, I think naming it as the false spirit at work gives it a persona and makes it less overwhelming because we can point to it and name it and therefore fight it and overcome it.

So, in the next episode we’ll talk a little bit more about this and eventually we are getting to what we need to do personally [00:48:00] to realize the acedia and overcome it in our own path.

[00:00:00] Okay, welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode two. So, it's been a little bit since episode one. I know that I left y'all on kind of a cliffhanger of sorts. Life has really been life’n lately, so I haven't had time to record the next episode, but I've been thinking a lot about it and it's been highly anticipated.

So, my sincere apologies for leaving you for such a long time and also on such a cliffhanger, and I hope that you will enjoy this episode that we have today. So, if you remember from the very first episode, what I had been talking about is essentially what [00:01:00] led me to do spiritual direction, namely the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola with my spiritual director. And that was around a six-month process where we very slowly went through those exercises, and I was trying to gain some insight into how I was feeling, which was somewhat new to me, I guess you could say, in the sense that I hadn't quite felt that way before.

And while it was perhaps a close cousin of other feelings I had had in the past, like maybe depression, it was somewhat different. And the way that I described it in episode one, in telling other people about it, was that I [00:02:00] think I had a spiritual problem that needed to be solved as opposed to a medical problem or a mental health problem, of which I was really familiar with up until that point in my life.

So. I laid out that whole scene and promised to tell you what I would eventually come to know that it is, and that's what we're gonna focus on today. So today we are going to name it, and we are going to do that in the next episodes where we really unpack what it is. It's nature. And ultimately how to overcome it.

I do wanna mention that most of my research around this not only came from my conversations in spiritual direction with Becky Eldredge, but also from [00:03:00] two texts that I read subsequently to learn more about it. And I'd like to share those with you because one, you might be interested in reading them and two, I want to give credit to the authors that wrote them and they have informed me of so much of its history and how it can manifest in our lives.

So the first text that I wanna draw to your attention, and we will be going over these in multiple episodes, is called The Noonday Devil: Acedia and the Unnamed Evil of our Times. So that's kind of a bit of a foreboding, somewhat, Uh, interesting title. It talks about the devil. It talks about evil. And if you know me, and you know how I talk about spirituality, I don't tend to bring up those two things [00:04:00] frequently. I prefer to use a different word for the devil, which is one that I learned during spiritual direction, which is the False Spirit, and that's something that St. Ignatius kind of coined, if you will.

And this text is written by Jean Charles Nault. Nault is spelled N-A-U-L-T, and he is with the Order of St. Benedict, (Benedict is a saint in the Catholic church) and he resides at the Abbott of Saint-Wandrille. And if you're noticing my very poor French accent that I've tried to salvage from my time in high school, though I doubt it was ever actually there, he resides in France. And [00:05:00] he is a monk there at this Benedictine Abbey in Normandy, France.

His book is one that I read, actually second after the next one I'll tell you about, and I will say it is a little more academic in its writing, so. I would not consider it to be kind of an entry level read to this topic. It is definitely a lot more theological, and also just academic in its approach to the topic, but it is really excellent. So if you're up for that, definitely check it out.

The second book that I wanna bring to your attention, and the first one I read. At the recommendation of Becky while I was going through direction is actually a New York Times bestseller, so that bodes well, and it is called Acedia [00:06:00] and Me: A Marriage, Monk’s, and Writer's Life. And that author is Kathleen Norris. And she is an American poet and essayist. She currently is Episcopalian, so that's one denomination of Christianity within the United States, but she also became what's called a Benedictine Oblate at the Assumption Abbey in North Dakota, which sounds like a really intriguing place to visit.

A Benedictine Oblate is essentially when a layperson, and by layperson we mean somebody who's not a priest or an ordained religious person, comes to an order like the Order of St. Benedict and says, I'm not going to become a monk [00:07:00] or an ordained follower of this St. Benedictine order, if you will, but I'm going to remain a lay person, and I want to live my life in accordance with the values and teachings of this saint. So, she is essentially a lay person like me and you. I would imagine not many of the people listening are priests or ordained religious, though if you are welcome, we are happy to have you here. But she really felt drawn to St. Benedict so much so that she wanted to make this commitment.

So if you haven't guessed already by the two titles, I have just read to you the thing that we are going to name and the thing that I feel I was really struggling with at that point in my life, and to be honest, still do or else I [00:08:00] wouldn't be here talking about it, is acedia.

So, acedia is spelled. A-C-E-D-I-A, and I spell these things only because if you want to Google them, you won't be like me guessing at the spelling when you do so acedia, say it with me if you'd like, because we're going to talk a lot about it. And what's interesting is that Jean Charles Nault calls it the root cause of the greatest crisis in the world today.

And while he is a contemporary with the rest of us, he did write his book a little bit ago (2015), but the fact that he [00:09:00] calls it the root cause of the greatest crisis in the world today speaks to how this concept of acedia has lasted for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and how we still find relevance in it today.

And one of my goals is to help you understand where it might operate in your own life, but also where it's operating, on a very large scale in our society, and hopefully you can find some comfort in naming it like I did. So, I'm going to read a little bit about Acedia from the Acedia and Me book.

On page three, she talks a little bit about where the word came from, and I think it starts to unpack its meaning and mystery. So [00:10:00] on page three, she says, “At its Greek root, the word acedia means the absence of care. The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care. Or is incapable of doing so when life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding. Acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine. You know the pain is there yet you can't rouse yourself to give a damn.”

So, that is a really intense definition, and having told you that I experienced this at a certain point in my life and perhaps still do, as I said, might seem a little contrary to those who know me because I certainly [00:11:00], like you, care a lot about what's going on in our world.

And a word to describe the absence of care seems a little bit contradictory on one level, but I want you to keep an open mind because I think that Greek root, the absence of care, is not essentially the way that you and I would think of as not caring today, but perhaps not caring to our fullest.

And that's a little bit of a teaser as to what we will be talking about. So, Kathleen also talks about naming it, and naming it, for me, you might remember from our first episode, was a bit of a liberation because it [00:12:00] is really difficult to suffer from something that you don't know the name or the nature of, but you're certainly feeling its impact and its symptoms.

And Kathleen struggled with this, which is one of the reasons I imagine she wrote this New York Times bestseller, and perhaps a lot of people do, if it was such a popular book. Yeah, but naming it, for her, and also for me, was like a point of liberation because I didn't really know how to describe it, and I sensed that it was not something that was in our modern day discourse that I could entirely point to, again, like depression is close, but not quite. It's a little bit different.

So I'd like to read a little excerpt from page four of Acedia and Me. She says, “As I read this, (and [00:13:00] she was referring to when she learned about acedia), I felt a weight lift from my soul for I had just discovered an accurate description of something that had plagued me for years but that I had never been able to name as any reader of fairytales can tell you not knowing the true name of your enemy, be it a troll, a demon, or a “issue,” puts you at a great disadvantage and learning the name can help to set you free. He's describing, (she was referring again to how she came to light of acedia and who wrote about it) He's describing half my life.”

I thought to myself. So, wow. Again, this is really powerful. [00:14:00] She uses the word enemy. She uses the word demon, but she also says, it set her free. As if she was in a way bound by this, and she says it describes half her life. I mean, that's pretty significant.

So again, I think this is a real issue and I think a lot of people either experience it or have periods of it, and she writes very eloquently and honestly about how it affected her.

So in reading these two books, I learned a lot and I took some handwritten notes as I was reading the first book, the Noonday Devil, and I jotted down the many ways that acedia is described or ways that kind of came to me as I was reading about it, [00:15:00] and these are synonyms, if you will, but I think with this being perhaps your first introduction to acedia, this list will help you to understand what I'm talking about as it helped me in reading it.

When I'm out and about talking to people about acedia, which happens a little more frequently than you might think, I had a wonderful discussion with a friend in DC about it some time ago, the first phrase that comes to mind for me is a tepidness of spirit, a tepidness of spirit. So, tepidness is like a lukewarmness, if you will.

And when we talk about spirit, especially our spirit, we want it to be big and maybe loud and proud and dynamic and honorable and all these things, [00:16:00] but the synonym for how acedia makes you feel is a tepidness of that.

Another phrase that comes up a lot when you read about acedia is spiritual sloth, so not necessarily sloth in the sense of like we're just liaising about on the couch doing nothing, but that we've ground to a bit of a spiritual halt, and it's taking every fiber of our being to get out of that place. It's an arrestment of our spirituality.

Another word is sadness, we'll talk about what type of sadness, specifically. Another phrase, a loss of meaning in life or losing a [00:17:00] relish for life. That relish for life is something that I think resonated with me because I've noticed this as I've gotten older, that back in the day when I was young or maybe high school age, I had this zeal for life and everything felt really vivid and interesting and profound and important, and I was almost like “sensorarily,” if that's a word, waking up to everything that life had to offer, and as I've gone through life, that volume has been turned down a little bit, and I think that's maybe part of aging and just part of growing older.

There's a lot more to life than you once thought, so you have to make room in your brain and you can't [00:18:00] respond with this intense reaction to everything because you would be exhausted. But this idea of losing a relish for life, I think, is something not just in the realm of age, but also in the realm of the spirit.

And this next phrase, again, another synonym, speaks to that and that is torpor of mind and spirit. So, torpor, T-O-R-P-O-R, is a word that I certainly did not know and don't particularly use. I didn't do the best on my SATs despite studying the flashcards for hours on end. So, if like me, you're not sure what torpor means, it means lethargy or a state of physical and mental inactivity.

So, in this [00:19:00] context, the phrase is torpor of mind and spirit. Other phrases, the midlife crisis. And being now 40 plus, I can definitely understand how acedia might creep up during this time. Disgust with activity, losing the joy of living, a spiritual depression, a break in the search for God. With that last one, you can see this grinding to a halt that we talked about with the other synonym, spiritual sloth.

The last one I wanna bring to you today is this phrase, the noonday devil, which again, is a synonym, but we don't really say noon day. And we probably don't talk about the devil casually in our everyday [00:20:00] life. This kind of noonday devil was a phrase that maybe would've been a little more used prior to our existence.

And it talks about the middle of the day, and I think we actually do still experience this because, I don't know about you, but when we get to like one, two o'clock in the afternoon. I kind of just feel like calling it a day and going to sleep. And a lot of us describe our hardest work hours as that stretch between lunch and the end of the day that seem to drag on for literally ever, and we're not super motivated to do much. So if you know what I'm talking about, perhaps you have experienced the noonday devil.

But back in the day before, offices and fluorescent lights and working [00:21:00] in front of a computer ad nauseum, people worked outside mostly, and they talk about the noonday devil as happening during the high heat of the day. So think of like the sun is directly above you in the sky. There's very little shadow because everything is directly under the sun. It's really hot. It's perhaps really still. They describe it as the hours when time stands still, and you are weary and fatigued. Think about working out in a field, plowing and harvesting in the dead of heat in the middle of the day so that describes the noonday devil, but I think even though we work primarily inside, probably most of us in front of a screen, I think we still do experience this when we have to really [00:22:00] get the jumper cables out and try to get ourselves going in the afternoon.

You might be wondering, how far back does this acedia thing go? So Jean Charles Nault, who wrote The Noon Day Devil talks about the person who gave it a sort of coherent doctrine and who continued to shed light on it was actually a fourth century Christian monk.

Let's unpack that a little bit because what is a fourth century Christian monk? And this person does have a name. His name is Evagrius Pontius, spelled E-V-A-G-R-I-U-S, lived between 345 and 399 AD. So he lived a really, really, [00:23:00] really long time ago, and the Christian monks, particularly his contemporaries, were a very well-known group in church history, and Jean Charles Nault talks about actually around page 21 of his book that after the Edict of Milan in 1313, and if you're like me, I'm like, I sure as heck don't remember what the Edict of Milan of 1313 is, but it was essentially a ruling by Roman Emperors Constantine the First and Emperor Licinius, which ended the decades-long persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, and it served as a birth certificate, if you will, for freedom of religion. You could [00:24:00] practice any religion in the Roman Empire and not be persecuted for it, particularly Christianity.

So these folks that Evagrius joined went out into the desert and started to lead a very interesting acetic, if you will, but also a mystical type life. And they did that in monasteries. So he lived in a monastery, but it was a monastery that surely he lived with other people nearby, but there was an intense focus on your individual spirituality and your prayer life, and he might've spent a lot of time in his small, simple room being encouraged to pray and deepen his faith.

You might be thinking, that sounds really unrelatable. [00:25:00] I haven't gone out into the desert or elsewhere and joined a monastery where I spend copious amounts of time in my tiny cell praying, but Evagrius, I mean, he's kind of become my dude, to be honest with you in learning about all this, and I think you will find that he has a lot more in common with us than we might think.

I want to also talk about some symptoms of acedia because like the synonyms, I actually think talking about the symptoms of something, just like we would talk about the symptoms of a disease or an illness, helps us to understand the nature of it. So again, I'm gonna read this list and what I hope it'll do for you is draw you into more understanding this concept.

So [00:26:00] symptoms of acedia: weariness, melancholy, feeling overworked. Is there anyone out there in this day and age that does not feel overworked? Please let me know so we can have you on this podcast and tell your secret to all of us! Other symptoms: discouragement, instability, and restlessness. This is interesting because I described acedia earlier as a sloth, a tepidness, an inability to get unstuck, but there's actually a little bit of a paradox going on.

When you experience acedia, you might feel that sloth and that paralysis, but you [00:27:00] also might experience a desire for instability and a restlessness, and it shows up in both ways. And we're gonna talk a lot more about how, despite seeming really paradoxical, it actually makes sense.

More symptoms: sinking into mediocrity. I added being on the hamster wheel of life or being on autopilot, which I think is very indicative of the time we find ourselves in. Paralysis, despair, gloominess, boredom, sloth, mediocrity. And Jean Charles Nault also describes it as everything bores us and burdens [00:28:00] us. So everything feels a burden or a bore, and one begins to lose interest and incentive.

So, intense, but perhaps some of you have experienced this in your line of work. You know, when it can feel like a chore to go in every day, or it seems boring in the sense that you feel like you're on autopilot and maybe nothing will ever change sort of thing.

These are quite intense, but I do think that they show up in our lives in different ways. I wanna also take a moment to talk about the difference between acedia and depression, something that I feel like I really needed to [00:29:00] put my finger on, especially when I was experiencing it because my friends who knew me and I was talking to about it would often say, do you think you're depressed? Because that's a legitimate question that we should ask ourselves and ask our friends when we're concerned about them.

I don't necessarily run from the word depression. I think it is a real thing, but I also knew that what I was experiencing was unlike the times that I had experienced depression earlier on in my life. Kathleen Norris really confronts this question head on. And I'm gonna read for you a passage that is on page 22 that starts to pose this question:

“I suspect that many [00:30:00] people now would answer the question, is acedia depression with a reflexive and assured yes, of course. Depression having become a catchall for not only mental illness, but also a wide range of emotions. Pharmaceutical companies advertise in newspapers and popular magazines with lists of symptoms, feeling down, anxious, fatigued, or discouraged. That would seem to cover most everyone at some time, as is, no doubt the point. These advertisements can inspire people who need treatment to seek it, but they also serve the purpose of commerce and feed a disturbing tendency to medicalize all human experience.”

So, she is not anti-depression, which she might come across as a little bit [00:31:00] in the latter part of that passage, but she believes in depression, and certainly I do, too. She makes this distinction that sometimes depression is what we feel in life, and it can run away from us, in which case we might need treatment, but it can also be a very normal and appropriate reaction to what we feel.

It's just perhaps part of our human experience. She poses the question, what if one responded to such a loss with a casual yawn? As if none of it had mattered in the first place, that is a different thing altogether. Depression might be a very legitimate response to something, but this lackadaisical [00:32:00] feeling of why does it matter anyway, starts to actually creep into acedia.

She talks about a contemporary scholar who she read up on in terms of acedia, and that scholar says, “For despair, participation in the divine nature through grace (in other words, God) is perceived as appealing, but impossible for a acedia. The prospect is possible, but unappealing.” Okay, let's unpack that a little bit.

So for despair, let's just say depression, perhaps we look at life as maybe appealing, but we feel like it's not possible for us right now because we're tethered in the throes of depression. [00:33:00] For acedia, we know that it's possible to engage and take action, let's say get up off the couch sort of thing, but it remains unappealing.

And that's where she talks about that casual yawn, right? I could do X, Y, and Z, but does it honestly matter? I wanna reiterate. I am very pro depression is real, and I think SSRIs are great. I think that brains are an organ and sometimes they malfunction, and we take a medication for our brain just as we would any other organ in our body that was going awry.

What I appreciate about what she brings up in this part of the book is that we tend to lump a lot of things into [00:34:00] the concept of depression, and we feel that we have the answer, which is, pharmaceutical medication, which obviously does work, but some of what we're feeling that maybe gets lumped into depression but is actually different is a spiritual problem.

When we screen for depression or just any sort of imbalance in mental health, we rarely talk about spirituality and faith and religion and how we're feeling on that front. Right? And we don't do that, I think as much, especially in the United States because one, the assumption is not that people are spiritual or religious, the assumption is that they might not be, and therefore it would be like rude or inappropriate to ask that question perhaps. But it is [00:35:00] part of our wellbeing and our spiritual health is tied to our overall health, so I appreciate that. What she's trying to say is, yes, depression exists, but are we casting so wide and net around it that we're actually missing the nuances of what we're feeling. And some of those feelings might be spiritual issues.

So I also wanna say, too, that when I was on SSRIs and actually have been for quite a while, when I was first prescribed them, I was told the goal of where I was trying to get, having been on them, was not to feel nothing at all. But instead to feel more like myself with a wide range of emotions. That was a bit of a [00:36:00] “aha” moment for me, like I thought depression medication was, so you can just kinda wipe the slate clean and just cruise through life.

I was a little hesitant about going on them, I remember, because I was worried that I would not only lose the bad parts of what I was feeling, but also maybe the good parts of myself, the happiness. I think those deep feelings also made me a really good writer. And it was the basis of my empathy, the way that I could listen to and understand other people that felt that way. So it was a bit of a relief when the wonderful nurse practitioner who I saw told me, no, actually we're not trying to mute everything that you are, right. Instead, we want you to feel like yourself, and we want you to have a wide range of emotions. She told me, if you're not crying [00:37:00] at all, you need to tell me, if crying is an appropriate response that you once had to x, Y, or Z and you can't do that we need to know.

So I think all of this is to say that there are a lot of nuances when we feel down or we feel paralyzed or glum or sad, if you've experienced those things, I hope you are open to talking to mental health professionals. If there is also, something else going on and you feel like it's not quite that, but it certainly is there, then you might be interested in acedia and how it impacts us.

I think acedia is so important to discuss right now, because going back to what we just talked about with [00:38:00] depression, if depression is appropriate response to loss, let's say, a part of our human experience to feel depressed sometimes, then to me, acedia is a logical response to the world we find ourselves in today. So right now, we tend to find ourselves in a place of overwhelming injustice on a really wider scale. I certainly feel that way right now. I would imagine many of you do, too, and we are experiencing a lot of unchecked evil.

Every time I open the one email a day, I let myself get about the news. I'm just overwhelmed, it's war, it's tragedy, it's exploitation, it's lying, deceit, [00:39:00] manipulation, seeing people as less than human, not honoring people's personhood,

Certainly, there is a reaction to that that I think the wider society is feeling right now. That can take the form of almost an apathy towards it. Like, well, it is what it is, or that's just the way it's gonna go, I guess, you know? It can also appear as despair at ever really overcoming it. It feels so overwhelming that we question whether we can ever get out of this or ever get to that better place that we've been working towards.

Or we know it exists, but we're resigned to the fact that it does. And we experience in those [00:40:00] feelings a type of paralysis. Maybe we have the response of just going on autopilot, putting our head down and just trying to get from point A to B every day because the rest of it is just too much.

That paralysis, that going into autopilot, or it might even be a restlessness, like we almost feel like there's a jitteriness, a constant need for activity and distraction that we can't shake is in the realm of acedia and these feelings of acedia hit people who are actually trying to do good in the world and have a lot of empathy.

A lot of my friends and myself, and that's part of the reason we're friends, tried to go into do-gooder [00:41:00] professions, to do good in the world. For me, that was because of my faith and spirituality convictions. I can't imagine existing in the world without trying to work towards justice and peace, but a lot of people, because of similar values or the call to do what is right and good, pursued professions with that lens in mind.

But something I've seen happen to myself and a lot of my friends is we get really burnt out and we feel a little bit listless, sometimes empty, or our response is just to try to clock in and clock out. Like, we have to create boundaries with our jobs because it is so draining despite working for the good.

We tend to feel ground down by all [00:42:00] the systems. It seems overwhelming. It's like we don't know whether to resign to the fact that these things exist or constantly weary ourselves trying to navigate them and overcome them. For a lot of my friends who've been in the helping professions and especially in the nonprofit sector, all y'all out there, the struggle is real in the nonprofit sector, right now, we feel this sense of should I just throw the towel in? Should I “sell out” and just make income and live my life and just stop trying to do this? And that is burnout, right? And that is also a bit of a acedia bearing down on us.

So, especially for those folks for whom you are in these professions and you're listening and you're like, yeah, I feel like that sometimes, or maybe [00:43:00] sometimes meaning every day, I really encourage you to keep listening to this podcast because I think you might find, the feeling of aloe on a burn, because we are feeling really burnt out, and we need something to cool our skin.

One of the best descriptions of acedia that I've heard of one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, Lena Dunham. Lena wrote, “I wouldn't say I am not happy, but I could be a lot happier.” And when I read that, I literally laughed out loud because I was like, that is such a good description of life. And that last part is really what I'm trying to focus on here with you with acedia, is that it's not that things are necessarily outrightly bad, [00:44:00] but we've lost something. We've lost that spark of life, and we realize that we have gotten in some ways to where we're trying to go, but once we've arrived, we might feel some emptiness or overwhelm or even a deep sense of fatigue. It's almost if the volume of life is turned down.

I see it a lot, too, in the paradoxical nature of acedia and where we find ourselves at this point in our lives while we do feel these feelings of a bit of glum and kind of autopilot, we also might feel feelings of restlessness and we're not sure why. One way that I think about this restlessness is the proverbial question, [00:45:00] Is this all there is? Or is this what I was really trying to do all these years and now I'm here and it doesn't feel or look like what I thought it would.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a career. It could be just, getting to family life or getting to retirement or, getting to be more independent growing up. One reaction to that feeling I think is restlessness of acedia, where we have this sense of wanting to move and maybe move around. So really what I need is a new job or. I need a new environment. I need a new home. Or I need to be in a different city. This would start to feel right or feel the way I thought it would if I change cities or change locations. And we have this [00:46:00] idea that if we make this change, it'll solve this feeling. That something else or somewhere else shows promise.

But I think what acedia would say is be careful that it's not giving you a false promise, because acedia is something that we have to sit here and bravely challenge ourselves, and it is not something that we can necessarily solve by running away or fleeing, or the grass is greener on the other side.

So all of this is just say, this is the challenge of our time. Maybe not all of what I've said here today resonates with you, but maybe parts of it do. If there's any part of it, whether it's where you find yourself in life, how [00:47:00] you're feeling about it, wondering, could I be better, happier, more fulfilled if I did X, Y, Z instead…If you're having those feelings of overwhelm, you're opening the newsreel app of your choice and you're feeling defeated, or why should I even keep caring? You know, when this just all feels so immense, I think this podcast is for you, and it's certainly is for me because again, once I named this feeling that I was having, which shows up in all those different ways, I felt an intense amount of liberation and freedom, and I wouldn't say that I've overcome it, spoiler alert, but it's much easier to try to overcome it when you truly know what it is.

We must [00:48:00] confront this head on. We need to understand it. We need to name it, and ultimately, we do need to overcome it. That vision of the world or our lives of being a more peaceful, fulfilled, and just place. I believe overcoming feelings of acedia is paramount to getting there.

I also wanna say that a lot of this is very religious, because it comes from specifically Catholic church history and teaching. And you may or may not be Catholic. I know, some folks on here might be of a different religion, and that's actually really encouraging because I think this shows up in several world religions.

So you might not be a religious person. Maybe you're more of a spiritual person or maybe you [00:49:00] don't even know, like, if you would put yourself in either of those two categories at this point in your life. Maybe you were raised religious or spiritual, or you've gotten away from it or. Maybe it harmed you in some way 'cause that's a real thing.

But if you're open to listening and hearing and you're okay with me prattling on about how this affects our religion and spirituality, I think that you will find this interesting because I think the feeling is real. The manifestation is real, and how you choose to confront it is ultimately your journey.

So, if you are open, we can explore and answer all these questions together.

Launching this has been a (good) itch in my side for quite a long time now, and it feels great to finally “scratch” the surface of podcasting.

I am including the transcript below for your listening/viewing ease.

Thank you for supporting me in this big step.

~ Christina

Episode 1 Transcript (includes links for further reading)

Hello, my name is Christina Gebel, and I am with the Moderate Catholic. This is our first episode of the Moderate Catholic, and I'm very happy that you're here. So today I would like to tell you a little bit more about myself, my background, what we hope to do here in our time, listening to the Moderate Catholic, and discussing the topics as well as what we're gonna focus on in the next episodes.

So, a little bit about me. I am a public health professional, specifically maternal and child health, and have been doing that [00:01:00] for about 11 years now. And in addition to that formal training, I have also been a doula for about 14 years now .

But that's actually not the expertise that I am bringing to this podcast at the outset.

I also have a deep love for spirituality and also my Catholic faith. So much so that I majored in theology and undergrad, and within theology, I focused a lot on ethics, particularly sexual ethics. And just developed a really deep love of the Catholic Church and many of the documents it's written, and I started to get more and more into social justice and particularly Catholic social teaching.

Some of the main figures out [00:02:00] there in Catholicism regarding social justice became heroes of mine, and I went on to try to live my life in a really intentional way.

So fast forward to today, which is a lot of years between today and undergrad, but I have remained in my Catholic faith, and one thing that has been a little bit of a challenge to me throughout these years post undergrad has been finding spaces where I can get together with like-minded Catholics and discuss not only my own thoughts and feelings, but also our faith and how it relates to the world that we're in. I noticed oftentimes that as I was moving from city to city and quote unquote [00:03:00] church shopping, which if you're not familiar with the phrase “church shopping,” it's when you go around to a bunch of parishes and try to figure out which one you feel most at home with, which resonates with a lot of your interest and values.

And granted, it's all Catholic, but for those who are Catholic and listening, you might know that some parishes have, let's say, a take on what to focus on within Catholicism. And so for me, the thing that was important to me in selecting a parish throughout these years since undergrad has been where can I find people that want to be in and of this world and also want to be Catholic and want to lead with compassion and social justice, and always putting vulnerable populations in mind whenever we're [00:04:00] making decisions that could affect them.

What I found is that, in every major city I've lived in so far, which is outside of where I grew up in Cincinnati…I've lived in St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, and now Durham. I found that, there are certainly just your run of the mill Catholic parishes with, let's say in aging population that aren't as active, but just go along, have Mass, have the sacraments, have a ladies' auxiliary function that sells, baked goods, a fish fry, all the good things that we remember, or at least I do from childhood.

But there's also some really traditional leaning parishes, and those seem to be. Very popular right now and growing in number. Those tend to be a [00:05:00] little more conservative. And also, there are parishes, which have more of a progressive, if you will, or a social justice leaning, and they might have a rainbow ministry for L-G-B-T-Q Catholics, they're not afraid to go there with the issues of the day, like immigration and so many of the hot button issues that actually we're experiencing right now in spades, they're not trying to shy away from the world or create an alternate world, or create a world as though it should be according to them. But more so a world as it should be according to the life and teaching and example of Jesus Christ.

And [in] those parishes, I feel good and at [00:06:00] home because there's a tension there, and it sounds odd in a way to say I feel good in a tension, but it kind of is, I think, where our faith lives. And that is in the tension of we have this 2000 plus year old religion, the Roman Catholic Church, and a lot has happened in 2000 years, and some of it looks familiar, some of it's slightly nuanced with different players and names and faces.

But a lot has happened, and we find ourselves as Catholics just continuing to wrestle and wrestle with taking the foundational values that Jesus laid out, again in his life example ministry and teachings, and trying to be in and of this world and apply them and. In my personal [00:07:00] opinion, as we keep going down the road in modernity, so to speak, that to me gets a lot more complicated.

Now, we're in this world where people still fight wars and people still get ill and, die and we still have widespread illnesses unfortunately.

But the way in which we confront those things has become a lot more complicated. And there's a lot more within our grasp right now that has never been available, and on the one hand that's good because it shows that we're progressing and we're using our, human intelligence and our ability to reason to solve the problems of the world.

But within it come really deep ethical questions about just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should. And that is my focus on ethics in a [00:08:00] nutshell, and why I naturally gravitated towards that when I started studying theology. And within that, I found kind of sexual ethics and marriage and family ethics, too.

And you'll come to know this about me, but I am married, which I'm very happy and proud of, to a wonderful, loving, compassionate man, who I found a little bit later in life compared to my peers, but was well worth the wait. And he grew up Hindu and it worked for me, not only because he is this incredible person, but I actually really appreciate when perspectives on Eastern theology and thinking come into my life because I think that Eastern religions and thought, enriches really our whole being, but also our [00:09:00] understanding of God, in my case, and even my understanding of what it means to be a good person on this earth and for me as a Christian to better live as Jesus intended.

So anyway, there's these parishes, there's this interest on ethics, there's the social justice vibe. It's been a journey in the modern world since then. But again, going back to why we're here today. I think that people really are craving community and spaces, and for me, there have become less and less spaces out there for so-called “moderate Catholics” who are looking to talk to each other, but not strictly within the bounds of these kind of polarized frameworks that we keep finding ourselves in today, [00:10:00] particularly conservative and liberal.

And as many good Catholic teachers and professors and priests have taught me over the years, if we really are to live into this Catholic faith, it's not going to fit really nicely into those frameworks. It transcends our secular understanding of conservative, liberal, or a lot of other philosophies that have come up throughout the ages.

So, at this point, maybe part of any of what I've just said and rambled on about, might speak to you and, I realize in articulating all of this, that, everything I'm saying is like über Catholic, you know? And sometimes I have to stop myself a little bit and be like, Christina, not [00:11:00] everybody wants to hear about everything you think about Catholicism.

But maybe there's some of you who do. And for some of you who are listening just because you're interested or you, felt guilty 'cause I encouraged you to, I'll try to stop and explain a little bit about some of the Catholic things that I keep, referring to, not only for folks who are less familiar with it, but also for folks who are Catholic themselves.

Because I'll be the first to say, I listen and read a lot of Catholic things out there, and I don't always know everything that they're referring to, to be honest with you. I would definitely love some refreshers on terms and people and all the things that's wrapped up in this like 2000 years of existence of the Roman Catholic Church and.[00:12:00]

I always love learning new things, too. There's a lot that I don't know, I don't really fully understand. I've talked a little bit already about what my focus has been within these years, but I think that was guided by the Holy Spirit, and I think the Holy Spirit helps us to figure out where our strengths lie, where the mission that we're trying to meet in the world is, and as the saying goes, marry those two things. So, you might see that reflected a little bit as well in the logo of the Moderate Catholic. So, there's a dove, which represents the Holy Spirit as a symbol, and the dove’s speaking kind of these audio tongues, you know, so it's a podcast, so it has audio things.

And then again, the Moderate Catholic piece comes from what I've started to describe, and we'll talk a [00:13:00] lot more about in future episodes, which is basically what does it mean to be moderate? And maybe that's not even the term for it. Maybe it's just that you find yourself somewhere that is not on one of the poles of the polarization, and you're just trying to do your best and live in the world and be a good person and imitate the life of Christ.

So, I wanted to launch right into, like, here's everything I think about politics right now and how, the left and the right aren't getting it right. And both of them have major flaws, but I've written a lot about that on my Substack. It doesn't always tend to go well, as you can imagine. I think one hard thing about being quote unquote moderate, and we'll just keep using that for expediency sake, is that you're always [00:14:00] gonna have somebody that disagrees with you because most people do tend to be a little closer to the left or the right, and also you don't really know how to name what you are as evidenced by “moderate,” maybe not capturing fully how you or I feel in these spaces. I think part of that is by design. Like, I think we ingest a lot of things every day that make us think that there's either right or wrong or left or right, or a person is either good or bad. And, I started having a reaction to that as a person because I really do think people are really a mixed bag and issues are really a mixed bag, and our media is definitely slanted in a variety of ways.

I think one [00:15:00] question, Catholic or not, that we're all facing right now is well, where do I stand in all of this? Because this is really overwhelming. It's at times confusing. It's triggering things in us about our values, our beliefs, our identities, our sense of justice. But yet, it all feels so unsettling.

It's like, where can I rest my head because I'm kind of drowning in the headlines and everything that's happening, so again, where I wanted to start was a place where I would talk about that, hey, you wanna be Catholic, you wanna be a good person, but how does that fit into the Signs of the Times that we're seeing, the politics, the policies and injustices that are [00:16:00] happening before our eyes, as well as the things that seem, quote unquote random, but not like natural disasters or pockets of violence that nobody saw coming. You know, there's so much there. And how do you be a person of faith and explain why these things are happening, or even more so what our response is supposed to be to them? But I think we can get there in our podcast.

And maybe just start somewhere that is a little more digestible, a little more personal. Because I do think in all of this and all of this kind of chaos for lack of a better word, that we are living in, I do think that working on ourselves…It's not necessarily a cop out, as some people might say that it is, [00:17:00] but I have thought a lot more about in this day and age. I feel very overwhelmed and sometimes powerless in the face of so much suffering and injustice.

How can I work on myself internally to really, hopefully, have more compassion? Compassion has kind of been my buzzword since January because if I really am living into this Christian calling, I need to ask myself if I am really being Christian in the midst of all of this. And it's easy, I think, to be Christian when you're around people that feel the same way that you do or quote unquote it's easy to love, but it's a lot harder when things aren't so clear cut and people aren't such [00:18:00] a clear example. And they might do really great things, and they might do really awful things.

So I kept coming back to this piece of personal spirituality and growth. And it's helped me in a way, not that I've exited the world or any of these issues, still very much in them, but it has given me a bit of an interior life, if you will, where I can be quiet, sit in the silence and think about that question that I raised earlier:

What really is my role here? What am I being asked to do?

But also I think in order to do that well, we have to really hold ourselves accountable internally. And therefore, starting out with a more spiritual [00:19:00] topic in the coming weeks, I think, it's just a good place to begin.

To better explain what spiritual topic I decided on as our start, I wanna tell you a little bit about a space that I was in roughly three years ago, three and change, which would've been 2022.

We had moved down to North Carolina in 2020. We had bought a house on a beautiful wooded lot. We had adopted our cat Stella, who you'll probably hear a lot about in the podcast. And you might even hear in the background if I'm not able to edit out all the sounds that she likes to make .

We had moved down from the Northeast, and my husband is a family physician, so he [00:20:00] continued to follow that path. And I had worked mostly from home, and most of my work is still in the Northeast, but. I found myself, like many people did after the pandemic started, being a very remote worker and just kind of plugging away at the computer with my cat.

And, my husband, he's in healthcare. He has very hands-on work, so a lot of days he's out of the house, and I started to notice, I guess, in those stiller moments where there was more silence in the house and in the woods that surround the house, that I was having kind of a particular feeling, and that feeling was really, really [00:21:00] hard for me to name.

And at this point in time in my life, I honestly had a lot of stability. Like I had a job and good colleagues and was doing good work and we were finally not renting, and we had a house and I enjoyed all my creative projects around the house, and so for all intents and purposes, things were where I had hoped they would be. We were both very happy. And honestly still are today in this current context, but I was having this feeling, if you will, of nagging, and it was not kind of your typical anxiety or depression, which I am all in favor of talking about, getting [00:22:00] all the things for counseling, SSRIs, whatever they may be. It was different than that and I knew that it wasn't that, but I also didn't know what it was, so I started talking to, my husband, my friends, people that usually are okay with me rambling on about abstract semi deep things, and I kept telling them I don't know what I'm feeling, but I have this nagging feeling of just unsettledness.

And it's not a positive feeling. It's restlessness in a certain way. So there's an energy to it there, but there's also this inertia, too. And [00:23:00] it was very, as you can tell from just that brief explanation, it was very paradoxical to me because, how can you feel restless and in art at the same time?

I went back to this phrase, which I believe is from St. Augustine: “My heart is restless until it rests in you, Oh, God.” I'll repeat that just to kinda let it gel: “My heart is restless until it rests in you, Oh, God.” And that phrase was the closest thing that I could get to articulating what I was going through.

I had a lot of really good people in my life who know me and know where I've been and how I felt over the years. And a lot of them asked a lot of really good questions. Like, well, do you think you're [00:24:00] depressed? And I'm like. Yeah, I, no, I was like, I, really don't think it's that.

It's just, it's something else. And I don't know. This went on for honestly, like probably, prior to 2022. (And I'm describing the moments in which it came to a head.) I think prior to that, maybe like 2019 onward to 2022. I had really felt this in some form and again, it came to the head in the time I was describing in, in 2022, but it was certainly there.

And it was in the background, and it would show up in different ways. And another way that it would show [00:25:00] up to help you conceptualize it, even though I'm talking about a time in my life where I couldn't conceptualize it, was I had kind of lost some of my zest for life.

It was good. Again, I was so confused because I was having all the things and doing all the things, so it was confusing to me why I felt toned down, if you will. There was a kind of lack of the fervor that I had felt for many years, and the energy that kind of came with that fervor, and it troubled me.

I guess I could have said at that point, Hey, it's probably the [COVID-19] pandemic. The pandemic has sucked all the things out of all of us who were, [00:26:00] lucky and thankful to have survived it, first of all. But, I think all of us came out a little wounded, a little worn, maybe a little bit better, but also just carrying some heavy wounds and maybe some traumas from that time.

It didn't strike me as kind of the pandemic slump that I think I did experience at certain points, but this was, again, different and again, frustrating. You're probably even just frustrated hearing me talk about this, like Christina gets to the point, what are you talking about?

What is this thing that you are struggling with? And if you're feeling that emotion right now, that's where I was. I was in this emotion of could it be this, could it be that? Not really, not exactly, but I also can't name it. And so I thought about a phrase that I came up with [00:27:00] shortly thereafter about how to talk to people about this, and the phrase I came up with was, I don't think I'm having a mental health problem. I think I'm having a spiritual problem. Lke, I think I have a spiritual problem.

It is an existential problem. It's a problem of the spirit and nothing materially is glaringly bad, but this goes deeper and penetrates into the level of the soul, you know, the spirit, the identity, who I am. Along that line of logic, I said to myself, okay, well if one has a spiritual issue, where does one go?

I was trying to like, find things to read, but I was blindly searching like I feel [00:28:00] spiritually, blah, you know, what, what book should I read? All of this to say where I settled was on a thing called Spiritual Direction. And for those of you who aren't familiar spiritual direction or spiritual directors within several denominations are people who train to be in some ways a counselor of the spirit.

They are like, in some ways, a coach in some ways, a guide, in some ways a counselor. It feels a little bit like counseling when you go and you talk to them about where you are and what's on your mind lately, what you're struggling with, but they have this kind of scope of work that is not mental health because that really is a clinical problem. But they're the spiritual health people, if you [00:29:00] will. I'd done a little bit of spiritual direction, at different times in my life throughout those years after undergrad. And I'd always gotten something out of it,

So, I started asking around and I really wanted somebody who is a writer and the reason for that was one thing that was coming up on the positive side throughout this was that I wanted to do more writing in my life and not like journal article writing or grant deliverable writing, but just like honest to God, reflective, putting it out there, putting my voice out there, writing that engages faith.

So, I set out on that journey, and I was trying to look for somebody who is a writer. And I asked one of my Catholic writer friends and she referred me to one of her Catholic writer friends, [00:30:00] And that person is Becky Eldredge.

Becky is phenomenal. She is the bee's knees in just about every way. And if you Google Becky, you will see that she's written some books, that she has a whole brand around Ignatian spirituality, which I highly, highly encourage you to support and follow. Becky, thankfully, had some time and availability to do direction with me and within spiritual direction, she led me through something called the Spiritual Exercises.

I needed to spiritually exercise. I needed to get stronger and push my boundaries and my limits and my spirit to really get at what was happening to me. And so the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola are things that Jesuits in training [00:31:00] do in order to strengthen their spiritual lives as they're going about their Jesuit journey. It's a guided experience. Becky had adapted the experience to work with lay people and lay people are people who aren't priests. She had given it to me in a way that was very accessible.

And normally a lot of Jesuits in training would do this during a 30-day silent retreat and they would meet with a spiritual director and it'd kind of be like this 30 day intensive, if you will. But there was an [19^th] annotation, Ignatius wrote about that basically said, hey, if you can't do a 30 day silent retreat. It's like, yeah, dude, a lot of people can't do that, you know? Then there's this annotation where you gradually work through the exercises piecemeal and you still do them. Becky told me, she's like, [00:32:00] this might take a full six or so months, and I was like, dang, how long are these exercises? But I was like, okay, cool. And I met with her once a week and that's what we did. We went through this process.

And so, to make a long story short, 'cause we're gonna talk about it in the next episodes, it really was one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life and it honest to God, could not have come at a better time. And even a part of me wishes I had found this experience earlier.

And Becky was the right person for me to journey with. I'm so grateful to her to this day that I had this profound experience with love and tenderness and compassion and openness, and even a little [00:33:00] tough love sometimes, you know? And I walked away, not necessarily - spoiler alert - solving the problem that I had, because to be honest with you, I am still solving the problem, but I was able to name the problem, and if you've ever named a problem that you have had but can't really like name, to name something is almost like to untether yourself from its control. I really felt a sense of deep, deep peace and freedom just in the naming of it, just in saying, this is what it is, [00:34:00] and I see you. I can see, I see you, I see you there. And I was getting more spiritual freedom now that I had named it to actually understand it, and to overcome it. That is where I want to journey with you all in this series.

Because I have a haunting suspicion that, one, I'm not the only person that has felt this way. And two, I think people are feeling this way a lot, and I believe that you want a better world and you want to be better in this world . And maybe you have those feelings, too, or at least some of them that I described, where it's like the [00:35:00] overwhelm, the inertia, the restlessness, the kind of tepidness of your spirit, and if that's speaking to you on any level, I really do think that you're gonna enjoy these next episodes because we're really gonna unpack that.

I'm going to use my own life as an example of how I named it with Becky. It has a name, and I'm gonna talk more about its symptoms, how it showed up in my life. I'm gonna talk about ways that in the Catholic tradition, we are encouraged to overcome it. But I think they really extend to all faith traditions and even just normal people walking around on the street. And then we're gonna talk about, how to overcome it or at least to [00:36:00] live with it in a way that we're mindful of it, and that again, it doesn't have that hold on us, like it wants to, and we're gonna personify it, because I think that it's easier to conceptualize, like, this is a real thing, and we struggle with it.

We're just human beings having a really human experience with a spirit in our body, in a world that is very tough and also wonderful. So that's all for this episode. I really am glad and grateful if you hung in this whole time. And I really look forward to continuing this series specifically on this topic and journeying together on this road.

[00:37:00]

I am very excited to announce a new direction for my Substack.

In the upcoming posts, I will be launching a podcast arm of my Substack!

The podcast, named The Moderate Catholic, will explore issues that inspire action and deepen faith.

I’m SUPER excited about this, and I hope you will continue on this journey with me.

For the time being, I’m going to take a pause on talking about the intersection of politics and Catholicism/faith, as these are draining times, and while I value conversations like these (especially where folks who normally wouldn’t discuss do!), I also have a deep love of personal reflection and faith formation.

The first series of podcast posts will be about a topic I deeply love: acedia.

If you’re like what the heck is that, then you’ll want to tune in.

Acedia is a lesser-known struggle that is perhaps the largest spiritual roadblock facing our society today. It has a fascinating history, despite very few books out there on it.

My first few posts talked about my desire to enter into the Spiritual Exercises, and acedia was a huge aha moment for me in that journey.

If you want to catch up on that journey (or want to re-read it), you can find Post 1, Post 2 and Post 3 for your enjoyment.

And finally, there is one more change coming.

The first podcast episode and transcript will be free! After that, audio content will be behind a (small) paywall, and eventually, both the transcript and the audio will be behind small paywalls.

A dear professor mentor of mine has been encouraging me to monetize my Substack, and I’m finally going to give in. If that’s upsetting, you can blame him for believing in me! :P

But really, I think he’s right, and please see the small expense per month as the equivalent of us going out and having a cup of tea and a great conversation together.

My hope is that it won’t be one-way audio listening but a two-way spiritual experience. I really want to hear your thoughts.

Take care in these trying times.

And as always, stay tuned.

~ Christina

I’m going to talk this week about what I like about the Pope being from North America, what I don’t like about it, what I have rolled my eyes at, and the kind of nervousness that would have undergirded any choice that would have happened. Finally, the hope.

Here we go.

So, the first emotion I had when I heard there was white smoke was surprise. I think a lot of Catholics out there, including myself, expected this to go on for a while - like a conclave-while, so like 3+ days. To have it happen the second day signaled, to me, that there was some sure-ity among what the Holy Spirit was doing, by way of the cardinals coalescing around a candidate pretty quickly. I think that’s significant.

Second, when they began the announcement by giving clues (country of origin) on the balcony - and that this person was from North America (which btw I needed my friend to interpret because it’s all in Latin and I’m like “huh?”) I was floored. And that’s when that first personal feeling came in:

Upon hearing the announcement that we had a Pope who is American, I was surprised by how I immediately felt about that.

In short, not super excited at first.

I surprised myself a little in feeling that, and in the days since, I have tried to lean into why I felt that way at first glance.

What I’ve come up with is that while I’m normally all about “firsts” because they sometimes point towards progress, an American “first” can be a tricky two-sides-of-the-same-coin kind of feeling.

Most of the feelings I immediately felt could be characterized as anxious. We, as Americans, already take up so much global air in the room (literally, we also pollute the air), that the Papacy was a place where I could previously go and feel like “it’s not all about us” - “it’s about God, not us.”

I heard that some faces fell when the announcement of a North American pope came, and perhaps it’s because they were rooting for another candidate, but perhaps it’s because Catholics from other countries weren’t immediately thrilled, either.

Most of my recent feelings about America on the global stage have been pretty much negative and embarrassing. In my opinion, Donald Trump is an embarrassment to our country, our values, and especially, our Constitution. Every day I tune into the news I wince in a precursory “what the f*ck did he do now?” kind of way. How much more damage can we do globally under his man?

So, thrusting us further out into the spotlight was not a great feeling. It was like overhearing the drunk annoying guy at a bar and then there’s an announcement that karaoke is starting and he’s on deck to go first.

While I have no doubt that Pope Leo is nothing like our current President, more of the world’s attention on us at a time when we have exported crappy foods and crappy politics did not feel great.

That was the first feeling.

The second feeling is harder to put into words, honestly. My best way to describe it is that in hearing that it was an American threatened some of the “special-ness” about the papacy for me.

When I think about the Papacy, there is a bit of mystery there that is helped by the fact that no other Pope to date has come from the country that I live in. When I get worn down by the media and people at dinner parties harping on the Catholic Church in the US and all the tired discourse about it, I could at least cling to the Papacy as a way to make it about the global Church. So much of America rhetorically stops at the borders of the US when they comment on the Catholic Church and fails to take in the wider picture - the much, much wider picture of over a billion people globally and fairly diverse when you zoom out.

While I know Pope Leo will continue the “global-ness” of the Church, and clearly he has some great global cred having lived several decades in Peru where he also became a citizen, it’s hard when the earthly leader of the Church comes from here to make the focus about issues and people beyond the US Catholic discourse and rhetoric.

Moreover, the grief of the “special-ness” was not made better by such a quintessentially American reaction to the news.

When the memes and the interviews immediately began rolling in - which included things like images of Buc-ee’s superimposed in St. Peter’s Square, alongside a Costco, banter about which Chicago sports team he supports, and whether Communion wafers will now be deep dish pizzas, I was like, ugh, now even the papacy is going to be the butt of jokes about sports and box stores. It was, in a cringe sort of way, so American.

I liked the days when we had a Pope, and I didn’t know what the biggest box store chain in Argentina was.

I also just simply liked hearing and seeing more of a global Catholic Church color the Papacy. I’m a person who when visiting another country wants to go to church there and “see what they do.” Songs they sing. Images they adore. Traditions they tweak. Vestments they wear. While there is comfort in the same-ness of a Catholic Mass in other countries, there is a thrill at seeing how the same things we all espouse can have such different and beautiful expressions globally.

And if I’m being honest, up until now, I have kind of romanticized the papacy some. I recently finished Pope Francis’ autobiography, and wow, is it an adventure. Reading about his family’s roots coming over on a nearly sunk boat, the wars he witnessed, the “disappearances” of family and friends during Argentina’s civil war, and the prostitutes he grew up alongside in the barrios, who everyone knew and loved, it painted a picture with some elements that were entirely foreign to me, and I like that. It brought parts of the world’s history to the fore that we as Americans aren’t taught in school. And I liked that.

So, when they interviews panned over to the new Pope’s brother walking in a stereotypical Midwest suburb, pictures of him with his family, that looks like any other family you might sit next two at a deep dish restaurant, it was sweet, relatable, and yet kinda … anticlimactic?

I had the weird thought that we are approaching papacies where the earliest pictures of Pope’s won’t be grainy and rare black and white photos but instead hundreds or Kodak film photos from the 1980s with the ugly neon date stamped on them. With the advent of smartphones, are the first pictures of a future Pope going to be jpegs of him in a high chair smearing and flinging his lunch? Weird. Lol.

But for all of these weird feelings that swirled through my head in a matter of moments, since then, I’ve been able to see, and trust, why an American Pope happened exactly now, in this moment. For all my concerns about having a Pope who has possibly gassed up at Buc-ee’s, I will say this: This is the most compelling moment in history that we have needed a Pope to come from North America.

I know, I know, the papacy is not political and can’t be confined by political terms (because it doesn’t fit neatly into any of them). But the idea of this papacy being an antidote (or at least a foil character) to what we have going on politically in the US is somewhat hopeful - a feeling in such scarcity these days.

When a now-Pope seems to have shared an article where the first words in the title are “JD Vance is Wrong,” I feel a trickle of hope come in.

Of all the years in the Church’s 2,000 years of history, we have to ask: Why is the Holy Spirit choosing now for a North American pope?

My own answer to that is that the type of conservatism flourishing in this country today is the worst vein of conservativism that I can think of. It’s blown past the debates in the 90s around sweatshops and the dignity of laborers and further proceeded into even more dangerous and dark territory.

The type of conservatism today is the worst of its kind: It offends the dignity of the person and uses religious rhetoric to justify itself morally.

There’s being conservative and disagreeing. Then there’s being conservative and believing that God is cool with and guiding your actions such that you feel you have a moral duty to do things like ruining people’s lives, killing them, and treating them as disposable.

Worse, this type of conservatism we are dealing with today is a close cousin of nationalism, and in the US, our flavor of nationalism is very closely tied with Christian nationalism in a very dangerous way. It’s basically like taking two chemicals that are independently toxic and pouring them into one another to make them become explosive.

The problem with all of this is that NONE OF THE CONSERVATIVE RHETORIC AND ACTIONS WE ARE SEEING TODAY ACTUALLY REFLECT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A CHRISTIAN.

In a world where the Vice President (who is supposedly Catholic) talks about Church teaching as a way to justify his xenophobic hatred and deportations, SOMEONE with clout needs to step in and say, actually, YOU. ARE. WRONG.

While my progressive and moderate Catholic friends and I can talk about this ad nauseum online and in person, what we’re up against right now in the US is something that will either (a) take a lot of time to form a critical mass to overthrow (with a lot of damage done in the meantime) or (b) need a person with much more power to step in, set the record straight, and shift the minds and hearts of people into the critical mass that says, “No, you cannot co-opt my religion for your personal agenda.”

Far too long, the Right has co-opted what it means to be Christian in this country, and now with JD Vance, he is an ill portrayal of what it means to be Catholic.

Now more than ever, we need a prominent voice who speaks Truth to power and who exemplifies what Christianity is actually about.

If you want to call that a political commentary or analysis, sure, go ahead. But for me, I call it a move by the Holy Spirit that returns the psyche of America (Christian, Catholic, and otherwise) back to the actual way to live out the teachings of Jesus Christ. We need a strong religious figure right now who can take a bastardized and incorrect promulgation of Christianity and get it back to the Person and values that it is really about: the unconditional love of Jesus Christ for all people.

So, I’m ending with hope.

As much as my eyes will roll out of my head as we have a typically American response to this announcement, I am willing to tolerate it if we have a future ahead of us where America being known as a “Christian country” actually means it is held accountable to what it truly means to be Christian.

Usually, at this revelation, the conversation happening prior goes on indefinite pause because if you find out someone got a car from Oprah, agenda be damned, you have to stop and get that story.

It’s a story I’ve told dozens of times in the more than a decade since it happened:

How I was unemployed at the time; filled out a “Are you Oprah’s biggest fan?” (yes) inquiry for her last season of The Oprah Show; how I got a barely descript email requesting my drivers license, social security number, and other personal details; how, upon telling my brother, he thought I had just emailed away my identity; how I called Harpo Studios (RIP Chicago building) and they said yes, it was in fact a legit email; how I found out I got two tickets (my mom and I, and yes, she got a car, too) for a “random” show in November; how when we got there, the first of two (the only hear to film two) Oprah’s Favorite Things Show was just letting you from filming; how we thought we had just missed it; how my heart sank when backstage, we filled out an index card asking for two questions we’d like to ask Dr. Phil or Suze Orman; how my heart swelled when I saw Oprah - in the flesh - for the first time; how after an ornament was thrown on stage, the whole stage birthed Christmas right before our eyes; how it started snowing - inside!; how I had what I can only describe as jumping-induced amnesia of what happened after that; how I fully embraced turning into a SNL skit trope; and how the hour or so that followed, complete with Josh Groban, Johnny Mathis, and lots more gifts was one of the most magical moments in my entire life.

And yes, Oprah paid that taxes. Since I was making around 20-some thousand that year, my tax return based on a “good faith estimate” was the cherry on top of all of it.

I met some incredible people in that audience, some of whom I still connect with regularly today via Facebook, including an Audience Members-Only group for that show that still lives on. Good people. Everyone who was chosen for those two audiences that day has done some incredible and selfless work in this world.

One little gift that circulated among us at our “reunion” the year after where we spent the better part of a day going around Chicago and doing good deeds was a frame of a quote from Oprah that she said that day, after the taping had concluded. To paraphrase, she encouraged us to realize that something magical and wonderful could happen to us when we least expect it. Engendering that in a group of full-grown adults who had seen some things in life was like finding a seed of childlike wonder that had not been nurtured for so long.

Some folks asked if they could raffle the car off for their nonprofit, to raise money. Oprah, in her infinite wisdom, responded clearly and with a sense of seriousness. The car was ours to do whatever we wanted with, so technically, yes, we could. But, she encouraged us, to instead try and simply receive the gift as many of us were so used to giving and not simply allowing a gift to come to us. Such a hard lesson to learn among a group of do-ers, some of whom, deep down inside, felt unworthy of such a luxury. It is so much easier to deny oneself and help another than it is to face the true depth of what it means to be given to, and to just accept it and let that be it.

I learned a lot that day from Oprah about what it means to just let joy sink in. To be given to and to not sit with unworthiness. To foster the childlike belief that something incredible can really be just around the corner, well into adulthood.

I hope you’ll continue reading this multi-part series of posts about the life of the Oprah car and ultimately, it’s recent death, which I’m still grieving and learning from.

This cars not “just a car.” It was not just a heavy heap of metal and plastic that I was grateful got me from point A to B everyday.

For me, and for when it happened in my life, it was a lot deeper than that.

Stay tuned, friends.