Episode 20 - Surrendering to Mystery with Eric K. Carr

Intersex author, poet, artist, bridge-builder, and secular ritualist Eric K. Carr shares his experience, wisdom, and love of mystery.

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Transcript

Welcome to season two of Barely Christian, Fully Christian. I'm your host, Anni Ponder, and I'm so glad you've stopped by for the conversation about loving Jesus, being repulsed by the un-Christ likeness of so much of what the world sees from Christianity, and my personal favorite, honoring the Holy Spirit as the Divine Mother, or as I call her, Mama God.

Today, I am so jazzed to introduce you to my guest Eric K. Carr. Together, we dive deep into the beauty of surrendering to mystery. As the world around us gets more and more rigid, clinging to the hope that certainty will guide us home, the artists, poets, and dreamers among us are here to point the way deep into the beautiful territory of mystery. Welcome, I’m so glad you’re here.

Anni: Eric K. Carr is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, author, artist, secular ritualist, and interfaith minister. Eric uses his academic background in theology and mindfulness, ritual certifications, and his perspective as an intersex author and poet to build bridges between the sacred and mundane. He does this through the philosophy of Everyday Divinas, a process he developed that interprets the entire world as a sacred text.

Oh, I am so, so, so delighted to welcome you here today, Eric. Thank you so much for joining us here.

Eric: Thank you for having me, Anni. This is a great pleasure. I love your podcast, so I'm very excited to be here.

Anni: Oh, thank you. Well, is there anything that you would add just straight away that didn't show up in your short form bio, by way of introducing yourself and how people can get a kind of an on ramp to this amazing person that you are this, I see you as kind of a beautiful tapestry with so many threads.

Anything else to mention before we get going?

Eric: Well, we probably need to define intersex for people. Intersex is someone who is born with both male and female traits. So there's a huge spectrum of that.

For me, it's a chromosome translocation.

So intersex is when someone is a natural trait, it can be genetic, it can be hormonal, it can be physical, but it's a biological trait that people are born with that gives them ambiguous sexuality or ambiguous sex. So in my case, I have a pretty rare form. It's a chromosome translocation along with internal ovaries, even though I was born externally male. So when I hit puberty, my gonads did not do anything, but my little internal ovaries that we didn't know existed all of a sudden started producing estrogen. So I had lived my life up until that point, totally as just like what I thought was a normal boy, and then started developing like a girl.

So that's rare. What's way less rare is like androgen insensitivity syndrome, where a girl or a woman with XY chromosomes is born totally looking female, but then never hits puberty or they have internal testes. And that's very common. And people would have you believe that it's really rare, but it's actually about 1.7% of the population. So it's about as common as red hair or green eyes. It's just most of us, you can't tell. And a lot of us, we don't even know until all of a sudden something starts happening with puberty. And it is biological proof that there's more than just male and female.

Anni: Oh, yes. And you're absolutely right.

In my experience, I had thought this was just an incredibly rare thing. And then I've just begun to learn about it. And actually, just full disclosure, you are the first person I have ever spoken to who's out to me as intersex. So thanks for helping me learn and for being so open about your experience.

Eric: Oh, absolutely.

Anni: So I want to tell people how I learned about Eric. I was going around on my Substack feed, as I love to do these days, and I saw this man in a bathrobe. And I just clicked on the video. I was like, I wonder what this guy is going to say?

And there you were, helping people to come close and learn what it means to be intersex and also involving us in the story that you found yourself in in that moment, which was going to a school board and making a case for, correct me if I get the details wrong, but why they should not fire a teacher that they had suspended for being intersex. Was that right?

Eric: No, all he did, he was a science teacher, and all he did was teach about intersex in his class, and even only one variation. He just showed slides of people that have androgen insensitivity syndrome and said, are these men or women? They have XY chromosomes, but they identify as women, and they have internal testes. This is called androgen insensitivity syndrome, and these people are intersex, which he did that in response to Trump's executive order saying that there's only male and female.

It just blew up into this major right-wing attack on him, and he's in a conservative district in the greater metropolitan Tucson area where I live. He's in Marana, and Marana is old farmland, and a lot of retirees, and is generally a red spot in a generally blue area of southern Arizona. He got into a ton of trouble and got a lot of press, and I woke up to that news that morning and just could not believe it. As soon as I read it, I was just like, I gotta make a video for my people on Substack just to say, hey, people like me exist, and this guy's gonna get fired for just saying that I exist and I will not be erased, and he deserves to teach his job as a science teacher. It just kind of blew up. It had something like 40,000 views on Reddit, and it had thousands and thousands of views on all the different social media and on Substack and everything, and it kind of took over my life. After that, I was invited to speak at the Marana School board, I was invited to speak at the County Democratic Party, and then a national organization has asked me to speak for them as well, and I've been invited on this podcast.

Anni: Of all the notoriety, Barely Christian, Fully Christian has invited you. And that's, thank you so much for doing that because when I saw you there in your bathrobe and I just felt like I need to know who this person is and what is he saying to the world so earnestly, I was drawn into this story and then I followed as you were heard and the school board decided not to fire the teacher, right?

Thank you. Thank you.

Eric: It was it was amazing. Incredible and think of.

Anni: And thinking about all of the students who are there to witness that story unfold and how, I don't know, just the million points of light that will continue to go out from your decision to just be yourself and educate other people about who you are. I'm so excited.

Thank you for doing that.

Eric: Oh, you know, I feel like I'm in a way doing it to all the kids that represent who I was when I was in school. I was horrifically bullied. I grew up in the rural South and come from an extremely conservative family. We were actually kicked out of the Southern Baptist Church for being too fundamentalist because my mom told the preacher when he said, God loves the sinner but hates the sin, she held up her Bible and said, Esau hath I hated, God hates sin and God hates sinners and we had to leave.

And so, you know, that was my enculturation. And I have always known I was intersex. My very earliest memories are of being both. And that's how I feel. For a lot of people, intersex is just their kind of diagnosis and their sex biologically. But for me, it's also my identity and my gender.

It's both for me, but I feel kind of, you know, and so I don't really care about pronouns personally. But when I was a kid, I just knew I was like, why are people choosing to be one or the other? What a limited, you know, I want to use all the crayons in my crayon box, not just the blue ones, you know? And I just felt so ridiculously limited by what I would come to know as the male-female binary. And I did not believe that everybody else wasn't like me. I thought, oh, well, I just, I'm just being myself and everybody else has believed this crazy lie that they have to choose one or the other. It wasn't until I finally went through sex ed in fourth grade that I figured out like, holy moly, I'm different. And maybe I shouldn't speak so much about this. But I played with Tonka Trucks and I played in the mud and I played with My Little Ponies and Barbies, you know, I would dress as a girl, I dressed as a boy, I would play house as the dad or the mom or the cousin or whatever. It didn't matter to me. And it was so liberating. So when I first hit puberty and started developing as a girl, I was like, finally, people are going to believe me. And I thought it was the most beautiful, amazing, sacred thing. I was so, so, so happy.

And I had had some kind of mystical Christian experiences early in childhood. So to me, this felt like God being on my side. And but then I went to the beach, we lived on the Gulf Coast and I went to the beach with my breasts out and which I had done my whole life up until that point. And then it was just like, I might as well have declared that I was a Satanist and was there to murder babies. You know, like people were so cruel and shocked and disgusted and people were pointing and mothers were shielding their kids' eyes. And it was very clear that I was a freak. And so then after that summer, it developed over a summer. I went back to school and it just got worse and worse and worse. And the more I developed, the more the taunting and the name calling and the bullying and, you know, I got beaten up a few times. It was and changing in the locker room was absolute hell. And so and my nickname from seventh grade on was booby. And so, you know, I had breasts, which I eventually had a double mastectomy to correct.

So, so I feel like that has a that's a foundational part of my theology, I did eventually go to seminary. And so this being such a huge part of my life and my identity really informed the way that I interpreted scripture and interpreted history and interpreted. So to someone else reading the book of Daniel, it's just the book about somebody who had a lot of faith. To me, I'm like, Daniel was a eunuch. He was the prettiest boy in all of Israel, you know, with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. And the chief of the eunuchs was in love with him. And he was an astrologer. This is so, so not the story of Daniel that I grew up with in kindergarten. I was just like, this is such a queer story. And I felt so empowered by that.

And, and the stories of like, Jonathan and Jesus saying that there are born eunuchs, because I had been living that experience. I saw it living in the Bible. And I think that really helped me feel like it was no longer a curse. I still felt kind of at war with my body, which is why I cut my breasts off. If I lived in another culture in society, I probably would not have, you know, mutilated my body. But you know, I was trying to conform because society is very binary, and it still is. So for me to speak out, I feel like we're going back in that direction to rural Florida in the 80s, where it was hell for me. And, and what does it teach those intersex kids? Chances are, Marana High School has about 200 intersex students. What does it do to them? And that's just, that's just intersex students. That's not kids with Guernica Mesho, or with body dysmorphia, or kids who are trans, or anything like that. This is just intersex kids. So there are probably a few hundred kids struggling with not fitting into the male-female binary. And they've just had all of their fears reified by the president, and by the school board, you know, suspending their teacher.

And they're being taught that they're not allowed to have scientific inquiry and question the status quo. And the bullies have just been empowered. And I just had to speak out about it. And once I did, I've been out as an intersex person since 1997, when I first got my blood karyotype and saw that I didn't have X, Y chromosomes. And so I didn't find out I had ovaries until maybe three years ago. And so I, because there's very little coverage for this in medicine, and I didn't really hit puberty. I hit like 12-year-old girl puberty, and then stayed there until I was 30. My body doesn't produce any sex hormones at all except for trace amounts in estrogen. So I started developing osteoporosis. I had no body hair, no body odor. There were several metabolic functions that weren't quite working because they rely on hormones. And I wasn't making them. And so it wasn't until 30 that, you know, almost 10 years after I found out I was intersex, that I finally got approved to see an endocrinologist who put me on testosterone to kind of combat some of that stuff.

And also, so that I could conform to something. I loved being androgynous. And I loved, I personally loved it, but it was still, I got called ma'am on the phone because my voice never deepened. I was sexualized a lot because I was this kind of freak that people thought was attractive, but in a really weird way, you know, and so I was fetishized.

And my partner at the time was, he kind of took advantage of that and did a lot to undermine my self-esteem. But I, so I changed my body too. And now I've got, you know, facial hair and body hair. And I went through all of the same puberty stuff. And so to get back to your original question about how it forms theology and also morality, I went, my endocrinologist said, Eric, you're going to be the only guy you know that's going to go through puberty and menopause at the same time. And I did. But the thing that I remember most is that for the first time in my life, I was so angry. Before that, I had no testosterone. I didn't have cortisol. I was just sitting there being hurt all the time. If somebody did something, it would hurt my feelings. And I really, truly believe that that was the estrogen. You know, this estrogen is a connecting to me. Having the estrogen helps me connect and feel gentle and kind and mothering and all of those things that we call feminine. And then all of a sudden, I went on estrogen blockers and on testosterone, and I got pissed for the first time in my life. Just so angry. And I also, before that, only having estrogen. Sexually, sex and love were completely conflated in my mind. I couldn't imagine why anybody would want to have a hookup or a one-night stand. Why would you ever want to be with someone that you weren't absolutely in love with, you know? And then all of a sudden, I had testosterone, and I was like, oh, that's what horniness feels like. You know, I had never experienced them until I was in my 30s, you know? And that's part of the puberty thing, you know? And so I started thinking, so I had all this shame around, like, oh, now I'm horny and pissed off at the world, and I'm getting angry at people, and I don't know how to deal with this, and I'm resentful, and I'm having a hard time forgiving people, and it felt like my hormones were eroding a sense of morality that I had because testosterone is kind of the mean hormone.

It's the angry thing, and sure, we need that in our society for the warriors and the defenders, but to suddenly go from female to male in the blink of an eye like that when, and I didn't know anybody else who had gone through anything like that. So I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know, you know, and this was in the early 2000s where I just, there wasn't a lot of literature out there, and there weren't a lot of outspoken intersex people with my story, and so I, certainly nobody that had gone to seminary and was in active Christian ministry and going through this and having to sit there and be like, oh, I've been preaching love and forgiveness, and now I hate these people. So it was a true faith crisis.

Now looking back on it, it gives me a lot of compassion for the struggles of men who have a hard time having empathy for the feminine experience, and I see where so much toxic masculinity comes from a drug. You know, it comes from testosterone, which is the angry horny chemical, you know, which is necessary for some things, but it sure isn't great for my spirituality.

Anni: I remember you saying when we first chatted on the phone, this is a substance that maybe even should be regulated, or I don't remember the words that you used as well, but it caught my attention. I had never considered that.

But as we're looking at what's happening right now, okay, and so to put a date stamp on this, we're recording this conversation on the 5th of March in 2025. So if you're listening to this later in time, you can look back and see what's happening right now for us. What I have noticed, and what I have, as I'm mulling over the events unfolding in our nation and in the world, is to me, it seems like we have such a backlash against things that we have attributed to femininity, and I'd be totally open to debate whether or not those things are actually feminine, or we've just decided they are, but whatever the case, things like empathy and nurture and collaboration and going slow and thinking about the future and building bridges, all of those things seem to be more and more regarded as weak. Like you were saying before we started recording about the recent proclamation from Elon about empathy being a weakness.

I mean, so you are somebody who has lived experiencing what it's like to be treated by the world as though you are a woman and also as though you are a man and you have experienced both and, and probably there's some stuff in the middle there too. What have you perceived that's rising to the surface right now about why do you think we're seeing so many people having a fear of what is feminine and hating it?

Eric: Well, I think that that's very nuanced and intersectional. There are lots of contributing factors. When Elon Musk goes on Joe Rogan and says, quote, that the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. That's an attack on empathy, you know, and I still have tremendous empathy, even though I'm on estrogen blockers. And I'm so grateful for those formative years of my life, you know, 18 years of my life I spent with only estrogen. And I think that really, it really helped me, you know, even women have more testosterone than I make, you know, because I don't make any. So usually a human profile, depending on your gender is or your sex is, you know, a mixture of DHEA and all the different hormones and estrogen and progesterone and testosterone and all that kind of stuff. I only naturally make estrogen. That's it. So I didn't get the mixture that typical people have. So I got to experience 18 years of my life only having estrogen and oxytocin and the bonding kinds of things. And I'm so grateful for that.

And I think it's scary to people because it's way easier to be pissed off than it is to have empathy, you know, and for me developing that what I consider a gift and a skill now of this estrogenic kind of, and I won't say female, I'll say estrogenic mind view and worldview. And you know, that was my whole reality. That's the way my brain worked. And I am so grateful I learned to have those kinds of connections and to learn how sex and intimacy and love can all be woven together as this beautiful three strand cord that they don't have to be divided. I mean, don't need to be conflated like I had before, but it opened the door for sacred sexuality to me and made monogamy so easy for me, you know, and got to see the beauty of that. And I got to see how it can enrich your relationship instead of being the central thing in a poverty mindset about it or lack or abundance or whatever, you know, it reframed all of these things for me because I never had the chemicals to teach me otherwise. I didn't have the body that had those urges. Well, I think that's threatening. I think that when I come along and I say, no, actually too much testosterone is a bad thing. Have you ever heard of roid rage? You know, like don't be a dick. The reason we don't say don't be a vagina, you know, to say that somebody is being mean is because testosterone is the mean chemical. And when we want to be, when we want to say someone is being effeminate, we call them, you know, we do call them a word for a vagina as a slur. But I mean, I feel like that's part of this masculinity that is what people get to when they talk about toxic masculinity. And I don't think masculinity is bad at all. Like I said, we need warriors and we need protectors and we need, we need virility and we need shit and we need all of that stuff as a society, you know, but toxic masculinity is when you take that so far that you're you sever yourself from the whole being. And why would anybody do that? And growing up as both, I got past both. So I think there's also a push against it because I do think that as women have found liberation and are getting closer, I mean, women are in no way equal, of course. We need podcasts like yours.

ideas. It used to be that the only messaging you heard was about maleness and patriarchy and God is a male and the apex of every kind of being is the male and the providers are male and the protectors are male and the nurturers and you know everything is male.

You know that the without a man, a woman can't do anything. The woman can't be a mother. The woman can't provide for her children or nurture the children. We're not the man providing for her you know. I mean women weren't even allowed to have credit cards until the 70s in America. So women weren't allowed to vote in Sweden until like the 80s or 90s. It's crazy how entrenched this idea is and it's being dismantled and I feel like I don't remember what the philosophical term for it is but it's kind of like when the soda machine stops working the people are desperate to keep using it. So instead of just saying oh well let's try some other machine or let's try tea you know they sit there and they bang on the soda, smash the buttons and they reach in and they get mad in there and they try desperately to make it work. I just did this with my iPhone. I'm the type of person that stays with my phone way too long and I finally got to the point where my phone just wasn't working anymore because it was old and because I waited so long it took two days for my old phone to back up to my new phone. So for two days I had no phone. Well I so desperately wanted my old phone to work. I just kept trying to use it and kept trying to use it and kept trying to use it and we do this in relationships. We do this all the time and I think people are doing that with patriarchy because it's what they know.

That's what they have believed in and once you pull the thread on the sweater of the thing that we're swimming in and that everybody believes is true then you start questioning everything else and that's a really difficult place to be and you've also got the structures that benefit from it and they want to keep those benefits. I think that's why my dad is so. Absolutely.

Anni: I think you've said something in our initial conversation about one of the reasons that you left your place in evangelical Christianity was because it was so self-edifying or like it couldn't stand any sort of challenging because it stood on this like, these aren't your words, but like this house of cards and if you're going to pull one out, the whole thing crumbles and we can't maintain our faith if we ask questions around the basis of the structure.

Eric: Yeah, when I left ministry the first time. So I was the head of an international online ministry, and it was enormous. And I was in my 20s when I started it. And it just kind of took off, there was nothing like it. There were no other queer-friendly evangelical churches online when I started it. And so it exploded.

And we had plants, church plants all over the world. And my main guy in Pakistan was kidnapped by his family in 2004, 2005. And I had been wrestling with my faith. Before this, I went to the world's only queer-inclusive evangelical fundamentalist seminary. And we learned about creation science. And we still believe that the Bible was the inherent word of God.

It's been mistranslated a bunch of times. And so I actually led a tour to Glen Rose, Texas, to show the fossilized dinosaur footprints and how they're with human footprints. And the world is only 6,000 years old. I was really drinking the Kool-Aid. And because my faith was wrapped up in the idea that there had been a literal Eden, which I needed to believe, because when I went in seminary and read, I had already had these experiences through childhood reading the Bible. But then when I went in seminary and started really dissecting it in Hebrew and in Greek, and I looked at Genesis through the original language and saw that original creation was both male and female, I saw myself. And I couldn't believe it. And so I needed to believe that that was true.

And also, so one of the things that my chromosome translocation does is it doesn't just give me ovaries and different hormones. It also produces a ton of cholesterol. So when they first figured out that there was something different about me when I was 12 and I hit puberty and all that stuff, they did all these blood tests and discovered that I had horrifically high bad cholesterol and zero good cholesterol, like none at all. So my doctor at 12 told me, if you don't give up all cholesterol, you're going to die. By the time you're 25, you'll have a heart attack. I said, I'd rather die than not be able to eat whatever I wanted to eat. And I rebelled against it and snuck food under the trailer because we were poor. So my life was falling apart and my grandparents were dying and it was just a horrible time in my life.

But the stories about things like Daniel and Adam and this kind of metaphysical or mystical connection that I had had to God for my whole life kind of carried me through that. So then when I was 17, 25 wasn't so far away anymore and I became vegan. And I still am today, 30 some years later, 33 years later now that I'm 50. But when I was in my 20s and seminary and reading in Hebrew, this really reading it with a lens, I saw myself in there and I was desperate for representation and to see myself in what I considered to be the word of God.

And I thought, this is divine creation. This is peak creation is an intersex vegan. And I needed that when I was a month old. And this was also in the 90s and I was the time I was identifying as gay because I still present as mostly male and I have a penis and I was with a male partner.

And my mom, she literally tried to do an honor killing when she found out that I was gay.

She came after me with a gun.

My parents were the worst at this point and my dad called me at work and said, don't go home. Your mom is waiting for you there and she's going to kill you. You need to get out of there. And so I did. And it was true to get my stuff. I had to go back with the police.

And then we had no contact for a couple of years. I finally gave her my mailing address at my mother-in-law's house and she started sending me books and anti-gay books and things. And then she started sending me my childhood belongings burned with notes about how I'm And so seeing myself like this armed me against that. It gave me a shield, you know, and it felt like God was giving me something to show people. I was okay. And so I showed my mom, I'm like, look, and by this time I had the blood karyotype, so I knew that I was intersex.

I'm like, look, mama, I am closer to God's original creation than you are. So you can't judge me.

How'd that go over?

Yeah, that wasn't cool. And then I was like, you can't judge me for being gay because I'm both. I'm not just male. So how can I be homosexual if I'm not even homo-anything? I'm both, you know, homo means one, homogeneous. I can't be that.

That did not go over well with my mom at all. But it gave me an inner courage to feel like I was doing the right thing. So I was very invested in Genesis and the Bible being true. And in that vein, I got into kind of the miracles of faith and healing and stuff like that, kind of like televangelists these days.

And so to depend on that, I had to believe God's original will for us is Eden and that disease is part of the curse and the fall of man and that Jesus came and redeemed the curse so that we are no longer under the curse of the law.

And so I had to believe that to believe in everything. That was the central framework of my being. That I could prove that it was okay to be who I was and it was okay to love and it was our mandate to be good neighbors. I could prove it with the Bible to all of these people that I saw as hateful bigots and hypocrites. And that I could affirm all the people who felt rejected from the church.

So I put that out online and there was obviously a huge demand for it because in the 90s, nobody else was really saying that on that medium. The United Church of Christ and some factions of Methodist and Episcopal and Presbyterian churches had started to have some open churches and things like that, but it was not widespread. And those were only in metropolitan areas.

And so there were people and they certainly weren't in Pakistan and Africa. And so we had an India and the Philippines and we had all these people all over the world that had been rejected from church and needed to hear that the Bible didn't hate them, that God didn't hate them.

And I felt like I had proved that. Well, back then it was very black and white for me.

I had to believe all of it or none of it. And so when I started reading through the Bible, it took me years and years because I don't speak or read Greek or Hebrew.

But I knew how to do it slowly. And so I finally got, I don't even remember now if it was first or second Peter in Greek and came across the term of Tartarus that he used for hell. I was writing a book on how I didn't really believe in the idea of eternal damnation in hell and biblical proof for that. And across Peter and the word translated as hell there is Tartarus. Well, I had studied comparative religion and religious history and everything. So I knew Tartarus was a pagan idea. And I was like, wait a minute, this is Peter, the guy who said you had to convert to Judaism and no longer be pagan using writing about Tartarus as if it's real. Either he's using it metaphorically and contextually, or he believes in Tartarus, a pagan idea. Which one is it? And if he's speaking in metaphor, what else in the Bible is metaphor? And I did not have room for that in my faith. I needed that certainty. I was addicted to certainty. And I think because of the chaos of my early life, I just absolutely depended on certainty and on knowing to the degree that once I started pulling that thread and the whole thing unraveled, I was left having no identity. My entire framework, my whole reason for living and being was this ministry. And now Basim, my friend and my apostle in Pakistan had been kidnapped by his Islamic fundamentalist family and was probably going to die for what I was questioning. And so I took a year-long sabbatical and it was so dark and so heavy and I just found myself flailing.

And that gives me a lot of compassion for people like my mom. She told me a couple of years ago, the only thing that keeps going is knowing that someday I'm going to die and wake up in the arms of Jesus and everyone will finally get what they deserve. Her need for some kind of divine justice is the only way she makes sense of suffering in the world.

And so I feel like, who am I to take that from her? I know what it did to me in my early 30s. What would it do to her at 80-something when her entire life has been this? I just don't think I could do that to her and even though it would probably help humanity. But I think that's what we're getting to. That's why people are so afraid to question what everybody thinks is true because that opens the door to all these other questions. And as a culture, as modernists, we are addicted to certainty and black and white and definitions and clear boundaries and we are terrified of mystery. And once we start dismantling the patriarchy that everybody assumes is absolutely rock solid, they're like, well crap, what am I going to replace it with? What else am I wrong about? And what are the things that I have done in this framework that have harmed people and how do I make amends for that? It calls into question every part of your being if your identity is built on the patriarchy or American patriotism and superiority or white privilege or whatever? You're asking people to deconstruct their whole identity and the whole framework that they interact with the world through.

Anni: Right. It is so upending or upsetting to consider that maybe I have some fallacies that some of my worldview is based on.

And if I were to address those and try to correct them, then would the thing just fall over? For so many people whose worldview is built on, first of all, the idea that there's scarcity and not enough resource, and we have to take, and then that just turns into greed, as we have seen. Then the idea that, well, if I considered, if the Bible, if that's my foundation, isn't 100% watertight, then I'd have to throw the whole thing out and none of it is helpful. And then that's terrifying.

And so what I'm going to do is just build walls around it and protect it and sanctify it, which is no way to interact with a sacred text whatsoever that wants to be a conversation and a library of poetry and novellas and all the things. And so I can so relate to even what you're saying about your octogenarian mother who just needs things to be a certain way so that she can then feel safe and that there is justice in the world and that all is not lost and the people who are deserving of God's wrath will then receive it one day and I'll stand back and feel, I don't know how people really imagine they would feel watching other people be tortured endlessly, but the need for certainty I think you've touched on is a drug that just takes us to terrible places.

Eric: Yeah. One of the things that really deconstructed my faith during that time is there was a book that came out around then called How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill or Cahill. I don't know how you pronounce it. It was an absolutely explosive book for me because it went into Celtic Christianity and St. Patrick and all of the stuff that I had learned even in seminary I found wasn't true. And then that was at the same time as The New Kind of Christian Books came out by Brian McLaren and I was just constantly reading all of this stuff and I was going to conferences where people were talking about emerging Christianity. I was friends with Tammy Faye Baker and her son Jay, I don't know still, but her son Jay was way out there doing like really liberal Christianity and amazing things and asking all sorts of questions. And she was just, she's still to this day, the most loving person I've ever met. She just embodied love and was so absolutely raked over the coals by people and made fun of it. I had made fun of that and to get to know her and see how loving and kind and open. But she was saying that she couldn't judge gay people because she had to love them and she truly loved me for who I was. And no other mainline Christian at that point had done anything close to that.

And I had kind of always had to be in the shadows when I went to these conferences and things. And for her, she's like, well, that's the mystery of grace. I was just like, oh, mystery, no. How do you deal with mystery? And I don't know if this is public knowledge or not, but when everything happened between her and her ex-husband, she really did a lot of inner work and realized how she had enabled it. And so much of that was she had invested all of her identity into being part of this. And so that was instrumental too in me kind of questioning this. Like, okay, if everything that I believed about Tammy Fay was wrong and everything I believed about grace and certainty. And after she said that, I was like, well, where's that in the Bible? And so I just happened upon the part in the book of Acts where Peter and Paul are like totally arguing with each other and want to have a big fight about it in Jerusalem. And I was like, wait a minute. Peter and Paul didn't even agree on major theological issues. One of them has to be wrong. So who do we follow? They didn't agree and one of them was wrong. Then who am I to think I have all the answers, which then exploded even more.

So one by one by one, as I started asking the questions, earnestly, I just found my entire framework of existence collapsing. And as Viktor Frankl says, the thing, what we're all searching for at the end of the day is meaning. And the context of our spirituality is what gives so much meaning to our work. And that's a hundredfold for ministers because your work isn't just a job. It's your vocation. It's your calling. It's your reason for being. It's what you're supposed to do. And then to start questioning that. And there's so much pressure. I mean, if you actually walk the talk to not tell people a lie and to not give people fluff, not make it a performance and to have it be genuine.

And how do I have this major platform and talk about my doubts and my insecurities and my fears when I've got people out there that work for me dying, possibly because of this. I should say that Basim's family did release him, he had to promise that he would not raise his son as a Christian. And we had to do this whole covert operation to get him to another country where he ended up going to a YWAM and all sorts of stuff. But I couldn't do it anymore.

I just couldn't do it. And I feel like it was such a dark time. Again, who am I to ask somebody else to go through that? And yet I have to balance that with advocacy and for standing up for people who are being hurt by these ideas. So I can have compassion on people who are struggling with the dismantling of a patriarchy. But I still can also say we still need to tear this stuff down. And it's

Anni: and it's time like it's the moment in history right now where we have to.

Eric: Absolutely. And I feel like the printing press is what toppled the power of the Roman Catholic Church and allowed these new ideas to disseminate all over the world.

Well, the internet is the new printing press. And so now we're in an even more global society and other ideas are coming in and we're seeing how other things work and people are traveling. Like I went to, you know, I've studied tea and tea culture at the National Tea Culture Institute in Hongzhou, China. And so I've been to China a few times and I have never once seen a homeless person because they take care of their homeless people. You know, I see what communal living offers the world. Before that, I'd heard all this stuff about the evils of Communist China, but then I went there and I was like, okay, I'm not going to judge a whole people based on the government. I don't want to be judged for the Iraq war because I didn't support that. You know, so why would I judge a billion people based on what their government is doing? You know, but I saw how the ideals of that government made for an absolutely beautiful society where every single person was taken care of. We don't have that here. We are totally happy in a meritocracy to throw the people that we don't think deserve things under the bus and to call them parasites or welfare moms or whatever or welfare queen and to demonize them for money. And in China, they have figured that out. And I went to Norway, same thing. There are no homeless people in Norway because Norway takes care of them. And so now that we live in a culture where we can travel, if we're aware when we travel, we see, oh, every culture and country has something to offer and they all have a shadow side too, just like every person. So that starts dismantling patriotism. I'm like, why do I, you know, and I live 60 miles north of Mexico. So I spend a lot of time in Mexico and I have a lot of friends that live in Mexico and I love Mexican culture and Mexico is not the cartels. And we can learn a lot from Mexico about families and about responsibility and about vibrance and rest and art and so much. But if we're so putting ourselves at the top of the pyramid that we don't want to do anything to lose that privilege, we're going to miss out on all the stuff the rest of the race.

Anni: Oh, I just resonate so deeply with, um, looking at how other cultures, how other civilizations have solved the problems that we all face. And, uh, I'm, I'm turning a, uh, I don't want to say critical eye because, you know, Jesus' words about like, Hey, judging is not a great idea, but I'm looking hard right now at, um, at what capitalism has become. And I, you know, I'm not an economist and I don't necessarily have any credentials that would give me confidence to say much about it, except for what I see is, you know, I've been reading the Sermon on the Mount a lot because I want to be informed by Jesus Himself rather like more, more than anything else. I want His words ringing in my ear.

So I read it as often as I can, not, not every day religiously, but quite often I read the Sermon on the Mount. And it has struck me recently as all of this is unfolding in our nation, that Jesus said you can serve God or money but never both, and how I think America has just picked money. I really think that's, if we boil it down, we are bowing at the foot of the almighty dollar. And this is where we are now. We are literally trying to erase entire groups of people and deport our neighbors and all the things that we, that we're so, um, so sad about today. And, and I really think it's just because of our obsession with money. And if Jesus were here, I know he would have some very pointed words.

Eric: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I look at the money changers and the Pharisees and I'm just like, that's what we are promoting right now. But I have to tell you, this isn't a new thing. When I was in early ministry, I think I had finished seminary at this point, but I went to a conference that was only for pastors and Christian leaders. And it was about having a successful church and things like this. And it was a pastors conference and they talked about all sorts of things. And I could not believe how much of it had to deal with book sales and how to invest and running your church like a business and the pastor as a CEO.

But I went to this one, I'm not going to say who it was, but it was a big, very well-known national leader out of Florida who was talking about their history and how they were just kind of on local access TV. And then the whole Anita Bryant thing happened with the anti-gay message. And they jumped on that and started preaching against the dangers of homosexuality and the gay lifestyle. And he said it was as if the windows of heaven had opened above us and we were swimming in money. He said, what I learned from that is that nothing will galvanize the troops like a common enemy. So give your congregation a common enemy and so that they will be 100% behind you and support you 100%. And the coffers of heaven will open because they will want to throw money at this problem to defend your church against the enemy and to defend God against evil. And I was just like, I cannot imagine Jesus saying that, you know. I could not believe he's actually saying, find an enemy that you can persecute because that will make you rich. And that is exactly what his message was. And I talked to some other people there and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. They were all excited about picking the issue that they were going to demonize so that people would start getting money to them because they need to support the war. And it is how to monetize the culture wars. And now that's mainstream. That is the playbook for marketing, for politics, for church, for so much. If you don't send $5 now, then X will have. And it's, I think you're absolutely right that this, you know, this country worships money. And that is the end goal of capitalism. It is about capital.

Anni: It, I mean, it's just there.

Eric: Christianity has been weaponized for that, and it's so profitable. You have these megachurches everywhere, and it's become so entrenched and intertwined with blessing in religious terminology that you're blessed, and therefore that is a sign of God's approval, and therefore what you're doing is not just okay, but actually righteous by tearing people down.

Anni: Yeah. And you have God's seal of approval because we can show your bank account is going up and up. And so therefore, oh, the prosperity gospel is just so, so devoid of soul. I just don't know how people conflate that with following Jesus and look at themselves in the mirror every day and believe this is truly me doing God's work in the world because God wants me to have comforts and be wealthy.

What gospels are you reading? I don't understand. That's not the Jesus I know.

Eric: Yeah. I think it is the Jesus that America has created, and now is all over the world. I've also traveled in Africa, and it's the same thing there. The American mega churches have just gone, and the proselytes of the National Prayer Breakfast and all of this kind of stuff have gone all over the world to kind of preach this very money-centered, power-centered, male-centered doctrine.

And now that's why the Anglican church in Africa is totally on board in some countries with the death penalty for homosexuality. And that's just heartbreaking to me, and it's not going to change until enough people speak out about it. And it's not going to change if we're demonizing empathy.

Yeah, that's an absolute strategy, and also to make femininity wrong and weak. I mean, there are actually pastors. Now, I thought this was a joke, so I looked it up and found the videos of the pastor saying that Jesus would be considered weak today, or that Jesus was weak. And I'm just like, what? What do you think Christian comes from? You know, like Jesus Christ. You can't call him weak.

And it reminded me of when I wrote a sermon and put it out to the world back in probably 2001. And it was about the Judaism, the Jewishness of Jesus and the Last Supper, and that was probably a Passover, and you know, all this stuff. And I had people write in and say, I cannot worship Jesus knowing that he was a Jew. And I was like, what? What? How in the world? You're so anti-Jew that you're going to throw Jesus in the Holocaust. You know, like, I could not wrap my head around that. And it seems so strange. But now I can see why these things are so entrenched, and how the entrenchment of them will undermine everything that they believe. I did some work in the Democratic Party here. And I was calling to get people to support Gabrielle Giffords when she was first time. And I talked to some Democrats in her district. We were only calling Democrats, and over and over and over, I had people say, oh, I won't vote for a woman. And this was in the 2000s. This wasn't ancient history. This is Gabby Giffords we're talking about. And I was like, you're a Democrat. You won't vote for a woman. But that's what we're dealing with.

And so going back to the broader focus of what you do and what you are really illustrating to the world is we talk about God in only male terms, which forms a basis for thinking that only maleness is godly. And so when we start adopting these qualities of God as the Spirit that broods, only female birds brood. And the mother hen, and the mother eagle, and the Many-Breasted One. There's so much in the Bible that celebrates these beautiful, nurturing, motherly aspects of God that we have whitewashed. We've just purged them from our preaching, and it's considered sacrilege. And I wonder if some of that comes from the Reformation where people thought that Mary was idolatry, worshiping Mary. But I look at my Roman Catholic friends who are very Marian in their worship, and they're really nice, and they're kind, and they're usually way more progressive than the other ones. And I feel like there's something to, I mean, I don't theologically believe in venerating Mary and the immaculate conception where she was born without sin. I'm like, well, if Mary was born without sin, why do we need Jesus? But I don't really care. And I'm open to the mystery of all of that. That's not my hill to die on. But I have seen benefits in cultures and in Christian cultures who lean more toward that. And I think it's beautiful.

And in the Episcopal church, where they allowed women to be priests, I have seen this flourish. And those congregations with female priests are often kinder, more progressive, more open to people with real need, and then the really patriarchal Episcopal churches, which is the background that I come from, that I went into ministry in again, not the background that I grew up with.

But the kind of male-dominated patriarchal Episcopal churches are the ones that are all about their program and filling the pews and the size of their churches and having a say at the big conventions and at the general meeting and being able to vote. It's really different. It's really different. And I think it's quantifiably different when theology can embrace the spirituality of the Divine Feminine and that when people see that represented in God, it allows it to be expressed within themselves.

Anni: I totally agree. That's where I have ended up in my theology. If I can point myself first, my gaze to this God that is both and all and not a divided being, and it is a mysterious thing, you know, being a Trinitarian, having the Three Persons, but it's this beautiful mystical, kind of like you were saying, with the rope being woven, then maybe we can reorient ourselves back to a balance where all of us, like you've put, are meant to be a blend, you know, heaven forbid that somebody only has, you know, testosterone in their body with no balancing estrogen or progesterone, so that we can, we don't have to be just all one thing or another, but we can kind of have these different energies and maybe more of one than the other, but finding a place to be in flow and in both-ness. And that's actually my word for this year.

Every new year, I choose a new word and mine for this year is both because I want to open my mind to, you know, beyond the binary, beyond just one or the other. And so, so then I just wonder, Eric, hearing you talk, it's so liberating, first of all, just knowing that you're there doing the things that you're doing in the world and showing up with your art and poetry and writing and advocacy and all of that. But I'm really curious what you would say about, from your vantage point, what you have experienced, what you've always known, what you are continually learning as you expand outward, as we all do, and as you also continue to go inward. What then, when you're looking at the world and the direction that it seems to be hurtling in this moment, and it just seems like we've taken a hard right toward the sort of things that are going to be written about in the history books as absolute devastation. Where do you draw your hope from in your own body and mind and experience?

Eric: I, so in my daily practice, which came from Lectio Divina, I wanted to figure out a way to take Lectio Divina and take it out of just Christianity because it was a really valuable contemplative practice for me. But when I left the church the second time, I just really was struggling with God.

My process to become an Episcopal priest was extraordinarily harmful and full of abuse. I was actually sexually abused even by a priest, a female priest, to give a little balance to what I was saying before.

And then the Episcopal church, the bishop did not defrock her after it came out that all these other people had been sexually abused by her. And she had done the same thing where she would do it and be like, oh, I thought you were into this. I'm sorry, if you tell anybody I'll kill myself.

And so finally I heard another person and then another person was like, oh, it's not just me. We have to do something about this. And it turned out it was a lot of people.

And instead of defrocking her, the bishop made her go to a few therapy sessions where she talked about her abusive dad and then they transferred her to be a youth minister in California. And I just thought, what is going on here? This is, again, this structure that is unable to do the right thing because they're afraid of collapse.

And it's self-serving and self-protecting. And that is so not the message of Jesus. And I love the Episcopal church. There are amazing things about it.

But I've realized at that moment, like there's no way I can, you know, after five years of that becoming an Episcopal priest after already spending another 10 years in evangelical ministry, I just couldn't do it.

And one of the things that I took out of that was the practices, the mystical arts, I guess you could say, of contemplative Christianity. But every single day for that five-year practice, I prayed, God, do whatever you need to do to get me where you want me to be. If this isn't what you want me to do, make it clear. And I kept getting encouragement. And I kept getting encouragement. And people were like, oh, you're going to be such a great priest.

And then I got installed as the associate at a church out in Gila Bend. And I did that for two years. And it was beautiful. And I loved it. And I got special dispensation to communion. And it felt so right. And yet there was all this abuse happening and all this codependency. And I wasn't allowed to have boundaries. And I literally had someone tell me when I was working so much, like all the time, just doing so much. And for free, because I was in formation and discernment, I didn't get paid for it, even though I was doing the job of a full-time priest and then taking kids to Europe on wages and coming up with liturgies for the whole church and everything, more than a full-time job for free for five years.

And then I was like, I absolutely need some time off. I am right at the edge of burnout. And they said, you can't say no, you're in formation. And I just thought, this is impossible. I'm going to kill myself doing this.

And I looked around and I saw, that's what everybody was doing. They were all working themselves to the bone. And it was for good causes. It was amazing stuff. We were making a difference. But there was no compassion for ourselves and no compassion for each other when we needed rest and we had completely blown the sacrament to the Sabbath out of the water.

So I was mad at God. I felt led on. I felt like every single day, and I mean literally every day for five years, over five years, I prayed that God would show me if it was ever time to leave and to keep it from happening and to just keep me going in his will and all of this kind of stuff. And so when it all collapsed, I went through another really dark period and I didn't know what to do. And I had been desperate again for certainty. It is that same addiction to certainty and knowing. I had to know that I was doing the right thing. I had to know that this was God's will.

And my whole life, I had been looking for my calling. I was run over by a car when I was 23 months old. And so in my little town, I was the miracle baby. And so the question was always, what are you going to be? You know, what has God called you to do? And so with that in mind, I had spent my whole life thinking, okay, and people would actually say to me, you know, Satan seeks the precious ones, boy, you've got a calling, you know, and any time I did something, you know, kind of leaning spiritually, people would would say like, oh, you've got a calling, oh, you're going to be a prophet, you're going to change the world, you know. And so I grew up thinking I had to find my calling.

So then when that's the matrix in which I'm praying every day, God expose my calling. And then I thought I was pursuing it. And then to realize that no, that wasn't it. I just didn't trust God anymore. And I didn't believe in the will of God anymore.

I just, I found myself really wrestling with the concept of the will of God. So I developed this practice to take the things that helped ground me and nourish me in Christianity and in ministry and secularized them, I guess you could say. And so instead of going to the Bible, which I was angry at, at that moment, I started opening it up to the idea of finding God in everything. And I was like, okay, you know, I'm not going to go point in the Bible and do Lectio Divina there. I'm going to approach this hike as a Lectio Divina. And I'm going to look for encouragement or nourishment on this hike. And then, and I had learned a little of that kind of mysticism when I worked with the Tohono O'odham Nation, which is the local indigenous tribe here in Arizona that lives near Tucson. And I worked with a medicine woman there and worked with their sacred Saguaro harvest for 17 years. And so I had, at this point, I had learned enough about how God shows up in these other ways, natural world. And at the same time, Mary Oliver had converted to Christianity and had joined the Episcopal Church.

And I was reading her books about nature and God and going upstream and finding God and all of these things. And that gave me the ability to keep going when yet again, I found myself completely devastated by the unraveling of my faith. So I continued to do that.

I developed it over the years into this thing that I call Everyday Divinas, where I literally approach the entire world as a sacred text. And I'm just like, okay, whatever you want to teach me, teach me today. And I go out looking for it and I'm open to it. It's kind of like what Mary Oliver says are three rules for living a life. Pay attention, be astonished and tell about it. And if you're really paying attention, you will be astonished and then you'll want to tell about it. And I think at the root that is helping to develop not only intuition, but also curiosity and also empathy because people are part of the world.

And if I watch them, I get to see them as a human. If I'm paying attention to the amazing miracle that is every single human on the planet, I can't just write them off as a MAGA. I can't write them off as a narcissist. They're more than that. And that's hard. That's really hard for me sometimes, especially when I'm at the receiving end of their hatred. But I do feel like if you really pay attention, we have to focus our attention. And that's what's giving me hope.

I can get totally overwhelmed by what's happening in the world. And we are inundated with what's happening in a way that we are not adapted to. We were not built to know what's happening all over the world. We are built to know what's happening in our community and mind our business. We are not meant to be concerned about Israel and Hamas and Palestine and Ukraine and Sudan and Mexico and everywhere. And yet that's what we're getting all the time as we're seeing things that we wouldn't have even known about happening live in front of us. So we're seeing it. I want to be aware, but I also want to train my attention back every day on the sacred and the divine that is in front of me everywhere I look, because I believe God is everywhere.

And I believe that, like Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about plants being our teachers, that they take air and water and sunlight and turn it into something that they can then give away for free. And they are a teacher of generosity. And I just feel like, yeah, I want to learn that lesson and I want to learn to connect, because like Hannah Arendt said, loneliness is what drives people to fascism. So the more connected I feel to people and the more connected I feel to the earth and the more connected I feel to myself and to God, the less I'm going to fall into despair or fascism or absolutism.

And then the other thing that gives me hope is that I can't control this stuff. My favorite quote of all time is from Gregory of Nyssa, "Concepts become idols, only wonder understands." And I feel like that has given me the courage to embrace wonder and mystery when I so want to know for an absolute fact that I'm doing the right thing or believing the right thing.

And what it really comes down to is being able to accept that I might be wrong and I think about the things that I absolutely believed even five or ten years ago and how much they've changed. And so I'm just going to embrace mystery.

And I don't know how this is going to play out, but I have so much evidence in my life that God will take care of me. And so I'm going to look back at that and that the earth provides and that I have so many people in this world that love me and will care for me and so many people that I love and will care for. And that's community. And because of the wonder of technology, I get to connect with those kinds of people all over the world.

And I get to find people like you who expand my and your guests, you know, I've only recently found your podcast and listening to your past episodes has just been so nourishing to my soul that gives me hope because we have access like we never had before. We will find each other and we'll take care of each other. We will make it through this. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of heartbreak and the fall of the dark ages and into the Renaissance was bloody and scary. And a lot of bad stuff came out of it and so did a lot of great stuff. But we have to trust in the process. And if I can connect every day, it makes the trusting a lot easier.

Anni: That is so beautiful and the listeners can't see this, but as you've been talking, I've just needed to put my hands over my heart and I just feel it pulsing with gratitude. And I don't even know what the word... I'm kind of at a loss for words right now, but you've touched my heart very deeply.

Embracing the mystery seems to me the antidote for clutching the certainty to the point where we make all of our systems crumble. And how beautiful that God shows Himself, Herself, Theirself, who knows, to you in every day in your tea ceremonies, when you're having conversations when you are in the nature, in whatever way, God shows up. And that's how... I mean, She does for me too, right? Like She just shows up all the time and reminds me, oh, my beloved, you're just so well-loved. You have no idea. You will never understand the full extent of my love for you. And I find a lot of hope there. So how lovely to have this... I'm going to call it Holy Communion here on this Ash Wednesday.

Eric: I think that's wonderful. I think that's why the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter, you know? It's so beautiful. And what a lovely and frankly feminine way to invite the Holy Spirit in. We all need mothering. We all do.

It's the thing our heart craves. And we've been cut off from that for so long. And I think we're learning how to do that again. And that comforting gives me incredible resilience and hope.

Anni: We are re-membering, as we often say in my church, to remember means to put it back together what has been separated. And that's absolutely right.

That's what I see the Spirit doing even now at this time of just horror. I see Her helping us to remember ourselves and one another. I wonder if something that you have shared today strikes a chord with anybody listening, if you could just give us a moment for how they could find you and the work that you put out into the world and connect with you.

Eric: Sure. My website where I have a lot of my poetry and art is erickcarr.com or ArsZoetica. It's a-r-s-z-o-e-t-i-c-a.

It's a pun on arspoetica, which is the art of poetry. And zoe, you know, is life, divine life, sacred life. And so it's the art of of sacramental living. But I'm mostly these days on Substack. That's really where I am. And it's under arszoetica on Substack as well. And almost weekly, I put something out, an essay with poetry. And that's really where I'm feeling at home.

I love Substack.

Anni: I do too. It's just such a beautiful community. I keep fighting these gems of people and I'm like, where have you been? Yeah. Yeah.

Eric: Yeah, it's so wonderful.

Anni: Well, as we close, I wonder, I'm going to put you on the spot. But if you have a poem that has been asking to be shared or or some sort of blessing to send us out as we wrap up this beautiful conversation, is there any word or or writings that you would offer here to close this out?

Eric: Sure. You know, I had an experience when I was wrestling with the concept of the will of God and really trying to say, you know, do you even exist? If so, prove it, you know, kind of doing the Gideon thing. And then all of a sudden a book showed up in the mail, totally unexpected. Somebody bought it at a tea house in Oregon and sent it, one of my old parishioners, saw it at this tea house in Portland and thought, oh wow, it's a poetry book about tea. Let me send that to Eric and mailed it to me out of the blue with no, and we hadn't been in contact since I'd left the church, you know, a few years before. And I just opened it up and it had such a beautiful inscription in it and the poems were really speaking to me. And I thought, wow, that was an envelope full of God.

And so I wrote about that and I think, I keep all of my poetry on my iPad so I can find it. Here it is.

An Envelope Full of God.

Just then at the nadir of my doubt, you arrived in my mailbox. God packaged in a plain brown envelope, ignoring the vitriol I had just expressed, turning a blind eye to my lack of faith. Or did you really? Does it even matter if I can find you or at least glean what you might mean in the more than random chance that you showed up as a gift mailed from an acquaintance and a gesture of unexpected kindness? It was an immediate answer to a prayer that I had spoken in anger and a liturgy of agnostic pain.

And yet only moments after such impiety, I got exactly the thing I needed from exactly the improbable messengers who could invite me back to belief. What is faith after a divorce from God? Can you and I really be friends if we couldn't make a marriage based on trust and love and vows? Can I really believe that you don't care whether I believe or not? And if you do, do you deserve such faith? I am ready to let go of notions of an insecure God prying into my heart to prove my credent trust, measuring my faith in little spoonfuls of mustard seeds. That is not love. It is testing. And I am done with that.

Or am I? Am I really ready to surrender to mystery, to live into the discomfort of not knowing, but still being surprised by tiny miracles, still being surprised by where I find grace? Yes, I am. I am ready. I am open. And yes, I am even willing to ponder that maybe I am that I am, or at least that you still are, even if symbols of bridegrooms no longer fit, even if all our ancient metaphors fail to inspire faith or trust, even if all you and I can have is a friendship across the thin veil of being. Until I pass through that liminal boundary myself into whatever great or empty things I cannot know just yet.

Anni: What a benediction. The things I cannot know just yet. Thank you. Thank you.

Eric: Thank you, Anni. This has just been so wonderful.

Anni: Until next time, I look forward to the time we meet in person because I am just going to put this out there. It needs to happen.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely. This is fantastic. And the world needs people like you and is hungry for this and it's time. So thank you for what you do and I'm really excited to see where this goes.

Anni: And so it is.