Episode 4 - Grief and Mama God with Colette Eaton

Writer and theologian Colette Eaton explores relating to the Divine Feminine, finding God in nature, and being an authentic follower of Jesus.

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Transcript

Hello, welcome to Barely Christian, Fully Christian. This is Anni Ponder. This podcast explores loving Jesus, being repulsed by much of Christianity, and relating to the Holy Spirit as the divine feminine, or as I prefer to call her, Mama God.

In today's episode, Grief and Mama God, we will meet writer and theologian Colette Eaton and hear her stories and what she's learned about relating to the divine feminine, finding God in nature, and being an authentic follower of Jesus.

Welcome along.

Well, want to welcome Colette Eaton today to Barely Christian. I'm going to introduce you and read your bio here so that folks can get a little introduction to who you are. Colette Eaton is passionate about creating space for others to explore an ever expansive faith in God.

Colette loves to write about faith resiliency on her sub -stack newsletter, Courage and Candor. Colette holds an undergrad degree in Bible and theology and recently graduated with her Masters of Divinity from Multnomah Seminary.

She works full -time at Union Gospel Mission as a grant writer and enjoys putting her writing skills to work in supporting the organization. Born in Alaska, she has a lover of wine, birthday cake, oomie too, charcuterie boards, and hiking on the weekends.

Currently living in Portland, Oregon, she loves mostly spending time with her husband, Joshua, and their German shepherd, Ingrid. Wonderful. Well, I have lots of dog questions. Good. But we might get there.

Who knows? Awesome. Welcome, Colette. I'm glad that you're here.

Thank you. I'm very happy. to be here.

Awesome. Well, I don't know if you know how I learned about you. I don't think in our exchanges, I've told you this story. I have an old and dear friend who sent me a link to your blog a while back and said, here's somebody else talking about Mother God, you got to know her, she loves Jesus and she does this church in the wild thing. And so I was like, what? And then I read most of your blogs, I think, since then, and really curious also about the church in the wild stuff. So, but anyway, that's how I came to find you. And really want to thank you for introducing me to the poetry of Carol Lynn Pearson.

Yes. She's amazing. Yeah.

Yeah. How did you find her?

I found her through a friend, you know, I've been, I've been on this journey with the divine feminine for a few years now and there's been a group of girlfriends that have just been walking the same path and we've kind of collectively brought different information and insight that we have just gathered as we have just been exploring.

So yeah, that came through a good friend of mine.

Oh, well, God bless Carol Lynn. I hope she gets the love coming out of this podcast. She's a woman. If anybody doesn't know, Carol Lynn Pearson, prophet, poet, activist, beautiful human being, over eighty and still writing and sharing the love of God and particularly mother God.

So, beautiful one. Okay, my first question in your bio, I'm so enlivened by this term that you use. Could you unpack a little bit what you mean by faith resiliency?

Yes. So, my journey with the Christian faith has had its bumps. It's had its bumps, these theological mountains I've kind of had to climb over and as I've climbed some of those mountains, those these big theological doctrines that I've really struggled with. And especially like the doctrine of suffering or lack of a doctrine of suffering or an ability to talk about suffering and just meet suffering with really pat answers.

Like God just has another plan or God is always good. I'm just like, that's at one point in my 30s, those answers were no longer sufficient for me. And so, and I actually ended up turning my anger not only towards the church but towards God and in times of my own personal suffering and as much as that season was painful, it actually helped me really shed a lot of unhelpful theological tenants around who God is. And in that shedding, there became an expansiveness that started happening where I started to see God as so much bigger and so much more mysterious.

And as I continued to settle into kind of the mystery of God, both the mystery and the significant intimacy that God has with us in the midst of it, in the midst of our suffering, I felt, I started feeling a resiliency as I actually started deconstructing some of those theological tendons.

Like, it almost made my faith, it made my faith stronger to let go of the tenants of suffering that You know, God is good all the time. God always has another plan. I'm like, does he, you know, really does he, you know?

And is this really his plan? You know, being able to let go of some of that and let go of the why and the need to always understand, which is such an American Christian habit, like the certainty and the need to understand and the need to have the answers.

But there are no answers in the midst of suffering. And so shedding that actually helped, you know, it was like a pruning. It was a pruning of these Christian doctrines that felt heavy and weren't giving a lot of life to my faith in God.

And it just made my roots go deeper into the soil. So that's what I mean by faith resiliency. Like, I feel like deconstruction has gotten such a bad name in some camps, not all camps, but in some camps.

And, but my experience of deconstruction has actually created a resiliency even more in my faith towards God. So, yeah.

Oh, beautiful. And I didn't want to interrupt, but there were about 12 different points you made that I'm like, me too. Yeah, yeah. Totally. Me too. I think of deconstruction as a pruning process and really necessary for then strengthening the core faith that we do hold to in the face of all the suffering and the uncertainty.

So, amen, could not agree more. I love that. Faith resiliency means embracing the suffering and the questions and...

Yeah, yeah. And the things that both things can be true. I think that was... you know, not that I don't believe that God is good, you know, that is definitely, but you know, if that's the only answer that I get in the midst of suffering, then that that's not, it needs to be God, God is good and suffering exists, like both things, like both things can be true.

And the reason, and that's where resiliency is born out of resiliency is born out of the, like us practicing the tension of holding in one sense, what feels like opposites, but what Richard Rohr would say, he's, you know, the contemplative teacher, it actually all belongs, it all belongs, and us being able to hold that space is what I think where resiliency truly comes from.

Yes, I have been long frustrated by the shallowness of the pack answers while, you know, God has a plan and, and maybe, as you say, maybe that is true, perhaps there's a divine plan. I do, one of my core beliefs is that God is ultimately good. And yet in the midst of suffering, hearing those little bumper sticker answers, it's insufficient. And my daughters know that I hate to go to the, there's a craft store, I won't name, but they got all of these, like, you know, little signs that are like, oh, there's always a reason.

And I'm like, I can't. In the midst of real human suffering, we can't have a slogan that then suffices for the truth and the depth of the suffering that we're experiencing. So, yeah.

Yeah, and I think why resiliency is so significant to me too, is because if I can hold the tension and if I have this ability, not ability, but I have this practice of holding the tension, and that creates a resiliency in me, that resiliency can't help itself, but be able to be poured out into the world in compassion, because those pat answers, they're theologically not necessarily that sound or very helpful because what they do is they remove personal responsibility and they put it on God instead of us being the manifestation of God's character in the world and us taking the personal responsibility to actually help and carry and walk alongside people in their suffering.

But that takes personal responsibility, but that also takes the ability for us to hold the tension between suffering and the goodness. And there's not a lot of people who can do that. And so then what you are served is this little platter of platitudes.

You know what image just came to mind as you were talking is, Jesus on his face in the Garden of Gethsemane, imploring God. to remove this cup and you know some nice little Christian coming along. “Well, Jesus, everything happens for a reason.”

Yeah. Yeah so we we press beyond the platitudes. Yes, yes, yes. Reserved by me to continue suffering. And I can almost imagine Jesus being all like get behind me Satan. Take your little sign and sent it to Gahenna.

Totally. Oh my goodness I love it. Amazing. Well that's a perfect segue into what I wanted to talk about in depth which is you write in one of your blogs about Finding Mother God about the process of finding her through your grief.

Yeah. And that it was a journey, is a journey that was marked by suffering that led you. to finding the feminine face of God. So I just want to hear all about that. Wherever you want to go with that.

Sure, how did that happen? Well, oh, it definitely was a journey. And that was my season of really significant personal suffering was my husband and I have about a 10 -year history with infertility. And we tried and tried and tried. And at the beginning of our journey, it was just a couple of years of like, oh, this isn't working. This isn't working. And then it came to the doctors and the tests. And then the bills started to roll in, the medical bills. And the thousands and thousands of thousands of dollars that we spent to try to have a baby. And through it all, every month was a disappointment. It was just like grief upon grief. And I've never had a positive pregnancy test. So I'm on the side of infertility where I never experienced some miscarriage. But I never experienced any sort of positive pregnancy. Just nothing worked. And we did all the way up to IVF a couple of times. And eventually decided to just walk out the rest of our life childless. The suffering and the grief just became too much. And we called it quits in what was it, January of 2022. And so there's still some fresh grief to it.

But I was well into my 40s at that point. I'm 43 now. And I basically just said, I'm done. I'm done. I can't do it anymore. And my husband couldn't do it anymore. But through that whole journey of trying to be healthy, I'm going to be healthy. I’m not going to become a mother. I walked through so many different stages of grief and a big part of that was just being angry, you know, and like I said, I turned my anger both on the church and the church in the sense where I was having two things happening in the church at one point.

I was a woman in leadership that was very limited in her roles because I was a woman, so that was a fight I was in and it was very uncomfortable. But then I was also angry at the church of this kind of cultural norm, you know, women you get married, you have kids, that's your status in the church and then you do children's ministry or whatever, you know, and I was so frustrated with that cultural norm within the conservative evangelical church specifically.

And so my worth both as a woman who had a calling to the church as a teacher. And as a woman who wanted to be a mom but couldn't be, I felt like I was just losing on all sides when it comes to my own feminine identity.

And then alongside all of that is I had a hard time relating to God at that point, so my anger just turned towards God. And like, you know, you say, you know, I would get into my literal mishaps of reading scripture as many of us do and I'm like, you know, I'm asking for bread and you're giving me stones.

I feel like you're giving me a stone. And you know, I don't want the fruits of the spirit. I want a baby. You know, I'm just like, all of it, all of it. It's like, I don't, I want this identity that in one sense, culture and the church has forced upon me to be and I want to be a mom.

So I have this desire and the pressure kind of coming at both sides. And so it was just kind of a, it was a full breaking down of the masculinity of God. And in that moment and my desire to want to be a mom and it just felt like an organic shift in my heart as I started saying, I don't know if I can say father God, but I certainly need a mom right now, you know, and I, because I want to be a mom and in that desire to be a mom.

And so I just started calling out to mother God. I'm like, mother God, like you, you know, and I know this theologically in my mind, like God is not male or female. Like I just know that I had good enough seminary professors for them to also know that.

Like we know that the God is genderless. Like God genders. Him or herself for us to relate to us. That is the divine intimacy of God. And it's us who are limited. Our language is limited and but God is not.

God is infinite. And so I started feeling more and more that I the only way I could relate to God in this season of suffering was as mother God. Because it's like only you as a mother God can understand this desire to be a mom.

And to carry you know like and I that's where I started really turning to more of the divine feminine in general like you know Mother Mary you know and and seeing her significance more expansive versus just on Christmas you know just during the Advent season but actually seeing her as as in one sense the Catholic faith seize her and I started kind of exploring that, you know, that, that theology of Mary.

And so, and, and that was helpful. And then my friends who are doing this along the way are, we're reading things together like, you know, the Finding Mother God, the Dance of the Dissonant Daughter, beautiful book like her journey as well.

And so I started reading these books and, and it just became natural. It just became natural for me to address God as mother. And then in that sense, God gave me a bigger vision for motherhood, like not just to carry a baby, not just to be a mom in real time in history, but to give birth to, to, to what's inside of myself, like, and to, to nurture it and to grow it.

And so I feel like God just gave me such a wider perspective out of my grief of the divine feminine as a place of creating and nurturing and giving birth to things in the world, you know, other than just a flesh and blood baby.

Nice. Wow. Oh, I can relate to so much of what you've shared. Yes. And I was just thinking about, I think actually I was rereading your blog where you talk about us being born again from, and the question is like, from what womb? We're not going back into our human mother's womb. And so this imagery is available to us if we have ears to hear. And then there being so much more to motherhood maternity than, as you say, birthing a child, but motherhood is a lifelong endeavor, whether we have human children or not, but it's almost an attitude or a way of being that gives birth to teachers, affirms all of these things that we do find in God's character. But for so long, this imagery has not, I don't know, I won't speak for you, but it sounds like maybe we have a similar background. It certainly was not available to me as a young Christian growing up in fundamental evangelicalism and trying to find my way. And what's been really life changing for me is now to be able to look at the idea that I am made in God's image and my femininity is derived from God.

And exactly as you say, God is above and beyond gender. That's maybe a good way for us to express our characteristics and our qualities here in this plane of existence, whatever, however that works.

But God is certainly transcendent. I have no problem with the argument that like, well, why are you even talking about the gender of God? God is above all that. Fine. And yet, God does speak to us in metaphor.

And I really love how you said it's an intimacy with us to God, to reveal God's self to us through gender. And that certainly has been very true in my life. Finding the words, Mama God has, I can't even encapsulate with words what that's done for me, affirming my own femininity and offering me nurture in the way that, like you say, especially when going through really dark valleys.

Sometimes you just want your mama and finding that she is there loving us. She's been here the whole time. Really quite an incredible discovery for me as it sounds like for you. How has it been? I mean, I read a little bit about your journey.

You talked about earlier on in your ministry feeling like you had the note -taker role at the table as a woman in the church. And you're like, well, I'll be the secretary and not one of the contributors to the wisdom that's being shared.

I'll just take the note. So I'm curious if you want to talk about how since you were maybe expansive resiliency wrapping around Mother God, how have things changed for you? Like the question is kind of the so what now for you.

Well, first of all, I definitely want to, I definitely feel like I want to address that God expanding my idea of motherhood, you know, for the moms who are listening, doesn't diminish actual mothers who give birth and they give their life over to their children.

And it's not, and it's also not a consolation prize that I feel like God's giving me. I actually feel like it was a full inward expanding. Kind of like, as I've moved further and further into more contemplative Christianity, I'm starting to understand that the deeper and deeper my roots go into the infinite God that lives in me.

You know, God is transcendent, of course, but God is so imminent with us. You know, God has created us for the capacity for the infinite in which she dwells. And tapping into that infinite, divine kind of abyss has been an expansive part of my Christian life where I feel like I'm slowly, slowly being able to let go of my need to understand and my need for the wise.

And that, that not only creates more resiliency as I move forward, it doesn't remove the grief, but it, the grief has a place, it has a home, you know, in that inside that expansiveness. And so does my mothering the way that God mothers me and the way that I mother through through, you know, whatever God has given to me in this life to, to create a nurture.

So I definitely wanted to say that, but, you know, how that has changed over the last year or so, especially when it comes to church ministry, you know, I really went into seminary, you know, six years ago now with, with the goal of being in vocational ministry.

And I've always had a deep, deep desire to be in vocational ministry and to be a pastor. And, and I have served in many, many different roles over the last, you know, two decades from, you know, being a worship leader, youth pastor, you know, basically acting like an executive pastor, but having the role of assistant, you know, things like that.

So I've gone through the gamut of being, you know, I've been in leadership and being a deacon, deaconess, whatever you say, whatever you can say about that. But I moved into seminary, started seminary with the goal of being a pastor.

of becoming a vocational pastor. And I left seminary, I graduated seminary, and I was in the middle of an internship at a local church here in Portland, and it was not going well. I'll just tell you that.

It was not going very well because this deepening and expanding that was happening kind of at the same time of my Christian faith and my need for a more quiet contemplative Christianity really, really did not fit inside the box of your typical evangelical church Sunday service where you like show up, you talk to a few strangers that you may or may not know, you sit down for an hour and a half, and you sing a few songs, you listen to a really long sermon that may or may not be good, you sing a few more songs, you have your crackers and juice, you leave, and you don't really talk to anybody for the rest of the week, and then you do it all over again.

And it was so, that type of traditional church actually started becoming very painful for me to show up. But I was in an internship. And I was trying so hard to be like, Lord, what happened? Like, this is my heart that I, my heart is for the church.

And God really just showed me a bigger picture. He's like, I don't live in this building. I mean, she's not there. She's like, I mean, she's like, I am here too, but I'm not just here. And after many, many years of being a part of, you know, traditional evangelical churches, which I loved and had their place, they really did.

And I had good and bad experiences across the gamut, so I'm holding both things as true. I'm not just throwing out, you know, the evangelical church completely, but for me personally, and much of my generation as well, millennials and Gen Xers, I'm more of a Gen Xer.

So many of us are walking away from the traditional American evangelical church. Like we just, many of us can't just walk back into the building. And, you know, and previously my husband and I were, you know, the one church that we still grieve we were a part of for almost a decade was a small kind of decentralized church, which basically was made up of a bunch of little home churches.

So we just met in these little small pockets of community around the neighborhoods in Portland. And we didn't put a lot of focus on Sundays. We put more focus on community and being present in the neighborhood and it wasn't Instagrammable, you know, stuff like that.

It was just basic, beautiful community. And that has stuck with us. And so when I tried to go back to the this traditional church while I was in this internship. I'm just like, wow, this is not where I'm at.

And so I left that internship and I felt like I walked out the door into the forest and I never went back. And my husband and I and a good, another friend of ours, another couple, which was a part of this previous community we were a part of for a while.

We started the Wild Church, a Wild Church movement in Portland, which is part of the larger Wild Church network. So that it's all over Canada and quite a bit on the East Coast. So there's Wild Churches all over the East Coast and Canada.

And there's some spattering here on the Pacific Northwest in California. And so, you know, that kind of came to me through the same friend group that has been exploring the divine feminine for years together You know, and so my friend brought this wild church movement up to me and I was like, this feels perfect.

This feels like where I'm at. And you know, my husband walked out the church doors way before I did and he just got dragged back in by me for years. Because I felt like I had the calling and he would joke.

He's like, I'm the best pastor's husband ever. Because he he just slapped on a smile and showed up on Sundays. And but once once I showed him wild church, he was like, this is totally what I want to do.

He's like, I feel the closest to God when I'm in nature. And I don't know if I can step foot in just a regular church again for a while at least. And so we launched Wild Church of Portland this last January.

And it's been really beautiful. Like, we just meet once a month in a city park. And it's a bit of an urban wild church, which is kind of a little funny for us because it's so many of the wild churches in Canada like meet out in these gorgeous huge farms.

And I'm like, well, we're in Portland. And we're going to just we're going to meet at this beautiful park called Mount Tabor in Portland. And and so we meet once a week and it's very contemplative. Like we have grounding exercises.

We where we just connect with the earth and we connect with the divine that that is being shown through creation. I think that's the one thing that I think I've been missing during my whole time that is so deeply connected to the divine feminine and the masculine and the Holy Trinity is that God is just ever creating.

Like, like one thing that I love what Jim Finley, he's a contemplative teacher says, he says, we God is loving us into existence. He is loving all. things, all beings and all creatures into existence.

And it's like in the contemplatives for sure the mystics of the Christian faith really got this. They just, especially when you think of like St. Francis of Assisi, you know just spend some time out in creation and you can't help but see that God is just pouring forth through her creation.

You just can't help it. You know I was lucky enough to grow up, even though I grew up in conservative evangelicalism, I was really lucky to grow up in a household that though my parents loved Jesus, they were both very deeply intellectual.

So my dad was a scientist, a marine biologist specifically, and my mom was a teacher. And so I just grew up in that kind of house where questions were good and doubting was good and learning new things and learning a diversity of new things, you know.

And my dad I remember my dad saying, I don't see how scientists aren't believers in God. I see God when I look through my microscope. And I was like, that's amazing. And so it's beautiful. It's like, it's so beautiful.

And so I grew up with that mentality. And so Wild Church just feels like such a fit to where my heart's at. And and we take communion together, you know, we say we we still invite people into from whatever tradition they're from, you know, Christian tradition, non -Christian tradition.

We do we do say that we are group, you know, our Wild Church of Portland is based out of the Christ tradition, but we want to welcome all people. All people are welcome. We're a very open and affirming community.

And so so we've been doing that now 10 months. It's been kind of wild.

Wow. Well, the friend of mine who introduced me to you first has been to your church at least once and he texted and he was like, you've got to know this lady and you need to know about this network. And here's a blog. He was so excited. So I know it's really meeting needs. Yeah. Really meeting needs. Finding God in nature, as you mentioned. Somewhere along the way, it feels like that thread got buried.

But I believe you're right. The mystics, the desert fathers and mothers, they were all plugged into finding God in God's creation. I mean, why not? Certainly there are great things to be encountered in a cathedral or in a tiny church.

And and also there's so much to be experienced along with God. I think you were talking about in one of your posts about. coming less prepared to give a talk and more prepared just to listen and experience together as the spirit speaks and moves and provides inspiration while you're there.

Can you tell us a story or two about when that's happened when when she's shown up? Yes, yes it has been doing this wild church with our good friend with our good friends Mike and Whitney. There are other guides with us.

It has definitely been a journey of just learning of just kind of keeping everything really open -handed. You know I was so used in traditional vocational ministry where I had so much control. I controlled the lights.

I was like planning services. What songs we were gonna sing and then when I did give us you know sermon here and there when they'd let me you know hours hours of preparation and I know exactly what to say.

And I remember our very first wild church that morning, it was the very first snow and it was so cold. And we, in the original like covered area that I wanted to stood the meat under was like covered in snow, so we like took all our little basket, our church fits in a small basket and we like found this huge, beautiful pine tree that was the most perfect shelter and we stood underneath it and we were completely dry.

And it was a full releasing of control for me. So that allowed me to just release control and so slowly, but slowly, those hooks of control started coming out of me. So when I finally came to that blog post you talked about where I said, I'm not gonna do a reflection, was basically my last, of kind of a last releasing of control and just instead of trying to steer people's thoughts to what they should be thinking in their contemplative time, I'm just gonna let the scripture and the pop, and the trees do the talking and let them be the teachers.

And because there's a lot of stuff we do before we actually go on our contemplative walk, which technically in Wild Church, the contemplative slow, like solo walk is our sermon, is the time where we invite people to go and listen to God, to go and listen to God and then come back and share.

And that like 45 minutes is what we technically would call what our sermon time is. And so I remember the time, so the first Sunday where I'm like, I'm not going to do a reflection, I'm going to let the scripture, because we always read a scripture, we read a couple poems, someone brings a poem to share.

Like I said, we do a grounding exercise. If we have kiddos there, we always like read a real fun kid story. And so all of that is kind of some content to kind of take with us into the woods with us as we take our 20, 25 minutes to sit with God and to listen. And the first Sunday we did that, I remember going into the woods and finding just a spot to sit. And I was just sitting and I, you know, my mind was distracted. I was trying to do like just a quiet meditative 20 minutes sit, my brain was all over the place.

And then I noticed there was this tiny little, it was sunny and beautiful. And there was this blade of grass that was like perfectly lit up by some sunshine. And then there's this tiny, tiny little green bug that started crawling on this blade of grass.

And for some reason I was like, I'm just so enthralled with this bug. So I started just staring at this bug. And at one point the bug just like stopped crawling and just like, I'm like, oh, we're gonna sit together.

So I just like, for a few minutes, we were just sitting together and it was the tiniest bug. You wouldn't have known it was there unless if you're staring at a blade of grass. But in a flash, I cannot tell you the experience that I had staring at that little bug.

It literally felt like the gates of heaven at one point actually opened behind me and just flooded through me this divine love towards this bug. And it was just pouring through me. And I just felt the infinite love of mother God who sees and nurtures all of creation.

And it was just the most profound thing that I have experienced in some of those moments of just contemplative sits and connecting with the infinite in that way that feels like I'm, God's flowing through me, flowing out of me, flowing into another created being.

And it's just continual and continual and continual. And it's like, that... was so, you know, I still have a hard time, like trying to describe it with words, honestly. It was just a moment where I felt like I was wordless and I could only feel the presence of God.

And it was nothing like I've ever felt sitting in church and with a sermon, which is like, not to say that that, you know, churches and sermons don't have a place. There's really great teachers out there.

You know, that I have really enjoyed. But just that experience of sitting and hearing from God, in one sense, just said, okay, this is why I relinquish control because God, you can talk. God, you are perfectly capable of talking.

But the point is, is we have to be quiet and still enough to hear Her voice. And we have to have this trust. I mean showing up and officiating a church service like you are talking about without a lesson plan without a sermon outline just coming and saying I know God is here and will speak and if we give God audience God is more than willing to show up and provide a Bug for us to love or yeah, I'm sure yeah like all of the experiences that you and your congregants or your oh just yes fellow gatherers or wanderers Wanderers I like that.

Yeah, every experience is unique and yeah yet It's a freedom to come together and say we are expecting that God has things to say It's not going to be something that I thought up and put down on paper And I'm gonna share with you now which again agreed.

There's time and place for that certainly. But maybe the pendulum could swing a little bit back toward the middle where yeah we make room for that kind of and to me that feels very feminine to sit, wait expectantly, and Trust God enough to show up and and when I say feminine Let me just be clear again that I don't mean that's a thing that women do and men don't I mean matter and energy or the yin and yan energy not yeah, yeah but the passive, waiting for Something that God might say to us feels very much how It feels natural and I'm I'm so glad to know there are all these places that are Yeah, providing a framework for that to happen.

Yeah, even within the context of Christianity Yeah, because that's something that I think Christianity has kind of, well there's been the contemplative tradition all along, but in recent centuries I guess we've kind of gotten away from that mainstream anyway, and so now we're returning to that interesting time to have something to say to us.

Yeah, and I think that the further I press into the contemplative path, the reason I'm starting to understand why people don't do it, is because it is so intimate, it's so intimate, and it requires so much death on our part, and the death of our egos, and the death of certainty, and the death of why, and the death of understanding, and the depth of our attachments to the way things we want to see things. And to just... And just to... Allow that death to be what absorbs us fully into experiencing God. It's a total surrender. And... And it is something that I'm constantly resisting in some sense.

You know, I try to have a regular contemplative practice. And where I sit in just silence for 20 minutes. And my mind is absolutely resisting every minute of it, at least for the first 10 minutes. And then I know that once I hit that 10 -minute mark, my mind starts to settle and I can sense my spirit expand.

But it is a lot of work to get there. But it's where my soul wants to go. And so listening and surrendering to that is really hard work. And it's also having to develop a tolerance for sitting in nothingness.

And I think that's why we do not love that as American... You know, former evangelical American Christian right here. You know, sitting and being comfortable with nothing, doing nothing. And seeing in one sense the nothingness as the infinity, the mystery of God that we are just lost in.

And it's really hard to let that go. It's really hard to let us go and to be drawn into just that. Yeah, the abyss of God, where we can just fall and fall and fall and fall deeper into God's very, very generous love and who, who he, you know, she, he gets to define us as who we are, you know, and we don't get to, we don't get to say in that, which is good because thank God, because thank God, we don't get to say in it.

Um, I think Thomas Merton said, um, we should fall on her knees every day and thank God that we don't get to live our life the way we want to. Um, because if we did, we would name ourselves all sorts of crap that we don't need to carry and God, God has already named us.

You know, She has the only power to name us who we are and we're beloved. And following falling into that belovedness is just that full surrender It feels almost impossible. We want to have a say in it.

We want to have a say in what we do. So the contemplative path is not the popular path By any means Yeah.

Uh -huh. But certainly that going in that going deep into the abyss of God I think is is what you said I've been reading all sorts of things since this expansion in me and So one of one of the threads that I'm on is the that are you familiar with the heroine's journey?

No, I'm not no, okay.

So, do you know what the heroes journey Joseph Campbell's literary? It's kind of that the archetype and so it's a it's a circular wheel if you will okay sort of the recipe that all epic tales are or Builds sure on right so first we experience the hero and he's in a setting and then there's a Call to the wild and and so he goes out and you see this in Harry Potter and it's in Star Wars Oh, yes.

Yes. It's like it's the formula by which we tell our story The one story that humans know how to tell we just write it in so many different forms, right? It always involves the hero going out and Having some experiences. He usually gets the elixir or the whatever thing that's needed for the community. There's a whole bunch of trials. There's the dark night of the soul. There's all this archetypal energy and he comes back and Helps to heal the the village or the tribe or the people With what he's done and the story hinges upon his being willing to go outward. Well a Woman named Maureen Murdoch, I think and heaven forgive me if I misrepresent that, wrote a book called The Heroine's Journey. And it's highlighting the inward journey that we all need to take into the dark abyss to find that we're actually already home in our own selves.

And to learn the lessons of being quiet, being still, being alone, and yet never really, truly alone, pressing through what you were talking about, all of these resistances to sitting still or to being, just being instead of doing all of the time.

And so, yeah, I've been reading about The Heroine's Journey, that inward traversing that we take once we're willing to look within. And so, I see that in the grander picture also, searching for, oh my God, is...of going inward and it's into the dark cavernous womb of where we were born in the first place. I love that. Yeah, I love that. I really enjoy that The Heroin's Journey. It's a fantastic book.

It reminds me a lot of St. Teresa of Avalas since I've been studying her work, the interior castle where she talks about God is in us in order. It was such a very controversial teaching in 16th century Spain to basically say, you want to find God?

Just turn inward. Enter into your own interior castle and you'll find that God is there calling you deeper and deeper and deeper into yourself, but also deeper into the infinite God. It's in us. Within us in which God has poured out into us.

Yes. And no wonder that was terrifying to the powers of the day because that cannot be controlled or monetized. If we're telling people, oh, you want to experience God, God's already inside of you. All you have to do is learn to sit and be still and quiet and can't control that.

And it's kind of like showing up for church and saying, I don't know what God's going to do today. Let's go out and bring it back. Wow. That I think feels terrifying to folks who need to have a plan and need to know what's going to happen and control all the outcomes so that it looks and feels a certain way.

God is wild and unpredictable. And I mean, like not a tame lion.

Yeah, definitely not. Not a tame lion.

Not a tame lion. But no, not tame whatsoever. Yeah. And so learning to be okay with not controlling for the outcome here, but being comfortable with a lot of the mystery.

Yeah, so if anybody's listening and going, I'd love a great place to start. And I'm only comfortable doing this within Christianity, I would highly suggest St. Teresa of Avila's the Interior Castle. And I would say this one disclaimer, I've recommended that book to so many friends, and they come back and go, I don't like how she's always putting herself down. She talks about, well, what do I know? I'm just a woman. And the history there is really important. She was under the watchful eye of the Inquisition. And all of these important powerful men were kind of making sure she didn't step outside her bounds.

And so that was her rebuttal. Oh, but what do I know? I'm just a woman. And she was very shrewd. She was a very, very clever and shrewd woman to know that the Inquisition was reading all of her writings.

So she just had to put a little quip in there. Yeah, but I don't really know. They just stroke their ego a bit and they let her go.

I know. Yeah, the history is really important when you're reading ancient, you know, mystics -teachers.

Or you know, scripture, for instance. Yes. The context, language, it all. All of it. Yes, all very important.

Totally. Oh my gosh. Yeah, and I was also going to say another easy place to begin with to learn to contemplate Christianity is Richard Rohrer. He has a really small book called Just This. It's literally Just This. It's the small little book that you can get on the center for action and contemplation. You might be able to get it on Amazon, but I'd rather just purchase it from them. I think it's like $10.99. And they're just these really short little teachings of him that talk about the contemplative path and they're very bite -size. So they're really easy to digest and kind of walk through kind of what this contemplative path is like.

They're not too heavy theologically, but they do make you think and they're very precise on kind of what is this contemplative path about. And so he tends to cover a lot of ground in that little book. So that's one recommendation I would definitely have for people who are very curious about practicing more contemplative Christianity.

Yeah, I agree. We have that title. I have not read it, but it's on our bookshelf.

So my husband's really into sitting and being with Jesus. And I'm just, I'm starting. I have a practice now. It's up to about five minutes a day. I'm really excited. And so far, I have to tell you, my contemplative practice really is ecstatic dance.

Oh, I love it. No, I actually love that. I love ecstatic dance. I do that. But when I do free movement, I think I call it just free movement, but you put on, it's really helpful for me when I'm in hard spaces emotionally and like I have emotions stuck in my body.

Yes. Yeah. It moves them through you. It moves them through. It's otherworldly. But I just wanted to share with anybody who's curious about what is all this talk about, you know, I hear all this contemplative talk.

So I have had a lot of, well, first of all, it's my husband's thing. So like, let's just recognize that my ego has been like, well, that's his thing. And my thing is dance. But recently I have, I have been invited into sitting with Jesus, sitting with my God, sitting with Mama and Papa God and just allowing myself to be in the presence of pure love.

And it's amazing. It's hard. You're right. There are all these things that come up and my brain just won't stop. And I feel like I need to be doing something. But when I settle in for the five minutes, let's just be clear, I'm not an expert here.

It's beautiful to feel that left. Yeah, it is. And the meditative practices such as Centering Prayer or Leccio Divina, those have been really helpful prompts for me when I first started the contemplative path and even just meditative walks.

There's this app that is created by the Catholic Church called Pray As You Go. And I love this app, the Pray As You Go app. They have like a daily kind of prayer. But what I love in them is they have like an imaginative prayer.

You just put your headphones on, you can listen to this 15 minute, doing an imaginative prayer exercise. You can do Alexio Divina, you can do an examined prayer, but they also had like a meditative walk that lasted about 35 to 40 minutes.

And so it's like, I slowly kind of started integrating the contemplative path through doing very, very specific meditations. And then I moved into a time of, like I didn't start out sitting in silence for 20 minutes.

Lord have mercy, there's no way I would have, I would have been able to do that. I started, I started with this, you know, with breath prayers and with walking and with Alexio Divina. Like I started out on all these different practices.

That's kind of what, and it just drew me deeper and deeper and deeper into more of the silent sits. But I definitely did not start there. And I think if I tried to, I probably wouldn't have stuck with it.

Right, baby steps and it's, baby steps, yeah. But that works though, it's a journey. Yeah. Well, I just wanna thank you for sharing your wisdom so courageously and candorously. I don't know. I was trying to weave in your blog.

I try to be as honest as possible. It's totally fine. You do, and the world just needs more of that. In fact, yeah, you know, C .S. Lewis, whom I love and also wrestle with, sometimes talked about how the world doesn't need more books about Christianity. I don't remember where he said this. He said, the world needs more books about all the things written by Christian authors. So we need books on plumbing by people who love Jesus. We need books on...

I love it.

And so I love that you are out there sharing your real -life experience, teaching from your journey, and inviting other people along. to do the same. So thank you for that. Do you wanna tell our listeners how to find you if they're curious or would like to sign up for some wisdom from you?

Oh, well, thanks, Anni. Well, it's been a real pleasure to just talk with you for this last hour. I just, I love connecting with other women who are journeying. You know, the only reason I'm here, honestly, is because of a community of women who seek together. So community is still very important to me, even though I don't show up on a Sunday morning, every Sunday for a traditional church, I still have a wonderful community of spiritual seekers and Jesus lovers who are constantly in and out of my life encouraging me.

And so it's just women like you who are reaching out to women like me and we connect. And then we connect with more people who love God and who are spiritually seeking. So it's just such a pleasure to continue to build and expand a community of spiritual seekers who love Jesus and but want to see more of their faith expand into new territories, fresh territories.

So anyway, thanks again. People can find me on Instagram, Colette Eaton, and I am somewhat active on there. I have kind of a love hate of social media. And but definitely, I'm definitely active on my sub -stack, the Courage and Candor sub -stack.

And if you live in Portland, Wild Church of Portland, come and find us. We meet the first Sunday of every month. So that's it. Next time I'm in Portland, I'm coming to you. That'd be wonderful. Well, I don't mean to put you on the spot.

I didn't ask you about this, but would you send us off with a benediction?

Oh my goodness, I would love it. I would love it. Okay. Well, I think the benediction that I want to invite everybody into right now is just to close your eyes.

And just put your hand over your heart and just feel your breath, the rise and fall of your chest and just know that the breath is always present, just as God is present. There is no past or future to our breath.

And as we breathe in and out, let us remind ourselves that the present is all that we have and God is here in this very moment. She surrounds us, she flows through us. She nurtures each of our breaths that come in and out.

And I just want to leave that with all of us today. That presence is powerful. That the presence is powerful because God is in the presence with us, the infinite. And though our minds want to rush to the past or worry about the future, what we really have right now is just this.

God with us. That's it. Amen.

Amen. And so it is. So it is. Beautiful.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thanks for being here for another episode of Barely Christian, Fully Christian. I'm so glad you joined us. If you'd like to get in touch with me, the easiest way to find me is on my website.

AnniPonder.com. That's a -n -n -i -ponder .com. Remember there's no e in my name Anni. From there you can find my Instagram and Facebook connections. You can send me a note. You can sign up for my newsletter and let me know how are you wrestling with the mystery in this moment in your life.

The artwork for Barely Christian, Fully Christian, was lovingly created by Lauren Leith of Little Moon Market. You can find her on Instagram if you'd like a beautiful moon of your own. This gorgeous song by Wyn Doran and Paul Craig is called Banks of Massachusetts.

Enjoy.