Belief and Faith

In Episode 24,  we are joined by Dr. Stephen Goyer, who is one of the more amazing Pastors that I have recently met. Steve received his Doctorate at the Union Theology Seminary in Virginia and was the Minister of a Church in Jacksonville Florida. Although he is officially retired as a Pastor, Steve continues to do incredible work as a spiritual and grief coach to individuals and families. After our interview, I can see why. As Steve and I talked, it became clear that the gratitude with which he lives in his life, is both hard won and at the same time, critical to his ability to help others find that place of gratitude in themselves. One of my questions to Steve was, given the world that we live in, and the reduced interest in organized religion, what kind of church and ministry does he think we need in order to begin to move beyond the angst, anxiety, and hatred that swirls around us every day.  

Transcript

Dr. Stephen  Goyer . Belief and Faith. 12/29/21

Susan Clark: [00:00:00]  Welcome to the podcast, Steve.

Steve Goyer: [00:00:02] Thank you, Susan. It's an amazing gift, this technology that we can connect them to different shores.

Susan Clark: [00:00:08] Absolutely, absolutely. I'd like to start our interview by drawing on some of your past and your experiences to really talk about this distinction we've discussed regarding belief and faith. I thought that would be a good place to start.

Steve Goyer: [00:00:25] Well, growing up in a basically mainline moderate southern family, business oriented, we went to church, started in the Methodist Church, Mainline Church and moved to Presbyterian, mainly for practical reasons. And I received there some sense of community, of some transcendent other that we needed to somehow connect to, a sense of diligence or practice through prayer through going to church. Just sort of the basic expectations and the doctrine and for lack of a better term, the dogma of their particular denomination, either Methodist or Presbyterian. I received all of that in an unconscious way and yet still had this sense that our connection to God or it or the holy other or the transcendent presence love whatever word you want to use for it. Our connection is based on what we believe, more than relationally, what we trusted or who we trusted, or to whom we gave our trust. And so up until really I went to seminary thinking the more I could learn theologically and intellectually about God, the history of the church and theology, the deeper, more connected I would be with God. The more I would know God, the more I learned about God and seminary provided a lot of that. Like you, I have rows and rows and rows of books. Many of them now are in storage after I retired from my professional vocation as a full time pastor, but I went to the book thinking that from a cognitive perspective, I could grow closer to God, and I was trained that the correct doctrine, the belief system that we as a reformed faith is what we call ourselves.

Steve Goyer: [00:02:21] A reformed faith should have about who we are and who God is, and that carried me for a while until several things in my life happened. One is, marriage was not easy and we were in and out of therapy, and I began to question some of the basic tenets of what I had been taught or what I sort of intuited or had inherited because they didn't work so much anymore. I didn't feel any closer to God. In fact, I felt really in a way more protected from God as if I'd been inoculated in my information drive. Mm hmm. And so that happened, and then [00:02:57] I grew up and began to differentiate from all of the influences that had been given me, which got me up to that point. I'm grateful for. To ask deeper questions about life and meaning. Who is God? Who am I? Do we connect to God through belief? Or is there some other way? And it struck me that it's relational as it is relating to anyone else. It's an act of trust giving a fidelity. Faith is an act of trust, more than belief. As I look around, churches are stocked full of people who are given the right doctrine, the right belief system and as long as you abide by the belief system, all as well and you're part of the community. But if you ever question that system, then you're no longer welcome. I began to question that and to see that maybe faith should be more like trust than belief. And that opened the door to a whole, completely different awareness. [00:04:02]

Susan Clark: [00:04:02] And what was that awareness that shifted as you began to see faith as a relationship to God?

Steve Goyer: [00:04:08] What shifted was the risk factor went up and

Susan Clark: [00:04:11] How did it go up? How did that risk go up?

Steve Goyer: [00:04:14] I had less to hang on to. I felt like trapeze from one to the other. I was in mid-air. I give up my doctrine, my belief system, all the dogma. What am I going to grab if there's this trust thing that? How do you define it? How do you grasp it? And it's such a sense of reality. I don't know how to explain it. [00:04:35] It's an essence of self giving to something that you're not even sure of. [00:04:40]

Susan Clark: [00:04:40] Mm hmm. Which is risky in your mind. Very risky. And how did that feel as you were going through that transition, as you were switching from one trapeze to the other?

Steve Goyer: [00:04:50] Well, in a sort of strange way, it felt both scary and also exhilarating, and I felt driven because of the sense of enthusiasm for it. The breath that gave me this inspiration that maybe this is more true than all the other truths that I have been fed all along. And so it fed me in a new way. 

Susan Clark: [00:05:10] And as you are beginning to make this transition, as you're beginning to think about what it is and how it feels to go from belief to this more interactive faith, what is it in your background that made you ready for it?

Steve Goyer: [00:05:24] Well, probably the most dramatic event, although there have been many, I can take you back to five years old and a long litany of events, but the most dramatic event was the death of my first wife, Nancy, in a tragic and very dramatic rollover accident in Atlanta. I was in ministry at the time. I had theologically and intellectually understood that God is not the power that causes these things to happen, but the power that is with us in it and the suffering and also with us in it by giving us strength and encouragement to get through it with hope that something would grow from it. That was redemptive, that somehow it would be used for some redemptive. I had all that intellectually but existentially. Of course, I'm dealing with a lot of shit. I'm dealing with the fact that, you know, my wife was mortally injured. Both girls were in the car Megan, Our 16 year old was driving. She hadn't had her license for long. And so I was struggling with what does it mean for them? Where are they going to go with this? Mm hmm. Both had serious trauma, not physically, but certainly psychically and emotionally sure and spiritually. I just held on to the trust and also the awareness that life is finite and that no matter what, it's still finite that there is still an infinite, at least my hope was and still is, an infinite presence of reality that exists that I can only sense from time to time and whispers and starts this intimations of immortality as Wordsworth talks about. But I still had faith and trust that there was something, so no matter the outcome, I could live with it, being that it was not eternal. And so that hope of something new in life and time, but also outside of time gave strength to get through it. We will go to bed every night and a prayer gratitude. We gave thanks to God for getting us through the day and we ask God to get us through tomorrow. That was our prayer. We did that for three, four months and we got through it.

Susan Clark: [00:07:36] And that's where you began to shift from belief to faith at that point.

Steve Goyer: [00:07:41] No, I had already started shifting intellectually, but existentially, I had not. I didn't have anything left to hang on to at that point, but faith and hope in the midst of this loss, which is a pretty biblical place to be. If you look back, you know there's Israel having to face their own exile in Babylon, which was the loss of everything they believed and what comes from that? Well, the Second Temple, a whole new understanding of Judaism. The awareness that the prophets were right all along, a new birth came from that. And of course, you know the story of Christ in his death on the cross. How do you make sense of that if he's actually Lord when he ends up being the suffering servant who just dies? And so I had a sense of camaraderie in some way to the Jewish texts and the Christian texts that may be somehow this is where transition comes. True transition comes through this kind of loss and suffering.

Susan Clark: [00:08:40] Well, and I know if we go back and look at it from kind of an intellectual perspective and we go back to many of the developmental psychologists and philosophers who talk about transitions. And I know you've listened to my mother's podcasts in the transition from what she calls instinctive, reactionary to collaborative and intentional. Often traumatic things drive that shift as we begin to see things differently. Have you found that that's similar?

Steve Goyer: [00:09:10] I would say yes in the process itself, sometimes it's dramatic and sometimes it's less so. [00:09:17] Sometimes it's just existential anxiety or cognitive dissonance, or this isn't working anymore. My mantra has become maybe my tombstone mantra. I wish I knew then how much I don't know now. [00:09:30] Mm hmm. [00:09:31] And what I mean by that is I've become more and more aware of how finite and limited my sense of reality is. I mean, it's held down by my own little bubble of perspective, of my own cultural milieu in which I've been raised and brought up the reactive, instinctual part of me that I've been given in all my maleness, my whiteness. All of that goes with it. That's a small little bubble for me. To think that that's total reality is just ludicrous, right? Narcissistic, ludicrous. And so I've learned more and more that it's bigger, wider, higher, deeper and more mysterious than anything I could ever have imagined before. [00:10:15]

Susan Clark: [00:10:15] When I think what's interesting as you talk about this, as we think about these transitions, what I was most interested in is you seeing God as cognitive dissonance? And I very much like that image. Would you like to talk a little bit more as we're talking about transitions.

Steve Goyer: [00:10:32]  [00:10:32]In as much as metaphor for God could be life or love or trust or the presence, the energy, the flow? And as much as all of that is God. It seems to me that the nature of that God is to. Love us into becoming the creature that we were created to become, and life is a process of that becoming and discovering that we are also belonging with emphasis on longing, longing for that, becoming longing for that deep, profound relationship and love being love love is that which expects us to live into it, to live fully into the depth of what love entails, which is risk trust giving of ourselves. And [00:11:19] so my sense is that God pushes us use that term earlier. That's push through, much like maybe we're pushed through the womb. Talk about the original cognitive dissonance we go from, you know, perfect utopia, womb like existence and there's no separation. The mother and I are one, and then somebody cuts the cord, and all of a sudden we're like, Whoa, we're now in a huge, dissonant state. This one that we feel connected to is also the one that we understand we are not connected to anymore. And so from then on in life, we live with that sort of existential dissonance. [00:11:59] God's godness, I think being, love, as I understand God, is to instill in us a deeper sense of how we can become more fully and authentically ourselves. Hmm. And I mean that not in so much a singularly selfish way as a self, but a self that can only be understood in relationship to others and to the other. But it's a both/and. [00:12:26]

Susan Clark: [00:12:26] Right. I'm intrigued with that because as we look at change and I know religion can play such an important part in all of that, and I also know within our culture, fewer and fewer people are really engaging in organized religion. It's really plummeting. And I'm intrigued with that because I think there is so much to gain from this combination of understanding. It is love and understanding it as a dissonance that those two together are really what's so important in helping us grow and move forward. [00:13:00] And how does that idea get back into an organization, into a religion, into a something that allows for people to have a structure that they can engage through this process they're going through? [00:13:14]

Steve Goyer: [00:13:14]  [00:13:14]It might have been one of your podcasts. This just comes to mind that I heard maybe it was Tom and you talking about sort of the summary podcast that you did about how do you do this organizationally and you have to create a safe place? That's one. And you also have to have expectations and accountability. That's true. And those two things, which is what love is, right? It's a safe presence while it also has an accountability and expectation. I don't know if that answers your question, but those two things are both and that are greater than the sum of the parts. [00:13:54]

Susan Clark: [00:13:54]  [00:13:54]Well, let's dig a little deeper into that because I'm intrigued with where we are heading as a culture in order to be able to engage spirituality and to move beyond just religion as a belief and really engage religion as a faith, as a trust, as a love, as a dissonance. How do you see that potentially happening? Do you see it happening anywhere? [00:14:19]

Steve Goyer: [00:14:19]  [00:14:19]I think it's happening all over us. I think COVID pandemic crisis is forcing that sort of existential awareness. A lot of ways. One is that we are finite and mortal and at great risk to nature, that we are subservient to nature and that we cannot control nature. We're facing that with climate change too, I think. [00:14:45] And it's also an awareness that the great idolatry today is science and technology. That technology is not going to save us in spite of the fact that many people think that it will. You know, there's this whole movement about being able to live to your three hundred years old. I got to tell you, I don't want to live on three hundred years old, but you know, if you do, that's fine. But regardless, science isn't going to protect us from the ultimate annihilation of death. Mm hmm. And so you had that going on on one hand that we just give ourselves over to the powers of science and technology. And I'm not dissing science. Listen, we all need it. We all and I deeply appreciate it. I'm a huge vaxxer, so don't hear me as dissing science. And the other side of that, I think, is religious fundamentalism that tends to draw tighter and tighter circles around itself to keep out culture and life and any dissonance or awareness that there are other options to our structure of faith and belief in who God is and who we are. And so they become more cult like more and more. Then there's this a new age movement that kind of says, you know, the material is bad, a sort of return to Gnosticism, materials bad and the spiritual is good. And so we need to sort of lift ourselves up in that higher order of the cosmos so that we are no longer dependent on and dirtied by our material existence. I think those are always out all different ways out of the dissonance. I think ultimately they don't survive in the end, and it throws us back on the deeper spiritual and I think religious questions about who we are and whose we are and from whom have we come.

Susan Clark: [00:16:37] Well, let's go into that a little bit more. So for what reasons do you think these three approaches pure science, pure cult and pure new age end up failing going away? As you said,

Steve Goyer: [00:16:52] As we're seeing science, you know, classic case of scientifically, the data shows that those who are vaccinated have a better response to COVID than those who were not. TYet, there's a large percentage, I mean, a minority still, but comparatively, it's a large percentage of people who claim that that's not true, even though scientifically the data says it is. So they are willing to live in the cognitive dissonance of their own sense of authority and integrity or some internet website versus all the data of science around the globe. Mm hmm. So it still fails because we have an unwillingness to fully embrace it. I think science also increases the dissonance, by the way. I mean, when they Copernicus came out with the telescope and discovered that the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, all hell broke loose. Mm hmm. You had to recant that not to be burned at the stake because the whole issue of the church was at stake that had been pushing that all along. The anxiety level of the world went up exponentially when we discovered that what we sensed to be true. It makes sense that the Sun revolves around the Earth. I mean, it starts on the East and moves to the West. What we thought our sense is told us as true is no longer true. Right? Well, how many times do we give in to our senses of what I just I know it's true. I intuitively know it's true. I sense it's true. So it's true. All right. Well, guess what? Sports fans, our senses are deceiving

Susan Clark: [00:18:30] As any pilot who flies instruments in bad weather can tell you, if you didn't have the instruments, you end up upside down and hitting the ground.

Steve Goyer: [00:18:38] Perfect analogy.

Susan Clark: [00:18:39] Well, and I think it's interesting because as we talk about how each one of these science cults and new age, all press boundaries creating dissonance, they all end up failing. And I think they end up failing because they're on the extremes right there causing changes. But they can only go so far because they keep getting more and more extreme and they end up petering out over time.

Steve Goyer: [00:19:04] They end up increasing dissonance because of that.

Susan Clark: [00:19:07] So as we begin to look at how we make transitions from pure belief into a better understanding of faith, having a truth, engaging in that love. How do you see religion standing in the middle of that? Or a new religion standing in the middle of that? That allows for us to be able to move beyond these extremes and come back together?

Steve Goyer: [00:19:32] That's a great question, and [00:19:33] I think everybody is asking themselves that question who are professional religious folk or even not can tell you how many young people have a conversation with, and they say they're their spiritual, but not religious. Mm hmm. And I always ask them the question How do you practice your spirituality? And they look at me like a deer in the headlights, because what I want them to know is that religion, the meaning of the term actually has two roots. One is religiary, which means that which binds or connects like ligaments or religinary, which is a sense of a painstaking commitment of practice. So you have those two meanings. If you're spiritual, you still have to practice spirituality. And it's not something that like grits that come by themselves. There's no such thing as a grit. There's no such thing as independent individual spirituality. It's connected to something greater than ourselves. And so how do you practice that? And so once you start practicing it, it's now a religion. It's something that binds us and connects us [00:20:42]

Susan Clark: [00:20:42] Well, and I've been reading a lot on some of the new integral thinking. Gene Webster, who was originally in Europe after World War Two, was writing a lot about evolution and change and mutations within culture, and part of what he was saying was that technology has taken us quite far down the road and we've reached a point now where the annihilation is clearly upon us and it's forcing us to go back and really learn about the past, about a connection, a more mystic and mythical connection that we used to have to the world and bring those together into a whole and to more, I guess the word would be a functional synctium to bring all those pieces together so that they begin to support and nurture each other, allowing us to move forward and address these incredible issues that are hitting us.

Steve Goyer: [00:21:39]  [00:21:39]Differentiated but still in a systemic relationship of something that works, that connects. [00:21:45]

Susan Clark: [00:21:45]  [00:21:45]Correct. Correct. Very well said.

Steve Goyer: [00:21:47] And I think a lot, especially technology these days, a.k.a. iPhones, is that which disconnects as we well know, all the data shows. I sense us going back to that. I think it's a return to reverence as much as anything

Susan Clark: [00:22:03]  [00:22:03]Define reverence for me, could you? [00:22:05]

Steve Goyer: [00:22:05]  [00:22:05]It's a sense of awe and wonder for that which is so wholly other that can only take our breath away. And that life then should be judged not by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of times our breath has been taken away. Like that and by breath, I mean, really, that's the, you know, that's the life force. That's the breath that was breathed into us, according to Genesis, that from God, the inspiration, our respiration. And when you die, you expire. You no longer have breath. It's that breath of life that catches us in a sense of reverence, in awe, respect and and really worship in the sense of bowing down to this thing that's so huge. That's my hope we can find a return to, but also know that we have some pain and suffering ahead of us before the hunger is going to be strong enough to get us there. [00:23:04]

Susan Clark: [00:23:04] Say a bit more about that. How is it that we have to go through that pain and suffering in order for us to feel that hunger?

Steve Goyer: [00:23:13] That's one of the questions I'm going to have to ask the grand maker why is there so much suffering? I mean, it was the question, Buddha asked, and I don't have an answer to it somehow. [00:23:25] Suffering is used, not caused by God, but is used by God to help us become. And I don't know that we would otherwise. Evolutionarily, it takes a whole lot of courage and adventure and suffering for a fish to crawl out of a pond and start trying to walk on its fins. I mean, that's that's painful. Yet that drive to become is so innate in every cell in us, I mean, since the beginning of time. And so it just is. It takes that kind of painstaking discipline and passion, which the route for passion is pathos. The root for pathos is pain for us to become what we can truly become or becoming. I'm not sure become is something we ever finally reach in this world. But becoming becoming, we become more. [00:24:21]

Susan Clark: [00:24:22] I think that's very good.

Steve Goyer: [00:24:23] And I also want to say about suffering that my understanding of God is the God who suffers. That's what God's pathos is all about. That God suffers. And that was what the Christ have been on. The cross was about God's promise to us that we are not alone in our suffering. And that God suffers with us.

Susan Clark: [00:24:43] And isn't that understanding that God is suffering with us also is about drawing us into an appreciation of God, that God is there with us struggling with us through this so that we feel we're not alone. We feel that we have companionship through what we have to. I think of your your first wife and the terrible tragedy that was very painful, I'm sure. And it's through that suffering that you began to feel very deeply, as you said, this shift in yourself from pure belief into faith, right?

Steve Goyer: [00:25:21] And let me say that at the same time that that happened, I experienced God's absence as much as I experienced God's presence, which was also part of the loss that I felt in many ways, sometimes abandoned. Where in the hell is God in this? While at the same time, looking back now I see God was everywhere through the community that loved us and cared for us and made meals and through their deep love and compassion through the many sort of coincidences that were more than coincidences, these little winks or nods to us that there's something bigger here. If we had the eyes for it reminds me of that wonderful Emily Dickinson poem. I tried to memorize it a thousand times. It's about we see a cuter quite by the wick that leaves, then by the wick that stays. Do you know that poem? Mm hmm. Yes, that is so true. Mm hmm. So in the absence of God, I began to see in a new way God's presence. But I'm dealing with that, God, That deep dissonance between God no longer seems to be present here. This is just absurdity.

Susan Clark: [00:26:34] Well, and it was it God as you saw God and felt and believed in God as you were growing up and as you were maturing, you'd begun to make an intellectual shift. And it's only when you made that huge emotional shift that you began that transition through the death of your wife, that you begin to see God differently and you can't see something differently till you can see its absence. Right?

Steve Goyer: [00:27:01] That's so well said. [00:27:03] If you're always looking for the sameness, it's the absence that comes when that no longer is visible. We need to sharpen our eyesight because something new is about to be seen. [00:27:14]

Susan Clark: [00:27:14] Wouldn't that be incredible? If we could look at the current situation we're in, the polarization within our country, this environmental crisis. All the things that are just blowing up in our faces as a celebration of, Oh my god, we don't have to see it that way anymore. What can we see new?

Steve Goyer: [00:27:33] You new can be born,

Susan Clark: [00:27:34] What new could be born, which is really as we talk about the evolution of our culture, a huge shift from that kind of instinctual, hierarchical, reactive space into that intentional, collaborative and even beginning to move into that integral space where you really are feeling that connection.

Steve Goyer: [00:27:50] I wish I could claim this, but Brian McLaren is the one who said at first who I overheard in a podcast. He's one of the new age, not new age. Sorry, wrong. We're a new church understanding gurus. His understanding of the way we move that way is similar exactly to yours. He said we begin with simplicity that reactive, instinctual. This is life. This is truth. This is reality. It's a simple little thing. And then all of a sudden we go off to college or we go to someplace and we discover that, you know what? Not everybody believes the same thing I do, and not everybody has the same perspective. And so we start moving or transitioning into complexity and an either or you're a Democrat. I'm a Republican. Well, that makes things more complex because I like you, but I don't know what to do with that. I'm not willing to give up my political ideology. And then something happens from complexity that moves us into perplexity where we lose our faith. We now are full of doubt. We're just perplexed. This doesn't work anymore. I'm in liminal space and I'm in it deep. I'm in the wilderness. Perplexed. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know where it's going to end up. What do I believe? And from that, if we stay in the journey and courageous enough to stay in the journey comes what McLaren calls harmony. Which is some level of OK. It's OK. I don't understand it all. I don't know at all. I'm humbled by it, but I'm also grounded by it and connected by it. Not only my faith, but to everything else in life. I feel connected, not completely in harmony, of course, but.

Susan Clark: [00:29:46] And is that the trust and the love that you talk about earlier around religion?

Steve Goyer: [00:29:51] Yes. And the Bible, that's what the Bible is. It's a narrative of the journey beginning right out of the chute. Adam and Eve, one of their little bliss in the mythology or metaphor or fable of the story in the garden. All they wanted was to form this perfect little lifestyle, but they were eaten alive by this cognitive dissonance that they didn't have all the knowledge. And so that tree promised it. The God said, Don't eat it. So they were trying to do away with their angst and be like God. They then had reality imposed upon them by God. We are far from God. The more I know, the more I don't know. And so then they experience shame hiding behind the tree and hiding themselves behind the tree. There's a human condition. And from that, I think God, some faiths say, Well, that was the fall that Jesus saves us from. I've come to believe that that was the rise. That was the beginning of adulthood when they were exiled from the garden and sent into the world to toil and to give birth and pain in childbirth and to produce and reproduce. That was the beginning of Agency for Humanity.

Susan Clark: [00:31:03] And what I hear you saying, Steve, it's not perfection that we're striving for in our religion, but it is connection to this broader range of experiences around ourselves and living with them with trust and care and harmony, which is not always perfect.

Steve Goyer: [00:31:26] I don't know that it is perfect ever, but at least as I understand perfection. But it's good enough I'll live with more sense of gratitude than I do anxiety, mainly because I practice gratitude and I practice connection. Our default, of course, is what anxiety. That's how we survived, right? I mean, those who sat around singing Kumbaya didn't last. It was the people who were most anxious to lasted. So we have that gene in us, which gives us strength. The shadow side of that is it gives us strength that propels us. But I look back on the text and I see this narrative, the fact it's real narrative that differentiates Judaism from paganism. [00:32:08] Judaism began to see history as a beginning, middle and end narrative. A story? Mm hmm. Apart from the pagan cultures that saw it in a circular way, according to the lunar movement, nothing ever change didn't expect any change. It was just always the same over and over again. When in the story God calls Abraham to leave his father's house to the land that I will show you, Abraham and Sarah. All of a sudden, my god, it's no longer the same. Now there is a narrative movement, character development. There's crisis. How is it going to be resolved? In the end? We're still in that price process. We don't know fully how it's going to be resolved, how it ends, but we have hope and trust that it ends somehow in God's reconciling love. That's at least my hope and trust. [00:32:58]

Susan Clark: [00:32:58] Well, and I think that's fascinating, because when we think about going back to Jean Gebser and a lot of the integral philosophers, what they're talking about now is that we've been going linear for quite a while. The industrial age is all about this linear story and that what we're now looking at is how is it that we go back and pick up the cyclical story so that while we're in the midst of this linear movement as we're making choices, not decisions, but choices that we stop and have a sense of where we fit into a spectrum that continues on the sun rises every day. The Moon has its cycle so that as we're moving along this linear path, we are looking at how the cyclical nature exists.

Steve Goyer: [00:33:47] Perfect. That's the both/andness that we can reclaim the sort of western eastern mythologies of of the both/and of that. I love that. I think it was your analogy. It's like a spiral staircase. We might be evolving, but we're also going back around and around and around and revisiting that, which was in order to get to that, which will be. And so, yes, both cyclical and lineal or the both/and this of that, which is truth.

Susan Clark: [00:34:16] And it's so hard as I look out into our culture to find where that's being taught. That's my interest in why I'm actually doing a lot of research right now on some of the more integral philosophers. You know, Ken Wilber in the U.S., Jean Gebser, of course, in Europe, a new gentleman by the name of Jeremy Johnson, who's kind of taken up where Gensler was working. So a lot of really interesting ideas, but I don't see it within the larger structure within our culture. Do you see it anywhere?

Steve Goyer: [00:34:46] Well, I'm looking at two Wilbur books underneath my computer, Integral Life practice and the Religion of Tomorrow. I thought that was a pretty good foundation to put my computer on.

Susan Clark: [00:34:57] I think that's a terrific one.

Steve Goyer: [00:34:58] I'm a big Wilbur fan before. I never read Wilbur well enough to understand that he takes seriously the shadows in the life practice he does. And to me, that's that's the dichotomy of our brokenness is actually the place where we find our strength. The deep part of us that we think is pathological is also the very source of our spirituality. Mm hmm. You know, it's it's a strange paradox. My worry about Wilbur was, if you follow the practice, we'll reach a place of integral nirvana. I'm very wary of promises of nirvana. To me, that's infantile regression. Mm hmm. Now I can be talked out of that, but as I understand it, I'm sort of an existentialist at heart and that is that we always have to live with the threat of annihilation. The day profoundest the dark depths of annihilation. We live with that in life. And so that being the case, we always carry with us sense of dread, of angst, anxiety.

Susan Clark: [00:36:16]  [00:36:16]That's a really interesting way of looking at it. I mean, there's one way to add to that could nirvana be a place where both the linear and the cyclical, where the bliss and the angst all those coexist? And in knowing they all coexist and experiencing that they coexist is where we find our ultimate peace. [00:36:44]

Steve Goyer: [00:36:45]  [00:36:45]There can be a place. I think our vernacular is, that's the kingdom of God. Mm hmm. Not heaven, but heaven now, heaven present now that which is in time, but beyond. Mm hmm. Yes, I think it does exist. I've experienced it. Know you well enough of this, but to know you have. Mm hmm. However, I don't think we can experience it fully, completely in time and in space, only again from time to time. [00:37:14]

Susan Clark: [00:37:14] The experience I see, yes, agreed. So that would be the distinction is that you do not stay in nirvana or bliss.

Steve Goyer: [00:37:23] God's going to kick your ass out of it as soon as you think you're there.

Susan Clark: [00:37:29] I think that that's probably pretty darn true and that what we need to do is when things are the hardest is when we go and find that place of bliss. In the midst of that pain is how we're able to make these transitions. Yes.

Steve Goyer: [00:37:45]  [00:37:45]Well, I think the question remains, it begs the question, how can we help people move from from one wherever they are placed to the to the other knowing that we're going to gripe and bitch and moan the whole way, like Israel did in the wilderness, at least in Israel. In Egypt, we had some carrots we could eat here. We don't have anything except this bad manna and toward the Promised Land, which when they get there, of course, it's not the Promised Land, it's full of all kinds of problems. So how do you get people to make that move unless they are so in need of liberation, so enslaved to the powers and principalities that they don't have any choice? I don't know. It was your mother who said without cognitive dissonance, it's not going to happen. Mm hmm. So, you know, preachers tend to want to solve everybody's cognitive dissonance. And I think in reality, I would like a church where you've got to be willing to let that cognitive dissonance become aware. And embraced and see that that is the place, the very place where God is going to be experienced. [00:39:04]

Susan Clark: [00:39:04] Well, have you thought about a mythical place that you have that would be a place that you could preach and that you've brought a group of people together? And these are random, folks. These are not folks that are prepared, but they're random folks. How might you preach to them? What might you want to talk to them about to help them understand this power of cognitive dissonance?

Steve Goyer: [00:39:33] I think I would first have to be able to share myself in a way that was vulnerable enough that they could trust being vulnerable in the community. Hmm. And share my own brokenness. Not too much information, but enough. To know that I'm struggling just as much as you are and that I have plenty of stuff to say, I'm grateful for forgiveness for. Mm hmm. And so in doing that, also holding up something that's greater even than my story as a story that we can try to live with or live into. And that is a story of unconditional love of God, our creator. Mm hmm. Story of God's presence, even though we don't always sense it or experience it. Mm hmm. Story of God's ultimate redemption and reconciliation. That's the story I try to live by. It gives me hope. And also in that there would be some liturgy, some kind of common order. So there's just not like, Oh, what are we going to do now stuff? I think you need some singing of some kind because music is what liberates. We are overcome, African American national anthem. They're all songs of liberation, movements don't happen unless their song to Go with it, I think. Yes. And then you need a common meal. You call it Eucharist, but it could just be dinner could be beer with dinner. My sermon would be 15 minutes, and the congregation would be small enough that we could have a conversation about it, rather than in the large nave of a church where everybody sits there like receiving heads. Mm hmm. And intellectualize at all. It needs to be embodied somehow. Maybe we dance.

Susan Clark: [00:41:27] Yes, maybe we dance. Well, Steve, this has been absolutely amazing talking with you. This has been a wonderful, wonderful treat as we're finishing up. Is there anything that you would like to share with the audience before we go?

Steve Goyer: [00:41:43] Don't lose hope. That's the place of resilience. Don't lose trust. That's the place of real, sincere and authentic relationship. You don't lose love. So that's the gift that there's no greater gift than these, that deep sense of love, the thing that we all most yearn for to love and be loved, to be known to know as we are known to be fully embraced in our beingness and loved regardless. Those are Paul's three things, of course, you know in First Corinthians 13, faith, hope and love. Abide these three. But the greatest of these is love. And think. Near the end, he changed to that in Romans. He kind of goes, the greatest of these is hope, you know, because he was facing his own demise. Of course. Yeah, my hope is that nothing can separate us from the love of God. That's what all my hope is engendered on that promise.

Susan Clark: [00:42:44] Well, thank you so much for spending time with us today. You're welcome.