Dr. Dan Allender and Dr. Curt Thompson are two of the most trusted and renown Christian therapists. They have spent their lives exploring what healing and redemption looks like, and they both join us for a long-form conversation.
We discuss the relationship between science and faith, belief and our bodies, healing vs medicating, and the difference between abundant life and consumerism.
Check out the Disruptor Initiative: https://www.provenmen.org/disruptors/
Dr. Thompson's latest book: The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope (https://a.co/d/8e3T1v6). To learn more about Dr. Thompson visit: https://curtthompsonmd.com/
Dr. Allender: Visit theallendercenter.org to find training opportunities, online courses, conferences, and workshops. (http://theallendercenter.org)
About Curt Thompson and Dan Allender:
Psychiatrist, speaker and author Curt Thompson connects our intrinsic desire to be known with the need to tell truer stories about ourselves — showing us how to form deep relationships, discover meaning and live integrated, creative lives.
Dr. Dan Allender is a pioneer of a unique and innovative approach to trauma and abuse therapy. For over 30 years, Narrative Focused Trauma Care has brought healing and transformation to hundreds of thousands of lives by bridging the story of the gospel and the stories of trauma and abuse that mark so many.
Dr. Dan Allender and Dr. Curt Thompson are two of the most trusted and renown Christian therapists. They have spent their lives exploring what healing and redemption looks like, and they both join us for a long-form conversation.
We discuss the relationship between science and faith, belief and our bodies, healing vs medicating, and the difference between abundant life and consumerism.
Check out the Disruptor Initiative: https://www.provenmen.org/disruptors/
Dr. Thompson's latest book: The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope (https://a.co/d/8e3T1v6). To learn more about Dr. Thompson visit: https://curtthompsonmd.com/
Dr. Allender: Visit theallendercenter.org to find training opportunities, online courses, conferences, and workshops. (http://theallendercenter.org)
About Curt Thompson and Dan Allender:
Psychiatrist, speaker and author Curt Thompson connects our intrinsic desire to be known with the need to tell truer stories about ourselves — showing us how to form deep relationships, discover meaning and live integrated, creative lives.
Dr. Dan Allender is a pioneer of a unique and innovative approach to trauma and abuse therapy. For over 30 years, Narrative Focused Trauma Care has brought healing and transformation to hundreds of thousands of lives by bridging the story of the gospel and the stories of trauma and abuse that mark so many.
Hello and welcome to the Naked Gospel, where we have conversations about sex, singleness, marriage, pornography and everything in between. We bring on cultural thinkers, parents, important folk and normal folk alike. I am your host, shane O'Neill. All of these episodes are available on every major podcast platform, whether you're listening or watching. Do subscribe and continue to track with us. Thank you for tuning in and enjoy the episode. Hello folks, welcome back to the Naked Gospel. This is your host, shane O'Neill.
Speaker 1:Today I have kind of a long form conversation with two special people, so Dr Dan Allender and Dr Kurt Thompson. So, just by way of bio, dr Dan Allender is a psychologist and a therapist. He's an author and he's a teacher. He's also a dad and a grandfather. He's written books like To Be Told and Moonded Healer several other books that we'll be hearing about throughout this conversation, I'm sure and he founded the Allender Institute. It's out in Seattle Washington, where he trains professionals and lay folk in a narrative based trauma care. They're doing incredible work. There'll be more info about that and more info well verbally communicated later, but also in the show notes down below.
Speaker 1:And Dr Kurt Thompson is joining us. He is a psychiatrist and a therapist. He's an MD. He's also an author and a father. Kurt, are you a grandfather? Not yet, okay. Okay, he's written the Anatomy of the Soul and the Soul of Shame, the Soul of Desire, and his latest book is called the Deepest Place. We'll hear more about that a little bit later as well, and links to his content will be in the show notes also. Guys, thanks, thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:Delightful, delightful it's a pleasure Always.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is cool.
Speaker 2:As my nine-year-old granddaughter would say Papa, you're not a real doctor, but Kurt is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're listening, and then Kurt's voice is priceless.
Speaker 3:Dan, you might be happy to hear that. I've had people say that to me. I mean, it's like what Are you going to just ask people what they feel about their incision? What's it? It's no win.
Speaker 2:No, maclachor, the idea of how we refer and how we are referred to is always fascinating, but having you initially thank you for altering that. I'm a psychiatrist I did take. I remember saying to my wife at one point when I was in the middle of grad school, I think I'd like to go on and get a medical degree. And she looked at me and she said you and your next wife will do well doing that. It was a limiting choice to then say I'd rather keep my wife than to have the attribution of psychiatrists, but immense and deep respect for my brother on this conversation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right back at you, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to play into that for a second.
Speaker 1:There I can't actually think when I look at there's a lot of phrases that are thrown around, but the therapeutic movement is often used kind of a yeah, the revolution movement.
Speaker 1:People use really strong language to describe even the therapy as kind of a social technology for the self.
Speaker 1:I know even historian Carl Truman is latest work explores a lot of that.
Speaker 1:But I can't actually think of like two men who have contributed more for Christians in understanding what it looks like to be a healer through these particular sorts of vocations in the therapeutic realm. And I'm actually pretty curious because you two have a relationship with one another and I'm interested to hear how you guys would communicate, articulate the contribution of the other person into kind of modern Christian imagination conceptualization, because like ever since Dallas Willard is really it was actually hard for me to find a book that didn't employ some kind of therapeutic psychological methodology in any book written about the Christian life, christian formation, christian disciplines, and in a sense five or 10 years ago the cool vocation was church planting and today it really is kind of counseling, psychology, therapy, and I think you guys have helped recalibrate some of the holy wars imagination for Christians to maybe rescue mission or healer, and so whoever wants to start, I can call on whomever, but maybe, like Dan, what's your, how would you articulate Kurt's contribution and Kurt, how would you?
Speaker 3:articulate Dan's yeah, I'm going to ask if I can go first. Yeah, please, yeah, well, and the reason I would ask to go first is because I was, I was aware of Dan before Dan was aware of me, and I think this is this is what I would say. You know, I think at least I'll say this for myself before you even meet people, you, you, you get a sense, even in their not for everybody, but for many people in their writing. And then that was the first way, dan, that I encountered you was in writing. You get a sense not just in the content of what they're saying, but you also have a sense in the spirit with which they write. And then, as I had the first occasion to listen, dan, to you speak, it was here in Northern Virginia. It was the very first time we met in person, that lunchtime intersection, that we had On the floor.
Speaker 3:Very, very, very so.
Speaker 2:I can almost say this time, when I was here, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I know the room where you were sitting and I was sitting and I think that what I sensed in Dan was the you were clear articulation. You weren't you weren't using this word all the time, or perhaps even certainly not often, but it was clear that your anthropology was the biblical narrative and that was clear, at least to me as a reader, because of what you said, but also because of the spirit with which you said it. And it was a way to talk about the real world and and, and you know, we're, we're, we're on the tail end of 500 years of modernity, which is kind of like split the universe into the material universe, over and against this imagined thing we call the spiritual realm, which is not a biblical way of understanding the way the real world works, I mean the way we talked about. It would be completely like unimaginable to a first century Hebrew. And I found in Dan's work and articulation that assumed a biblical anthropology and that came out sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, in the way that he's talking while he at the same time is naming real things in language that was making sense to the world in which he was naming it. In the New Testament, jesus and his disciples and his followers named things in language that were consistent with the world that they occupied, and our world has a really hard time making sense of language that's in the scriptures unless you're actually going to go, do the work of immersing yourself in the text and the context. Our language, the language of our world, is the language of neuroscientists, the language of psychology. It's that language.
Speaker 3:What I sensed in Dan was someone who was using that dialect, but the mother tongue that was surrounding all of it was a biblical narrative, and so it makes not just the stuff he's naming trauma healing. How we go about doing that. He wasn't just like naming it, which made it possible for us to enter into the real world. We were no longer pretending we were going to be in the church, we were going to pretend everything's fine.
Speaker 3:Whatever that trauma stuff is, I don't even know because I don't have language for it. He gave us language for that, but he also, in so doing, I think, actually created space for my experience of my faith itself to be rejuvenated, because he's using a dialect that is grounded in an anthropology that assumed that names that Jesus is the king, and if that's where we begin, everything else follows, and so when we get to Paul's language in Romans, one about everybody from the beginning has known what the nature of God and his power are from the creation. My sense is that what Dan has been doing is like naming what's true in the creative world, like this is what's happening in the world, but he's doing so from a perspective that sees that world through the lens of Genesis to Revelation.
Speaker 2:That's such a gift. And the dilemma in responding is it doesn't sound very thoughtful to use the word ditto, but let's start with that. But before I start with that sitting with you, in that, I mean, there were a lot of people and we really just had to literally get on the floor and kind of like shut out the noise of a number of other people who were in that room. And I think my first sense and this is it may not be great theology, but my core question is would I want to go drink a beer with this person? And the answer was absolutely yes within a matter of seconds. So my sense of that first encounter is I'm with a man who's just beautiful, who's a beautiful heart and mind, and the way you crafted language, the way you spoke, the questions you asked and the nature. Even though it was a brief interaction, there was an actual dialogue that when I departed I had a sense of loss, that this was meant to go on longer and because of the framing of it, being in the middle of a conference, obviously it was not possible.
Speaker 2:So I think in many ways, what I looked to first is the presence of beauty and again, this is not a trivial concept it is. Is there coherence? Is there something like the word cavod glory, is there something sparkling? Is there something alive that when you're in the presence of this person you feel more alive by the privilege of being with them? And then cavod also glory has also that notion of substance, of something literally, the corresponding word is the word thick and to just be in the conversation. So when I finally had the privilege of reading your first book, there was such a clear sense of this is a man who loves words but, even more important, loves the word, loves truth and longs to craft it so that we are captured even more by the beauty of the word, through the words. And that may sound very elitistic, but I don't find a lot of people in our field who substantially want their life to be about the word, about the very creator, the king, the kingdom of God, the redemptive process, and I'm all for healing on so many levels, but the healer ultimately is an engagement with Jesus and certainly through the spirit revealing the father.
Speaker 2:Nonetheless, you can taste in the presence of a human being whether or not there is this capacity to engage death but, on the other hand, knows something of the glory of the resurrection, which in and of itself is the fundamental paradox or an enemy that you're left with.
Speaker 2:People who know death are just despairing, people who, in one sense, no little but the resurrection, have a kind of victorious irritation about them. When you can find somebody that holds death and resurrection in their own unique way, yet in a way that compels you because of that beauty, then everything else now opens to the conversation of what can I what? What privilege of being able to learn from you Am I granted and I think that's been the basis of our friendship, as we learn a lot from another, and there is no, there's no envy that that you get this access, you have this success, you have this privilege. I don't, I don't, I don't give a shit. That's the freedom of being able to delight and to in some sense be in awe of one another, and that's enough to be able to say that's the picture of what happened for me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right on. Okay, can I, can I have a follow on? Can I, can I? Yeah, so before you start to record, I referenced a conversation that Dan and I had a few years ago in which I said he saved my bacon. I think is what I said.
Speaker 3:And, dan, to your point, I think that there is a sense in which, if I, if I am allowed to also say ditto, there was the sense that I'm, I mean, I love, I love that juxtaposition of death and resurrection, like on this side of the new heaven and earth. We can't escape that. These things are both true and I would say I called you in no small part because I needed to talk to somebody who I knew, knew what death is and yet could trust that he also knew resurrection, in a moment where it felt like it was really hard for me to find it. And you know that for me, that first conversation that we had sitting on the floor at that conference and that conversation that we had where I was sitting in my chair in my office in Northern Virginia, are like these pillars for me, that both of which are reflective of what you just said.
Speaker 2:It's really Well for the For most people with the kind of gifting that you have been granted. And again, none of us choose our gifts. We choose how we participate or use them, but we don't choose them any more than we choose our face, that we choose the DNA, etc. But there is something holy in being able to embrace to at least a degree. This is who I am, this is what I bring to whatever endeavor I'm part of.
Speaker 2:But also in owning gifting there also has to be this deep sense of oh, my gifts are very limited and I get to participate not use, not consume, but I get to participate in the gifting of others and that intersection of I have something to offer but I am so much more aware of what my body, heart, mind needs. So French with you has been again that privilege of oh my gosh, you would call me what an honor. And to have that privilege of engaging certain of the wars you were in at that season, wars that again, not to say I was passed in and then somehow came out of, but inevitable to be in, no matter where you are in life.
Speaker 2:Those are the moments where I think there is both a strange, appropriate humility, which is a form of death, but also honor, which is the taste of resurrection. So when we combine humility and honor in a way in which we're able to offer but also receive, again, we're back to. This is what the Lord's table is. It is passing on to one another breven wine with a taste of again that sensuality. It's one of the things that, when we were talking before we began taping, your writing is so sensual. It has that like I can read a paragraph and literally have to close the book because I just have a mouthful and if I just keep eating I'm going to actually harm myself, so I just have to close it.
Speaker 2:And occasionally I walk in our neighborhood with one of your books and that process of then reading to my wife as we're walking and then close it and walking, and we are meant to not eat in a kind of violent way, but we're to take it to just the goodness and the glory and the presence of others, because we need it.
Speaker 2:But there's the other side and that is we're at the table and we're not meant to just take in. We're meant to offer food, we're meant to be able to bring blessing and goodness to one another by talking about the flavor of what this rich bear enables us to experience. So I think that's the nature of what any kind of godly relationship. There ought to be a stirring, there ought to be an invitation, there ought to be, in one sense, a calling forth to the glory that you are meant to reveal about the glory of God. And when you find relationships that provide that, even if you're not able to be together as we're not, we're seldom together I mean the gift of just even a few minutes with you when we had our 25th anniversary.
Speaker 2:I was sitting at a table and somebody who actually didn't know me that well and certainly didn't know you, leaned over and said, literally in the middle of your talk, like he's amazing. And I'm like, oh, hold on, you have not seen yet what will happen before Kurt finishes. So that's what I think when Paul particularly talks about love one another deeply from the heart. You can't love one another well unless you are in one sense taken by one another's glory, one another's honor and delight.
Speaker 1:There's a world of difference between consuming and feasting, and I like Paul's language when he talks about the Passover and he talks about them gathering and feasting and it's like and he's criticizing them because, like you're not, you're not actually feasting. You know you're consuming your own stuff and you're refusing to share, consuming one another. Thanks for who are listening and watching. What we just beheld was a loop of outdoing one another and honor.
Speaker 1:The just over and over is beautiful to behold. I think the question that falls out of listening to y'all is some of the things that I'm struck by are Okay, let me frame this differently. Paul really kind of epitomizes the holy wars, imagination, whereas I do like it is to be a therapist, is to be a healer, and I like Nancy Pierces language where she puts forward rescue mission as opposed to indirect contrast to holy wars. What if we understood our mission not as a as a culture war but as a rescue mission? So apologetics, so there's this kind of like this, you know, truth versus relationship dichotomy at play for a lot of people right now, even kind of modernity and postmodernity, because we're just like well, what's your truth, what's your story? Where it's emphasizing people over this kind of clinical truism that we have an allegiance to at a propositional level.
Speaker 1:I think that's what hurts so much about, that's what hurt me so much about Ravi Zacharias. He was the apologist with a heart right, like he was, that he branded himself as a safe big brother, a father, you know where he just so, just his words and his tones saturated with affection, maybe really sad, you know, because so many apologies are so clinical and miss people for the sake of truth. But then there's this other side where a lot of people have a fear, maybe, I think, a fear of a therapy, because it emphasizes, maybe, methodology, or emphasizes what is the truth of the person over like what? What is abundant life? And that's something I'm struck by listening to.
Speaker 1:It's like, okay, so constants in a biblical story, that there is a meta story, that there are. There's something real like honor, like honors, real values, real, seeing people as real at a? Yeah, it's real, it's regardless, like people are made in God's image. And excavating that and finding it, it seems like there's, there's a giddy joy inside of both of you of getting to behold that. Could you? I would love to hear you all speak to what it, what has been like to hold, to see people and hold truth. And for those who have an allergy to therapy because it emphasizes again that dichotomy of grace instead of truth or love instead of truth Can you speak to and just wed that and how that's played out for you all? Kurt?
Speaker 3:Well, I would say I there are. In responding, shane, to your question, I think there are a number of streams that are all kind of coming together to kind of converging. I think I think one would be again, we. One of the one of the taglines we tag I guess tagline we might say that we use in our practices that are our mission are is to help people tell their stories more truly. And by truly we mean we don't just mean true according to facts, which is, you know, truth. That's a modernist way of using that word, not the way that, just for Jesus, the word truth would be more like the old English word trough, which is about faithfulness, and be faithful means I want to tell all of my story, not as opposed to falsehoods, which is part of that, but I mean it's, it's how do I, how do I tell the story faithfully, this story, my story and what? And so that's that's one thing that we want to do. We believe that if we live truly, in the same way that if you, if you build an airplane true to Bernoulli's principle, it will be able to fly, if you, if you put, if you, if you build a table true to the laws of gravity. You will want to make it level so that the plate where pencils don't roll off the table. You're making it true, not factually, you're making it faithful to the way the material world which, in my sense, like includes the spiritual realm, like all this right is the way that it actually is. And so everybody, everybody's telling the story. I mean, because we can't help it as human beings, this is, this is what we're doing. We're all telling stories and, as we like to say, we do it differently than, as far as we know, than other, any other animal does. And and one of the things that's true about that is that I only, I only ever tell my story collaboratively, right, I'm, I'm if the story that I tell, I certainly am the agent of, like, I'm the lead author on the paper, but I have, like several co-authors. I, kurt Thompson, never writes his story by himself. I'm writing it with Dan, I'm writing it with Shane. Jane and Dan are co-authors and I'm listening to their contribution and you help me find my voice, and if you're not in the room, I can't tell my story as truly as I could when you're in the room. Now, of course.
Speaker 3:Then the question becomes well, who are the people who are in the room. There's lots of people in the room, whether they some of the, some of the mercenary. They're not even alive anymore. They're helping me tell my story more truly. So the question then well, what is? You know?
Speaker 3:This is pilot to Jesus. What is truth? And then Jesus answers, not to him but in another place, like I am the true, I am, I am and I am this sense of like. No, it's a living, breathing, relational faithfulness, free, like the real. It is in the room at the moment. So I'm saying all that then then that's, that's, that's one stream.
Speaker 3:What is, what is the story that I believe that I'm living in? What is the true story? And I might believe that I'm living in a story in which the dominant voice is the part of me. That is unwontable, that might be the dominant voice. Or my dad will never love me, or all the things that you know that we work with in these clinical spaces, and then another, another stream that is part of this conversation, and I'll try to wrap up with this because I don't want to just like talk forever, even though I would be tempted we'd listen is that actually paying attention to the way the world does operate. And this is the way I would say that, like neuroscience, you know, this interpersonal neuro biological field tells us about the mechanics of the way the world works, including things about attachment, including things about the fact that we first sense, and only then do we make sense of what we sense, that my body is leading the story long before my words are.
Speaker 3:And so to the point of how kind of we modernists have separated, especially when it comes to have, when it comes to spirituality, we've kind of separated that often to some abstract realm of something or other. But that's but that spirituality actually begins with my body. That's not something that most Westerners, let alone Western Christians, we don't imagine. We, we understand spirituality as that which we are hearing from a sermon, from a pulpit, this abstract truth thing, and so faith and hope and love, we think about these things as these abstractions. As my friend Jeff duty, who's a professor of philosophy in Edmonton, would say, like there is no such thing as love. There's love as an adverb, like it's always how loving, how am I, am I lovingly? Am I, am I love? Am I, am, I, am I, am I behaving anything I'm doing in a loving fashion because I'm doing it with my body, I'm doing it with my facial expression, my tone of voice, all these things.
Speaker 3:And I say all that to say then, you know when, when, dan, when you guys do your work with the storytelling at the Alender Center and when we do our work in these confessional communities, the stories are being told first by the bodies that are in the room. And I'm saying all this to say that, when it then comes to our present moment, with all of our conflict, with all of our, you know, when we say apologetic you know I love Leslie Newbegin when he says we. You know, when, asked who himself was a great apologist, but who went, asked like how do we defend the gospel? He said we defend the gospel by preaching the gospel and we are the gospel that we preach. We are the gospel that we preach. My tone of voice and my eye contact and my kindness and my vulnerability and all that and my willingness to suffer when someone, when others, are mean to me, and not to engage in a war but instead to come and ask them to come to dinner.
Speaker 3:And I would say that, in many respects, what we are trying to do in our work, what I would say, that how I would describe it is that we are walking with people into the way of wisdom. This is what we're trying to do. We are purveyors of wisdom, and wisdom includes understanding the way the material world works, the mechanics of mature. This is interpersonal neurobiology. Wisdom also understands that those mechanics in and of themselves don't explain themselves. Human beings have to tell the story about the mechanics and we human beings always do that collaboratively and we're going to pick from a number of limited number of stories and we have to decide what that story is we believe we're living in.
Speaker 3:And when we look at the biblical story, we have a story that, from the beginning to the end, is, as you were saying earlier, shane, it's a rescue mission. The biblical narrative is a rescue mission, right. First it was you know, it was going to be Abraham, and then it was going to be all the country, you know, all the nation of Israel, and then it was you know, and then finally, like we, then he's got to rescue the rescuers, like the NT rights language, right, this is with Jesus. And then we become part of that rescue mission and we come offering us. We want to come a hospitably to.
Speaker 3:So, to your Dan, to your imagery of feasting. We want to spread. We want to spread the table. We want to spread the table for folks that we want to. We're going to bring the table. Please come. You can choose not to. You can choose to come and like rip the table off off. You can be violent, like. I'm not going to return it in that in that way.
Speaker 3:So we invite people to a table in which we long for them to feast by telling your story more truly. We want to collaborate with that. We want to do it in light of this large story of God is rescuer, but he doesn't rescue us on our terms, he rescues us on his terms, which kind of like you know again, if I want to build the airplane or make my table, I there, I have particular rules I'm going to have to live with, but it's, it's it. But when people are willing to come to the table and eat and you watch them become nourished and you're like, oh my gosh, how in the world did I, how was I ever privileged to host this table? Like I just feel like I've hosted it. But now I'm just like watching other people like become nourished.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:I'll stop.
Speaker 2:That's what I would say is the nature of mutuality, which is Trinitarian. So the absolutely the division between truth and relationship already denies the reality that, as Kurt said brilliantly, truth is trust, truth is trust and trust is again the beginning of attachment. Do we have attunement? Yeah, and the ability to hold the parameters of our relationship, how we handle time together, how we handle meeting, where we're going to meet, etc. All that becomes a Trinitarian reflection of Shalom. So where there's Shalom, there is joy, pleasure. There is that intersection of mutuality, but Trinity loves each other.
Speaker 2:So when you come to something as clear as 1 Corinthians 13, which I would say is one of the passages, most people know, without me having to even go back through it, that everything else about me is a clanging symbol and irritant if there is not love as important as which bears more than just propositional ascension. There is a sense in which it's what we trust and hope at one level, what we dream and what we're willing to risk and defy structures of the status quo to actually be part of co-creating. Faith and hope are central to our humanity, but they're all moving toward love. So in that sense, you know truth as to what someone believes by how they offer hospitality, by how they actually engage with curiosity what others believe, hold live and do. So when you find a person who is unable to share the table or unable to speak at the table, you know at one level then there is this absence of mutuality, which is then the absence of the presence of the Trinity. So there are a lot of Christians who claim truth and do in some sense love the truth, but what they have lost is hospitality for those who are an offense to them or an offense to God. So you know, what Jesus gets accused often of is being crazy or a libertine, because he's hosting people that a truly righteous Jew would never share food with. So already what we have is a hermeneutic or a apogee, an apologetic based on how we love, ie how we create hospitality, and so that notion that, look, we are not a single being.
Speaker 2:You know, kurtz said that so well. I mean just what we know from neuroscience and the work of Michael Gazanga and others. We were complex, and even in what we can presume to be our Edenic structure we were complex, and also as a result of the fall. So we're divided internally, we're divided relationally and we're divided at some level before the great king of the universe. So anything that begins not to annihilate difference but actually to be able to engage difference with honor, with curiosity, not necessarily agreement, but with that level of you, have much to teach me, even if I radically dipper from what you have said.
Speaker 2:If there is a stance of humility, then we're right back to these lovely words humus dirt. We are made of dirt, and if you're not impressed with yourself, then need to go back to your constitution, your breath and dirt. And yet, with that humility, you come back to you, get to grow in humanity. And yet we're right back to the humus word which then opens the door. Just trying to take this a little bit further, to humor, it's laughter. It is more than good medicine. It's what enables us to live out the glory of the resurrection. Our ability to mock death, to be able to say my dear friend who died this last spring, and sitting with his widow but a few days ago, and being able to weep with her. And yet, as we're telling stories about her husband, we're laughing. And that ability now to grieve, to weep but also to laugh where it's not laughter to escape grief, it's simply the woven together of death and resurrection. Now we're back to. What constitutes the best defense of the gospel is the quality of how we participate in one another's humanity.
Speaker 1:Hello, this episode is sponsored and brought to you by you. The Naked Gospel interviews the guests that listeners request. You pursue the themes and topics that you want explored and we ask the questions that you want asked. The first link in these show notes will allow you to join the Disruptor Initiative. Having a Disruptor allows you to request who we invite on and you're notified about upcoming guests each month so you can send in the questions you want explored.
Speaker 1:We don't believe in having isolated conversations simply to stimulate or satisfy curiosity. We are pursuing the abundant life that Jesus came, died and resurrected to give us and we want to do that together, as parents, as grandparents, in marriage and singleness. We want to disrupt the messages and the loneliness we see all around us through the friendship and kingship of Jesus. So if there are any topics that are important to you, areas you want to learn more about, people you want us to have on themes you wished Christians explored, or questions you wish you could ask, check out the link below and help shape this podcast and the kind of resource that you and your community are most looking for. Not to mention that you get sweet swag, like a naked gospel coffee mug. Click on the link in the show notes to join and learn more. And now let's get back to our current conversation. All right, so I'm going to ask, I'm going to frame a question for Dan and I'm going to frame the same question, but it's going to be tailored for Kurt. You guys are welcome to take those two questions and then we can toss them into a drink, have a cocktail and enjoy them together, or you can have them separately, it's up to you. So, Kurt, I like your work, your work contextualized for me and my peers and the communities I've been a part of.
Speaker 1:Human's not intuitive anymore, it's not, you know, like we have remarkable powers of imagination and being where we're not, you know and we've designed a lot of technology as to bolster that ability to be where we're not it's really wrecking us, it's messing us up in a lot of ways. I think I would say only in the last year have I discovered that I'm passionate about using my body. I actually really like it. It's almost like my body's my friend and I get to like take care of it, it takes care of me, it talks to me and we hang out, we spend time together and I even like the romantic language that I just use, like I really am quite passionate about it and it's so fun. I think one of my favorite parts about living right now is going for walks. But that aside, like there's so much to use an allender word there's so much contempt for our bodies and even now, like I carry a lot of feelings inside my body that I don't know what to do with. And your work is very interesting because it starts to, it engages that reality. It dignifies the body and gives us, it dares us to imagine that being embodied could be a good thing, that there are treasures there that we know nothing about and I just wasn't. I didn't grow up using my hands, I didn't know how to swing a hammer till just a few years ago, and I love it. I love using my body to explore and to build and to do things Just on wonders for my anxiety, for my clinical depression that I was diagnosed with in middle school just really incredible. So flipping over, Dan, your work.
Speaker 1:I've been a part of a lot of like I've done like a community development and like several cities on the East Coast. Something that's very evident is that people don't generalizing. People don't like their stories and they don't like the characters in their. They don't like their character. I struggle, I struggle. I get into so many other stories. That's why I'm addicted to Netflix or pornography or whatever it might be. I'm we're all just fascinated with other stories and like what is disassociation? It's not running from your own story, you know. You just don't. I don't like the characters. Like the shame, like we were just talking about the shame, the contempt and so learning.
Speaker 1:I think one of the what an aspect of the good news that is existentially good news is that Jesus came into my story to invite me into his story. He doesn't like yell up from me from heaven and say, hey, come, get, be a part of my story. You know he says, hey, I'll come, be a part of your story. I'll come, I will come, I will come and hang out with you. I will sit Indian style on the ground with you in the dark and let you throw punches at me from time to time, but I won't leave, you know. So I'd be interested for you guys just to get. Your work is so pertinent, it's so well placed and I would love to hear you reflect just on your work. When I think of Dan Allender, I think of narrative and when I think of Kurt Thompson I think of embodiment. And if you just reflect on culture and your work and what you're trying to do, but Grant, grant, grant question to start with.
Speaker 2:I remember the day in seminary when they I went to seminary because my best friend essentially went to seminary and pose the question of are you going to get a job or go to grad school? And I hadn't really thought about anything. So I had no future, I didn't want to go to work. And he said the only only graduate school that will accept you this late is probably the seminary I'm going to. So I ended up in seminary, sort of a Christian, maybe not entirely, somewhat interested, but not terribly interested. So that context of I'm sitting in classes and remember hearing the word propitiation and because it sounded too much like urination, I said to tremper too loud, and I won't say the exact phrase, but essentially what I said to him what does that mean? And he was like I'll tell you after class. So my education came primarily through the vicarious experience of being trained by tremper as he went through school. But I remember one day where a professor said and he was talking about Luke 15, and he said the phrase repentance begins in the belly. It doesn't have to do with the holiness, the righteousness, the truth of God, it has to do with your own fundamental hunger, and we never know why a sentence or phrase will, shall we say, light up inside of us. But that was the moment where there was something in me that went oh, if I listen to my body there may be something of God I might find, because I wasn't finding a lot of God and sort of the reform propositional truths that weren't intriguing. I'd still find them intriguing but nonetheless, at least for me at that moment. So that beginning point of repentance begins in the belly and then obviously running across, like reading Romans quite often, but coming to Romans two, romans four, and that brilliant statement it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. And then Paul's phrase and why and why do you treat the kindness of God with contempt? There was something in that that triggered that. Oh, contempt's really the issue here. And so that journey to try and understand my own and other people's contempt. If I want to change, I've got to deal with the security of shame and contempt, to dislodge the deeper parts of my body's violence toward myself and toward others. And I think that is the framework that both of us have engaged.
Speaker 2:I mean, I remember reading Kurt's work on shame and just going, oh yes, oh yes. And in that oh yes, my body is actually responding with release. Not just oh, I think that's true, but kind of oh, I don't care how often you talk about it, write about it, preach about it. We're all still to some degree bound in the kind of neurology of shame. And when we begin to find release that actually brings not just freedom but joy, then I think again our body becomes the weather vane, the compass.
Speaker 2:Look at the work of Antonio Demasio, who began talking about the nature of self as the reading of body states, the ability to read that. You know I'm feeling angry. You know, again, as a 18 month old, I don't have the category of vengeance, I don't have the category of object relations, I don't have the cat, but my body is telling me something, even at 18 months, let alone a three years or 23 years. So the ability to read our body has been eschewed since Plato and Aristotle, where the mind was essentially nothing but the left hemisphere, nothing but our cogitation, and that the lesser part of us affect emotion, desire was what complicated life. If we can only synthesize it through rationality and you begin to go oh, my goodness, it is the body. That is our call to repentance and if we were honoring it's not that the body is Mount Olympus Zeus. It's not a constant, pure, accurate perceiver of truth, but it is amazingly important to engage. So those two intersections of embodiment and the disruption of contempt, I think is crucial for all forms of repentance. Thanks, dan.
Speaker 3:Well, dan, I think you know it's interesting. I think I have not paid attention to that text in Romans in the way that you just pointed out and it's really helpful. And I'm like, wow, yeah, that whole notion of contempt for what we sense, contempt for these things that the body tries to tell us. You know, shane, I would you know one thing. We talked about how, you know, first we sense, then we make sense of what we sense. The brain, the central nervous system, often, you know it operates bottom to top and right to left, and once I'm sensing and then make sense of what I sense, I then have a sensation of what I've made sense of. And this process continues and the kind of expression of all this is in the stories that we eventually tell with words. But you know, as we've, we know, we've read this, we've seen this in other places 60 to 90% of all human communication is nonverbal in its nature, and so there is a great deal of our stories that we tell with our bodies. And Dan's work, you know just, you've highlighted this, you've emphasized is the work that you do in your storytelling, work at the center. You know, we pay attention to people's. You know what are they saying that they're not saying with words, all those kinds of things. And I think to your point, dan, about how you know who we are and the way that I tell a story and this story is has become so confined to a left hemispheric way of engaging the world. And you know this notion of how you know.
Speaker 3:Even a Gilchrist would talk about how the major difference between the right and the left hemisphere is that the left hemisphere. There are lots of things that both these hemispheres can do that the other hemisphere can do if given the opportunity to train to do this. But we train them in such a way so that the left eventually kind of works out its way of being and the right works out its way of being. But the things that are definitely different about them constitutionally has to do with the way they pay attention to the world. But the left hemisphere attunes to the world as a thing over here that I analyze and that I construct and that I manipulate, I use to. You know it's me fixing my tire, knowing how to fix my tire, my flat tire, my car. But my right hemisphere actually is with the world. It's not analyzing the world, it wants to be with the world, experience the world. So I fix my tire so that I can be with my wife at the airport. I can do these kinds of things and in that way I'm telling the story. I'm telling the story of, like I'm fixing my tire in order to be with my wife. But so often we get, you know, we get hijacked in such a way that the only thing that we do is analyze things. So the story that I tell.
Speaker 3:Of course, I think I'd said earlier that I'm making this list of people that I have to forgive, and the reason I have to forgive them is because I have been holding on to these grudges.
Speaker 3:And in the grudge, what I'm doing is I'm telling a story and I'm doing it with my body. Every time I have a thought about a particular person, I start to feel my chest tighten, I start to feel my jaw tighten and there's a certain part of me that anticipates the enjoyment that's going to come when I imagine, like you know, eviscerating them in public in my mind right, because I'm enjoying holding the grudge, and I can do that as long as my left hemisphere is the dominant governor of this particular way of being in relationship with this story. But if I, first of all, if I recognize that actually I'm the one who's telling the story, I'm the one who's generating all this, and I'm able to do this because I am not with this person, I'm not having a con… I'm not inviting them to my table where I would ask them the question like what, when you think of me, what's the story that you tell?
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 3:Am I? Am I the idiot that I believe that you believe that I am? Is that the story that you're telling? Of course, I'm sure that many of them would look at me and say like, excuse me, like, what are you talking about? I'm like, well, I'm talking about all these, this, this, this story that you've you've told about me for the last 15 years, and like, and they're like, oh, you mean the story that you've told, that I've told about you, and so, unless I have someone else in the room whose body right not just they're not just giving me information, like that night that Dan and I am talking, dan's asking me questions and even though he's on the West Coast and I'm in Virginia, like he might as well have been in my office, I might as well have been in his living room, because his voice is not just asking me questions, where I'm pondering information in the abstract, like I'm feeling his presence. That allows my, the terror of my own shame, of what I'm becoming, to come into a space where someone else holds it and I feel it in my chest.
Speaker 3:I don't understand it as an abstract. In fact, we like to say something is not ultimately true yet for me until I feel it in my chest. The love of Jesus is not true until it's here. So to your point, dan, about like it, like repentance begins in the belly, like absolutely, and the way that we tell stories begins in the belly. Like my belly is telling the story long before my left hemisphere is doing it with words and I need someone else to help me frame the telling of that story, because if I'm left to my own accord, what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell the story with words and images that my belly is telling. I'm going to tell that story the way I've been telling a story about these 10 people that are on my list. That's what I'm going to do and it is going to do auger a hole in my soul that is just going to be emptiness. And so I I love, shane, that the question I love, just you know, I think.
Speaker 3:Going back to your original question about how would I describe one of the things that Dan does, I mean I think that, dan, your from the very beginning, the, from the very first book that you wrote, where I was telling you, the first book that you wrote, where I became a way back in the 90s, where I became aware of your presence, this notion of oh, this is a person who's telling the story Truly, like we're telling the story about the way the world really is, all of it, the brokenness, yes, but the gospel coming to the broken, and this is a cord. I mean, this is what the scriptures are. The scriptures are a story, and they are a story that I am invited to not just read as information, but to be meditate on and be curious to. How is the story now moving its way into my belly, literally? And the way that I do that most effectively is by, like, telling the story, exploring the story with others, with Dan who, in with his curiosity, can be curious about the parts of me that are broken without Shane and the things that enable that to come into the room where in which a different story can be told, that we tell together, because I can't do that by myself.
Speaker 3:Very well, but in the course of doing that, in the course of telling that story differently, like I reinforce a different body, like I like, literally Right. So when Paul talks in second Corinthians, for at the end of four, where he says like day by day we are being renewed even though our bodies are wasting away day by day Tuesday I knew, wednesday I knewer than that Thursday which is like a bit of a mind like weird thing. How am I supposed to do that? But this is what we are told is happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that picture again of Second Corinthians four. You know it's interesting during the whole COVID era, like there were, I had so much different time on my hands and I spent so much time in Second Corinthians to chapter one through five. And you know you get into Second Corinthians four, verse 10, where Paul says in some summary statement you know, I live in my body the death of Jesus so that I may live again. He emphasizes in my body the life of Jesus. And you know, for all the war that there has been with regard to the category of flesh and we have so associated flesh with literally our flesh, rather than understanding.
Speaker 2:No, I'm sorry, he's really operating in a metaphor, but when he speaks about body he's actually living out, in some sense, the presence of Jesus in the incarnation. The glory of a human body is the presence of Jesus as fully human and fully God. So that framing of being able to listen, knowing that the left hemisphere operates so differently, the way Kurt Pudett, is just so helpful and brilliant. I need to listen that right now I'm listening as much with my right hemisphere or with my left, and our attending is often in division so that those who are very bright, very gifted with intellect, oftentimes eschew having to deal with the disruptive presence of their splogna, which is the Greek word for guts and what we know about this time.
Speaker 3:Isn't it a great Greek word for guts?
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it, it's like it's just.
Speaker 2:Splogna, splogna. It just hits the windshield. Oh my God, there's another splogna on the windshield. So when we begin to go, the ancients understood that there are not neurons in our stomach but glia cells that actually think in a way that we don't. We refuse to listen to the fact that our stomach is our second brain. And so when we begin to hold, the reality of our body is telling us so much more than what we have by school, by family, by church. Learn to listen to. How much discipleship is built on learning to listen to your splogna.
Speaker 2:Nothing am I seminary or, shall we say, ecclesial career, has there been much listening or developing both the spiritual discernment but as well the understanding.
Speaker 2:So in some ways, back to one of your original question, shane, understanding so much more about the brain gives us a greater template as to what it means to be mature and to grow in maturity. And if we skew that like it's absolutely no importance whatsoever, it's a hatred of knowledge. It's a hatred of the wisdom that God gives in a growing way in every era. And so we are so blessed by neuroscience because we are so much clearer about the beauty of what God created with our three billion or more neurons in our brain. So that's where I look particularly to Kirk and when I say to his ill. But there are very few like him that not only bear great sophistication understanding the brain but also know how to work therapeutically with people but begin with core biblical categories as the center for understanding. That's where the priority even if there is a form of integration, the priority is to biblical categories and making sense of them with other forms of knowledge. That is a unique gift that Kirk and others bring to our world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. I was never. I was never taught. It's like just taking me so many years to realize that a part of my priesthood identity is temple care. It just put those pieces together. It's just temple care, like it's. A part of my royal priesthood is to tend well to my body to be embodied. We talk about incarnational ministry all the time and we're so disembodied as we do it. Okay, so you guys were mentioning Can I just say something real quick.
Speaker 3:Can I just say something real quick, Of course, Just about this. And I just wanna say to that end, I'm thinking of two stories in which God I mean and these are two of many, but in which God was moving to protect people's bodies, Like so he moves to protect Adam and Eve, even as he is moving them out of the garden, even as he is keeping them from being in the garden, he moves to protect them by giving them skins. Something had to die, he's protecting them. And then here's this other, like literally yesterday, the first time this ever caught my attention At the end of Exodus 20, you get the 10 commandments, and then God gives Moses this very short section about altars, and he says first of all, you will make an altar of dirt, not an altar of stone, you'll make an altar of dirt, so you're taking the earth to build an altar.
Speaker 3:And the second is that, if you're going to, but it's still like an altar is made of material stuff. The second, then, is that, but if you make an altar of stone, it cannot be hewn stone, you can't cut it with a chisel. I just want the natural rock, just bring the natural rock right. Okay, fine. And then he says this other very interesting thing. He says and don't build steps because I don't want your nakedness to be revealed if you walk up the steps, which basically is like you're wearing clothes, like you got no underclothes on, people are gonna, and Babylonian temples and so forth, like these are big places and big altars where people can climb up steps, and like you could see the underground, like you could see things, and I just think of like at one level.
Speaker 3:You read this and it all just looks like a rule right, God, don't do this, don't do this, do this. And then another like oh my gosh, no, he's actually. He wants to protect our bodies. The body is important, that even God is moving to attune to it and to protect it, even when it comes to the worship practices, it's not just a rule. He's saying I want you to. I don't want your longing for me to somehow become a vehicle for other people to shame you. So I want, we're gonna protect you even in this regard. I mean, we just find, over and over, God loves the body. I mean he, like you know, he could have, just he could have made us so many other different ways, I suppose, but like he did this, and redemption, I mean yeah, anyway, we could go on and on. I'll just. It just jumped off the page of me for the very first time.
Speaker 1:I'm like, wow, even there he's paying attention to what he's made and wants to protect it. Yeah, yeah, there's a. I intuitively still read the Bible. I read Paul as having body contempt, at the very best, body disregard, and that theologically anchored in Jesus's body, got beat to hell literally. And we're supposed to follow him. So let's beat our bodies to hell like Paul did. You know that's how the logic plays out theologically and you know it's just. It's funny because, like you know Jesus, he wouldn't go through that bodily if our bodies didn't matter. You know like he'd save his body. A lot of pain, a lot of torment. So I actually saw there in Hebrews, for the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorned it's shame, right, and you know we're that joy which is really, it's a precious thing.
Speaker 1:You guys were talking earlier about hope and the significance of hope. A lot of, so a lot of people conceive of their faith through a faith paradigm. We were looking at that great apologetics passage there where Peter talks about it Always be ready to give a defense. But we never really finished. Right, for the hope that is in you. Right, like people are supposed to look and they're just, they're just like. Why are you so focused on that and I think that's a great thing. They're supposed to look and they're just like why are you so hopeful? You're not supposed to have that sort of hope. Why do you have that hope? Can you tell me, explain to me why you have hope right? And that's when we give it events right. I would defend the hope. Hope is really okay. So we define faith culturally, again, generalization, define faith propositionally, which means then, to defend the faith is to know our propositions really well and to have really logical, succinct, deductive defenses for God's existence and the validity of the resurrection.
Speaker 1:Good things I really like designs and patterns and creation and how it speaks of a designer. I think that's really sweet. I literally had a graduate degree in apologetics. I think it's cool. So but that doesn't actually cost me anything except for studying. That doesn't cost me, that doesn't cause me love and at the and maybe like it costs me like a militant again, like that's sort of like a self slave, driving love of getting myself in line and disciplining myself. Hope, hope costs something. Hope is really fragile.
Speaker 1:Kurt, you and I were talking once and you said, you said you can't become what you can imagine, haven't been able to shake that one. Jesus is single greatest utterance. What do you want? I've only learned recently that it's a. It's a.
Speaker 1:The question is like, inherently dopaminergic, Like it's just you. It's proof, you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to. You have to imagine who you long to be Right and like. What is that, if not a cry for redemption, right, the reconciliation of something you know? I'd love to hear you guys, because a lot of your work isn't just about hey, like, let's get away from shame and contempt. A lot of your work is no, no, no, no, it's.
Speaker 1:It's because this story is so extraordinary that we dare live in it. We dare, and that is that is, you know, the Christian audacity, you know, like we dare to look at Candidly at the worst of things and still have hope. We dare to look at the worst of human action and motive and still have love Right. We dare to believe in the one who says I will make love, I will make love, I will make love, I will make love If we dare to believe in the one who says I will make all things new. So, when it comes to hope, I People are the mission, I am the mission. It's taken me a lot of counseling to be able to say that I believed everyone else was the mission and I was the doormat.
Speaker 1:For like, all like ever always, and it's really, it's really frustrating to feel like you're trying to like get like God on board. Do you know, like that feeling of like hey, jesus, but like it's his mission, and like letting him lead and letting him love you and daring to have imagination for who you could be and not just for who other people could be. So I'd like for you to speak to just kind of the individual psyche of the Christian listener right now and you're speaking to me. Just what does it look like to cultivate hope, to use and exercise our faith as Christians in the way of hope? What does it look like to practice hope?
Speaker 2:My quick and brief responses. We make too much of a separation between faith and hope. That faith at one level is again let's go back to this word who or what do you trust? And again, propositions play a very important role because, as Kurt was saying, you, you, you, if you want a good table, you have to take into reality physics, you have to take into account the bridge, etc. Etc.
Speaker 2:So when we understand that faith is memory, it is remembering the redemptive goodness of God and in that sense we we have the Exodus as the central redemptive act in the Old Testament and we have Jesus's Exodus, which is his death and resurrection and ascension. So when we allow ourselves to remember but we don't remember abstractly we remember through our own and other people's stories, the resurrection, the Exodus, the intersection of story to story. And that embedded, embodied way is what it means to trust. But trust creates an anticipation for the future. So in some sense I would say what is faith? It is hope with regard to our past. What is hope? It is faith with regard to our future.
Speaker 2:So in that sense, hope is a willingness to risk, on the basis of the end of the story, what is now not yet and that not yet of creating in the moment, whether it's a chocolate chip cookie or whether it's a new ministry at one level, I don't think God cares it's are you creating some taste of goodness and beauty and life?
Speaker 2:For back to the metaphor. But the actuality of the table as the place of hospitality. So that sense of hope is always radical, it's always risky. It has nothing to do with Hallmark, has nothing to do with a kind of positivity that things will work out, because the framework is you will die and likely your death will not be a pleasant experience for you or others. So the nature of hope is not things will work out, it is that it has worked out. It is being worked out with me, for me, but not with me as the central player on the stage. So in that larger sense of you put a brilliantly earlier Shane, you are the temple which the temple was always meant to be, a prefigurement or a reminder of Eden.
Speaker 2:So you are you in your body. You are an outpost of Eden and and and a fairly fractured and at times divided and divisive and anathetical, but nonetheless you are a living presence of Eden. Now, if you've tasted something of goodness in the Edenic presence of God within you, it only creates an even greater anticipation of, if it says good as it is now, what will it one day be. And that promise gets to be now lived out with that risky, defiant status quo, disrupting presence of what hope brings. So hope doesn't make you optimistic, it makes you realistic, but realistic within the playfulness of creativity. Thanks, Dan.
Speaker 3:Wow, so you, you, you that that that article right there is ready to. Is it ready to be published? I'm just just checking to see if you've got that.
Speaker 2:I don't. I don't read my own writing, so I don't know.
Speaker 3:Dude, so good. I, shane, I, I, the. Everything that Dan has just said, I think in some respects, is what I'm, what I'm, what I'm trying to get at in this new book. Right, and therefore, since we've been justified by faith, right, faith is what faith is. Trusting and trusting is really about attachment. It's about do I have an embodied encounter with someone who I feel in my chest, loves me and whom I'm allowing myself, by who I'm allowing myself, to be loved? My friends are our friends.
Speaker 3:Jay and Catherine Wolf talk about this notion that everybody's disabled. Some are just more visible than others. Some disabilities are more visible than others, and we talk about how it's pretty plain, you look around we're, when it comes to loving other people were pretty disabled. We're not very good at that. It's also equally true that we can't give what we don't have, and that means that I have an even greater disability than my inability to love others well, and that greater disability is my resistance to being loved. I, I, you, know everything about my world, my pop culture, my music, my teeth, all the day that we all talk about how desperately deeply it's obvious we want to be loved. I want to be loved until love actually shows up and then it just, and then it scares a living crap out of me Because it doesn't, because it comes on its terms, it doesn't come on my terms. It comes with loving, kindness, and it also comes with demands. It comes with the demand that I also be a person of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithful and general self control. And like I actually don't have that in my back closet, which is why I want you to just to love me so that on my terms. And so this disability is really difficult, and so if I'm going to have like faith is not, it's not an abstract concept, it is an embodied experience. And so when we talk about faith and Jesus, we're really talking about that happening because it's been mediated by other people. Like Jesus was talking to me on the phone, he was using Dan's voice. Now, however, many years ago, that that night, that we had that phone call Right.
Speaker 3:This is an embodied encounter, through the Holy Spirit, with the King and that builds a sense. And I have a moment in which, when I am in my some of my worst space, jesus walks in the door and gives me an embodied encounter with, with glory and God I'm body encounter with, like I want to be in the room with you, yes, the you that is this, this part of you that you are hating the most right now. That's the part that I want to be in the room with and in my being seen and soothed and maybe safe and secure in that space. I create an expo. We co created experience that experiences created that is narrowly embedded, that I remember and, as we like to say, is Dan said so well we remember our future.
Speaker 3:Nothing that I anticipate. Do I anticipate apart from remembered experience. I have a collection of experiences in which I am, in which I am sensing the resurrection in the middle of death. This then becomes the hope that I'm actually forming, hope the word hope that we, you, when we imagine how we imagine a future state, I'm hoping for something, whether it's five minutes from now or five years now, or after I'm dead for 100 years, I'm hoping like it's a future state, and I only ever anticipate my future out of my remembered past. But my remembered past is a collection of moments that I'm paying attention to, and if I'm paying attention to multiple moments In which I, in my vulnerability, I'm allowing myself to be loved and allowing myself to have demands placed on me that put more weight on the bar and asked me to exercise and grow into the person God wants me to become. That gives me an experience in which I have a sense of being okay in the middle of everything around me. Not being okay and I'm not going to be able to do anything. That I embed. And if I have lots of collections of that, that becomes the launch pad from which I anticipate my future. And so, in this way, one of the things that we know when Paul talks about this notion that hope, you know you, when we went that whole passage in Romans five, the first five verses, you know you don't get to suffering until the middle part of that whole section. Right, and this thing about trust, justification and glory that precedes it.
Speaker 3:If we're going to talk about suffering as believers, we first must talk about the on ramp to it. You have to first talk about trust, justification, peacemaking, standing embodied, grace and glory, especially the glory that we read about in john's gospel. This, the glory of a father who loves his son. There are lots of things about God's glory, but nothing is more so about his, god's glory than his delight in us as the object of his pleasure, our, his, his glory is his taking delight in our, taking delight in him, taking delight in us. And, like I don't have a lot of places where I experience someone's delight in me, especially if I'm bringing into the room the parts of me that I hate the most.
Speaker 3:But that's what happened that night, when I'm talking to Dan, and if I have enough of those experiences, this then becomes literally an embodied, remembered future, like hope is not a is not an abstraction, it is like literally taking up residence in my body, not just in my thinking, not just in my sensations or in my imagery. And that's all that. And I need the story of the text, I need the story of the Gospels that will inform Dan that when Dan comes for me, dan becomes the gospel that imagines the thing for me while my imagination is trying to catch up. I couldn't have imagined I could. It would have been impossible for me to have imagined what I heard from Dan the night that we talked on my own. There was, there was, there was. No way, I don't know. Imagine that, apart from somebody else imagining it for me, inviting me to catch up to it. Yeah, and I patiently waiting.
Speaker 2:I had imagination, not fantasy, in that I knew enough about you, enough about you as a beautiful being that I can in one sense anticipate the trajectory of how the ball is actually in the air, where you can't see the ball because of myopia of shame. At least in that moment I'm not embedded in that same shame. So I can see the balls trajectory and I think that's the anticipation of. Can we read one another well enough to have a sense of where the movement, of where our lives in the particular or in a much more general sense, is actually moving? And we have no right to hope if we've not been embedded in the story. And the story is where framework of faith develops, as you have put it so brilliantly. So if we see faith and hope as, in some ways, handmaidens that serve love, you can't love without faith, you can't love without hope. And they are different. And yet there's such similarity that when we begin to refract and to say I remember a whole lot better than a lot of people, but I find hope hard for me, I don't find it hard for you, I find it hard to hope on my own behalf.
Speaker 2:So often what I've been privileged to be able to engage is my own children, my own grandchildren, naming on my behalf. Where, where I offer what I will not receive, and so we're, in one sense, contradiction of my being is now being invited back to the table to partake of the food that I may have served well, but I somehow am too busy to eat on my own and that that hold of. Shall we? Shall we become hopeful people? If so, we can look for how we deal with racism, how we deal with political divisions, how we deal in the constructs of a culture war, where we're not of the left and I am not of the right and I'm not a centrist. I actually believe in the kingdom of God. Therefore, I can't be a Republican, can't be a Democrat and fundamentally I'm independent, but I can't even be that. So, where we come hard to pin down, not because we're elusive or falsely mysterious, but where the taste of the kingdom is greater than any of these counterfeit religions, and let's just say.
Speaker 2:I think we are in such a polarized, hopeless era where, when you begin to say, um, yeah, I'll vote in the upcoming election, and but in that process. I have no allure to think I'm saving America or doing the quote unquote right thing, other than I'm inviting all of us Again. How do we hold faith and hope for the purpose of love?
Speaker 3:You know I this is so helpful, dan I. I'm reminded this notion that I'm going to circle back to something you said earlier, shane, about the body and the content that we have for the body. A couple of things. One is that Paul had a lot of metaphors that he could have used to talk about the gathering of Christians. He lived at a time in which there was as much, if not greater, contempt for the body as we have now. Right, if you're a Roman citizen, you can have sex with whoever you want, wherever and whenever you want to have it. Right, there's your, it's just. It's just like. It's just an object, it's, it's, you know, it's like a walking stick. I do with it whatever I want to do, this is like. So there's all this contempt for the body, no care for the body, and Paul comes along and says oh, actually we're going to use that metaphor, hearkening back to Genesis two. He forms the body out of the mud. We're going to the very thing that the world can test contempt for, we're going to honor by using it as, as the metaphor.
Speaker 3:And the thing that strikes me about this passage in Romans, and is the case for all of his work. I read the passage and I think to myself okay, kurt's reading it, as if Paul wrote it to me, but Paul didn't write it to me, but Paul didn't write it to a particular Roman, paul wrote it to a church by and everybody's reading it together. And what that means is that I don't, through suffering, perseverance, character, form hope. I don't form hope for me, we form hope for me and we form hope for you. And and we actually form it. We often imagine hope. I think at least I sense this in my patients in the kind of culturally we think that hope is a thing like we'll either have it or we don't. It drops out of the sky where you flip the coin. Maybe today we will, maybe today we won't. It's, you know, dependent upon all these other external forces. I don't have much agency in the formation of hope, but in fact we do.
Speaker 3:But the way that we do it begins in intimately connected, embodied encounters, literally at the dinner table, literally at having conversation with someone. So it's fashionable in our era, when, you know, when, with all the things that we name culture, war, political ranker, so forth and so on, it's fashionable for us to write. You know, we're going to, we're going to write books that tell us here's the grand vision for how we're going to solve this problem, and I want to invite us to consider that this, the these things, if we're going to do anything about, it's going to happen at kitchen tables, it's going to happen in embodied connection with others. It's not going to happen because somebody writes a book that postulates some kind of new way of thinking about the world, because all of my embodied encounter, especially as I walk around with the supercomputer that I have in my pocket, that only continues to keep me less connected from other people. As long as I practice being less connected to people, having a new solution for our problem is not going to help matters. I'm only going to be able to form hope by literally forming it with someone else.
Speaker 3:I don't do this on my own, but I do it actually using the very vehicle that God said was good from the beginning, which is why he made it, and so I'm actually hopeful. I'm actually you know. You know, dan, how it is when you're, when you're working with a patient who walks in and you know they've been to like seven other therapists and whatever the thing is like there you come to discover in the first, you know few minutes, perhaps the first hour that you have a conversation with them, you come to discover pretty quickly the things that they actually haven't done, the thing, the parts of their story that they haven't addressed. And you sense this pretty quickly and they are at their wit's end and they feel like there's nothing more, that they are feeling so hopeless and you say to them like, oh my gosh, I cannot, I can't tell you how, how hopeful I am because of what you haven't done yet.
Speaker 3:Exactly, exactly it's. I would want to say to us I'm hopeful not because there's some magic, you know. I'm not hopeless because we haven't come up with the solution. I'm hopeful because we have before us that which we can do. It's hard to do to invite the person that I think is my enemy into my kitchen. And this is where I would say, like you know, I get it that we want to come up with political solutions and social solutions and academic solutions, and I have to say I'm I'm all for anything that we can do. And at the same time, I'm aware that you know, apart from Jesus, danger is tough.
Speaker 2:That image of Romans 8, once since the quintessential chapter that addresses hope starts again with this core issue of the earth groans in childbirth.
Speaker 3:You and.
Speaker 2:I groan in childbirth. And then you have the third image of the spirit groaning on our behalf with words that are for us. At this juncture we don't have the epistemological basis to be able to read and understand what the spirit's saying on our behalf, but it seems that hope is actually grown in the soil of groaning.
Speaker 2:So we have this medical picture of, again, the hallmark positive hope. I'm optimistic and you kind of go. Oh, I'm not optimistic in any sense of the word, but I'm not hopeless. In fact, I feel so excited about the cruelty and vision of this era. It is a time where, in one sense, the hospitality of the gospel has a greater power, even if very few people are choosing to exercise that.
Speaker 2:But can we groan together? Can I enter your groaning? Can I enter the earth's groaning? Can I enter the world's spirit on your behalf? And to the degree I can grieve, groan? And now you have the paradox of the Beatitudes Blessed are you born for. They will be an attachment language, they will be comforted. So we're right back to faith. That increases the capacity for reality and therefore to dream redemption. To dream. This is not the way it's meant to be for me, for you, for us, for the larger cultural context. And in that I don't have much of a voice, I don't have much of a platform, but I have one. And if you have one person at your table, or whether you've got 10,000, you get to invite people into the dreaming of what redemption means for my daughter and I, or for my grandfather and I, or for my wife and I and to be able to go. Oh, everything's fractured in my life. Nothing is well, but it's actually well.
Speaker 2:And are you lying? I'm looking at nothing is as it was meant to be in Eden and I'm an outpost of Eden and I have a taste of the coming kingdom. Now, how do I hold past, future in the present in a way in which we have joy? Well, that to me, is this time together. What a freaking wonderful way to spend a couple of hours on a morning. And very few people. It isn't our platform.
Speaker 2:Very few people have joy, and I think that's one of the things that just grieves me but also angers me, like there is so much more joy in a good lasagna and a good red wine, if you're with company, where you can engage. Brokenness and beauty, death and resurrection, and it's not the trivialization of spirituality, it's actually the engagement with your reading a brek or of Tolstoy, or of what you read in the New York Times or a comic book that you just picked up. Everything's intriguing if it's moving ultimately to that engagement of the heart in the larger realm of what reality holds. Now that, just to me, is just like this is freaking fun, absolutely fun, because to some degree we are putting our foot on the neck of evil through this conversation.
Speaker 2:When Paul says in Romans 16,. May the God of peace be with you soon when he will crush evil under your feet. That's hope. I can't wait to crush evil, but we get to do a little pause on that today, so where we get to say hell, no, but also heaven, yes, it's way more than just involved.
Speaker 1:Amen, I have found for somebody listening who's I'm entranced by this and wanting to practice it, it's for me, hope first off. Allow hope to be something that can be refined. Like you get better at it, it's okay to be bad. That's the scary part, I think, though, because, like hope is, it's delicate when it goes wrong it's, but it's also inherently relational. I have to tell Jesus what I want. I have to see if he wants that too. I have to see if I'm groaning in the right direction, which is prayer, if we can define it that way from Romans 8.
Speaker 1:So, for me, asking myself the question where in today or this week is bad news to me? Is it that thing my wife does? Is it that coworker? Is it that project that I have? What is bad news? What am I afraid of? And then imagining practicing hope. With what good news? Doing that with Jesus. That's been a really good place to start, and for me, actually, I haven't moved past that. I really love that practice. So, kurt and Dan, our time is. We crushed it. That was awesome, and we always end with two questions how can we pray for you and how can people find what you're doing Kurt. You've done this before, so actually so have you, dan. We'll still start with Kurt. Kurt, how can we be praying for you, man, and how can we track with what you're doing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would appreciate prayer in being present. I want to really be well. Like I said, I'm in this journey of really having to pay attention to the ocean of envy that I carry in so many different ways and as I journey to do this work of forgiveness that is related to this envy that I carry. So that's, and I think that that work that I'm doing with those things, praying, that I would do that work well, of surrendering to the work of the spirit in that place, because that has impact on all the things my family, my work things. That's one thing.
Speaker 3:And then people can find my work through the four books. The most recent one, the Deepest Place, Suffering, and the Formation of Hope. This is my website, kurtthompsonmdcom. We have a podcast, the being Known podcast, that Pepper Sweeney and I co-host together, which we really have a lot of fun doing. And then you can find me through Facebook and Instagram and what and I guess now formally what was Twitter as it shows up on the email. And then, the last thing I would say for our listeners, there is this little nonprofit that we have called the Center for being Known Coming up at the end of October. We have a conference that's both live and that's going to be streaming, called Connections. On October 27th you can find out more about our work in the confessional communities, that we do there, and then the practice that we have a new story of behavioral health where we're also doing confessional community trainings. So it's a long, long re-list.
Speaker 1:Thank you, sir Dan.
Speaker 2:Well, to me, there is nothing more important than my relationship with my wife and when to ask for prayer, particularly that we're of the age that most of our friends are saying things like when are you going to retire and I'm like having too much fun quote, unquote to retire. But there are changes in our bodies and in our capacities, so we are doing what I would call an end of life inventory. What are we meant to do if we have five years, 10 years, 20 years left? What are we most meant to do? And some of that, I think, boils down to how are we meant to become even deeper, sweeter lovers of one another and ease us together? So what I'd say is my marriage has always been rocky, always been complex, because I'm not an easy man to be married to. But our marriage is well, but it can grow so much more than what I would say. We are 47 years into marriage. We can grow so much more. So I think that would be with that and that I have three adult children. I love them, they love me. There's a fierce loyalty and care for one another. That can grow so much more. So what I would say is whatever the spirit prompts with regard to the most important part of my life, that's my family, may it be. And then how to get a hold. I don't like being gotten a hold of, so for the most part you can't get a hold of me. You know the Alander center dot org. It gives you a good taste of what we're doing.
Speaker 2:Becky and I and another couple, steve and Lisa call, have been developing material through his ministry called reconnect ministries. So we're I'm going to leave in about an hour or two to drive to his little town called Ferdale, washington, and we'll do a marriage intensive retreat for eight couples. Now that's like it's so freaking fun to bring people who are to some degree committed but some degree divided and begin to explore their story. So I feel like you know I'm 71. I hope I'm given a minimum of 15 more years of kingdom activity, but I've had dear friends die in the last six months and year. So I'm in the dying age and in that I want to live. Well, I want to end this wild, odd, absurd at times, but beautiful race. Well, that would be my prayer.
Speaker 1:Man, I think you for taking two hours to be with me and to be with all of us to process this. This has been really good, really grateful for you both. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Welcome. Thank you for the interview.
Speaker 3:Yeah, all right. Thanks, shane, great to be with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Likewise guys. Folks, if this was encouraging to you, I would ask you to share it with somebody you think would benefit from it. Thanks, I'm Shane and I'm the Naked Gospel, and we will catch you next time.