This is Exploring a Course in Miracles, a program for students and teachers of the complete and annotated edition of A Course in Miracles, from The Circle of Atonement, a non-profit sharing the spiritual path of the course since 1993. Exploring a Course in Miracles is hosted by Robert Perry and Emily Bennington and can be found online at circleofa.org. Welcome to Exploring a Course in Miracles. I'm Emily Perry with The Circle of Atonement and today I am so thrilled to be speaking to Oshita Moore. Oshita is a bit of a spiritual hero of mine and so before we get into it, I just want to give a quick background on why that is and how this conversation came to be. For a few years now, I have been looking for peacemaker activists, people who are out there doing the work of fixing systems that are broken but who are doing that work from a place of spiritual love and that's a really hard balance to find because from my experience we tend to err on one side or the other. We become too harsh in wanting to fix the system, to angry and to impatient with each other or we become too checked out because that's supposedly the spiritual or the loving thing to do and I don't have spiritual heroes lately. The people that I admire in this world are those who truly seek to model the example of unconditional love and active healing, actively working for the betterment of others because that's what Jesus gave his life to. Martin Luther King called Jesus the world's most dedicated non-conformist. He talked about Jesus' non-conformity still challenging the conscience of mankind and how it's the inner transformation that's required, that transformation of seeing others as beloved that's required for the outer transformation of our world. This is what we've made our lives about here at the Circle and when I found you, Oshita, I knew that I had found someone who is also deeply, deeply dedicated to these same ideas so that's what we're going to talk about today. Quick bio on Oshita, Oshita Moore is a pastor and author, a spiritual director who is deeply committed to issues of peacemaking and racial justice. She is the co-pastor of the Roots Covenant Church in St. Paul, Minnesota alongside her husband and she is the author of Shalom Sisters, living wholeheartedly in a broken-hearted world and dear white peacemakers, dismantling racism with grit and grace. Thank you so much for being here, Oshita, it's such an honor. It's more than an honor, it's a gift to be able to be with you after the time that we've spent together, I consider you a friend, so I get to just chat with one of my favorite friends. Before we hit record, I know you have a hard stop and I was like, "Gosh, we got to start recording." I'm like, "Don't catch me up, yeah." I know, it's so good to see you again. Okay, so backing up, I found you through your book, Dear White Peacemakers, which I absolutely love. And Jen Hatmaker wrote the forward for this book and she said something that having gotten to know you, I know is true. In the forward, she said, "What do our leaders care about? This is where they will take us. Our teachers lead us towards their own north star and Oshita's is beloved community. And anyone who knows you knows that there are two words that are central to who you are. Shalom and beloved community." And so I want to start there, what do these words mean to you and how have they guided your life? Yeah. My husband and I met doing urban core work in New Orleans and peacemaking was a huge part of the work that we did because he's an ex-gang member and we would host these dinners in our homes, bringing gang members from the community together. My answer was trying to start this entrepreneurial venture with all these members of these gangs, making t-shirts. And so he wanted to give them something to do together to make money and work through their conflict and create something beautiful. And so we would have these like dreaming sessions at our home. And because of that, I had a very fixed picture of what peace and peacemaking looked like. It looked like moving into a neighborhood, doing the hard work, being like right in the sick of conflict, mediating conflict. And I really loved that and it felt to me like it met Jesus' expectation or what I thought Jesus' expectation was when he says, "Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God." I totally felt like a child of God. But then Hurricane Katrina happened and we had to evacuate quickly. It was eight months pregnant with our second child and when we ended up moving to Boston for my husband to go to seminary, I still felt this pull to peacemaking, but I wasn't in a season of my life to replicate any of those kinds of things we were doing in New Orleans. And so I had to make peace with the concept of peacemaking and renegotiate my relationship to the identity as a peacemaker. And I needed something that had more, that was much more sustainable, that was more like evergreen than the like, "You are a peacemaker because you throw yourself into war-torn or violent spaces or in the midst of conflict." And so for 40 days, I studied the concept of peace in the Bible every time peace came up. And I noticed that there was this common hebraic word, shalom, that was kind of like the root of these, like when you get back to the original language, it was commonly shalom. And then I started studying from Walter Brueggemann about shalom, and there's a phrase he used, he uses phrase, multi-dimensional and multi-directional, which just made it so incredibly expansive for me that shalom is God's peace, and it's us showing up as peacemakers in multi-directions and multi-dimensions in a variety of spaces and in a variety of ways that we are the ones who bring God's peace into his face wherever we are. And the definition that I like to use for shalom is God's dream for the world as it should be, nothing broken, nothing missing, everything made whole. So shalom is this picture of flourishing, of goodness, of vibrancy, of harmony. And so we are the ones who bring that missing piece of peace into the root spaces. So shalom became like a core foundational word for me, like I had like reclaimed wood part made of the word shalom on it, and I got a key with the word shalom on it. And that's why my first book is called shalom systems. So that's what shalom means for me. And so as I was writing, working with your white peacemakers, there's a chapter in shalom systems about owning my belovedness as a black woman, even though I've had to navigate so much racism and white supremacy in a lot of spaces. I'm from a predominantly white city. I went to predominantly white church, and so I was the only and the lonely black person in a lot of spaces. And I wrote a chapter reflecting on that and how that how God shalom entered in that. And that seemed to really resonate with my editor and it really resonated with me. But that was that was the topic of the next book of how the intersection of Jesus, peacemaking ethic, with anti racism, and as I was trying to figure out how all that works together, I landed on Dr. King's work on the beloved community and went back to Josiah Royce's work on the beloved community. And I was like, Oh, this is the picture of how we show up as activists, seeking God's shalom for other people, but then I was like, Henry, now and has all this good work and belovedness. And I don't see a whole lot of intersection between these two. I got to see a lot of now and stuff showing up in these spaces that I was studying about the beloved community. So I spent some time with the now and then that's what dear my peacemakers is, is becoming owning our belovedness, proclaiming the belovedness of others so that we can become a unique expression of the beloved community, particularly around areas of race, justice. Yeah, that's what I got out of your work. I love that definition of shalom where it's God's vision for the world, everything whole, nothing broken. And it feels like beloved community seeing each other as beloved is how we get there. And I love in dear white peacemakers, you wrote, making beloved community. My north star has been the single most impactful and Christ centering adjustment. I've made in all my years of practicing shalom. And I could not agree with that more. I know that you're not all that familiar with a course in miracles, but the course is a spiritual path where we find our way home to God by seeing the inherent holiness, equality and worth and all beings without exception. In the course, we look past through what is ultimately unreal, like our personalities, these what we do in these bodies, our behaviors and even our character to that invisible divine reality in the other person. And that's the basis on which we forgive and love and heal. And your work is the closest I have seen to that idea or among the closest I have seen to that idea. And so I'm just wondering how did you get to that place where the belovedness of the other person is not in question, like how did you arrive there? Oh, I would say that it was a there are two or three key moments that helped me fully lean into what what I call an enemy love or loving your enemy so that I can call them my God to love it and proclaim their belovedness and you have a good definition of enemy. Yes. So I was so thank you for that. So when I think of my enemy because we don't typically like walk around saying like I have my enemy like we're not Marvel superheroes waking up with like the super villain that started like that's not how we move through our world, right? You don't think of ourselves as like always to have enemies or desirous of like keeping or holding an enemy, at least I I'm not like that. And most of the people I talk to don't think in terms of like I myself and I have an enemy. So what I what I noticed and this was way back, I think it was probably when I was writing Shalom sisters because I was thinking about enemy love. I was something happened. Another racially charging I think it was Michael Brown at that point when I was working on Shalom sisters and I was looking at the riots and I was looking at the conflict and I was like paying attention to other anti-racist teachers remarking and tweeting about it. And there was just a just a general spirit, I would say, or posture that they had towards the white people in that audience. And in those spaces that was very like the cauterize their empathy, like they were just like, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. And it really felt like I didn't know how to enter into that space. And I realized that like for me, empathy is like the the fuel, you know, it is what I need that like moves me into life giving relationships with someone and even more so impactfully my enemy. I can access empathy for someone, even though I will view them as my enemy, but then I thought how do I communicate this intersection between the enemy and their in my need for empathy towards them. And so I started saying that my enemy is a person who is just beyond my capacity for empathy. So that means like I don't have an enemy, I have the capacity for empathy and some people is very easy for me to have empathy for and there are some people that's harder. And so when I read Jesus teachings on loving my enemy or praying for those who persecute me, I'm rethinking that and saying who is right on the outside of my empathy, we're like, I do not want to humanize them. I don't want to understand their stories. I don't want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Who are those people then my job is to take Jesus teachings around enemy love and directed towards them. And when I do that, when my empathy expands to them, I have noticed that it's been one of the most disarming things I've ever seen and ever done because when I start with somebody who's expecting me to be, you know, antagonistic toward them, and I just harm them by being kind and calm and curious and patient and naming the weirdness of the space, it disarms and it gives us a space to be too beloved, trying to figure out something hard. And so yeah, that's just kind of been the work of my life of expanding my empathy out. And you have been in really, I mean, the work that you do has placed you in super challenging situations in this regard. I remember you were saying you were on a panel once with a neo-Nazi. And one of the things that you said was, I felt like my job in that moment was to hold the space of belovedness. And if I could do my part, then Jesus would work on his heart. And I was just like, wow, gosh, that's the idea of loving your enemies and that is the seed that can heal our world. However, I do think that I'm sure, in fact, I know from your book that you've received pushback on this idea because loving your enemies feels like siding with the oppressors, right? Like, if we love our enemies, then they'll just keep on doing the abusive things. And it's a naive, if not a dangerous thing to do. So what do you say to those who say loving your enemies sounds noble, but it's actually dangerous? Well, so the thing is I can love you and not agree with you. And I think that why beloved community has become my North Star is because it's given me permission to reframe what a win is when I'm engaging at somebody who is just beyond my empathy or my enemy. Because the win is no longer getting you to agree with me. The win is no longer me proving the rightness of my beliefs and shaming you for the wrongness of your beliefs. The win is leaving the door open for ongoing conversation and collective transformation. So when I'm in a conversation with somebody, like, I remember having a conversation with somebody, a director of a nonprofit who did something that I found was problematic, racially problematic, and I remember talking to different mentors and other anti-racism teachers who I trust, talking to them and asking for advice going into that conversation, a variety, I got a variety of responses, but a lot of them were like, don't lose any ground. Like hold him accountable, like make him see and what he did was wrong in all these things, right? And that didn't feel right to me. If I did, if I went in like that, that was me actually being violent in that conversation and violence begins violence. If I come in trying to prove to him how wrong and how bad an ally he was, he was just going to push back harder with all the reasons why he's a good ally or shut me down. Like, well, I guess you don't really see or you're not really committed or do all these things, right? And so I chose to go into that conversation with a lot of empathy, a lot of questions but I also went in with very clear eye statements about how that experience affected me as a black woman and in questioning statements about, like, what could he do better? And I think that that for me was a good balance of going in and loving my enemy but also holding them accountable to the harm that they perpetrated and the responsibility that they have. And I would also say, I would add kind of just a little caveat to that is that I was going to him as the executive director of a nonprofit which is mostly run by white people doing work with brown and black communities. He has a responsibility to be held accountable. And so enemy love in that instance is not just like loving and tending to him, but also loving him and trusting him enough as a leader to say this is your responsibility and you need to do better. If I were to just have a conversation with a friend one off, I would be like, or one on one, I would say I would use more eye statement but I would also be like, are you open to more conversations about how this, you know, how we could do better together? What does this look like for us in the future? I wouldn't be as like a stark in my holding them accountable. Does that make sense? Yeah, social location and responsibility of the person I'm interacting with determines what enemy love looks like in that instance. And also there's the line that you don't create peace by adopting the tools of the oppressors. Right. Audra Lord. Yeah. Yeah. And so we have to realize that if we want to create peace, we can't do that through shame, blame and attack. No. We have to find a better way and the better way is coming in and recognizing that we're both hurting here and how can we find our way through. I love the reframe on winning that you talked about earlier. Like winning is keeping the door open. Moving is slamming it in each other's face. Yeah. And I think that's why so many of us are afraid to talk to our, you know, our uncles or talk to our family members about politics or things like that, because it does feel very much like you got to pick a side and your side has got to win. What if the conversation is more, how can we talk about this in a way that like you get to tell your story about how you live and your experiences and how you came to that, you know, this political ideal. Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons why this political moment feels so stressful for a lot of people is because we're set up to think about conversations around politics as a win or lose. I picked my candidate and now I want my candidate to win and your candidate to lose. And I think that that is fundamentally a problem for those of us that want to be peace makers and have these ongoing conversations. What if we had these conversations in such a way that we're story based? This is my story and this is how I came to this political ideal. This is why this candidate and their rhetoric or the way they think about America, this is why it resonates with me and that's the America that I want to see. And you may not agree with me and I may not agree with you, but we can continue coming back and telling stories and trusting each other in stories. I'm curious what that would look like and how that would deescalate some of the concerns we have. And also, I think sometimes we expect all spaces that we're in with somebody who has a different view or opinion than has to be those spaces that we hash out those hard things. And I honestly like, I call this peace making agility. Sometimes you just got to say, I really want to have a hard conversation with you about politics. Can we go for a long walk where we both know that that's the purpose of the conversation, not springing on somebody when you're like, pass the roles. And by the way, I'm building for so and so. One thing we can't do very well as a human society is stay in the discomfort of hard conversations. Yeah. Yeah. We want to just bounce off the topic and make it personal, either personal about the person that we're talking to or personal about what we're arguing about. We can't quite stay in the uncomfortable nature of uncomfortable conversations. We're not taught how to do that very well. And that's why the work of peacemaking is so important. We should have it as children so that we're better at it as adults, but okay, for those of us who are adults who didn't learn this as children, there just needs to be a value on peacemaking. And to your point, it feels like the value is on winning. Yes. And I think too, you know, and that's why you are part of our journey of hope cohort. And there's a line in our brave and resilient covenant that talks about self-awareness and advocating for yourself and being aware of, you know, what you need. And I think that that is something that peacemakers, we are not very good at being attuned to our own needs and our own triggers and our own trauma and making peace within ourselves. We are, we are celebrated for the peacemaking work we do out for others in the world, but we don't turn that good work into ourselves. And I think that is actually the most important part of peacemaking for me is that self-awareness because I will know I am not in a good space is the anniversary of a hard thing that's happened in my life. My body needs time to rest, my mind needs time to rest, my soul needs time to rest. So I probably should not take this coffee date with somebody who's just beyond my empathy because I'm not going to be my best self in it, you know. I think learning to do that work and also learning to build community around us to tend to us like a therapist, like a spiritual leader, a spiritual friend, a spiritual director, like a good friend, like a good, you know, friend who will hold that space, a healer, like building that around us where we can have somebody else kind of look in and say, you know what? Every time you talk about Uncle Bob, this happens, I noticed this in your body and I hear this in your voice and I think maybe we need to work with that so that there's more groundedness and more confidence and more care in your voice when you talk about Uncle Bob before you go back to have a conversation with him, you know. I love that you say that because one of the questions that I had for you was how do you personally maintain what you call that beloved, non-anxious presence, right? Like how can you be in that space of I'm just going to see the belovedness in you without my own fear, coming from a place of my own fear. And so you mentioned the self-care and the having the tribe around you who can be your support system. Is there anything that you do in the moment when you're feeling that you're beyond your ability to feel empathy, but you're with the person, what do you do in that moment to restore your peace? Right. I am, I say this jokingly but so true, peacemakers should be the ones that make things awkward. And what I mean by that is I have, I've gotten really comfortable with saying out loud when I'm in a situation that feels like there's, it's uncomfortable, you know. I feel really dysregulated right now or I feel really flooded or I have a lot of feelings about what you just said and I'm not quite sure how to respond. I'm actually like thinking through what you just said. Is it okay if we table this conversation and come back another time? And I promise you they'll come back to you, but I think right now, I'm not going to give you a really great reaction response because I'm going to be reacting to what you just said. Like I've learned to be that awkward person and my husband and I do this all the time. We build that trust with each other that that I can now do it with strangers where I'm just like, oh, you know, what you just said, it's so interesting. It makes sense in some ways, but it does, but it doesn't feel right for me. And I need some time to think through that. I think we are so conditioned to be like debaters and we are not conditioned to be beloved. It's to love others, like we don't know how to do that. And I think clarity is kindness, like Mr. Roger says, and being clear in the moment of like I yell off. And so I'm not going to be my best self in this conversation. Can we come back to it? That's what I would do initially, but I'm going to have a buzzword with your husband. Yeah, we do have, we sometimes say zimzam and that's kind of like a, like a, oh, I'm feeling off, but I would say like, but so much of what your, of your question also has like baked into it, this work that I've done to know when my body, because I think what happens is we feel that rush and we feel like that we think that rush is the adrenaline to go and invite. And so we go in and fight, you know, but I have learned that to tell that, to tell myself that that rush is telling me that I am overwhelmed and I am flooded. And I am not going to be my best because I don't want to fight. So learning to tell myself like, oh, I'm feeling that and the impulse is to fight and I deescalate in myself by saying, yeah, I'm not going to fight. I'm going to take the time I need. And then I'll let go home and like bake up a storm because I have a ton of energy, you know. Yeah, I love that idea that the adrenaline that we feel we interpret as just get in there and win, but we could feel it and reinterpret it as actually you need to pause right now. That rush means stop and boy, would our behaviors be more wise if we could actually do that. Yeah, I mean, I remember my therapist telling me this and I, it's been one of the things I come back to. She was like, we don't have savory tooth tigers anymore. Oh, she don't we there's no need for us to have that level of aggression and react reaction talking about my anxiety and how like it just makes my anxiety sometimes makes me the worst person to be around because I'm trying so hard to fix everything. And so she was like, yeah, you you're fighting a savory tooth tiger and we don't have those anxiety. And so that's kind of what I show myself is like, the other person on the inside is not a prehistoric predator, that is a beloved and I need to respect them. Yeah, what I used to be a mindful leadership coach and one of the things that I would tell my clients was the quicker your decision, most likely the less wise it's going to be. Exactly. Yeah. Because if you feel triggered and then you just snap, you're going to say the thing that you have to clean up later and you might even do the thing that damages the relationship forever. Yeah. So did you want to say something? Well, yeah, no, because actually, well, this is kind of kind of not so I have something called the three touch rule whenever I go out and whenever I'm shopping, if I come across something that I wasn't planning on buying, but I'm like, Oh my gosh, I really want that. I have a three touch rule, meaning like if I touch it and I look at it, I'll put it down and then I'll go and like do the rest of my trip. And if I'm still thinking about it, like my brain is still touching back, like I'll go back and I like look at it a little bit more than I'll leave it, like check out and then my brain is still thinking about like touching back to the thing, then I'll go back to the store and hold it one more time and be like, okay, yes, this can come into my life. And like that doing that like with my shopping has taught me exactly what you said. It's like my impulse, the decision that I want to make with that flood of like, you know, dopamine or or adrenaline or whatever it is in that moment is probably not the best decision to make, like get myself three touches, like three opportunities like come back to it. And if I do come back to it, then it's mine, you know, to like deal with it. And sometimes I feel like that with conversations with somebody who is my enemy, you know, they may like post something online and I might want to be like, I need to say something or they might say something when we're out for drinks and I'm like, I need to like call them out right now. But maybe like, I just take that in, I process that, I go away, I think about that. And then I come back to that person and say, Hey, you said something over drinks. I really would love to talk about when can we get together, you go away and then you come back to the actual time you talk, but take the time you need to tend to your belovedness so you can proclaim the belovedness of others. And that's it, that's really the secret of life, I think, and the secret of spiritual life, which is you take that space from when you're triggered and when you respond, but you fill it with God and you fill it with a way to see the other person that allows you to transcend whatever it is that they did and restore that belovedness. That's what I admire so much about your work is that you're always trying to find that place where the belovedness of the other person is restored no matter what. And I know you, you have to go here pretty soon, but just a couple more questions for you. You're a spiritual director in addition to all the many other hats that you wear. Yes. Yes. And so I'm just curious as do we have a lot of people in our audience who are interested in becoming spiritual directors or having a spiritual director and from your experience, what do you say makes for a good spiritual director? What kind of spiritual director are you trying to be? And what's the journey that you want to walk people through in your spiritual direction? I will take your second question and then move into your first because I think that's kind of how my brain is working right now. So my journey into spiritual direction came because I attended a conference and one of the perks of an early registration was that you got an hour with a spiritual director. And I kind of knew what that was because the church I was going to have this thing where members could have a spiritual direction session with three spiritual directors once a year where they were three people just kind of sit and you talk about where you've been with God in that past year and they pray with you. But it was only, it was like tied in my membership to this church so it wasn't like an ongoing spiritual formation or care thing. So I went to this conference. My kids were really, really little and my husband's training gave me a pastor. We've been in ministry our whole life or most of our whole lives. I was really feeling disconnected from God because I wasn't doing ministry. I was a parent which is a kind of ministry. And I was sitting across from this director and just telling her about how disconnected from God I felt and how like I had all these ways that I knew how to hear God, how to find God and none of them were working in my life. And through the course of the conversation she just asked me a few questions. Let me tell stories. Then she said, you know, as you've been talking, I've noticed that you tend to use nature metaphors a lot. Like you talk about trees and animals and being at door. So she's like, have you ever thought of yourself as a naturalist on a sacred pathways? And I never heard of that language at all. And I was like, what do you mean? She was like, oh, there's all these different ways that you can connect with the divine. And some people connect with the divine through nature. And it sounds like to me that every time that you're in nature, it's for the service of your children, but it's never or rarely ever for you to just connect with God. And then she started to share some scriptures about nature and God and she was like, you know, I would just encourage you to bring nature into your house and to see what happens there. For me, I love that tear-stained face, but just so confident in my capacity to connect with the divine. Like so aware that like I had agency where I felt like so much of my spiritual life was God does this, God does that. You do this in order for God like it just felt very like God driven where like me looking at myself, my personality, what makes me come alive, honoring it, infusing it or marrying it with my connection to God, like she gave me permission to do that. And to this day, like God and I do our very best work through music and nature. And it's because of my work with various spiritual directors and because of the permission that she gave me at that in that session, to own who I am and my personality and how God made me and use that to connect with God. So as I was writing Dear White Peacemaker, I kept shoving in all these spiritual practice in the book. I ended each chapter with a breath prayer, but there were so many more little practices that I was throwing in there and they kept getting pulled out because the book was long enough as it is. And I realized that that's that contemplative spiritual formation, desire was still so deeply in me. And it felt like it was important to bring that to a conversation and bring it to a space with activists who are so used to like going out and doing and being driven by the brokenness of the world, but like not taking any agency of like how God has made them, what's their unique capacity and being like, actually, I'm going to bring myself into this work and experience God's justice in this work as my true whole self. So I became the spiritual director primarily because I wanted to sit with white allies as they are learning how to navigate race and justice and the various ways they're showing up as activists. But I would say to someone who is looking for a spiritual director, I would say it is a very unique kind of relationship and it's okay to like try out different kinds of directors because like I have a friend who integrates indigenous practices in her sessions, another friend who brings in yoga, I have a friend who used to be a therapist and while spiritual direction is not therapy, you know, she has some insight on our brain and our spirituality that she's able to bring into sessions and so I think that's one thing, it's like, you know, find a couple spiritual directors that you want to try and if they offer a free consultation or even a free session and tell them like, hi, I'm trying out various spiritual directors and try to find somebody to companion to me and my spiritual formation. I would say like, do that. And I would say for anyone who wants to be a spiritual director, well, let me just say to the question of like, what makes a good spiritual director, I think what makes a good spiritual director is someone who genuinely believes in the goodness and the capacity to connect with the divine in every single person, like I can't imagine anybody who has like a deep skepticism or like who are missing throats wanting to do this work because for me, my job as a director is just to remind you of how much you were loved by God and I have to be able to like see the inherent good in you. And so if you find that that's something that comes naturally to you or something that you grown in and it brings you a lot of life to call that out on people, that's a beautiful gift for a spiritual director to have because in essence, like I get to be the voice, not the voice of God, but I get to say to them, you know, things that I am sensing God is saying to them or bringing them scriptures. And that might be the only time in their whole month that they have a spiritual experience because they may not be going to church. And so it's like an awesome responsibility. And then I would say the other thing is like for me, I'm Jesus in church, I love Jesus, but I also am curious about other faith traditions. And so I can hold space with people in a variety of spiritual backgrounds. So I would just say like no kind of like your spiritual stream and like know like what you feel most comfortable with and then offer like be a spiritual director or off go through a training that go through a program that trains you to hold that. So like I would do a Christian based program because I'm a Christian, but I also like in my program learned a variety of ways to hold people from different backgrounds. Yeah, and then I would say like the final thing is is that for me as a spiritual director, I can't really connect with connect people to God if I don't spend time tending to my own spiritual formation. So if you are somebody, I mean, you're in the course of miracles. So like you're listening to this podcast, you're curious about your spiritual formation. So I would say be really clear and be really comfortable with your own process of spiritual formation before you move it to some kind of training to be a director. Yeah. And that's why I really appreciate about the spiritual direction that you gave us through the journey of hope program, which we'll talk about here in just a second, but you really did hold the space of belovedness of all, pointing us towards truth, pointing us towards God, pointing us towards seeing each other as beloved, no matter what the external circumstances look like. And that companionship is priceless. And part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you about spiritual direction is because I would love to see an explosion of truly trained spiritual directors who are out there shepherding people along on their spiritual journeys because that balance I was talking about earlier, we all need it, right? We can get too much in the world and too angry about what's happening here, but then we can also withdraw too much and leave others to suffer. And there has to be a balance and walking that narrow middle way requires companionship. And for those who are who can truly do it, it's a sacred calling and so thank you for answering that call. Of course. And you know what I also would just say that for me having gone through deconstruction and reconstruction of my faith and church trauma, having a touch point, having a person in my life who reminds me that God is good, even though God's people are not always good. And holding being that lifeline for me back to my spiritual formation gave me the confidence that I needed to continue through some like really dark times and still stay connected to my spiritual self. So I feel like this is a moment where so many people are just saying like, you know, many Christians are saying like, I don't go to church because of all the things I've seen or I don't go to church because the church I grew up with and you know, there was like conflict or you know, toxic leadership or whatever and I feel disconnected from God because I don't have that church structure and I'm a pastor. So I'm like, yes, find a local church, but in the absence of that while you're still grappling with your spiritual formation, a spiritual director, a trained one can be so important for you. It's like keeping up here with your like, you know, your like annual checkup, you know, it's having that like monthly check in with your soul. So you don't forget that your body and my soul. You mentioned deconstruction and reconstruction, you're a classic reconstructionist, right? Like you're going to heal it from the inside out. Yes. Is that are you a reconstructionist because you just believe in God, like God is love and and Jesus is your Jesus centric. So Jesus is your model and the goodness of those models has kept you in the church and your faith. I'm a reconstructionist because at the lowest point of my deconstruction, I was so lonely and so disconnected from my true self. I was so angry and so lonely and I didn't, I didn't like who I was. I liked, I liked that I got rid of a lot of toxic things, but I didn't feel like a Sheena. There were parts of my free deconstruction parts of my, my life before where I would be like, I just feel, I feel the divine, I feel close to God. And because of that, I will deal with this bad theology or this toxic leadership or whatever, because there are parts of this experience where I feel so connected to God. And when I got when I left all of that and the anger and the bitterness set in, I didn't feel connected to God. And so I had to go to do this work of reclaiming my relationship with God and being brave enough to have hard conversations and restructure models that didn't work for me then, but could work for me now. So I guess what I'm saying is like I came back around, but I made it my own because I didn't like who I was without God as an essential part of my life. And it's not that the model, I beholden to it so much as the, the, the beauty of life giving relationships with other Jesus centered people. And if you want to call that a church because it's easy shorthand for us, sure. But I needed that and I missed that. And I'm a reconstructionist because I believe that God is a reconstructionist, God makes all things new. And I believe that the kingdom of God is a reconstruction of what was broken. And so if I, if I strip away all the BS that I experienced before and dare to imagine a new structure, a new way of being together with other Christian people that looks like Jesus and looks like us holding our belovedness, then if I can do that, then that's what I want to live into. And that's what I hope that I do as a pastor, you know, the church of the pastor, I hope people feel their belovedness. We even have, we have a welcome lit me that we say every Sunday and one of the lines of the welcome lit me, the leader says, welcome to this place where your name is first and always beloved. And so yeah, I'm a reconstructionist because of the love andness. Yeah. Long story short. Yeah. I, I, I, that what you just said about I didn't like who I was without God. That's huge. That's huge because it's that value of love that no matter what happens, I'm going to try and find my way back to that. Then we become able to look at ourselves in the mirror, right? And, and because we're helping to create a better world and how can the ripple effect of that not heal. Yeah. Okay. Last thing. Yes. I have 15, 15 more minutes. So yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, the next to last thing, because, because I, what you're saying about the, the deconstruction and reconstruction of the church reminds me so much of, of what's happening in our nation right now. There's a lot of people who listen to this from around the world and I get it into a little bit of trouble when I'm too American centric, but at the same time, there's something happening here that is, I've never seen in my lifetime, and, and it feels like there's a fabric of the country that's being pulled apart, where, whether it's the political arguing, whether it's the rise of authoritarian Christianity, whether it's the, the racial divisions that we've never healed. You have been bravely in there, in this election season, just trying to get people to see the belovedness of all. And so my question is, what would you say to somebody who wants to be a healing presence in this time, but doesn't quite know where to start? I would say start small and start local. And I, I would honestly say, you know, if you don't know where to begin, if you want to be a part of rebuilding, ask yourself, where do you feel the most brokenhearted? Because you think where you feel the most brokenhearted is where you are uniquely gifted to show up as an agent of, of Shalom. So if you feel uniquely brokenhearted about banned books in your community, I would say, go to your library, go to your schools and ask those people who are at the front lines of that, like what do you need? What are the policies that you want us to pass, how do you want us to advocate? I would say start small, because even if the candidate that you don't want to win wins, our responsibility to build the beloved community doesn't stop, we still have to get stronger. Right. So like somebody, so I taught a class last week about peace and politics. And I said, if you were to ask me who I'm going to vote for, I would say that's none of your business, you know, like, I don't want to sway you or tell you who you should vote for. I will tell you this. I'm going to vote for the beloved community and I'm going to vote for the candidate that I think will make it easier for me to build the beloved community in my, in my context. But even still, if the other candidate wins, it just changes my, it just changes my strategy. I have to become more creative, more thoughtful, try different things, but still build the beloved community. So I'd say start small, start local and pay attention to what your passions are. Yeah. This is where that language of beloved, non-anxious presence is so good, because it's, it's easy to, in these situations that really do feel like the foundations of what makes normal democracy are kind of getting chipped away at the root. How do you show up as a non-anxious presence in the face of that, right? Yeah. And that's where spirituality comes in, because you have to, the only way to do it is to see that there's something bigger going on here. And, and so that's that transcendence while you're working, is that two parts, right? You need to do both. Right. That and celebrating the heck out of every small win, like as I was studying the civil rights movement and setting some of the different leaders or people's names that were common coming up, I noticed that there were certain houses that were dedicated, like the dance party house, where after they would do a sit-in or they would protest or they would have a meeting, they would go to this particular place and have a dance party. Anyway, when I read that, I thought, oh my gosh, that is something that we don't talk enough about with this work of activism, the build of the beloved community, is the importance of subversive joy, like celebrating every single win and being like, yes, I am seeing peace flourish, even if, even if it's as small as we did not get kicked out of the restaurant, you know, or we did not, or we, or we helped three young girls get, you know, into the clinic to get the healthcare they need or whatever it is, you know, like the small, not, you know, the small steps, the small wins that we see, it's so important to celebrate that because we are so conditioned to think macro-huge, meta, the big ultimate win, we're so conditioned for that, but this, I can, we got to celebrate the small little battles, the small battles we win in the midst of the war, you know. Yeah, the course calls God's plan for salvation, the plan of the teachers and everyone's a teacher, it's just everyone loving everyone else, and teaching love through demonstrating love, and that's how we heal our world. Okay, so last thing, I remember years ago in reading in Dear White Peacemakers that you had done this immersion trip with people to the south, and I thought as I was reading, I want to do that one day with you, and we did just this past year, and we had this wonderful immersion trip to the south, we went to Dexter Avenue Church where Martin Luther King preached, we saw his house, we ended up in Rosa Parks apartment, I don't know how you pulled that off, we read Howard Thurman together, and it was such a magical experience, and it happened because of your work with global immersion, and so as we close here, I don't know if you want to say any more about the work that you're doing with global immersion, about journey of hope, that program that we went on together, that you co-lead with Jair who I'll also be interviewing for this podcast, and any other way that people who are interested in learning more about you who are inspired by you, like I am, can find you. Well, you can find me on Instagram, I'll shoot a more on Instagram, and if you're the Twin Cities, swing by and visit my church, Bruce Moravian, just check the website because we have a non-traditional worshiping rhythm, where it's emcee.org, about journey of hope. It has been the best experience, and I would say the most fulfilling work of peacemaking and peacemaking leadership that I have done, aside from my writing and ministry work, but in terms of building community and connection with other peacemakers, being a part of global immersion, and doing journey of hope has been just wonderful for me, because peacemaking can get really lonely, and it can be such an isolating, solitary experience. So journey of hope is a cohort. We're together for, I believe it's six months, and then we end with a immersion experience. The past couple of years we've gone down south, and the focus has been on Christian right nationalism and white supremacy in America. We have different modules where we look at all the multi-direction, the multi-dimensions of Shalom, and how it applies to us in our interior life so that we can be a part of making and making peace, building peace out the world. We look at things like our belovedness, we call this a pilgrimage because the journey we take together. We look at things like Shalom with our earth, peace with the earth, peace and systems, a variety of systems, and what we do is we gather together twice a month, there's some teaching, and then there's some small group time, and then the second time we're pulling the threads from what we learned together, and the application is open now, so Jared and I receive applications, and then we read over the applicants, and we pray and think about the best mix of the cohort, and then we invite people into the cohort. This time around though, it's going to be interesting because we're actually going to Northern Ireland. The first time I did this, we went to Northern Ireland. We're going back, and we're going to be at Coromila for several days, and just learning about conflict in Northern Ireland during the troubles, meeting with actual people on the ground who are part of reconciliation, and this cohort is designed for people who are passionate about peacemaking within their context, and they are a leader of some kind. We have everything from non-profit leaders to church leaders to people who are leading in the corporate world. If you have any sort of space where you show up as a leader, we had a small group leader, once you show up as a leader, there are people who God is entrusted to you to tend to and care for, whatever size they are. We invite you to join, to apply for the cohort. If you want to be an agent of reconciliation and teach those around you how to be reconcilers, journey of hope is open for you, and this time around when we go to Northern Ireland, there's going to be a certification for conflict mediation that you'll receive at the end of this, which is new and different, and so you'll also be equipped with a skill, more another additional skill that you can bring back to your context. It's so exciting and to the point of what we were saying before, these are skills that are so needed. We've got to learn how to have these peacemaking conversations if we are going to have peace in the world, and where do you start? You got to learn it somewhere. Thank you for all the work that you do in the world. Thank you for your work with Global Immersion. I have a funny little aside in the interview that I did for Journey of Hope. It's like, "Why do you want to be part of this program?" I was like, "Oshita." I'm here for "Oshita." And what was funny is who I was paired with my roommate on the immersion trip. I was like, "So what made you want to sit?" She was like, "Oshita." And I was like, "Me too!" I was like, "What was it? How did you do?" Yeah, yeah, so anyway, thank you for your work. And I hope that we've introduced some new people to your incredibly generous spirit and your beloved shalom. I mean, you really do embody that, "Oshita." And thank you for the ripple effect of who you are that goes out into the world and has served so many, including myself. Oh my gosh. Thank you, Emily. This was a gift to spend time with you and to share more of my story. And thank you for inviting me. I love it. I mean, I just remember reading this and I was like, "I love her!" and to know you is just an honor. So I'll leave it there and we'll see you next time. Bye for now. Thank you for listening to "Exploring a Course in Miracles" from The Circle of Atonement. To learn more about the complete and annotated edition of "A Course in Miracles" and our course-based training programs, please visit circleofa.org. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
