Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 421 Tish Harrison Warren - What Grows in Weary Lands
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What do you do when the fire won't start - when life is full but God feels distant, when faith is intact but the soul is running on empty? In this conversation, I sit down with Tish Harrison Warren, who draws on her new book, What Grows in Weary Lands, to explore acedia, the ancient concept usually translated as sloth but better understood as a sadness that the good is difficult. We trace how the desert fathers and mothers were grappling with the same exhaustion and spiritual languishing that defines our moment and what their practices have to teach us about endurance, formation, and encounter with the living God.
Tish Harrison Warren is a writer and an Anglican priest. She is the author of several books, including Liturgy of the Ordinary, which won Christianity Today’s 2018 Book of the Year, and Prayer in the Night, which won Christianity Today’s 2022 Book of the Year and the 2022 ECPA Christian Book of the Year. She formerly wrote a weekly newsletter for The New York Times, which focused on faith in public discourse and private life. She was also a columnist at Christianity Today. Her articles and essays have appeared in Comment Magazine, the The Point Magazine, Religion News Service, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the C.S. Lewis Theological Writer-in-Residence for The Anglican Episcopal House of Studies at Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. She is a senior fellow with the Trinity Forum and an assisting priest at Immanuel Anglican Church. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and three children.
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I think I'm just, this is gonna sound like some sort of false humility, but I think I'm just more unimpressive than I've been in the Christian faith. But I think that, like the reality of God is stronger, that there is this kind of unfailing base note of grace that just turns out to be there at all times. And I don't have to drum it up. I don't have to make it happen. And I can't, and I can't, even if I can't control it, and I do want to, I do always try to control God and, and one of the things that I think this teaches you is God is wild and unpredictable and unleashed and and he want, he wants me, but that's going to look just so wildly different than I would script it if I could script it.
Joshua Johnson:You. John, hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, we're tired, not really the kind of tired that sleep fixes. It's something deeper, deeper in our bones. It's a weariness that sits beneath a full life, a productive life, even a faithful life, the fire just won't start. Our guest today, Tish Harrison Warren was writing weekly about faith for the New York Times, speaking, producing, mothering her kids, and somewhere inside all of that abundance, God began to feel distant. It wasn't really a big crisis. It was a quiet crisis. It was the wild God of heaven and earth reduced to a topic, a trend, an object on a table being analyzed rather than a being to be encountered. Her new book, what grows in weary lands is what came out of that season. And the guys that she found weren't modern. They were Desert Fathers and mothers monks from the third through fifth centuries who fled into the Egyptian wilderness and wrote 1700 years ago about exhaustion and listlessness and the noonday devil in ways that sound like it could have been from last week. Today, we get into a Sadia, that ancient word sometimes translated as sloth, which is really something closer to a sadness that the good is difficult, a resistance to the demands of love. We talk about what it means to stay in your cell when everything in you wants to leave, and we follow the thread of where these ancient practices actually lead, not to productivity or relief, but to encounter with the living God. So join us. Here is my conversation with Tish. Harrison Warren, Tish, welcome to the shifting culture. Excited to have you on thanks for joining me.
Tish Harrison Warren:Yeah, thank you for having me.
Joshua Johnson:You start out your book striking a match, trying to light a fire, and it's just wouldn't start, and it feels like it was a metaphor for what you were going through at the time when you were at that retreat center, what was happening in your life? What were you feeling deep in your bones?
Tish Harrison Warren:So when I was at that retreat center, I was working for The New York Times. I had a weekly newsletter for the times that the tagline was faith in public discourse and private life. So I had not left the times yet. So I was producing a lot. I was I was writing a lot, I was speaking. My career was big, and I had three kids, and like my life looked abundant and was abundant. I mean, it did not that was not fake. It was truly abundant in lots of ways and very full, but I had this sense of God's distance, and I felt what I say in the book I talk about that God in the course of writing weekly about faith, God as God, not as a topic to write on, but as a being to interact with, began to feel. I describe it in the book as God was a corpse on a table that we were all medical examiners like analyzing, or where God was a sociological trend driving voting patterns and instead of various groups and I, but I felt in that, in times of prayer or in daily life, this actual kind of wild God that is creator of heaven and earth and is bigger than them. Catechism or a debate, or the comment section of the New York Times on faith, that being felt distant and and I was just exhausted. I was struggling so much with weariness, with a sense of, I think, disillusionment. I think there had been institutions and the church and and people in my life who had I was disappointed by and so it left me feeling really lost, and I I still believed what I was writing was still going to church. I was I was a believer, but I felt like I really couldn't plot where I was on a map. It did not feel like deepest suffering. That's the thing. My life externally was fine. My kids are healthy. I wasn't. The last book I wrote was about kind of overt suffering and loss and grief that we had experienced that was not this. I mean, things were externally okay, but I felt like I had run out of steam. I felt the metaphor the fire was. It just felt like I could not sort of get the fire going, both spiritually but also creatively. I think I was struggling with my work in a way that I had not before, just kind of trying to put one foot in front of the other, but also relationships. Our marriage was struggling again, not in like some big, scandalous kind of way. All of these things felt quiet, but they were all felt hard. They all felt there was a distinct lack of gladness. It felt like or levity in my life,
Joshua Johnson:that feels like something that you were feeling individually, as you know yourself, that there's a lot of that happening in culture at the moment, like we feel like there is an epidemic of exhaustion, that we are languishing, that we're not in the space of being on fire at the moment. What do you think that is? Yeah, so I
Tish Harrison Warren:would just want to affirm, I think that's very true. I when I write books, I don't ever want to just write a book out of my own experience. I own I mean, I have lots of experiences, but that I don't write about, but I try to only write when I feel like my experience touches on what I'm seeing broadly in the culture, when it's this larger phenomenon than just kind of me, and because I am interested In in the culture in the broader kind of ways that we experience the world together. Of course, that affects me individually, but I agree with you. I mean, Ezra Klein, the writer and podcaster, New York Times journalist, said burnout is he called it the omnipresent diagnosis of modernity. And I quote Adam Smith, I think is his name, but he wrote an article on languishing in the New York Times, which he described as not depression, but not exactly flourishing either. He talked about it feeling like walking in a fog, feeling like weariness and exhaustion, boredom, muddling through your days, and it went wildly viral at the time that I started writing this, the books on burnout were hitting the bestseller list on the New York Times. It just felt like and i There were memes being passed around. A friend of mine posted some meme that was like, every email that I write begins with like, I'm so sorry this is late. I'm really burned out. I hope your burnout isn't is getting better. I'm sorry that my burnout made your burnout more burny. So it did feel like this broader conversation, like we're all kind of exhausted. It's been a hard decade in many ways, and I think, I think we're tired.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, we're exhausted. We're tired. We're weary. And one of the things that that started to help you through some of this weariness is looking back at the Desert Fathers and mothers as they were in their in their monasteries, in the deserts, in their cells, just persevering day in and day out, and actually then encountering the living God. Who are these Desert Fathers and mothers? And why do they retreat? Where do they go? What was happening with them?
Tish Harrison Warren:So the Desert Fathers and mothers are, they're essentially the earliest Christian monks. They're the ones who sort of started all of monasticism, though they didn't mean to, and they didn't know they were doing that at the time. But it's this Padre people that ended up, I would argue, massively changed the world would be they could easily. If there was a contest, they would at least be in the top 10 of kind of world impact. But they didn't have any ambition for that, or even thoughts of that. It was men and women. This is from the third to the fifth century, mostly, that fled cities civilization and lived in the desert, literally, and out in it was mostly in Egypt Syria, those sort of like, think of sort of Egypt Syria, that sort of region of the Middle East, out in the wild lands. And they did that to seek a life of an ending prayer. They fasted a ton the and they worked. They also did manual labor, and that was like part of their spiritual practice, even they saw it as one thing, and it ended up where a few people began to do this, and then more and more and more. So they almost got a little bit of like a spiritual celebrity status. I mean, this is again, fourth century, not intentionally. In fact, they sometimes would flee. I mean, they would literally move to, like a different cave or a different place to try to get away from people coming to them asking for advice and prayer and wisdom, but they ended up starting this movement based on a rhythm of life, renunciation of the world. So we have these sayings of the desert, fathers and mothers and they're wild. I mean, there's certainly crazy things in it. I feel like I need to give that disclaimer. If you just pick up Desert Fathers and mothers, you'll be like, what is happening on some of them, and then there's other ones, and this is why I ended up writing about them, is that when I was in this experience of burnout and weariness and kind of not knowing, I mean, it was a midlife crisis in a lot of ways, that that would be like a, like a, it's, I don't, I don't like that description because it feels too trite. It feels like I went and, you know, bought a sports car that was too expensive, or something, which is not what happened, but, but in this sort of I was just kind of tossing around, looking for resources, and felt like there was such I was not connecting with anything. It felt I couldn't find things that were sort of like scratching the itch that I was after I I was not in a play because I was so tired. I didn't want, like, a heavy academic book. I didn't want Christian, you know, kind of happy clappy Jesus stuff. I didn't I, I just was looking and then a lot of, a lot of the secular resources were were good, but they were so devoid of the spiritual reality of this in ways, it felt like I need to, like, get more sleep and have better work life balance and take more vitamin D, and all those are helpful suggestions, but it felt like that something that didn't address, like the sense of God's distance and the sense of my discontent. And so I just really happened upon this, this, these sayings of the Desert Fathers and mothers, and I was so taken in by them, because they were so wild. I think when I was working at the New York Times, you hear the same spiritual arguments over and over again. You get there was an atheist website that wanted me to lose my job, and so you kind of like get the same arguments again and again. And this was just like, this is different than anything I've ever heard online. So I was really drawn to it. And what I loved about it, there's 1700 years between me and these people. And by the way, the desert mothers were a ton of mothers. There were actually more women in the desert than men. We don't have as many of their writings left, but we have some so 1700 years separating me and these men and women. But they were talking about burnout. They would they weren't using that word, but they were talking about exhaustion, weariness. What, what would have been called a Sadia or Acadia at the time, which is kind of like listlessness, energyless cynicism, nostalgia. I mean, they were writing about these things that felt like, oh, man, this sounds like my friends and I talking. I mean, it felt so contemporary and was so wildly out of our culture. And I think I just was taken by that. I just loved the idea of that.
Joshua Johnson:So bring a Sadia here into today. So like, what was it hitting on? What were they going through that really resonated with what is happening right now?
Tish Harrison Warren:So a Sadia is often translated sloth, which I think is just one of the worst, the most anemic translations that we could give it, because to me, sloth is like I should have cleaned the house and I watched Netflix instead, which is maybe part that is maybe part of what this is, but it speaks much more to Well, I use John Paul the second definition in the book, which is, which is a sadness and overwhelming sadness that the good is difficult. It's just that we want ease. We want things to be easy. And Rebecca de Young, another thinker described as haidia, as the resistance to the demands of love and that that I think, is such a powerful idea, that we just want things to be easy. We just want things to work the way we want them to. So a Sadia has been associated with all when you start to look it up, I mean, I at one point, I there were 20 different definitions. But it's listlessness, it's, it's spiritual torpor, it's, it's kind of looking back on the past and thinking about how much better it was. And despising your present, despising whatever is present in your life, your work, your friends, your relationships, your home, despising, that. And we see this in all kinds of ways. We see it in malaise. I think we see it in the widespread exhaustion we kind of being sick of it all. We certainly see it in politics of resisting the demands of love and the complexity that that calls for. We see it. I mean, this was a part of the book that ended up not in the book, but, you know, in pixars, inside out, if you've seen it on way the have you? Have you seen inside out to the new one? But there's on way in which is kind of boredom or passivity that would be really related to what we're talking about with a Sadia. That would be one way to actually translate a Sadia. And you know, it's the onwei, is the only character that has a prop, and it's the cell phone. It's her smartphone or his smartphone. I don't, I don't actually know it was kind of gender ambiguous, but the smartphone is, oh, it's almost part of their body. They never, they never put it down. It's and so I do think these are kind of our our smartphones, which I'm lifting up is kind of, they're sort of a Sadie machines. I don't want to blame it just on that, because obviously monks were struggling with boredom and irritation and a sense of God's distance 1700 years ago. But I do think digital life makes us more resistant to anything that adds friction to our life that is not a frictionless existence and love relationships. Spirituality practices always cost something. They always add some level of friction or disquiet in some ways to our lives. They also are our chief source of meaning and joy. But it's never a quick fix. It's always this. It's always a struggle. And I do think digital life trains us away from anything that feels like it requires a struggle at all.
Joshua Johnson:If we look at digital life. I mean, you're getting 1000s of different messages every day. It feels like we're rootless, because I'm looking at Gaza, I'm looking at Iran, I'm looking at Ukraine, I'm looking at all of these horrible things that are happening all over the world. And I'm getting images, videos of destruction that is just, it's dehumanizing, and it's doing something to my soul that I can't do anything about. I'm I'm halfway around the world. I'm not like there. I don't have control over it. It's really disorienting for me and really difficult, and it makes me want to withdraw and go away somewhere. But then you look at the Desert Fathers and mothers, and they're experiencing a city talking about the noon day devil like it's that right in the middle of the day. It's their boredom. But they withdrew. They retreated there in silence and contemplation and prayer, but they're still experiencing the same thing. So if withdraw isn't going to really help me, like walk through it to the other side, what's going to help what's going to help us get through this? Idea,
Tish Harrison Warren:that's a big question. I think I want to make a couple of distinctions. I do actually think that some and I and I'm going to say this, but I need to nuance it. So stick with me. But I think there, there is a with draw that is helpful with this and the desert, fathers, mothers experienced that. I mean, one of the things they were always tempted by when they faced a Sadia, which I absolutely is not just from digital life. I mean, this is certainly, this is a it would be considered the early church named it as one of the eight bad thoughts or wicked kind of experiences we have, which ended up being translated into seven deadly sins. So it's always been there. But I think one of the things the monks really faced when they would experience this is to leave the desert, is to give up what they were doing and go back into civilization. And the elders there would tell them, stay in your cell, which I talk about in the quite a bit in the book, which is a sense of withdrawal. I mean, the cell was a hut or a cave or a crudely built building where a monk would live a desert father and mother would live, sometimes by themselves, sometimes kind of right around a few others. And that was a place of withdrawal in some sense. I mean, they were praying, they were working, and they were encouraged to stay there. I think there's different kinds of withdrawal, I think is what I want to say. There's a withdrawal in that's escapism, that's like, Oh, this is too much. I can't handle it, which I actually think there's a healthy I mean, I think what you're saying is, right, like, there is very little that we can do. I mean, we can vote, we can talk to Congress people, we can pray. But watching hours of destructive video footage is not going to help us do any of that. It's going to make it more difficult for us to do that. So going back to withdraw, I think there is, there is a type of withdrawal that is, I almost want to give a different word to this, but I can't, I can't think of one, but Andy Crouch talks about the quadrant of withdrawal where you're kind of shrinking away from suffering, but also in the process. So you're moving towards ease, but in the process, you're also moving towards moving away from the ability to exercise power in a in a good way, to exercise like your your dignified human ability to try to impact the world around you in meaningful ways. So we kind of withdraw into, like, we're not really making a difference in the world. We're just kind of sated on, you know, TV and food and DoorDash and like, whatever kind of makes us comfortable and not having to engage. But then there is a withdraw into. I mean, the monks absolutely withdrew. They literally withdrew from civilization, which I do not think we are all called to. I mean, I have kids and live in a city, and I my life is nothing like a desert monks, but, but they withdrew to engage. I mean, they were constantly in prayer. They were constantly in spiritual battles, which they saw as very literal. They were constantly, I don't mean literal, like literally battling demons. I they didn't they were non violent, like they they did not take up arms or anything. But they were, they were pressing into kind of the spiritual realm, and they were pressing into their work, and they were pressing into their vows, into prayer, into God, into their rhythm of life, but also to their place and to their small communities. They would, they would stay with the same people in the same place for decades and decades and decades. So they withdrew from something. They withdrew from the noise and the crowds, but they did not see it as an escape alone. Were pressing into something else. So they were intentionally not withdrawing from their cell. They were staying in their cell, which is both their literal, physical place that they were in, but also their rhythm of prayer, their rhythm of work, the vows and community that they had given themselves to. They like, kept at it over and over again. So I guess I want to just make a distinction between withdrawing from noise and withdrawing from distraction and withdrawing from the crowd, which feels like this super, not only necessary, but spiritually important thing to do, and then withdraw for the sake of ease or a. Escape or a Sadia, essentially withdraw out of out of sloth or out of resistance to the demands of love. But if we are to rise to the demands of love, we're going to have to decrease the noise in our life. I mean, it's just the our world is so overwhelming and so loud now that we really cannot take up what I call in the book arduous goods. We cannot take up the difficult things that we need to flourish as individuals or a society unless we are able to kind of build muscles of resilience that only can come from having patterns of like very healthy withdraw and very restorative withdraw,
Joshua Johnson:if we want to rise to the demands of love growing up in faith, I've been a Christian for a long time, and I had such high emotional moments growing up In faith, and I could experience God. I could feel God. I'm feeling these emotional highs. And it feels like that was that got me going in faith. And then we move into a place of, oh, I don't feel those highs anymore. It's we're feeling something different. You write, you quote yourself from a book, previous book, that you have right faith is more craft than feeling. And when you first wrote that, you're like, Oh, is that true? Do I believe that? Is it more craft than feeling? Sometimes when I say, I want to rise to the demands of love, I was like, I need to feel love so that I can act, but you're saying, if there's craft, If faith is craft, it's something different than just feeling to create the action. There's something else. There's practices. There's something that's going to get us to get up in the morning, to put our butt in the chair, to, you know, get that action. What is this craft that helps with the feeling and the action of love?
Tish Harrison Warren:Yeah, I use craft as an analogy, partly because I am a writer, and so I feel like I experienced this. The best sort of analogy for growing in faith or love, actually, in my life, is this craft of writing where there's a lot of talk and interest lately in like flow states, those times in writing or athletic competition, where you're just in the zone, where you're completely feeling it, you it feels And I've experienced this where it feels like words are flowing through you, that you are not in control of, that it's it's nearly euphoric, and it just feels like this, like creative, like mountaintop, right? It feels like this. It's this gift that is lovely when it happens and but you learn now that I've been a writer for over a decade, for quite a while now, it feels like you learn pretty quick that sort of can get you going in a project, or get you going as a writer, but if you live for that, you're not going to write for long, because Most of the work doesn't feel that way. It's showing up. It's repetition. It's a going back to the same practices again and again. It's the craft. It's, it's, it sometimes is really divorced from feeling. In fact, sometimes you're like, I would rather be doing anything other than what I'm doing right now. And you sit down, and in the words of Anne Lamott, it's like how to be a writer, but in chair, like you just sit down and you do and you begin to do the work. And of course, there's more to writing than just work. I mean, there is there you experience inspiration and you learn, and you wrestle with ideas and you contemplate, but it so even though there's more, it can never it can never be less than also the practice itself. And so that just provides a really helpful metaphor, not a perfect metaphor. I don't think these are the exact same, but a helpful metaphor for faith and for growing in love, in the sense of you do have those feelings are real experiences. Of you can have spiritual feelings or spiritual experiences that are kind of mind blowing. That's not false. It's just not what faith is about. It's not the goal any more than like flow state is what writing is about. I mean, we would have very little words written if that were the case. It's and it's not even what it looks like in kind of its ordinary, everyday practices, and it is not what will sustain faith over. A lifetime, in many different seasons, I would say the same thing about love. I mean, this is partly why we get married till death. Do Us Part is because, if it's the idea is that it kind of takes decades and decades to even sort of kind of figure out what this thing called love is, and it often doesn't have to do with feelings or ginning up feelings, which are always kind of shifting and hard, and they just kind of leak like a sieve. It's hard to hold on to feelings. And I experienced this as, of course, a spouse, but also as a friend with people and as a mother. I mean, maybe there are better mothers out there than me, but you are not inflamed with love for your children at every moment of every day, and they often do things to try to make sure that you're not feeling it. And so love does become like a practice. It's a discipline, it's a craft. It's something that you grow in. It's something that you need wisdom to figure out, because how to love in a given situation is not always totally evident, and so having to grow in in sort of discernment and wisdom and understanding is this really long. It's just a really I think that's the other reason I'm drawn to craft is we just kind of know that you can't just do it the first day and get it. It's this really long practice. And in the same way, I think faith is a really long practice, growing in knowledge of God and love of God and knowledge of ourselves. And not that our early experiences of whatever it is, conversion or euphoria or excitement or, you know, mystical spiritual experiences even are not real. Those are important that just it's so often in the American church that we make those feelings kind of a goal or what faith is about. This is true in evangelicalism, especially with focus on conversion or focus on getting people to a certain spiritual experience. I don't think this only affects evangelicalism, though, I think that there is a tendency to think it only does I think it looks different in mainline circles, the passion may not be for conversion, but it may be for justice. It may be the like seeking a sense of kind of being. You need to show that you're fired up enough about whatever late the controversy of the day is, you know, you need to show how angry you are, how how zealous you are about about what is happening in the world. But I think all of that kind of burns itself out. It's like lighter fluid. It burns hot, but it burns quick. And there's some kind of slower, longer practice of faith, of love, of what the Desert Fathers and mothers talk about as fortitude. That really drew me in about, oh, that's what I need in this season of my life to kind of get through these the middle this middle part of middle of faith, middle of life, middle of marriage, middle of the fog, middle of vocational questions, like getting through the middle is this quieter, slower, but deeper, I think, deeper, place of faith. It not lighter fluid. It's a slow burn. And sometimes the fire doesn't, doesn't seem like it's gonna start
Joshua Johnson:growing up. I heard so many times that just going through the motions of practice and of liturgy, and, you know, just doing some spiritual practice is hollow. It's performative. It lacks something. I mean, that's what I heard growing up. And then so speak to maybe those parts of the Christian world where they're saying that these practices, they're really just shallow. How are they? How do they help us deepen our walk with God. How do they start to drive our feelings and the way that we interact with God?
Tish Harrison Warren:Yeah, I do think, and this gets into all of my books, actually, the but the idea that it's practices and habits that sort of form us over time and beliefs, of course, that but those beliefs have to be sort of instantiated in practices and habits, far more than feelings that will guide us. And one of the things I think, the focus on having to kind of gin up a particular experience, exactly what you're saying about kind of the practices itself are shallow and. We we need to sort of feel it, or to be authentic. I think it sets us up for either feeling like spiritual failures when we don't experience that, or deconstructing being like, Oh, this didn't work. Like I used to feel it, and now I don't. So I guess it's not real. And then, when, particularly if you're then facing things like disillusionment and church hurt or pain in the world, just brokenness and in the what you were talking about, I mean the violence and the suffering in the world, then we really have, we've not built the kind of muscles we need through practice to even know how to how to walk in the pain and the tension and the reality of that. So when I kind of came on this place where I was so exhausted, I felt like I couldn't make myself feel any feelings towards God or my husband or my kids or my friend, you know, I couldn't gin up the feelings. I just was caught. I was not prepared. I think I was caught off guard, and I had not been told explicitly. I mean, maybe, maybe this had come up along the way, and I didn't, I wasn't listening, but I was had not been told, or I did not know that I had been told to ex to like that. This is an important part of discipleship, like that. That's what has was so fascinating to me, both with the Desert Fathers and mothers. But also I talk in the book about John of the Cross and his discussion of the dark night of the soul, which I had heard the phrase dark night of the soul. I've used the phrase dark night of the soul, and I kind of took it to mean, like, you know, suffering when bad things happen in the world, when we are, like, struggling with faith because of deep loss or deep grief. But that's not really how John uses it. He He talks about that we basically begin the faith with with what he calls the illumination. So we're full of what the tradition would have called consolation. We prayer feels rich and full. Christian community feels rich and full. It's what you're saying. It's like the feelings that and we experience this with relationship with God, but also with relationship with people. You know, young love, new love, also excitement about a new friend, you know, new job, like all of these kinds of the new excitement, and then eventually, as part of growth, he says it's an essential part of the Christian life. We experience the dark night of the soul, which is not necessarily suffering, external suffering or tragedy, but is a sense of God's God seems to withdraw a subjective sense of his presence, and it seems like God is distant. We have fewer of the highs that you were talking about. Prayer feels really hard, but I think this affects all of our life, just just as I said about our relationships, I think work feels harder. I think relationships feel harder. I think relationships with the church feel harder. I think I think that we there is kind of a space of of languishing and disorientation, where we don't have as many consolations, we experience what the tradition would call desolation. It's the desert, right? It's that I come to again in the book. It's it's a desert experience of faith. And John of the Cross says, This is not caused by sin. This is not cause, because you're doing something wrong, although he says, but people will tell you, and of course, sin is part of this and can cause this. But he says this is primarily a necessary step in the Christian life. It's when you're weaned from coming to God for a certain experience or coming to your spouse or your work or whatever, for a certain experience, and begin to come to God for God's sake. You begin to learn to love, not because of a certain feeling it gives you or because it makes you feel fulfilled. You begin to learn to love for the sake of the Beloved, and that's a massive shift in our soul. And it's it's when we kind of go from adolescent to adult. I don't mean that. I'm not talking about age there that doesn't actually necessarily happen at a certain age, that can happen at any age. And for some people, it never happens no matter, no matter what age they are. And some people it happens very young. But I mean, spiritually, it's when we kind of go from an adolescent to an adult. There's nothing wrong with the early part. There's nothing wrong with adolescence. I mean, I have. To adolescents in my home, and I want them to be adolescents, right? But there is this sort of maturation that has to happen, that can only happen through the desert, through this, through when times feel full of friction. There isn't ease. It requires resilience and fortitude. And often I mean St John of the Cross would say, God sort of pushes us into that experience through through these times that feel really empty, through these times where God feels distance and but I just had never been told this is a good and necessary part of the spiritual life and journey I was I was completely unprepared for that.
Joshua Johnson:As we walk through this wall, this dark night of the soul, it seems to me that our conceptions of God or our pictures of God start to fall away, and we can't find our pictures that served us really well growing up and and early in our faith, and now we are like, lost in the dark, right? We don't know where it is, but you get to a point of, then you get to, you're like, swimming in this the grace and love of God. And you're just like, you're sitting and you you're like, I'm Beloved. God is all around me that people get to that place. How does that happen in the dark? How does it happen when we actually then realize, oh, I don't need that picture anymore. God is present. God is with me. I am Beloved.
Tish Harrison Warren:Yeah, it's hard because I feel like I don't know how that will happen for you or for the listener. It feels so personal. It feels so it is like, usually God showing up for who you specifically are in some interesting ways. But in general, this is what I would say. We get there slowly. It takes time, the desert over and over again. This is talked about throughout the Christian tradition. I I mentioned it some in the book, but they people are constantly saying, basically, you can't rush this. You can't make it to the other side of the desert. You can't, like, find an oasis. You can't you have to sort of sit in it and accept it. You also, I think it also comes when you realize you don't control it. So much of religious faith tends to be us trying to move the levers to make God's presence shown right to kind of like, whatever we need to do, put in the quarter, you know, get the machine on where we can kind of control not only our lives, of course, and the world, but it control even our experience of God. We want this. This happens in churches. This happens in mega churches by, you know, they put the kick drum in during the chorus so that you can like and then everybody has a sense of the Holy Spirit. I mean, rich Mullins has this great story of someone being like man, the Holy Spirit really fell at this point. And he said, Well, that's when the kick drum comes into the chorus, and that's when everybody, every night, tells me that the Holy Spirit falls so, so there's manipulative it's a way to manipulate people's kind of subjective spiritual experience. And I believe holy, the Holy Spirit does fall. It just isn't mechanistic or controllable like that. And so I think I sort of have had to let go of control or even expectation of what knowing and following God will feel like. And it only feels like on the other side of that, that sort of releasing of control that you begin what you're saying to experience something new, which I honestly think might be kind of a new thing for me that I have sort of swimming around in the grace and love of God. As you said, I'm stealing your words there. I mean, it's been interesting, because what one of the things that has been paired away from me, P, A, R, E, away from me, in the experience of kind of exhaustion, being in the desert and then remaining in faith. I mean, there were certainly times where I I thought about sort of deconstructing or blowing my life up and starting over in various ways. I am not trying to offend people really into deconstruction, because I I think there are some ways that my faith needed to be deconstructed and rebuilt, but, but, I mean, there were ways that I kind of was tempted by numbing out or or flaming out, which is the language I use in the book, but I didn't, by God's grace, like remaining in the commitments I've made and in the faith that I profess, in the church that I'm in, in. The practices of prayer, those things have changed in the sense that one of the things that's been kind of taken away or pared away is the sense that I kind of have to do something to make God present, or I have to feel something to have God present. And I think I'm just, this is gonna sound like some sort of false humility, but I think I'm just more unimpressive than I've been in the Christian but I think that, like the reality of God is stronger, that there is this kind of unfailing base note of grace that it that just turns out to be there at all times. And I don't have to drum it up. I don't have to make it happen. And I can't, and I can't, even if I can't control it, and I do want to, I do always try to control God and, and one of the things that I think this teaches you is God is wild and unpredictable and unleashed and and he want, he wants me, but that's going to look just so wildly different than I would script it if I could script it.
Joshua Johnson:Well, this has been beautiful. Tish, I have a couple of quick questions here at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Tish Harrison Warren:I yeah, I think keep learning the practices you're learning. I think that there were things that I didn't realize were important, things like prayer that I wouldn't have even really thought about, that really have carried me. So there would be some positive I think I would tell myself not to worry so much. I'm a worrier and I'm anxious. And at 21 I was very worried. And I think that I would tell myself, life is going to be far more disappointing than I thought, and then I'm going to that I'm I'm going to fail in much bigger ways than I thought I would, that on the other side of that there's redemption that I could I could not imagine. At the time I was 21 I was so wanting to get it right life. I mean, I don't even mean I wasn't a fundamentalist or anything like that, but I think I just wanted to. I wanted to take every step right? I wanted to make every relationship the best it could be. I wanted to make every decision the best it could be. And I think I would tell myself, you're going to disappoint yourself. And on the other side of that, there's you just, I think I I think that redemption and grace is this thing that we talk about, but we don't want to actually have to use or experience. And I think I would tell myself, you know, you're worse than you think you are, and you're far more beloved than you could imagine.
Joshua Johnson:Amen, anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend,
Tish Harrison Warren:oh my gosh. I literally was reading it right before I came on this podcast. I'm reading Martin Shaw's liturgies of the Wild.
Joshua Johnson:Isn't it good?
Tish Harrison Warren:Oh my gosh, this
Joshua Johnson:book,
Tish Harrison Warren:it's so good. Martin Shaw. Martin Shaw endorsed my next book. So please buy my book, which comes out May 12. But so, but I that said, I mean, I might be more excited about this book than I am about my own, my I'm sure my publisher would not like me saying that it is so good. So I have been a i, a friend alerted me to the existence of Martin Shaw probably two years ago, and so I've been following his work, and I and I knew this book would be good because I was a fan, but it is better than I thought it would be. I mean, maybe just May, like, I feel like I'm being very exuberant here, but, and it is because, like, literally, I was reading it less than an hour ago, I think, or I guess, an hour ago now, but it's so good it. I mean, I I'm, I don't know, about 100 pages in, but if this keeps going like this, it's gonna end up in like, my top 20 books of all time, like, I just love it. So,
Joshua Johnson:yeah, I agree. I'm, I'm with you in it. I read it. It was so phenomenal, so good, and I was able to talk to him on the podcast for it. Oh, it was such a great conversation.
Tish Harrison Warren:You should bring us back sometime together, because, and this is why I've, I've thought about, well, partly because I'm completely obsessed with this person, but also my first book was liturgy of the ordinary, and his book is liturgies of the wild, which are such similar titles, but opposites, right? And that is intriguing to me, just in and of itself, like I would like to have a conversation with him about how formation happens. And in the wild, and how formation happens in the ordinary, and how, actually, the wild tends to be very ordinary. In the ordinary turns out to be very wild. And anyway, you don't have to have us back together. I
Joshua Johnson:would love that. But
Tish Harrison Warren:as people read liturgy, the wild also read liturgy the ordinary. And think it's just I am intrigued, I think because, because of the the juxtaposition of those ideas, which I think because, I mean, I am the author of liturgy of the ordinary. I and I am in love with this book. I think they end it turns out that those are they go to the same place. That's what's intriguing to me. They're not binary. They feed each other. And I think that's really interesting.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, well, that's wonderful. So go get liturgies of the ordinary and liturgies of the wild, and then get what grows and where he lands, which will be out May 12, anywhere books are sold. It's also a fantastic book. I loved it. And you're such, you just bring us into this space, such as you know, you're a brilliant writer, and I could feel it with you, and I could feel the emotions. And I could feel the the aesthetia. I could feel like the the languishing. I could feel it. And I could say, Okay, this is what it takes for me to go deeper and deeper in faith and to what we didn't get to the to the end, which is becoming all flame. And you're going to have to read the book to get there. And this quote that you have at the end of the book, which the point of all of our lives is encounter and unity with the living God, that these practices and these things can actually lead us to encounter and unity with the living God, which is, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. I want people to go and get the book, what grows and where he lands, anywhere that you'd like to point people to. How could they connect with you and what you're doing as well?
Tish Harrison Warren:Yeah, well, please get the book pre orders help. So I don't know when this is coming out. So you can pre order it in terms of pointing people with the book. You can pre order through book people, which I'm going to have, that's a local bookstore here in town. If you pre order through that, I will sign it, and so you get a signed copy. So if people are interested in that, besides that, I mean, I have a website. I'm mostly off social media, but I am occasionally on, especially to promote the book these days or or my my friend Isaac will post for me, because I mostly got off a few years ago. So I don't I, I hesitate to point people to that because I want you people. I want everyone online less, not more. But if you need to find me, a great way to find me is through my website. And there's a way that you can contact me through my website. So if you want to write me, can't write everyone back, because I get a lot, but I read them. I read all everything.
Joshua Johnson:Excellent. Well, Tish, thank you for this conversation. Really enjoyed talking to you, going deep into all of this. And what does it look like to live a life of faith, and then what does this middle part of it all really look like, and how we can grow in resilience and faith over the long term? Fantastic conversation.
Tish Harrison Warren:Thank you so
Joshua Johnson:much.
Tish Harrison Warren:Yeah, it was good to be with you. You
Joshua Johnson:you.
