In the Season Two finale I talk to (un)common good media founder and podcast host pauli reese about painting and in particular how it invites us to experience the divine. We get into our checkered evangelical upbringings and our complicated journeys out of them. We also talk about what it means to have private versus public experiences of engaging with the spiritual and much, much more.
Content from this episode:
More info about Black Bottom tribe
Balikbayan box episode of 99% Invisible
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
In the Season Two finale I talk to (un)common good media founder and podcast host pauli reese about painting and in particular how it invites us to experience the divine. We get into our checkered evangelical upbringings and our complicated journeys out of them. We also talk about what it means to have private versus public experiences of engaging with the spiritual and much, much more.
Content from this episode:
More info about Black Bottom tribe
Balikbayan box episode of 99% Invisible
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)
David Dylan Thomas
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of what I believe will be the season finale of season two of ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’ with my very special guest, Pauli Reese.
I'm coming to you live from the unceded territory of the Leni-Lenape, otherwise known as Media, PA. As I said, my special guest today is Pauli Reese. Pauli, tell the good folks what it is you get up to.
Pauli Reese
Hey, David. Thank you for having me. I am also sitting on the unceded land of the Leni-Lenape and in the specific part of that, where I'm sitting, also the currently contested space of the Black Bottom community. For more on that, Penn's website specifically covers the part of what is known colonially as Philadelphia. It covers the neighborhood that is presently known as University City.
So, what I get up to, among other things, what pays my bills is doing digital technology work and digital media strategy and live streaming and production. What I'm super passionate about right now, I just started a media company which I'm calling (Un)common Good Media, which is the home for my podcast – (Un)common Good with Pauli Reese. Our commitments in our work, our mission in our work is that we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good and service of our common humanity. We do this, we are creating community across lines of difference by inviting dialogue about the squishy and vulnerable bits of life.
We have conversations with guests on my show about what journey brought you here. What sort of things help you keep hopeful and help refill the inner wellspring and keep you resilient when things are tough, when times are tough and morale is low. We talk about impact and legacy. In particular, the question that we love, which David has also answered on my show as a former guest of mine, is, what do you want the world to look like when you're done with it?
David Dylan Thomas
That was a very fun question to answer, by the way. I feel like that's a question everyone should kind of, in their own domicile, in their own moment of peace, kind of think about. I think it's one thing to think about.
So, Pauli, let me first thank you for having me on your podcast, I had a great time. Let me ask you, now that you're on my podcast, the million-dollar question, what have you been thinking about lately?
Pauli Reese
This very morning, I have been thinking a lot about painting.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, okay. A novel answer, go on!
Pauli Reese
I am not a painter. I never took a class in painting besides elementary art school, art classes, not even art school, just art classes. Shout out to Nancy Grayson Elementary School in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania! To the best of my knowledge, it's still there. But Ms Keels elementary art classes – that was the extent of my painting training. However, I have multiple friends who have a deep and profound interest in Bob Ross as a painter. Shout out to the Bob Ross podcast; Ron Scalzo hosts that and my friend Mark Stetson, who's also been a guest on my show, who had a short-lived web series called the Bob Ross Challenge, where he taped celebrities attempting to paint in real time, along with a Bob Ross episode of The Joy of Painting.
So those things, and I just taped an episode this morning with my friend Bronwyn Mayer Henry, who is a local visual artist here in Philly. I got the privilege of getting to tape – we tape video – and getting to see a couple of her works in progress in her background, in her studio behind where we were taping. So that was just so much joy and fun and makes my job as a podcaster easy because there's immediately things to talk about that are unplanned. And the unplanned components of podcasting, at least in my experience, are the gold of podcasts.
David Dylan Thomas
I feel the same way about giving talks. It's the Q and A I look forward to because I don't know what people are going to ask.
Pauli Reese
Yes. I had the privilege of helping to engineer a taping of yours and I remember there being a very lively…
David Dylan Thomas
Full disclosure, so he's referring to the Malaika Carpenter episode that he was kind enough to produce. It was recorded live. See, it all ties back. This is the season finale. That’s the season premiere, which is going to premiere whenever this season. There was some intense debate over race in the Q and A section, which I'll be honest, I didn't release it. It just doesn't really translate well if you're not there. But yes, it absolutely was. So again, thank you for taping that. So, what about painting has kind of struck you
this morning?
Pauli Reese
A couple of things. I want to make just a gentle adjustment and I should introduce this as well. I use a they and them pronoun over he. The thing that struck me about painting is that, in particular, Bronwyn was telling me painting is a spiritual practice for her much in the same way I would equate as anything that a person finds spiritually meaningful would do. I hesitate to say going to faith gatherings because I don't know a lot of people that find going to temple, church, going to a meeting like that to be spiritually meaningful in the way that Bronwyn finds painting. To Bronwyn, to her, when she would talk about painting, I was like the level of passion and fully aliveness that you describe your work in studio that you bring to that is something that I rarely ever see from a person who's sitting in a pew at church.
I think because a couple of things. One, the communal aspect of being in a faith tradition or any spirituality experience means the social component. I think certainly today, sitting three years into a pandemic, where we're not presently under lockdowns, but who knows? We think we have good vaccines and we probably won't need lockdowns again, but we don't know.
I think the social aspect of spirituality immediately means that we're posturing in a way that time alone in the studio just releases us from. There’s no physically present reminder that other people are watching my expression of relationship to the divine, whatever that is. Whether that’s a personified deity, like God, Yahweh, the Prophet Muhammad, Allah, whatever that commitment to the divine is. There's no one that's watching my specific experience of the divine unless you're streaming or Tik-Toking or whatever, but like when the cameras are off, when you are by yourself, when you're creating, nobody's paying attention to you. You don’t have that component, that variable in the process of creativity. I love that. I recorded my first ever solo podcast of this, where it was just me and I happened to be reasonably comfortable on camera. I'm fairly comfortable expressing what feels like an authentic version of self on camera. Yes, I'm wearing a very strong magenta lip right now…
David Dylan Thomas
I was going to say, it looks fantastic, by the way.
Pauli Reese
Thank you! And in one of my best floral dresses, and I have my set behind me, which is the set that I typically tape on, there are a bunch of knickknacks, like an old Yeti microphone from like back when they were like being surge priced on Amazon for like $200, a painting of mine that a friend made for me when I was really sick, that’s a painting of my hands knitting. My podcast mascots, you can only see their tips of their toes, but you can't really see them because I have like a nice narrow wide aperture lens on the zoom and then over my other shoulder a contestant thank you card from when I was on a quiz show. But yeah, and then there's a Zegar print, Isaiah Zagar, the proprietor and artist of the Magic Gardens in Philadelphia up there over my other shoulder.
But suffice it to say like there's something when you're in a space where you are either less self-conscious about the audience that's watching, or you know that they're watching and you have the capacity to emote in a way that feels authentic to the self anyway that I just don't think the vast majority of people that I know who participate in communal organized experiences of faith and spirituality, religion even, can sort of crack through because there's so much dynamic of power and authority and agency and social posturing.
David Dylan Thomas
So, there's a lot there. I'm really curious though about the aspect of the divine, the aspect of being in commune with the divine that almost shouldn't be witnessed. You're reminding me of the line of the Bible where it's like, if you were giving, let your right hand not know what your left hand is doing. If you're going to give, don't do so in public. Like keeping it secret, which is specifically about giving, but it tends toward this notion of a more intimate relationship with God or the divine.
It's interesting to me to think about what you're suggesting is that there is this potential, maybe this freedom, in being able to touch the divine when you're alone, or specifically when you're not being witnessed and not subject to the pressure to perform, to wear your Sunday best. To show up at a certain time so the neighbors don't talk. All the sort of social stuff that gets wrapped up in church or other forms of worship. I like the word used there, posturing, which it's now I'm more about communing with my neighbors as opposed to communing with the divine. There's a tension there, I think, that you kind of released yourself from when you're communing alone.
Pauli Reese
Yeah. There is the opportunity to examine the relationship to the divine and in addition to that, the relationship with the self, I think it's not that it's not there, but it's being balanced with so many other relationships that it doesn't have the level of focus. So another piece, there is some component of sacred text to my history. I did do a Master of Divinity, specifically thinking about ministry and Christian traditions and what that looks like. At one point I was thinking about doing clergy work. That's not the case anymore, but the training from that, one of the things that I think gets often lost is that there is a very pragmatic and functional component to sacred texts that at some point in its history, how it is treated by the people who look after it, translate it, care for it, interpret it, preserve it, adapt it, or just read it, or just hear it verbally read to them, I think it's very lost that some of the things, practices, ways that sacred texts, or not even talking about religion, but just the way that we do things, values that are important to us. We forget that so many of them might have been purely functional when they were originally incepted and adopted and perhaps even enshrined, whether by writing them down in a text that became sacred after the fact, or to kick it political, to be written into policy and law.
David Dylan Thomas
Well, you're reminding me of, and again, this is my rudimentary understanding. Anyone who has studied religion may feel free to correct me, but my understanding is a lot of the nutritional law you see in places like Leviticus or Torah text or the first five books of the Bible, if you kind of analyze it, is what you would need to eat to stay alive in the desert. To your point about being functional, it's sort of like, Hey, if you want to stay alive, maybe don't eat so much shellfish, don't eat pork, whatever. There are certain things where it's like, no, really this is to keep you alive, as opposed to some weird mystical like thing that would apply just as well in a tropical city. Then that lives long enough that it can become revered and be like, well, when they wrote this, clearly, they got this from God. So, I guess God wants us to, not, your body wants you to, or the environment wants you to. It's like no, God wants you to. So yes, if you dare eat that thing, we're going to cast you out.
Pauli Reese
Yes, exactly that. To give a present example for which I would be qualified to speak on and have a level of study to where I understand it, that being Anglican tradition in history, Church of England, Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. When you go to a service and they're celebrating what's called the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper, Communion, whatever you want to call it. The table, the altar, whatever language is right?
Usually there's going to be some sort of either wafer or – if you are really fancy, there might be –by fancy I mean progressive, there might be a piece of unleavened bread that's been actually baked as opposed to the crispy wafer and then there will be a chalice of wine.
The part that's important to our story, everything is important when it comes to liturgy, and by that, I mean the physical things that a religious organization does, and the actions that they take, the physical properties of things, because usually they've been imbued with spiritual meaning of some sort. A lot of people will tell you that; not everybody will tell you that, but this gets back to the thing of spirituality and functionality and stuff.
What’s important to our conversation is the way that goblet, that chalice looks when it’s being prepared and ready. Depending on what tradition you may be from, it could be made of different things. It could be pottery, could be stoneware, it could be silver, it could be gold.
If it's a much less very conventional service, if it’s a lot more lo-fi, a lot less high church. Actually, that's not even fair but, I’ll just say it this way. I've been a part of services in this tradition where rather than using what I would call fancier chalices they'll have plastic ones. And certainly, during covid this was necessary, where you would have individual packets, where you had an individual serving that was a plastic cup of grape juice, and then a packet on the top that had like an individually produced wafer and they were sealed so that they would be safe. I work in some communities where they still use those things because it's not practical or safe to have a full piece of bread or a large wafer or a cup of wine or juice, whatever. Anyway, you know, in some traditions it matters whether you use wine or juice. In some traditions, it matters whether you use a wafer, or you use a piece of bread, what sort of materials are in it, whether it's wheat or something that's gluten-free or something else, or a combination of all of these things, depending on who you ask. These things either matter a lot, matter not at all, or matter somewhere in between. It’s a very localized and individual component, which again, depending on what tradition it is, might also have a regional authority that is saying what it should be in order for it to count, for it to be real, for spiritual realities to be reflected and empowered in the physical manifestation of them.
But what's important about this and the point of this anecdote, it's too late for it to be long story short, thank you, Clue; Madeline Kahn and Lesley Ann Warren. And Michael McKean etc. So, when that chalice comes to it, usually there's like stuff that's on top of it. There might be a cloth, which is known as a purificator, it's usually white. There might be a square of material. Usually, it's cardboard that is often enwrapped in another piece of cloth, which is called a pall. But these things come to have spiritual meaning, but the original need and use for them was they were there to keep the flies out.
And so, something that was entirely functional became imbued with spiritual meaning because someone else decided, or perhaps a community decided that it was important enough to make note.
David Dylan Thomas
Well, I mean, I believe the term is ratification, you have a thing that has gained a certain amount of symbolism and expectation in a way that is separated from the original reason. What you're reminding me of is…
Pauli Reese
Guns and whiteness?
David Dylan Thomas
Okay, there's that! Oh, do you really want to get into the real reason the Second Amendment exists? It's not cause of militias. But no, what I'm actually thinking is the mummy. So, we have in our heads the notion of the mummy, the cinematic mummy as this person wrapped in bandages and kind of shambling slowly along. Now, as it turns out, if you look at the 1930s, Boris Karloff, The Mummy, the one that kind of made it big, that guy spends time in like robes or whatever, like barely. He's mostly a very handsome professor for most of the movie. They made the sequel and they couldn't get Boris Karloff, so they were like, oh, how do we cover up the fact that we don't have Boris Karloff? Oh, they'll be wrapped in bandages the whole time. And the person that they had wrapped in bandages had rheumatoid arthritis, so they could really only shamble along. They couldn't be a fast zombie. From that though, the collective imagination was, oh, mummies are these very slow-moving bandage covered things. In fact, it was, we couldn't get Boris Karloff and the person who we could get had rheumatoid arthritis. That's what's actually happening. But what we take from it is this complete picture of what this should be, and if you ever deviate from that you're either an iconoclast or you just don't get it.
Do you think that stems from our need to have something beyond the practical? To aspire to, to adhere to? Do we get disappointed when we find out that this was just to keep flies out? Or is it like, I'd rather not know? Or is it like, yeah, I get that, but I want to do it anyway because it makes me feel good?
Pauli Reese
I think it's hilarious, first and foremost. I have distanced from the times in my tradition, I grew up in the evangelical Christian tradition, which also cares about these things especially on the conservative spectrum of that. We're now splitting hairs sociologically because to say that there's a conservative end of evangelical Christianity assumes a certain knowledge of evangelical Christianity beyond, just broadly speaking, sociologically and politically conservative stance to begin with.
David Dylan Thomas
And full disclosure, audience, like both Pauli and I have a history, let's say. I would describe myself as a recovering evangelical. Do you feel that's a similar situation for you?
Pauli Reese
I would even go so far as to say repentant.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh yeah, sure, sure.
Pauli Reese
To use their own language.
David Dylan Thomas
Yes. Well, we'll get into this, but not fully repentant, at least for me, because repentance means like turning around completely and no, I salvaged some of the things I liked.
Pauli Reese
We did talk about this.
David Dylan Thomas
So we we'll get into that.
Pauli Reese
So, to this end, yes. I do think that there is a deeper thing. I do think that there are deeper things that we as humans are wired to want to have answers to. I think that it's profoundly uncomfortable for us to not have answers. It's why so much of the preaching that you heard, like during Covid, I worked in churches during the time I heard a lot of Zoom preaching. So much of it was the same thing, like have hope. If you live in the Christian tradition, it's, remember that this is not all that this is, that heaven is coming later, like a greater connection with God in a physical and corporeal sense beyond what people experience now, which is depending on who you ask, is sort of corporeal, but not entirely because it's sacramental, but not entirely, blah, blah, blah. This is not like a systematic sacramental theology podcast. And there are more people who have spent more time in this than I have who are more qualified to speak on these things.
I do think that we seek that, I do think we seek answers to the questions that are ultimately unanswerable because we live in a world and it's not only capitalism and media, but we just live in a world where the natural desire for us is to have an answer to questions. That's what curiosity is, I think. I think curiosity is a thing of us being wanting to learn more about things we don't understand, whether they're things that are potentially scientifically answerable. Although as you and I have discussed on the record, science doesn't always provide us objective answers anyway, if ever. Then the other answer about that is that on the other side of that question, damn it, I really want a good fucking Mummy movie to be made before the centennial of Boris Karloff’s The Mummy, like Tom Cruise, had no reason being in a Mummy movie. Brendan Fraser was excellent and was very funny. And John Hannah and Rachel Weis were very funny together. They were a very good cast. That could have been a great franchise, the hope of rebooting the universal monster cinematic universe could have rested on that film franchise if they wouldn't have just had such fucking awful – can we swear, can we cuss on your podcast?
David Dylan Thomas
Oh yeah. This is a super fucking cursing podcast.
Pauli Reese
Perfect. So the Mummy franchise could have been an awesome franchise if they hadn't had such fucking awful CGI.
David Dylan Thomas
It's the screenwriting too. I'm not even going to say, let's not go down – we are going down this rabbit hole. I always get this muddled, but there is a line again. So, part of our shared history is, I think we both have a pretty good familiarity with the Bible. There is a line in the Bible, something along the lines of loving what is on the altar and forgetting what makes the altar sacred. I think that is what most studios took away from the MCU was, oh, the key is to make it connected. And that's not the key. MCU's work was a number of things, not the least, likable characters. Characters who it was as much, if not more fun to watch Tony Stark than it was to watch Ironman. He actually became more boring when he became Ironman and that is one of key things that made the MCU work. Tom Cruise was not interesting. A lot of these universes they create, they didn't have interesting characters. They just didn't. I didn't care about the characters. If you can't get that, then it doesn't matter if they're connected.
But I think that is a piece of it too, is this notion of, because I like what you're saying about the curiosity, but I think there's a counterpoint, which is our search for awe. I think there's also this human need to have something bigger than us to belong, something bigger than us. And I think that very much is in our politics today. I think for conservatives it is belonging to this kind of like MAGA inspired victimhood, resentfulness, like we have been the underdog for too long, it's time to take back the country, thing. For more liberals, it is more of this, there are these principles we believe in around equity and around how different groups have been treated over time and a collective fear of the violence inherent in what we see coming out of the more conservative movements. In both cases though, it's not just, well, this is what I think and fuck everybody else. It's, this is what we think.
And so I think there is on the one hand this curiosity, which is absolutely human drive, but I think there's this also at best collaborative and generative and at worst conflicting drive around, I need something bigger than myself, which I think got really complicated during covid because we couldn't simply show up in a crowd except like maybe at a Black Lives Matter rally, show up in a crowd, or at a MAGA rally – show up in a crowd and feel that.
Pauli Reese
I don't have an answer to your question, I'm just processing it. The piece that I'll add, I think, I'm making a connection between the isolating effects of social media and the pandemic, the sort of #alonetogether hashtag that I remember, that phenomenon of all of us being alone, but all of us being in the same ontological state of loneliness, well, let's not conflate the two because they're different. They're shades of meaning. The ontological state of being alone while also having social media to help us remain connected and acknowledge that all of us have the same experience of being alone. I'm making the connection between that and the history among spiritual people and those that are pointed to as the mystics, the leaders, the people on the fringe of, you would call it either, asceticism or monasticism, the act of seeking spiritual enlightenment in the experience of isolation.
David Dylan Thomas
I think that that rings true and, and to bring it back to painting, I feel like painting actually becomes that generative combination of curiosity and awe because I imagine that when you are painting or when one is painting in the way that you were describing before, there is on one hand a curiosity that it comes from the curiosity of exploration. I am manifesting this act of creation. I'm exploring an idea through paint, through the act of painting and I don't know what's going to happen, but I want to know what's going to happen and I'm going to go through this. But there's also a communion with the divine, a communion with the thing that is bigger than myself because I'm not doing this. This is not paint by numbers. I don't know what's going to happen and therefore I am, by definition beholden in a way to something bigger than myself or becoming a part or in communion with something bigger than myself.
So, I feel like that, when you were showing that economy between someone finding so much religious fulfilment in a solitary act of painting versus the communal act of worship? I thought about like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know that I ever really felt that in a church. And I do know that and when I worship, I do it alone. I have my own personal sort of worship. When I think about times when I've gotten those kinds of spiritual feelings in a crowd, it was – to bring it back to the MCU, it was in the movie theatre.
MCU is one example, I've seen it in other places, but when that moment happens, in Avengers End Game – and just Google it if you don't know, and the guy gets the thing and the whole crowd erupts and it's like that to me is what I should be getting when I go to church. I'm getting it here in the theater because I think the theater is actually my church. But when I think about what is the communal experience of that spiritual awe, it is that kind of like the stories we tell and how our relationship to those stories binds us in a way where we don't know each other's names. But we know that character's name and we are all feeling this wonderful emotion at once and it hits very differently than if I was sitting in that movie theater alone when the thing happens.
Pauli Reese
Yeah. The shared experience of having a certainly a sensory, a somatically, overwhelming experience, which we know from neuroscience can often result in having an emotionally or a physiologically overwhelming experience, potentially positive if it's euphoric, potentially harmful, if it's traumatic triggering. To your same point, going to a concert, going to an athletic event, the sport balling as it were.
David Dylan Thomas
Do you think that there was a time when like that was what the church was, that the church had that at some point? Or was it always kind of just like, all right, Sunday morning, let's go!
Pauli Reese
Well, I mean the history, the history of Christian traditions tells us that yes, that is certainly the case that's happening. At least as of earlier this week, there's documentation that there is a student revival happening similar to the third-grade awakening, talking about American religious history.
David Dylan Thomas
What Great Awakening?
Pauli Reese
The third, apparently looking at Asbury University in Kentucky, there was a student university sponsored worship service that went for multiple days, nearly two weeks I believe, that went multiple day and many public theologians have weighed in a about this, including some that I know closely, others that I've interacted with marginally. So it certainly happens for some people that like there are at least the visible outward experience would seem to signify that people are having the sort of somatically engaging experience of wonder, the divine, collective consciousness that you were describing.
The last time that I experienced it, I work in churches a lot. I work in mostly churches, mostly Christian churches. I think it's different to experience that as someone who's seen how the sausage is made and experiences that on the regular as a part of producing those experiences for other people. I would equate my experience of that to developing like a weed tolerance. I mean that's the problem with a weed card. In spite of what we say, people develop tolerances that mean that they have to adjust their dosages as time goes on.
David Dylan Thomas
So I’ve got to go to church five times a week now to get what I used to get out of one!
Pauli Reese
Yes, that! But yeah, the last time that it happened for me, when it does happen, it doesn't look like what it used to for me. I'll have like an emotional reaction where I'll have, I think probably what's most physiologically quantifiable as like a dopamine release similar to what I experienced in doing comedy, being sexually intimate with a partner, stuff like that. The physical sensation of that is very similar. The spiritual experience of that is probably a little difficult to tease out because I do have spiritual trauma, just like many people in my experience, where they carry multiple identities that the church doesn't really know what to do with at this time, like being, being a person of color that's not white or black. Being divorced, having lived in minority and like whitewashed, like Korean adoptee culture, being trans, non-binary, being disabled, like all of that stuff, makes participating in organized religious experiences difficult to enjoy and to have like a personally meaningful spiritual experience.
The last time that it happened for me corporately that I can point to, I was working a Black History month, sort of mini-concert and church service type thing that was like a good solid four hours long. It was more during the concert portion, a choir was performing and I was like, this is a really awesome experience, but I also can't point to the fact that I can't deny the point also that it was specifically a choral performance, which could have happened and did happen entirely independently of the church service part of that four-hour experience. They were very specific to say that the concert is not a part of the church service in this tradition. So, this being by their very own acknowledgement and design of their experience. It was not church.
David Dylan Thomas
I have a friend who's Muslim and he says his favorite part of Christian Church is the gospel choir because that's kind of accessible to everybody.
Pauli Reese
And to your point, and to talk about the historical ramifications, a non-white component of the Christian Church, impacted by colonialism and thank you to my former instructors, Josef Sorett and Braxton Shelley at Columbia and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Certainly impacted by whiteness, representing an appropriation of black and negro expressions of spirituality, using, using that language in the purest academic sense but still a representation of that sort of spirituality that exists outside of the cultural morays of whiteness that Christianity loves to live in.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, which is interesting because Christianity in and of itself, pre-dates whiteness by a minute. But by the time whiteness comes along, and here I'm fiddling about with history I'm marginally familiar with, but by the time whiteness comes along…Well, its interesting right, because Christianity had already become a defining factor in whether or not you would be a slave. Before whiteness was invented. That is actually the determining factor. Catholic church among others, sort of saying, okay, oh, are they converted? Okay. You can't make them a slave. So it makes perfect sense especially as you see whiteness invented to promote slavery, that you would then fold Christianity into that and say, Christian whites are here and that whiteness and Christianity like are going to share this power dynamic since they're basically aiming to do the same thing.
So that actually makes a lot of sense in retrospect that there is this tight-knit power relationship between Christianity and whiteness. But what fascinates me is how blackness co-opted, subverted, found hope – to go back to your original statement in that, which blows my mind. I find this repeatedly in the history of oppression, that the targets of oppression will find a way to take the things that are being directed at them and fold them and manipulate them and MacGyver the shit out of them to turn them into something that actually gives them power.
Pauli Reese
Yes. Thinking about being a Korean adoptee where my indigenous spiritual practices and cultures are things that I have learned as an outsider, there's no better place than in food. Some of the best and most well-known Korean delicacies, or at least stews and soups and broths and sauces and spices. In particular, one of my personal favorites is called budae jjigae, which translates roughly to army stew, is a stew which incorporates the best of like kimchi and gochugang and gochugaru and all of these Korean spices. But then because of impacts of the Korean War, very processed, perishable things like instant ramen noodles, Vienna sausages, spam, and American cheese product.
David Dylan Thomas
I knew you were going to say spam, by the way!
Pauli Reese
Okay, so it is true all of us, we all have strong feelings about spam. I know very few people of Asian descent who, who absolutely hate it, but it is delicious and we all have different ways of preparing it.
David Dylan Thomas
Well, it’s just the political ramification of that, because my first encounter with that connection was listening to a podcast about boxes that were sent back home from Filipino’s for our home that always included spam. That is a war, that is a political thing from when the US was occupying there. Spam becomes this weird export of the military. And again, it's folded in and now beloved.
Pauli Reese
Yeah. 100%! I mean to this evidencing, I had an O’ahu friend in on the podcast, and we spent 15 minutes talking about our favorite ways to prepare it. The history of the spam egg cheese McMuffin – that's a real thing that happened!
David Dylan Thomas
Actually, I've never had spam in my life. Should I? And if so, how?
Pauli Reese
Well, yes, it's a breakfast meat to be sure. You’re not originally a Pennsylvanian, but you've spent enough time here to where, you know a little bit about our state beyond Philadelphia. Plus, we have a good Amish market here at Reading Terminal and others and we're reasonably close to Lancaster County. Have you ever had scrapple before?
David Dylan Thomas
I knew you were gonna say scrapple! The truth is, I don't know. I've had things that if I had to guess, I'd say they were scrapple? Hodgepodge? So, I’ve probably had it. So are you intimating that spam scrapple would be a good first step?
Pauli Reese
Well scrapple is similar in that it's particulates of the meat that are not necessarily like the saleable cuts. The actual brand of spam is usually made out of pork meat, although it gets flavored into other things, like turkey spam. I don't know that there's actually any Turkey in that, but spam is great.
David Dylan Thomas
Turkey here is the flavor, not the meat.
Pauli Reese
Flavor is good. It's like a breakfast meat texture, so griddle it, sizzle it put it in a sandwich with some eggs and a big slice of your favorite cheese.
David Dylan Thomas
You sold me already, because a good breakfast sandwich, whether it's bacon, egg and cheese, or sausage, egg and cheese. I'm already sold, so you’re just saying spam, egg and cheese.
Pauli Reese
Spam, egg and cheese. Maybe make yourself like a sriracha mayo, like a one-to-one mayonnaise and sriracha sandwich sauce to go on it. Ideally on an English muffin, because you want all of that delicious sauce to like seep into the nooks and crannies, chefs kiss, perfect!
David Dylan Thomas
Okay. You sold me. I'm going to try this out. No, that's awesome!
I kind of want to come back to this. I feel like there's a parallel between what we're talking about with this individual experience of the divine with painting or some other thing that you are passionate about and kind of our journeys, which we've never really gone in depth about, from like a more holistic embodied experience of Christian Evangelicalism to this kind of distancing, perhaps running away from, experience of it.
I can say from my perspective, and feel free to share as much little as you like about your history here. I grew up in a fairly, I would say, liberal household. My mother used to be sort of involved in kind of black nationalism-ish, in like the sixties and seventies. Then by the time she had me, was working for the Department of Human Resources and I just remember growing up in a household that was very anti-Reagans. This is my childhood, I'm 10 years old and I didn't know why we hated Reagan, but I just knew we hated Reagan. At around the age of 14, we all got born again. It was just me and my mother and my sister. So, my mother and my sister got born again and I kind of followed it close behind.
And full disclosure, I don't think I've ever said this on a podcast before. At the time I made a deal with God, there was a girl I really liked at school and I was just like, Hey, if you can like get me in with this girl….Sounds terrible now, and it was terrible, but it was sort of like, I really want to talk to this girl, you know, God, I'll like follow you on whatever this journey is if you can promise me I'll get to talk to this girl. So that was, that was kind of like where I was going into this. But then I found this world of like very compelling speakers which appealed to me. You can't see it on the podcast, but I broke Pauli!
Pauli Reese
I've been broken. This non-binary person cannot stop talking or cannot stop laughing, whatever. I'm so broken that I can't even use the correct words.
David Dylan Thomas
I like to think I'm not the only one who fell for this scam, but anyway. There are these very charismatic speakers in that world that appealed to me. Not realizing it at the time as a budding speaker and performer and a lot of just intellectualism, pseudo intellectualism that kind of went into I that I still benefit from to this day. I think there's a lot of interesting things I learned. It wasn't even the church part of it so much, and this notion of belief. The particular line of evangelicalism that I was into was basically faith conquers all. Faith is the thing. And if you have faith, you can do anything. Literally, if you have enough faith, if you speak it, it exists. Which we're seeing now.
The implications of when you take it from a religious sphere into a political one, holy shit, we'll get back to that, but for me at the time it was like this sort of novel, kind of like hopeful. And again, not being conscious of it at the time, but as a lower-middle-class black kid, I didn't exactly have a lot of other things going for me. So yeah, let me see if I can speak my reality into being, because that's all I got.
So having that be this very hopeful, loving piece that was sort of like, not necessarily about rules but about faith. That appealed to me. But at the same time, there were rules. There were rules around abortion, there were rules around gay people. There were all these like rules that suddenly as I grew up, because I was fairly conservative, actually, I voted for a libertarian in the Bush v. Gore. I was part of the problem. I voted for libertarian because that was here my thinking was at the time. Again, the face Pauli is making, I'm sorry, I wish I'd videotaped this. It wasn't until I started to really spend lots and lots of time with people who were coming from a different point of view, especially my girlfriend at the time, then my wife, where I really started to be like, oh, this is totally out of line with what I believe. And at the same time, my mother and sister are growing far more conservative. So going from, ‘we hate Reagan’ to, ‘we watch Fox News.’
So, all of that is this weird journey of going deep into evangelical Christianity, finding the parts I liked around love and equality, and then running away with those parts, being like, okay, I gotta get out of here now, let me take these parts out of the safe that are really important and I believe in, and let me get the hell outta here as fast as I can, leading to very awkward kind of conversations with my family after that.
Pauli Reese
Yeah, I receive all of that. And you identified a little bit of this like previous in previous conversations you and I have had, it is good to acknowledge that those things that we choose to, broadly speaking, leave and to distance ourselves from, for whatever reason, there are things that are helpful, that are generative, beneficial, that we take from them. I don't think that evangelical Christianity can justify itself on the whole with the whole love and equality piece because the same was true about the vast majority of other sex of Christendom, including Catholicism at the time, before a lot of, frankly, a lot of systems agency and power got involved.
The same is true of evangelical Christianity. One of the things that happened among others is, and one of the greatest cases in point is the Hillsong movement in Australia.
David Dylan Thomas
So what is that exactly? Because this is the second time I've heard someone talk about that.
Pauli Reese
Historically speaking it’s a non-denominational evangelical Christian church tradition down in Australia. They're particularly known beyond Australia for their music. But there is now a lot of cancel culture around them because of the horrifying business practices. I mean, let's be honest, because of prosperity gospel and celebrity and like secretive, hidden mysteries culture, probably other clergy impropriety that made household names out of otherwise largely unknown church music leaders. They would have their church, which has multiple sites, I think to this day has multiple sites, back in the day of their cultural apexes and ideas, they had huge tours where just like any other band where they would tour internationally and just bring a band where they would play their songs that were designed as like congregational hymn sings. With echoes of like Billy Graham revival sort of stuff in that lineage of things.
David Dylan Thomas
So, tell me a bit then, and if you're comfortable, about your journey to repentance.
Pauli Reese
So, for me, it's all wrapped up in my experience of going back to like being adopted. There's so much of that history now that I know more of it through cultural artifacts, through the history that is increasingly becoming common and being more and more studied and researched that as we have had more anecdotal and sociological studies, but now those are growing up and maturing. There's a lot of whitewashing and intentional removal of Asian traditions and culture from people who are adopted trans-nationally, trans-racially.
I grew up with white central Pennsylvanian parents who were very loving and who honestly did their best by what they thought they were supposed to do by raising a child that was mostly divorced from their Korean culture. That was mostly raised in a conventionally masculine that is mostly toxic, mostly masculine gender roles, socialized in such a way, Christianized in such a way, academic size in such a way. All of that, all of the culture around model minority stuff is true. Like we were raised whether you were raised by parents of your ethnic tradition or not? We were raised in such a way as that in order for us to fit in, we had to be exceptional, that Asian exceptionalism to the nth degree and being the shorthand of it being like the good non-white race, like the achievers that whiteness can point to as being like, why can't you be like them? We were raised to participate in that. Like that's all 100% true.
At least in my parents’ adoption papers of me from the agency, I have seen the cultural documents that encourage them to raise me that way. All of that was a part of the culture that they were told is the best way to give a good life to an adoptee. I've seen it. The leaving of that became me deciding that I was going to be more committed to what I felt inside and what lived under all of those things, and how I actually felt once I started allowing myself to validate my own opinion and emotions. And more recently, becoming physically disabled, my own body, and its limitations. Being more willing to acknowledge my limitations, and as a result, producing better art, producing better aid work, producing better everything else, having a much greater quality of life as a result. Also, letting go of beliefs that are unhelpful, like believing in a God that says that the best way that I can be most like God is to be as close…what's the right word for this? To be as close to an unquestioning bystander of whiteness as possible is not a God that I need to believe in anymore.
I'm not convinced that the biblical teachings of Jesus actually ask for that, but it's certainly being raised in white, Protestant, evangelical American Christianity. That is a facet of that God that is both historically and now sociologically, undeniable. I don't even know that there's necessarily judgment in that anymore for me because that's what all humans do – they imagine a God that is more compassionate to them and imagine a God that provides them sucker. That’s one of the roles of God and the Christian God, of white evangelicalism, we're taping in a season that Christians will know as Lent. The Christian God is one that punishes the enemy, and the Evangelical Christian God tends to be one that punishes even Christians when they stray from a life of purity and holiness.
There are other versions of God that would be considered more on the fringes of Christianity that feel differently – I would say on the fringes, it's a version of God that has been on the fringes more times than it hasn't. I think at least in the course of my life, perhaps in the course of recorded history, I don't know, I'm not that much of a Christian historian. My specialty is much more in spiritual ministry and restorative, spiritual work among people who have experienced trauma at the hands of organized religion. Yes, that’s right, my greatest ministry is in the work of healing myself!
It's something to acknowledge and I think if we could acknowledge that with less stigma and less anger at the people who participate that and who benefit, with less anger towards white people, but anger at the idea that is causing so many people to suffer and with a lens towards finding a better idea while still preserving the human dignity of white people, I think we would see a more positive outcome for everyone, including white people.
David Dylan Thomas
Well, you said it there, man. It's my turn to process. So first off, I can see in your body language and just in the very objective nature of what you've described, that that was not easy for you to experience in life. I just want to say, I'm sorry you had to go through that.
Pauli Reese
Thanks.
David Dylan Thomas
You've put a finger on something that was staring me into the face the whole time. It was one of those, if it was a snake, it would've bit me moments, which is, I've been talking about how I don’t get how black people could embrace Christianity and turn to their advantage when it was being used to subjugated. I don't get how Japanese citizens who were American citizens who were interned could then want to be in the army and fight for the country that interned them. My relationship to Christianity is exactly that. I was in communion with a Christianity that hated blackness and pretended to like it. But really it was, as you said, standing witness to white supremacy the whole time and encouraging the principles of just binary thinking, period. But ones that were particularly helpful to white supremacy, like sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell.
That was something I could never completely resolve. It's like, I believe I believe in this God that is love, and yet this is also a God who will send people to hell forever? Like I don't even get a chance to get out? I don't get a chance to try again. Really? I mean, I guess it says it there. And yet, rather than just say, well I'm just going to throw the baby out with the bath water, I'm going to say, well no, actually there's a lot of really good ideas here. In fact, You probably shouldn't have shown me this. You should probably take taken all that love shit out of here before you showed me this, because now I've got something. Now I've got something that gives me a reason to treat everyone equally. John 3:16, I interpret that as the textbook for equality. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, not God so loved white people, not God so loved the especially abled, not God so loved like everyone who is cis. No, God so loved the world, everyone. So, what that tells me is literally every human on the planet has the same value and that value is literally equivalent through the Son of God. Now, regardless of whether you believe there is a God and that he has a son, conceptually as a thought experiment, that's a pretty big fucking deal, right?
It's saying, Hey, guess what? Let's imagine there's a God, and let's imagine that God has a son and he says, I will kill this kid, because I think that is the value that literally everyone who is and ever will be, has. How are you going to tell me that we should stone gay people and keep them out of the military? How are you going to tell me that?
When he just said, basically, you're telling me it's okay to keep Jesus out of the military, that's really what you're telling me, right? That is the piece where I was like, oh, you shouldn't have told me that, because now I'm going to use that. I'm going to use it against you now!
Pauli Reese
That’s the sad thing, right? At one point evangelicalism was a counter-reaction to the excesses of Anglicanism, Quakerism, all of the earlier versions of American Christianity. The evangelicalism of the 20th century and the late 19th century was a counter-reaction against all those other things, was in its own time was revolutionary. And now it's something that needs to be revolutionized against in order to preserve principles of common, universal human dignity. And probably not just evangelical Christianity.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. I mean, it's been co-opted a bit and then kind of become the engine. Again, like it is frightening to me, I've like grown up with this name, if I claim it – like if I say it, it's reality kind of thing, and watched that evolve into this – Trump is president because I said he's president. That's the thing about the big lie. It's like, yeah, but they don't see it as a lie because you can't have a lie. You can only have what you speak. And if you speak that Trump won, then Trump won. That is the line of logic they're going with there a lot of them. And it's like, oh, that's a much bigger problem.
There's no set of facts, there's no set of numbers you can show to a person who believes that anything they say is real that will convince them what reality is. So that's a whole other thing, and we've gone way over and I'm glad we have. This is fantastic.
I want to bring it in around this notion, this word you said before, which I find really compelling, which is awakening. It's a word that I feel is helping coalesce something that I haven't been able to put a word to, which is what I think is happening in America right now. One half of it is this notion of reckoning and all of that, which is more about punitive, it's about retribution, it's about chickens coming home to roost. But there's another piece that I think is more hopeful and necessary and healing, which is this notion of awakening. That you have this idea that you have a whole bunch of people in this country who are yearning for something and it is borrowing, I think a bit from – I'd love to hear more about this, like a third-grade awakening where a bunch of third graders went out…I'm getting like children of the corn vibes off this. But no, this idea of an awakening to sort of try to steal back the word ‘woke’, that this awakening of like, no, we don't have to live like this.
So your part of what's the vision for the next thing? Like, this shit is corrupt. This shit is done, I don't think we can save it, but what's the thing we can build? Where can we go from here? What are we waking up to? And I like waking up to, as opposed to, because I believe deeply that this isn't, if we go somewhere good; it doesn't need to be a thing that we've created whole cloth. I feel like there is so much rich indigenous culture we've forgotten, Buddhist culture we've forgotten. I, I think if we reach deep enough into any of our suppressed backgrounds, we'll find some really good shit that worked for thousands of years and we've just been trained to suppress. That's why I like the term awakening more. It's like waking up and realizing, wait, my ancestors actually my deep ancestors, go back 500,000 years, they were on some good shit. They were on some climate change solving shit, that I'm only just now waking up to.
I kind of want to tease out a little bit more of that awakening logic or magic as we come to close here.
Pauli Reese
So, yes, everything you just said. Two, the thing that makes this an awakening #staywoke, is, I think we're reaching a critical mass where the normal way of doing things, the way we've always done things, is no longer sustainable and beneficial for the right number of people. In the world that we live in, because we live in the United States of America, there are enough white people who are uncomfortable to where things need to change. There are enough people in the dominant cultural group that has enough moral authority and potentially political authority that are uncomfortable, that represents a need for change. Things are going to change regardless of whether they change in a way that we find desirable or not.
Things will either become more uncomfortable for the non-dominant groups. There are plenty of documented cases in history where that's happened. It's just that it doesn't make history books because it's nothing new. It's just more human cruelty and nobody wants to talk about that. Or, there will be a little bit of change. Again, going back to the history of Western spirituality, there will be a compromise of change that allows for something to happen and a new version of the dominant cultural authority will emerge. Which is not to say that when that emerges, that there won't still be benefit to everyone because it could.
If I'm fair, there's a lot to be said that the Protestant reformation, the formation of the Church of England in places that are more in my history, that there weren't positives, there weren't improvements of quality of life that happened for the people who were directly impacted. Say like Tudor England and the Germans of Luther's Day or Zwingli or Calvin or whatever.
There's so much broadness of Christian tradition these days that there's not much to be said. It is harder to nail down one or two people. The Billy Grahams, etc. But it is to say that there's still going to be people who benefit more because of power. Those are the things that if we do well, to make sure that the most good happens rather than for one person, but diffused among as many people as possible, those are the things we do well to be mindful of.
To go back to like glass onion, can we break the system? I'm sure it's possible. 100%. But all that means is that another system will replace it and the people who control that new system will probably be different, although they might not.
David Dylan Thomas
Pauli, I want to thank you so much. This has been a wonderful, deep and I think hopeful and meaningful way to end the season. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Pauli Reese
Thank you for having me, David. My pleasure.
David Dylan Thomas
And for, ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’, I'm David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you next time, maybe next season. Thanks, bye.