The Tension of Emergence: Thriving in a world that remakes, not breaks

On Matrimony, Mothering Culture and the Undoing of Self with Stephen Jenkinson

• Jennifer England • Season 4 • Episode 9

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In this festive wedding season, what if matrimony wasn’t here to affirm the intensity of love between two people but a courageous submission to the unknown?  

Jennifer speaks with Stephen Jenkinson—cultural activist, author, ceremonialist—about the necessary burdens of love through the ritual of matrimony. With characteristic poetic edge, Stephen challenges the Western obsession with autonomy, authenticity and safety and gestures toward a redemptive cultural project: one of radical hospitality, memory, and the mystery of matrimony as a village-making act.

Together they dive into:

  • How matrimony is distinct from weddings and is rooted in mothering culture, not just romantic love
  • The lost valence of patrimony, and what it asks of us
  • The role of the stranger in belonging and village making
  • Why being “yourself” might not be the gift you think it is

This conversation reveals how ritual and ceremony thins the membrane with other worlds, makes congress with the divine and helps us honor what's come before —so we might find our place, and responsibility, in what’s yet to come.

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Gratitude for this show’s theme song Inside the House, composed by the talented Yukon musician, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Jordy Walker. Artwork by the imaginative writer, filmmaker and artist Jon Marro.

On Matrimony, Mothering Culture and the Undoing of Self

with Stephen Jenkinson
===

[00:00:00] 

Jennifer: There's a dilemma that I can sense at times in our culture, this push pull between. Our quest for self-expression and authenticity. Like I wanna be fully aligned with the deepest part of me and have the freedom and opportunity to offer that to the world.

So there's this desire for evolution and becoming and self-expression. And then there's this other pull, this pull to culture, to belonging, responsibility, and a longing to feel part of something that's bigger than us.

And yet collectively we are feeling more loneliness than ever and question our belonging to groups, to communities, to something bigger, to the [00:01:00] unseen world in our day-to-day lives. And it leaves us in this limbo where then I sense, and I don't know about you.

This sort of pressure on the will in order to choreograph a future that fulfills this ache when we are caught in between our desire for self-expression and our desire for belonging to something bigger.

And for many of us, especially in Anglo North America, in this lack of meaning or in this exhaustion of pushing ourselves, we end up reaching out to other cultures for help, whether it's to plant medicine, to indigenous knowledge keepers, or to the distraction of capitalist culture in order to somehow find our place.

And yet there are ceremonies and there are songs, and there is myth [00:02:00] that swirl in the back eddies of our memory and our ancestry that can offer us clues of how to both. Self-express and make a vow or be vowed to something so much bigger than ourselves.

So it's no wonder that I reached out to the incredible Steven Jenkinson, who is Canadian cultural worker, a teacher, an author, and a Ceremonialist. He's the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, which he founded in 2010 with his wife Natalie Roy. And the school is a teaching house for skills of deep living and making human culture.

That are mandatory in endangered and endangering times. Steven has a master's degree from Harvard University in Theology and the University of Toronto in social work, and he [00:03:00] apprenticed to a master's storyteller as a young man and is a former program director in a major Canadian hospital and a former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. Steven is the author of Reckoning co-authored with Kimberly Ann Johnson, who has also been on this podcast called A Generation's Worth

spirit work while the crisis reigns. He's also written Come of Age, the case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. And the award-winning Die Wise, a manifesto for sanity and soul among many other books.

Steven has taught me. So much about how to listen differently to the rites of passages that life brings us, and to do the deep surrender work to fully allow life to transform us through the mystery of living. And so today we unpack the many [00:04:00] tentacles of this ritual called matrimony. And so perfect to be doing this in the summer of weddings and celebrations of love.

And to unpack what makes matrimony a radioactive ritual, one that untether us from the knots and the illusion of authenticity, the narrative of a tightly bounded self, and instead asks us to take a vow to something bigger, to creating village, to becoming a citizen of the world.

Enjoy.

Well, welcome Steven. I wanted to begin with honoring the burden and joy of work that you've done to remember us, to our ancestors and the land and our elders. And not only that, but also the work of becoming elders, [00:05:00] ancestors, and with a open mind and an open heart that doesn't get lost in nostalgia.

Mm-hmm. And doesn't get lost in certainties. 

Stephen: Well, thank you for noticing all of that. I recognize most of the things you described me as. I think so. 

Jennifer: Oh, yeah. Great. And, and so I, I wanted to begin with, you know, my curiosity of, of your turning towards matrimony and why matrimony, why now, why this as an additional rite of passage that felt so important to illuminate?

Stephen: Yeah. Well, I wish I could tell you there was a master plan of some sort, you know, kind of big takeover scheme for the universe or, or something. But of course, you know, that's not the way it worked at all. What happened very simply was it was not unlike me coming to write the book about money, money and the soul's [00:06:00] desires.

You know, I, I, there was no plan to do it. Certain circumstances put me in the crosshairs. Of that combination of understandings, money and the soul's desires. And there I was in my life and in certain kind of my understanding wasn't up to the task of, of my life at the time. So something had to give. And so I had to work on the understanding in order to be able to just live it all.

That's 25 or so years ago. That's basically the first book I wrote. This is the seventh that's coming out in August called Matrimony. And what happened there was not dissimilar. What happened there was as a consequence of the work you kindly described there I had young people on occasion, I don't mean to say thousands, but on occasion young people separately or together or in small groups would kind of sheepishly [00:07:00] uncertainly.

Approached me with the request that I quote, do something. And that's how articulated it was. Often at the time, I would do something that would somehow drag the carcass of weddings across some kind of threshold into something that could possibly mean something. So they had this, this kind of unformed sense that it was supposed to be more than anything that they'd seen, but that's all they had was a kind of generic misgiving and, and sense of fundamental vacancy on the matter.

Could I fill the vacancy? 

Jennifer (3): Hmm. 

Stephen: So I. You know, one is foolish from time to time in life. So you're more foolish [00:08:00] oftentimes when you say yes to something than when you say no, because there's no grounds. In this case, there was no grounds for me to take up the mantle of doing somebody's wedding for them.

No, by which I mean, it's not like I had time in on the event. This was part of anything I'd ever thought about or really cared a lot about at the time, but I said yes, and then scrambled madly behind the scenes to try to dream and remember my way towards something substantial.

In order to do that, all I did was start to do a survey thematically in terms of vocabulary, in terms of moment and choreography. Things like that. Tried to remember all the weddings that I'd been to, which weren't many, so it wasn't that difficult. But and remember what my experience was of them.

[00:09:00] And as I did so, I came to realize that it was as grim in its way as the funerals and the memorial services and the so-called celebrations of life that I'd been obliged to attend during the course of my days working in the death trade. There was a such a clear, impoverished parallel between the two that the the kind of psychic private investigator in me decided he had to find out why people, you know, settled for a 15 minute walkthrough with rehearsals and cues.

To go along with telling you what to say in somebody else's language and all the stuff that we're, you know, in a vague way, alert to. And as I did that, I know this is a bit of a long answer, but properly, so I think, and as I did [00:10:00] that the real, the gaping poverty's and the culture generally, which I had seen in other contexts in the context of Elderhood with the Elderhood book in the case of Dying with the Die Wise book in the case of the pandemic with a book called A Generation's Worth.

And I couldn't sit still. I couldn't, I couldn't let it pass. I was aggrieved on their behalf and I was probably deeply offended on their behalf by this impoverishment. Hmm. That's kind of how it began, you know, very uncertainly, not in the full flush of, you know, springtime bouquets of genuine inspiration and things of that sort.

It was it was a mournful beginning. But a very important engagement with how [00:11:00] things have come to be as they are. And that's what it became an, a deep running encounter with how things have come to be in a way that no one would've voted for, for themselves or their loved ones or their families.

And yet, very frequently, much more so than not settled for anyway, as if, well, that's just the way they are. That's just, you don't go to a hardware store for bread and you don't go to a wedding to change the world. 

I decided that I did. 

Jennifer (3): Hmm. 

Stephen: So I set out, you know, changing the world. 

Jennifer: When you describe the impoverishment of weddings, but also the impoverishment of the dying process and funerals that you saw in the culture.

Yeah. How would you describe that for people who can just get a glimpse of it but can't yet [00:12:00] describe it? Because we might be so inundated by consumerism and all the trappings of distraction and the, this is how it's done. From an external perspective, how did you trust that there was this impoverishment, but secondly that you could feel into the possibility of something much deeper and richer?

Stephen: That's a great question. Well, I'll start with the dying parallel first, partly because it chronologically it happened much sooner in my working life and in my, my encounters with all these things than the matrimony element did. So I can tell you one scenario, one kind of vignette that carries most of what you're asking me about in it.

So I would routinely be asked by, well-intended and deeply concerned parents of young kids, [00:13:00] whether or not I thought I, that they should be bringing those young kids to the nursing home or to the deathbed or to the funeral home, or to the graveside.

You, I hope everyone who's listening feels the gravitational pull of the concern. I'm not making fun of it. That was the beginning, you know, and the self-evident undertow of that was, it was very questionable whether kids should be exposed to any or all of those things. That was the undertow, that was the parental concern.

That was a kind of conviction that was already there. And so, as is my want, I flush it to the surface and I, I would say something in the order of, right, why wouldn't you? In other words, put the emphasis on the right sable. You see, [00:14:00] don't accept the fact that by definition, kids shouldn't be there. Wonder instead from whence comes to the notion that they shouldn't.

So why wouldn't you bring, and the parents typically would say something in the order of, well, grandpa's looking pretty rough now. His teeth are out, whether he is, you know, drooling out the sides of his mouth or incontinent or, doesn't smell good, whatever it is, all the standard last minute, parting arrangements that we are entrusted with because we have a body and because we have people around us.

So I would say granted looks pretty rough. That's true. What else, what other reasons? Well I'd like him to remember grandpa, the way he was Ah, so there's a authorized version of grandpa for your kid's memory. Is there, I wouldn't say it like this, but I'm saying it to you to, [00:15:00] to show you how I, what I was working with and, and how I came to do it.

So there's an authorized memory that your child must have. There's unauthorized memories, which your child should not have. And apparently your dad in denuement ma in diminishment is not a legitimate memory to have. Which of course means that when it's this child's turn, no matter how old he or she might be, when it's their turn, what will they have to go by that guides their ship in the midnight hour?

And they'll have dread, won't they? Because of this teaching, this avoidance, this aversion, this strategizing, imagining that there's no trauma if you go this way. And of course that's the word that would ultimately come up. And I, I don't want the kid to be traumatized. And I, I would say, of course not. [00:16:00] What would they be traumatized by?

And it became a very close circle of symptoms and garishness and too strong and. That's when I would interrupt and I would say, listen, I get it. I'm a parent myself, but for what it's worth to you, I'm gonna tell you something that I don't think you're gonna arrive at on your own. Here it goes.

Your child is in the room, has been there yet, is in the room and is observing two things at the same time. Grandpa in the bed who is recognizable as grandpa to him, no matter what you think, and you and your wife perhaps, and others of your age group and your child is going back and forth surveying the territory and grandpa's recognizable, but you are [00:17:00] not your collusion around.

Refusing to have this version of grandpa be as legitimate as all the other versions is registering on your child. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance that your kid doesn't know how to make sense of. Why are you behaving like this? Because grandpa's not behaving like you are. Grandpa's recognizable, but you are ceasing to be recognizable as the reasonable parent that your child once may have known.

And so I'm telling you, if there's any traumatizing to be had, that's where it's coming from because your kid has to choose between his experience of grandpa in the bed, which is a true thing, and watching you obfuscate and jitterbug around this whole thing. Okay? That's what poverty looks [00:18:00] like on the ground when it's happening.

Jennifer (3): Yeah, 

Stephen: you could say that there's a, to push it a little further in the direction of matrimony, there is a kind of death phobia that's manifest in the story I just told you, but probably more so there's a grief, illiteracy. These are my terms from years and years ago. I'm using the word grief literacy deliberately to say that grief is something that you learn or fail to learn or haphazardly learn.

Yeah. So it's not instinctual, it's gathered over time. Tested fails. You reconstitute it, you come at it again, that sort of thing. In the context of the mat monies that I saw, I would say every one of them without question. Was characterized by a kind of ceremonial [00:19:00] illiteracy, no sense whatsoever about what constitutes a legitimate ritual in real time.

And so what they ended up up with was a kind of default thing. And the default thing turns out to be, please join so and so and so and so for a celebration of love for so and so and Soandso celebration of love. Sounds great. Yeah, but you don't need a wedding to do that. They're not synonyms. That's not what a wedding is.

And God knows that's not what a ritual is. What a ritual is is Congress with the divine period. What a ritual is, is you, you know, throwing the knuckle bones [00:20:00] and seeing what's to be, and your part in it, and finding out what you're capable of. And this is why, and I'll end the answer with this element. This is why there is a difference in the English language between the word promise and the word vow.

If you were to stop people on the street and ask them, most people would say that these are synonyms. That they're basically one and one a, you know, it's kind of, they're kind of the same thing. They partake of the same stuff, et cetera. Well, why do we have two separate words, number one, and why is one of them used fairly routinely and the other one almost never.

I mean, when was the last time you used the word vow to describe anything you had said or done? It's exceedingly rare. No, because intuitively, you know that vows [00:21:00] come from some kind of psychic or spiritual mountaintop, or Mount Olympus or, deep in the, bowels of the earth or something. You have a feel that something's up with a vow, with a promise ain't no big deal.

And celebrations of love. So called they're a problem to me for this reason.

They make sure that nothing happens. What they do is they rubber stamp something that already exists called the intensity of feeling between two people. Hmm. That's what they are. They're an affirmation. It's not an evil thing, but let's call it what it is. It's an affirmation of something that already exists, but there's no conjuring in it at all.

There's no ifs. There's no knuckle bones, [00:22:00] there's no divine, there's no mountaintop. There's just what was there yesterday, and hopefully we'll be there tomorrow. 

Jennifer: I wanna, wanna read a quote from your book on ritual, and I appreciated this perspective on ritual and that it is not familiar.

You know, sometimes I think there can be an assumption that ritual is something you, you perform over and over again, and there's, there's an assumption of familiarity. And to me, you broke that open by saying, ritual is barely regulated. Congress with the psychic, wilderness, with the silent teleric, shudder of life's makings, it leaves you bewildered probably and be deviled, perhaps an un ignorant.

Surely for a domesticated person, [00:23:00] the encounter is undoing safety and assuredness is the undoing of ritual. There is no safe place in ritual undertakings. And you say earlier than this ritual is radioactive. That gives me shivers. That's that's 

Stephen: pretty good stuff really, isn't it? That's, 

Jennifer: yeah.

You're a beautiful writer. But I, I wanna talk about that because, you know, often I think what you're saying is that we come to weddings or to love as this heroic harbor, if you will, a safe place from the impingement of a world undone. And I see in your work how you're very mindful of this idea that it's not just me, it's not just an "I", it's not just a small us, it's an invitation into something bigger.

Mm-hmm. And so I'd love you to speak to this [00:24:00] ritual as. A lack of safety for the sake of something bigger that safety cannot be guaranteed. And in our culture, we want it so bad. Yeah. So I'd love you to speak to that if you would. 

Stephen: Sure. Well, let's start with the notion of safety.

Please don't misunderstand, I'm not sneering at safety or the expectation or the requirement to be safe or the seeking after it. I'm genuinely not. I understand. I mean, the domesticated North American heart is a comfort seeking missile. Okay. 

Jennifer (3): I would 

Stephen: say. 

Jennifer (3): And 

Stephen: this comfort is drawn down from the notion that things are predictable, that you can see stuff coming.

That you can exercise. Here we go. Agency and dominion, things of this order, right? Autonomy and so forth. So it reminds me of [00:25:00] in the death trade days when dying, people used to say to me, no, I, I want you to check me into a nursing home. Whatever. I'll die there. I said, what about at home? What about with your people?

Nah, it's be too hard on them. Why do you think it'd be so hard on them? I mean, I'll be around, I'll, I'll help 'em out. Nah, I don't wanna be a burden. I, that's what I was waiting for. And I would lean in and I would say Too late. And they'd say, what? It's too late for you not to be a burden to other people.

Jennifer (3): And 

Stephen: that shit started a long time ago. That's called hanging out. That's called saying yes to someone. Yeah. Or having them say yes to you. Of course it is. You are a burdensome proposition much of the time. Okay, so I mean, just to say [00:26:00] it. 

You're a weighty thing, you know, and it's not always easy to have you around.

I mean, speaking about myself here now, so, so if it's too late to not be a burden to people, then you realize the real task, psychic, spiritual, emotional, poetic, even physical, those aspects of the task seem to me, the task itself comes down to this. How can you translate the inevitability of burdensomeness into something that smells much more like necessity?

Opportunity opening and the possibility that the other world can find its way for a short time into this one for the sake of this one. And that's what ritual [00:27:00] fundamentally is for, is to thin the membrane.

If you propose to invite the other world into your wedding ceremony and then you propose to tell them how to behave, you're kind of asking for it, not in the sense of being punished. You're asking for it in the sense of man who would, who on the receiving end of such an invitation would ever come.

And so you make these kind of hippie fueled invitations to the other world, let's say generic kind of, you know, the holy and whatever the language is, and nothing happens, but everybody looks at each other and they go along with it. They go along for the ride. Because if you call it a ceremony, I guess it is.

And if you were to lean in and say, folks, what, what makes this a ceremony? This thing that we're standing here in the middle of, allegedly now. [00:28:00] Well the recognizable bits, as you were saying earlier, no, the recognizable bits simply make something familiar to you. They don't make it ceremonial. So, so let's go back to the question.

What makes ceremony. And script is not part of it. What makes a ceremony is the kind of, I was gonna use the word surrender submission might be not a bad word to use either. 

Jennifer: A little edgier. 

Stephen: Yeah, maybe so, yeah, that you submit even your best intent for this day or this night, or this special thing to the following possibility.

Do you remember, are you aware that in most jurisdictions, I don't know if this is true anymore, but in most [00:29:00] jurisdictions, not so long ago, it was a legal requirement of the officiant to say some version of, if anyone here knows any reason why this thing should not proceed, speak now. Forever hold your peace.

Jennifer (3): Mm-hmm. 

Stephen: Right? What's going on there? I'm submitted to you. What's going on there? Is this more people than not in attendance know more than one good reason why this thing should not proceed. They're more familiar with one of the the betrothed than the other. They've got an angle in on their prior relationships.

They've seen them in action. Isn't it true? 

Jennifer: Yeah. Dude, this is gonna be a burden. 

Stephen: This is a kind of track record involved, right? And if the people in who are present [00:30:00] are older and have a little time in under their belts, they know what's coming for these people, no matter what they say to each other today.

What's coming will all but ignore what's happening today? Right. And that's why they need witnesses and that's what makes a ritual that the people present are not an audience, not a Greek chorus, not a conglomeration of yes men and yes women. These people are there to bear faithful witness. That's why they're called witnesses, not audience witnesses.

We are gathered here the, I'm telling you why, and the day will come and everybody knows it. When these people standing up here now with all the good intention they can possibly gather, will [00:31:00] need to be reminded of what they have said this day. 

Jennifer: Yeah, beautiful. 

Stephen: Because the slings and arrows will move them in other directions and everybody knows it, and that's just the normal stuff.

Okay. So you need help is the point. And as long as you exercise kind of mission control strategy over the whole operation, you will make sure that the people in attendance are just an audience and you will make sure that at the level of the other world, there's nobody there but you. 

Jennifer: Mm. It reminds me of something you've said around how matrimony, which is different than weddings, is the process of creating culture.

It's the mothering of culture, I think you've said, and I believe your point there is that. You know, [00:32:00] the wedding isn't just about the two people, as you've pointed out. It's around the witnesses who are there and the making of citizens. And so I'm curious around creating Village, how matrimony is an invitation to something beyond, of course, the love, the joy of families coming together, but you're gesturing towards the making of village at a time of orphaning and radical loneliness.

And so I'm curious what the connection is between ceremony and citizenship and becoming the kind of village that offers a radical hospitality to one another across difference. 

Stephen: [00:33:00] Okay. There's a lot in that. Let me see what I can do. Well on the matter of citizenship, you could say as a generic understanding of the word.

Yeah. Oh look, I just got mine in the mail recently. Citizenship is not a matter of this 

Jennifer: showing me his passport right now. For listeners showing very nice Canadian passport, 

Stephen: brand new version of the passport, which is frankly, design wise, God awfully ugly. So we'll be famous for that in due course out.

So citizenship I'm saying is not a possession. Citizenship is not something you have, even though that's exactly the phrase we used to describe it, right? Citizenship I think is something you're charged with. So for every bit of privilege or opportunity or good fortune [00:34:00] that comes with the political understanding of citizenship comes a kind of moral undertow, a kind of moral, ethical.

Oblig sequence of obligations where you ongoingly earn the good fortune that has come your way as a consequence of the, let's call it the umbrella, that citizenship of a legal and, and political kind can be. That's one layer. If you begin to think less about rights and more about obligations, then you might be inclined to imagine that for every right that's conferred upon you by, by the passport and everything that it means you have handfuls of obligations to sustain the best part of the place you claim as your home.

[00:35:00] Sustain it now, and to work on the other parts, you know, be it residential school. Stories, you know, that's the first one that comes to mind speaking. We're both Canadians here, correct? 

Jennifer: Yeah. 

Stephen: So this is a good one to point to. No. And the work to be done to that. You don't arbitrarily artificially and way too prematurely use the word reconciliation that you recognize.

Reconciliation is the end product of the endeavor, to be honest and candid, and to, to recognize in your present circumstance that which you neither intended nor superintended, but you're the beneficiary of nonetheless, let's say. Okay. So, so far, this doesn't sound like it has much to do with, matrimony per se.

So we'll begin with the word proper as you had identified a little bit the, the [00:36:00] etymology of the word. The Moy part at the end signifies something like the conditions of, or the repertoire by which such a thing could be recognized. The prefix in this case, of course is mother, not wife, not woman.

Jennifer (3): Mm-hmm. 

Stephen: Mother. That was the word that was taken up to carry this kind of understanding that I'm beginning to circle around now. And of all the things to call this event that we're describing, this wedding event, of all things to call it, you would call it the repertoire of mothering. Who thinks of mothering at a time like this?

Okay. That's supposed to come later if it comes at all. 

Jennifer (3): Right, 

Stephen: right in the sequence, in the, in the quote, the standard sequence. So then you [00:37:00] realize this, this is not talking about procreation. This is talking about the furthering and the deepening, not of a living arrangement, but of a kind of mutual or shared understanding of our place in the world and what the world properly would ask of us.

Given that for the time being we're here, the claim that the world lays upon us, matrimony is an attempt to respond overtly with a certain kind of choreography or repertoire, which, which you could call very properly mothering. It's not creating. It's sustaining and founding and founding and sustaining and obliging out into the world and tracking.[00:38:00] 

Right. And the difference could be, I mean, there's the word patrimony, which could be brought up now. 

Jennifer (2): Yeah. 

Stephen: I, I should say as the preamble to the last bit of the answer here that I pointed out in the book, and this occurred to me quite early on, that while the people at the front of the room are being obliged to consider entering into the holy bonds of matrimony, nobody nowhere is invited, nevermind asked to join in anything like what could be called, wait for it.

The holy bonds of patrimony, the phrase wouldn't even occur to you. 

Jennifer (2): No, 

Stephen: I dare say it hasn't. If I hadn't raised it for you, you probably never would've put the words together. 

Jennifer (3): Mm-hmm. 

Stephen: So, as they say, what up with that? 

Jennifer (3): Hmm. 

Stephen: Okay. So in an age of alleged [00:39:00] inclusivity, what's going on or what's not going on?

So Patrimony, of course, is the same understanding, inflected in the direction of, let's call it generically the masculine enterprise. Okay. And patrimony says, the house of culture and love needs building. Matrimony says, I'll move in and make of it a home. And that's the pairing I. That's the relationship between the two.

That's the dynamic restorative and redemptive enterprise that is there laying between the two repertoires, the two skills or, or groupings of skills you could say. So these things are not in any way gender [00:40:00] specific. They don't ignore the, notions and the realities of gender. They simply employ them.

You see, they're not restricted around them. They just employ the tendencies 

augment them. Sorry, what were you gonna say? 

Jennifer: Oh, I, I just have a wondering that's coming up for me as, as you introduce patrimony and matrimony, and to be honest, I did gender work for like 20 years and.

I've never spent the time to uncouple some of the words from a narrow gender delineation. And so it's very freeing what you're offering. And I think you're pointing to, and you use this word frequently, these shards, you know, as a culture maker, you're picking up these shards. And often in, etymology, the shards of language and words.

You're bringing them to us to say, look, here's the meaning that has been lost. Here's what we might [00:41:00] make of it. And so my curiosity is, and 'cause I can pick this up in your work, that there's always this tension between preservation and evolution and there's this constant dance. And what I understand from patrimony is that it's bearing the responsibility of the past, of culture, of memory, of land, of stories.

And so in a way it's, tilling the soil of the past, and then the matrimony is this unknown, you know, the ritual that brings us into this unknown, uncertain contribution to this becoming in village. And so is, that how you understand it, is this kind of, in a way elastic band between patrimony and matrimony, this preservation and evolution that both offer us?

Stephen: I recognize the scenario you're describing [00:42:00] and I think yes. The short answer would be yes. I'd find such elements there. Yeah. But I think the the momentum, I. The sort of pendulum, no, it's not the right term. The, the propensity. There you go. The propensity is the dynamic between the two. 

Jennifer (3): Mm-hmm. 

Stephen: You know, I'll give you a very quick vignette.

You came across this probably in the book, I was reading a, a book by John Berger, who's dead now but wrote an amazing trilogy called Into Their Labors, I think it's called about peasant life, the last generation of peasants alive in the Pyrenees as a consequence of what the EU is doing to their way of life.

And there's a book there called Pig Earth. And in the book there's a peasant woman, a term you're not even supposed to use [00:43:00] now. Though the peasants are deeply untroubled by the word. I'm sure those of them left. But anyway, it's very accurate and it's an honorific title. But the peasant woman in question is she has a young daughter with her and she's giving her young daughter life advice basically, and the advice of all things takes the following form.

I'm paraphrasing now. I don't have it committed to memory. She says something like, I will tell you which men are worthy of us. The ones through whom all possessions pass to others. The ones who, oh God, I'm gonna blow it now. This is bad. This is like, I'm impressed though. Yeah. Anyway, the third one is, and those who lived their lives looking for God.

Jennifer (3): Mm. 

Stephen: The rest she says are pig shit. [00:44:00] A little severe. A little severe, but not unrecognizable. Right? So what she, what she did with that triumvirate of obligations that she recognizes attain to men is this, she's describing patrimony. She doesn't use the term, she may not have known it, but that's what it is.

You know, working after, for the sake of the world, seeing to it that the people around you benefit from the fact that you're alive and seeking after God. That's basically the marching orders of the patronomic presence among us. So is it a cultivating presence? Well, you know that some people would be disturbed by the notion of cultivation as being a kind of agrarian.

Kind of, and I'm not even gonna go into the history now. I'm not troubled in the same [00:45:00] way other people are unnecessarily fainting around such notions, you know? So I wouldn't use the word cultivate probably, but I would imagine that what we're talking about here from the patrimonial point of view is the willingness to engage, employ the past, employ tradition in particular, the manifestation of the past in the present.

And to honor that has come, which has come before by making themselves honorable in this life. And all of those require the presence of everyone besides themselves for any of this stuff to register. Right? And, and the, the matrimonial undertaking or oath, if you will, is one that will take its chances with generativity, because generativity historically for human beings, [00:46:00] very iffy.

Lots of death and childbirth going back as far as humans go, right? Or the child survives the birth, but not the mother. So everybody knew that maternity, in every sense of the term, was an exceedingly risky proposition. And so those who who came to it did so as, as if they were gateways to another world for the people around them that literally life comes into life through them.

I don't think this was ever isolated. Strictly to the, procreative genitals. I think the, doorway that I'm thinking of is every bit has under been understood from time immemorial among cogent humans,

as the way that life also comes to us, the, the corporeal life, right? Which all other [00:47:00] lives rest upon. So it's a remarkably verdant, fecund and iffy for all of that proposition, and you bring them together and each of them have a chance in the presence of the other and the world is reborn, thereby. Hmm. And finally then 

Jennifer (3): the 

Stephen: matrimonial event that we're talking about, which we shorthand to call a wedding, but that whole sequence of things is a ritual recreation of what you and I have just talked about for the last 15 minutes.

Jennifer: So I have a curiosity around our culture's obsession, and it can be my own as as well. Full disclosure, you know, authenticity, self-expression, and any time that we [00:48:00] consider saying yes to a ritual, whether it's religious, non-religious, whether it's experimental or not, there's this worry, subtle or unspoken, maybe sometimes spoken that.

I'm not going to be able to be me fully if I participate in it. Right. And so I'd love you to unpack this difference between self-expression and authenticity and becoming something bigger on behalf of the village, the world, our fellow citizens. 

Stephen: Okay. That's pretty good too. Well, I'm reminded of, I did an interview some years ago and the fellow opened, the first question was this.

He said, I paid a lot of attention to you over the years. Okay. I said, he says, I'd like you to tell us, please, how do you know when you're [00:49:00] ready to teach? I said, what makes you think the world needs another teacher? I. I kind of stopped everything in his tracks because of course he, what he was counting on was the notion that I was all about betterment, 

Jennifer (3): right?

Stephen: Mm-hmm. And, and upward psychic mobility, maybe things of that kind that, and that the question would never be centered around what the world needs of us, only what we need of the world, you see? Yeah. Yeah. So that's one, two, you know, I'm gonna say something that's going to probably sound outrageous, but not probably unexpected.

If you've listened to anything I've talked about over the years, and it's this, you know, are you sure being yourself is a good idea?

Jennifer: Say more. I love it. 

Stephen: [00:50:00] I mean, no, really, I mean, let's stop the momentum for a second and, and ask. I I don't mean seriously as in the absence of chuckling, I mean, I mean, earnestly, earnestly pursue the following possibility that being yourself might not be the best iteration of you. Because, and here's what I mean by this, this notion that there is a self, first of all, that it's isolatable in some fashion that you can talk about its perimeter and therefore it's, its center,

somehow. That it exists in some kind of austere singularity it hovers in some fashion or gently, you know, nudges against other singularities. And somehow the amalgam of all of that happening all the time constitutes what? What do you think that that whole [00:51:00] thing amounts to? Do you honestly think that the principle, source of conflict in the world is that people are not themselves?

Jennifer (3): That's great. 

Stephen: I have, I mean, you gotta laugh sometimes. 

Jennifer (3): Yeah. 

Stephen: You know? 'cause the distinct possibility is because, honey, you have been yourself for far too long. 

It's, you know, the world is pleading for something else. 

That's why shit keeps coming at you. 

Jennifer (3): You 

Stephen: see, because it's, it's the stuff in question, the, the kind of slings and arrows.

They're not overly impressed with the fixity that you have arrived at in referring to something called I. 

You see? Mm-hmm. You know, there's a kind of molten ness to the proposition as there properly should be. You know, that the passage of time takes various pounds of flesh from what you used to think.

Was fair and right [00:52:00] and purposeful and called for and things like this. So one of the things that you're doing just ongoingly as a kind of cognizant post-adolescent human is taking the measure of whether or not the kind of carum effect between you and the world is a problem with the world. You know, and we have a lot of quote, psychological tradition now in the west.

I mean, it hasn't go back very long, but it's very pervasive, which trades on this notion that to th to th own self be true basically. You know? And I, of course, my response is, which one? 

Jennifer (2): Yeah. 

Stephen: Which self you're talking about? The married. The married self, the unmarried. Are you a, are you a truer version of yourself now that you've walked through the hallowed halls of matrimonial or, or are you truer because you didn't?

Jennifer (3): Mm-hmm. 

Stephen: [00:53:00] So you didn't compromise, 

Jennifer (3): right? 

Stephen: You didn't give in, you didn't blink, you stayed. Are you sure true is the right word to use here now? 

Jennifer (3): Mm-hmm. 

Stephen: You stayed soul maybe. How's that? You stayed recognizable to yourself maybe. But isn't that as much habit as it is achievement? 

Jennifer: Mm-hmm. 

Stephen: Yeah. So my point here is that there's a lot to wonder about in order to invoke the notion that the unchanged me or the uncompromised me.

Is the best conceivable version of me and the rest of the deal is how do I mitigate the compromises that the world seems to, you know, send like paper airplanes in my general direction? [00:54:00] Maybe, maybe one of the things that's going on is that some kind of divinity is employing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to appeal to you instead of defeat you.

Maybe these things are love letters camouflaged as

just a minute now. What's the word I need? Adversity there. 

Jennifer: Yeah.

As you speak, the word that's coming up for me is the undoing, the unbecoming, becoming unbecoming, the undoing. Because what I hear in the invitation of ritual and ceremony and in also standing on the shoulders of culture is that there's no fixed arrival point. There's no place to arrive in some perfect [00:55:00] harmony, some perfect version, future version of the, you know, the, the having the pension and the long-term relationship and the golden handcuffs and the nice house and the 2.4 kids and the picket fence.

This idea of marriage or we weddings or certain. Rituals helping us have more stability and security and fixed nature is the opposite of what is actually we're being invited into. That's what I hear you saying. 

Stephen: Indeed. And I, I would encourage you, you know, the list that you just made of the 2.4 kids in the picket fence and all that stuff.

Mm-hmm. I mean, I'm saying this very gently, update your references. No, no, seriously. Here's why. 

Jennifer: Yeah, I agree. 

Stephen: All of those are quote discreditable and easy to do, right? 

Jennifer: Yeah, sure. 

Stephen: But if you update, you know, there's a new and improved version, 12.6 of all of those recognizable today. 

Jennifer (3): Mm-hmm. 

Stephen: Make that [00:56:00] list and, and find something remarkable will happen to your mouth when you say them in the same terms, with the same tone of voice that you reserve for the picket fence and the kits.

Autonomy. You know, you start just peeling the, the gotto list mm-hmm. Away from the ideologues for a moment, and you realize, God almighty, many of these attributes function very similarly to the so-called discredited functions of times, not so long past. 

Jennifer: Yeah, 

Stephen: yeah, 

Jennifer: yeah. What I hear you saying is, is go for where there's the attachment to what we think we should be.

Stephen: Maybe

Jennifer: okay. 

Stephen: No, sure. But I think I'm also hopefully getting close to the following. Let me use the word God for a minute without defining my terms. Okay. I'll just say it. You could say. [00:57:00] That seeking after God to use John Burgess recommendation, there is not the self-evident thing you might think it is.

Here's why. Because God has to figure out a way, a scheme for survival too, no? I mean, it can't be an easy time to be God. And so I suspect the survival strategy of divinity is that it, it goes to places where the hardnesses and the darknesses are, aren't likely to seek it out because they seem at first blush, ungodly so unlikely to be a domicile of the divine, that nobody would go there looking for it.

And that's where the divine goes. And that's the movement I'm talking about. So when you [00:58:00] find stuff singularly despicable and beneath you and that you know, you, that kind of involuntary, very strong reactivity, you know, racism, what, whatever it is apart that just, there's always a list. Think about it for a moment.

Acknowledge of course the obvious, and then ask yourself whether or not the flip side of all of those reactivities are inherently benign or better. And you're likely to find the list doesn't stay orderly for very long. And so my appeal here is a kind of parabolic appeal, isn't it? It's the appeal of the parable to say the ungodly is probably the footstool of the divine.

Go there. And so, you know, PS then another human being [00:59:00] is very hard on your understanding and your pursuit of infinity, of infinite possibility of potential and all that. Say it again. Another human being is very hard on your understanding or your attempts to, to be after maximum growth possibility in a realization.

And the rest. Of course they are. Of course we are. Of course you are and I am. Of course us talking about this now and being overheard by other people intrudes upon. I. They're thinking about these things and that those intrusions are not always, or even not very frequently welcome. And that's what we are to each other.

Unwelcome carborundum, grinding away on our sense [01:00:00] of what's possible. 

Jennifer: Yeah. That's, 

Stephen: that's culture. 

Jennifer: What's coming to me is that concept of strangers that you talk about and how strangers are needed in our midst. Maybe like the unholy, because it's where radical hospitality is beckoned, perhaps by, by your thinking.

And so I'm hearing a responsibility that you're invoking in all of us not to get trodden down by kind of the naval gazing obsession with our own arrival points, however updated. But to move in the direction also of responsibility. That is at the heart of having the courage to meet the stranger, the courage to be with what we [01:01:00] want to reject.

Stephen: It's very good that you bring this up towards the end of our time here. You know, the, I mean, God bless the Americans, they've got enough to deal with, but might as well pick another thing off the shelf here. You know, it's an Americanism basically. I think it was Will Rogers, who apparently said something, and there are no strangers.

They're just friends I haven't met yet. That whole thing sounds very affable, sounds very open-hearted, open-minded, and all the rest. It's as lame as it's possible to be. Here's why. It demonizes stranger. It says nobody's supposed to be a stranger. It says, the problem with this world is strangers or stranger hood.

And I'm proposing in the book and, and now and frequently the following [01:02:00] strangers are God given. Zeus, in Greek mythology, was the, I'm gonna use the term patron saint. It doesn't quite work, but I think the translation is kind of obvious. Zeus was the patron saint of strangers of all things. Now you've heard of Zeus, not a big player.

Big time fellow. Right. And strangers were his thing. So in other words, the Greeks were onto something. They knew that it's the presence of the stranger in your midst that can bring out the best of what you've been entrusted with culturally. And the degree to which you grind away on the stranger hood of the stranger and turn them into a pale imitation of you is the degree to which you stay the same.

You become [01:03:00] endogemous, inward looking, self-possessed, and the rest. So strangers have remarkably, I'm gonna use the word salvific. Valence, and they are a kind of calamity for conservatism. But they're remarkably provocative in terms of obliging people who are at home to look inside their homeness, their feelings of home, and wonder whether or not there's a place for the stranger there. And matrimony

the event of matrimony is one of the places where the stranger is treated in his or her strangeness, and the strangeness has not taken away and call that friendship. [01:04:00] Friendships' high achievement is that two people remain strangers to each other fundamentally, and their stranger who is mutually recognizable one to the other, and it's honored.

You see? Yeah. 

Jennifer: What's coming to me as you say that is, you know your point do we need more teachers or maybe we need more, radical hospitality holders. There's something that's, you know, crossing these bridges of difference and strangers and conflict and making village in a postmodern global world.

Right? There's something that you're calling us, especially those with Anglo North American heritage, to rediscover something that's worthy of our time, that's worthy of [01:05:00] learning, that's worthy of slowing down. Yeah. 

Well, was gonna ask a question to end if that's okay, please.

for the white folks listening, those who identify with Scottish, Irish, British, Anglo North American roots, how might we play a meaningful role in becoming hospitable through the culture making, not just matrimony, but I'm just thinking really practically like this summer, this fall, this next year in our lives, what is one thing we can do experiment with knowing that there's no certainties, but somehow trusting that we can fall into the shoulders of culture, even if there's just shards of memory to offer something where belonging and [01:06:00] longing that you speak of are.

I don't wanna say fertile invitations for togetherness. 

Stephen: Well, it's a, it's a great dream that your question has buried in it, isn't it? 

Jennifer (3): Yeah. 

Stephen: Waking dream. I don't mean the, you know, idleness, I mean, it's, it's a good waking dream. My hesitation about answering the question in those terms is that I think we're in a time of such distinct peril at, at, you know, considerable number of levels.

That the idea that we'll feel all those things as a precursor to doing the work that you're asking me about, or anytime soon is it's mis thought, frankly. It's not going to happen that way, I [01:07:00] don't think. You're not going to get paid and then do the work. You're not gonna feel the feelings of stimulation and encouragement and recogni and all the rest, and then undertake the work that's supposed to generate those things in the first place.

I don't think these things will actually meet very often. I think for a foreseeable number of generations, our obligation is to work without benefit of the reward that your question imagines, right? So you have to be willing to undertake this almost anonymously, almost without expectation that you even have an affirmation that you're doing the work.

Okay? So that's the overview. Then the rest of it might be something like this. Okay. All the world's changes [01:08:00] are incremental, not large scale. That includes improvements as well as detriments. That you need to be not only content, but capable of working at a very incremental, observable, slow movement level.

For example,

someone's ways strike you as odd or worse, you're off put by them. So the first thing you do is investigate your. Unhesitating reactivity to what you find disagreeable or worse. This will do something to the grievance gospel [01:09:00] that is being read from every day, all day long by the ideologues, the grievance gospel.

It's a good phrase. And I'm not saying it makes anything better, boom, like this. I'm saying what it does is it, you got to slow the momentum before you stop. You can't stop like this. You can't stop being the person that you're not wild about like that. You gotta slow down first and then you gotta bear the incremental frustration of envisioning a better outcome, but not quite living it out yet.

'cause you don't quite know what it looks like. You don't know, quote, what you're supposed to be doing. So you pay attention now to your frustration over, you know, the fact that breaking is, is putting you [01:10:00] off. You want something more spectacular, more rewarding than this? Do you now? So you want to feel better, do you, before it gets better.

So you see what I, the, the recommendation here is strangely un unsatisfying, but it doesn't come from nowhere, right? The recommendation I'm making is if you slow down, your capability for stopping is enhanced and stopping is the prerequisite for changing. You gotta stop doing the shit that's crazy before you're ever gonna do stuff.

The stuff that's sane. And sanity is not a bad measure now, right? Sanity to me, works better than goodness as a kind of operating principle. You know? And sanity has a kind of appeal [01:11:00] that because you, you, you feel what crazy is, you have an under kind of nascent understanding that craziness is not a made up thing.

I'm not talking about psychiatric disease here. I'm talking about, you know, what the hell is that all about stuff, right? And so imagine then that you don't need a spectacle with 10,000 eyes on you and the influencers picking up on you and all of that gear to have a consequence that's human scaled and favorable.

I. To the divine. You need to operate at that level, I think. And even though I write the books and do this kind of thing and stuff, I really understand myself to be operating at that level too. And that's why I agreed to do the weddings to start with, to see simply could it be otherwise? [01:12:00] Can I get one other person to come to a wedding to change the world?

And I think it's happened.

Jennifer: I appreciate the slowing down.

It takes 

Stephen: more slow down than it does to stop, I swear. 

Jennifer: Yeah. 

Stephen: More discipline, more talking to yourself. More willingness to see the, the other side of, in every coin, that's what it takes. It takes a, a kind of emotional maturity that sudden stops, veering, turns, chanting at marches. God bless him for trying, getting arrested, you know, symbolically, those kinds of things.

They probably have their purpose. Right. But since you're asking me, my tiny little recommendation is to slow down sooner [01:13:00] to avoid being stopped. 

Jennifer: I agree. Well, with that, I have no words to kind of do a sweet wrap up. I, I'm just really grateful, really grateful for your generosity. 

Stephen: Thank you.

Thank you for asking. 

Jennifer: Great. Thank you. 

So here's the essence of my conversation with Steven. I think today I wanna share what stretched me, and I love how he really makes me think carefully about what ritual is. How it's not a performance of the familiar, it's not something that necessarily one repeats over and over again, but that the essence is that something magical, mysterious is invited [01:14:00] in that somehow in the enactment,

the full bodied participation in a ritual we are no longer in control. And instead are surrendering to life forces and energy, magic, and spirit that are beyond our individual dreaming.

And secondly he really challenges me to think about ritual, not as an affirmation of what's already here. He gives the example of love that's obvious, he says, but that it is a portal into. Village and village making of remembering culture, of enacting culture of something that we have roots in.

And that this village is not. A bigger reverberation of our own individual preferences or [01:15:00] even values, but he reminds us that the stranger is necessary. The stranger helps us enact the best parts of ourselves our hospitality and our generosity, but also our stories and our storytelling.

Lastly, what stood out to me was two things. One, that he took a risk that he scrambled and tried to remember and to

read and study such that he could change the world by bringing this quality of gathering, of ritual and ceremony. 

He took a risk and it wasn't easy and there was no straightforward path. And so for me, that gives me encouragement. To be curious about the rituals and ceremonies coming from my own cultural background that might foreground what the world needs of me. And then lastly. Where we ended together, [01:16:00] where he was encouraging me to slow down so we can stop and do the hard work of cultural repair speaking particularly of conciliation with indigenous peoples leading to meaningful reconciliation.

This idea of sometimes dreaming and wanting to feel good while doing it is definitely not the prerequisite, and that there's something about standing in the shadows, doing the hard, slow work of culture, building that matters. And so when I think about this theme of season four, which is exploring what does this world need now?

Does it need our saving or does it need something very different? And I think

he is encouraging me to remember that this is nothing about the phantoms of individual dreaming, but that we're in a time of villaging, of vowing, of digging deeper

into the serious work of taking responsibility for our planet, [01:17:00] for the land, for the stories.

You can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes to learn more about Steven's work, to order his new upcoming book on matrimony and to take advantage of future gatherings and teaching opportunities from him. If you know of someone who'd depreciate this conversation, please share this episode.

We're weaving a wholehearted web based on kinship, not kingship, at the speed of one heart opening conversation at a time. And if you wanna stay in touch with me, Jennifer, you can sign up for my newsletter on substack@jengland.substack.com

and stay tuned for the next short episode, . That's all for now, my friend.

Thank you so much for being here. I'm Jennifer England. Talk to you soon. I.