Yearning for wholeness with Elizabeth Oldfield (Part 1 of 2)

Elizabeth Oldfield is the author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. She has spent her career trying to lever open space for deeper conversations - about what it means to be a human being, where we can find wisdom and how we build a society where we hate each other a little less. She has worked at BBC Radio 4, led a Westminster think tank, and is now the host of The Sacred podcast, speaking to guests like Nick Cave, Sally Philips, Rabbi Sacks, Rainn Wilson, Sathnam Sanghera and Krista Tippett about their deepest values. She lives with her family in a Christian intentional community in South London.

In this first part of our conversation, we talk about:

• How cultural narratives shape our understanding of the world
• Making sense of our turbulent times
• How religious traditions can be a source of wisdom 
• The concept of sin as our tendency to f*** things up
• Our deep need for connection 

To learn more about Elizabeth and her work:

• LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-oldfield-5a5b6216 
• Website: https://www.elizabetholdfield.com/ 
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabethsaraholdfield/ 
• X: https://x.com/esoldfield 
• Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times: https://a.co/d/4iFq69r 
• Substack Newsletter: https://morefullyalive.substack.com/ 
• Larger Us Organization: https://larger.us/ 
• The Sacred podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=1326888108

This episode is sponsored by:

• John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/) and
• Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

The model that we have for nonfiction books is basically claim a universal thesis, say this is something we haven't understood, this is a new lens on the world. I find those books not always that helpful. The things I find helpful are honest human stories of how we all wrestle with these deep metaphysical things, woven with ideas. And so all I have really felt able to do is tell my story of feeling very existentially overwhelmed a lot of the time by our concept and what where I went looking for steadiness of soul, and where I found a sense of actually some agency and some relief in these very, very old spiritual pathways.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

What it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templet Religion Trust. It's become a cliche to say that we live in unprecedented times. But many of us are indeed struggling under the combined weight of several crises that leave us feeling anxious and fractured. What does it mean to pursue our longing for wholeness in these difficult times? And what role can religion play here, even for those of us who might not be religious? My guest today, Elizabeth Oldfield, tackles these questions in her new book. Elizabeth has spent her career trying to lever open space for deeper conversations about what it means to be a human being, where we can find wisdom, and how we can build a society where we hate each other a little less. She's worked at BBC Radio 4, led a Westminster think tank, and is now the host of the Sacred Podcast, speaking to guests like Nick Cave, Rabbi Sachs, Rain Wilson, Krista Tippett, and others about their deepest values. Hey Elizabeth, thanks for joining us. Great to have you on the podcast. It's really nice to be here. I usually like to start by asking guests to share an experience of beauty that they had in their childhoods that remains with them till today. Is there a particular memory that the the word beauty evokes for you from your childhood?

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Yeah, what a beautiful question. What came to mind was that I always used to dance on the beach. I did a lot of dance classes anyway. Dancing was a big part of my childhood. But every time I went to the sea or the beach, the expanse of wet sand just in front of where the the waves come in would draw me with this very intense um sense of needing to move and needing to move in these kind of swooping and looping, you know, non-choreographed, expressive dance moves, kind of just on the edges of the sea. And it was it became a sort of joke in my family that we couldn't go anywhere near the seaside without me kicking off my shoes and needing to dance. And I don't know that before you asked me that question, I would have necessarily categorized that as beauty, but that is what came back to me in response to your question.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

What about it do you associate with beauty today?

SPEAKER_00 3:03

The embodiment, the sense of the awe-inspiring power of the sea, that the wildness of the natural world, and where it comes crashing up against civilization. And then my quite and it's it was from when I was quite young, sort of very unforced childlike response to it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Yeah. It really struck me that it's not just a participatory reception of beauty, but you're actively engaged in it, right? And so the the the response you have is almost a delight expressing itself in some kind of participation.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Yeah. Yeah, kind of responding to beauty with creativity, although that, you know, that's not how I would have analyzed it at the time. But what the d the delight wanting to spill over in some way.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. Great. Well, listen, I'm really delighted that you're able to join us. And um, I want to talk about this new book you've written, Fully Alive, which I highly recommend. I loved reading it a couple of times actually. Really profound book. And I want to, you know, for the readers who are and listeners and viewers who are not familiar with your work, could you say a little bit about your your journey? I mean, you you've you've had a really interesting career. You worked for the BBC, you started a religion think tank. Say a little bit about your your story and what led you to write this book.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Hmm. That's not an easy question. Uh someone who cares a lot about stories, uh, you could frame that in many ways. I think the thread of my life has has been, ironically, an interest in stories, in the stories that shape us, in and particularly in the kind of cultural narratives and the way they create imaginative space. They create the social imaginary, is what Charles Taylor says. Um, you know, it starts off just like a nerdy bookish child who read a lot of novels, told a lot of stories, just a sort of instinctive interest in stories, as many children have. And then through studying literature and history and then going to work at the BBC and they're like right in the heart of this like media story production machine. I've really seen how those cultural narratives are the air that we breathe, and they make some things seem legitimate and some things seem illegitimate. They uh kind of frame the goodies and baddies for us, they they encourage particular choices, they sort of reflect our memetic desires back to us. And so that's the thread I've really been pulling on. I made radio and television programs, really trying to get to these deep questions. What is a human? What is a good life? How now shall we live? And that was the thread that I was pulling on through leading a think tank, um, and now writing and speaking. But it's been a strange, zigzagging career, and I think that's the thread that I've been following.

SPEAKER_02 5:52

Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, it's it's and it comes through certainly in the in the book as you I mean, you talk about the decisions you've made, you know, along the way, the interesting journey you've had from having profound religious and spiritual experiences to giving up on faith and returning to faith and then and then living in now an intentional community that is a fairly countercultural, if not radical, decision to make these days, and one that probably doesn't make a lot of sense to people, but I imagine would resonate with a lot of our yearnings in what you call turbulent times. Could you say a bit about the uh and we'll get back to talking about some of these threads, but but could you say a bit about the turbulent times in the subtitle of the book? What are you trying to speak to in our contemporary culture and and and the situation we're in?

SPEAKER_00 6:36

It might be helpful to for listeners that I'm realizing the more I talk about it that that phrase intentional community is um not always understood. It's a bit jargony. So uh people can think of it as a micro-monastery. We are two families who've decided to move in together with shared rhythms and rituals and practices, driven partly by this sense of turbulent times and this honestly existential anxiety that I am having to grapple with. And I think many people are having to grapple with, particularly people in the rising generation who are inheriting a world which which looks just deeply, deeply unstable. The combined unsettling of the climate crisis, right? This wicked existential threat that we have really struggled to reckon with in any serious way, with the kind of geopolitical trends, growing division, withdrawing trust, and accelerating advances in AI that raise all very deep questions about what a human is and how we live together and what kind of work we value, whether we value work. And that sense that certainly the cultural story I was raised with in the 1980s and 90s was really that end of history cultural story, right? It was really, you know, we've come out the Trondlook Gloria's of 30 years after the Second World War, and there was a little bump there with the Cold War, but we've sorted that out now that the Berlin Wall has fallen. And generally in the West, we are in these sunlit uplands of uh reason, democracy, prosperity, free trade has saved the world. And I think I grew up expecting life and the world to go on largely as it always has. You know, I had a very safe middle-class, middle-of-the-road childhood. The idea that life is going to go on largely as it has done is not the story that is being told now, right? The sense that change is accelerating beyond our capacity to keep up with it, and we might actually have set fire to our only home is a significantly different story to wrestle with and reckon with and know how to live within.

SPEAKER_02 8:37

Yeah, you're reminding me of the German sociologist Hart Motrosa, who talks about dynamic stabilization. This is a strange term, but he means that I mean we're in this context in which what is stable is the constant acceleration, right? Like you have to keep increasing profits year on year. They can't be stable.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

And GDP has to keep growing. Everything has to keep growing, and that's the only thing that we can we can see as a constant. Um you also draw on Bung Chul Han in talking about this context in which everything that is solid melts into information. And there's an interesting tension that he lays out between information and narrative, right? That information doesn't give us meaning, information doesn't give us orientation. These are things that typically we found in religion. Uh, but there's there's so much baggage around religion, around God, around the concept of sin. These are the things that people like to discard very quickly, and you're leaning into these concepts. Could you say a little bit about your choices to sort of yeah, to rely on the very things that that people have discarded about religion in order to address the this turbulence, this, you know, this sort of uh strange context we're living in?

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Honestly, it still surprises me. I I'm not someone formed in tribes that would go looking to religion in general, Christianity in particular, right, as a source of wisdom. Maybe religion as long as it's, you know, air quotes Eastern.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

The sort of sense of my life going off script is very strong for me. You know, where I was raised, middle class, middle of the road, largely secular, most of the people raised in the way that I was raised have no interest in religion and no faith. You know, they were went through university at the tail end of the secularization thesis, this idea of you know that we're right at the end of the long withdrawing roar. You know, it is the tide of faith is is so far off we can't even see it anymore. But this accident, or I don't know what you'd call it, this fork in the road in my life of being taken to a Christian youth festival by a friend's youth group and having a very powerful ecstatic experience, uh, is the kind of uh sociologically acceptable way of putting it, has shaped everything else, you know. Maybe is the inciting incident in my story. And this sense that there is something, there is something beyond us, there is something beyond what we can see, that there is more to this world than just increasing my status, comfort, convenience, like aspiring to what, nice holidays and a fancy kitchen island and a nice job title, like that there is more meaning to be had has really dogged me. And it's dogged me through attempting to be an atheist, having these major faith crises, deciding that only stupid people could possibly believe that, and then circling all the way back to finding it. This surprising, humane, psychologically astute source of the wisdom that I think we might need right now.

SPEAKER_02 11:29

Yeah, yeah. You talk about uh you know, your book is laid out as a journey from a series of of polarities uh uh organized along the seven deadly sins. Could you say a little bit more about the idea of sin as the human propensity to f things up? And like why is the concept of sin perhaps useful to us today, especially people who are either tired of religion, have walked away from it, are done with it, or people who, you know, may not even be interested in it, or or people from other faith traditions, perhaps.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Yeah. Are you saying that I'm allowed to swear this is the first American podcast where something not bleeped out the word? We'll probably bleep it out, but um yeah, yeah, it was an ongoing, it was a big discussion with my American editors. The British edition has the full letter word in its glory, and the American one does not.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Um Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Yes, so for the sake of your future editor, the um the human propensity to F things up is from Francis Spufford, who is this amazing award-winning literary novelist. And he really set me on this journey of wanting to reclaim this concept, this, I think, kind of known and lived reality of human beings, that we we mess stuff up, right? We break things. We can't call it the crooked timber of humanity. That's not what I'd inherited as the story about sin. I thought sin was of no use to us as a concept, because it was either this hellfire and brimstone kosh to beat other people with, right? That it was about imposed guilt and shame and it was psychologically crippling, or it was this kind of silly, naughty, you know, calories and cream cakes and like the cool liberated Halloween costumes, or you know, whatever it was. But at heart, I think we all need to grapple with the sense that we might have these principles and these values and these aspirations about the kind of life we want to live and the kind of people that we want to be, and we largely fail to live up to them, right? It's really hard to be brave and honest and loyal and kind and selfless and to um treat other people equally and to really love anyone other than ourselves at any depth. Maybe it's just me. I I don't think it's just me, but I uh maybe it's just me. Um and so this right this reality of my tendency to disconnect, which is another way I really think of sin, disconnection, um, withdrawal from relationship with my own soul or my own deepest self, if you prefer that language, of what it really needs, which is usually not what it's craving in the instant moment. Um disconnection from other people, from deep relationships, intimacy and trust and respect with other people. And yes, connection, withdrawal from the relationship with love divine that and the connection beyond us. But what's been interesting about writing the book and speaking about it is I'm realizing that this concept of sin, even for those who don't know what they think about the metaphysics, explained as disconnection, withdrawal, and fracture, makes all kind of sense because I think we see it in all our lives.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so one way to approach it, people might say is our disconnection from ourselves, from nature, from others around us, is just a function of our social structures, right? Like we are living in late capitalism and late modernity, whatever you want to call it, and it's just a product of social structures, and and if we recreate society in a different way, we don't have to deal with this problem, right? And I think some of the romantic era had this sort of idea that that our you know fundamental state of nature is clean slate.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:04

Yeah. What would you say to people who feel, look, the reason I can't connect is is you know, nothing's wrong with me, it's this damn world, and it's the structures we're in.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Too big a question for me to have a very tight, tight thesis on, but my intuitive response is can't it be both. One of the things I do is I'm chair of an organization called Larger Us, and one of it's about the kind of way collective psychological forces are affecting the political world. A phrase we use a lot is this our states of mind create the state of the world, and the state of the world creates our states of mind.

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Amazing.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

And so I think if we see this deep tendency to disconnection in ourselves, we would expect to see it in the world, and if we see it in the world, we would expect for it to be forming us, right? This cultural story is part of our formation, which is one of those old concepts from my religion that I have found to be remarkably helpful. It just means who we are becoming and the fact that we have some agency in that. But in the religious sense, who we are becoming is not we just need to strip off all our bad programming and heal from all our trauma and make all the systems just. None of those things I think are bad, by the way. But that it's not we need to get back to this pure state of the tabula rasa, you know, humans are default good and it's the systems are bad. It's that we inherit a complicity and an entanglement with disconnection and fracture and sin. And we need to move forward and towards love and towards connection and towards healing and towards um restoration and reconciliation. And that that helps me because it's not that I think I'm, you know, this terrible fallen, I'm not a Calvinist who's like total prof depravity. I know enough about myself to not think that deep down left on my own, I would naturally make good and loving choices.

SPEAKER_02 16:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's great. So I love the way you've organized the book then along the lines of that kind of development into becoming, you know, a different kind of person, and and I appreciate especially the vulnerability with which you've you've shared your own story and your own struggles on all these fronts. So moving, you know, from polarization to peacemaking on the sin of wrath, and then moving from stuffocation to gratitude and generosity when it comes to avarice, from distraction to attention, uh, from status anxiety to belovedness, from numbing to ecstasy, from objectification to sexual humanism, from individual individualism to community. Um would you say that these are universal longings? Like, is this what it means to flourish for all people? Like we have we all want to have these inner movements in order to flourish, or is is this a particular conception that I I'm just not in the temperament to claim anything as universal, to be honest, Brambling.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

I'm just not sure that's knowable by the human mind. Um we don't insufficient data, and always insufficient data. Um I and it's the but the book is a funny thing, right? It took a long time to get the courage to write it because it doesn't the model that we have for nonfiction books is basically claim a universal thesis, say this is something we haven't understood, this is a new lens on the world. I find those books not always that helpful. The things I find helpful are honest human stories of how we all wrestle with these deep metaphysical things woven with ideas. And so all I have really felt able to do is tell my story of feeling very existentially overwhelmed a lot of the time by our concept and what where I went looking for steadiness of soul and where I found a sense of actually some agency and some relief in in these very, very old spiritual pathways. The reception from the book and the people that have read it, my guess is there's a lot that we share in these longings. I I think probably we are made for a relationship and deep connection with ourselves and other people and the world, and yes, God is what I think, is probably universal. But that's my theological anthropology speaking. I can't prove it to you.

SPEAKER_02 18:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm I'm in the middle of, well, finished data collection for this project on spiritual yearning among uh scientists, and we're we're looking in particular at scientists who are not religious, and it is an interesting question that we're trying to get at is whether these longings for connection are universal or not. Because there's some people who tell us, I don't even know what you mean by connection, I can't even imagine what that would mean. And you know, so maybe some people are unmusical, as you know, Max Weber would put it when it comes to religion or spirituality. Or it's or it's just that uh we don't have the right way to articulate an experience that that is happening.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Yeah. So I would love you to go away and do this bit of work that I'm not qualified to do, which is that my current working hypothesis is it's about hemispheric formation. I am very influenced by the work of Ian McGilchrist, and I think that when I'm talking about connection and relationship and interdependence, it's a very right hemispheric model of the world. And he would say that's the master, right? That's that that's designed to be the master. That hemispheric form of attention is designed to and and and is able to give a more accurate picture of the world as it really is, right? This is key. We live in a world that is left encourages left hemispheric forms of attention, and because of neuroplasticity, the m you know, the more you use one form of attention, the more that strengthens and you lose touch with the other one. And for people who say I don't even know what you mean by this connection, I would love to find some way to test has have they had many left hemispheric forms of attention.

SPEAKER_02 20:30

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

And is it actually they've lost lost, yeah, probably lost a connection with the mother tongue because of what they've been paying attention to, rather than it's not inherent in all of us. But obviously that just that is because I want to prove my thesis and I might be wrong.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

Yeah, yeah. No, I I think there's there's something to I know I know I know Ian McGillcraft's work is a bit debated as to whether those those hemispheres actually map on to how the brain really works, but I think there's something to that. I mean, there's uh some literature on absorption that Tanya Lerman has talked about in her work, and and it it seems that some people are more naturally inclined to spiritual experiences, but others can learn it as she did. And so so it may be, you know, this is a capacity that is underdeveloped.

SPEAKER_00 21:09

I think that's where I'm landing on it. And it's why the god bit is at the end of the book, because I want it to be useful to people who don't know what they think. Like most of my friends are atheists, I have a sort of spot for them. I think there's wisdom here, even if the god bit is really an open question for you. But that it is, if you want to believe and currently don't, which a lot more and more people are admitting to me, that the practices and the postures and the rituals are forms of attention that might actually make it easier to believe. It's not that it doesn't matter if it's true or not, it's that something about the way of head tension changes what we're able to believe or not, what we rule in or roll out.

SPEAKER_02 21:45

That's a great stopping point for the first half of our conversation. Stay tuned for the second half next week, where Elizabeth talks about the power of community in shaping our spiritual commitments and how to move from polarization to peacemaking, from greed to generosity and gratitude, and overcoming our unhealthy individualism. To make sure you don't miss it, subscribe to our podcast if you haven't already, and please leave us a review. We'd love to hear what you think about the show.