Yearning for wholeness with Elizabeth Oldfield (Part 2 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 second part of our conversation, we talk about:

• Moving beyond individualism
• Moving from wrath to peacemaking
• Moving from greed to generosity and gratitude
• Finding freedom in commitment
• The concept of God

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_01 0:00

The way we've set up an economic story to be repeatedly accelerating our avarice means I think we're all formed into being hypocrites. And Oliver James, who is not religious at all, as far as I know, talks about this a lot in Affluenza. That one of the key ways that this he talks about affluenza is a virus, you know, this insatiable hunger for more and more and more, never being satisfied with enough, having no concept of enough, that um forms of religious practice are one of the only known antidotes to affluenza. Because the claim, and it's a truth claim, of my tradition, is not only that money won't make you happy, but that it is dangerous for your soul.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust. Hey everyone, this is the second half of my conversation with Elizabeth Oldfield about her new book, Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. Please check out the first half of our conversation if you haven't already. In the first part, we talked about Elizabeth's journey to writing a book that aims at unpacking the resources that religion can offer all of us for helping us pursue our yearning for connection and wholeness. In this episode, she talks in particular about how to move from polarization to peacemaking, from greed to generosity and gratitude, and how to overcome our unhealthy individualism. Let's get started. Say a little bit about some of those practices, because you talk a lot about practices in the book. And are there are there things you might recommend to people who are in that position of saying, gosh, I, you know, I'm I'm intrigued by these spiritual experiences that others are having. I've never had anything like it. I don't think I can get myself to believe there's anything more than that in some molecules. What do I do?

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Honestly, my advice is so basic that people find it quite shocking. Go to church. And if like the Christian bit is massively off-putting for you, that's where that's where I'm coming from. That's my mother tongue. Yeah. Go somewhere else. But go to a religious congregation and be there for a while. Like, I think the way we think about spirituality in the West at the moment is hyper-individualized. And I, this is very, very, very unworked out. But the next thing I want to be working on is how central the collective is in religious traditions and therefore how collective collective formation is the thing that really changes us. I think. I think we when we pay attention in the same way with other people, it has massively more power than just like lighting a candle in our room. Like no, and I'm not dismissing any of this. Meditation is good, those mystical forms of prayer, all good. I think if you really want to develop this capacity in yourself, go be with other people. That's what Pascal said in Pascal's Wager, which is not really about heaven or hell at all. It's much more this very honest, beautiful. He's, I mean, I have this huge intellectual crush on Pascal. It is beautiful. He's having this argument with himself. This evidence points this way, this evidence points this way. What should I do? It's basically like, go to church, go be with people who believe. Because we know that beliefs are caught, not taught. Or everything we know about how we come to conclusions is in relationships, etc. etc. So basically don't try and do it on your own. Join something.

SPEAKER_02 3:22

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was really struck by that part of your book. I wasn't aware of that aspect of Pascal's life. And you know, I think as he put it, it was something like go spend time with people who've solved the problems you're trying to solve, or you know, there's something about the modeling yourself after after those who have shown the path in some way, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

Um spend time.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

And we we have this like in and it's and it's a legacy of particular kind of Protestant evangelism. We have this kind of, I must I can't show up in a religious congregation unless I believe these following things. But frankly, half of the people in that religious congregation won't believe all those things on any given day anyway. I don't, like, not half the time, but some of the time. It is much more about where, what do what am I committing myself to pay attention to? Who do I want to be becoming and where am I most likely to be becoming that person? On the days where I don't believe any of this, I still go to church because I think that is the path that's going to help me become the kind of person the world needs and the kind of person I want to grow up into. But there's this beautiful line, he says, okay, go to church, you know, be with people who already believe this, but what are you afraid of? So this it's this dialogue between himself, that in so doing I will come to believe is basically, isn't that what you want? And there's this like, I don't want to be conned. What if isn't that fake? Like, shouldn't I be able to get there on my own? And again, I think this understanding of what attention is like and how we actually change our mind, which is not usually working out a hypothesis in our head, but in relationship and in community and through the testimony of people that we trust, really helps people just relax about all of that.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot in what you're saying here that I think uh applies to one aspect of our current crisis, which is uh polarization. And there's you know some interesting research by the polarization lab at Duke that you know has tried to expose people to different perspectives, and and it seems that they only get more entrenched in their beliefs if you know if they're exposed to other perspectives. I want to ask you a little bit about how we become peacemakers and uh and you know how we move from just just hanging out with you know people like me to people who are not like me. Uh and you you say a lot about that in your chapter on wrath, but I want to first ask you for that the excellent story that you shared about getting onto the bus and being confronted by this lady while you're sitting with your child. Uh could you share that story? Because it I just found that incredibly striking and there's a lot that we could learn from over there.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Yes. Yeah, I think I'm I'm understanding how much we all have this instinctive preference for people like ourselves. It's called homophily in the literature. I call it people like me syndrome. But how much it's exacerbated and accelerated by fire or flight and by frankly being tired and grumpy and like having low, low resources. And so this was one day when I was um our kids are quite young and we didn't have a car. And I was picking one of them up from nursery and one of them up from school. Maybe they were maybe even younger than that. And I got on a bus and it was empty, and I sat one child on their own seat either side of me. Um, and a woman got on the bus and she was so rude, and she said, Move your child. And I was like, This is all these free seats, and there's another free seat over there. And she said, I want to sit there, move your child. I was just like, Wow, okay. Dragged my very large toddler onto my lap and said, and this I'm really embarrassed about this, I was so snarky. I was like, I am trying to teach my children good manners. You could have a you could use a please or a thank you. And then she sat down and we sat there. And I don't know if you've ever had this, but I was just so full of rage. Just like, how dare you? I wish I'd said no, you know, muttering to myself, basically. Um, and I could feel her tension, right? And her annoyance, and there was both of us in this like confined space, super stressed. For whatever reason, I'd been reading about this parenting technique of do-overs, and I knew we had a while to go on this bus, and I thought, I don't want to sit here feeling this disgusting rage and resentment. So I just said, Shall we start again? My name's Elizabeth. What's your name? And it completely transformed the situation. She laughed. It released so like it's discharged some of the stress hormones. I think is what it does. It's unexpected. And she told me her name, and I said, Where do you live? And we got chatting, and she'd been to the hospital and she was in pain, and her particular type of pain I have experienced. So we had something in common, right? And then vulnerability gets in the mix, and we had a really lovely, lovely, lovely conversation. And towards the end of the bus journey, it the bus had super filled up, and I don't know if you have this, but on London buses, there's an area where you park your buggies, strollers, do you call them strollers?

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

And um, someone had got on, and there was always two strollers, and someone else had got on, and they were like shoving the stroller around, and we're like, Who's this? Who's this? And I couldn't get out because I had a kid on my lap and everything was too crowded in. And the woman next to me just was like, Would you give her a minute? She's doing her best.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

So we left the bus it having completely transformed it because of this very simple thing of just being willing to change the dynamic a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

Yeah, yeah. How do you how have you seen that kind of transformation play out, either in the communities you're in or or elsewhere in the world? Is is how how can we actually in in these polarized times where we don't want to trust other people, we've got you know fixed opinions in the US, now we have elections coming up pretty soon. I think this is intensifying. Is there anything we could learn in that, you know, in terms of moving in that direction?

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Yeah, lots. I mean, this is the podcast that I host trying to model this, and I think it is one of those strange things that's actually a really simple thing in us, and we can take very simple steps, but there is no scaffolding for it, and there is no teaching around it. But I I I summarise the two things you need to know is homophily, which is people like me syndrome. Everyone prefers people who remind them of themselves. It's a constant across cultures and centuries, it doesn't make you a terrible person. You have to keep an eye on it and be deliberately spending time with people not like yourself and listening to people not like yourself and noticing in you the ridiculous preferences of people who like wear the same glasses as you or remind you of, you know, I saw someone with a with on the train the other day was using the same brand of pen that I really like and seek out, and my brain went, they seem like a good person, right? It's ridiculous, it's ridiculous, but we all do it and we need to keep an eye on it. And the way that fight or flight increases our homophily, like accelerates our desire for people like ourselves. And so the way that we change that is we notice when we're triggered, and we do this thing that Jesus talked about, which is turning the other cheek. And turning the other cheek is a really enigmatic phrase if you're not someone that gets hit in the face, like it comes from if when you're when someone strikes you in the face, turn the other cheek. It's really famous, but it's really hard to know how to apply if you're not regularly being struck in the face. And I came to understand it as a very deliberate, quite badass way that we can respond to any situation of threat, social discomfort, conflict. Because when someone attacks you, demeans you, disagrees with you, um, dismisses your identity or your tribe or your group or your political position, we get a flood of stress hormone triggered into fight or flight. I won't go into freeze and fawn. And the natural reaction is therefore to attack back or with to withdraw into our tribes and our parallel communities. And what turning the other cheek means is keeping the conversation open, keeping the relationship open, keeping the connection open. And what that often caches out into is rather than responding with anger, saying, asking a question, help me understand. I can hear your angry, or would you like to come for dinner, which is where I usually land.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

That's great. I want to ask you a little bit about uh the move from greed to generosity and gratitude. And that, you know, this again, I think, is one aspect of our of our crisis we're in. And going back to Harkman Frozen, I mean, he talks about this constant situation we're in of wanting more and more things to be available to us and then accessible and attainable, right? So we're in this rat race because we we're constantly chasing after attaining those things that are increasingly becoming accessible to us in the in the world, right? And and there are many ways in which I think you're suggesting that religious communities and practices and traditions can help us put a stop to this constant chasing. Could you say a little bit about the practices and decisions you've made in order to make this move from avarice to gratitude and generosity?

SPEAKER_01 11:37

I mean, I feel like I'm a hypocrite in all these areas. This is the worst. I feel like such a beginner. The way we've set up an economic story to be repeatedly accelerating our avarice means I think we're all formed into being hypocrites. Um, and Oliver James, who is not religious at all, as far as I know, talks about this a lot in Affluenza. That one of the key ways that this he talks about affluenza is a virus, you know, this this insatiable hunger for more and more and more, and never being satisfied with enough, having no concept of enough, that um forms of religious practice are one of the only known antidotes to affluenza. Because the claim, and it's a truth claim of my tradition is not only that money won't make you happy, but that it is dangerous for your soul. Like it's Christianity in particular is like radically ambivalent about money and wealth in particular. Love of money is the root of all evil. You know, there's ways you can nuance these verses, but looked at as straightforwardly as you can, the accumulation of wealth is bad for us. And I still want to accumulate wealth, but I at least am attempting to be formed by a story that is calling that into question and reminding me what actually helps me flourish, which again we know from the positive psychology literature, which basically agrees with religion, which is deep relationships, being in community, which again collective religious practice helps you with, sense of meaning and purpose in your life, a level of freedom and health, which actually randomly religious people do tend to be healthier. We're not quite sure what the mechanism is there. So, yes, that kind of like what the way religion has some claims about what a good life is and what's important and it's not getting rich, and then continually reminds you of it and gives you rituals and practices and forms of attention to be acting as some kind of antidote to the economic story, is where I think its power lies in this area.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's it's it's really helpful for you to um you know to talk about the I mean the way in which again living in community with other people forces you to you know share details about your economic lives or or even make decisions to tithe. And and I I I think you had mentioned you would stop buying new clothing, for instance. And and those are those are all very challenging practices for I think most of us to think about. But I yeah, I do think it's you know, something like that seems to be needed to put the brakes on the constant, you know, uh hamster wheel we're on. Uh I want to ask a little bit about pride and the movement to, you know, out of individualism. You quote Oliver Berkman who says that freedom is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule, but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community, participating in forms of social life where you don't get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it. Um it sounds really paradoxical, right? How do you achieve freedom by submitting to constraint and uh especially, you know, almost subjecting yourself to other people, right? And again, it seems in our individualistic times this is uh really an affront to many of us, but what has your experience been uh of living in community and how you've found freedom in this experience?

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Yeah, it is, isn't it, it's one of the most entrenched lies that we tell about what a good life is. More autonomy. Another thing that Oliver Berkman says is that the way that cashes out in our society is the freedom to never see your friends, right? All that autonomy leaves us immensely lonely. And if, as I believe, we are made for each other and we are made by each other, we are relational into our bones, and you can do that through your theological Trinitarian theological anthropology, but you can also do it through sociology, you know, understanding of mirror neurons. There's like there are many, many ways that we are coming to know that we are that that there is a myth of the individual. We're more like those trees with all the roots connected under the surface. Um, so living in community has involved releasing some autonomy over my time. We have some really quite rigorous commitments to each other. You know, we get up and do morning prayer, we do Compline, Wednesday night is house night, Friday morning we read the Bible together, once a month we have a house day that we spend together, Monday evenings we host big open table dinners. Like I'd say a third of my time every week is spent with commitments to this very small community and what we want to do together, which restricts other bits of my life. But I have felt like I've grown up my soul more living in community for three years than the like previous 20 years. And it is one of those claims of religion that doesn't make much sense outside that imaginative world. But my experience is that in c in creating some covenant commitments to the things I want to be defining my life and the things I want to be being formed by, I feel more free. It's weird.

SPEAKER_02 16:23

Yeah, yeah. I think it's a challenge even for people in in religious communities. I one of the research projects we did, we found that people who are really active in their faith communities in the US, anyway, rarely share their personal struggles and problems with others in their faith community. And so there's there's, you know, maybe a desire to keep up appearances or uh just no clear sort of practices, right? No, no sort of mechanisms by which one would do that. Where we found some variation there. We we found that it was the the Catholic and Jewish communities that did the worst, and the best were the the the African-American Protestants who, black Baptists in particular, who have practices of coming together and asking for prayer and and and receiving prayer, right? So you you don't share problems as venting, but as an experience where someone loves you. Um and I think we have a lot to learn about the kinds of practices, even in faith communities, that are genuinely going to foster connection and vulnerability. Because the church can be a really alienating experience for a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Yeah, yeah. Can I offer a hypothesis about that?

SPEAKER_02 17:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

I think you should do some cross-trabulation around economics. Because I write about it in the Avaris chapter. I think that one of the things that disconnects us is the re the reason that money is warned against is for I'm sure reasons that I don't understand, but I have come to believe that it's because it rel it relationally distances us from each other, because we don't need each other, and we are designed to meet each other's needs, and what kind of this state of capitalism does is encourages us to be able to meet all of our own needs and find our own safety because other people are annoying, frankly, and it's difficult being vulnerable and asking for help. And if, as my understandings are correct, the kind of black Baptist populations in the US have historically been poorer, then those the context of interdependence that's economic may be as important as the practice and the postures and the theology for helping them actually show up and be and know themselves and see and be seen and love and be loved.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

Yeah, no, that's something for us to look into. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

I'm sorry, I'm just like giving you tasks in things I'm interested in.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

That's right, no, it's very helpful. Yeah, no, this is, I mean, yeah, we have, you know, we're we're trying to figure out make sense of the mechanisms too, right? And and to understand, yeah, is it a you know, would we find differences in in wealthier communities and maybe more more of a desire to keep people away. You know, certainly their their um houses are bigger and further distanced from each other, so that it's self-communication.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Like we are formed by a story about not wanting or needing help, and I think that's sort of what sin is, really.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

Right, yeah, yeah. What do you learn? I mean, you have it, you know, a lot of people in your community who who come to your dinners are are not people of faith. Are there ways in which people who are uh believers and non-believers can learn from each other when it comes to this longing for wholeness, living a fully human life?

SPEAKER_01 19:07

I just think listening is the heart of everything good, and it's annoying because it's sounds so boring and it's really not boring. Um, I believe that a good, honest question is a holy thing, and that asking each other real questions and then really listening to what is beneath the surface of each other. I have almost no tolerance for small talk. It means I'm quite intense in person. I think I'm sometimes a bit too intense. But the the thing that happens at our dinners often is that we just get into actual heart-to-heart conversations about the things that mean the most to us, and then we listen to each other, and no one's like, I am right and you are wrong, and you know, turn or burn. It's much more we are meaning-seeking creatures with these longings, and we don't always know what to do with them, but we're probably better working it out together than we are doing in the past.

SPEAKER_02 19:55

Yeah, yeah. You leave the God question towards the end of the book and you have God in square brackets throughout. Um, could you say a bit about that choice and and perhaps how do people who may have been hurt by religion or by a concept of God, what do you recommend for people who are in that position?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Yeah. Oh, it's such a tender thing. Like, I have much of that in my story, and uh some days I'm like, how can there be any goodness in here given the absolute institutional carnage, right? And the repeated failure of Christians in public, and then Christians like myself, right? Um I put the God word in square brackets because it is the most semiotically dense three letters in the English language, and I think assuming that everyone means the same thing by it is foolish, and we're all dragging our associations into that gap. And I'm really aware that for a lot of people I sort of want to have a duty of care to the reader. Like I remember what it was like when I was at least trying to be an atheist. I remember what it was like before I was a Christian, and you can set off an emotional firestorm. This question of is there love, is there a logic of love in the universe? Like, am I seen is there justice? It doesn't look like it a lot of the time, right? These are very tender, complex, intimate, private questions. And so I left it to last because I wanted to build up trust in the reader that I wasn't gonna take those bruises or those risks glibly, yeah, and that we would treat it with care and with I hope appropriate humility of so much I don't claim to know any of it. I think having been out of the church and then in it and then out of it, and now like sort of slightly reluctantly and grumpily, but properly in it again, I always come back to to like to whom else shall we go? I've sort of looked everywhere else for wisdom. And this path seems to be the one most likely to make me feel fully alive and fully human, that there's treasure in the rubble, and we can focus on that bit.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Yeah, thank you. I realize you you have to run. Um is is there any anything you'd like to add in terms of maybe maybe a question that you wish people would ask you about the book that uh that people don't haven't yet, or anything else you want to leave us with?

SPEAKER_01 22:16

No. Um we don't have time for it, but it's hilarious to me that I've written a whole chapter on lust, which is very direct about the uh Christian sexual ethical, very frank. And no one is brave enough to go there. Um so I would say if you are interested in sex, go read that bit, but um uh but otherwise, no. Thank you for your beautiful and thoughtful questions. It's been really fun.

SPEAKER_02 22:39

Yeah, no, thank you. It's been a delight. And uh, where can we direct our uh viewers and listeners to your work?

SPEAKER_01 22:44

So I have a Substack, more Fully Alive, um, at substack.com, the sacred podcast, or by the book.

SPEAKER_02 22:51

Perfect. And yeah, Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive, I highly recommend it. Thank you so much for joining us again. It's been such a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_02 22:59

All right, folks, that's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks and see you next time.