Let's Talk About: Where Am I?

Brad is back, and this episode is an honest account of where he's been.

• After months of silence, Brad returns to the mic to share what's kept him away: the death of his mother in late October, a brutal flare of his ulcerative colitis, and his daughter's unexpected health issues, all compressed into the same brutal stretch of months
• He reflects on grief that is "clean but massive." The ache of losing someone you genuinely liked, not just loved
• Why he couldn't bring himself to theologize at his own mother's funeral, and what that revealed about Christianity's complicated relationship with sitting in pain
• The slow thaw from creative hibernation: the precipitation cycle that froze, and what it feels like as it starts again
• A shift in posture: from authoritative teacher to honest processor, and why he no longer needs to cap every thought with hope

This one isn't a history episode. But it is human. And it might be what you need to hear if you've also been somewhere dark and quiet lately.

Transcript

This is my first time back on the mic in front of a camera in a long time, months now, many months. Maybe you have wondered where I've been, what I've been doing, what's been going on. It's been difficult to get back on here. I've experienced a lot of resistance.
It's kind of kept me from pushing record. It's been a very painful, difficult few months, which does explain where I've been. A mixture of things. Most impactful being the loss of my mom in late October.
chronic illness, my ulcerative colitis, which had been dormant for quite a while, five years, had been, really had given me no issues whatsoever, was on a powerful medication that sort of kept everything at bay. But it came back with a vengeance and sort of took me out of commission completely for more than two months. And so just my...
personal experience sort of kept me from engaging and that's okay. That's what happens, but it's, it's almost like I feel rusty. My muscles haven't not atrophied, but you know, they're, they're out of practice. And when you go through these kinds of things, you can't help, but you can't help.
start processing reality in your life in different ways it's it's unavoidable so while I sometimes I try to sort of speak with sort of the authority of someone in the know a historian or with regards to Christianity someone who's you know in the know has experienced a lot of the things I talk about but when worlds
collapse, the landscape shifts and changes rapidly. You're sort of left not knowing exactly what to say anymore because you're not really who you were. And that's what I've been grappling with. Not really the exact same person I was, you know, even six months ago. And in a lot of ways, I've been in just a fog.
Thick, misty, cold fog since October. I feel myself coming out of something. Not coming out of grief, but coming out of some form of hibernation. Ulcerative colitis. The disease also known as inflammatory bowel disease. I have a very intense form of it.
But it operates in extremes in both ways. It's like it's either completely active and just decimating my body, my weight, my energy, my health, or it's under complete control and not really affecting me at all. You know, there's a lot of people out there who kind of live with IBD and it at sort of a mild or moderate level.
And I actually think that could potentially be worse to always have some symptoms and have it on your mind a lot. For me, it's like it is actually either all or nothing. I'm glad that I wasn't born 30 years earlier because the treatments available today, there's a lot of different treatments that you can move between that are really powerful and effective.
research foundation and charitable foundation behind it, Crohn's and colitis. And so there's always new things coming out. So in that way, if you have to have some kind of chronic disease, it's not the worst one because it has options. It has treatments. It has research and new things coming out all the time. So for about
what is it, the last six weeks or so, I've been on a new medication that started working right away. And so it takes a while to build up your energy stores and your blood levels again and stuff like that. But once that has been restored, which I think that's what I'm feeling now, physically I feel pretty normal again, just like I did before.
A destructive illness like ulcerative colitis also really occupies all your time and mental energy for a while. And so now that I'm feeling physically strong again and stable, I am now having to kind of look at the emotional landscape, emotional, spiritual landscape that's kind of all around me in the wake of my mom's death. And just the...
The trauma that a destructive illness brings, it's like we tend to operate in our daily lives with some sense of stability. And an illness like that throws that stability out the window. And so you're left kind of, even after you feel better, you're kind of left trembling. There's like this wake of destruction around you.
It was a lot worse for me the first few times that this disease flared up. It first started when I was, how old was I, 31? A lot of people, it gets activated when they're teenagers. So I'm really glad and thankful that I skipped all that. I didn't have any symptoms of this when I was younger. It didn't start till I was quite old. But the first few times...
losing that faith, that automatic sort of assumption that your body will take care of you, will be able to weather things.
will be able to, you know, maybe it gets sick, but it's able to self heal. And when you lose that assumption, life just starts to feel a lot more shaky and impermanent. So this flare up this time wasn't emotionally as devastating or traumatic because I knew the feelings. I knew what was
what was coming and what to expect. So it wasn't like an unknown threat, but it still has this real tendency to kind of isolate you. You can't go out. Your body just won't let you. You are too vulnerable. And so you start to isolate because you need to. It's just the practical. But then that has
you know, an emotional social cost because I'm quite an extroverted person. I like to be around people. New people energize me. Parties, I like being at parties. I like being at gatherings of people. When I feel good, I'm often, I'm loud and, you know, maybe too much like to be the center of attention, things like that.
kind of classic extroverted things. And so when I become isolated from other people, I really do wither quickly and shrivel. And it has all these really potent ripple effects on my mood and personality that I can tell right away. But then like so many people, the more you isolate from people, the more you want to.
And then you stop responding to texts and invitations and even just like, how are you doing messages? And you stop thinking in terms of kind of having a life out there. And that just leads to more, in my experience, more shriveling and withering. And so the feeling I'm having right now is sort of like,
After pushing record, it kind of feels like a bear coming out of hibernation, opening his eyes after this period of sleepy dormancy, a grogginess. The light is bright. The outside light is bright. The air is still cold. Your body, you know, you've...
Like a bear, you've lost all your sort of winter stores of fat and energy and you're kind of thin and weak, hungry, but also sleepy. And so that's kind of where, how I'm feeling right now in a lot of different ways. And you can probably hear it in my voice, my voice. It just doesn't feel, I don't have that usual.
sort of energy behind it. And so part of that is because of coming out of hibernation. Obviously part of it is grief and the ongoing grief. So I'm navigating that very new terrain for me. I've never lost someone. I guess there is no one like your mother. That loss is unique. So I've lost, you know, grandparents and things like that. But
None of those losses were like reality altering in the same way as this one was. My mom and I were very close, always have been, had a really healthy relationship in most ways that I can think of. I would say we had become really good friends in the years after I...
became an adult. Some parents don't transition well from being parents of children to parents of adults. They struggle with how to relate to their kids as adults, as autonomous adults. But that was never really our problem. My mom and I did not have that issue. It's like when I
became an adult, she treated me with respect and curiosity, wanted to know who I was at each time, who I was becoming. Like a lot of people, when you go off to university and come home for Thanksgiving or Christmas or summer, after each semester, you're sort of a different person, new passions, new
new obsessions and interests, new insight. And sometimes I'm assuming it can sound, to the parents, it can sound kind of arrogant at times. You come back and you kind of think you understand everything anew and you go back to school and come back again and think you now understand everything even better. But my parents, my mom and dad always treated me with that.
respect and curiosity, asking genuine questions about sort of what I was thinking, what I was doing, what I was planning, what these new insights meant to me. And that really never ended. And I tried to sort of do the same to them. So we were really, yeah, my mom and I were really close. She was just a wonderful person to know, a very safe,
secure leader of a person, a planner, an organizer, and someone who you could always go to in a crisis for wise decision-making and plans of action. But I really did just love to talk with her. Generally, how it would go is, you know, as the night got later and later, more
people my dad brielle my my wife my partner would
start to nod off go go to sleep and it was always my mom and I just left left talking and often had to just force ourselves to stop because the clock would hit 1 30 or 2 and that was that was just the the relationship we had for the really the majority of my adult life and so in a lot of ways it's a it's mixed it's like losing
losing a good friend as well as losing a mother. But I'm thankful my grief is not, as far as I can tell, complex grief. From people I know, from friends, I understand that losing a parent when you have a really unhealthy relationship or with all kinds of dysfunctional dynamics is really complicated. For me,
My grief is clean, which I'm thankful for. And that comes from having a relationship, like comes from a person like my mom who pursued maturity and wisdom and curiosity. Love, really, when you put it all together, it leaves the grief is huge. The abyss that you feel internally is painful and vacuous and massive.
But it is still fairly straightforward. The grief is missing her. Wishing this wasn't the case. Wishing she was still there. So that we could keep doing the things we did. Wanting that relationship, that dynamic, those conversations to go on for another 25 years. That's all it is. It's just wishing this wasn't.
true. You know, you ask yourself, am I grieving properly? Am I doing it right? The advice is always the same. There's no right way to grieve. There's no one way to do it. There's no exact timeline. There's no amount of tears or lack thereof that's what it should be. So I don't know if I'm grieving well.
I know that I feel better. I feel a release and relief when I do let myself think of her and dwell on those, dwell on the beautiful memories that generate the pain that leads to tears. And I try not to suppress that or avoid it. I know I do at times, but I try not to. In fact, I...
You know, sometimes I try to put myself in situations where I will feel those, will feel that pain. Like visiting her, visiting my parents' place and kind of just sitting there in the places we used to sit alone to just really feel the absence. Because feeling that absence, it's strange, but it feels good in a way. It doesn't feel.
pleasant. It doesn't feel happy or peaceful, but it feels right and good. And another thing I haven't done, which various forms of the old me would have done, is try to rush to theologize and rush to announce hope to myself and those around me who are also in grief.
my wife and my daughters and my brother and his family and my dad. I did the eulogy at her funeral, and I always thought, or at least, again, this old version of me thought that that's the kind of space where it's good to be sad but also announce hope, particularly Christian hope, the hope of resurrection, the hope of a world made.
right a world made new and all that but i just couldn't i not that i couldn't bring myself to say it i just i had no desire to speak of that it just felt contrived and wrong and it just that was not what i was going to say at the eulogy so i focused on kind of inviting the people there into my
experience of absence so it was it was kind of like a sort of a personal history of our life my mom and and me in particular and kind of that shifting relationship sort of like what I just said about moving from sort of child to friend but that that left me with you know some sort of foundational
Questions and I don't even know what to call them. Not necessarily questions or concerns, but foundational sort of changes at what we might think of as a theological or spiritual foundational level. And just realizing that how much of Christianity and the messages it's delivered over the years, over the centuries, have been about.
I've been about reframing grief and pain with hope. But when I was actually there, I just really didn't want to hear it. And it wasn't because I felt it wasn't because I was feeling fragile and angry that that just really wasn't the feeling. I just didn't want to hear about what was going to come because I didn't want to hear about.
the world to come or where our hope is because it just felt like there was something missing, something being short-circuited in truly feeling the absence for a prolonged period of time.
not feeling it for a minute or two and then putting the bookend on a boat. But we have hope. I just didn't want any of that. I just wanted to take in the absence. In our social lives, when you are struggling with something or have lost, there's grief or pain, so often we...
have to learn that people don't want to hear in that moment a solution. They don't want to hear a silver lining. They don't want to hear why it's good or someone's statement of, well, at least fill in the blank. People who are grieving and struggling just often don't want to hear that in that moment. And the people who persist and
must say something hopeful or positive, even when the grieving person doesn't want to receive that, we generally think, okay, well, that person needs to say something hopeful for themselves. They're the ones, they're uncomfortable with what's happening. They can't handle the crisis. They're saying this stuff. Sometimes people are saying it to bring you comfort, but often they're saying it because they
They need that comfort and that certainty. And in our social lives, we would probably, if you had a healthy relationship with said person, you'd probably want to ask them why they feel the need to this compulsion to say something positive or hopeful because it's not necessarily the healthiest thing. But that just got me thinking how much of Christianity's relationship with
suffering and pain and loss is kind of like that unhealthy person who isn't willing to feel the absence, who isn't willing to feel the pain, who needs to resolve their own psychic crisis with words of hope and encouragement in order to kind of go on. That's got me thinking a lot. I mean, I already think a lot about
As you know, Christianity's history. I talk a lot about Christianity's trauma that the Christian community has endured, especially early on in its history, but then in the ensuing centuries, you know, going from persecuted minority to persecuting majority and all the different things that I cover in my course, The Body of Christ Keeps the Score.
where I kind of try to track the family origins of the major Christian dysfunctions that we see, especially in the Western tradition around things like fear and control. Christianity's most obvious and insidious dysfunctions that have caused a lot of suffering in the world. That's important to me because hiding, suppressing,
reinterpreting, putting a positive spin, diluting the dysfunctions of Christianity don't serve anyone. They only serve to perpetuate harm. And I'm a person in my work who's very committed to exposing these dynamics and looking at where they came from and letting them just be there like any dysfunctional family at some point, if you really want.
to get help and really want to heal the rifts and stop cycles of harm. You have to expose the family's secret history to the light and feel its pain. You have to. If you don't, if you keep it locked away in the damp basement of the church, it molds.
It rots, but it doesn't decompose. And the only way is to bring it into the light, into the air, so that it can actually sit there and break down and return whatever fertility it has to the soil. So that's something that I'm very passionate about and committed to. And that's what most of my work focuses on, is exploring different aspects of...
Western Christianity's dysfunctional family history. But, you know, when over the last year, so 2025 and now 2026, even though I know quite a bit about religious trauma, Christianity's dysfunctions, it has also been just a horrendous year for Christianity.
in the West, especially in North America. We have seen the ugliest tendencies and dysfunctions of the Christian tradition on full display every day with Christian nationalism, with right-wing authoritarianism. And I think I thought I would be, because of what I study and think about, I thought I would be more prepared for it.
But I got to say, the last year has been just enraging and embarrassing and infuriating. And disappointing doesn't really capture it. Just have wanted to distance myself from, this is the honest truth, I've wanted to distance myself from Christianity as much as I could. In so many ways, it's exhausting.
And it just leaves you with so many questions. And I think that being like, so you have, you know, Christianities, especially evangelicalism, but evangelicalism has such a powerful gravitational weight in North America that other Christian traditions or even just other less.
less aggressive, less destructive, more mature versions of the church, even though those certainly exist.
In my personal life, that's the kind of community I'm connected to. It's still evangelicals gravitational pull pulls Christianity as a whole in forcing us to kind of reckon and respond as we should. Because American evangelicalism, even though it's in our face every day and it's in so many ways very ugly and needs to break down and decompose, it is...
What it's doing is it's manifesting the family, the Christian family's most destructive dysfunctions in the loudest way. But it doesn't mean that the other versions of Christianity haven't inherited some of those same family patterns. I have so many thoughts because I've been so...
My throat has just been closed up. My voice has been silent for so many months. I have so many thoughts and things to say. It's like the precipitation cycle that I usually go through has been frozen. Often I enter into a phase of consuming.
reading all kinds of things and listening to all sorts of books and lectures and takes. And I'm writing down all kinds of thoughts and going down rabbit holes and exploring. That phase is sort of like, it's kind of, I don't know what stage of the precipitation cycle that is, but I guess it's sort of the, like water is on the ground and the ground is like soaking it up and it's evaporating. So those two things are happening.
And then it forms clouds. And when the clouds get, you know, saturated, they just have to start, have to rain and return that water back down to the earth. And that's usually what it was like for me, at least when things are kind of functioning normally, this period of consuming and absorbing and thinking, and then it turns into producing something, you know.
recording a video or a podcast or making a course or writing a lecture or a webinar or something like that. But in the months since my mom's death, I've just been, it's like this polar vortex sort of blew in from the north of life and froze everything. And so that's kind of what, it's like my throat, my voice was frozen. So I've been reading a lot.
I've been, not at first, at first, after, you know, in the couple months after my mom passed and my sickness rebooted, even then I didn't even want, I didn't want to read anything. I didn't want anything new coming into my mind. I just didn't have any capacity for it. It's like the processing was full. And in some ways that processing is still pretty, you know,
not to overuse like computer metaphors, but like my CPU, personal CPU was maxed out in the last couple of weeks as my physical health returned. And I've been sort of sorting through internally and externally some of the emotional wreckage of my mom's death and my sickness and another complicating factor at the same time, which sort of...
also really threw me was my daughter started having, well, she's had two seizures, kind of came out of nowhere. And so that's just, she's fine. She's doing well in every way that they can test neurologically and doesn't seem to have any lasting damage, but it's just, it's cranked up the hypervigilance. That is sort of my default setting.
to really high levels. And, you know, I'm trying to be mindful of how that, you know, my anxiety about her seizures affects her, how she receives that because people are co-regulating. And I think me being anxious about it raises her anxiety about it, which that's just not a good cycle to get into. So there's been a lot of challenge on that with that as well. And that's all been in the same few months. Obviously it's not just me.
going through this. My mom had a very positive impact on a lot of people. And it was just really a force for a source of meaningful relationship to a number of different people, including her granddaughters, who had just a, you know, only got, I guess, at the end of the day, a little more than a decade with her. I thought it would be a lot longer.
But in that decade, she packed in a lot of grandmothering that they'll probably remember for their whole life. So it hasn't just been hard for me. I know in this episode here, I'm talking a lot about my experience. And I don't know, I guess there's a part in me that is warning me to stop making it all about me.
There's just a lot of processing going on and I kind of have to talk like this for a while. But what I was trying to say is the sort of religious and political background noise and goings on behind these very personally painful experiences was the last year has not been one of peace and progress and integration.
people coming together and working to make things better. It's been a very destructive, acidic, hideous, ugly year full of all kinds of suffering for so many people. Whether it's through war or through the U.S.'s sort of corrosive war on itself and its own citizens and its own
you know, inhabitants. It's just been ugly, you know, Trump and all the authoritarian moves and the growth of American fascism and the breakdown and corrosion of the rule of law and things like that. That has taken its toll on all of us. And I'm, you know, a Canadian living far from the center of that.
occupying a place of privilege a male white christian privilege and it takes its toll it has taken its toll even on me i i can't really i can't really imagine the kind of anxiety that that generates in in others so that's been really ugly it's been a really gross backdrop kind of behind these personal tragedies and then
I mean, also just being in Canada as my mom is kind of dying and having to even entertain the ideas of American invasion or destabilization. You just want to be like, look, life is hard enough when everything goes well. And we have this...
Human beings, especially those who have achieved a position of power and control and who want to maintain that position by any means necessary because it feels like annihilation to lose the power and control that you've established. We just have this tendency to continue to focus on the completely wrong things and make everything worse for everybody as we...
pursue these amygdala driven subconscious survival strategies, willing to step on those around us to get back to a place of a feeling of security and safety that really no amount of power and prestige and money fills. So with that, that stuff going on as my mom is kind of dying, you just had to, I, and part of me, parts of me.
had to go numb to that, but other parts just couldn't go numb. It's the world that we live in. And then you add the Christian, just, I don't even know what to call it. Really, it's the collapse of Christianity as we know it. Christianity as we, as a millennial, as I experienced it, evangelicalism in the late 90s, early 2000s, I'm one of those people.
And there's enough to process from then, from that period, again, even when everything's going well. But evangelicalism in particular will never return to that situation. That's in the past forever now. Christianity as we know it, as we have typically experienced it in North America, is collapsed. It will always be different now.
The conversations we have about it, the assumptions we have about it are different. And there's a lot there to unpack and process. And I hope to do that. I guess what I'm hoping to do in these new podcast episodes and videos where I hopefully can grab clips from some of the more, I don't know, interesting moments and put them on my platform.
To occupy the position of authoritative teacher less and more occupy a position of sort of informed, authentic processor. I am a historian. That's what I know and think about and read about most of the time. So that's all still going to be there. But just kind of leaning more into processing complicated things that don't end up with some easy resolution.
In my days, even five years ago, even two years ago, I kind of desperately craved resolution and certainty, especially in matters of faith. And I was willing to kind of engage with painful, complex, nuanced, ambiguous material on Christianity's
relationship with power and colonialism and all that kind of thing. I was willing to engage with that and feel pain and tension, but I needed it to be able to have a resolution where I could come out and say something like, well, yes, colonization was damaging and Christians were complicit in it, but you also have to consider this side. And I wanted to come to some kind of
I've talked about this before, but wanting to have some kind of balanced ledger. Here's 10 strikes against Christianity. Here's 10 strikes four. So we come out even. I needed to have some kind of resolution or even something like feeling, just viscerally experiencing the pain of the world and having to say, but at least one day all things will be made well or something.
I understand very well the need for that, and that that can be received as good news and be stabilizing at times. That is true, but I needed it because I needed this psychic or existential crisis in the moment of encountering the ambiguity of it all. I needed that to be tucked away, drained away, and certainty.
confidence to be reestablished kind of at the end of every conversation. Even it's like it was capping off every thought at some level, capping off every thought and every conversation and everything I wrote and every video I made. I wanted to cap it off with hope. And I could tell myself I was doing it because, you know, I was committed to the gospel or the truth or wanted to.
didn't want to lead anyone into despair or something like that. But the honest truth is I was doing it because I needed it for my own sense of stable identity and my own relationship with the world and reality. I needed that to be said because I needed it to be true so that I could feel secure. And I don't know why completely. I don't feel like I need that anymore.
And I don't feel nihilistic and I don't feel hopeless and I don't feel like there's no truth and that there's none of that, which is, again, at least in evangelical or reform circles, that was the threat that you would feel that sort of destabilization if you kind of move away from the...
uncertainties that are confessed. And I don't feel any of those things. I just feel slower and quieter and more comfortable in a way with ambiguity, with not knowing, with the unknown itself. And there's a lot to reflect on there that I hopefully will do. I hope that I can continue to be pushing record and re-engaging because I am now
trying to reconnect initially, because I was feeling like I have to make something. I got to record a podcast. I got to make some videos. I need to write a new lecture, something like that. I've been feeling that for weeks, but the blockages were too great. And I realized that I was feeling that because for reasons that were probably not healthy, connecting my identity as a person who speaks in public about
important matters or something like that. So I was feeling a little bit of a desperation and I just eventually kind of let it go and thought I'll speak again when I, I'll speak again at some point. And so in that precipice precipitation cycle, I really do feel now like a thaw is beginning and evaporation is starting to occur. It is not like a, you know, 20 degree boosted by 20 degrees kind of thaw.
But it's like I'm hitting zero, one, two, three degrees Celsius. And the ice, what's frozen is starting to thaw. Clouds are starting to form from evaporation. And, you know, it's spitting. There's some rain or mist in the air. So much to say. And I'm looking forward to reconnecting with you.
with some of the people that I love having conversations with, and just with the situations that we're dealing with in the world and in Christian circles and ex-Christian circles right now. My goals are a little looser, a little less defined, kind of changing, but I know that I want to engage honestly with reality, with history, and with what is happening on the ground, what is actually happening in the real world.
more honestly. Because I think doing that, just like that family and therapy, it leads, it's painful, it's disorienting, but it leads somewhere. It leads somewhere good and restorative and healing. Honesty doesn't lead to despair, even though it can really hurt. Well, thanks for listening to this new episode of Freestyle Theology. I appreciate
If you made it this far, I appreciate that. And hopefully I will be back really soon and you'll see me start seeing my face again out there in the world. Until next time.