Spring Re-Release: Spirituality, Religion, and the Rhythm of our Lives

We're back with another special, Spring re-release! Take a listen to our very first conversation with Hero Rev. Lizzie. 

In April, we explored past episodes that dealt with ... well, the Past! Stay tuned for May, when we'll revisit conversations centered around finding peace in the Present.

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Spirituality and religion provide a framework for understanding the divine through patterns of prayer, rituals, and community support that help us navigate both the ordinary and extraordinary moments. Whether through the solace of personal meditation or the solidarity of communal worship, these practices can ground us and bring us closer to understanding our place in the world and our relationship with the divine.

In this episode, Hero Rev. Lizzie McManus Dail explains the differences between spirituality and religion, how faith can change you, and the role spirituality can play in the darkest times. Lizzie is passionate about the evangelism of a God who makes each of us for joy, which is why you might see her doing silly dances and talking about church history on Instagram and TikTok with her over 70K followers.

What You Will Learn

• [05:49] What spirituality is and how it differs from religion 
• [07:28] How spirituality helps when navigating grief and difficult times 
• [15:10] The complaint prayer to finding peace
• [17:57] Why God didn’t intervene in that tragic experience 
• [21:43] How spiritual conversations help us reconnect with ourselves and find peace  
• [29:03] Lizzie's turning point to becoming an ordained priest
• [37:36] About Jubilee church and the work Lizzie does as a priest
• [42:06] How to be more spiritual in your life through the Ignatian examination  

Let’s Connect!

Rev. Lizzie McManus Dail

Website | Instagram

Chandler Stroud

Website | LinkedIn | Instagram

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Mixing and editing provided by Next Day Podcast.

Transcript

Hey guys, it's Chandler and welcome to The Healing Heroes. 

I promise you (music)

I'm Chandler Stroud, an executive wife and busy mom of two who after years of living with anxiety health struggles and an unshakeable feeling like I should be happier, made a profound discovery that changed everything. Join me on a journey where unexpected paths lead to healing and more happiness. On this show, we will explore unconventional ways to unlock more joy in your own life. With the help of my very own healers and trusted advisors, the healing heroes. 

Hi everyone. Today I am joined by a very special individual for what is to be a deeply meaningful conversation. We will be diving into the difference between spirituality and religion, how faith can change you, the role spirituality can play in your darkest of times, and why you may already be engaging in spiritual practices without even realizing it. As always, I want to provide a bit of personal context for this episode before we begin. I grew up Christian and a parishioner of an Episcopalian church. The place where I was baptized, confirmed, and later married. Despite all that time going to church, I still couldn't tell you much about the Bible. I mostly went because my parents told me to. And for the powdered donuts after Sunday service, to me, it was a thing of formality, a place you go out of obligation to demonstrate to others you're a good Christian. 

I pretty much stopped going after I was confirmed. Yet I would speak to God in private occasions when I thought I needed his help. My attempts to communicate with God stopped entirely in the spring of 2019 when one of my closest childhood friends, Erin lost her daughter Lillian, shortly after giving birth in the hospital for inexplicable reasons, I grieved intensely and although I tried to find comfort in church, became so overcome with emotion at the service following her memorial, I fell apart and had to leave the building. Ironically, it was Aaron, that same friend who unknowingly prompted me to rediscover my faith. You see, at the request of my husband, I joined him for a come As you are service last year, saw her there and learned she had been attending every single Sunday. I couldn't take my eyes off of her. I kept thinking, if she's here, she must have forgiven or somehow made peace with him. 

I returned the following Sunday, and as the band played, I sang through tears. Something shifted inside me at that service and I knew I'd never be the same again. While this is intended to be an episode about spirituality and not religion, as I hope my story indicated, my faith journey has been filled with many twists and turns. However, I can tell you now with absolute certainty that rediscovering and most importantly, redefining my spirituality and religious practices, these last several months has been one of the most transformational aspects of healing my way to a happier life. And so today I couldn't be more thrilled to welcome Reverend Lizzie McManus Dale to our show. I met her through a mutual friend and local priest. So before we dive in, let me tell you a little bit more about my friend Lizzie. She has lived all over the world with her boots now rooted in Austin, Texas, where Lizzie is living her dream. 

As the founder of Jubilee Episcopal Church, she's passionate about evangelism for a God who makes each of us for joy, which is why you might see her doing silly dances and talking about church history on Instagram and TikTok with her 60,000 followers, Lizzie received her first communion as a devout Catholic in the second grade. She's a second generation clergy woman and specifically a clergy woman mama. And she delights in talking about motherhood, pregnancy and reproductive justice. From this lens of faith and leadership in the church, a graduate from Mount Holyoke College, Lizzie brought a passion for intersectional feminism and queer theology to her studies at Duke Divinity School and Seminary of the Southwest. It was her time in both Massachusetts and North Carolina that brought her into the Episcopal Church where she was ordained in 2020. While grateful for her academic formation, she still swears that most things she learned about being a priest, she learned from five plus years of working in the service industry and access to the arts in her public high school. Please join me in welcoming Lizzie to the show. Lizzie, I'm so excited to have you here today. Welcome, and thank you for joining us. 

Oh my gosh, it is truly my joy and my honor, and just what a beautiful sharing that you have offered, Chandler. I mean, that's the whole reason I'm here is for your love and your solidarity that you express for your friends. And as a fellow mom who loves and feels very deeply, it's just an absolute honor to be here in conversation with you. 

Thanks, Lizzie, really appreciate that and I feel the same. I'm so excited to cover this meaningful topic for so many of our listeners, and I'm eager to dive into your own faith journey during our time together. Before we get there, I'd love to start with an important question that I think will inform much of our conversation today. Can you share your perspective on what spirituality is and how you think it differs from religion? This is 

Such a fascinating question that I have been dreaming, scheming, thinking, researching about for 15 plus years because some days I'm like, there's no difference. And some days I'm like, oh, there's very stark difference. And that I say that as someone who studied religion, anthropologically as a religion major at a secular school, religion is often seen as dogmatic and structured and judgmental and closed off where spirituality is something organic and enriching for God within and outside of ourselves. Spirituality sort of has connotations of nature and connection, and I think religion can have really beautiful connotations of big gorgeous stained glass windows and soaring ceilings, but also have a sort of aura of, I think about the judge and hunchback of Notre Dame. 

So I think sometimes if I were to take a wild stab at this, I would say religion offers us a structure and an ancient connection to a pattern of worship. And I'm speaking specifically as a Christian because I can only speak authentically from my own experience. And so I think other folks from other religions and other faiths would have different definitions. But my own definition would be religion offers us that structure, that ancient connection, that history, that context, that situation that gives spirituality a place to breathe and a place to be held in communion with other people. 

That is a beautiful definition and I really appreciate you sharing that. Thank you. I love that. How have you seen spirituality help those who are navigating grief or other types of difficult distressing times in their lives? 

I see this in so many ways, and so I want to share a personal story of how it has helped me. So in the Episcopal church, we have a phrase that's not exclusively ours, but it's one that we kind of own that says, praying, shapes believing. And what I cherish about this is it means that the religious practices, the rhythm, the repetition, the going to church and having powdered donuts and saying your prayers right, even there is a liturgy to coffee hour. Make no mistake. 

Thank you for that. That's really affirming for me. No, there really 

Is. So I think that the sort of repetition, the rhythm, the pattern that we engage in and in the Episcopal church we have a pretty predictable flow to the service. There's some readings of scripture, there's some prayers, there's some songs, but then we move to this holy meal called Holy Eucharist, which is just a fancy Greek word for giving of thanks or thanksgiving, and it's a meal that we share in bread and wine. And this Episcopal phrase, praying shapes, believing draws upon the fact that this is a rhythmic repetitive action. Week in, week out, when you're feeling it, when you're not feeling it, when there's feet of snow on the ground outside or when it's burning hot, we have this rhythm. We have this rhythm of prayer that can ground us. And so when you are in places and times in your life that are full of grief, which is a time that I think profoundly disorients us from our rhythms, it rips open the pattern of our lives. 

It rips open predictability, it rips open safety. It rips open a sense of stability when we feel like we have no center, we have no pattern. Prayer is something there to give us a pattern, to give us a rhythm that can take us not only back to times when perhaps we were more deeply in that rhythm and felt more settled, but also to help us find new with a new body, with a new way of being, with a new way of looking at the world with a heavier heart, with wounds. It helps us find a way to find our way back to God. And so we have a prayer in the Episcopal church that I have said every night for 10 years, this prayer service. It's very simple. It's called coplan. So it comes from a really ancient history all the way back to monks and nuns, to the desert, mothers and fathers, to people praying and keeping the hours of every day praying at certain times every day. 

And Complan is night prayers or right before you go to bed. And these prayers have a lot of intercessions or pleading to protect us from the perils of night, which for years I was sort of like, yeah, sure, okay, God, please protect me from the perils of this night. And I had an academic intellectual grasp that these are prayers from a time before electricity or even from a time when people were genuinely afraid of lions coming in and eating them, which is still a reality in parts of the world. So there's sort of this kind of almost primal urgency, this very ancient fear of the night that's in these prayers that I did not have as someone with 21st century American comforts who can flip on a switch. And then I had a baby and I had that wave of hormonal panic of falling in love as a mother, this tidal wave of I have never known, love this. 

This is so powerful, this is so consuming. And oh my God, my heart is now outside of my body. And I suddenly realized that this night is full of peril. This night is full of terrors and especially for me, I didn't sleep the whole time I was in the hospital after giving birth. I was so afraid to close my eyes and take my eyes off of my daughter in part because I'd had a very traumatic birth and she wasn't breathing when she was born, and so they couldn't give her to me right away. They had to save her life. They were doing what they needed to do. But that moment of not being able to hold her the first time in her life, we'd been separated. I couldn't be there for her, haunted me. And so all of a sudden in this moment, that wasn't the deepest grief of my life. 

I've had losses, but was sort of the greatest terror in realizing my own vulnerability and loving her so fiercely outside of my body and realizing, oh my God, I have given birth. I have helped create the person who is going to be in my undoing if something happens to her. All of a sudden I was like, God, protect her. Save me from the perils of this night. I know that there are enemies like a roaring and ravaging lion. Protect her, protect her, protect her, and give me the assurance that you are God. And I am not so that I as an exhausted mother can take a sleep. 

Oh, Lizzie, that I'm sure resonates with so many women out there. 

Yeah, thank you. I mean, I don't want to flip it and ask you, but is that something that you've ever experienced as a mom, that anxiety, that need to pray? 

Oh my gosh, absolutely. I think it's really interesting. I talk a lot on the show about how I had suppressed that trauma and was constantly living in this state of hypervigilance and survivor mode for most of my life. Can I tell you the physical symptoms of that truly started when I became a mother? The dreams I had when my son was a few months old of him falling out of airplanes in the night in a storm, it sounds so crazy, but I would wake up and scream these noises that came from my body even woke my husband up, which is guys saying a lot to wake that man up out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night. And I just didn't know. I was like, it must be coming from the exhaustion and the hormones and whatever. But as he aged and then my daughter was born, one of the signals last year that really tipped me off that I probably needed to explore this feeling in a deeper way was I would go away for weekends without my kids. 

And whenever I left my life and would go away, whether it was with my husband or even a group of girlfriends, the most irrational fears would come at night. During the day I was completely fine, but when the house got quiet and the lights went out and I was by myself, but not by myself, I'd be sharing a bedroom with a good friend and I would lay there and think the worst thoughts and my heart would race and my breathing would get shallow. And it's awful. It's terrifying. It's really the worst feeling in the world. And what brought me comfort, what eventually allowed me to sleep was meditating. I turned to meditation. There was a sleep meditation that was free on one of the apps on my phone, and I would play, it was four minutes long and I would play it on repeat until I could relax enough to fall asleep. Yeah. So I've definitely been there. The anxiety was palpable in those situations. Your heart is outside your body and it can feel irrational at times. 

Yeah. It's a rational, but it's also the most rational response at the same time. You know what I mean? I think it's actually a totally human and normal response to all of a sudden realize that you have a love so powerful that it wakes you up in the dead of night. 

Amen to that. Yeah. And I have to share with you, when we were prepping for this call, you shared the Complan prayer that you said yourself. I remember to find peace and I've been saying it every night since that conversation. I love it. I absolutely love it. 

Could I share it now? Is that okay? 

Please? Absolutely. I would love for you to read it. So 

The service of compliments a couple pages and it is really nice. So if you've ever look up Book of Common Prayer, it starts on page 127, and this comes from page 1 34. And it goes like this, keep watch, dear Lord with those who work or watch or weep this night and give your angels charge over those who sleep, tend the sick Lord Christ, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted shield, the joyous and all for your love sake. And for me in that list, that litany of soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, bless the dying, be with all people who are suffering, who are going through the grief, the disorientation, the lack of rhythm that this offers. There's this line shield, the joyous. And that was also kind of my salvation and kind of the way that this very structured, very old prayer gave my spirituality space to breathe because it was like shield the joyous trust that God is going to shield your joy, that God is going to shield the joy of this love of this child, but also all the good and beautiful things that have happened that are happening that will happen, and that I don't have to armor up to borrow from Brene Brown. 

I don't have to guard against joy and feel like it is under threat. Instead, I can trust that that joy is here because it is actually even more primal and even more foundational than fear because God made us for joy. 

So well said. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And I do, I love that prayer. I love the other line too. Guide us waking and guard us sleeping that awake. We may watch with Christ and asleep. We may rest in peace. It's such a beautiful way to end every day. 

And this makes me emotional to think about, but we say rest in peace when someone has died, right? And so to guard us, waking can guide us sleeping that awake, we may watch with Christ in asleep, we may rest in peace. It's like it's permission to fall into this sort of thin place that dreams offer us to connect with God, but also a prayer that we sustain for our whole lifelong so that when we die, we can accept it with peace and those who love us and those who will grieve can have a sense of peace even in the midst of potentially trauma and loss and 

Sorrow. Well, thank you again for sharing that. Oh, thank you. Thank you. And I don't even just mean on this podcast. I mean with me in life, I've really come to love saying it every night, and I just really appreciate that. So I'm grateful for you. One question I know that I've had experience grappling with is I shared at the start of our discussion today is what do you say to the individual who after experiencing a tragedy or significant loss, asks you why God didn't intervene in the outcome? I just 

Want to first say that there's not actually a cookie cutter response to this because as a priest when someone asks me this, right, and people really do all the time, sometimes in the grocery store, it's a total stranger. They see me in my collar and I actually, oh my gosh, please always approach me if I have my collar on in public. That means I'm open to a conversation and I cherish. I cherish that trust. I mean, that's like what a sacred thing. But I also have that with friends. I've had that with teachers. I've had that of course with my parishioners. And so that is a question that comes from the belly of loss. And there is no answer that is going to be a salve over that wound. There's just not. And I think a lot of Christians have made really terrible mistakes in trying to say really crappy things like God needed another angel in heaven, or everything happens for a reason, or insert some other platitude here. 

And if those phrases have been useful to you personally in your healing journey, be blessed by them. I have had things, phrases, very sort of intense theological moves come to me in moments of my deep grief that I needed to hear, but they did not come to me in the form of someone saying, you had this bad thing happen. Let me brush it away, or let me tell you why it happened. It came to me in the form of people who were also in the pit, people who were also deep down in the burrows of grief, or it came to me from people who had lived through something really similar. And we're speaking of that experience 10, 20, 30 years down the line from where I am. And so I just want to say that there's not a one size fits all response. And so my first impulse when someone asks me why didn't God intervene is to first say, I am so sorry. 

I am so sorry that you are grieving. I am so sorry that this happened to you. I am so sorry for the shrapnel that continues to cut you open. I see it. I see that this hurts. And sometimes I can say, I see that this was unjust. I can see that what was done to you was an injustice. What was done to you was a sin against God, right? Because there is a whole spectrum of pain that we can be talking about here. But I also know that there are times like the story you shared at the beginning of just horrific random loss that doesn't have an explanation. And so in those moments, I completely understand why people want to walk away from God. I really do. And what I know and I trust is God never walks away from us. And the story and scripture that has been my guiding light when several years ago, 10 years ago now actually four people in my family were killed in a plane crash. 

Oh, Lizzie, I didn't know. I'm so sorry. 

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It's terrible. No one knows why it happened. Something malfunctioned in the engine and it exploded and it was instant and horrific. And there's no guidebook for that. There's just no, it's a wild thing to lose a whole branch of your family. I mean aunt, uncle, and two cousins. And what my father said, and everyone in my family kept coming back to is the story of Jesus in John chapter 11 where his friend Lazarus has died and Lazarus had two sisters, Mary and Martha, and we meet Mary and Martha several times in scripture because their house is clearly a place that Jesus found respite. It was a place where he's not surrounded by a crowd, which is actually quite unusual in the gospels for Jesus to not have this whole clamoring crew around him. He's just chilling, right? Good visual. No, right. He's chilling. Martha's cooking him dinner, Mary's asking him questions. So he's getting to have some one-on-one time with these two very precious disciples and women leaders in the church, but it's a place he took respite. These are his friends, this is his crew. And Lazarus, he knew that Lazarus was sick actually, they sent word to him several times, and his friends who are with him when they get this word, he's like, shouldn't we go? Can't you do something dude who heals people? 

Yeah, exactly. Isn't this part of your JD job description? Yes, definitely under general responsibilities. And Jesus doesn't go, he doesn't go. He doesn't go. And then he walks up to the house and Mary and Martha come running out one at a time to speak with him. And they say, my God, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. They're furious. They're grieving. They don't hold back. They don't say, oh God, I know that you did this on purpose. If you had been here, he wouldn't have died. WTF basically. And Jesus does not, even though he has at other places in scripture said, this is going to be for God's glory or things that I think Christians can sometimes reach for as a nice little explanation. That's not what Jesus does in that moment. We have the shortest verse in all of scripture. 

Jesus weeps, he weeps with his friends, Mary and Martha. I come to that story and I just see Jesus weeping and he doesn't force a theological explanation or spiritual explanation. He doesn't try to tell Mary and Martha, it's all going to work out. He weeps with them. He is present to them deep in solidarity, in their grief, which I think when we have terrible losses in our life, that is what we crave from our human community. And it is what I believe God is most doing with us too, is standing deep in solidarity with us saying, I know this pain too, and I'm going to sit here with you as you sob with all over your face. And I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid of you yelling at me. I'm not afraid of you cursing me. I'm not afraid of you saying you never want to darken the door of a church again. I love you and I'm here with you. 

I'm so moved by that and it really resonates and I find it so helpful. I really do. I don't think that particular scene has never been brought to life for me in the way that you just shared it. So I really appreciate you doing it and articulating it that way that really hit home. How would you say spiritual conversations, whether prayer, meditation or something else, help people reconnect with themselves and find peace 

In so many ways, a doctrine, which is a fancy way of saying a thing, we believe in Christianity and the Episcopal Church is that we believe all of us are made in the image of God. And it's a very specific and also really weirdly vague thing to say, made in the image of just like God, also have hot pink lipstick. I mean probably sometimes, 

But 

What I think that means, how I have seen it embodied in my own prayer life. And when I speak with people who are just so wise and just people who you can just feel that they are tapped in to the source, 

Love those people. It is 

Speaking to God, but it is also speaking to the God within us. That image of God means that when we get quiet, when we get really deep into our own inner wisdom, and sometimes tapping into that inner wisdom is being quiet with ourselves, but sometimes that is also in community because to be a Christian is to be a part of the body of Christ, which means our individual bodies with other bodies, meaning other people together form the body of Christ. So we need that communion. We need that conversation. We need that community and that connection. And those are places to have these kinds of sacred conversations to reveal that inner wisdom, that inner connection with God helps us know more and more who we are and whose we are. And that is what I think prayer offers us. My daughter's really into Moana right now. 

Best phase. I could watch Moana every day of the week truly come 

Over. It's on every day. So we actually run a rotation between Moana and Mama Mia right now, which is actually pretty top tier. Honestly. You 

Should sprinkle in some encanto because that is now officially my number one favorite Disney movie of all time. I love that movie. 

Oh my gosh, so good, so good. And also the music so good. So the Moana connection is this. So I think about this all the time because I'm sitting writing my sermon while moana's on in the background. So every sermon has some sort of Moana reference explicitly or implicitly. Now, 

I love it. Inspo comes from all sorts of surprising places. 

It does. But getting so for real, Moana over and over and over is the ocean chose me to return the heart. And there's this great line where Maui is like, the ocean shows you you're 12 can't sail, or seven whatever. You're like seven can't sail, great choice. And then he says, why didn't the ocean just return the heart itself? And he is like, this doesn't make sense. And that question is just left. It is just left open in the plot of the movie. There's no ocean coming up saying, Moana, I chose you because you have a heart of gold or because you're the Hercules of your people or whatever. That question is just open. And so when Moana has this moment of great defeat, when Maui abandons her, when she's tried to return the heart, and the first time she tries and she's not successful, she's weeping and she's staring at the ocean and her grandma comes to visit her, and her grandma doesn't even answer the question. 

Her grandma does not say, well, the ocean shows you because all she says is the ocean chose you. And then Moana and the big crescendo of the song says, I am moa. That's the phrase that's repeated over and over and over. And so she doesn't have an answer, but she knows who she is. She knows who she is. And that's what I think prayer does is it's the conversation with the communion of saints, the people we love and long for who still speak to us, the people who can be our best friends and our adversaries at the same time, which is Maui to Moana. And also the conversation we have with God in the ocean around us, in the ocean of our souls and in the stars in the sky, and in the communion of people around us. And what I think prayer can lead us to is perhaps not clear answers of why, but clear answers of who. 

That was incredible. Thank you for sharing that perspective. I am. I could listen to you all day. I'm just going to sit like this for the rest of the interview. Thank 

You. Oh my gosh, I really appreciate that. I feel like that's such a deep cuts of Moana. So I'm sorry people don't know it, but we've 

Lived, who doesn't know Moana? I'm sorry. You don't even have to be a mom as a listener to know Moana. It's that good? That good? Yeah. Yeah, guys, Disney, we should do a whole episode on Disney and God, Disney and spirituality, Disney. They really nailed that formula. Hero's journey. Okay. I would love to know a little bit more about you and your background. So changing gears a little bit, can I ask, what was the turning point when you knew you wanted to become an ordained priest? 

Okay, so I'm laughing because on the outside, this is a story where you're like, yes, Lizzie, this was an inevitability that you set yourself up for. But on the inside I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. Kicking and screaming. So I was baptized Catholic and raised in a very devout Catholic family. And the first time I felt called to be a priest, I didn't have the language for it, but it was my first communion. And then when I was in fifth grade, my mom led our family into the United Methodist Church because she had felt a lifelong calling to be a priest. And that obviously was not an option for her in the Catholic church. And she had been a campus minister, she'd been a youth minister. She'd done everything that you can do as a married lay woman within Catholicism. And pretty much as soon as we started at this Methodist church. 

And her story is her story and it's beautiful, but she sort of found her way into divinity school and found her way into her calling to be an ordained united Methodist elder, which is incredible. I got to watch my mom at the age of 40 when I was in middle school. And that was a powerful thing to see as a young girl and to watch her step into her calling and being a pastor's kid is sort of notoriously kind of a difficult thing because you live in this little fishbowl of people having a lot of ideas and expectations of you. And also where you worship as a family is also your mom's workplace. And that's just complicated, and there's really no way for it not to be complicated. So by the time I got to college, I was like, I'm done. I am done with church. I am done with all of it. I used to pray to God to make me an atheist. So embarrassing. 

I was just, oh my gosh was You heard it here first folks. 

Yeah, that's like such an oxymoron. But I was just determined to have a break from it. But I also just kind of felt this inevitable pulling right back into the church. And so I get to Mount Holyoke, which is a thousand miles away from my hometown, and I went, I don't know, two, three Sundays without going to church. Before I was like, I am 18 and a thousand miles from home and really homesick, so I would like to go home, which is church. And so I could go to church where I could walk. And so I walked into an Episcopal church and I loved it, and I definitely was like walk in right at the start of the service and leave as the closing hymn was singing. I was like, I didn't want to interact with anybody. I was like, I am just here for me. I'm not here for anybody else yet. And over time, my priest, Reverend Tanya, who's wonderful, started to elicit more of my story for me. She was like, what is going on here? 

And more and more, she was showing me not only that the Episcopal church was inclusive of lgbtqia plus people, which was very profound for me, especially in that chapter of my life. But she also was showing me that the church could be something that was mine too, that it wasn't just something I did out of obligation to my family. And so my senior year, I was majoring in religion, but not because I was going to be a priest because I was going to go study feminist theology and be a professor, which in my mind was a radically different path. 

That's funny. Yes, yes. 

That's where it's like on the outside looking in, you're like, yeah, Lizzie, wow, what a rebel. But Tanya, she said, Lizzie, I'd really love for you to have an internship here and you can get academic credit for your religion major for it. Which the gift that she gave me actually is she had me preach once a month, which is a pretty big responsibility for a senior in college. There are folks who are in seminary who don't get to preach that much. 

I barely presented to my classmates at school or in college. I can't believe you were preaching to a whole congregation. 

Yeah, two services once a month. And I will also say Tanya was a solo clergy person, and now I am the only priest on staff at my church. And so I'm like, I get 

It. I just need a break. Mama needs a break. 

But also Tanya saw that I had gifts for leadership, that I had gifts for preaching, and that I had this call into the church that I was not going to follow without a little bit of a kick in the booty for. And this is, I think when church is at our best, we call people's beings vocations forth into serving God. And so she asked me to start preaching once a month, and it was preaching, it was writing sermons and thinking about this sort of beautiful blend of artistry and scripture and theology and public speaking. That started to sort of make me think, huh, maybe I could do this as a job. But it wasn't until I was in divinity school again, not because I was going to be a priest, but because I was going to be a professor. I know. Very cute, very rebellious. 

Are there other students at Divinity School who think they're not going to be a pastor? 

A surprising number actually. 

Wow, I didn't realize that. Okay. 

Yeah. Yeah. Because some folks who do dual degrees who are MSWs through social work and divinity school or they're getting their jd or there's folks who work in, I would not say it's the largest portion of the population, but it's not uncommon. But yes, all of my college friends were like, sure, Lizzie. Yeah, go be a Vasser. Very lovingly. But it was in the middle of the Easter vigil, which is this absolutely banana service in the Episcopal church. It's very old. Again, a service that you can tell is like 2000 years old because it starts outside with a fire, which is very pre electricity here, very primal elements. And we light the fire and we light the Paschal candle from the fire, and you come in and you light all these other candles. Well, I had never been to an Easter vigil in the Episcopal church before. I'd been to Methodist vigils, which are where you sit quietly in the sanctuary overnight and pray. So when my priest was like, would you ACO light for this? I was like, yeah, sure. And then she's like, meet me out by the bonfire. And I was like, I'm sorry, what? And then she was like, 

Bonfire what? 

Bonfire what? And then she's like, you have to light 50 candles in the span of five minutes. So I was completely freaking out, and I'm trying to light all of these candles because the sanctuary's dark and you have to light the candles to light everything. Oh my gosh. And they're way up high and it's not working. And it's like the song is coming to an end and the candles are not lit, and there's clearly more of service to come. And so these two 8-year-old boys who were the regular acolytes get up to show me the grad student, how to light the candles. 

I mean, that's just perfect. So 

I sit down honestly with tears in my eyes, humiliated after finally lighting all these freaking candles, and I'm just like, I can't do this. These people are so fancy. My understanding of God is not this fancy. I feel like such an idiot. Who am I kidding right now is sort of the script playing in my head and the text that year. So the gospel reading for the vigil that year was the resurrection account in the gospel of Mark, which has a sort of particularly kind of mysterious ending where the women come to the tomb and it's empty, and an angel tells them he is not here. He has been raised just as he told you, and they run away for fear and amazement. But I heard this gospel text proclaimed, and my friend Amy, who was the seminarian at St. Luke's, my church in Durham, and she was preaching about this wonder and this terror that the women felt. 

And I just very clearly heard the voice of God say, you have been fleeing for fear. It's time tofl back to me for amazement. And I finished the service and my husband, who had also been accolade with me and who had also been a bumbling fool up there trying to get those candles lit, who has also figured out at this point that he thinks he's called to be a priest. He's also in divinity school. So we get home to have dinner, and I look at him and I say, I think God is calling me to be a priest. And he went, that's what you got from that service. And then immediately was like, yes, I've been waiting for you to say this for forever. 

But so funny. That is a great story. Well, I'm glad that that message came to you at the right place, right time, 

Very much. And it's definitely one of those people had been trying for years to tell me, and I was in the river headed that direction, but I was not going to start paddling of my own accord until I was ready to. 

Well, I'm glad you did. I would love for you to share a little bit more about Jubilee, your church in Austin and the work you're doing there. It feels so groundbreaking, and I think it's a great example of the ways religion in particular has evolved to meet the needs of modern day thinking. 

So Jubilee is both a very new and very ancient way of being church, but the first churches were house churches, and the first churches were church plans, meaning that they were new faith communities that started gathering as a church in the living room. So that's a very ancient way, the first way of being church. And that is how Jubilee was born because the Diocese of Texas, the diocese, the sort of big organization that I work within, really values new faith communities, recognizing that there are so many and more every year people who are not going to church for a whole host of reasons, and they are disillusioned, they're deconstructing, they're frustrated. They're frustrated with the bigotry, with the misogyny, with the racism, with the homophobia, the transphobia that they see. And for a million reasons that are all totally valid. There's a lot of people who don't want to walk through the doors of a big, beautiful old stately church. Even though to be very clear, I love big, beautiful old stately churches, so that's not shade. And that's actually when I finally felt I was called to be a priest. I was like, I'd love to work in a cathedral, and God just has a sense of humor because my church meets in a strip mall. We signed a lease in January, 2023 in what was a dance studio that's in between a dentist office and a martial arts studio, which makes the sound that comes through the walls very amusing, 

I would imagine. Yeah. 

Sometimes I'm sitting there praying and I hear next door 

People 

Beating each other up. 

That's 

Amazing. It's great. And so in some ways, this is so unconventional, right? It's church in a strip mall. You pull up out front and you're like, okay, is this just another restaurant or something? And then you walk in and it's a church. We actually have a ton of stuff like liturgical stuff that other churches that have closed have given us. So candelabras and a pulpit. And actually the altar was not from a church that closed. It's from a church that got a new altar and they send it to us. So we have all these beautiful, traditional, traditional churchy things. And so my particular heart for Jubilee is twofold. On the one hand, we are just another church, like any other church. This is a community of believing people, of doubting people, of curious people, of people who are full of Christian faith and agnostics who are just there to support a spouse or because they're curious. 

And so in some ways it's very traditional and in other ways, the sort of particular energy of Jubilee is our music and our style of worship is very influenced by contemporary evangelical worship spaces and songs. So it's very joyful. We sing super traditional hymns, but we do them with a guitar and a drum set and piano and incredible harmonies. Our band is just amazing. Our music minister, Carly, is exceptionally talented. So there's all this sort of youth and vitality and small groups and joy of evangelical spaces, but all of the ancient orthodox inclusive theology of the Episcopal church. And so it's just this gorgeous, joyful, jubilant place, and kids are running around and coloring and interrupting my Serb in the best way. So that's 

Jubilee. That's incredible. I love that. It sounds akin to the service that really resonated with me here in town. The come As you are, it's in the youth center instead of the main church, and it's just bright and light, and there's a play area for kids to color and run around, and no one cares if they make noise. And the band is incredible, and people come in jeans or lacrosse shorts or whatever, everyone's just dropped. What they were doing came at 5:00 PM The sun is streaming through the windows. The music is modern, and it's playing, and everyone's there to just absorb love so they can take that love and bring it to everyone they encounter in their week. I just love it. I love it so much. It really spoke to me in a different way. And I'm not knocking the big ancient formal traditional church. 

I've spent plenty of time in that beautiful space as well. But there is something about just shining a light on the core of why we're there in a way that feels really accessible and tangible. To me, that has been so transformational, really. It's just really broken through in a way that some of the more traditional religious practices haven't been able to do. What are some ways our listeners can be more spiritual in their own lives, even if they don't actively participate in a faith community? Are there simple ways they can explore spirituality on their own? 

Absolutely. And I will, my little plug, that is not a judgmental or condescending plug, but spirituality in any capacity is not meant to be practiced in isolation. And so for me, that is why religious communities matter, right? Having people with whom you can share your spiritual life with is a really sacred thing. And finding those people who you can say, I know this sounds crazy, but I feel like God is telling me something. Or I know this sounds wild, but I'm just feeling led down this different path. That is also an expression of spirituality. But there is one particular practice I'd love to share that please is called the Ignatian examine. And there's lots of different nuances and ways that people interpret the Ignatian examine, but I'll share as it was taught to me, which is simply a way to pray and to reflect and to look ahead at the end of every day. And there are ways that I see how the Ignatian examine has actually filtered out in all kinds of mental health practices, in parenting blogs and in simple things that I did at summer camp. So have you ever had someone say, Hey, what was your rosebud thorn or your high low buffalo? 

Yes, yes, I have. 

So Rosebud Thorn, something that was good, something you're looking forward to, something that was hard, or you're high low buffalo. What was the best part of the day? The low, the worst part of the day in Buffalo, something when we're talking to kids, I'll say something silly that happened today, or something surprising, something unexpected. Well, all of that actually kind of traces its roots back to this practice called the Ignatian examine, which is taking time to be in quiet or community. So this is something you can do around the dinner table. This is if you have other people in your household, this is something you can do in the shower at night. This is something you can do as you're laying down and you're trying to quiet your mind from everything you've been scrolling in, the emails you've been reading and the thinking about your marriage, all that, just to have a sort of okay quiet mind moment. 

You first just reflect on your day. And you can do this by literally being like, when I first woke up this morning, what did I think? What did I do? Did I wake up? I had a toddler come jump into my bed? Did I wake up and immediately check my phone? Did I wake up just feeling refreshed? Did I wake up anxious because of that meeting yesterday? Right? Just sort of check in with yourself and literally without judgment as much as you can, almost as if you're an outside observer to the movie of your life, let your day play before your eyes and just think about everything that happened and every person you encountered. And one thing that this is doing, I really think actually is praying for everybody you've encountered. You're just acknowledging their presence and perhaps giving gratitude for it, or perhaps interceding that they may love you better next time, but you just think through your day and to have the very traditional sort of Ignatian questions you would think about what you said or thought or did in these instances of connecting with people or doing things throughout your day. 

And just ask yourself, was I drawing closer to God or was I far away from God? And what about those interactions? That book you read, that conversation you had that drive, you had drew you close or pushed you away, and then you just reflect and you receive that as information about how you are existing in this world. It can be an invitation to say, I'm realizing actually that this conversation with my kid made me feel really far from God. I think that's because it made me really anxious because it triggered this memory from my own childhood or because it pressed upon my own insecurities, and that's why I reacted in that way or whatever. It's, but this can start to give us some really great self-awareness that of course, we can explore and I co-sign in other places, therapy co-sign, medical Field, co-sign, all of that. 

But I do think that having a spiritual dimension to this is how we really start to pay attention to the sort of deeper source and connection between all of us. And then if you feel like taking on the sort of final part of the Ignatian examine is you just look towards what's coming up tomorrow and tomorrow is another chance. It's another chance to draw closer to God. And another chance, I think, to realize when you're feeling far from God again, don't notice that and say, gosh, I'm such a bad person, or, oh, I'm not spiritual. Just notice it. Just notice it. Very traditionally, the Ignatian examine, closes with the our Father, so are in heaven, but you can close with any kind of prayer, just close with some kind of rhythm prayer, a repetitive prayer that you say every day. You say it when you're feeling it, you say it when you're not feeling it, you say it when you're happy, you say it when you're sad, and it starts to become this orienting rhythm towards God or towards the source of all life, or towards the source of our deep connection with one another. 

However you would articulate that spiritual life. 

I love that example. Thank you for sharing that. And it's so accessible to anyone in your own home alone with your family, to your point. I think that's just such a great way for people to start experiencing a way to bring spirituality into themselves in new ways. So I love that example. Lizzie, thank you so much for joining today and for this deeply meaningful conversation. I know I learned a lot. I love any chance I have to speak with you about these topics and I can't wait to do it again. So thank you for being here. 

Oh my gosh, truly such a joy, a privilege. And thank you for sharing your story. And thank you for your courage, for your courage to step back into a church and for your courage to love your friend and bear witness to her story and her grief and her healing. It has blessed me to hear that story today. 

Thank you for that, Lizzie. That means a lot. Well, that's all we have time for today, but to those tuning in, if you are moved by today's conversation, please share it with friends and don't forget to subscribe. You can also visit healing heroes podcast.com to get resources, meet the heroes, and share your ideas for future episodes. Thanks for listening everyone, and until next time, remember, be curious, be courageous, and be kind to yourself. You've got this.