The Unrolling of the stone

Let's look at what happens when the weight of tradition gets moved!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Just because I feel an outline is important. Not that it was an absolute that I had to hold to. It's just always helpful for me to have kind of a kind of an outline going into something. So this episode was supposed to be the episode where I dove into the other side of uh your hosts, the man and the boy, Nick, currently speaking, and and the younger version of myself, who was discovered through a specific type of therapy, uh, which which I'll get into in the next episode. It occurred to me when I was prepping for this episode that two days after my last episode was released was Easter. Uh I'd never claimed to be the brightest person. It really seemed like a pretty pertinent date, considering what the topic of this podcast is. And it felt to me like I couldn't just let that pass through. It was something I had to kind of slow down and talk on. Religious holidays are very interesting in that they almost seem to attach on more than just one, you know, one hold point, one one anchor point. And they're sprinkled, you know, throughout the year enough that it it never really seems like you have a whole lot of a break from it. But there are a lot of difficult parts about that. There'sn't a holiday that goes by where there isn't old tapes. And these old tapes are often played through grief and loss, guilt, sorrow. We'll speak more on that a little later. But it did occur to me that there are some listeners that could be coming into this episode feeling pretty raw and pretty emotionally hung over from the past week, depending on where you are in your deconstruction. If you were still at that point where you're asking the questions, you're being curious, but you're doing it with kind of that hush tone, and maybe everybody doesn't know, then you're likely still attending the the functions that you normally would have or that you traditionally always have. Then there are those like myself, where I've made my deconstructive decision. The the cat's out of that bag. Uh I I don't get to sit around a table and and kind of keep that dirty secret to to myself. And and I'll tell you what, when that was finally something that I could share and speak to with the people who I was most intimidated about speaking with, it was an extremely liberating feeling. Very light, very in line with this episode with Easter. Again, my religious upbringing was in Catholicism, so when I speak to my understanding of things, it would be it's what was taught to me through the teaching of my mom and dad, as well as the private school that they that they sent me to. Uh this was day daily curriculum. But again, the Catholic approach, the Catholic version, like I guess we'll call it. Uh so Holy Week is an interesting one. The arm of Catholicism that I grew up in, it wasn't just a few days. It was it was holy week. For simplicity in this podcast, I I'm just gonna focus on kind of the big three because I know the the big three are shared by a lot more uh Christian denominations than the Catholic's approach to it. So so we'll go with kind of the kind of the big three. And I I've spoken in the past about how visualization is so important to me. My level of comprehension of something is usually usually much greater if I've got a a solid visual. So I shut my mouth long enough to to think on this with a piece of paper and a pen, trying to find a way that I could communicate what I believe without it feeling like uh word word vomiting or that I'm just dumping on you. I likened the deconstruction process to Holy Week. Uh I'm I'm going to say, uh maybe this is kinda kind of a disclaimer, so I'm going to be speaking about breaking traditions or religious traditions, but I'm going to do it in terms of religion. Now that isn't me being spiteful or hateful. Rather, this rationale is what was taught to me as a little little, like well before I could remember. So this is as deeply ingrained in my mind as as likely anything. Oftentimes I find that my perspective is nearly as important, if not sometimes more important, than the actual meat and potatoes of a situation. There's still that resentful voice in me that so much of the knowledge that I still have is religious based. It was such a constant in my childhood that religion worked its way into every conversation, ev every activity. It'd be pretty great if we could pick. I think we would all have a large bucket of things that we would like to just pull out of our brain and make room for more pertinent things, but here we are. So this type of thinking, while it can be something that I feel resentment towards, it exists and I can use that to my advantage. Explaining deconstruction and that journey by linking its similarities to the big three days of Holy Week. Our last episode we spoke a lot about breaking tradition. We started by defining it, citing examples and then discussing kind of the um discussing what breaking a tradition entailed and dealing with some of the potential fallout. Once the understanding is there with your family and friends and and it's not that secret anymore. I have what I've named the seasonal ghost. The idea of the ghost came into my mind. Well we were watching a Muppet's Christmas Carols. You've got your you've got your your three ghosts. So these the seasonal ghost. We've all heard of what phantom pain is. In fact, it it just my wife and I were just joking about it the other day. I won't get into the details, but it was it was it was funny. It was something that that comes up every once in a while. So phantom pain. There's a traumatic injury. A body part needs to be altered, potentially removed. And there are people, there are a lot of examples of people that still feel that arm or leg or or what whatever was injured, even though it's not there. As it relates to the seasonal ghost, they're they're kind of echoes. Say you shout in a cave, you were done making noise well before the echo stops making noise. So even though I've removed myself from many religious traditions, and I've removed myself from negative, self-deprecating ways of thinking, those echoes are still in there. That noise generator is gone, but those echoes are still in there. That's kind of that haunting part, and for me it is still every holiday. Granted, things are largely different because of the steps that I have decided to make, but it's still different. Continuing with the visuals, something that is present for me every holiday when I realize that I'm not going to be hanging out with my family. I I kind of liken it to an empty chair. So we've decided to make a step. We've decided that this isn't the narrative that we want. So we we leave or we back out. Or in some situations I'm sure just asking the question could be enough to get you uh kicked out of your chair. That empty chair represents, in my experience, definitely emotional pain. The physical pain, you know, the stomach aches with with the worrying, the anxiety, the the constant back and forth in my own mind with the self-doubt versus the self-worth and the confidence versus the resentment and the gratitude. The distance from the family is is certainly a part of it. Although frankly, you can have distance from family because of a say a job move or going off to college. So th there's going to be a physical distance from family, certainly not what we're speaking about right now. But these events, these holiday meals, even if there's way more negative than there is positive in it for you, it's still something that is centered on gathering. I'm an avid bow hunter, and during bow season which in Wisconsin is mid-September through through mid-November. Every time that I hunt, I'm in the stand before light, and I leave after light. Sunup to sundown, every single time I sit. That's solitude, and I love it. I love solitude. However, I'm not a solitary person all the time. And so losing that gathering sense that being with your pack, you being with your people, which I'll reference later, your people, and and no longer having that, that is an empty chair. That's difficult. Now the physical empty chair. Say I traditionally host fill in the blank holiday. And now because the people that come over leave it so religiously charged, you've determined it's not something you're gonna do anymore. So by no longer hosting, you have empty chairs. Looking at that empty chair, maybe you're gonna see the sibling that would normally be sitting in it. Or in my case, I had a very religious mother who passed away before my deconstruction. Sometimes I think that her just ignoring me on holidays out of disappointment would be better than knowing that when she passed she still thought that I was this incredibly devoted Catholic. There's still that little kid voice in me saying, But but this is not the right thing to do. This isn't what we were told to do. Echoes. I was talking with a coworker who unfortunately lost a family member recently. This was their first Easter without them. And something that she had said was that it was even harder to have their families gathering without this family member because of the time of the year that it is. It's spring, it's greening up, it's that that rebirth. So it's kind of a huge contrast between what we have have traditionally felt versus what we're feeling now. This wasn't an incredibly difficult one for for me, which is why it was so interesting when when my coworker said it, because it wasn't my perspective. I've always seen spring with just a little bit of sadness. I uh love fishing, so spring, I get to watch the ice melt, I get to get my boat ready to go, and then I get to start spring fishing. One of my passions, I love it. But if you're from the Midwest or anywhere with snow, you'll know that until everything is melted, it's just really brown. And in this area of Wisconsin, large snow piles will obviously take forever to melt. But all the dirt in the snow just stays there, so you have these just sad-looking snow banks everywhere, and so there was always kind of a about it. For me, this was a a foreign concept uh to think of you know, as a kid, the greening up of everything, which I've already referenced, right? Everything's blooming and budding. I've got a lot of bulbed plants around my around my house. In the spring, you have to pull the dead part from the last year to make room for the new stuff to grow through. It's not even gonna touch how symbolic this could be. I mean I'm going nuts with visuals right now when that just popped in my head. So that aspect of it was something that that I've always felt. Yeah, we have new we have new growth coming through the ground, but to nurture that I have to remove the part that was so beautiful last year. Trees, everything's starting to bud, that's life. But before you start mowing, you have to spend a half a day picking up twigs and branches that blew off that tree during the winter. That's death. It's the love opposites. You've got this life. There has to be a counter to it. That is death. And I'll consider that my teaser for the next second attack is fine. This is, you know, the the what is different. This is the the body of that seasonal ghost. Traditionally, Sunday morning, I wake up for mass. Now, I wake up when I wake up. There's no rush to get anywhere. There's no rush to be somewhere. Growing up, traditionally, I wake up for mass. Next thing you do, you put on your nicest clothes. It was human nature. We put on our best clothes so that that old biddy in the pew behind us wouldn't tell some other old biddy to check out that poorly dressed young boy there. Tradition get together and have a meal. Now, my tradition is a family meal. My table seats more people than we ever have over, other than on holidays. But the food on that table is gonna taste the same whether there's three people sitting around it or fifteen people sitting around it. The laughter between myself, my wife and daughters at those meals just as real as it was at the traditional family ones. In fact, I would argue that they're probably more real now in my home. And I found that that laughter and those jokes and the positive memories made now that I've broken from old religious tradition. That laughter and those jokes and those smiles are so much more authentic and pure than any that I can recall having growing up. Despite the fact that this is not my first cycle through religious holidays since openly deconstructing, I still feel guilt. That young self is still in there saying, but no, this isn't this isn't what we were told. You know that this is going to be disappointing. You know that mom and dad are gonna be angry. You know there's gonna be judgment, guilt, shame. Good people wake up early for mass, and then they put on their nicest clothes, and then they have their family meal. That's what good people do, but I'm not doing that, and I'm bad. As I discussed in a previous episode, we're we're born bad, and that's that's what we're taught through no fault of our own. We've already addressed that a lot, so I'm I'm not gonna get back into it. And I've noticed that it's always seemed to be my nature when asking what I'm feeling to start with the perceived negative feelings. I've done a lot of parts work through therapy over the past years, and one of the first things that I realized was that shame and guilt, fear, excitement, joy, love, passion, vulnerability, these are kind of pinging back and forth on this perceived, these are the good feelings and these are the bad ones. It was a realization for me that there aren't bad ones, there are current ones. What I'm feeling is what I'm currently feeling. I'm not feeling something good or bad. I might not be feeling good or bad, but what I'm feeling is not good or bad. It is a part, but those parts and that old wiring and that old muscle memory, it doesn't know the journey that we're on. It doesn't know the questions we're asking. So it's still doing what it feels it's supposed to do. How about excitement? I feel that every holiday, and if I'm being honest, I'm feeling a little more of that every holiday. Excitement because a boundary has finally been put in place. And I say finally because for me, that is absolutely not the norm. Not because I'm disappo disappointing people, but because I made a new tradition. That's a tradition that isn't predicated on shame and fear and self-deprecation. There's a level of contentment that comes with knowing that even if it's uncomfortable and scary and filled with guilt and filled with shame and filled with perceived disappointment, there's still a contentment that I feel knowing that while the results of these decisions may not please everybody, the decisions were mine, and I don't have to make decisions based on the fallout. I don't have to make a decision based on how it's going to make somebody else feel. Obviously with within reason, that certainly doesn't apply to everything, but as it applies to myself and my religious traditions that I'm breaking from, that is absolutely the case. Part of the breaking of tradition, it really can, and in my case certainly did, it increased the internal isolation, the internal mourning. Yeah, I still feel a strangeness a week or so before every holiday because I'm thinking, boy, will I get that invite, or I know I'm not gonna get that invite. Or I'm not gonna get an invite because I'm a disappointment. I still feel disappointing. Okay, and welcome back. I'm gonna continue walking through Holy Week as explained by church terms. So Good Friday was always the day that I was really confused and conflicted as a kid. While church didn't typically involve a lot of joy and positivity, uh in my upbringing and in my experience, Good Friday was the darkest. I mean that was a it was a funeral day. I mean, sorrowful day. This is the most sorrowful day because Jesus dies. You know, in many situations and traditions, there's no resurrection without death. We've already mentioned the law of opposites. So considering that there's no resurrection without death, how do I assign death to the situation? Well, for me, breaking away, there's a term called ego death. The death of the old self. Maybe the death that I mourn now on Good Friday is the death of the version of me that I was expected to be, that I was taught that I needed to be. This is very different than Jesus' Good Friday experience. Good Friday for me growing up was a very sad day, a shameful day, a guilt filled day, a day where I discover how much of a failure I am. While it might be a little weird to hear that this immediately for Nick goes to shame and guilt, A, it's not lost on me, and it is on the top of my to do list in therapy, I promise. Maybe you'll hear even more confident and proud human. But the reason I went there immediately was because the brand, the brand of Christianity that I was taught, if I was good, then Jesus would not have had to sacrifice himself. His act wouldn't be needed because the gift of death wouldn't be necessary. His death is my fault. So of course that's gonna be a day where I feel shame. I remember as a kid thinking, gosh, if if Jesus hadn't had to die for our sins, how much better would the world be? And I was picturing like re picture your utopian image. I couldn't at that age, with the level of indoctrination, I couldn't dream of a better scenario than Jesus not having to have died for me. I mean we're not talking like soda in the drinking fountains at work, we're not talking about all day recess. This is what I probably should have been attributing to utopia. But it's guilt, it's shame. It's my fault. And that's very different than the death that I'm observing within myself. Because that is one, like I'd said, there's excitement, contentment, and there's pride in myself, liberated, free, accomplished, finally showing that I'm loving myself, or if you haven't taken any step other than curiosity, asking that question, ask the hard question. And here's the thing, by hard question, it's not necessarily hard for the one asking. It's going to be hard for the recipient oftentimes, not because they don't know an answer, or not because they can't find an answer, but because of what the ramifications of you even asking that question mean. I had just mentioned that Jesus had to die for our sins. He had to give up his life, the greatest sacrifice he could make. And in that line of thinking, that's the cost of death. That's what I was taught. That's the cost of death. So let's stay looking through that lens. What's the cost of death of our old selves? Well, we sacrificed. What did we sacrifice? We sacrificed a sense of family. We sacrificed community. Having that group, having the people that you see every weekend. Maybe your kids are on the same baseball team and you see each other during the week, but then the added bonus is you get to see them on Sundays for worship. And this is a community, and we build community. That was one of the costs, is that we sacrifice that sense of community. I don't have friends that I see at church anymore. I don't have many deeply religious friends anymore. I will tell you that that is not because I decide not to hang out with Christians. And while it sounds kind of callous to just say, well, yeah, no, we're not friends anymore, I'll remind you in episode one I spoke about how I'm in recovery. That was an early and difficult lesson to deal with in the early stages of my sobriety. And that was that Sober Nick does not have all of the same things in common with his friends that he used to. And I wasn't told to just abandon my friends. My sponsor basically just said, Nick, you need to keep in mind that every relationship you have is going to be affected by your sobriety. And it's possible that you've got relationships where A, the person's maybe never even known you sober, or B, it's such an integral part of your friend group, or this relationship, or these activities that you guys do, that Sobernick lost a lot of that. And there's no callousness to that. I don't look at the people that I used to call friends and resent them. I I I I really don't. Just like I don't resent family members who disagree with me. I don't resent friends that say, Hey, yeah, maybe we'll go fishing Saturday morning because I've got church on Sunday. That's fine. So it's not that this isn't a loss when you lose that sense of community or family. Maybe it's a sign that you're taking steps towards having different needs. And this isn't to say that these are bad people. Another sacrifice that crossed my mind, and and I wrote it down and I circled it because before I was done writing it down, I already had kind of a counterthought to it. One of the things that I had listed was certainty. Tradition. Well with tradition comes a level of certainty, because of the level of predictability just feeds your sense of certainty. So here's Nick, not at Christmas dinner, not at Easter dinner, having sacrificed a sense of community, family, health family harmony, and now certainty, because I'm no longer certain about what I believe. But then it hit me that the certainty that I've walked away from or given up wasn't a certainty based on anything other than faith. The word faith and certainty, they're not often two words that hang out together because if something is certain, then it inherently requires less faith. The certainty's there and we're certain we're certain of it, so I don't have to believe it. I don't walk around telling people that I believe in pickup trucks. Of course you do. So now when I sit with certainty, I think to myself, I am actually certain about more things right now about me, about where I am in this world, about what my role is, about what my roadmap is starting to look like. I am more certain about any of that than I have ever been, because this doesn't require faith to be the answer. Hope, well, it's based on faith, avoiding danger in religion. That's based on faith. What happens to you and how things happen to you is a reflection of the level of your faith, the level of your devotion, your willingness to sacrifice, and to what level you're going to sacrifice for God. So I'm very happy that I'm certain that that's not something that I need anymore, and that's not something that I want to expose the people that I love to anymore. The last part of the Good Friday story, the burial. We've all been to funerals for family or loved one, and there is real mourning. And like I'd said before we started this, it is not my intention to be spiteful, it is not my intention to sound scorned, and I don't want it to be taken that way. But while I feel all of the characters in this whole UE story are entirely fictitious, the feelings associated with it are extremely human, and those are extremely human in my opinion, because they were written by humans decades at the earliest to hundreds of years later, and they're only going to be able to put it in non-divine terms. They're only going to be able to put it in the terms that they know. And after the burial of our old self, there is a void there. There's a huge void there. And that really segues perfectly in the holy standard day. So after this place, okay, welcome back. So it turns out I learned in high school apologetics class. Was that? Holy Saturday is a very unique day. It is as sad as Good Friday, but there's hope because as the prophecies have foretold in the church holy week calendar, tomorrow's a pretty big day, Easter. That's a big day. So we've got to find a way to get through the Saturday that God took off for us. The liminal space. Liminal space is is known as uh times of great change. Those could be marriage, those could be divorce, a new career. There's some positives in there. There's a negative, the death of a loved one. Negative. This is a transitional period. So that's what the liminal space is. That's what the liminal time of Holy Saturday was referencing. They fast, they pray in silence, just as his followers did. And that is why we did it. That is why as a kid who was frickin' hungry, but my bread and water was what I had to eat because that is what his followers did. Yeah, these they they roughed it by eating very little and praying, so that's why we have to do that as well. But we can do the same with our old self. Letting go of the old self is going to happen. And while that seems like a very sudden, here it is the decision's made, if we've learned anything in these previous episodes or in our own personal deconstruction journeys, this is a very slow and a long process. But we say peace out to old self. New self's still in production. There's going to be a period of time where our sense of identity and that was one of the things we spoke about in the last episode. Once we have had our funeral ceremony for old self, we don't get to immediately leave the room and take the hand of our new self. Not because it's not finished, because new self we have an opportunity to integrate new self in every single day. So to say that new self is done and ready to roll, I don't think is necessarily the most accurate. New self is always learning and getting smarter. But there's that period of time where we don't have new self yet. And we don't have old self anymore. And so we're alone. Or it feels like it. You know, an example that came to mind when I was thinking about that liminal period, old self is is gone now. We're still waiting and eagerly anticipating the arrival of a functioning new self. Watching old self go was was interesting for me because there's so much pain and trauma associated with my past that it just seems like I took a logical step of associating myself, my identity, with my memories and what's happened to me. And I think that that's very human. Death of the old self is not a betrayal. You know, the example that came to my mind, the neighborhood that I live in has a relatively older age as an average. It's getting younger, and I think we we see that many places that are still growing. But all of the original residents of my development, they're off into retirement. But the vast majority of them are selling the homes that they built. And so if you think about even if you did build the house, think think of your starter home. I I had this experience with my wife the day we left for the last time. It's just a building. But how many firsts happened there? How many things that I would give up anything to ensure I would never forget happened there? How many good times, bad times it did you you know where I'm going with it? Watching that house get smaller in your rear view, you are not turning your back on a single thing that happened that house. The house isn't bad. The new version of your house is better though. I didn't leave my last house because it was a bad house. I left my last house because we were able to improve, to have a nicer house, to have something that fit our family more, to have more space, etc, etc. So mourning the death of old self isn't saying that the house is bad. Old self is not bad. Every joy that I experienced in my entire life up until my deconstruction started was tied to that. And so there's no resentment, and there is true grief and sadness, but law of opposites. All of those feelings are equaled at a minimum by other feelings as I think about new self and and that journey, the optimism, the hope, the joy. Again, pride in myself, not something that historically has ever easily rolled off my tongue that I'm proud of myself, but I am. And you should be too. Every memory in old self is still ours. We just get to remove the lenses that were put on our faces for us, and now we get to self-author. Now we get to self-explore. We get to go on a self-guided tour towards a better us. Something that I noticed very early on into my first or maybe second religious holiday that I was no longer with family and friends was that there's a silence. We talked about the empty chair. Now let's look at the room itself. There's less voices in it. It's silent. And how do we handle that quiet? How do we handle a quiet home? Or is it quiet? Maybe instead of going to church we take the money we used to tithe every year and we went apeshit on Easter for the kids and it's eggs everywhere and they're screaming and maybe it's not quiet. And and maybe you found yourself a loud tradition. Holy Week in general was a very loud week. Very different music than the rest of the liturgical calendar. Much darker music, but love opposites, Easter, very joyous music, very happy music, very light, bright music, but it's all loud. And then you leave this loud service and you go sit around a table with twenty people, and unfortunately, eighteen of them are trying to be the loudest one. So when you sacrifice maybe a level of community or family harmony, there are also some negatives that will leave with those. And those are notices that are worth making. There's a level of discomfort that comes with this. But I encourage you to find value in the say the waiting room. Old self is gone, new self isn't here yet. How about we sit with that rather than just rushing on to find the new orthodoxy? Maybe we just stay here for a little bit, instead of just running at a breakneck speed towards the next I'm using air quotes me. Or the next set of, you know, rigid rules. I'm not saying that we need to live a lawless life. Church law is a law that I am one hundred percent comfortable not abiding by and not having in my life. I had mentioned that certainty was something that we had sacrificed. I explained to you that certainty to me was certainty in a faith, not in fact. Um however, so we don't know what to do now. We don't have a roadmap that's been handed down for eight generations. We've actually just gotten rid of that roadmap because it wasn't it wasn't leading to a place where we saw merit in visiting. Be okay with not knowing. It was such a foreign concept for me when I finally had the realization that I I don't know, and that's okay. That was such a moment for me. It felt so foreign to have these thoughts following each other at the same time in my head. My religious formation equaled uncertainty if I was able to put into words like I can now what I was feeling then. It was extremely uncertain, because again, if uncertainty is rooted one hundred percent in faith, then there is just another lack of certainty there. Yet every question that I had had a divine answer. Every weekend there were plans. Sunday morning, you know where to find me, and there's no budging on that. Also, one of those Sundays a month, after master going out in the basement to eat stale donuts with a bunch of old blue hairs for forty-five minutes to an hour and a half, uh, those plans are handed to you. There were very little opportunities or even needs to make big decisions. You know, because again, that that roadmap was printed and it existed before us, and it will be damn near the same roadmap that gets passed on three generations or thirty generations from now. We don't have that because we're individual and we're individuals and we see and recognize that we're individuals. We're not sheep, we're not part of a flock, we're not part of a herd, we're not okay hiding behind, well, this is the way it's always been. We're using new pathways now, with that uncertainty that we're trying very hard to be okay with. We're using new pathways, so let's crawl. We'll be walking before you know it, and maybe two or three Christmases from now you'll be running. So be okay not knowing, and let's be okay not being efficient walkers. Let's be okay not hitting benchmarks like we necessarily feel from our old upbringing that we have to constantly be working towards the next achievement. Just be okay not knowing, and be okay not attending. So work on being okay with not knowing. Of course, the only remaining day of the holy week is Easter, Resurrection Sunday. So the story of the resurrection uh, and this this is a super interesting one to look into. Start by reading the gospel's accounts of the resurrection. Once I looked at all the different basically versions of this story in the Gospels, it it occurred to me that while the same three or four events are the same, every other detail is just slightly different. Again, divinely inspired, of course, there there wouldn't be multiple gospels, there would there would be one because they would just be duplicates of each other because they're divinely inspired. Not the case. The way the gospel's explanations of the resurrection feel to me, I liken it to when I was a little kid, and say me and two of my buddies were together and we were, you know, fucking around doing something we shouldn't, and we were lying, but we were all lying. So three kids trying to tell the same lie are likely gonna get two or three of the big items identical in every single rendition of it, but all of those details are going to be different. But that's because you have three people who don't know how to get out of what they're talking about, so they lie about the details. That's how that felt to me. Like we had, you know, three guys sitting in a room talking about the same event, and then saying, Well shit, this this assignment requires how many words? Alright, well, I g I mean I guess we'll fill it in. Everybody use your best judgment, and then we got differences. The version that I'm gonna go with is just kind of a very high level of all of them, a few of the things that they can agree on. And then I'm gonna draw the line, draw the connection between the biblical Easter and the deconstructive Easter. So, curiosity. I know you guys are sick and tired of hearing it. So in the Bible, the tomb was viewed. How's that? I will call our curiosity as kind of that we're crawling, remember, before we're walking. Let's just peek at the tomb. Let's just peek at it. Picture kids outside that notoriously haunted house in a small town. They start off by being, ooh, I was the one that stood the closest to it. And then it's well I got on the front porch. Well then I rang the doorbell and so on and so forth, and that's kind of how I picture it. I started by peeking at the tomb, and then my wobbly fawn legs got a little stronger, and I walked up to the tomb, and then I rolled back the rock. The mental image that comes to my mind when I think of this this gospel story was that Mary Magdalene was the one that was there. Again, we're we're not going down the historical accuracy of the Bible, that's not this episode. When they rolled back the rock, that is when he has ascended body and soul. Well our ascension in this, if if again, if we're going back to explaining our journey through this lens, then what if our ascension is us rising, we'll use their words, rising into our new boundaries, our the new hopes that we've made for ourselves, the new direction that we want to see our families go, the new version of ourselves that we want to provide the people that we love rising into our new mental health. If I were to ask ten deconstructing people, what positive side effect surprised them the most? If they were honest, I bet you more than half would say the mental health. Not necessarily because this is an exercise in improving our coping skills, of improving our deductive reasoning, of improving the way we interact with people. It's not necessarily about that, at least in the interim, and at least for me it wasn't. But I was stripping. Away so many things that weren't productive that comparatively I felt like a better human. Well, maybe I hadn't necessarily improved certain skills. I had shed toxicity that I shouldn't have had that was handcuffing me. After the resurrection, we now have spring, new life. I've got irises that are starting to come through already through the mulch. Really excited about that because I'm a 43-year-old 42. My wife keeps correcting me, 42-year-old man that loves watching his irises grow. My wife and I love to look at the furry woodland creatures that come up to our house. My wife has got a special relationship apparently with our rabbits, and so we see the rabbits, and then we won't see a rabbit for a few days, and then lo and behold, more more rabbits. Um So what does a secular rebirth, an individual rebirth look like? We've ascended into uh new boundaries, hopes, uh health journeys, versions of ourselves. I found when when answering the what now aspect of it, when I answered the holy shit, I you know I'd worked so long on building up the nerve to do this that I never took the time to consider what it was gonna feel like now, how cavernous the halls were gonna sound or feel. So I sat with that for a little bit, as long as I felt I could, and you know, as many minutes in a row as I felt I could, and then I gave myself permission to walk away from it with the intention of returning. And I found that there was a lot of discomfort. We've discussed discomfort quite a bit already. And sometimes I find benefit in sitting with it myself, the young version of myself, and this part, why am I feeling what I'm feeling? What do you have to tell me that would explain why I feel this way? I found a lot of benefit sitting with it, naming it, write it down. However you process things the best, some of the discomfort was the removal of certain things. We've discussed it, uh going to mass or church first thing in the morning, or w wh whenever your church held their service during these super special days in their liturgical calendar. Maybe take that time to go for a walk. Maybe take it as an opportunity to start your own traditions, as you know, I said last episode. Maybe you find a specific meal. You talk about it as a family. We had a couple year stretch where I grilled Bratwurst patties for Christmas Eve dinner. I don't know that that's a super popular Christmas dish, but who who cares? My wife and I were recently married. We had a very young baby, and I'm sure we had to do a day or two of budgeting just to afford the nice brat patties and hamburger punts. How about a quiet morning? How about instead of getting up and getting your best clothes on and getting on out the door early enough that nobody gets about you being the last one that walked in? What if you replace that with a quiet morning? I don't know, if you have a TV in your bedroom, maybe you watch a show before you get out of bed, maybe you leave your your book or your tablet on the nightstand next to your bed before you before you call it a night. Maybe you do absolutely nothing. Maybe you start a new hobby, maybe you start golfing every Sunday morning, whatever it is, it ultimately doesn't matter what it is. But these were the things that I noticed while sitting with the discomfort. Another thing that I noticed was that at times I can feel isolated. While there was much more toxicity than benefit in the version of holidays I had growing up, I wasn't alone. You know what I mean? Uh and that and that can be a lot. And it's not just a preference thing. I mean, being alone is extremely difficult for a lot of people. I think for a long enough period of time, it's difficult for every person. But it's really important to have your your people find a family to celebrate with, maybe a secular family, maybe you double date at a restaurant that happens to be up on easier or whatever it is. I didn't consider this during the early stages of my journey. I was fortunate enough to have the support from my spouse and my kids. So I was never on an island, and and I'm extremely grateful for that. Since I've advanced on this journey, I have and I do see the benefit in picking picking a family. We've got a couple very close friends where we'll have them come up to our land for weekends in the summer and and hang out and talk about anything and everything, but there's there's no religious weight on it. There are no dire consequences on it. These are just good people that don't have to have the fear of damnation to motivate them to be good people. These are just good people. And it's really important to find your people. I found, like I'd said, I mean, I found my people. I just I just didn't know it. I've already made a few references this episode to a roadmap, something that I brought up quite a few times in past episodes about, you know, turning in that roadmap, and now we're making our own. The the death of our old selves is not a wiping of the slate. There are lingering effects, scars, and they're they're gonna stay. Acknowledging that, just like the tradition story, the new version of me still carries a lot of the marks of where I came from. And that's awesome. That's not just okay, that's awesome. Because when we talk about forming a new identity, we never discussed closing a book and starting from scratch. We we never did, because that's not how that works. You can change courses, but there will still be evidence of the previous course that you were on. In my case, I didn't pick to be on that journey. That was the journey that I was set on. But now we're blazing new trails, we're taking more small steps, and we are getting more sure footed. But guess what? We still remember the old map. And so that we don't forget the stories behind the scars, we don't forget the reasoning behind why we wanted to make this change, why we even started exploring this change. Maybe in a in a moment of uncertainty and thinking you want to run back into it into religion because we made the wrong decision by questioning. That's fine. We still remember that old map. We still remember what trails we were allowed to be on and areas that we couldn't go. We don't have that now. We're writing it every day, we're writing it more and more. Every time we ask ourselves a difficult question, give ourselves the honest answer, sometimes the difficult answer. We're now writing our new map. But it's important that we acknowledge that those scars or past traumas or negative feelings, those aren't a reflection of the version of ourselves that we were, rather the version of who we were because of the things that we've decided we we can go without. I'm gonna end with two last things, and these are very brief, I promise. If you're just pulling into your driveway now, put it in park for 20 seconds and you'll be able to go inside. When we were talking about the silence, and we were talking about Holy Saturday, the limnal space, sitting with that discomfort, I made a reference to the loud rituals, the volume. We've spoken about finding that family to celebrate with our people. Find your people. When I removed the loud rituals, the the the masses, the services, the loud people that were so present in my childhood, when I removed that from my life, I realized that I was left with very few supportive people. I've already told you how supportive my wife and my family has been. Uh if I was told that I would only have a few supportive people, my wife would be the first one that I would pick because she's never wavered in that. If you don't have supportive people, if you don't have support, if you don't have community, I'm very sorry that that's how you have to experience things right now. Nobody's taken advantage of it yet, but every one of my podcasts I have an email address on there. And I believe that you can leave messages in an inbox for me that it's not an email. If you want to ask a question, just reach out. We don't have to be alone. It's important that we choose. This topic is an uncomfortable and a difficult one, and sometimes a painful one. And I find that when I start spinning my wheels in that heavy thinking, the large consequences really helpful for me to pull out, to pull back and see what's in front of me. So when I shifted from religious teaching and more towards the natural cycle, my view of spring changed. Because it's not about a liturgical calendar anymore. It's not about what color vestments the priest is going to be wearing the next few Sundays. Now spring is about making room for my new lilies. It's about getting the boat ready to go. I just brought my my bow into a shop for tuning so that I'm ready for the next hunting season. This is a time of starting over. So when I made a reference to seeing what is in front of me, I found that it's really healthy for me to see things for what they are sometimes. And absolutely nothing more. Look at a I've got maples in my in my yard. Look at 'em. You're gonna start seeing new buds soon. I I made reference to my wife's bunnies and the babies. Birds are going crazy right now making nests. Little tip, I didn't believe it until I tried it either, but if you have a cat or a dog, and it doesn't make sense that this is real, but I promise it is, if you have a cat or a dog, brush them, take some of their fur, and use a clothespin to put it on branches of you know small shrubs or a little tree in your yard, and birds will come and grab the different fibers of fur and weave them into their nests, and they insulate, so your cat, believe it or not, can uh provide a nurturing home for the baby birds. I'm allowed to witness mysteries, and I don't have to go down that miracle route. I don't have to go down the why God loves me. I can look at something that I don't understand and go, huh. Who knows, maybe there's understanding in my future on this. If we have the energy to look at these things through our deconstructing eyes, then then great, and that's necessary. But again, when things for me are getting too much and too heavy, sometimes it's amazing to just let a sunrise be a sunrise. Because it is important to look at things through deconstructing eyes. But for me, there have also been times where it is imperative that I just see what I'm looking at. That's gonna wrap up today's episode. I would give you a spoiler on what the next episode is gonna be about, but like I've already stated, sometimes I go road. Thank you again for listening. And remember, take your own.