Episode 249 - Brad Jersak, "Out of the Embers, Part 1"

“I needed to dismantle those elements of my image of God that were harming me.” - Brad Jersak

For the past five years or so, the term ‘deconstruction” has become quite familiar in evangelical circles and is used to describe a process as varied as the people who experience it, but it primarily revolves around questioning tenets of faith. For some, it can mean leaving a particular church. For others, it is a process of understanding their faith in a different way or leaving religion altogether.

Brad Jersak is a frequent guest to the Restoring the Soul podcast and is joining Michael for the next two episodes as they discuss Brad’s latest book, “Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction.” In the book, Brad explores the necessity, perils, and possibilities of the Great Deconstruction—how it has the potential to either sabotage our communion with God or infuse it with the breath of life, the light and life of Christ himself.

Brad will share a fascinating look back at his own spiritual journey and the ramifications deconstruction had on his ministry and his personal relationships.

Helpful Resources:
Episode 194 - Brad Jersak, "IN: Incarnation, Inclusion, Abba & Lamb"
Episode 117 - Brad Jersak & Peter Zaremba, "Centering Prayer, Part 1"
Episode 51 - Brad Jersak Part II, "A More Beautiful Gospel"
Episode 50 - Brad Jersak Part 1, "A More Beautiful Gospel"

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Thanks for listening!

Transcript

Brian Beatty: 0:12

Hello and welcome to restoring the soul, a podcast dedicated to helping you close the gap between what you believe and what you actually experience. I'm your producer Brian Beatty, thank you for listening. For the past five years or so, the term deconstruction has become quite familiar in evangelical circles, and is used to describe a process as varied as the people who experience it. But it largely revolves around questioning tenants of faith. For some, it can mean leaving a particular church, and for others, it's a process of understanding their faith in a different way, or leaving religion altogether. Brad gjerset is a frequent guest to the restoring the soul podcast, and is joining Michael for the next two episodes, as they discuss Brad's latest book out of the embers, Faith after the great deconstruction. In the book Brad explores the necessity, perils and possibilities of the great deconstruction, how it has the potential to either sabotage our communion with God, or infuse it with the breath of life, the light and life of Christ Himself. Stay tuned as Brad shares a fascinating look back at his own spiritual journey and the ramifications deconstruction had on his ministry and his personal relationships. So Now without any further delay, here's your host, Michael John Cusack.

MICHAEL CUSICK: 1:49

Dr. Brad Jurassic, I want to welcome you back to the restoring soul podcast. Glad you're here.

Brad Jersak: 1:55

Thanks for having me, I so miss you. And this is it's great to reconnect. And in fact, I got to turn my phone off. There was no problem

MICHAEL CUSICK: 2:05

I need to turn my pacemaker off. But not really, people who have not listened to your previous two or three times you've been on the restoring soul podcast once talking about centering prayer, great conversation we had when you were live here in the studio when you were part of one of our restoring soul weekend's and then also, I think the very first time I talked to you that turned into multiple episodes. And those have been super popular. But today, I'm very excited for your new book out of the embers, Faith after the great deconstruction, the title alone is worthy of an hour long conversation. But this book seems to me to be kind of the culmination of your work and life so far. But it really starts with your story of as you said, your life unraveling as a pastor, and in your faith, start for our listeners and just hear a little bit about the personal aspect of this subject for you.

Brad Jersak: 3:06

Yeah, sure. So, you know, I happen to believe that this all too trendy word deconstruction, it describes quite a complex of, of experiences. And that's true, not only of different people, but in me. And so prior to 2008, I had gone through a long period of a kind of positive deconstruction where I was dismantling constructs of God that were nasty, and coming into a very liberating revelation that God is love revealed in Jesus, you know, that's, that should be something obvious to us. But really, I needed to dismantle those elements of my image of God that were harming me, and shaming me and driving me and actually probably driving addiction. But overall, that kind of experience was super liberating. And I also had the good fortune of having a community that was walking it with me instead of resisting it in me. And so instead of firing me when I started teaching what I was learning about God, they found it expansive. And so I wish that was the case. For others. It's not always but I had that going for me. So I come into 2008, completely convinced now that God is good. Instead of this retributive angry monster God or punishing judge, that was a conviction of mine, but we started to have these series of tragedies in our faith community. A lot of deaths around the kind of people we worked with third of our church were people with disabilities and some of those had sudden and really, a punch to the gut kind of departure through death that we didn't expect. And then a series of people in our addictions community had overdose deaths. And we had a number of suicides. We had a gruesome murder. Eventually in that period, we had a, an abduction of one of our girls who was visiting down in Guatemala. Like one thing after another, and by the time I got to about 35 of these in a little church, you know, we're talking 150 people where there's 35, tragic deaths or maimings, or whatever. Three of our favorite intercessor women all got cancer that year. I mean, it was crazy. And so, you know, typical to me Why Why not take a tragedy and make it even worse. So as I began to melt down, then that's when I was started acting out in a love addiction and crossing boundaries with dear friends and ruining relationships. And I came to a point where I was in such deep shame about this, but that I was willing to start getting help through 12 step recovery, I started work with a spiritual director. I had a mentor who talked me under his wing and a wife who was super naturally gracious. Not only did she, she care for me, but she became she took my place as pastor in the church at the at the board's request, to walk them through the healing journey of all this trauma. I've only just thought of this as we came online, the deconstruction I experienced in that negative sense in the in the my faith, unraveling sense was made worse, because I had believed God is good to finally, you know, if I had still believed he's a punitive monster, then all the stuff that happened would have made sense to me. But now that I know that he's good and only good. It was so bewildering that for a while I didn't know if I could trust him. And if if that's the case, I didn't, I didn't know why to keep living. And so that's some of the trauma that happened that I think the whole deconstruction industry has become too happy clappy and evangelical frankly, the extra angelically. I've just got a new conversion story. And I think what we need is actually, the first order of business is empathy for the traumatized and secondary trauma. Also, not only let's say they leave their church because there was some trauma there. But now they get the second trauma of being isolated or alienated and not knowing who to connect with. So that's, that's a summary so far of my messy memoir.

MICHAEL CUSICK: 7:35

Thank you for all of that. And I think that there's a lot of elements of what you shared, that some listeners can relate to. And I think what you highlighted for me in the book, and even now is how much pain is underneath deconstruction. And I to sometimes resist the word deconstruction, I bristle at it, and I think you used you said, I believe in deconstruction, but I use the term advisedly, and with a Twitch, yeah. But the great, great majority of the time, this is not people that are being intellectually rebellious, or somehow trying to be problematic, trying to create a new movement, but there are people that are in pain. And that's obvious with you, not just trauma, but a kind of existential pain. And I recall reading some references in the book where you said, I did not want to live and thoughts of I can't get out of bed, I can't function. And it's so interesting to me that chapters and chunks of the your thinking about this topic are from some of the great existential thinkers, like Kierkegaard. And you have a chapter two chapters on Nietzsche, which is interesting, because of course, he was an atheist or an agnostic, right? Yeah. And yet, can tremendously inform us about some of these existential questions. So Brad, the obvious question, and if you can maybe just give a thumbnail on this, because the book flushes it out. And I'm hoping some of the big ideas that we discuss will help to flesh this out. But how did you get from that place of an existential despair or near despair of I don't want to live an addiction and having to leave the ministry to a place where you write a book about faith after deconstruction.

Brad Jersak: 9:33

Yeah, well, it's called out of the embers for a reason. And maybe a good word for that is that the kind of faith I'm talking about is quite a gift. It is inexplicable. It is an act of grace from above. And so in my case, what that looked like was, I think of it like when the bulldozer came over, and scraped me down to two rock bottom. What shocked me was that I could make the confession that God is good. I like why would I even say that or believe that but there it is. It just is. And I could only regard that as a grace gift. But then that had a follow up question. If God is good, then my question was, Does God care and I can't, I don't care if he has a caring heart sitting on a throne watching our tragedies, that's not care in my mind. I'm thinking about the caregivers, who work with people with disabilities who are quadriplegics, and who need to be spoon fed and adult diaper changes. I need that kind of caregiver. And it was through seeing my spiritual director, Steven, but over the course of 10 years that I went from God is good as this pure, kind of inexplicable gift to seeing some ways in real life, through people largely, but also inner work in my heart, that God actually as a divine caregiver, despite the tragedies we we can pull out, we can pull out receipts for the tragedies and the affliction no problem. But I experienced also God as a caregiver, and especially through a community of people who, who showed me mercy and in my self disqualification. Now, I wouldn't have any platform worthy of, you know, sharing if it weren't the idea of paying forward the mercy I received. And, and I also needed a new theology, that divine care at the end of the day force, severe affliction, that there's no rationalizing the problem of evil, what we have is a cross. And on the cross, we see absolute goodness and absolute affliction, the great contradiction, intersecting in that one man hanging there. And so I've been I was all the more completely captivated by the glorified wounds of Christ and how they touched my wounds.

MICHAEL CUSICK: 12:15

And both as a human being, and as a theologian, you obviously had intellectual cognitive categories for everything you just described. Yeah. But would you agree? And if not, please push back and we'll explore this. Would you agree that at the end of the day, the intellectual answers are insufficient, and that we have to have some kind of encounter or experience?

Brad Jersak: 12:42

I absolutely agree. I think that was the key to it was coming to the end of reason. My definition of affliction, I get it from Simone de, is this is non redemptive suffering. That is absurd, like, so there's no lesson in it. There is no journey in it. There's, it's the toddler drowning in his grandparents hot tub. You know, what do you do with that? And so, instances like that, or the Holocaust, today's Holocaust Remembrance Day, right? And so it's like, there's not an answer. There's not a reasoned answer. And so what the saving grace was when I, the encounter at the cross, where I look up at the one hanging there, and I see I see the wounds of God, I don't know that there's any worthy future for Christianity apart from direct experience of the love of God. It has to be mystical. Karl Rahner said this, you know, if it's not mystical, and by mystical, we don't mean airy fairy ethereal. What we mean is encountering a living God a real connection directly.

MICHAEL CUSICK: 13:52

Yeah, yeah. I love that you wrote a sentence in your book that I, I've said for 10 years. And I've discovered that a lot of people that are deconstructing or who deconstruct, they either go atheist or agnostic on the one hand, or they ended up with a kind of, well, I believe in love, or I believe in the force, or, you know, there's a there's a great spirit, and I understand that I'm not judging that. But your line that I so deeply resonated with is that I need a person, I need a face, I need a real living, human being slash God, who is a human being and Jesus, to to see to touch to taste to smell and of course, those are very sacramental Eucharistic ideas. But it's not just enough to have an idea of a god or a belief in God. When we get down to these kind of existential psychological, ontological realities.

Brad Jersak: 15:00

And that's probably the very nature of the best forms of deconstruction from the Christian tradition. And that is that the idea of God is never God. The idea or construct, to de construct is to interrogate our ideas and our notions and our constructs of God, recognizing that God is always more than that. And Meister Eckhart said, you know, God delivered me from God. And what he means is there is there is a there there, there is a God as such, but we need to be delivered from every idea of God that creates an idol or a box for him that he doesn't fit in anyway. And so, sometimes the tragic is the only way that that will let go of those, those very puny ideas of who God is. And then when those crack open, you might have an encounter with, with the transcendence that has a face.

MICHAEL CUSICK: 16:01

Yeah, the something someone real that is captivating and compelling. I'm not a Latin speaker, and I'm not a theologian as you are you referring to what God is not. That's the via negativa, or the apophatic. Spirituality?

Brad Jersak: 16:19

Yes, I perceive you're a theologian.

MICHAEL CUSICK: 16:22

Thank you, and I perceive that you were a kind man, I want to talk about disorientation. And I'm saying that out loud, because you talk about five potential reasons for it. And I'm saying it out loud, so that I won't forget when I come back. Or if I do forget, I'll say what did I forget, but I have to come back to something, this idea about the real wounds of Christ and this transcendent, yet imminent face of God. I have been praying for two years now, not every day, but the Anima Christi, which is a Catholic, historic early church prayer, and it starts out with Soul of Christ be with me, Blood of Christ, inebriate me. And then it says, Lord Jesus, hide me within your wounds. And I have begun to take in and behold this idea that Jesus didn't just suffer 2000 years ago. But in relation to this idea of on the cross, there was glory and ruin, and that question of goodness, and tragedy and suffering together, that Jesus still bears our wounds today. And that he still suffers. And as I've explored this, for some people, and I know, there's probably books and tomes to read about it. Some people have said, I've always thought that and others have said, that's just heretical. Can you talk a little bit as a theologian and as someone who practices and lives the Orthodox Christian faith, this idea that Jesus is suffering on our behalf today, that he is in our trauma that he's in our wounds that he's in our suffering?

Brad Jersak: 18:08

Yeah, so the reason there's a debate, I think, is because we we are stuck in a temporal that means time bound kind of vision of what this means because if you if you just think Jesus is on a timeline, right, well, he died. And then he and then he rose again. So he's not dead anymore. He suffered so he doesn't suffer anymore. And that now he's now he's impassable which which doesn't mean passive, but it means he is not he is not reactive, or jerked around by our drama, he comes to it in the in a glorified state. But But that's, that's to keep Jesus on a timeline. Here's what I think actually happens. And people can read about this in John Bear's book, the mystery of Christ, and that is that the God man is a union of a temporal human being and in eternal God, and in that indivisible union, the one who did in time, suffer, die and come back to life is indivisible from from God, the sun, it's the one it's one person right, but as God the sun and eternity that means, forever from even above time, he, he, he is directly connected to every aspect of his life, and yours. So in the Orthodox Church, at the Feast of the Nativity, we never say Christ was born, we say Christ is born. We don't say, you know, Christ was crucified, we say he is crucified. He hangs on a tree and he is not was He is risen. So to an eternal God who stands outside of time, the entire Your incarnation is now to him. And so are you. And so that means, I don't think it's secondary in this sense. It's not like Well, Jesus suffered in some awful ways. And and in the past, and you suffer in some awful ways, so he gets it and he can empathize with, you know, it's much more direct than that he is united himself to your wounds. And so Jesus Christ can say to Paul on the road to Damascus, why are you persecuting me? And so that means he doesn't just suffer something, let's say like the sexual abuse victim. He didn't, I don't have to wonder whether or not he actually suffered sexual abuse. He does suffer sexual abuse in his union with you. And so he's so Dostoyevsky you know, great orthodox existentialist. His, the theme of his major theme of his work is CO suffering love. So yeah. I, it's not like, well, poor Jesus is crying probably because of something I did. Again, it's no he, he has made himself one with me in a way that he endures what I endure and takes all that darkness up into himself, but also brings it into direct contact with healing, light and love.

MICHAEL CUSICK: 21:33

Thank you for explaining that. So clearly, it brings me to tears. Because about, almost 20 years ago, in the midst of some deep trauma, I had a vision, where the vision was Jesus replaced me being abused to him being abused. And he didn't say what it was, it was a deep experience that led me to weeping and crying out and opening my heart. But it was it was very clear that that was like the exchange. And the scripture that I found myself drawn to for a long time after that was Isaiah 53, which wasn't about punishment, as we typically think about that, that God was punishing Jesus with. I deserve to be punished. So Jesus took that on, it was about his suffering, and his carrying the pain of sin, and the pain of wounding, and isn't all sin. I've been wounded. So now I'm going to wound someone else. I'm lacking. So I'm going to steal. I feel powerless. So I'm going to murder.

Brad Jersak: 22:37

Yeah. So it's the it's those broken passions that drive the behaviors, right. And he's gone right down into that the midst of that darkness. And then you know, Isaiah 53, he bears it. Yeah, bears all our sins and all our sorrows. Yeah, in a way that transfigures them.

MICHAEL CUSICK: 22:55

And I don't want to sound hyperbolic. But this is a secret truth. It seems that if this was preached, it would be like the answer to theodicy. Like, how can God allow suffering? Well, he's in the suffering, my PTSD is his PTSD, those disabled people in your church that Jesus was suffering and in the wheelchair, and dying with them, and in your unraveling, that Jesus was unraveling. And that's what's utterly unthinkable about God. Right? That's the good news that God who is all powerful, and all good, chooses as an act of love to unravel with us?

Brad Jersak: 23:39

Yeah, and the reason why, you know, Cyril of Alexandria will say in the fifth century, he addressing this idea of is he impassable or not, yes, he is. But it means he says he suffered impassively so the word there doesn't mean, sort of like a semi suffering, what it means is completely willing. No one took his life from him. He he lays it down willingly, in perfect surrender to His Father, so that he can take it up again and us up again. And so that's why we would say no, he he enters the full depths of human suffering in an authentic way. Or he's not fully human. Gregory the Theologian said, you know, what is not assumed is not healed. So he assumed

MICHAEL CUSICK: 24:28

everything. Say that again, Gregory who said Gregory the

Brad Jersak: 24:33

Theologian, or he's also called Gregory of Nazianzus. And he said, he, he's, he's addressing is Christ, fully human, like fully, fully human. And he said, What is not assumed is not healed. So the idea is, he had to assume the entirety of the human condition so that he could heal the entirety of the human condition. And so there's not one aspect of our human An entity that he hasn't taken into himself and up into himself in a totalizing way at the cross. And then from those wounds our wounds, flows, healing love and light into the world

MICHAEL CUSICK: 25:15

that is so compelling to my heart, and to my body in my my visceral being, and so captivating I can only imagine as I have walked through my own path of aspects of my faith and life being deconstructed how someone in a place of despair would find real hope in this, you know, where is God, he's, he's right here in my pain,

Brad Jersak: 25:40

even the despair, right so that on the cross Christ even says, Where is God like, he has to even assume that, but in by assuming it, and then not creating a false narrative, he's able to testify, oh, he has not despised the affliction of the afflicted one. He has not turned his face for me. But he couldn't say that authentically until he felt our alienation in himself.

Brian Beatty: 26:09

So thank you for listening to another episode of restoring the soul. We want you to know that restoring the soul is so much more than a podcast. What we're all about is helping couples and individuals get unstuck. You know how some people go to counseling or marriage therapy for months or even years and never really get anywhere. Our intensive programs help clients get unstuck in as little as two weeks. To learn more visit restoring the soul.com That's restoring the soul.com