Episode 353 - Tara Owens, "Embracing the Body: Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone"

Welcome back to Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. In today’s episode, Michael sits down with Tara Owens, author of Embracing the Body: Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone, for a rich conversation about the intersection of faith, embodiment, and the profound ways our physical selves connect us to God. Together, they explore how centuries of Christian teaching have shaped our views of the body, often separating the spiritual from the physical, and what it looks like to reclaim embodied living as part of spiritual wholeness.

Tara shares deeply from her own story, reflecting on the journey toward befriending her body, wrestling with illness, and moving beyond inherited theologies that diminish the goodness of our physicality. Michael and Tara discuss the ongoing relevance of Jesus’s embodiment—his exhaustion, pain, and friendships—and how this shapes our understanding of being human and spiritual.

Touching on themes like Gnosticism, church history, touch deprivation in our society, and the real-life struggles of finding God amid physical limitations, this episode is a vulnerable invitation to embrace the sacredness of our skin and bones.

Whether you’re curious about embodiment, recovering from damaging messages about your body, or simply longing for a deeper spiritual connection, this conversation illuminates the wholeness available when we find God not despite our bodies but through them. Plus, Tara offers insights into her ministry, Anam Cara, and the role of spiritual direction in nurturing soulful friendship with God.

Transcript

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Hi, Restoring the Soul. Listeners, welcome back to another episode. Today I am talking with Tara Owens, who has written this book 15 years ago, embracing the Body, Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone. For anybody who's watching, there's the book Embracing the Body. Tara, welcome to the podcast. I am so glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me, Michael. It's lovely that we're both in Colorado. That's a rare thing for a podcast. I'm just up in Denver. You're down in Colorado Springs. And as I commented at the beginning, the birds are singing outside of where you are, and I have trucks in the background doing some kind of construction. So hopefully I'll. These are the seasons of Colorado, are they not? That's right. The 3.0 seasons instead of 4, I call it. Well, first of all, thank you for writing this book. A number of people recommended the book. I got a complimentary copy from InterVarsity. We share them as a publisher a while back. And I was fascinated by the book when I opened it up. And it's just one of the many books that I've wanted to read that got set aside. And then as I said, your name kept coming up. And a dear friend said, you just. You just have to interview Tara for the program. What I expected when I read the book was not what the book was about, and it was actually much better because, as you know, the word embodiment has entered into popular culture and people now throw that word around, like the word cyber or something like that. You know, that 30 years ago, we didn't use that. But your book is really not a book of exercises about how to breathe and do somatic awareness. It's really an invitation to come home to ourselves, but to understand this much, much broader context of. In one sense, I'll take the statement that was made on the back of the copy that I have. And that is, what is God trying to do through our skin and bones? So let's start there. What is God trying to do through our skin and bones? Well, I think that the main thing that God is always trying to do, which is love us and communicate with us and bring healing and wholeness and fullness, not just through our bodies, but in our bodies and with our bodies. And this reality that especially in this modern moment, that we, through our own responding, reacting to our traumas, to our brokenness, to our ways of attachment, have become completely divorced from our bodies in so many ways. And God is saying, come home. And you talk about in so many ways, like not just the statement, but unpacking this over and over again, that our bodies teach us about God, which at first is a really like what? It's the Bible that teaches us about God and it's listening to Christian podcasts and sermons. Yeah, but we cannot be human without our bodies. It's this sort of fundamental thing that I think that we've lost in so many ways is that. And it's the thing that I'm actually concerned about with this moment with AI, which I think is an incredible tool. And it is, as Andy Crouch talks about the difference between tools and technologies, this ensouled reality of our bodies, that we cannot be human without this flesh, are very specific, particular. And as our listeners are, as you are listening to this, your particular body is speaking to you about God right now and what it means to come home to the very place that we have felt like in the. In the parable of the prodigal son is not taking care of us the way we think we should be taking care of. And we have run away, we have gone off and. And there are lots of reasons for that. There's lots of really good reasons for that. As somebody who lives with a couple of invisible diseases and disorders, like there's a way that I live in tension with my own body. And what are you saying? What am I hearing? But that we can't really experience the goodness of God without our bodies. And that's, that's. It's a hard thing to know that God has given us this as a way of learning about who God is, which again, in so many of our theologies and ways of dealing with God doesn't have to do with our bodies. You just talked about so many of our theologies and you unpack this in a couple of chapters as well. But we have inherited in 2025, a couple thousand years of unhelpful and often inaccurate teaching about the body from, you know, Augustine of Hippo, who gave really profound wisdom that led to a lot of great theology, but also who thought that the act of sex was only for procreation and who was very anti body in many ways. So I know it's a semester long seminary class to answer this question, but will you just give an overview of some of the bad teaching that we've inherited and what that has led to within us as humans who follow Jesus. Oh, Michael, you're making me do some work today. I love it. Yeah. This reality that in the west, our theology around our bodies primarily does come from Augustine and his, his approach and just the deep wisdom that Augustine Has I. Like I. There is this sort of a little, very nerdy Christian, like, not quite drinking game, but close enough on any podcast or anything I'm listening to is like, long before somebody's quoting Augustine and like, it's. It's usually not long at all. So much of our thinking is influenced by his wisdom and his deep relationship with God, but he really had a disordered relationship with bodies that came out of his own relationship with prostitutes and sex and sexuality, which was part of his history. And what we do so often, what I did, what so many people do, is take what has been wrong in our past and demonize that instead of become curious about it and become like, where were those longings taking me? And what were those longings? And how did they get distorted along the way? Augustine sort of villainized all of sexuality and embodiment. He was that you referenced it, but there's this quote that he was embarrassed that procreation could not take place without a certain amount of bestial movement is a quote from him. But he really did believe that our bodies were beasts in a certain way. And if you've ever lived with a beast in your house and we, you know, I recently lost a wonderful dog, but they're pretty domesticated, those animals. Cats are a little more beastial in terms of, like, how they act in your home. You're not in total control of them, even if you think you are. And there's this, like, there's this way of interacting with embodiment that has been in the west, really underpinned by a deep mistrust of our bodies, that the messages that we're giving it are wrong, that are giving us are wrong, that the way that we ought to treat it is as. As a. As a beast, as something lower than actual us, instead of with care and with dignity and with listening to what's going on in our bodies. I trust that that message is true in the east. And I am all for wonderful Eastern theologies. Our brothers and sisters in the Orthodox Church are great gifts to me. But in the east, the. There's theology that is part of that tradition as well, that says that our bodies are a result of the Fall, that we were not even embodied in the garden, and that this enfleshment is God's second best for us. And if we live with a belief that our bodies are second best or beasts, there is no listening that is actually redemptive to that. And on some ways, to me, the healing that God has, the full healing that God has for us and the holiness and the wholeness isn't actually possible. And you know, we live with a lived theology, what we actually live out in a day to day life and what we say we believe. And often those things aren't actually very close together, especially when it comes to our bodies. And I loved your definition of Gnosticism, which, you know, many people who write and think about the body theologically speak not frequently enough that we're modern Gnostics where we privilege the spiritual and the immaterial over the physical and the material. Talk a little bit about that and then I'll tie two questions together. I apologize, but the thought just popped in my mind. It's actually more of a comment. I so appreciated that this wasn't just a theological treatise, but that I won't say it's memoir, but you wove a lot of your story throughout this in incredibly vulnerable ways, talking about your history. And I think that that just deeply enriched the topic and it made it so much more welcome inside of me. And I just had an immediate sense of trust in you as an author. But talk about how we privilege the, the spiritual over the physical and what are the implications of that. Yeah, I, I think that I have come to realize that we cannot get over our particularity. So I'm going to tie my answer together. We cannot, we cannot come from anywhere but where we come from. Which is why on some level I had to share some of the stories, some of the most vulnerable stories. Chapter four still makes me want to throw up a little bit in terms of like the, like how much I shared about myself. But this, we talk about Gnosticism, which is this belief that material is, is lesser than is base, is evil and the spiritual is the better, the good, the holy. And what I want to add back to our discussion about gnosticism, especially, you know, 15 years on from writing the book, is that it also comes with this idea that there is special knowledge. Gnostics believe that there is a. There is, there's a select few who get to know the thing or the things and the rest of us have missed it and that you have to find the key. I even think spiritual formation language falls into sort of subtle Gnosticism by like implying that you can't be close to God if you aren't using the right spiritual formation language, if you're talking about discipleship instead of formation, or if you're talking like we do this, we grab this like there's something special out there other that I'm missing instead of the fact that it's all here with us and with God. That our generous God has given us everything. And because of our stories and our brokenness and the just the realities of living in this world. I mean, I'm an enneagram4. I can, like, feel misunderstood with the best of them and believe that something is missing with the best of them. And I do it all the time. Did it this morning, like this reality that. That we live with this belief that somehow God is holding out on us. I mean, it's. It's the garden, it's the. It's the snake whispering. You know, did God really say. And, you know, he. You. If you ate of that fruit, you would be like God. And clearly he's holding back. Clearly there's something you haven't been given. But in. In this gnostic way of being, our bodies are. Are less than material is less than. And often a seat of evil. The place of that. That is the. The bre. That which pulls us away from God. And living with that belief really makes healing, true healing, as you've wrote about, impossible. Thank you for expanding on that even more. We're kind of moving through, not in a linear fashion, but through some of the topics, especially in the. Especially in the first part of the book. And I want to come back to Jesus humanity, fully God, fully man. And how does Jesus incarnation, God in the flesh, as John 1 tells us, how does that inform us about the body? And what are the implications of that today? Because it's been said that the second member of the Trinity today exists for the rest of eternity in a body. Mm. Yeah. This reality that Jesus is embodied even now, which. That in and of itself, there are two things that have been sort of the source of my meditation recently. One is also related to embodiment in a certain way that Jesus continues to say to us, I do not call you servants anymore. I call you friends. And what it means to be a friend of God. And then the second part of that, that Jesus is eternally embodied, means that our humanity is caught up with God. The embodiment, like it really does change everything. That Jesus walked around and wept and sweat and. And all of our bodily functions that we do. He probably stubbed his toe. He had wounds before. He had wounds on the cross. He scraped an elbow. He was exhausted. It's one of my favorite again, little moments with the Samaritan woman at the well, where it says, Jesus, tired from the journey, sat down at the well. And so many of us, myself included, treat exhaustion as somehow sinful. Jesus was exhausted and sat down like that. That in and of itself gives us permission to be tired because we're human. And there's. There's something about that that's so beautiful. Like there's a whole theology around that Jesus was tired and sat down. And I think of in the beginning of the Beatitudes, which I've been slowly working my way through memorizing, and it says that when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. And I thought, why does Matthew make a point of saying, and he sat down? But isn't there also something in us that goes, no, come on. Jesus must have been taking electrolytes and, you know, just the right diet. And so he wouldn't have been exhausted. And then even he had the perfect boundaries because he took a master class on how to do self care. But he was exhausted. I mean, that strikes me today as, huh. Then it gives me permission to think that when I'm exhausted, it's not always because I've overworked and overtired and set poor boundaries. That's just part of my humanity and what it means. It's my favorite Simone VAY quote that's up on my wall because I need to remember it all the time, which is compassion directed towards oneself is true humility. I love that Jesus sitting down at the well was him having compassion on himself. The recognition that our bodies like to live in a body life is to live a finite life into and through the fullness of the resurrection and what is to come. We are nonetheless in these finite realities that Jesus dealt with and has redeemed fully. And in that sort of in between, we do have to wrestle with, like, what. What is. Am I unboundaried and therefore pushing myself too hard and therefore causing myself to get sick? Like, is my body telling me, hey, Tara, like, you need to slow down, girl. This is. You were doing this out of people pleasing, out of so many things, out of your own broken attachments. Like, can. Can I listen to the tension in my shoulders or to the parts of myself? I mean, one of the gifts of writing a book about the body is that it keeps me accountable to my body in a continual way. And I talk about the story of my first heart attack in the book. And then two years after this was published, I had a second heart attack. Um, and. And what it means to then realize I live with a connective tissue disorder and that I could have a heart attack or a stroke at any time. And I've. Since the first event in my life I've, I've lived with that momentum mori that like keep your death always before you. Which sounds really morbid but is actually a profound gift to just live with limits, to live with my finite embodied reality and to be thankful for it. I mean, I once a year, on the anniversary of that first heart attack, I look at my funeral plans and say, oh, actually there's somebody else that I want to ask to be included in that. As I think about what my last act of loving people on this side of the veil will be in terms of that moment. So like, that it's both the gift that Jesus's exhaustion, Jesus's embodiment, helps me be compassionate towards myself and also to embrace my own limitations as a human in the world. Wow. I'm touched by and reflective. So I guess I didn't hear the last three sentences you said, but thinking about how you said that it was your last act of love, that even though you will have passed to think about and to curate your funeral and who would be involved in that and what that would be like, that's a beautiful way of thinking about it. Rather than just, you know, I'm taking pressure off my loved ones or something like that, that it's actually a ministry of love. Yeah, it's. I mean, I teach about grief and death a lot and one of the things that I say to people and literally will get down on my knees and say, like, if you want to love the people that you know will be grieving your death, this is an opportunity not, not just to say, like, I want things this particular way and, and, and to be heavy handed about it. And, and we, I know many people who deal with wounds around that, but what it means to actually like, be able to say the last thing that you get to say. I have a mentor who talks about how wise it is to know what to say to the sacred future in terms of those last words, whether it's at your funeral or right before your death, to know that there's not pressure but opportunity to steward the love that you've been given even more deeply into these hearts. Because we do remember those moments, those threshold moments of life and death, of birth with such a profound clarity that cuts through all the noise that we're living in and gives us an opportunity to embrace, reflect, heal change in those sort of threshold moments. That is really beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And especially just this idea of the sacred future I so often sense in the work that I do. And I'm guessing that you encounter this in kind of the undercurrent of people's lives, but that people, and I'll include myself in this, so often think that to be more spiritual means to be less human. And of course, the idea of human includes our body. But, like, I need to become less myself, less of my humanity and more of God, you know, so like John the Baptist saying, well, less of me and more of him. And of course, that means to deny my physical body and to, you know, make myself less. Can you comment on that? Oh, goodness. I mean, I see that so often when I'm sitting with beloved people in spiritual direction, being around other folks, I see it in myself. Like this idea that somehow to be godly is to be less myself, to be less connected. And yet the relief, the grace, the rest, the wholeness that comes when we actually become curious about who and where we are. It's. I think about it in sitting with folks who are longing for God, longing for deeper with God, and yet not willing to turn towards themselves and be curious because God is already there. There is that. That sense that there is. There is the presence of God with you and what it means to take a deep breath, to become interested in oneself and to push through because it's uncomfortable. Right? Michael? It is that thing of saying, I can feel in my body right now all of the pieces of me that really want you to like me like that want a genuine connection beyond a podcast. Like, I can feel myself sweating a little bit. I can feel like the intellectually. And even if I would say spiritually with some air quotes, like, I know it doesn't matter, like, I'm good. I know that God loves me and that's like. But also, I want real human connection. My body is saying, this matters to me. And instead of judging that as like, oh, you people, pleaser Chara, which is probably part of it as well, to say, oh, I'm longing for connection. I'm like. To be. To say, oh, there's what God has put in me is a longing to connect. And that when I come down to it and be curious about it and push through what I've been taught to be ashamed of, which is my body's responses, my sense of what's going on right here and now, and become curious about it, I get to be real. I get to be with. I get to be one who is being encountered by the living God. Even my weakness and my vulnerability and my woundedness, or perhaps even more especially there. Wow, Again, thank you for sharing that. What's fun in these conversations and podcasts are when there is that kind of human connection, you know, and, and so the, the interesting thing is as soon as you shared what you shared about, you know that there's something in you that you're feeling in your body that you want me to like you. And I'm an enneagram too, and you're four and there's something in me that's like, I, I want you to like me. Right. There's that sense. And as soon as you said that it's about connection, it went from performance. And I don't mean just the technology performance of how people listen to the podcast, but that there's something in me that innately wants to perform for you. Because we've never met face to face and our left brain might go, well, I know that, and I would teach that to people, that there's this people pleaser. But as you talk about it, there's this welcome and acceptance even of what's happening in the body. And that allows me to look at the longing, the yearning that's inside and not to pathologize it, to close the door to shame. Although if shame were there, that would be welcome too. But it reminds me of the quote, almost in contrast to Augustine as we were talking about him from Aquinas centuries later, who said that beneath every unhealthy behavior is a legitimate God given appetite. And I might paraphrase that now as beneath every unpleasant embodied response is a legitimate God given appetite for a sense of safety, for a sense of connection, as you said. So thank you. And hopefully this brief interaction will be helpful to people to go, oh, that's why I feel that. Or they deal with that too. Wow. Because people are listening and they go, well, no, if you've written a book on embodiment, surely you must not struggle with that. And I wrote a book with a chapter on embodiment, but I don't struggle with that. But maybe we wrote this stuff precisely because of our attunement to the struggle. Exactly. I think in writing we talk about, you have to write, you write the book you need. Right. And I wrote Embracing the Body because I wasn't hearing it anywhere. And I wasn't hearing 15 years ago there wasn't permission for me to actually listen to my body. Especially as a woman in the Christian church, my body was dangerous to others. That's the message I got most often. And what it means to actually have explored, wrestled with, gone. Something is like not right here in terms of how we're talking and how we're Interacting, like, why won't anyone give me an actual hug, please? Like as there's this and especially as women and to the women who are listening to this podcast, like there's. There is a message we are taught about how we are embraced by God, by the way people refuse to embrace us like physically and what it means to actually like, slow down and say what is, what is the way that I am interacting with my body, but other people are interacting with my body and is that teaching me something true or something false about God? And that really matters. And it's still something that I have to come back to again and again and again. I'm so glad you brought that up about the embrace or a hug, because you said, and I, and I wholeheartedly agree that we are a touch deposit deprived society. And yet we are sexually obsessed through pornography and online behavior. And we're also, you know, there's more and more talk about embodiment. So, but, but in that touch deprivation, will you say more about touch? And in general, there's this hesitation to embrace and to touch and especially as you described as a woman. But Jesus was nothing if not somebody who was absolutely free to touch in safe and appropriate ways. And we even have liturgy in James chapter five of, you know, come together and anoint with oil and lay your hands upon. So talk a little bit about touch and scripture and how you see that as essential to embracing our body. Yeah, we are a really touch deprived society. And there's a word that we don't seem to be able to express physically, which is affection. Jesus was affectionate. He touched people with kindness and safety. All over the text you see him, whether it's this anointing one another or gathering or the John's laying his head on his chest, like there is all sorts of touch and affection and physicality. So much so that people were kind of scandalized by the way Jesus was affectionate. I have a painting in my spiritual direction office that I absolutely adore. I know it's sort of an imaginative moment, but it's Jesus with his adult mother, like squeezing her and giving her a kiss. And it's not an image I see portrayed very often of Jesus of like this adult to adult affectionate reality that we are so starved of. We're starved of that connection that doesn't sort of turn into some dangerous enactment of lust. And I think that we have, when we feel a need for touch or connection, we immediately put that in the bucket of, of sexual interaction, particularly intercourse. Like that's where we go with all touch almost as soon as we can, because we don't have anywhere else to put it. Like, we've got very little example of safe, affectionate touch lived out in front of our actual bodies. We ran an event with our ministry a couple years ago for our 10th anniversary. And one of my friends and mentors, he and his adult son were together for that event. And I will tell you, Michael, the one picture I got sent more often than any other after that event was these two men hugging each other, leaning on each other affectionately, looking at each other. And it, and it was just the affection between an adult father and an adult son, which was not even the main event. But I got literally 25, 30 pictures of these two men from that evening after the event because people were so stunned to see affection, physical affection, and so delighted on it, in it and on it, that they had to capture it, they had to take a picture of it, they had to remember it as an icon of something. I think, because Jesus went around touching people. One of my favorite saints, Francis, was all about that reality and his own struggle with what healthy, good touch was and the people that he was afraid to touch, which were particularly the lepers. And I think there's so many people who have become our modern day lepers as, as women in the church. I think we have become lepers in a certain way because somehow our bodies are dangerous. They're going to produce some kind of infection that is actually not our responsibility, which is a whole discussion about purity, culture and what that's done. But this reality, that touch and affection, our God, Jesus walking around was affectionate and how much that might be our birthright to touch with healing and hope and kindness and not usury. I would really like to live in that church. I many, many years ago worked in inpatient psychiatry and at that point in time, a lot of the admissions, probably 25%, were people that were there who were quite elderly being evaluated for Alzheimer's. And back then, if you had a psychiatric admission, you'd need to be out in 72 hours, extreme search situations, maybe a few more days. But if you were being eval for Alzheimer's, there were no limits on the insurance reimbursement. So they'd be there for months. And there you could just see these men and women respond when you'd put your hand on their back or their shoulder. And there was just this wonderful freedom for myself and some of the other staff to come up because they're almost childlike and to run fingers through their hair and just to see them light up and to see their posture instead of being braced, to see them begin to relax. And we won't get into the neuro science of all of that right now, but there really is something about human touch that releases chemicals that allows us not just to relax, but for the body to heal. And I think it's interesting when we have the conversations face to face with Jesus about what was it about how he healed people, sometimes just with words, but oftentimes with touch and then with different kinds of touch. So to one blind man, he knelt down and made mud and put it on his eye. And the other time he just touched him. And to the woman who had been bleeding, she touched him, but just his cloak. And I wonder what kind of metaphysical reality was happening there through that kind of touch. I love those wonderings. And I have a whole long list of conversations I want to have with Jesus about that and have had. I just haven't gotten clarity yet. One final question, and then I want to hear about Anamkara, your ministry. But you quoted John Paul ii, who wrote this wonderful tome of the theology of the body, and Christopher west has done a lot of work around exegeting that and shortening that up and maybe making the books popular. I have a copy of the original Theology of the Body that's almost three inches thick, but it's this quote. The body is the only part of us, and I guess I'm paraphrasing here, the body is the only part of us capable of making visible what is invisible. There's a kind of surface sense of a Christian hearing that. And yeah, okay, so, you know, I'm showing Jesus through my positive actions. But you're talking about something deeper, revealing, something deeper that's invisible. Absolutely. There is at this moment no incarnation of Christ on earth but us. And that reality of what it means to touch, like, to really believe, to know that our bodies make visible what is invisible, which is the love of God. Love is always embodied. It is not just floating around out there as something you could catch and bring in. It is always in beings, in humans, in those of us who are loved. I mean, in everybody, I believe. But in those of us who have acknowledged and loved of Jesus. We get to incarnate that, we get to make it real for people. And I can't tell you how many times I've had people say, you know, I just wish Jesus was standing right here. And, and I get, I get, I get that desire. But he is in and through us, and, and we can take that as a heavy responsibility. Or we can take that as a gift of his divine presence with us. And like in our bodies and what it means to make visible that love, to actually enact it in our conversations with our Toddlers or our 10 year olds or our 26 year old or 36 year old children, in what it means to do that in church, to be that to one another, to be that in sitting in therapy with someone, bodies can't heal without other bodies. And that like invisible reality of God made visible is such a profound gift. And, and also, and I think all the right ways makes me shudder a little bit because of all the ways that we mishandle the fact that our bodies make visible the invisible and miscommunicate that. Now I don't think we have to be perfect, but it is a gift to know. And you know, there's a poem in the book by Saint Simeon the New Theologian, which I giggle at every time, him calling himself new because he's thousands of years old. But this, this wisdom of like there is Christ in your hand and in your foot and in your body and that, that, that love of God that you wake up with every day in your embodied flesh is present in the world and we get to bring that. And that has profound implications for a theology of suffering, as people in my work often wrestle with. Where was God? And you know, why didn't God stop it if he's all powerful? And the only answer that I have is incarnation, not even crucifixion, which shows his willingness to suffer, but incarnation, which I really believe that based on that poem, but also based on Scripture, that every tear that we cry, every pain that we experience, every broken bone, if we were to be crucified, every nail that we would feel, every cancer treatment that we get, every heart attack that we go through, as you shared that Jesus shares that. And therefore it's not just that he's with us in our suffering, that he's actually suffering with us. And that means that the little child that's being sexually abused or the child in Gaza right now who is, you know, sleeping, I just heard on the radio the other day, 80 family members sleeping in a three room apartment with no water, can't imagine that. And yet Jesus is there in them. I would argue they are his children and that he is suffering as well. And I would also argue that Jesus is there in Israel with the people that are suffering as well. So that wasn't a partisan or political comment, but it's absolutely profound that as you're talking about embracing the body. It's really embracing Christ within. So very, very last question, because I want to honor your time. I want to come back to the subtitle. I often say on the podcast that subtitles are underrated. Finding God in Flesh and Bone if someone wants to find God, they don't go look out at the horizon or up into the sky. They look within because God is in our flesh and bones. Just say a few words about that. I firmly believe that we can experience God in the transcendent, but when we're talking about our bodies, we're experiencing God in the imminent in us. That there is God in your red and white blood cells, that there is God in this very stuff of us. And that there is a really beautiful and I know for some people, really terrifying journey to take to discover where God already is. And I think there's a. There's a sacred surprise that can be had and a kind of beautiful individual revelation when we're willing to slow down enough to notice where God already is in the very places we. We think he hasn't been or isn't. I really do believe that God is in our kneecaps as much as in our Eucharist. And that may sound silly, but I think it's. It's worth paying attention to. Will you talk, Tara, about Anam Kara or Anam Khera? I've heard it pronounced both ways and what it is that you do, because a big part of what you do is training spiritual directors and a lot of our listeners are on that journey or looking toward that journey. Yeah. So anamkara, although just like my name, you can pronounce it however you want, I'm okay with that. Anamkara is actually the Gaelic word for soul friend. And I've been a practicing spiritual director for almost 20 years, which is crazy. Say, I get the profound gift of walking alongside of people who are discerning what I would call the vocation of spiritual direction. Eugene Peterson once said that there are four unique Christian teaching preaching what he would call evangelism. But he also used the word witnessing, telling the story of God in our particular lives. And spiritual direction. And spiritual direction very much is a language of listening and listening to the soul of another. So I get to, along with a couple of other supervisors who I adore and trust, be alongside those who are on that journey of what it means to become holy listeners, to be non anxious, non manipulative presences with others as they explore their relationship with God, which is just a profound and honestly, like completely delightful. Like, I get to do this? How do I get to do this? And we also do things called scripture circles, because I'm in love with the text. And we do sort of rabbinic or Socratic method of bringing communities together with their real questions about God, their real wrestlings, their real wonderings. And then we open the story and see where it goes. And it's. It's just a delight to do that in the various communities that we get to do that. So we do. We do a lot of things. We do retreats, we do workshops for spiritual directors around various topics. And I am really on the daily. Profoundly humbled, as I'm sure you are, Michael, of what it means to sit across from another human being or a group of human beings and witness the work of God in them. And to see it is just. We're in the Easter season as we're having this conversation, and the word feast comes to mind. It's a profound feast, even in the hardest, darkest places to be with people in their walk with God.