What does it mean to be fully alive and at peace with ourselves and our neighbors in the anxiety and fear of contemporary life? Joining Evan Rosa in this episode is Elizabeth Oldfield—a journalist, communicator, and podcast host of *The Sacred*. She’s author of *Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times*. Together they discuss life in her micro-monastery in south London; the meaning of liturgical and sacramental life embedded in a fast-paced, technological, capitalistic, obsessively popular society; the concept of personal encounter and Martin Buber’s idea that “all living is meeting”; the fundamentally disconnecting power of sin that works against the fully aliveness of truly meeting the other; including discussions of wrath or contempt that drives us toward violence; greed or avarice and the incessant insatiable accumulation of wealth; the attention-training benefits of gratitude and the identify forming power of our attention; throughout it all, working through the spiritual psychology of sin and topography of the soul—and the fact that we are, all of us, in Elizabeth’s words, “unutterably beloved.”
What does it mean to be fully alive and at peace with ourselves and our neighbors in the anxiety and fear of contemporary life?
Joining Evan Rosa in this episode is Elizabeth Oldfield—a journalist, communicator, and podcast host of The Sacred. She’s author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.
Together they discuss life in her micro-monastery in south London; the meaning of liturgical and sacramental life embedded in a fast-paced, technological, capitalistic, obsessively popular society; the concept of personal encounter and Martin Buber’s idea that “all living is meeting”; the fundamentally disconnecting power of sin that works against the fully aliveness of truly meeting the other; including discussions of wrath or contempt that drives us toward violence; greed or avarice and the incessant insatiable accumulation of wealth; the attention-training benefits of gratitude and the identify forming power of our attention; throughout it all, working through the spiritual psychology of sin and topography of the soul—and the fact that we are, all of us, in Elizabeth’s words, “unutterably beloved.”
About Elizabeth Oldfield
Elizabeth Oldfield is a journalist, communicator, and author. She hosts a beautiful podcast called The Sacred. And she’s author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. Follow her @esoldfield, and visit her website elizabetholdfield.com
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Honestly, I think seeking after watertight definition of what the soul is, is a distraction from the actual soul work. It felt like I needed to like elbow out some room. You know, for uncertainty and for poetry and for something more right, hemispheric. The soul sits there. It's not a mathematical concept.
It's not a biological concept. As language for the fact that we have a deep self that is beloved and seen and known, and that we sin against, that we sin against our own souls. We numb our souls and we distract our souls. And we bow down to idols because we're too scared to trust capital our love. You know, we're too scared to be vulnerable enough to ask for help.
We're too scared to acknowledge the tender childlike part of us that longs to be in that relationship of unconditional love, because it's easier to stay guarded and self reliant and achieving and distracted. Distracted is the key, I think. Um, so yeah, I am still, I would say like a charismatic Christian.
I have in no way felt like I needed to sort of cast off that part of my story. I have instead just added in a bunch of contemplative practices to keep my soul company in conversation with the love of God. Not as a narcissistic turning inwards of like endless fascination with my particular temperamental quirks, but as a way of saying, what needs to come out into the light?
What needs to come out towards love? What lies, what flaming arrows have got stuck in here? And how can I actually receive the inheritance that is mine, which is freedom?
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. It's easy to cave to a historical myopia, an anxious or fearful nearsightedness that prevents us from seeing a much larger picture. And of course, what we see up close is wrath, greed, envy, gluttony, idolatry, lust.
But off in the distance is a long history of spiritual psychology. That dates back to the ancient desert mothers and fathers, even further, of course, than them. But these ancient people, they too wrestled with these deadly vices that so existentially threaten us from the perspective of this moment. This is a long history exploring the topography of the soul and the gritty, salty textures of the human mind.
Those double edged capacities that make us who we are. We could learn a lot of wisdom from them. We could perhaps gain a lot of peace from them, but how can we do that as creatures of our time? My guest on the show today is Elizabeth Oldfield. She's a journalist, communicator. She hosts a beautiful podcast called The Sacred, and she's author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.
She graciously joined me to talk about this recent book of hers and what developed was a very contemplative and monastically, sacramentally paced conversation. Together, we discuss life in her micro monastery in south London. The meaning of liturgical and sacramental life embedded in fast paced, technological, capitalistic, obsessively popular society.
The concept of personal encounter and Martin Buber's idea that, quote, all living is meeting. The fundamentally disconnecting power of sin that works against the fully aliveness of truly meeting the other. And that includes discussions of wrath or contempt that drive us toward violence, greed or avarice, and the incessant, insatiable accumulation of wealth, the attention training benefits of gratitude, and the identity forming power of our attention.
Throughout it all, we work through the spiritual psychology of sin and the fact that we are, all of us, in Elizabeth's words, unutterably beloved. Thanks for listening.
Elizabeth,
thanks for joining me on For the Life of the World.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Delighted to be here.
Evan Rosa: I wanted to start with giving you an opportunity to share a little bit about who you are and the community that you're a part of, because I have a feeling that who you are and the people and place that you, that you associate with are an important part of that equation.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, very much so. I live in South London in the UK, an area called Pickham, which I adore. I live with my husband and our two kids and another family. The sort of Christian world jargon I think is intentional community, but I'm realizing that people, not everyone knows what that is. I jokingly call us a commune.
My housemates is always like, not that kind of commune. My current way of describing it as a micro monastery. So we obviously are not, groups of religious sisters or brothers in that we all have jobs and the adults are married to one person each and there are kids in the equation, but we do draw very deeply on monastic rhythms and practices.
We have a rule of life. We have turned our garage into a chapel and we pray morning prayer and complain. We have a rhythm of hospitality and we really are trying to think about how we live our lives. As a household that is growing in faith, hope, and love, that is seeking to invite ourselves and others into the life and love of Jesus, is the sort of shorthand for our reason we exist.
And a lot of people pass through.
Evan Rosa: So when you have people come by, what does that, what's passing through the micro monastery feel like? And do you ever notice like a shift of tempo or pace where people are finding their way into the rhythm of the micro monastery? What does that do?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, it's all kinds of different people.
So we just, we have whole households, friends and family coming to stay and particularly in London. People love a spare room in London. But we also have open table dinners and other kind of rhythms, house days where we do gardening and we invite the whole street and the whole neighborhood. And particularly at those dinners, there is something about being invited to someone's house that you don't know very well that really shifts people.
And being invited into a household that is set up slightly differently than the mainstream, That really, it makes it really easy to get to depth. And one of the first things we do is people come in and we chat and we're cooking and say, here's the forks, help lay the table or whatever. And you might like this person and don't worry, this guy's been before.
It's not scary. And then we'll gather around the table when we say, this is what we're doing. And the only weird bits is that you can come pray compliment at the end in the chapel if you want, but you don't have to. And we will start with some silence. Those of us who pray can give thanks in that silence.
Those of us who just want to contemplate, we frame it as as inclusively as possible. And then we have maybe 30 seconds or a minute of silence. And the holiness of that moment of 12 people, most of whom have never met each other before, just breathing together, coming from our days, coming from our worries, coming from what we're up to.
You know, it's very subtle. It's not like a completely radical transformation moment, but people always want to come back and they say, I love sitting in silence with other people and I love coming to pray Compline or listen to Compline, the number of people who say that who have had no normal practice of prayer in their lives.
And I love how interesting it is to meet people I wouldn't normally meet.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if you would give us a bit of an example for the listener, insofar as you are representing what that's like, and insofar as anyone here listening has felt what I felt when you paused and slowed down and there was that space to breathe.
Would you give us a little bit of an example about that liturgical space if you would use some of the liturgy that comes to mind? Even in this moment.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I want to reach for my Celtic daily prayer book. Let me get it. I'll read you some. It's Monday night. We've had a really good dinner and then we walked down our, it's not long and I'm sure in the wild west, but it's 150 foot garden, which is big in London.
And it's dark. And we walked down the garden and we take the candles from the table and just Then we just have candles and people stand in a circle. We say, you know, we're going to go around the circle and if you would like to pray or just read, do. We change readers at the star and some people listen and this is part of the Monday Compline that we pray again and again on a Monday night.
I make the cross of Christ upon my breast over the tablet of my hard heart and I beseech the living God of the universe. May the light of light come to my dark heart from thy place. May the spirit's wisdom come to my heart's tablet. From my savior, Christ without sin, Christ of wounds, I am placing my soul and my body under thy guarding this night, Christ of the poor, Christ of tears, thy cross be my shielding this night, son of tears of the wounds of the piercing, I am going now into the sleep, O be it in thy dear arms keep, O God of grace.
I shall awake and it goes on and each night is slightly differently different for the compliment, but they always finish the peace of all peace. Be ours this night in the name of the father and the son and the Holy spirit. Amen.
Evan Rosa: Amen. What I want to do from the space that, that the very restful space that Compline Prayer offers is now put your book in perspective.
So you've got this new book, Fully Alive, which you've just described to me as an expression of what feels like almost every thought you've ever had. And that's depth and that's wanting to bring so much to it. Tell me a little bit about how you see your liturgical life, the rhythms of your life, however you have, or else you might describe your approach to spirituality as.
Providing the soil for this book to keep that garden metaphor going.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What a great question. I don't know that I would have written this book if we hadn't been living in community. A very strange book in that it doesn't really sit in a pre existing genre, which is a big nightmare for the PR team at the publishes, but it is part memoir, part ideas, something.
And it felt like the work that was mine to do, it felt like. the conversations that we were having with people who, this is very churchy language, but certainly my husband and I have always felt the kind of the church jargon is like our gifting is evangelists and I, I have always felt most interested in having conversations across differences, across divides, translating and listening and learning and trying to communicate something of my tradition to those outside the church.
It felt like lots of people did want it, that they were really interested and that there was treasure and depth that was so at odds with the public narratives about Christianity. And there was a hunger to understand what on earth this tradition might have to say now, for the problems now, the very real serious crises that the world faces.
It wasn't, I knew I wasn't, I couldn't write a big ideas book that was just like, here's my 10 point plan or a sort of devotional book which was very keen on getting everything right. Um, and so it was only when I began living in community and being part of the rhythms of prayer and confession to each other and a bit more space, actually a bit more margin, a bit more capacity and living up close with other people who took my vocation seriously as I did and I took theirs.
as seriously as they did. That I could both, I think, hear the leading within me and have people speak courage into me in order to do it.
Evan Rosa: I want to talk about what it means to be fully alive for you. And you say in the book that it's summed up by connection, but the book itself is arranged around, around sin and the kinds of things that are, that spill out our propensity to undo so much of that connection.
And so flesh out what it is to be fully alive for you.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, it's relationship. Everything. Is always about relationship for me, and I came to that conclusion intuitively before I had a kind of theological or philosophical underpinning for it, which of course makes sense if it's something woven into the fabric of life itself, as I believe it is.
Yeah, I am most fully alive and I think fully aliveness is a deep connection with our own soul, our own deep selves. And I'm interested in the way different religious traditions and different traditions in general all have this sense that there are, we are parts in some way, right? Freudians talk about the id and the superego.
There's this, the connection with my deep self or my soul that longs for relationship, that longs for love, that longs to be seen and known and to see and know. Relationship with other people, deep connection with other people, relationships of intimacy and trust and respect while you are seen. And then Relationships with the Divine.
When all that's lining up, that's it for me.
Evan Rosa: You bring in the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber on, on All Living is Meeting. Unpack that a little bit. It's hard to unpack Martin Buber, but, but maybe, what about this? If All Living is Meeting, how are we failing in that regard, because I think you're nod to the human prevent a technical term.
I'll mention to the readers, the human propensity to F things up as pushing against all living is meeting.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. I need to point out that I'm quoting Francis Buffett, very eminent novelist and writer in his book unapologetic. And I do find his, that as his definition of sin, very helpful for helping us hear the brutality actually.
Evan Rosa: Yes, of course.
Elizabeth Oldfield: But Yeah, so sin is disconnection. It's the ways we pull back into ourselves. I think we are designed to reach outward into relationship and we turn back into ourselves. It's Luther and Augustine's Hemingway and Compartison say we are an ingrown toenail, right? Designed for relationship, instead pulling back, turning into ourselves.
John Donne has this extraordinary quote, I think it starts with, man alone of all envenomed things does work upon himself with inward sting. This self harm that disconnection is, that sin is. Because if you believe that humans are made in the image of a Trinitarian God, that we are designed for a relationship, or if like Buba, you believe all living is meeting, that is only in these moments of encounter with other people at the I thou level, at the fully non objectifying level.
You are, you are not an it, you are a you and I'm going to look in your eyes and really see you and really be seen. And that's, he says, that is all that's really real. If you believe either of those things and they're not incompatible. And all of these sins, all of these ways we numb, all of these ways we distance, all of these ways we attack, all of these ways we compete, all of these ways we objectify, are undermining our very humanity and the opposite of life.
That's why I can get on board with the idea of sin being, the wages of sin being death, because they pull us away from fully aliveness.
Evan Rosa: Uh, in your Twitter bio, you have an Auden quote that I feel is maybe an expression of this. You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart. And one thank you for that because I hadn't read that in Auden.
So where does it come from in Auden? And it seems like that's part of what's happening here, that crookedness and yet working with what we have. to try to, it's clear that we all sense this, this push toward, back toward connection, encounter, meeting, unity.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. I can't remember the title of the poem right now, but it's a very melancholy one where he's looking out the window and have a propensity to F things up, you know, and, and so does everyone else.
And still you shall love your neighbor.
Evan Rosa: Much of what you've been doing, Up to this point through your podcast, The Sacred has seemed to me to try to depolarize. I think you use this kind of framework for thinking about it. And, and that looks like working with disconnection in so many ways, right? Working with the crooked neighbor, working with our own crooked heart in all of its crookedness, and yet trying to work through things.
Polarization and division. and just the incredible fragmentation of life that tends to split people. The world tends to be toward, it tends toward splitting sadly in so many ways, even if we could say it might also tend toward meeting in some sense. But talk about this work of, maybe we still need to do a little more like diagnosis of polarization that's, and disconnection that you observe that seems to me in looking at the structure of the book and looking through these, the structure of sin and the responses to it.
There might be something instructive here.
Elizabeth Oldfield: As I was writing, I was like, there's something here in this tradition that I want to translate. And the deeper I got into it, the more it was like, it was nourishing my own soul. I'm preaching to my own soul and feeling this, like falling back in love with these ideas.
In lots of my other work, because I do other work in reconciliation and peace building and working with anti polarization charities, and also weirdly through understanding child development, coming to this sense of the role of fight or flight and the way that, at a very basic level, my analysis, there is two things going on.
One is homophily, which is very deep seated preference for people like us, people like me syndrome. And you see it in scripture, you see it in all cultures, given a choice, If we are not concentrating, we will feel warmness towards people who are like us or who remind us of ourselves or who we think will like us, right?
And this can be like super arbitrary things like eye color. I generally feel warm towards tall women when I first meet them because small women make me feel like a giant. Like ridiculous, nonsense, childish stuff that's still deep in us. You have that. And then you have the fight or flight response in us, which whenever we're threatened or anxious, amplifies People Like Me syndrome and draws us back into our tribes, reduces empathy, reduces curiosity.
It's just, and all societies have this, and healthy societies create institutions and setups and rituals, moments of collective effervescence, collective stories to be part of, which keeps it in check. Our society has done the opposite. Like, I could go into all of the analysis of that, I won't, but I know that we are feeling the increase of tribalism and And the words of Jesus are like targeted medicine, the sort of astonishing, astonishing psychological acuteness of someone who walked through a divided society, like, huckishly, mischievously, ignoring tribal boundaries.
being seen with people that you shouldn't be seen with, always going to the outsider, always going to the person that's going to raise eyebrows, all like absolutely refusing to have any truck whatsoever with purity lines and tribal boundaries, just nothing, almost hilarious. When you start reading it through that lens, he's so winked to the camera, look who I'm going to go hang out with now.
And it, that, that refusal to play the game of who's in and who's out and who's not my tribe is so radical. And then. Turn the other cheek as a posture of resistance to fight or flight, as a way of saying, when you're hit in the face, or you meet someone who you disagree with, or you're in a party with a bunch of people who you actually don't really feel comfortable with, do not.
Get snippy, contemptuous, eye rolly, bitchy, gossipy, fight. And also don't just back, just don't run away. Don't flight, don't, don't shut down, don't create a parallel culture. Don't avoid ever being with people not like you. But turn the other cheek, stay in relationships, stay connected, build the internal spiritual core strength to be in these relationships that ask a lot of us, because that's where the magic is.
Just that ministry of reconciliation has become so central to my understanding of what the gospel is and what our call is and how transformative it can be when we live it. But it's like extremely difficult muscle to build.
Evan Rosa: One way, I almost said this earlier, but when you were describing the nature of the book and it's the way you feel like it's breaking some genres, it feels like a sort of topography of the soul in certain ways.
It feels like you're doing a kind of like spiritual psychology. That's something going on here. And that's because I think through the seven deadly sins tradition, you do have a lot of early psychology, if you will, right? It's not of the modern variety, but it's that early moral spiritual psychology, which is a turning inward.
And it's fascinating to me to look outward at polarization, look outward at division and the inability for things to go together. It's almost turning the magnet around and seeing that, that I think it would be literal magnetic polarization in that way. But then when you can't connect, when you can't find meaning, When you can't find encounter, it's almost as if I do need to look inward.
And so I'm coming here to the one of the, well, you also quote Marilynne Robinson in the epigram of the book, I find the soul a valuable concept. She says, a statement of the dignity of a human life. And of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience, I find my own soul interesting company. Why that quote at the beginning?
Elizabeth Oldfield: If in doubt, quote Marilyn Robinson. Yeah. I mean, that's literally it because she's, she's like the wisest person I can ever find on any topic. And because I'd put the soul in the subtitle of the book. And again, writing this book, the bit of me that has a master's in and spends a lot of time around academic nerves, nerds.
All the way through was this voice in my ear being like, define your terms! And had to, in order to write the kind of book that I felt called to write, I had to just compassionately ask that voice to stand down because it's like narrative non fiction. This is not academic fiction. It's not academic writing.
And I'm going to use this concept of the soul quite loosely. And I'm going to use it partly because it makes enough sense to the audience that I'm trying to speak to who might not be very informed about the Christian tradition. to travel. And because honestly, we don't know, even if I did try to do a very tight analysis of what the soul is, it's not like a land on a mathematical solution.
And so just naming her better words, saying why I use it, why it's helpful. And I just love that last line. I found my own so interesting company, right? It's just such a sort of lovely mischievous, beautiful. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: It is mischievous. It is beautiful. point to this desire for connection and meeting and integration.
And in one important sense, there's a lot of healing to be done within our own souls, within our own crooked hearts. So the ability to sit with one's soul, and I applaud you not for going metaphysical on this particular thing, plenty of ink has been spilled, and to be fully alive Surely we're going to have to work out some strategies without having the metaphysics to all settled.
Yeah. But just the patience to find one's own soul interesting company. That's that feels aspirational.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Evan Rosa: In so many ways.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Yeah. Not to be up on it, not to numb it, not to over inflate its importance that always it's these twin temptations, right? To. The patience, and this comes up a lot in this chapter on gluttony about sort of numbing and addictive behaviors, patient to be the tender childlike creature that we are, right?
The craving for more certainty and more safety and more security and more deity, frankly, than we as humans are designed for is just every day. And the coming back to a place of trust and reliance and Intimacy and the ground of being, you know, forehead to forehead with the love of God. It's a, it's the work of a lifetime to actually listen to what it's mark.
And you can, you can use the language of the heart, all of these things as poetic, metaphorical, grasping towards something. But yeah, soul is the closest I get the, I wanna really listen to, to the person that I made to be
Evan Rosa: the idea that we could find our souls. Interesting. And this project of being able to both observe the.
disconnection out in the world, observe the disconnection in our own souls, and then try to make sense of both and have the patience with ourselves to get through, to work through that division and then still reach out for that meeting. It's in that sense that a mere description of the soul in some metaphysical sense is just not enough and also unnecessary.
Probably.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Evan Rosa: It has to be unnecessary because we can't get to any kind of. agreement or certainty about it, I don't think. Yeah. And so we have to be able to work with something and that expression from Marilyn, you're right, when in doubt, go there. It says so much, just keeping company with ourselves in order to keep company with others.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. And honestly, I think seeking after what's tight definition of what the soul is, is a distraction from the actual soul work. It felt like I needed to like elbow out some room, you know, for uncertainty and for poetry and for something more right, hemispheric. The soul sits there, it's not a mathematical concept, it's not a biological concept.
As language for the fact that we have a deep self that is beloved and seen and known, and that we sin against, that we sin against our own souls, we numb our souls and we distract and we bow down to idols. Because we're too scared to trust capital our love, you know, we're too scared to be vulnerable enough to ask for help.
We're too scared to acknowledge the tender childlike part of us that longs to be in that relationship of unconditional love because it's easier to stay guarded and self reliant and achieving and distracted. Distracted is the key thing, I think. Um, so yeah, I am still, I would say like a charismatic Christian.
I have in no way felt like I needed to sort of cast off that part of my story. I have instead just added in a bunch of contemplative practices to keep my soul company in conversation with the love of God, not as a narcissistic turning inwards of like endless fascination with my particular temperamental quirks, but as a way of saying what needs to come out into the light?
What needs to come out towards love? What lies, what flaming arrows have got stuck in here? And how can I actually receive the inheritance that is mine, which is freedom?
Evan Rosa: I think one of the other things that we missed that I want to just be able to capture is the characterization of contemporary life is both angry and greedy.
When you think about needing to start there, when you think about the urgency that you're observing with a world that seems angry, that seems constantly offended, constantly outraged, and also constantly feeling empty. and wanting more. These are two elements that you start the book with, wrath and an avarice, which are very depictive of the contemporary world, angry and greedy.
I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about that. The felt need to start there.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Roth was the first chapter that I've written in my head. And in all this work I've been doing in polarization and tribalism and, and in my coming to a bodge together, peace building philosophy, which I then realized already existed in my scriptures.
And it really is the play. It is the thing that causes me most grief is at some point I need to do a big bit of work on contempt as the universal acid, because We have somehow bought this really diabolical lie that contempt for tribes that we don't agree with is morally righteous, but it's a proper response rather than being poison for our souls, for everyone's souls, for social ties, for the bonds of community, for the ability to have anything like a flourishing common life.
And so, yeah, the chapter on wrath was really trying to say, we have, we have a big problem here because No one is teaching us, one, that we should be attempting to cross these divides and retain our sense of each other's full humanity. We're being told the opposite, that we shouldn't be seen with them. We shouldn't platform, we shouldn't retweet, we shouldn't listen to people not like us because they're the enemy.
Even making the argument that you should is radical and I get that's one of my most radical positions and people I lose have lost friends and family. things over it. And then the how you do it, that even when you're convinced that you should, are so difficult to do because we are in this ambiently anxious culture where we're all just swimming in stress hormone, which as we just know biologically is not a place from which it's easy to be empathetic and curious and actually listen to anyone, actually understand and actually change our minds, actually learn anything.
We're just, we're, there's a scholar that calls it mutual radicalization and you just see it all over the place. And a Christian non violent tradition, this insanely challenging call to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, the moral beauty of that, the transformative power of that, I'm like in the foothills of learning how to do that, but I was like, we have to, that, I have to find a way to, I have to find a way to say it, I have to find a way to share it.
Evan Rosa: What's interesting to me about contempt and some of the recent things that I've been looking at here and interested in around anger and contempt is, is the opportunity to grieve or lament. as a way of working through angry feelings, working through offense, and yet finding a different kind of bonding space in grief than you might find in the bonding space that anger and contempt and outrage offers.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, I think you're right. It's not that we can go, I'm just going to stop feeling angry with people and find this some of the things people do and say in the world totally fine. But the commitment to a healthy processing of emotions collectively feels like one of the genius gifts of healthy religious traditions that the Psalms as emotion processing technology, which my friend Laura Fabriki says as a blueprint for going from rage.
and fear and overwhelm down into it and expressing it right in song in ritual as a congregation with others and then coming out into, you know, do not be downcast of my soul. Yeah. I will praise him to that place. Okay. And it's what, that's what psychologists say, right? That you can't, unless you allow yourself to feel your feelings, they cannot move through you.
It's like therapy 101. And it's all over scripture. This sense of. Unless you have moments of collective effervescence, unless you have rituals and rhythms, unless you have language, unless you have stories to be And it's, it is the beauty of the liturgical year, right? It's basically the, it's basically Holy Week going down and through and up and grief and hope and down and through and up.
That feels, I was going to say colonic irrigation for the soul, which is possibly, but something about a healthy cycle of grief and lament and then joy and praise, grief and lament and joy and praise stops us getting stuck in grief. Roth and contempt.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, because they do have a way of, you call it kryptonite for change.
There's something, and I see that, and I think there's a lovely turn of phrase for contempt or anger or wrath to be kryptonite for change is to really stay solidified or cemented. in your outrage to hang on to resentment instead of letting that flow occur.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if we could, um, talk a little bit, um, more through greed and avarice.
You initially raised, raised this in the context of climate change. And I know what's interesting. I just, I just interviewed a poet, Mihal Oshiel, who did a collection of poetry that on that he calls desire. talking about what's really worth wanting, which is a phrase that works pretty well for what we do at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
But, but this idea of, of avarice being one of the ground level causes of climate change, something that keeps the, keeps the fuel burning. What's your take on, I want you to, would you introduce your take on greed? And I like the idea of stuffication and moving instead toward gratitude and generosity.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
This was a hard chapter to write. The, like, sense of personal hypocrisy. Phyllis Tickle has this amazing paragraph about the way Christians just, like, self justify our failure to take seriously.
There's a particular line at the end of the Parable of the Sower that haunts me where it says the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choked the life and that feels like the deceitfulness of wealth and it's not, I think every society has dealt with it and that's why it's in scripture, right, that we have this tendency to build bigger and bigger barns.
We want to make ourselves safe by accumulation and acquisition, like the original, perhaps biggest idol for human beings. We've always wanted more than we need. And we've, it's always been hard to share. And this is one of our deep tendencies towards disconnection. What I think, I'm going to pretend to know the many interconnected forces that have led us to where we are, but I think what we lost as a society in the middle of the 20th century is any sort of shame of around that, right?
any sort of sense that there was something unlovely and undignified about restless acquisition and relentless accumulation of wealth. Like even the merchants of the Victorian era, like the early merchant banks in the UK, coots and whores, have quite a lot of built in safeguards against out of control acquisition.
It was baked into various nations, kind of economic policies and then Keynes. And then again in the eighties, the sense that actually we can redirect this acquisitive greedy nature of the human heart to lead to universal prosperity. And it's been disastrous. It's, we made it our gods. We made money and wealth and comfort and convenience, our gods.
And the more you feel that the more you want, the less we can be satisfied with enough. and simple lives. And it is really the most, I make myself read scripture on this subject regularly and I never want to, never want to. And I always look at it out of just one eye, but I'm like, if you don't let yourself be formed by this story, which knows how much money and stuff wants to suffocate you and squeeze and choke the life out of you, then the rest of the time, I'm in this imaginative world that's telling me, why not just one more pair of earrings?
On Instagram. Bought another one the other day.
Evan Rosa: You prop up gratitude as, as this alternative, but not, but I found it interesting. You talk about the need to silence cynicism. And I find this interesting, right? Like what cynicism is doing across the board, perhaps. And I think maybe cynicism could get its own chapter as one that you could add it as an eighth sin for sure.
But gratitude as an alternative to cynicism as a, as important medicine to treat greed.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. One caveat is that chapter, I am least satisfied with my prophet antidotes. They feel like very, not strong enough for the scale of the problem, which is why right at the end, I have this kind of gesturing towards only the un instrumentalizing presence of the divine can maybe do this better.
for us drawing on Thomas Traherne, but I do think that gratitude, there's a reason that we are called to it, almost all religious traditions proffer it. And there's now all the good sort of psychological literature around gratitude journals and things like that, because what it is on a sort of functional psychological level is it's the antidote to hedonic adaptation, this sense in which we And I would love to, no, I would love to have a chat with God about this as a design flaw.
We too used to things too fast and the things that we, there's this great Governor B song he's a UK rapper called These Are The Days We Prayed For and we long for something so much and we pray for it and we work to it. And it's seconds after it arrives, the horizon moves forward and we don't even really notice the gift that we've been given.
And gratitude is a form of attention training, like continually making yourself notice the fact that you have healthy children is not background noise, it's a gift. The fact that you have enough food, it's not Don't take that for granted. Don't be entitled. Billions of people don't. Notice it. Notice it.
Notice these gifts. Give thanks. Don't let yourself be veiled to their very presence by this strange cognitive quirk that, that means we get used to things and stop seeing them. So it's a sort of magnifying glass on the gifts that we've already been given. And in that sense, Both helps our posture, remind us that our posture is of dependence to God, I believe, and also to other people for everything.
And being an entitled arsehole about it is not good for us. So yeah, it just, it is one, one pushback against that sin of disconnection.
Evan Rosa: I also want to, appreciate the fact that you're also identifying that it's just misplaced desire as well. It's not the fact of desire. It's almost as if, you know, continue to, to, to be a glutton, but a glutton on a glutton for what it's, it's a fascinating kind of thing.
If you could just be a glutton for the simplicity of pure gift that life is in all of its quotidian or mundane, or honestly, sometimes painful. Yeah. Sometimes. very often painful and destructive, sadly, you know, like there's so much to lament, to grieve. And yet the very givenness of it, if we could only just desire that endlessly, go ahead and want, go ahead and want deeply.
Yeah. But to extend their point, everyone around us is trying to help us become fully alive by simply helping us get more of what we already want. Just making the assumption that was worth wanting, but it seems to be misplaced so often. I want to ask you about attention though, too. And I think that this, and I think cynicism, perhaps for me, sits better in, in this, in the vice of Acadia and a kind of spiritual apathy.
a kind of, a kind of despair
Elizabeth Oldfield: and
Evan Rosa: hopelessness. And, and so we are dealing with a particular kind of attention problem as well. And, and the distracted nature of, of the human, of human psychology at the moment is concerning. It's really deeply concerning for the kind of world that Generation Alpha has grown up in.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, I realized I've been saying Acidia in my head and I have no idea how you actually say it. So no
Evan Rosa: one knows.
Elizabeth Oldfield: No, because it's laughter, I guess.
Evan Rosa: Acadia.
Elizabeth Oldfield: That's the joy of laughter, we don't know what it sounds like.
Evan Rosa: And you know what, Kathleen Norris, she wrote a book about Acidia and me and she says Acidia.
So I might as well just say Acidia.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It's a funny thing writing a book because you write it and then you go back and read it and I didn't really realize I was writing a book about formation and I didn't really realize I was writing a book about attention, but those are the things that um. like shot through the whole thing because formation is attention and attention is formation.
And this is how we become, you know, this is, and you can talk about that in terms of our plastic neurobiology and you can talk about it in terms of our soul. But what we pay attention to is functionally who we become. And That's terrifying when you spend as much time faffing around on your phone as I do.
And that's, I think, where I got this need for stronger containers. It's, I think, semi consciously why we moved into community. It's why we have a rule of life. It's why we tried to do this collective 24 hour Sabbath thing, which The only thing that's working for me now is getting my children to hide all my devices because I am the most weak willed person in the entire world.
And it's why, actually, I was walking over the Thames, I was walking over the Waterloo Bridge the other day on my phone as usual, and I had such a strong urge to just get away from me. It's like being shackled. What am I doing? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it feels like a very, and I feel like things are beginning to turn a little bit in terms of Jonathan Haidt's work on childhood and our understanding of how much it's harming us, but the collective action slash soul work slash discipline to actually shift how we're living.
We're not there yet, I would say.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. But you talk about the kinds of rhythms that are there to help us resist. And I would say it's, it's, that is a, it is an extension of going from like greed and desire and what we all want into also training, our training, the shape of life and our habits and, and the way that, that thinking liturgically and thinking through a rule of life in the context of.
Communal accountability offers some kind of reprieve from it. And that's where the monastery, that little micro monastery offers some hope and that we could all find our way into the micro monasteries of those rhythms of life that draw us toward what really does matter and what, what, and put our attention toward that.
That seems promising.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. discipled in three years of living in community than in the previous 20 years in and out of congregations because It's not enough. Like the forces of distraction, the formative stories of advertising and striving and division are too strong and I'm immersing them too much for me to think that two hours on a Sunday morning is enough of an antidote.
I'm just, I don't mean this in a nuclear Benedict option, withdraw from all things. Like we are still in the city for a reason. We are very porous. We are still all doing normal mainstream jobs. And he needs more discipleship. I needed more accountability. I needed more scaffolding for my soul. It felt like I was getting ever so diluted.
Evan Rosa: That leads me to ask you a little bit about the envy chapter, because that's, you're describing a kind of relationality that. that isn't built around comparison or envy, but is rather one of mutual connection and mutual encouragement and the lofty goal of being oneself together with others.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, the sort of discovery slash rediscovery of the gifts of what the gospel is supposed to be, that the idea that we could be unutterably beloved and completely unremarkable in being unutterably beloved, you know, this, the rewiring of human value.
away from comparison and competition and how countercultural that is and how radical and how liberatory and relieving it is. On the times when I can bring it into focus, I can sit in this. I am beloved. I am known. I am seen. I always was, and I always will be, and there's nothing I can do to F that up because it's all gift.
So is her and you and them, and I'm not better than them because of it. And they're not better than me. It's just, it's not, it's counterintuitive to how we've set up the world. And I'm just like, I want to sit in it every day.
Evan Rosa: That belovedness and the kind of love that you're receiving from the neighbor there is also the kind of divine love we need to acknowledge is this ultimate sense of love that does this undoing work that moves us back toward unity from within division and moves us toward being fully alive.
That kind of thing. I wonder if I'm going right to the end, right to the end here, because this, this verse from Song of Solomon that you closed the book with really jumped out to me. What if you'd read that and then comment on the ways in which that that's, it remains meaningful to you, the hope that it offers.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I already told you I'm not a theologian. Do you mind if I read the page?
Evan Rosa: Sure could. Thanks. You could tell the story that kind of leads up to it if you want.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I won't go into detail but it's about baptism and confrontations with our immortality and the need to sit with the idea of death. Baptism was not a once for all solution to the pain of being a person, clearly.
Enacting one's death one day does not make the prospect of our end, the end of the world, suddenly a comfortable thought. I think a part of me did begin to grow up that day though. I'd go on to lose my faith and find it again, and who knows where I'll be by the time this book comes out. I know I will suffer, because life does that, and so will the people I love.
The world outside of Eden will break all of our hearts. We had a reading from the Song of Solomon at our wedding that includes these verses. Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm, for love is strong as death. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. Whatever is ahead of me, ahead of us, it will include many deaths, but love remains.
I hope I can remember to surrender again to the tide that is always trying to pull me home. And I think Honestly, some of this book came out of anxiety, out of, and who do I need to be to meet this moment? And I think the answer I always come back to is I need to be rooted and grounded in this love. I need to be putting my roots down into love that is stronger than death so that when the droughts come, you know, I will not be afraid cause the floods can't drown it.
And there's obviously a climate illusions in there, but there's also just this sense of. Wanting to put more of my weight on the love of God and to believe and to have help with my unbelief. Love is stronger than death, that it is stronger than all of the ways we have effed up, Francis Buffett said, more than death.
More is fixable than we know that. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: And thank God. Yeah. You wrote this out of a desire for helping people become, I think, and I clearly see the ways in which you have sought out a means by which you yourself are becoming more fully alive in turbulent times. And that's what really jumped out to me as I listened to you read that verse, that these many waters are in fact, a description of quite a bit of turbulence.
What I like about that verse, a seal on the heart, is that there's a security in it that even amidst the turbulence, there is a quieting, and this is to maybe even go full circle to the kind of quiet space that you brought us into and the beginning of our conversation, but there is a kind of quiet and stable and secure
Elizabeth Oldfield: silence.
Evan Rosa: experience of life that's on offer. If you wouldn't mind commenting on that need for security and stability in this moment, uh, by way of closing.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I think we long for steadiness, right? And it's really helpful, actually. Thank you for inviting me to read those verses again and to look, it's really helpful because it's, there's always this movement, isn't it?
And in writing about my own very failing faltering attempts to find steadiness. And I felt like by the end of the writing process, I had actually processed a lot of emotions healthily and I had been honest with myself about a lot of things for the first time and put it on the page in a way that feels very vulnerable and had landed somewhere that was not, that felt like a sort of robust hope.
And in reading it, I'm realizing that in the busyness, I actually need to come back to that. I need to come back to the seal upon my heart that I am held. So, somehow, are we all? This story that we're part of is not over yet, and that the wiping of every tear and the restoration of all things is still to come.
That is a good place to put your anchor into.
Evan Rosa: Elizabeth, thank you so much for your time and for writing this book, for welcoming a love of our crooked neighbor through our crooked. lives. And I'm grateful for the way that you're working through each of these elements, each of them incredibly urgent and incredibly important questions that are both timeless and very of the moment.
So thank you so much.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Thank you for your time and your attention.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Elizabeth Oldfield. Production assistance by Alexa Rollow and Kacie Barrett. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith. yale.
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