Stories and Maps

You're listening to The Exile Project with your hosts Elisa Booker and Patricia Manwaring.

I think that in Western American culture that puts such a premium on individualism, we tend to do our spiritual life as a private thing on our own, and there's not often pathways to share our faith, especially to share the difficulties or the breakdown of our faith.

Hi, everyone. I'm Patricia. I'm Elisa. And welcome to The Exile Project. We're so glad you're here this is our first podcast. We're very excited, although we're kind of experienced at doing our first podcast. Yeah, we, did one last week and we just felt like little much time. Talking about circumcision. Yeah. Which will come up. Yeah, you will come up, you will get used to that. But we figured we begin in, a different place all that to say you are in good will you are this it it is going to be so great So we want to talk about maps and our own personal stories. and we want to kind of talk about how stories can become maps. We also want to share how to use our own stories and our journeys of faith to help one another. I think that in Western American culture that puts such a premium on individualism, we tend to do our spiritual life as a private thing on our own, and there's not often pathways to share our faith, especially to share the difficulties or the breakdown of our faith going through the hard stuff together. Yeah, I think we've all heard the analogy that the Bible is our map, it's the way we know where to go. And, in, in some ways it is, but I think not in the ways that has been traditionally presented. petition not only as a theologian. She is also a historian. And she often helps me go into a world, with people having a full emotional journey with, with relationships. And and as we see the story through that lens, it does become a map because it reveals more about who we are, our history, and then how we relate to the world or to God or to each other. Yeah. Speaking about maps. I have. the worst luck or the best propensity. I'm not sure which one. I get lost all the time. I never drive without jeeps. And I can say I want to avoid traffic. I want to avoid challenges and difficulty in my drive. yeah, G.P.S. is like, you know, I've got to, you know, it's a mission understanding of how the traffic world works and can reroute me. Do you drive a lot? No. Never. I don't drive, but I do actually still use GPS. I will be in the city and map my walking route I was in a taxi yesterday And the guy did not have GPS, which I noticed. And I was like, How long have you been driving the city? And is like over 30 years? And I was like, Oh my gosh, I am in the presence of someone who knows the roads intimately. So anyway, reflecting on maps. I was thinking about the Middle Ages and kind of the advent of navigational map making and in the 1400s, Constantinople was really the center of the Christian world and the Ottomans 70,000 strong victoriously conquer What ends up happening There's disruption of the trade routes. So there there was this necessity to find new pathways to the Far East. Now, at this time, also, interestingly enough, maps were flat, and so is the world. Hmm. you have these navigators starting to begin to map the coast of Africa, and it was such a important process, like their experience was being translated to a physical map and those maps were warning early navigators where the shallows were or where there were, I don't know, reefs or rocks or whatever. And I they were prized possessions. And only a ship could only have one map at a time. And there these hand-drawn stories of people's lives, essentially in a way forward. And in 1488 or so. Bartolomeo Diaz is sailing down the coast of Africa and there's this awful storm. And he is really in this difficult position because on one side, it's the shallows, And basically he'll probably die because there's in the middle of a storm trying to navigate your boat past those rocks, you know. So death on one side and then on the other side. It's the edge of the world. You know, so you have like death on one side or like, you know, total unknown. And he chooses the unknown. Yeah. Spoiler. The earth is round. And so he, like, ends up discovering this underwater current, He gets looped down to the bottom of Africa, plans a flag for Portugal, and then names it Cape Hope. And within 50 years, that treacherous, disruptive journey becomes a kind of naval highway into the Near East. I think it's an interesting metaphor for how. Our journeys can help guide one another. Yeah. The reason that we called this the Exile Project is because we think that the Babylonian exile, the center of the Bible, truly is the way to look at the story. And the Babylonian exile is this major moment of trauma in Israel's history. It is a it is a moment that changes the shape of everything they know and understand. And in fact, this is something that I just recently learned and as I was so interesting, is that a lot of the Old Testament is only recorded during and after the exile. So the actually the Bible that we read is being told through the lens of this trauma, And so we think that it is so important to understand, because trauma informs our life. suffering informs our life. And and today we want to tell you a story of suffering. And it's pretty heavy, but it's super central to our journey of faith. when we're talking about trauma, where we're talking about being in a state of pain, distress or hardship, and if you have been in a spot where you feel the weight of the world in shoulders that is suffering. And that matters to God. And and it matters to us. and so as we go into this story just hold that center, that suffering matters to God. And so, Patricia, will you share with us? Yeah. In 2018, my husband Gareth and I took over a small coffee shop in Brooklyn Roots Cafe. It had passed through two other families at our church and we were the third family and very excited. Zero background and running a coffee shop. I have a fine arts degree followed by a degree in d'allergie and anthropology, but no business. I but I love coffee, I love food, So anyway, we jump into this so excited, really believing that it was going to be this church in the wild. I was praying for miraculous healing. I was believing that people would come in and stand in line to get a lot hay and the Shekinah glory of God and be like so heavy. Which is kind of a weird business model in retrospect, but whatever, you know. So anyway, like we walk in and we're so excited. We have a lot of enthusiasm and pretty quickly, like within, within a couple of months like. There was just a lot of tension. I mean, it's always difficult learning a new thing. You know, it's like. So. So there was, like, a lot of levels of just stress. Oh, yeah. And figuring things out and took over in January. And then in the beginning of March, there was a car accident in our neighborhood. And a few women from our church, one of whom was pregnant, one of whom was a close friend of mine, left a prayer meeting that they had actually led that morning. And they walked across the street chatting and pushing strollers, and they got hit by car. And two of the children died on impact and a little boy stood Watching a desperate mother giving CPR to her lifeless son while his mother screamed over and over, the children are dead. And I know this because she handed the phone to a stranger. And I just heard her in the background and I'll never get it out of my head. You know, I was at the coffee shop at the time, and I just remember just just being like, wait, what? all I could hear in the background was chaos. And the voice of the screaming woman saying again and again, the children are dead. And I eventually got the woman on the phone to give me a location in Iran. I just ran the 15 blocks to the site of the accident, praying that she was wrong, praying that there had been a mistake, praying for a miracle. And there there wasn't a mistake. And there wasn't a miracle. It was. I spent the following week close to my friend Lauren, whose son Joshua had died in the car accident. And I remember just sitting on the floor, just showing up, And there were moments where she was just choosing to sing in the midst of her pain, in her grief. there's something so profound in the grief of a mother. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. and just the way that that sounds and the loss that so. It's like watching someone's heart be ripped out. It's so it's just such an intense. Intense thing and. there was the feelings of just the tragedy of it, the tragedy of witnessing it, her own grief, the guilt of. Feeling grief, but being able to go home and hug my children and to get an idea and, And then in the midst of that, like over the next few weeks, people in our neighborhood were saying how moved they were with our church and how the church had rallied together and the way God was being made visible and our love for each other. And I remember walking home one night after spending the day with my friend in her ocean of grief. And I just had this thought, pop into my head that maybe God was using the death of these children to bring glory to his name. And just that thought just kind of like sucker punched me It was just this idea of God that I never considered. Right. Like, I think it's so common. Yeah, I think. I think the way. Like, when. When we're in the midst of these incredibly hard moments, we want to make sense of the story, and we want to make sense of God. And so we go. Maybe this is for His glory. Maybe we will. We'll see His glory and and and. But at the expense of what? At the expense of. A child of. A mother And you. You're just like, what kind of God is this? What kind of God have aligned myself with? And A lot of it became theological. because saying this is God's will. Like people were like, this is God's. It was God's will that they would die. And I'd never really wrestled with the sovereignty of God before. And all of a sudden, it's like, Wait, what? And it just honestly felt like a tipping point in the narrative of our church. Like, there was this, like, flickering question. A doorway cracked open to doubt, to doubt the character of God, to doubt his goodness, to doubt his love. And we witnessed many of the people who had gathered there initially to pray in the hospital slowly in the years after leaving the church. And and we didn't we didn't have a theology that could hold us up. You know, someone said that mother, the mothers love their children so much that they had become idols and God is a jealous God. Someone said that it was just part of God's plan to bring himself glory. And of course, they're saying they're not saying it callously. Right. Like, I mean, I think there's this belief in it. someone said it was demonic warfare. Someone said that God chooses some people like chaff and others like wheat, and their their lives are blown away in the wind. And who are we to judge? People used to job, you know, the suffering of jobe like, oh, if God took everything away from Jobe, like, you know, there's precedent that he would take away from us Like the Lord gives and the Lord takes. Yeah. Pardon me. Like that. God does not sound safe. No. You know, and I felt like we kind of had come to the end of ourselves, but unlike Jobe, for many of us, the experience of God's presence in our midst, it wasn't enough. Like, it was just. It was. Or we didn't. Or we didn't have the language for even his presence or what. It just was just wasn't enough. I remember sitting in the service the day after and our worship pastor was standing at the front and he said, I know you didn't do this. I know this isn't your will. I know your heart is breaking with us. And that literally felt like news to me. I had been working in this church, teaching God's word. And I wasn't sure that was true and. And I remember praying that night. God, you have to show me that's true or I'm out. I remember a few months after the car accident, I had gone home to visit my family in upstate New York, and I was at a church service. And there was this guy speaking that morning who was doing a lot of work with the incarcerated population and telling him and he was telling his story. And part of the story was that he had. Been a drunk driver and had Killed a child. And it's he's talking about, like, the way that God's using his life. I was I was having a little bit of a breakdown and decided to leave church. I drove home and I just sat in my parent's driveway and I was weeping And just in this moment, just feeling. You know that I didn't want Dorothy Bruns the woman who had been driving the car, who who had killed these children. I didn't want her to feel God's grace. I didn't want I was like, I'm not opposed God to her someday. having this transformative thing. But not now. Like, not now. She needs to feel the way of what she's done. She had a medical condition. She. She was prone to seizures. She knew she shouldn't have been driving. She had a history of car accidents. And she chose to drive. She chose to drive. and I remember Being like, I don't. want her to feel your grace. God, no. She she deserves to carry the weight and the pain of the her actions have caused. And I found out the next day that she had killed herself that night. She swallowed a bottle of pills and was found dead in her Staten Island apartment early the next morning. And. I felt really ashamed. Of my heart. I feel like I had. Then someone who had led out in prayer and in worship and carrying God's love for people. And I felt so like, no, I don't, I don't I don't know if convicted is the word, but because it's like it was it it was just like this shameful. Like, I carried a sense of responsibility for her death. And, you know, and I just it just began a season of spiritual disintegration and a lot of deconstruction and just a really painful disorientation, you know, just a little alliteration in the middle of the story. And we wouldn't be it wouldn't be Christian without it. But I just you know, I didn't want to partner with God if it meant car accidents and tragedies. I had felt that like I'd been invited to pray God's heart. I considered myself to be an intercessor and someone who was was growing in the prophetic gifts. And, and, and this was just like, wait, what? Like, you're not answering my prayers for healing. You know, you're silent then. But then in the coldness of my heart, when I'm sitting in a car wanting this woman to feel the absence of your grace, she. She's literally feeling it to the point of taking her own life. And. I stopped going to church and I stopped praying. And I just I just remember, sitting in the dark on the floor of my kitchen and I would just weep. And my prayers, quote, unquote, just became these, like, profanity ridden, Anger expressed at God. And I had never I mean, prior to this moment, I feel like I didn't realize where a lot like this is a tipping point, but it's like, you know, there's this moment of just being. So, like, beyond yourself, you need. New language. And in the midst of all of this. The coffee shop was one year into a ten year lease. Like, I had no way out. I had no idea what I was doing. I and I just lived going through the motions, the stress of being a new business owner in New York City or homeschooling my three small children. I was struggling with anxiety and depression and I didn't have language for deconstructing, although that was what was happening. And I just I felt like I'd fallen off the edge of the world. I felt like I couldn't go back to the faith I had before because it was like the storm. I just didn't see a way through. There was no hope. There was no hope. Yeah. And. One night. I don't know. Maybe a year or so later. I remember just sitting. In the dark. And I just had this sense and it probably was like believing of God. But I don't I don't know if I would have necessarily called it that at that point, but it was just this sense of like going through the photos on my phone from 2018 and. I start at the beginning of the year and start slowly started looking through these photos. And the thing about photos on our phone is we don't tend to snapshot the moments that are awful. The moment that you take a photo like a beautiful dinner or like that timer kids around here, like, you know what I mean, right? You're not taking pictures while you're crying in the dark. and there there was all this joy in that year that I had completely forgotten about. And I think. I honestly think I had been. Sustained by joy while like even though all I remembered was the trauma. And I remember reading this thing by James Fowler and he said that faith has to do with the making, maintenance and transformation of human meaning. And I think in this moment, I had lost my faith. I had lost. the meaning, a lot of the meaning that had held me up, wasn't able to hold me up anymore. And I was, struggling to find new meaning. And, I was daily living with this fear that my kids were going to die. and it was just like God was unsafe and I was angry all the time. And then somehow, you know, I'm looking back at that year and I'm seeing places of joy and I think it made me aware of the way we tell our stories. I think it made me think about how when we tell our stories, we're choosing what to leave in and what to leave out. And even if we're not conscious of it. Yeah. You know, there is this, you know, like our inner monologues aren't necessarily neutral. And my mind wasn't because I was, like, wrestling with who is God, right? You know, like in this way that I hadn't before. And I remember, like going to this conference, I got invited to go to this thing and I only went because it was honestly. My mom was in town and it was an opportunity to leave my kids at home. not super into it, but like I go to this conference and I remember standing in the back of this room of worshiping people, not feeling it, and I just remember being like, I'm fine. Like, I still believe in God. I know that your God. I just don't think you're safe. I just pulled up some 88 it says you have put me in the lowest pit in the darkest depths. Your wrath lies heavily on me, have overwhelmed me with all your waves. You've taken me from my closest friends and have made me repulsive to them. I'm confined and cannot escape. My eyes are dim with grief and I think growing up, my interpretation of this would have been. Not that this is an expression of Islamist of someone of a singer, an artist, apparently, Really at the edge, you know, just expressing his feelings. I think I would have interpreted as God is the one who chooses to put you in the pit. kind of wrestling with that in the back of this room. I just felt like God in that moment was Showing me how, believing that was making me. less soft to the people around me. You know, I just was really struggling with anger, which someone eventually told me to say the Enneagram. And apparently I'm an eight. I mean, like, you know, anger how I respond to stress, right? Which I didn't know, you know? Yeah. Because I didn't have a language for that. So all of a sudden, It was so freeing. I don't know much about that other than the stress part, but it was like, Oh, I can just be angry because I'm stressed. And I think like that just helped provide different language. And so thinking about. My anger through a different lens, thinking about just the different levels of stress. to see myself in a more gentle way. Like, I mean, when you grow up in a in a faith tradition, that anger is evil. Right. Right. Right. Unless it's God's anger and it's righteous and then it's right. You know, we're not we don't feel emotions. It was like guilt and shame and anger were my three emotions. Mm hmm. I mean, all the time. Those are the only three. Yeah, for the most part. Unless I look at my photos and I'm like, Oh, my gosh. I also think these are cute. So it's just like this really crazy moment. But anyway, I'm walking to the coffee shop and I'm thinking about all this stuff and all. I just had the verse from Luke 418 where Jesus is like kind of. I mean, he's such a kind of powerhouse moment he like walks into the into the synagogue or picks up the scroll, reads like the spirit of the Lord is upon me because there's anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He sent me to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight, to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed. And then he, you know. Drives that make. in that moment, it was just kind of like the phrase binder, broken hearts and all this. I hadn't ever thought about that before. Yeah. And I was just like, Oh my gosh, Jesus inaugurates his earthly ministry and binding of broken hearts is important to him. I felt like I was being invited to rediscover the gospel, that it wasn't. I'm a dirty, rotten sinners and saved by grace. Yeah, right. But it. But it was like the binding up of my broken heart. A preferential option for the poor, freedom for the captive. A new way of seeing. I began to see Jesus as. The fullness of God. In the presence of suffering. have read a really influential book over the years. Vincent de Coke, who is a South African theologian, and he wrote this book called Out of My Mind. And he kind of roadmaps a deconstruction pathway. And in his language, he uses generative, generative and regenerative. he writes in in this in his book about. Jesus as the fullness of God that this understanding of the Trinity, if we if we understand that it isn't God turning his back on Jesus of the cross. But it's the cross holding the Trinity that it's God choosing to suffer. And he tells the story. by Eli Wiesel about this Jewish boy who's being hung by the Nazis And in Heroes that the boy did not die immediately. His death was prolonged by 30 minutes of suffering. The onlookers around Wise Owl asked, Where is God now? Somehow Wise Owl heard the answer coming from within himself. Where is he? He's here. He is hanging there on the gallows. Any other answer would be blasphemy. There cannot be any other Christian answer to the question of this torment. To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make out a demon. To speak here of an absolute God would make out an annihilating nothingness. To speak here of an indifferent God would condemn us all to indifference. there's this interplay between the presence of God. And we see that in some 22. in the Jewish tradition, they would have sung the entirety of the song. And while it begins with, My God, my God, why you for saving me? It goes on to trace like the, you know, their piercing my hands and feet, their casting lots for my clothes like the. It is this crazy prophetic. Foreshadowing of the cross, but it doesn't end there. Later on in the song, he talks about how God does hear the voice of his afflicted while he doesn't turn his back. And I hadn't I hadn't noticed that before. I hadn't noticed that before that this song from the cross is a pathway from pain and to embrace. As I started to understand Jesus as and the cross as as God's suffering and started to kind of consider the idea of of a suffering God, my life story began to change. I could see God there in the midst of the car accident there, you know, with his heart broken. I see him there. With Dorothy Bruns in that moment when I couldn't love in a way that reflected the heart of God. Like it didn't it didn't determine God's love for her. His love was still for her. Even when she sat in the dark with that bottle of pills, he sat with her and her death and all death is held up in his in his death. Like when he said when Jesus said on the cross, it is finished. I don't think you just meant, ah, badness. I think it was I think he was making a comment about absorbing all death into himself and If that's the case, then the emphasis on resurrection life really sets us free into New Easter reality. If it's in that he's he's dying for. that he's conquering with his resurrection. There's always two. There's the sin that we commit. And there's the sin that people commit against us. It's other people's sin. He's dying for all of it. It's the brokenness of the world. It's the pain that we carry. he came to bind up the broken hearted. In this story when God looks at you. He is more concerned about your broken heart and the experience that you had to have. Weeping with a mother over a casket. Then he is about your hard heart. Towards Dorothy, like. In fact, I believe with my whole entire being that he was like, I get it. I'm taking care of you. You don't even have to worry about her. It's not even sin. because he's so well acquainted with why we're in any given moment of our life. And and yet our embodied theology for so long led you to a place of carrying the weight of that feeling like you had a part in in taking this woman's life when it was not on you at all me just sitting here and sharing the story is like a lot of work and time and a lot of that. And community and people who felt safe to voice things to and provide different perspectives. And to have someone sit and speak for you. And I think that's one of the things in Protestantism, like we. We don't like in confession, right? Like, there's this practice in Catholicism of you sit with someone and you confess things. You know, you confess the things that burn in your heart. Yeah. And then someone sits there and they're like, your sins are forgiven. Yeah. go in peace. And I think in Protestantism, you don't do that enough with one another. I think the Bible does what it sets out to do perfectly, which is model God in real places and in real time throughout history, meeting ordinary people, speaking to them in language that they understand. And I think it shows God's heart for people throughout time. It's it's Easter. And what's funny is we we really wanted to put out our first episode last week. And so now we're here on Easter weekend talking about all of this and. I think it's really beautiful because what we've learned is God came in the form of man to establish his kingdom that cannot be destroyed because he rose from the grave like He established something that cannot be taken away. and his spirit is with us, is present with us when we are in the worst moments of our life. And it's with us in great moments. Through this, I've had an incredibly different relationship with the moment where Jesus says, you know, do not be. Do not be anxious or do not be overwhelmed because I have overcome the world I took that as you align yourself with God and Christianity. And we don't have to be anxious God will take care of it or something like that. And but then when bad things happen, that theology crumbles. now my association with that is we are in the world where there is heartache, whether you align yourself with God or you don't, there is heartache, there is chaos, there is discomfort We just live here The promise is not that it will not enter our life experience is that he's with us in it. And the goodness of the gospel, the good news of of the Bible is that he is present with us as we walk through that. It's interesting to see how when the expectation of what God is offering us changes I think being uncomfortable doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. Being in pain doesn't mean being punished. one thing that's brought me a lot of comfort is this is uniquely American or it's really uniquely first world and it's definitely not ancient. Right. So, there was no thought that the ancient world wouldn't suffer or be uncomfortable, like they were living in tents and schlepping around the desert. But also, even in our modern world, in lots of other cultures around the world, there's no expectation that things will be easy or comfortable. But in our in our context, comfort means success. Cover means we're living the right life. And That's not how it works. So instead, what do we do? Right. sometimes we're comfortable. And sometimes we suffer. We cling to hope. And we take care of the suffering. Yeah, We are meant to be. God's tangible presence for other when people are suffering. And it doesn't mean giving them an answer. like in your story, people were like, maybe it's God being a jealous God. Maybe it's God wanting glory for us. No, no, no. It's just really awful. It's really awful. And we're going to sit here and make you a casserole. Yeah, and I don't know what else I'm going to do, but that's it. I'm going to be here as God's manifest presence with you. So good. And that's what we're going to do. 
And that's what we want to do here. I mean, this is our first our first step at this. But ultimately, like, that's our heart. We want to begin to create spaces that people can share their story. We want to talk about a different framework. Reading the Bible. Yeah, we're really excited to be on this journey with you, and we're just so grateful that you're here with us. Yeah.So we'll talk to soon.

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This podcast is produced by Armistead Booker and recorded in Brooklyn New York with audio engineer Gareth Manwaring.

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