What Would Love Have Me Do?

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session. 

 

Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform.  It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

 I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support. 

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, and I’m so excited for this conversation. Truth be told, my heart is full and overflowing. Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is someone who lives with this question as her personal compass: What would love have me do? She’s a public theologian and the first Black senior minister at the Progressive Multicultural Middle Church in Manhattan. She’s a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and has a doctorate in psychology and religion from Drew University. And she’s the author of a gorgeous book, a book that goes straight in through storytelling, inspiration, and a communication of a love that can’t be stopped. It’s called Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World. Jacqui, welcome. 

 

Jacqui Lewis: What’s up Tami? What’s up? 

 

TS: Welcome.

JL: Hi, how are you? 

TS: Doing really well. How are you doing? 

 

JL: I’m good, I’m good. I’ve got that eight-o’clock-on-the-East-Coast feeling, but I’m so excited to have this conversation with you. It’s been a good day and can’t wait to dig into what we’re going to talk about.

 

TS: I want to start off because when I became familiar with you and your work through reading Fierce Love and I read in your own words how you sense that your identity has been forged by fire and I learned of the fire at the Middle Church in Manhattan. I have to say I just had this moment of what happened, how did this happen, how did this impact Jacqui and her community?

 

JL: Yeah, it’s wild and thank you first of all, thank you so much. I’m a big fan of Sounds True and I’m so glad to be on your show to have this conversation as we speak. The last thing I did was to write a substack, right, my article that I write and I wrote a love note about Valentine’s Day and I said to my communities, this fire keeps burning. It really does. I think it was December, 2020, it was right after Covid sort of began to ravage the earth. Our neighbor had a second fire in a year and their building was a chimney and just torched our beautiful wooden ceiling that looked like a Dutch upside down ship, six alarm fire to totally destroyed, totally decimated our sanctuary and we’re moving back into part of our building at Easter. So there’s this really interesting now and not yet ness of that.

It’s been four years, we’ve done some work on this five story program space. We are turning part of into a temporary sanctuary and the work is so good and hard, but it’s not the same. And so you’re inside the space and there’s grief and relief, there’s grieving and joy, there’s the sense of sorrow and coming and I feel like it’s so Tami, what’s happening right now in our national discourse, this search for joy in the midst of hardness, this looking for the relief spaces for the love, even though you’re grieving and the Onfi of our culture and the Onfi ness of our fire are absolutely dancing with each other right now in ways that sometimes leave me exhausted and sometimes make me feel wow. Let’s talk about resilience and let’s talk about what it means to recover because my community is still here. We’re still here.

 

TS: When you find yourself in a place of grief or despair, but it’s your job to get up and lead people in fierce love, how do you find your way through that to find your voice and inspiration?

 

JL: That is such a good question. As professional faith folks, I think sometimes we get a message that we’re supposed to put a facade on or a false self on. And what I have really come to understand in my 38 years in ministry, but my 21 years at middle is how important it’s to be authentic in how we feel, what we express that this kind of love neighbor love self dynamic, the love of ourselves I think demands honesty with ourselves and with the people around us. So my mother died Tami eight years ago of lung cancer and my dad died almost two years ago of a LS and my community created such a container for me to be real. I grieved out loud. I had to preach a sermon on Easter Sunday right as she died and I was like, I’m not sure I’m feeling about resurrection today. Let me just be honest with you about how hard this is. So what do I do? I try to model that love and truth go together. I try to model authentic storytelling, vulnerability, humor. I laugh a lot at what’s happening, but we are not going to make it if we’re faking it. So a leader that can represent what is true invites other people to represent what is true and that’s how we’re going to heal together.

 

TS: You referenced yourself and I think included me as part of it as we professional faith people and what I notice is I lose and find faith all the time and I wanted to hear from you what in your experience happens where you lose faith If you do, maybe you don’t, maybe there’s some kind of underlying aquifer in your life and it never goes away or maybe not, but then how you return and find it again and what that process is like for you.

 

JL: Yeah, that’s such a great question. I say I’m a professional Christian and maybe I should say I’m a professional universalist, but this is what I do for a living. I am standing in the space between the now, not yet between the ineffable and what’s real, what’s tangible and I believe fervently that there is a holy other that is both outside of us and of us. And then I would say we are also that holiness, and this is a woman who’s 65 who has gone through stages of faith, really grew up in a family that was deeply Christian and I would say the God my parents gave me to fall in love with was maybe like baby Jesus. I was too little to understand the difference between God and Jesus or if there was a difference, but I have a clear sense of my parents almost like this is your sibling, God is your parent and God is Jesus’ parent and we’re your parents.

And there was this kind of familial sense of can be honest with this holy other, don’t have to fake it with this holy other, this Jesus is my friend. What a friend we have in Jesus type of thing. And tell me that works when you’re little and then you get to be a teenager and faith becomes about what you can’t do, what you shouldn’t do, don’t have sex, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t that. And I think for most of us, our faith goes to the disciplinarian, faith in all the stages of my life, broken relationships, fired, burned down church, a fire I had as a young woman with all my stuff burned up on a moving van, the death of my parents and honestly just being black in America and the southern freedom movement and kids sitting at lunchroom counters and the violence of lynching and it’s tough out there and there is, I would say my aquifer is joy.

I would say maybe a family trait is even though it’s hard, what we’re going to put on some James Brown and dance to I feel good or get up off of that thing. We’re going to barbecue, we’re going to give the backyard and play badminton. We’re going to just play cards and tease each other that my parents’ joy was a part of their survival strategy and I think they bequeathed that to us. And so my faith, my aquifer is I can return to joy and it is not contingent my faith on whether God answers a list of demands or I don’t believe in a God who’s my genie in a bottle. I don’t believe God’s on my demand dial, hurry up and fix it. I feel like God’s a partner and God is love and love is always around. So God is always around and that is my sustaining grace. I’m here because God has left.

 

TS: If members of your middle church brought you the question of how could this fire happen to us when God is good, how could this happen to us? This isn’t right, this isn’t fair. We have been protected from something like this. And this is a very obvious question and I’m sure it was in the field of your community and how do you address that? I think people have this idea, it’s kind of like a childlike idea that if I’m a deeply faith-filled person, I’ll be immune to certain kinds of tragedies. And yet obviously we’re not,

 

JL: Obviously we’re not. And that kind of faith leads us to breaking up with God or breaking up with ourselves. There’s a way in which if the God we are leaning on is nefarious or fickle or moody or going to punish us if we get something wrong, if the God we create my guild is psychology of religion and I believe God is God, we just don’t know enough about God, Tami, right? So we’re always making up a bit about what this holy one is and it’s based on our experience or based on our parenting or based on the stories we are taught or the songs we sing or the stained glass windows. God is made up of lots of our stuff. And if the God we’re relying on is unkind and punitive and will punish you with a storm called Katrina because people are gay or will give you acor called HIV AIDS or Covid or that God will cause you heartbreak and that God will make you want to die when you fail that God.

So I was a little person with that God and I used to write about letting God grow up. There’s no way to have a sustainable relationship with a God who should have protected you from a fire but didn’t or a God who caused the fire to teach you a lesson. That’s a little bit much. That’s a kind of abusive relationship that some of us have with God. And gosh, if I could do one magic wand as a clergy, I would say let that God go liberate yourself from that God and think about instead a kind of vulnerable partner in the universe who wants to be, I’m thinking about Suge Avery telling Sealy, it just wants to be love, it wants you to love the color Purple Alice Walker’s beautiful book. And yeah, we’re in a relationship with this holy one that is not transactional but is transformative, that is not soothing and wimp, but his partner and that comforts me. Tami, I have agency that in my life. And did we start the fire? No, a neighbor’s poor choice started the fire. Did God make the neighbor make a bad choice? No. So my congregation, I don’t think ever wondered what we did to deserve the fire. And isn’t that better than the other question?

 

TS: In Fierce Love, you write about how you collected, received and then saved 500 plus emails and letters from people who shared their love and support with you and how important that was. And I wonder if you can talk some about that and how each of us as people who want to embody fierce love can respond when a tragedy happens. Not with I wonder why this happened to them as if we can find an explanation but in some other way. What did people say that was helpful?

 

JL: Yeah, we’re walking around the theological constructs that are identity creating, right? I mean there’s a lot of, I really believe that our identity is a product of stories told to us about us, around us, stories of gender, stories of sexuality, stories of race, stories of class at caste and stories of faith or not faith. An atheist child might not likely hear stories of faith, that child might hear stories of humanism or what we can do as a people. And all of those stories get to be refracted or changed or synthesized. As we grow up, we interrogate our stories. So if I’m a person who believes God sends a fire, the comforting note I’m writing to the person who had the fire is like, God’s never going to give you more than you can bear, or thank God you survived it, but maybe there was a lesson in it.

And I just frankly got very few of those notes and for that I’m just so grateful. I don’t know, I didn’t get to sit down and have a big theological conversation with those people, but they were like, we love you and you are our cathedral. Your ministry matters. We’re praying for you. People that didn’t know us started GoFundMe or Facebook fundraisers. The city of New York just wrapped its arms around us and from Bendigo Australia to Beijing, China to Paris to Paris Street in New York with just so much love. How did people even know? So bad news travels, but good news does too. And the good news that was traveling was that there was a place on the lower east side of Manhattan that had been in the same location since 1892. That is the oldest when the bio says I’m the first black one since 1628, our church starts in 1628, we are the ones who bought MHA from the Lenape and we’re the ones who built part of the city with labor of enslaved Africans.

So we’re not proud of that. But people saw us trying to love hard Tami and they were like, we see you at Stonewall, we see you Black Lives Matter. We see you women’s march, we see you living on kids and we see you feeding the people. And they were just so kind. So they held up a mirror to the best part of ourselves. That’s what I’m trying to say. And that’s I think a loving thing we can do for each other is I see you and this philosophy of a balloon two I write about, right? I see you and you exist. I see who you are and I reflect that back to you and celebrate that. And that helps us become

 

TS: What’s your working definition of fierce love?

 

JL: Bold, fearless, ferocious, courageous, demanding, insistent. The apostle Paul writes in the book of Corinthians: Love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous. Love is does not insist on its own way. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things endures all things. I’m like actually love insists on love. Love insists on justice. Love demands equality. Love is strident. Love is giant. It is loud and it does not bear all things. Love does not bear lying. Love does not bear violence and war love does not, cannot coexist with injustice and derision. So love’s cranky love is like, nope, not on my watch. And so this kind of fierce love isn’t sentimental, it’s tough and resilient. 

 

TS: One of the things I’m curious about is, it seems like in our interactions with each other embodying fierce love is within each one of ours capacity. It’s right there. We can do that. We can do that with each person we interact with. And I can even love my teacup and everything that I touch when it comes to things that are happening on a bigger scale in the world. Sometimes I don’t know how to be a fierce lover. And you write in the book about this willingness always to see that it requires that we see and take action. And I notice especially in the world today when there are so many painful events and tragedies to be seen, it feels overwhelming.

 

JL: Yes, it is overwhelming. It really is. Period. Just is. And also it’s right. One of my favorite rabbis, this guy Donio Hartman at the Hartman Institute in Israel had a chance to study there a few times with him. And he says, an ethical life is learning how to see. And when he says that he’s doing midrash, let’s say on the texts and the Hebrew scriptures that Christians borrow about loving your neighbor, Jesus is Jewish, Jesus is Jewish, my friends. And when Jesus is saying in an answer to what does it mean? How do you love, how do love beyond your teacup, right? He says, you love God with heart, soul, mind and strength and you love your neighbor as yourself. And when he says that, he’s quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus, so it’s not a new command. He’s putting these commands from the Torah together. And let’s say when Expositing that text, the rabbis will say, so what does it mean to love your neighbor? And this cracks me up, but what does it mean to love your neighbor? If your neighbor’s cow wanders in your yard, you feed your neighbor’s cow and you feed it, you don’t keep it, you don’t kill it, you don’t cook it, you feed it and you water it until your neighbor comes back and then you give the cow back to your neighbor. Now this is a parable or story from an agrarian culture that is aired. And so cows need to be watered. But if you think about it,

Loving your neighbor means feeding your neighbor’s mother, feeding your neighbor’s children, making sure your neighbor’s auntie has healthcare, making sure your neighbor’s little boy is safe on the playground. The little boy is your little boy. So this goes to this Ubuntu thing. I just want to say it again like I am who I am because you are who you are a human, as a human through other humans. I’m not human by myself. We are Dr. King said, woven together in a garment of destiny. And I can’t be who I am till you are who you are. So this kind of love is work, right Tami, this is not sentimentality. This isn’t like, oh, a theory. I got to know that the choices I make impact the kids in Detroit and in Casa and in Sudan. That the impact of the way we as a nation live impact the entire globe. And so also what happens around the globe impacts us. And this is not consuming love like a Valentine’s card. It’s also not a spectator sport. It really is work and it’s worth it. My friend Linda’s grandmother is in gaa and that’s my grandmother and my friend Valarie’s little boy. Covey is my little boy and your people, my people, your spouse is my concern. This is how we would make a human family, Tami, in which everyone was safe and everyone was valued and everyone has enough. And we who say we’re Christian, which my people say, if we don’t get that part right, if we don’t get neighbor love, right then not actually being Christian.

 

TS: You share a lot of fierce love stories in the book. And the moment that I felt this kind of trembling, there were a few, but this moment I felt this kind of trembling come over me and I was like, wow, I’m feeling a lot right now. It had to do when you told the story of the Canadian woman in the hospital who reached out to help you, I’d love if you can share about that. But also to answer a question that I’ve held for a long time, which is why is it when strangers, people we’ve never met before do something extraordinarily kind and generous? I notice it just breaks me open in a very unique kind of way, partially because I’ve never met this person and it’s unexpected and I’d love to kind of get your take on that. But if you can first start by sharing this story that happened to you,

 

JL: I’d be so delighted. I used to think, God, let me just keep searching for her name, searching for her name. I used to know her name and it’s so long ago now, but I was newly married and traveling across Canada on the way to a wedding. I had gotten married in June and this was September. So we were newlyweds and we were all like sparkly worky and just all in love and everything. And it was a beautiful day. September day sunroof off the little car and something happened. I have no idea yet. The insurance company never really figured it out, but maybe the front left tire blew out. But the car drove itself across four lanes in the QEW and the Queen Elizabeth way and traffic, not traffic, but traffic didn’t hit anything, didn’t hit anybody, but all the way across the highway. All the way across the highway.

And I was driving. So I turned the wheel to stop the travel and the car flipped around like 360 a few times. And then I will say, if your car is going to flip over, your stomach goes first. So the car flipped over onto the sunroof and then onto the tires and then onto the sunroof and then onto the tires. Tami, from when I say it, I go back there, it’s unbelievable. And when we landed on the tires and glass and just blood and there were these kids on a bus, it turned out they were on the way from winter to Detroit to play ball or something like that. They get out of the bus, these teenage miss lady, miss lady, here’s your Bible. I had a Bible in the car. This is what saved you. Like no, I don’t know what saved me, but we were saved. We were saved. My husband had abrasions in his hand and it turned out had a neck injury, but not a bad one. So we walked away from this accident,

And I mean, I will tell you that when I had bad theology, I thought God had punished me for having sex with my husband two weeks before our wedding that this car accident was some kind of wake up call and punishment. Of course that’s not true. But what happened in the hospital was an encounter with this stranger, a white woman with short hair and a cloth coat who saw me crying in the lobby and who just walked over to me and said, what is going on? And told her all the things and she was like, what can I do to help? And I couldn’t even form a sentence, I think I said, my car’s totaled. And she took me to the drugstore to get stuff, took me to I think Burger King to get food, checked me into a hotel, paid the bill, took me upstairs, waited till this 22-year-old woman locked the door, picked me up the next morning, took me back to the hospital, took me to the insurance company, took me to the car lot to pick up my car. I mean, what? So the good Canadian right? Christian scriptures have a story. The good Samaritan, this good Canadian just loved me so hard. And yeah, it’s not the only time that a stranger has shown me profound love, but that is the time that took everything I would learn in seminary. I hadn’t gone yet. Everything I would read, write, think about, about what fierce love is. If I look it up, there’s her picture just loving me for no reason except that she was human and I was too. It’s mind blowing.

 

TS: And this question about how come when it comes from a stranger, it lands in such an inner explosion.

 

JL: I think that these kinds of stories mean that story that’s in the Christian scripture probably has all kinds of partner stories, corollary stories across bha, Vida and Torah and Quran because all the world’s major religions have something about loving your neighbor as yourself. Don’t withhold from someone that what you need for yourself. Islam don’t do anything to break anyone’s heart. It’s what? Six here. So I think it’s an archetypal story, Tami, there was once a stranger that I think it resonates with us. 

It breaks our heart, it vibrates with us because our ancestors experienced it. We know somebody was hungry and somebody brought the potatoes or somebody was sick and somebody brought the soup or somebody was stuck in the house after Katrina and somebody waited in the feted waters and got them and somebody ran into the fire to save a baby. We know that this is what humans do, and I think we are attached to those kinds of stories by our heartstrings.

 

TS: One of the definitions of love that you offer that you received from one of your mentors has to do with this recognition of the particularity of each person. I don’t think I’m getting the words exactly. That’s right. But I noticed I started practicing it because you talk about fierce love, it’s a practice, and I thought, this is great. Faith comes, goes, but fierce love I can. I’m equipped. I’m equipped to do that. I’m equipped to appreciate the particularity of every single person I am encountering and seeing through that lens. So I wonder if you can speak to that and what that’s like for you when you’re looking through those glasses of particularity.

 

JL: Yeah. This is Jim Loder, who was one of my professors at Princeton. He was just a character Christian educator and wild story of coming to faith because a car falls on him and his little teeny tiny, petite wife like picks up the car and saves his life. And he calls that a transformational moment. And there’s a book he wrote called The Transformational Moment, but this non possessive delight and the unique particularity of the other, the non possessive delight and the unique particularity of the other. My best friend is my husband. I’m so lucky. I like him a lot. We love each other deeply, but also I really like him and the way I illustrate this sense of the non possessive delight in his unique particularly is John is just not really fun to be with until he is had his first cup of coffee. He’s just really not right.

And I on the other hand, as he says, will talk to an empty room. I mean I just will. So we know that I’m going to wake up talking and we know he’s going to be surly until he has his coffee. And that’s just who we are. There’s no project of wonder if I could get John to talk before coffee and wonder if he could get Jacqui to not talk First thing I wake up, I’m so happy. This is just what it is. Now think about, that’s intimacy. You’re married and I’m married and that’s intimacy. But think about it directed toward our children, a non possessive delight and the unique particularity of the other. One of my colleagues has a child who’s just really declared, I am gender fluid. I just am. And the child is about 10. Maybe there’s the most lovely human on the planet, just sweet as they want to be. And the mother and the father are like, oh my God. They’re like, let me watch and see what this child is showing me about this child with a curiosity. You’re reading a good book. Wonder what wonder this child is going to show me. 

Now, let’s take it to colleagues at work, Cranky Bob. Today in a meeting, a non-possessive delight could be translated to curiosity. Wonder what’s up, wonder what’s happening. Wonder if the child in the classroom didn’t get enough breakfast, wonder if Bob is having a bad day or something had happened at home. What if we could think about our whole neighborhood with more curiosity, less judgment with less demands upon the person to be what you want them to be and more receiving who they are? Think of the reduction in enmity. Think of the expansiveness of heart. I love that definition, don’t you?

 

TS: I do. As soon as I think about particularity, yes, the non possessive delight. The delight in the particularly. So much information comes in that is unrepeatable about that particular person that I appreciate so much now, I’m so glad, Jacqui, that you brought up your husband John, because that was another moment in encountering your life story where I felt the love that the two of you have and the gorgeousness of it. I could feel it and I thought I really want to talk to, and I think it was when you said holding hands, that’s our jam. And I was like, wow, holding hands. That’s their jam. There was just something so pure about it, the delight in that and the savoring of that simple feeling of each other. And I thought to myself, I wonder when Jacqui reflects on her life, what she feels was asked of her to be able to enter that kind of meeting.

 

JL: Wow, I hope this answers your question. I think I was waiting for John all of my life. So what was asked of me was the other stories like the other relationships, the rehearsals, the profoundly deep intimacy and other relationships that taught me how to golf and how to play tennis and how to cry and how to cook, but also how to ask for what I need and also how not to get it or how to not be clingy or all the things, all of those things. The myriad choices and lessons and orgasms, okay? And laughter and fried chicken dinners or whatever, movies, concerts, and every one of those relationships that were formative and instructive and generous and also selfish. And every single thing. Every single thing. The texture of all of those that wrote on my heart something that then when I met John, it was like a John shaped readiness for a grownup human who’s 14 years older than I am. And so we fall asleep, people spoon and I love a spoon, but we fall asleep, goodnight, goodnight, face to face, hand like that on each other’s hands. And I think, ah, this is the sexiest thing. This right here just hand to hand. If there’s hand to hand combat, is there hand to intimacy or is there hand to hand reckoning or hand to hand accompanying? That’s the word that’s in my mind. Tami. He accompanies me and I accompany him and I’m so lucky. What prepared me for that meaning just right time, right place, working for this company, working on race, talking about race, having a crush on somebody who smelled good and was smart, and just being open to the demands and the delight of giving your heart to somebody.

 

TS: You use this phrase in our conversation, interrogating our identities, the identities that we’ve constructed early in our life that we’ve perhaps created out of various kinds of interjects from our family. And part of what I was really impressed by in Fierce Love is how you took identities that were formed that had the fingerprints of shame in them. They had the residue of shame and you were able through your own inner work to liberate yourself from those identities. And I thought, God, that’s what people want. People want to be able to do that, and they touch it, they see it, but the transformation often doesn’t feel complete or feels like I kind of get the problem, but I don’t quite know how to get to the new world. And I wonder what you might say to that.

 

JL: That is just, that’s the whole thing, isn’t it, Tami? That’s the whole, to me, that’s the whole ball game. The question you’re asking, but how somebody said this better than I’m thinking it right now. Maybe it’s Valarie Kaur in a conversation recently. I don’t know that she said metabolize, but I thought metabolize, there’s this pain, there’s this hurt, there’s this heartbreak, there’s this shame. How do I metabolize that toward my good and the good of the world? And Timmy, many of us are taught that actually therapy is shameful or to need help is shameful. And so we find other ways to get it together. We medicate ourselves or we just hide it, tap it down. But I don’t mean to say this in a dramatic way, but I mean it to be true. I just wanted more. I was just ambitious for wellness, just ambitious for health. And so I did take myself to therapy about the places where I was hurt and felt ashamed and I worked on it. My mentor Patty would say, you will turn a lens on yourself all day. I’m like, yeah, I’m curious about it.

I’m curious about my daddy’s daddy and his mother and what were these ancestral stories and what happened to make my father, my father, this vulnerable boy with this big temper, I’m curious about that. To be curious about him helped me forgive him for not being perfect and I’m not perfect. To be curious about him helped me to love the parts of me that I know are exactly like him, to love the parts of me that are just like my mother, and to laugh at the parts of my mother and my father that are in me that are think, oh my God, I didn’t think that was going to happen. But surely it did to just own it and find the sweetness, the sweetness in the kitchen barbecuing, the sweetness in being my mother’s daughter and my father’s son in some ways, my brother Sam, one of the other brothers. The sweetness in the sorrow, the hurt that we experienced together each of us and collectively. And to be 100% sure that before either of them died, we just got it together. We just made it right together. We just forgave each other and laugh together. 

My mother, in my book, I write about being in her hospital room and I wake up, she’s staring at me, mommy, what are you looking at? What are you doing? I love you. You’re so beautiful. No, you’re so beautiful. And I walk over to give her a kiss and she goes, don’t come. I just passed wind. My mother was too polite to call it that farting. But I just passed away, just the silliest, funniest, reconciling times, the priceless times in the car with my parents. I had a therapist once who said, the way you’re going to finish growing up, I was 35, is to let your parents parent you. So I made trips home to Chicago when I would get there before my siblings, just so I could be in the bosom of their parenting, I had shame around things that happened to me and I realized they were not my fault. Goodwill hunting style, that is not my fault. And also some of what happened to me, I could have thought that’s my parents’ fault, but it wasn’t theirs either.

Most parents are just doing the best they can with what they have. And again, unique particularity, right? Here’s what it is, here’s the stuff we’ve got and will we make sweetness out of it or will we stay stuck? And shame and blame, I chose just to love the hell out of my parents and they’re in me in the most beautiful pockets of memory and sweetness.

 

TS: You write beautifully about the power of truth and truth telling. And you mentioned here how love and truth go together and you also engaged in quite a lot of confrontational truth telling with your parents. And I’m wondering what suggestions you might have to people who say, I have unfinished business. I want to do some of this confrontational truth. I’m not sure it’s going to go over so well.

 

JL: You and I are people in the business of executing what faith means or what? Yeah, A life of ethic. A life of purpose. So every single human and every single family system are all different. And I just want to make sure I say that. So if I say you could should, I mean with the softest touch, I would say if you have the chance to tell the truth, if you have the chance to make amends, if you have the chance to confront what’s hard, if you have the chance, the opportunity to get it right with your sister, brother, friend, neighbor, coworker, kid, it’s just better. The stuff that we don’t acknowledge is still there. We just didn’t acknowledge it. It doesn’t go away. So to me, when the Christian scriptures say, we shall know the truth and the truth will set us free, I think we often don’t quote that first part. You will know the truth. So to know the truth is to tell the truth and to be told the truth. To have conversations that open our eyes and make us go, oh, really? That might be therapy. That might be a best friend. That might be your lover partner. But the risk taking and the profound love it requires to hold each other accountable is so important. And I don’t know that we can really repair our relationships with lies in the middle of them. I don’t really think we can. And there’s a lot of that kind of patina facade. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but we didn’t really get at it. I think we have to try to take it all the way down to what’s honest and see then if we can make repair.

 

TS: We know this platform is called Sounds True. So I loved this section of Fierce Love. I double down on telling the hard truth rather than a comforting lie.

 

JL: Yeah, that’s me the last 10 years. And I really believe that my parents passing away my mother first, that unbelievable yearning to see her fully and for her to see me fully was just honestly, honestly the commitment to show her to her, my full self, to not protect her from me. And in turn, she showed me her full self. And listen, I’m not going to be able to say this without crying. I said this to another adult, adult female friend that I felt like my mother finished birthing me in that moment, in those moments where we were just naked with each other, that if I was almost a grownup person, if I was almost a fully realized girl child grown up, that the umbilical cord that was still tied to something like, I can’t show you all of this, that she cut it for me and that I just became really myself. And that would not have happened if we hadn’t disrobed. So I’m committed, and I mean, it’s not easy and everybody doesn’t like it, but I can’t regress to polite comforting fibs.

 

TS: You mentioned that your father died two years ago. Was there a sense of completion maybe in a different way with him? What was that like?

 

JL: 100%. 100%. And not, yes, in a different way, but not wholly different. My dad died of a LS and there was this kind of whole daddy sick and we don’t know what it is. So part of the truth was getting at what really was making him sick. And I think for him, this lion of a man lost all this weight and really shrunk before our eyes to this vulnerable person who didn’t have any more defenses about who he was. And it was all of the siblings, all of us took turns loving dad in a way that you love a person who’s sick like that. But before that, it was funny, we laughed one Christmas time or something happened and somebody said, and dad, then in 2014, whatever that was you, you weren’t kind. And then we piled on. And then in 2017, it was a fascinating kind of time in which I think he was ready to hear us unload what may have burdened us. And did he know he was dying then? I don’t know, but I think he might’ve, but he was so kind. Just give it to me. Tell me what you got. And then I’m sorry, y’all.

 

TS: When I introduced you, Jacqui, I said that you use this compass because this is what you described for your life. What would love have me do? Tell me how that actually plays out in your life in situations. How does that instruct you?

 

JL: Yeah, I feel like my mom gave me that. What would love have you do? And honestly, Tami, I think as a young woman, let’s say old, older, teenager, young woman, I had all of those things that you and I might’ve had from the women of the generation before us. That love would have you sacrifice, love, would have you be quiet, love would have you take it, love would have you sit down, whatever, like a whole list of things that were self negating, self deriding. And so yes, at a point in my life that questioned what would love have me do, had me doing things that weren’t about loving me. So now the what would love have me do question is about love God, love neighbor, love self, right? What would love have me do? It’s like an automatic prayer in a meeting with a colleague, a subordinate, a person who I have a lot of power over in a room with someone who’s a man talking rudely to a woman, eye contact with the woman, a secret, how are we going to handle it? And then handling it at the polls.

When I write an article, a person I love deeply in my life is just not nice right now. How do I protect myself? What does love have me do to take care of myself in that dynamic? This is the question that goes from eggs or cereal to bedtime that attacks me toward my better self. Not my perfect self, but my better self.

 

TS: You and I have a shared friend, father Richard Rohr, and when I interviewed him many years ago, I asked him if we could end our conversation, if he would offer a blessing. And I told him how much I love receiving blessings and being with someone, a professional like him gives me that opportunity and for our audience. And he did. And I’m going to ask you the same thing. Would you take us through a blessing here as we conclude? Would that be okay on this notion of us responding to what love would have us do?

 

JL: I’ll be honored to do that. Thank you for Tami, for me, for you listener, dear listener, this notion of love, oh my gosh, I wanted to start with you from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet, to the superpowers, you know, inhabit and the prickly bits you wish you could shave off every single bit of you, all of it is just wonderful and awesome and made in the image of the holy. So love you, love yourself, love your flesh. To quote baby holy, just love yourself. And when you love the strangest part of yourself, the hardest part of yourself, it’s a rehearsal for loving the strangest part of your neighbor. Dig deep, laugh hard, love yourself well. Amen. 

 

TS: Amen. Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, author of the book, Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World. Thank you so very much.

 

JL: Thank you, Tami. I feel like I could talk to you for hours and hours. We’re just getting started. Thank you so much.

TS: If you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundtrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.