Transcript: Episode 67
67. Easter
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
***Interview Begins***
Interviewer: Bold Font
Interviewee: Standard Font
I can’t even do this. We bantered. It was so cute.
That’s okay.
Uh. Okay, again, I’m still not functioning and just recorded half a podcast without actually recording it. So, I’m not impressed with myself right now. [Laughing]
We did all the jokes in that take. This one is just going to be all boring.
We had sign language jokes and braille jokes. It was amazing.
Yeah, you should have been there.
Uh. Train gone. Sadness. Okay, I can’t even repeat the jokes, because it’s not funny this time. But here’s the thing, we have got -- [Laughing].
[Laughing]
Obviously with The Husband today, on the podcast. And we have gotten lots of emails about Molly’s talk that she shared on an episode a while back. And a lot of other people who had organizational abuse or ritual abuse or other kinds of church trauma, and it is also Easter Sunday in America, which is all things commercialism. And so, if you do not want to talk about church or religion or ritual abuse of any kind, definitely skip this episode.
But, I wanted to come full circle and share about some things. And so I want The Husband, that’s you, to --
Yes, it is the me.
[Laughing] How many of you are there?
Um, I have an associative identity.
[Laughing]
So, there are many sides of me, but we all slosh around together.
[Laughing] That is why I love you. Slosher. You’re sloshed.
[Laughing] I’m totally sloshed.
[Laughing] So --
[Laughing]
Oh my goodness. So, he’s going to have his nerd hat on, except still be adorable, because he always is.
It’s a nerd fedora.
[Laughing] So, skip this episode if you don’t want to talk church things. It’s not like a preachy kind of episode. But, it is some historical things and stuff we shared with the children today when they were asking questions about Easter eggs and other things. And I think that later, after I finish talking with him, which is never, because he’s awesome. Thanks for being my best friend.
Aww.
Take that, Julie.
[Laughing]
I’m just kidding. So, I just now told The Husband that I’m going to spend some time with Julie. She’s coming to visit actually, and so that’s why I’m teasing.
Okay so, here’s what’s going on. We’re going to talk about some traditions and some history and some different perspectives that we have from our own faith tradition, and why that matters, and how that’s been healing to us. So, if this is not an episode for you to listen to, totally skip. It won’t hurt our feelings. We won’t even actually know. But, if you do want to listen to it, it will be kind of Molly-ish, in that kind of sharing our perspective and tying some pieces together, as well as by the end of the episode, I want to bring it full circle to talk about some DID-related things and some trauma-related things in a churchy kind of way, spiritually speaking.
So, no pressure, Husband.
[Laughing]
I’m really sad that we lost the first part of what we shared already.
That’s okay.
They’ll never know how cute and funny we are.
They can just imagine.
[Laughing]
Insert cute and funny line here.
Nice. Unscripted, folx. Okay, so we were downstairs at lunch. It is Easter Sunday.
It is Easter Sunday.
And you taught Sunday School today.
For 13 and 14 year olds.
Ooh, even better.
They are so -- I was going to say focused, but I knew that was just sarcastic.
[Laughing]
They are so developing into people. They’re working on it.
You’re so compassionate.
I’m trying.
So, tell us about your class today.
So, we started out by asking the kids if they have any Easter traditions in their family. We did not get very far beyond Easter eggs and bunnies. I mean, they all know about Jesus and the crucifixion and all of that. But as far as traditions go, that was what they talked about.
And so I said, “Why do we use Easter eggs and bunnies as the symbols of Easter?” And then they were a little confused. Somebody came up with the idea that they represented new life and new birth and all of that. And that was good. I think that’s kind of how we apply them now. But it brings up the question also of why is the holiday called Easter. Where does the name Easter come from? Because it doesn’t come from the direction. [Laughing]
Easter -- [Laughing] Oh my goodness.
Well, that’s what I thought when I was a kid. I was like, “The sun coming up in the east. So, we call it Easter.”
Oh, that’s really clever, actually.
I was a smart kid.
And how did bunnies become a symbol of new life? Like I know they’re pretty prolific traditionally, and in cartoons especially.
[Laughing]
But lots of animals --
Yeah.
Have lots of babies in spring time.
So, I am not a scholar in the way that Dr. E is. So, if I’m incorrect in this, please feel free to send your complaints.
Don’t send any complaints. What is wrong with you?
It’s not my email.
[Laughing]
So, Easter is the name of a fertility goddess from --
Hello, pleasure.
[Laughing]
[Laughing]
Uh huh.
Okay, go ahead.
Yes, I’m sure that’s involved. Yes.
[Laughing]
A European fertility goddess, whose symbols were rabbits and eggs, because they represent fertility and birth. And as the medieval Christian church was expanding, this happened in several different locations with different holiday’s. They would come across an existing festival that was already entrenched in the culture, and if it was not something that could disband in some way, then they would co-opt it.
So like appropriation, but more?
Yes. So, like Christmas is the classic one, because the nativity story in the bible suggests that it happened in the springtime, because they’re shepherds out with their sheeps, with their sheeps.
[Laughing]
With their sheep who are having a lamb. That’s a springtime story.
So even though according to the story, Jesus was born in the springtime, like nowish.
Yeah, we have his party in December.
We have his birthday party in December.
Yes, and that’s because there was already a big celebration that happened on that time, around the 25th of December, and they couldn’t get people to stop celebrating it, and so they transformed it into the Christian holiday of the birth of Jesus. So, in the same way, they adopted this springtime festival of fertility and life and birth and all that into a celebration of the crucifixion and resurrection. There are other interesting pieces about it too. There’s something called computus, which is a branch of mathematics specifically about figuring out when Easter is supposed to happen, because it involves lots of different kinds of calendars. There’s lunar calendars and solar calendars and there’s Jewish holidays and then there’s full moons and all these different things to find out exactly when it is.
Is that your only math fact?
You notice I didn’t use any numbers in my discussion [laughing] of that branch of mathematics.
[Laughing]
But, look up in wikipedia, computus.
How do you spell it.
Computus and it is the most spectacular sort of double speak I’ve ever seen. I’m a pretty smart guy, and I have no idea what they’re talking about. So, there’s just all of this confusion about what Easter is and what it means and parts of different cultures coming in and all of this sort of sophistry and philosophies of men getting all mixed together. And then we talked with the kids -- we had -- I had the kids in my class read through the four gospels where it talks about --
Do you mean Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
I do mean - those very four.
[Laughing]
Each one is an account of the life of Jesus, and I had the kids read specifically the passages about the Garden of Gethsemane. Which, in our church, we consider it to be extremely important. That’s where the most important stuff happens in our understanding of it.
And this is a big deal. And I know it’s where you’re going, but it’s a big deal, because I grew up in Protestant churches and none of them ever talked about this. I had no idea until I was baptized and was taught in this church.
Well, and the reason is because if you look at all four of those, it does not talk about what actually is going on in the garden, other than Jesus praying and saying, “Please, if there’s any way that I cannot do this, let me not do it” and suffering and bleeding and all of that.
That’s me.
[Laughing]
If there’s any way I can not do any suffering, let’s do that. It’s like the whole chapter on avoidance. I’m learning about that in group workbook, you know.
Nice.
Jesus was in avoidance?
But he did it.
Oh. Uh huh.
It’s like I tell the kids --
Snap.
Being brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It just means you do it anyway.
Wait, what? Say it again.
Being brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It just means you do it anyway.
This is why I married him, you guys.
[Laughing]
[Laughing] That’s a nugget right there.
That nugget’s all yours.
[Laughing]
So, should I talk about our church perspective?
Sure. I’ve never said the name of our church on the podcast. I just refer to it as my faith tradition. Some people have guessed it because they know or have been exposed enough to understand, but I never mentioned it specifically.
Are you doing it now? Are we still mysterious?
No, I’m just telling you that so you know.
Okay.
But you can keep going.
So, we are Christian, for sure. But our church has a different perspective on things than a lot of traditional christianity. So, we believe that all people, before we were born on earth existed as spirits, and we lived with our Heavenly Father. And that while we were there, we learned and grew and developed and had relationships and talents and all kinds of things. But there came a point where our growth hit a limit, because we wanted to become like our Heavenly Father, but there were two things in our way. First, was that He had a perfected physical body - an eternal body. And second, He was perfect spiritually, which meant that He always made good choices, even without any limitations on what He could choose or what He knew about. He always chose the right thing.
I always say that there’s not a bad word out there that the Heavenly Father doesn’t know. [Laughing] He just doesn’t use them.
[Laughing] That’s amazing. I love it.
So, in order to overcome those obstacles, an earth was created and we came here. So now we have a physical body and we have the opportunity to choose without being under the visible supervision of God.
Like sending the children out to play in the backyard.
Yeah.
And who are they really? Who is their character when we’re not watching?
That’s what I tell them. Yeah, who you are when we’re not looking is who you really are. So, we are now here with the opportunity to choose freely, but that leaves us with two problems. One, we had this nice physical body, but at the end of --
Thank you.
Eh. At the end of our life here, we die, and then once again, we’re without a physical body. And two, we, with our marvelous freedom, also make a lot of bad choices, and those bad choices separate us from the presence of the Heavenly Father. So, when this life ends, it makes it as unqualified to return to him. So, to overcome those two things from the very beginning, the Heavenly Father prepared a Savior as a part of his plan, and that’s Jesus Christ.
And he came to earth, not as an ordinary person, but with the ability to overcome those two things for us. So, no one can overcome death on their own. So, everybody has access to the resurrection. Jesus died and then was able to take back a perfected physical body and because he broke those chains, that’s going to be made available for all of us.
So, everybody gets that no matter what?
Everybody gets that. It’s your participation prize for coming to earth. [Laughing]
So, even people who don’t agree or don’t like or don’t believe in Jesus, or whatever --
Yeah.
They still get resurrected, because that’s just done.
Yes.
They made it this far to earth.
And having a blessing -- having a body we consider to be a blessing that we will miss it when we die and have to wait for our resurrection.
That’s a good reminder, because I think we take our bodies for granted, even when we’re struggling with them.
Yeah.
Like whether that’s chemo or different addictions or --
Yeah.
Whatever people struggle with. Or like our kids with their special needs.
Yeah.
We still forget that even then, it’s still a blessing, and there are things that we are here to learn in this condition that we couldn’t learn in any other way.
Yeah. So, the resurrection is pretty clearly talked about in the Bible. What is less clearly talked about is, the Savior took upon himself the punishment for all of our sins, all of the things that made us imperfect and less than Godly, and paid that price so that we can then repent and return to Heavenly Father.
Now see, growing up in Protestant churches, I had an understanding of that in some way, but it was all related to the whole cross thing.
Hmm.
It was not about the garden. No one talked about the garden other than just the disciples fell asleep, or whatever.
Yeah.
There was nothing. It was all focused on the cross. But the cross was the physical death.
Yeah. So, somehow in God time, I don’t think this happened in mortal tome -- somehow our Savior took all of the guilt and all of the shame and all of the suffering and all of the imperfection that separated us from God and paid for that for us. It’s something that only someone who is not already in debt, spiritually, could do. And he is the only one who is able to live without sin. So, he did that for all of us, and it was so excruciating that he bled. Gethsemane means oil press, like olive oil. And with olive oil, a weight crushes down on the olives until the oil squeezes out like blood squeezing out of your pores.
So this intercession --
Yes.
This prayer. This taking on of all of our weakness, our challenges, our sins, our mistakes, our choices when we didn’t know better, our choices when we did know better, all of those things, that was in the garden.
Yes.
What?
Yes. And I used to think of it as sins as discrete little amounts of bad behavior, like taking black legos out of the bag of white legos, right? They’re just little pieces.
[Laughing]
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that sin, these imperfections, don’t have a specific beginning and end. Like let’s say I choose to rob a bank.
Oh, please don’t.
I won’t.
Not without me.
[Laughing]
I’m just kidding.
You can be my Bonnie.
Thank you, baby.
But there were thoughts and other actions that came before that. And there were thoughts and actions that came before that. And there were thoughts and actions that came before that. You didn’t one day just wake up and randomly rob a bank. It came as a whole series of choices and desires and thoughts and habits. And all of those have been paid for. So, the more I thought about it, the more I came to understand that he didn’t just pay for our sins, like these little chunks of badness, he paid for our ungodliness. He paid for our imperfection. And to do that, he would have had to carry the weight of our entire lives. For him to be able to carry our sins and understand us perfectly, he has to carry our whole selves. There is not one moment of our lives that he has not experienced with us, and that is the weight that he carried in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Now this matters to the podcast, because that, what you just said also includes being abused.
Yes. yes, it does.
Because when I’ve said, “This is too hard to talk about. I can’t keep going. I don’t want to go to therapy.” I’ll hang out with the therapist, but I don’t want to go to therapy. [Laughing]
[Laughing]
Or I can go to therapy, but I don’t want to talk about hard things. Or is there a way around this without facing -- like when we talk about avoidance, is there a way to get through this without having to face what’s really caused all this and what’s really been hard and what’s really -- what really happened back then?
And you say, “Why do we have to do it?” You have --
So, the wife and I have talked about forgiveness a lot. And how in order to forgive someone perfectly, you have to acknowledge the truth perfectly. Right? In order to feel forgiving yourself perfectly, you have to be known perfectly. You can’t be hiding a piece of yourself and feel like you’ve been known and forgiven. And in the same way, in order to forgive others, we also have to acknowledge the truth, because if you’re setting part of that aside as a secret, then you’re not forgiving that. You’re just -- I’m not saying like secrets that you’re -- not secrets -- something that you’re telling around. I just mean something you’re not acknowledging.
So, in our conversations, as part of forgiving yourself as part of forgiving parents and abusers, as part of moving past all of that, there has to be an honest acknowledgement of all of the truth, which is really hard to do. It takes a lot of time. But that is how the Savior forgives us perfectly, because he also had to have a perfect empathetic knowledge of our lives in order to actually forgive us perfectly. And I believe that he carried the weight of our whole lives. That he is in some way, with us, through all of our experiences in that garden moment.
And I think that even talking about forgiveness can be so triggering, because I don’t think it always means what people think it means.
Mmm.
Or people use the word wrong.
Yeah.
And it’s not about everything’s okay.
Yes. It is absolutely not that.
It’s like almost the opposite of that of saying, “Here is what is not okay. Here is exactly what was not okay.” And letting go of that and let that --
Moving past it. Yeah. They say that not forgiving someone is like drinking poison and expecting them to die.
Right.
When you hold onto that anger, bad feelings. But then how do you let it go without discounting the actual pain that it caused? How do you still respect yourself and acknowledge the accountability of others while within yourself letting go?
Let it go! I’m just kidding.
The magic of Disney.
Uh. So terrible. Right?
I think, for me, part of that is understanding that it’s not my job to judge. It’s not my job to deliver consequences. My job is to live my life and my job is to move forward with where I am now and who I want to be and where I want to go. So, forgiveness, for me, is learning to do the part that you’re talking about, that I’m not good yet of okay, I have to face every bit of this and all of it needs to be acknowledged in some way.
Yeah.
And the truth of all of it be out. But then when I’m letting go of it, the letting go piece is not denying the past or shoving it down or separating it from myself. It’s just the acknowledging that this is now between you and God.
Yes.
Because I’ve spoken my part.
Yeah.
And so God can deliver the consequences and God can deliver the justice and God can decide who gets mercy or not, because that’s not about anything I have to do.
Can I give an example?
Please do.
So, there are things that I know that you struggle with now that are because of trauma that’s happening in your past.
What? I don’t struggle with anything!
[Laughing] But the people who are interacting with you now, who might have a hard time with some aspects of what’s going on, don’t know those things in your past. And so you, as a person, I, as as person, desperately want to know that I am understood as I am being -- judged, I guess is a horrible word. Assessed. Understood. I need to be seen. I think of the bad things that I do and I desperately pray, “Oh, Heavenly Father, you know that I meant to do something good. You understood my intentions and my history and my weakness and my efforts and my failures and all of that.” Right?
So, in order to be a perfect judge, the Savior has to understand us perfectly. And in that same way, the people who have done wrong to us, which is absolutely wrong, they are bad things that have been done, but we don’t understand those people in the way that we ourselves want to be understood when judgment is passed. It is impossible for us to judge those people, because of that limit on our understanding. Right? We can say those things were bad things, and they definitely affected me and have affected the rest of my life.
And that has to be a part of it.
Yes.
That’s part of what they need to understand --
Yes.
At some point.
But the rest of it, you just have to put over into God’s hands, because you don’t know. You don’t know their history. When you and I were fostering, one of our first kiddos was an adorable little nine-year-old boy, and we both felt pretty confident that when he grew up he was going to be a sexual predator.
Right.
And because of the way that he had been traumatized and tortured as a child --
And it wasn’t something we wanted to condemn him to.
No.
And not something we found --
It just felt like that was the path he was on.
You could just see it.
So, a fair and loving God is not going to just see that one little piece of him and say, “No, boo you. You missed out.”
Right.
“Because you were born in these situations, too bad.” No, he understands that we are affected by our experiences and by our history. And he sees how we try our best within the context of who we are. So, he has to understand us perfectly in order to judge us perfectly.
So you mean the things that happened to my parents when they were little?
Yeah.
Woah.
There’s no way for you to perfectly understand what happened to your parents or what happened to their parents.
[Break]
Hmm.
You know your interactions with them. You know how that has affected you and you have come so far in working to love them and to work through that trauma, but they’ve had their own trauma or else they wouldn’t have behaved like that. Remember sin is not like a lego. It’s like a whole tapestry of experiences and choices all worked in together.
But if that’s true, then it’s also true that it’s not just our fault.
The thing that happened to you?
Yeah.
Of course it’s not your fault.
But what if I’m the black lego?
You’re not a black lego.
Well, I’m a white lego.
You are a bag of legos of many colors. [Laughing]
[Laughing]
No, you’re not a bad lego. You too are a person with choices and experiences. And other people’s choices are not your fault. Your choices are your own responsibility.
[Break]
We always used to tell our kids -- our kids would tattle on kids, or try and control other kids, and be bossy or whatever. And we always used to say, “Focus on yourself. Leave the other kids alone.” But we’ve changed the wording in our family so that -- in our family to say, “Focus on your choices.” Because you can’t control other people’s choices. Sometimes other people’s choices are terrible, and they affect you in bad ways. But focus on your choices and what you can do, because ultimately, that’s all you can do.
And that’s a part of everyone coming here to earth --
Absolutely.
And to having free agency. Everyone came here to learn to choose. Right?
Yeah.
But the only way we could really learn that is to also have the choice to choose bad?
Yeah.
And some people do.
All of us came here to have bad experiences, honestly. [Laughing]
Right.
We had to learn the things that we couldn’t learn in the presence of a loving Heavenly Father. And for us to have a full spectrum of understanding, a full breath of, a capacity of human and Godly compassion and knowledge, and all of that. We couldn’t just have happy things happen to us. We have to experience hard things, and the bad things that happened to you as a child, they break my heart, and they make me cry. But I also know that you are a fuller and richer person because of them.
Wait, what happened to me makes you cry?
Yeah.
[Break]
So, the last month or so in therapy has been super hard.
Yeah.
Different than before, because I think we’re starting to talk about things differently than before.
Yeah.
And that’s just hard.
Yeah. Yeah.
I know you know our nightmares have been worse or whatever. But also, there is something about -- however things went down in our family -- and I’m trying not to be abuse-specific enough that it’s too triggering for the podcast, but just being real. There’s something about the way things happened in my family or the way the dynamic was set up in the family that part of me was so focused on dealing with the mother and part of me was so focused on dealing with the father. And last week in therapy, she asked one question, just one simple question. And I don’t want to talk about it right now on the podcast what the issue was or what the question was, because it’s just not trauma dumping on the podcast.
But the one question made me realize that both parents are responsible for pretty much everything that happened as the parents. And I don’t mean that both of them did the same things wrong.
Right.
But it was the first time that my brain comprehended, for just a moment, that both of my parents were -- what was that word? We talked about it. I asked you about that word, when you’re responsible for something?
Like a stewardship or accountable?
No. Complicit.
Ooh, yeah. They were both complicit.
And so they were not stewards of my safety. They were not stewards of my healthy, normal development.
They should have been.
And they were both complicit in some of the things that the other was doing or responsible for what they did that was not good.
Yeah.
And that moment in therapy physically hurt my body. I don’t know how to explain it. It made my brain hurt and I know I say that all the time, because I know your brain can’t really hurt, but it did. I could not -- it was like a moment where all of the sudden I was aware that I was in therapy, but it wasn’t me in therapy, but I was aware of it. And I was aware that this was the piece that was clicking in all the way down.
Mmm.
Like if our entire system was a tall building --
[Laughing]
Which it’s not, but I mean as a visual.
Yeah.
It was like all of the sudden the therapist just pushed the elevator button and down we went and up we went. It went -- whatever that piece of information went all the way through.
Wow.
And it’s been really difficult to sit with that.
Mm.
So, how do -- hmm. I think understanding pieces like what you share about the whole story needing to be put together and out there, because that’s the only way it’s fully known, the only way we are fully known, that is a powerful piece for healing for me. And it somehow empowers layers that otherwise would just be shame.
Mmhmm.
Because guilt is when you do something wrong and so sins or transgressions or whatever in a spiritual context, that’s the language they use. Right? When you make a wrong choice.
Yeah.
But shame is about who you are being bad. I mean, feeling bad for who you are as opposed to what you did.
Ah.
And so this is about what you said, we’re not pieces of legos. And it’s bigger than that and it externalizes it somehow. It puts what happened to me, is out here, and I need to talk about this piece so that that piece can be swept away or cleaned or put back on them where it belongs, because it’s not mine. They put it on me, but it’s not my piece. It’s their piece.
Like the therapist has been saying for the last month or so, “It’s not your secret.”
Mmm.
You can talk about it, and you’re not going to have consequences for talking about it, because it’s not your secret. It’s their secret.
Yeah.
And so it externalizes it and puts it out there so we can either just get rid of it altogether or put it back on them, because it is theirs.
Yeah.
That’s a very different thing than this piece is in me and so therefore I am a terrible -- and terrible forever and doomed to be terrible forever.
That brings us back to the Garden of Gethsemane.
Right! Exactly! Which is why I wanted to talk about this, because the Garden is a whole piece that I never had access to growing up.
Yeah. The Savior, in the Garden of Gethsemane, carried the weight of our entire lives, all of our sickness and sorrow and loneliness and bad choices and suffering. We are not carrying them alone. He is carrying them with us.
Hmm. Okay. Thank you.
I love you.
I love you, too. Happy Easter.
Happy Easter.
[Break]
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