This transcrpit has been edited for clarity.

Episode 036 – Grandkids, Groveling and The Greatest Love

March 26^th, 2024

S: Hi, I’m Sharon. And Tracey is doing grandma duty right now, so for today this is Feet of Clay Confessions of the Cult Sister singular. I’m actually up in the mountains of Utah recording in an Air BnB so I don’t know – might have a lot of reverb because there’s hardwood floors, there’s also this really fierce wind storm outside, so I’m not quite as dedicated to sound quality as Tracey is, as you will recall, she has been known to get under a laundry basket and put blankets all over the place to make her sound better. Yeah, that ain’t me, so what you hear is what you get folks. Alright. Our last episode was the kick off of a multi-part in-depth series we are calling The Demise of Last Days Ministries. As we mentioned in part one, we thought we might need a little more time to do justice to this big subject that spans many years. It really is important to both me and Tracey that we do a good job so there’s a lot of organizing and compiling and fact checking the things that we want to share. So we need some more time with that.  Interestingly, in the couple of weeks right after we recorded part one, there have been other significant things in our lives. The most wonderful and beautiful of which is, Tracey is now officially a grandmother. Her first grandchild was born on March *, everyone is healthy and happy, it went great so that’s always a big, big relief and right now she’s now enjoying some very special quality time with them. I asked her – I did ask her if she has a personalized granny handle but I think that decision is still pending. By the way, mine is Gramsham, so yeah, Tracey how creative can you get huh? Are you just gonna be Grandma T? Bring it on girl, come up with something good.

Alright, as all of our listeners should be aware, neither Tracey nor I are new to babies. We each had five of our own and I am really looking forward to talking with her about – it’s just an incredible experience that she’s having, holding this precious newborn in her arms. It’s actually making me feel a little emotional right now. It’s the next generation of her own flesh and blood, and it’s pretty cool. There’s an old joke most of you have probably heard, the one that goes if I knew that grandchildren were this much fun, I’d have had them first. Yeah – corny. Sorry. Then we also hear people talk about the reason that grandkids are so great is because you can enjoy all the good parts; you can have fun, you can play with them, and do all the wonderful things and then you just give them back to their parents to deal with the hard stuff. There’s definitely a bit of truth in those things, but for me, the total coolness of having grandkids goes much, much deeper in a way that I did not expect. Holding my infant grandchildren, it’s definitely been a powerfully moving experience. I think the one thing that has made it all the more profound for me is that there’s this stark contrast between my former beliefs as an Evangelical fundamentalist when I was having my own children, compared to my spiritual beliefs now as I’m seeing and interacting with my grandkids. That contrast – it just became way more clear to me this last week. I think it was like, two days after Tracey’s grand was born and we were texting back and forth, we were both really, really excited. I had a very unexpected and emotional encounter with my past. I also realized that there is a significant universal truth that tied these two experiences together; the birth of Tracey’s grandchild, and what I unexpectedly encountered. So I figured since we’re not yet ready to do part two of The Demise Of Last Days Ministries series that I would briefly share these ideas with you guys.

So, being a grandmother now versus being a mother way back when, decades ago, what are the differences that I feel? Of course, when I held my own babies – I’m sorry people, I’m probably going to get emotional when I talk about this. Oh well. It’s me. Alright, so when I held my own babies, when I nursed them and I watched them take their first steps, and I heard their first words, I don’t know – if you haven’t had children I don’t know how you can – you can’t. You just can’t understand it. My heart just was overflowing with this indescribable love for each of them. It still does, right now. Right now I am picturing all of their faces, and it just makes my heart smile and overflow. At the same time though, that I was experiencing this beauty of motherhood – remember, I had bought into that belief system. I mean, I drank down all the Kool-Aid believing that at the core of the being of each one of my children was a selfish and sinful soul. A soul that’s so dark and so evil that Jesus had to suffer and die for them. So the most important job that I had as a parent, that I had to hold onto and focus on was I needed to help them to learn to despise their sin, to repent, and follow Jesus. Otherwise they’re going to be doomed to eternal torture in hell. Well – that’s some pretty heavy shit to be thinking when you’re looking into the eyes of this beautiful, magical new life. Have you ever had that experience where you hold out your pinkie finger, and they curl their tiny little, perfect fingers around yours and they squeeze it? It’s indescribable. Alright, I guess I’m kind of rambling a bit. Anyway.

Here’s what happened with this unexpected experience I had that coincided with the birth of Tracey’s grandchild. As most of you have figured out, she’s the one that’s always doing tons of research, sending me links to videos and interviews and articles and stuff. Well, this time I’m poking around a little bit, and I happen to see the title of this certain podcast that had a guest person talking about the history of CCM, or Contemporary Christian Music. So I wanted to listen to it and see are they going to give any mention to Keith Green – actually they didn’t, but they were going to play little snippets of various songs by early CCM artists throughout this episode of that podcast. The very first little clip they played was a song I hadn’t heard for at least three decades. Just the first few chords of that song were enough to instantly transport me back to that place and that time all those years ago. The emotional impact was surprizing and profound, and totally unexpected. It’s actually making me choke up right now, just recalling it again and I’ve got that song playing in my mind, and the words are in the back of my head. The song is Testify to Love by the group Avalon. I tried to keep listening – I want to listen to the rest of that podcast, but I found my heart just pounding and my mind racing and searching and trying to remember the entire song. So I paused the podcast and I went to YouTube and I pulled up a version of the song so that I could listen all the way through. And I cried. I cried and I mouthed the words, the words that I remembered from all those years ago. I’ll put a link in the show notes so those who aren’t familiar with the song can listen if you want to.

What was happening for me was I was remembering, and I was right back there feeling what I felt in – I mean, it seems like a lifetime ago. Whenever I would play that song, I would sing with everything in me, and I always wept. I really, really wept, and it took me by surprize that I found myself so overcome with sobbing once again. You guys can hear it – here I am, it’s still very emotional. And that got me stopping and thinking and pondering – why? What is the hold? What is the hook that’s still there in me all these decades later? What I realized is that it’s this lingering residue of that horrible belief system that I don’t adhere to anymore, but it’s that sense of how completely unworthy I was, and the belief that I am deserving of nothing but eternal punishment. All those years ago that song would bring me to this place of – I think it was just like, emotional ecstasy, to a point of weeping. Overwhelm – I’m not sure how even to describe it, but it was gratitude. I think that was the huge, huge emotion inside me. This gratitude that a perfect God could stoop so low as to love me and sacrifice himself for me. The words to the song have all this imagery of the beauty of nature, and the power of the cosmos and I think that that does rightfully allow us to feel the vastness of the universe, and our own insignificance in that context, but the emotion was more than just a sense of just being tiny in a vast universe. It was a sense of just total unworthiness, mixed in with this awe and this wonder, and then that morphs into this indebtedness – the gratitude of being in debt, and that feeling of love and thankfulness for God, but it’s all flowing from a position of spiritual groveling. Like a worm – this worm, so miserable and so lowly that even the meagerest of crumbs is more than I deserve.

Logically I know that’s a really twisted, fucked up way of thinking, and yet it really is the foundation of fundamental Evangelical Christianity – the Progressive forms might focus more on love and forgiveness and kind of brush aside that judgement, but let’s face it folks – if we aren’t sinful and without hope then Jesus wouldn’t have had to die, so it’s baked right in there to the foundation of the theology. I don’t want to get off on that.

Over the years I have been really, really fortunate to have had the benefit of some great therapists. I mean, they’ve helped me untangle lots of unhealthy beliefs, helped me with unhealthy relationship dynamics and learn how to shift those, and also just gain freedom from really unhealthy self-concepts. One of the things I’ve learned about is this idea that there are different parts of each of us, and there’s this one mode of therapy that identifies these various parts that we need to integrate in order to develop our potential as a healthy, functional adult. These three parts that are dealing with our childhood – one of them is call the original precious child. That’s who we are from the womb, with all our unique possibilities and potential and foibles – it’s just who we are, authentically. Then there’s the wounded child. That speaks to the injuries we experience when we have less than ideal parenting, or we go through situations in life that are harmful, or if we’ve suffered some form of neglect or abuse. Of course, there’s no such thing as a perfect parent or a perfect childhood, so to one degree or another, all of us have wounding. That’s just normal. That’s human. But for some it’s far worse than others. So then we come to the adapted child. That’s how each and every one of us finds ways to deal with the pains and fears we experience. How we learn to cope. If we’ve had caretakers who are engaged and safe and supportive, they can help us learn to navigate the experiences. They teach us to become aware of our emotions; to name them, to validate them, to develop skills for self-regulation – all that healthy development that should be happening. But if we don’t have those safe and supportive primary caregivers – and then of course if one of our caregivers is the actual source of wounding or abuse, then we’ve got to figure out, all on our own, as children – sometimes as tiny, tiny children – how to survive the trauma. How to escape the terror. The survival strategies that we come up with – they’re basically subconscious, right? No three- or four-year-old is cognitively thinking through how do I make myself feel safe. Actually, neither is a thirteen-year-old. But we develop these adaptive strategies and we use them in our childhood and our teen years, and they help us survive those really tough times. They’re usually unhealthy ways of coping later in adult life, so that’s part of why the work that we do to understand ourselves is so important.

But what Evangelical fundamentalism – as well as so many other religions have done, is to label that normal learning experience, that normal process of childhood and growing – that normal adaptation for emotional and sometimes physical survival – religion labels it as evidence of sin and a rebellious nature. To label the person as evil in the very essence of their being. That’s why you need a savior right? I bought into that label. I bought into it. I believed that about myself and I wore that label with a vengeance – that label of I’m a sinner, deserving only of death. So now, older in life, as grandmothers, we’re cradling these astounding miracles of life, that the cosmos has brought into being, and how beautiful and amazing and complete and how perfect they are. You hold this little baby, and that idea of an innate wickedness – it’s like, laughably offensive and dangerously preposterous. It’s just like, unthinkable – what the fuck?? It’s the most ridiculous thing that could possibly be. And yet – sorry folks, and yet while this is so absolutely clear for me while I look at my grandchildren, at times it is still hard for me to give myself that same sense of grace. The indoctrination and brainwashing were so – they were so effective. At times it’s hard to remember, I can forget that I too, am at my core, before the wounding, before the adapting, that I am a previous, original, authentic child. I’m guessing it’s also hard for many of you listening to give yourselves that grace and that space as well.

We were taught that each child is selfish and that that is the proof of a sinful heart, right? And you can watch them not want to share their toys, and the first time they say no to a request from a parent, we saw that as evidence of that evil heart. We were taught that to be an acceptable human child, and later to be an acceptable child of God, we must be obedient. We can exert no will of our own; that that original child, the essence of who we are, is selfish and corrupt. But that, my friends, that is a lie. It is not the truth. At our core, at your core, is a beautiful, precious, worthy, original child.  As a grandmother I can see that perfection. The innocence, the beauty of each child. I can see it in all its clarity now, and that’s a contrast as to when I first held my own babies and my vision, my mind was clouded with this mythology of original sin. The message we taught our children as they grew up, and the message you may have received if you grew up raised by parents – parents like we were, the message you received was Jesus loves you, and at the core of your being you are so bad that he had to suffer and die just to let you hang out with him. You need to die to yourself, give up all of you so that he can control you and use you as he sees fit – and if you obey enough, and if you believe exactly the right way, you’ll escape hell and get to heaven. That is so fucked up.

So the message that we want to teach our grandchildren now, as they grow, and to reteach our children and to reteach ourselves, is this:

Who you are, at the essence of your being, is perfect, and beautiful, and wonderful, and loved. And you’re going to have a lifetime to learn about yourself, to learn about others, to discover who you are; to figure out what you like and what you don’t like; what brings you joy and what makes you sad. You will learn to love to honor yourself; learn to love and honor others. You’re going to find your deepest meaning in true connection with your authentic self. Not in trying to hide or suppress who you really are, because You Are Worthy. Just as you are. And we love you. Your greatest challenge in this life is to learn to truly, truly love yourself. Testify to that kind of love. That is the love worth singing about.