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Lyndsey: Hi, welcome back to Crumbling Empires, a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I’m here today with Liz Charlotte Grant, who is the author of a Webby-nominated, really interesting and fun and edifying Substack and a new book coming out in 2024.
Her Substack is called The Empathy List. Thank you so much for writing that and thank you for being here today, Liz.
Liz: I am so delighted, Lyndsey.
Lyndsey: I was just telling you, your book is far enough out that we don’t have the advanced copies or anything. And so this is my first interview that’s just like, honestly, I’ll be honest. I pretended to be like Terry Gross and Krista Tippett and I’ve always been jealous that they get to just go on these deep dives of people’s work and sort of investigate people and then talk to them.
Liz: We’re all jealous of them, Lindsay. We’re all jealous.
Lyndsey: So I tried it and it was really fun. I recommend it to everyone with a podcast, I guess, or even if you don’t have a podcast. You could do that with a family member or something.
Um, so, um, that just has, that’s where we’re going with this conversation is everywhere.
Liz: And that’s perfect.
Lyndsey: It was really, really fun to read through all your old work and stuff.
Liz: Oh, wow. You’ve got all my old work. Some of it’s not good.
Lyndsey: I was really glad you had like a big, fairly extensive portfolio on your website. And then I read through some of your Substacks and stuff. So and then when I when you we were talking about where this conversation was going to go earlier, you had said you wanted to like noticing and attention and wonder have been really present for you lately. And that that would be a really generative space to talk through.
I’ve been seeing a lot of people in my spheres, friends, writer friends, gravitating towards this practice and this way of looking at the world. And I am curious what you think, what do you think is drawing so many of us towards this similar space and a similar practice around just being present to what’s around us and really curious and committed to that noticing.
Liz: I love that. I think it’s part of the artistic calling for one. I think it’s a natural reason that we get into what we get into. We start as children noticing things. And then we, as writers and artists, we notice that other people are not noticing the way we are. People start to call us strange or if not that maybe intense. I probably got that a lot as a teen. I was mature to adults and then I was kind of intense and ambitious to my peers.
Lyndsey: Yes.
Liz: And really it was this hunger for understanding and for beauty that was hard to explain and was not easily satisfied. And I think that is a very common experience for artists to come to this place of recognizing that they are different in how they see the world. And that that can be actually generative, that it can create something new out of old things or out of tired things. And all of a sudden, then you can, you can have something unique and interesting that wasn’t there before, you know, and I think it becomes really contagious. Like as you notice things uniquely, you want to create unique things as well. So that other people can be the experience that kind of generative cycle.
I also think, you know, this season of living as a human is very disembodied. And I know that that’s a big theme in your work, Lyndsey, kind of attuning to our bodies again. And I think that is that is very true. I you know, I think the role of the artist in some ways is to remember that you’re an embodied person and to attend to what that means. So, you know, I think especially with social media being so central to our lives, I think it can feel like everything we’re doing is just in our mind. You know, a lot of us work on our computers. And so we kind of are just big brains walking around most of the time.
And so to be able to actually get small and notice tangible, real things. You know, to use our eyes to get slower. You know, Mischa Boyett does stuff around the slow way, which I love. You know, what does it mean to get small, to get low, to attend to the ground? You know, I find myself drawn toward smaller and smaller things. You know, cities are less interesting, but you know what’s really interesting? A butterfly. Yeah, something about attending to something specific is is healing. It’s a balm, I think.
Lyndsey: Yes, I think this attention, noticing, wonder, and curiosity have also—I have just found them to be at the convergence of— as a creative person, having been doing this in a public fashion for a while, I found myself in a similar space to my spiritual space. It’s like, okay, this is part of who I am. It used to be really exciting. And how do we maintain this thing? How do we keep going? This and this and this are how I’m disillusioned with it. You know? All of these things— of any sphere of your life that is really exciting when you’re young or when it’s new and then it becomes a practice and a discipline.
I’ve found art, creativity, very broadly defined, and spirituality to be just found myself in the same place with both of those things. So I wonder how, what this looks like as a spiritual practice for you as well.
Liz: Hmm. Well, do you mind telling me more about like, what did it look like to find yourself in that same place? What was the place you found yourself?
Lyndsey: Oh, the place of like, okay. I used to really love that. Like I used to be so enamored of this and now it’s a part of who I am. Like it’s definitely not going away. But it’s also just that much more complicated. It’s that much, you know, my old ways of doing it are tired and there’s-
Liz: Yeah, so there’s like a rote kind of boredom.
Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Liz: there’s a question like, what’s next? Where’s this headed?
Lyndsey: Yeah. Yes, I. So you write about art and you do lots of creative stuff. And I am curious, like talk more about how that interacts with spirituality for you, like embodiment, of course, is very spiritual; being present and aware is very spiritual; but in your practice of spirituality and religion and relationship with spirit, with God, can we be more explicit about that?
Liz: Yeah, absolutely. I would say, you know, as I, so I grew up in evangelicalism, was a very devout and enthusiastic teen in youth group. And, you know, I did the American white evangelical thing to a tee, including went to an evangelical university, you know, I married young, I had babies young, that was just, you know, the way it happened for me.
Um, and then, you know, things got complicated because of some pain, you know, because of some spiritual abuse, because of family trauma that I dealt with, um, in mostly in my twenties. Um, I’m in my mid thirties now. Um, so still a young baby as far as that’s concerned, but, um, as like a 20 something, I was very—I felt like everything shifted underneath me and all of a sudden I was having to grapple with these big questions.
I think that’s a very common experience in your 20s and 30s. You know, this, sometimes they call it a third individuation where it’s like, all of a sudden you’re figuring out, you know, who are you as an adult, apart from family, apart from maybe even institutional design for you. You know, some people go through that earlier or later.
I was like, raring to go in my early twenties and disillusioned early too. So I was always trying to run ahead. I was an overachiever. So even in that.
I think that my experience of spirituality and art are so tied together because, you know, in some sense, what you’re asking is like, how do you make both sustainable? Like how do you continue to be a religious person who loves Jesus, and how do you keep making art, and how do those interact together? And what you know, like, what does that actually look like day to day? And I think that’s a really hard thing for most artists.
But, you know, my husband, so my husband is actually a visual artist. So I’ve learned a lot from him and the way that he practices. And one of his main sort of mantras that he comes back to you and has told me, you know, if I’ve ever come to him, you know, whiny and, and sad and depressive, which is common for me, he will kind of just tell me: “Make the work.” That’s it. You know, like, the whole thing is to keep returning.
I think that’s that’s very true of a religious experience as well, where there’s a sense of, you know, You go through a middle phase, you go through a phase in all of these things where you kind of find yourself, maybe a little bit stuck, or maybe a little bored. You know, and I think that space of boredom actually has potential to be very generative as well, because it’s forcing us to reckon with the way that we’ve been doing it. And now that it’s not working anymore. The question is, is there a new way forward? What does it look like to reengage?
So, you know, when I, when I got married in my young 20s, I was like, I’m such a baby. I had babies when I was a baby. Basically, I was like 25 when I had my daughter, 27 when I had my son. And I just felt like I needed, I needed a new way to do writing after they came into the world.
And so all of a sudden I discovered this kind of new discipline and desire in myself and this new strength that kind of emerged in part from those experiences, but really just from growing up, you know, getting older. And I found myself much more focused in my writing times and would initially write during nap times. And that was only 30 minutes at a time sometimes. 30 minutes to two hours, you know, is what I would have. I would like say, I’m not doing dishes. Yeah. I’m not cleaning the house. I’m gonna sit on my butt and sit in front of my computer. And even if something’s not coming, I’m gonna try, you know, I’m gonna read something interesting, or I’m gonna free write for a bit, or I’m going to just reread something that I had written before and see if it sparks something.
And so sometimes I feel like those new practices have been very important in both faith and writing for me to say, you know, I was in evangelicalism and then I moved into Anglicanism. And that was really meaningful because all of a sudden I had this new language and this new way to use my body. I had daily prayers I could pray. I could, I started to draw on the contemplatives more. So I, you know, read about St. Ignatius and I started reaching into the Catholic saints more and, and found that some of those stories felt very artistic.
They felt very, um, much closer to my experience of art and religion than some of the evangelical language around those things, which tends to be very, you know, within evangelicalism art, see the purpose of art seems to be, what is it? What are the three they talk about? Do you know what I’m talking about?
Lyndsey: Oh, that sounds like a Reformed type of thing that I am not as familiar with.
Liz: Oh, truth, beauty, goodness. I think that might be it.
Lyndsey: Which sounds fine?
Liz: I mean, what’s so interesting about it is I think there is this sense that…Actually, let me pull you up first. I’ll be right back.
Lyndsey: Like a narrow sense of what define what constitutes those?
Liz: So what they’ll say is like, beauty is whatever is true and good. And, and I don’t think that’s true. Actually, I think that beauty is its own distinctive and that beauty itself is this kind of abundant expression of God. And so, you know, in some sense, some of the desert fathers and mothers, the contemplatives had a finger on this in the way that we don’t or we didn’t in evangelicalism.
There was this sense of actually just being with God, being loved by God, being present to God, making space to be present with God. That itself is beautiful and it is this relationship. You know, you don’t have to bring all your learning to it necessarily. You don’t have to bring, you know, like every, every theologian who’s ever been born on your back doesn’t sit in the room with you.
Lyndsey: Yeah, like it doesn’t have to live up to a definition of truth or even like, you are you producing goodness, but you can just be beautiful.
Liz: Yeah. Yeah, right. And I think being more contented with showing up in whatever state, you know, and that includes, you know, in the writing too, being able to show up without a plan sometimes or being able to, you know, but just continuing to make the space anyway.
Lyndsey: But that is so unnerving. If beauty can just be out there by itself, you know, not contained by truth and goodness, if like if God and our artistic practice and our prayer practices just happen and not be sort of—we don’t have these rubrics, where they’re going to go, or what’s going to make them correct? What are you saying, Liz?
Liz: Yeah, no, I think I think that’s a very common. That’s a very common criticism of this kind of thinking. But I also think it’s a reason—and I’ve often seen this tie between this kind of expressive, emotive experience of God and misogyny because often what we see as unbound is actually just a different mode of engaging divinity.
And in fact, the Holy Spirit, which, you know, the Reformed theobros are very, I think, pretty uncomfortable with, pretty cessationist. I think the Holy Spirit, who was so essential to the desert fathers and mothers in helping them day to day live their lives and to experience Christ and God, I think the Holy Spirit feels like a threat. Because what if the Spirit speaks something new?
You know, what if, what about progressive theology? What about how we treat women? What about LGBTQ folks? You know what I mean?
And I think I think art is like that, too. There’s this like intuitive, inner self that you sort of need to connect to, you know, they talk about neurologists and also artists, I’ve heard talk about flow state. And that is very much when you get into this work state in which you lose track of time. So it’s this sort of timeless, entirely engrossed experience. And I, you know, as you become more proficient in your work, whatever that is, but in the arts, you know, as you write your million words or whatever, you know, you have to write a million words before you write a single good word.
So you write your million words, and then all of a sudden you find yourself more and more able to get into that flow state. And it itself can, you know, there’s all the dopamine and all the things that come from that. But I think for myself, what has been, excuse me, I think for myself, what has been so fascinating about finding that state in my practice from time to time has been the sense of surprise that emerges.
There’s this sense of, you know, this intuitive part of me that is leading a certain direction that my conscious mind did not always recognize. And you know, if I’m writing an essay and all of a sudden I realize what it’s about, you know, all of a sudden it’s about my mom and I didn’t know before, but I get to the end and I go, oh, now I need to revise the whole thing with that specific thing in mind because that’s what I was writing about.
Lyndsey: This sounds like I really wanted to hear more about the evolution of your book that’s coming out in 2024. I have read your Substack post about it several times because there’s just so much in there and I’m so fascinated with people’s processes and you talked for a really long time about money in there. And also because I knew you had, for a while you’d been working on a book about losing vision in one of your eyes. And so just tell me the story and then tell me what drew you to writing about Genesis and how has the book evolved since then?
Liz: So Yeah, so the book I was, the book I have written is a memoir about a surprise illness, which came up out of the blue. It’s like a one in a million disease. And a lesion grew in the center of my macula, which is the central vision in the eye, in the retina, and just started destroying retinal cells, which do not grow back and are not in any way retrievable or operable, they just go away. So I started, I’m legally blind in my right eye from this experience and for quite a while was getting shots in my eye because the symptoms looked like macular degeneration and they have a really miraculous drug that helps people whose macula is degenerating. So. That actually helped for a long time. And lately it’s been stable, which praise the Lord for that.
But I wrote a memoir about that. And I was probably working on it for four years. I started it, I was working on something else and then this disease intruded and all of a sudden that’s all I could think about. And so I was bringing, you know, journals, notebooks into appointments, writing down all the details. I mean, I like got on medical websites to research the different tools that they were using on me, you know, because I was like, what is that thing? You know, what is that weird camera? Yes. And so I’m I’m like asking every single question I can think of. I’m doing all this research. And it was really because I was so obsessive and anxious about what this meant for my life and, you know, where it was headed, because, of course, I didn’t know.
So initially the book was about healing. Can we find healing? Is that even a reasonable request of God? You know, and and is it okay to ask for that? And then what if it doesn’t come and then why are so many other people obsessed with my healing? Which I know is an experience you’ve had. So that initially was what it was about. And then I was really honored to go to a Collegeville Institute workshop where folks read it and gave me feedback on the memoir and uh Lauren Winner was leading that workshop and she’s one of my favorite memoirists. She kind of inspired me to get into it when I was a younger woman, a younger writer and a lot of people haven’t heard of her but she wrote Girl Meets God. She wrote my favorite of hers is called Still which I highly recommend. It’s it’s wonderful, very concise and very much about faith in this middle space. Anyway, enough about Lauren, but she’s a delight.
Lyndsey: I went to that I went to that workshop in 2022 while I was revising my book and it was incredible.
Liz: And what a gift is. Yes, you get it. Yeah, so she read my book, which was like a dream come true and also utterly terrifying. And the thing that she told me was that I hadn’t found my story yet. And I’m telling you, I had the whole book written. And she said, this is a situation. So this is the strange situation you found yourself in. But it is not the story and the reason behind why this matters. It’s not why you wrote this book.
And as soon as she said that, I knew that my book was about family dysfunction, my family of origin dysfunction. I was both furious and I knew she was right. I just had this sinking feeling and I was like, I have to write about them. So I ended up rewriting the book like two more times, going back and adding in stories of family dysfunction because really it was about going through an illness without family support. Okay. Which is an unusual experience for many people, but not so unusual that other people haven’t gone through it.
So anyway, that was that book and I had an agent for that and we pitched it around. We pitched for about two years and no one bought it. And that was heart rending and just, you know, it had its own ups and downs and ebbs and flows. And I felt, I felt a little bit—It was actually the second book that I had written that hadn’t been bought. I’d written a book of short stories when I was much younger. And I think I felt like maybe that’s just a shut door. I don’t know. Yeah.
And then somehow I had applied sort of at random again to another Collegeville thing, they’re the best, by the way, the Collegeville Institute, any writers listening, you should look them up immediately.
And I started writing about the voice of God. You know, I was thinking about the prophets and I was like, what is the thing about the prophets that’s most important? It’s the voice, you know, it’s the message, even more so than the messenger. Like, what do we make of this voice? And as I started exploring that question, Michael McGregor is the one who leads that workshop. He’s a fabulous writer in his own right. He kind of freaked out and loved it. I was like, I guess I shouldn’t ignore this.
And I started going back to Genesis because I was like, that’s the first time the voice appears. You know, it seems reasonable to begin there. And so I began with the creation story thinking that that would kind of be it. And I just got sucked into the story and it just, I found that it ended up being a means of coming to terms with the Bible itself, you know, like what is this book that we’ve inherited? How do we make sense of it now, you know, amid faith transitionou k? Ynow, is inerrancy—do I even believe in inerrancy anymore? You know, the truly infallible word of God that has never been touched or sullied by the human hand. You know what I mean? That’s kind of the idea I had about the Bible. Like God is, you know, as a ghost is sort of haunting people and kind of what’s the word I’ve been using.
Lyndsey: Like they’re transcribing.
Liz: Oh, yeah. Like God is like possessing these humans like some demon. Yeah. And like making them write whatever he wants, you know, taking over their bodily functions to write God’s story. Is that what I really believe? You know, I think that’s what I thought as an evangelical. I got that sense. What is divine inspiration? It’s literally the human disappears from the process.
And I think I was sort of reckoning with that question of what role does humanity play in this creative process of creating the book we call the Holy Bible? Yeah. You know, and what does that collaboration mean? And how do we participate? And what does God want us to do and take from this? You know what I mean? So all of a sudden it became all these questions about the Bible as well and how it came to be and what we do with it.
Lyndsey: Yeah, and then you said you started to layer in journalism. You started to keep, as these questions unfolded, you were like, oh, I need to find out this thing about archeology, which also sounds similar to your process in writing about your vision, that that kind of prepared you for that. Because you were researching everything and trying to pull all these pieces together.
Liz: Yeah, I think I think the the journalism, you know, that actually felt even more natural than writing about inerrancy to me. I did not really want to write about, like, inerrancy has always sounded really boring to me. So that ended up really being this question of like, who gets to decide what God says and how God says it.
But what I found was that my natural inclination was to bring all these other stories in to try to understand. So I bring in Whale Song, for example, to talk about the voice of God. This alien expression of life, this life form on our planet, we don’t understand it really. And it’s powerful. And it’s unpredictable. And it’s beautiful, but it’s alien. You know, and so being able to kind of find the connections between some of those sorts of things to say, what is what is kind of putting these two stories, you know, back to back close together? What does that actually teach me uniquely about the biblical story? And that just tends to be how I think anyway. So the associative kind of bringing in different stories was just was always going to end up like that, I think.
Lyndsey: Yeah, and I’m really excited about reading, following you on those journeys. And I didn’t know Whale Song was involved, but now I’m super stoked.
To further associate across expanses and boundaries, I wanted to ask you what your experience of attending the Here for the Kids action was in Denver. Tell us what that was and what you took away from it. Have you been in activism around anything or around gun control much before?
Liz: I think generally my activism has looked very local. So it’s looked like volunteering in my kids’ elementary school and getting to know families there.
Lyndsey: Yeah, that’s awesome.
Liz: I garden. Yeah, I garden at my kids’ school. But I think, you know, I attended a rally for Elijah McLane, who was a young black man killed by police about a mile from my house. Um, and so we, my husband and I attended a rally for that.
And Here for the Kids was a protest, basically a week long protest at the Capitol, the Denver Capitol, um, demanding basically the abolition of guns in Colorado, just no guns whatsoever. Um, I think sometimes I, you know, I tend to be a person, I don’t actually love crowds. So I struggle with some of the protest stuff. But these movements, in particular the Here for the Kids movement is a very gentle and kind of mother centric movement.
So any activism before has been more focused around kind of the stories that I’m telling about it and the ways I’m talking about it with people in my life. However, this felt serious to me. So I think, you know, having two kids in elementary school who are doing gun drills, you know, where they gun safety drills, where they practice what happens if there’s an active shooter, that’s a really unacceptable situation for my children. So, and to put teachers in that position, you know, for me, it’s just mind boggling and unacceptable. So that was really meaningful to be able to kind of sit with other mothers and, and talk about those experiences and talk about what it looks like to make real change.
Lyndsey: It’s really lovely to hear that your experience of that action was gentle and thoughtful. Even, I mean, the idea of a week-long protest could sound really exhausting or it could sound like—Actually, we have time, you know? Actually, we’re here to to be gathered for more than just to be like—You can’t you literally can’t scream for a week straight. So what else can we do here?
And I I do think when people hear “protest” it sounds like there is one right way to be here. And a lot of them are set up that way. The way to be here is angry and loud and certain and mad at your enemies and we could go on—and somehow energized by crowds. And I also am hearing about more and more actions, I think even especially as… a lot of intersecting issues are feeling more dire and the sort of what we were starting to call the Trump era, if we’re realizing it’s not going, is not ending soon. That people, a lot of these spaces are getting more creative and more diverse and more interesting because they’re more set up for the long haul.
Also because this way of screaming, like, at your enemies, “you’re a bad person,” is not working.
Liz: I also I mean, I love the idea of taking inspiration from these peaceful marches, you know, that civil rights leaders initiated this way of protesting. And I feel so inspired by their example of what that looks like.
Lyndsey:
Yeah. And there’s a new, like so many of the, like the Movement for Black Lives and Here for the Kids are led by women, they’re led by Black women, is also different from that. And I think really, really necessary for this time. And I’m really excited about it.
I’m also thinking, when you say, “My kids go to school and do these drills and it is just not right.” There is something about noticing there. Where like, if we are not attuned to this practice of just being present to what is going on around us, we’re not going to notice when the most obvious glaring things are not right.
Liz: I think the chance to like pay heed to what the actual experiences of teachers and students is really meaningful. And that’s very much this kind of empathic experience, which we’re called to as believers. One of the things that I’ve seen, which is pretty painful, is that a lot of Christian mothers I know are actually pulling their children out of public school settings, doing homeschooling, which then allows them to shut their eyes, it seems, to violence that is happening in our schools.
And for those of us who have remained, I think it feels, it’s very confusing to have so little care happen in those spaces. Actually, no place is safe. Do your children go to the movies? Do they go to the mall? Do they play sports? Do they go to public school? You know, there’s this kind of sense of, we can keep them safe. You know, it’s just crazy people with their guns. And really, that’s not true. All of us suffer because these weapons are available. And even if you personally have not suffered, someone you know has. And I think it’s essential for us to pay attention to their stories.
Lyndsey:
There’s just there’s so much here about the illusions we will trade for actually getting in into the muck and trying to solve the problem.
So in the midst of maybe in the midst of an empire that encourages us towards obliviousness and not towards noticing, How do you define hope and where are you finding it right now?
Liz: I see hope as this returning, like continuing to return and to keep trying. I think that’s like this picture of repentance too, right? Where we keep turning around and keep turning back toward God. I think that for me has been the most meaningful picture of hope over time. You know, the sustained effort of continuing to turn back toward what’s good, toward what’s right, toward a picture of what should be, that is sustaining.
Lyndsey: Yeah. That’s so beautiful. Often we think of hope as to be this shiny beacon off in the distance. And what you’re saying is actually this is a daily practice and this is a very ordinary thing.
Liz: Yeah, it’s an action performed with our body to keep returning and turning around. Yeah.
I think I feel hope that there are so many hard questions being asked, you know, that that process has not ended and that we continue to, you know, I think it can be really disheartening to see all the ways that theology, the Bible, Christianity is being used to harm people. And yet there are those voices who continue to say this is not right. This is not true to what this is.
And that feels so hopeful to me to say, listen, what is true has not died. It still is here. It still exists and we can access it. And the spirit of God continues to reveal what is true. And so I think for me, I’ve been taking a lot of comfort in the liberation theologians. James H. Cone has been huge, but also Delores Williams wrote about Hagar and this resiliency that was developed in the black communities in the same way that Hagar has offered resiliency from God to return and also to be sustained in the desert. And I think that is such a beautiful example for us who are fighting for justice and freedom in this world, to be continually reminded, there are voices here. There is always this voice of truth leading us forward.
Lyndsey: Yes, I’m super grateful that you are a voice and you’re asking these questions. We get to ask them together today. Liz Grant, does your book have a title yet?
Liz: I am gunning for Knock at the Sky.
Lyndsey: Oh, nice. So we’re looking out for that in 2024 and your Substack is The Empathy List. And of course we will have the links attached to this podcast wherever you are listening to it. And if you’re listening on Substack, you can get to Liz’s Substack super easy. Thank you so much for joining us today, Liz.
Liz: Thanks for having me, Lyndsey.
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