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Hello and welcome to the brand-new Crumbling Empires podcast! I’m Lyndsey Medford, author of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World that is Sick.

This is a podcast about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires, with realism and with hope. Just like I’ve become a person who’s very comfortable talking about disease and doctors and the near-inevitability of disability in all of our lives, I’m also someone who very cheerfully assumes that most of the systems and structures around us are slowly falling apart, even if they appear not to be. Many of us admit this ourselves any time we casually use the word “unsustainable” to describe habits, systems, or cultures. “Unsustainable” sounds sort of benign or jargony, but it literally means: this pattern will eventually become self-destroying.

Not to put too fine a point on it, extractive colonial capitalism, and the systems and cultures of oppression it creates, are the ultimate unsustainable empires.

I’m cheerful about all this because, well, nothing lasts forever and lots of things need to change. And because very few of these unsustainable things actually suit us very well. They don’t contribute to our flourishing or our neighbors’. They hide or distract us from what we truly want, what we were created for. 

But that doesn’t negate the reality that we still live within them, and that navigating them, resisting them, or replacing them, as wholehearted human beings, is a skill we’re still struggling to develop.

So after this episode, this will actually be an interview show. I’m bringing on guests to share about various crumbling empires and various strategies for living practically and meaningfully in the midst of these realities. I am so excited to share a conversation with Courtney Ellis’s on practicing presence amidst transience and loneliness, Kim Knowle-Zeller and Erin Strybis’s wisdom on mothering in this nonsense world that is so inhospitable to mothers, and Sara Billups’s perspective on the crumbling empire of the American evangelical church. And of course, those are just the folks who have confirmed so far!

Before we get to the interviews, though, I thought I would share a bit more about why I’m doing a podcast, which is actually also my behind-the-scenes reflection on life in the midst of the crumbling empire of publishing and influencing and being a spiritual writer.  Which I hope will have a bit of relevance to non-influencers!

If you follow any conversations about publishing, you know that it is a mess. I deeply, honestly, genuinely love and appreciate my publisher, Broadleaf Books, and everyone I work with there. But my guess is they would also tell you the industry is a mess.

Basically, lots of things about the internet disrupted how publishing works and how publishers make money. So the goal of publishing really interesting, insightful, helpful books and the goal of running a publishing business have never been more divergent.

This makes it really confusing and difficult to be an author who cares about content and craft, even when your publisher, like mine, does their darnedest to make those goals converge again.

A lot of us work in places where we are kind of set up to fail because we are supposed to meet competing goals. One place I’ve encountered this is in church planting. You are supposed to follow the Holy Spirit’s lead and build really deep community and try new and creative things, which in reality often means failing, but you’re also supposed to hit a bunch of metrics about what an impressive church looks like that don’t measure those things. Most nonprofits have this same tension between their real mission, and what they feel pressured to make their organization look like to those who fund the mission without actually being involved in it. And I think anyone who works in any industry or organization with certain profit goals, or certain markers of belonging and status, but who also wants to live out justice and liberation in their day-to-day life, is also going to feel torn some of the time.

Another thing all these situations share with my own experience in publishing is that this specific place of bewilderment is common enough that a bunch of people are very happy to step into this gap and offer magic solutions that are supposed to tell you how to reach all your goals. The problem is, their magic solutions don’t have to actually work for their business to be successful. They are trading in hope. And some of them are also trading in really hard-won expertise and empathy for their customers, but you don’t always know who they are.

So all of this is the background just for me to say: I have done a lot of research on the supposed path to becoming a successful author, and almost all of it has been stuff that doesn’t actually have anything to do with writing good words and serving an audience well, or it doesn’t work. And so, when it came time to launch this book, I had to make some decisions. Do I just kind of grit my teeth, put on my work boots, and hustle my way about selling selling selling my work? Do I basically give up on marketing this thing like I’ve seen a lot of authors do? Do I look around me and try to blend in by following all the industry norms?

None of those felt like the right option to me. Not least because the book itself is about how we live into greater integrity and Wholeness. And about how we keep going without giving up. And about how we resist what isn’t helping us and isn’t actually working even when it feels like we’re going against the norm.

So here are some supposedly common-sense things that were not working for me:

1. Instagram. Instagram looks shiny and braggy and it gives you instant feedback which is a head rush. But to actually sell books from that platform I think requires authors to be on there basically all the ding-dang time. There are people for whom that fits into their daily schedules and their patterns of creating. I’m not that girl. At least not right now.
2. Self-promotion. By this I do not mean saying that I think the book is good and you should buy it! So maybe this is a bit of a misnomer. But what I mean is that there is this received wisdom that authors are inherently isolated creatures. And when you launch a book, everyone trains their eyes on *you* and asks you what *you* are going to do and you feel all this pressure to do all the things and because you are so pressured, you also feel bad asking anyone else for help. And everyone just assumes this is how things go.
3. Launch Day/week/month itself. Generating a lot of momentum with some well-placed buzz can help move books. And obviously, if your goal is to hit some sort of bestseller list, you have to throw all your energy at one single week. But otherwise, there is not an expiration date on books! There are lots of ways to sell them besides getting artificially stressed about an imaginary deadline. And if you know me, you know that getting artificially stressed about an imaginary deadline is particularly, materially, corporeally UNSUSTAINABLE for me. IN FACT, I’m becoming more and more aware that front-loading the hype like this makes a lot of sense if the book is not particularly good. If you can’t count on the quality of the book to speak for itself, you better sell it hard. 

SO. How do you sell books with integrity in the midst of a crumbling empire. Frankly, I do not know the answer yet. Frankly, it has been a slow start—WHICH a lot of people involved with this book expected. But I will tell you two ways that I am doing it in a way that feels SUSTAINABLE.

First, extending this bizarre imaginary timeline. I think it is a well-kept secret that most authors give up on their books way too soon. Here’s the thing: there are people in business or in other entertainment industries who write books in order to grow their platforms. But authors get it stuck in our heads that we have to have platforms to sell books and by the time it’s Launch Day it’s already too late. The truth is a book is an incredible tool for growing a platform. But it takes time. It honestly takes a lot of time. What’s sad about not taking the time is that there’s a point where inertia stops working against you and starts working for you. 

It also just seems like a more reasonable way of working for most of us. Like, I have now added this book to my body of work and I’m going to make my way out there to keep sharing it indefinitely, because this work is important to me, this idea is interesting to me, and I want to connect with people who feel the same. When we are running around frantically pitching articles and podcasts everywhere under the sun in the space of a month, of course we get totally sick of it and all the “nos” coming in at once make us sad, and all the “yeses” coming in at once make us stressed, and we get really tired of hearing ourselves talk, and we forget things and drop balls, and our butts fuse to our computer chairs, and we complain to each other and feel oppressed. Whereas if we just are willing to keep plugging away at it, no matter how slow the pace objectively is, we’re still going to do way more in a year, and be able to do it really well, than we did in that exhausting month.

The second thing is that I’ve been very frustrated by the sense of isolation authors have, that I’m slowly becoming more and more convinced is really unnecessary. I also think it’s pretty harmful and kind of bizarre to imagine that this really intensive creative work is being served by our belief that books are the work of lone geniuses. When you write a book you know that’s not true, but because of this myth, you also feel the pressure of making it “succeed” by yourself. But the truth is, writing and authoring in community is just far more sustainable on every level. It makes your work better. It introduces some accountability into your process. It feels good when other things about writing and authoring do not feel good. It can challenge you and expand your ideas. AND! It is an incredibly powerful strategy for selling books. (BUT! Caveat! It only rarely looks sexy on Instagram.)

So for a while I’ve really been craving more ways to work collaboratively and to meaningfully promote other authors. And so far I’ve been lucky enough or irritated and stubborn enough to do some of that in more behind-the-scenes ways. But I’m really, really, really excited to finally get this podcast going and start putting these things regularly on the schedule. I’m really hopeful that this is a way to be helpful to other authors in a way that doesn’t feel draining for me. Frankly, I just like talking to my friends and soon-to-be-friends!! To return to sustainability, it also feels more feasible with some of the tools that are fairly new to the scene, like Substack, in a way that it didn’t before now. 

I also think this Substack will be a lot more valuable and fun with some other voices included. As an author, I could figure out manipulative ways to keep growing my audience while not actually offering that much, or I could get mad that there are “too many Substacks” now, or I could take the competition as a challenge to get creative, to figure out what resonates with you, dear listener, and to really look at all the tools at my disposal and see which ones best suit my strengths and interests. And I’m really, really hopeful that asking great questions of some amazing authors is a way to make your day better.

(By the way, if you are listening on a regular podcast app and not via Substack, I regularly post essays that I also read as audio reflections, *like this one,* on Substack, while only the interviews will go out to all the podcast feeds. So please join me over at lyndseymedford.substack.com.)

 To get back to the crumbling empires theme, this all comes down to turning down the noise and acting on what I actually believe about how good books should make their way into the world with some sense of conviction that it can work that way. Which requires wayyyy more focus on the process and on how it feels and aligns, rather than on measuring the results at artificially close intervals. A lot of things that work really well, but on non-linear timelines, get discarded in favor of things that work kind of OK on super-short timelines. And I just won’t, and can’t, work that way. What happens when we choose this process way, though, is that we allow our work to be sustainable, and creative, and surprising, and we learn to fail and move on, and we find these incredible untapped sources of power that we missed this whole time. I think it “works” far more often than we expect it to. And even when it doesn’t quite turn out how we’d hoped, we’re growing these amazing skills and alternative ways of seeing, doing, and being, that we will need any time an empire crumbles.

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This is the transcript of an episode of the “Crumbling Empires” podcast. To listen or to view the show notes, head over to lyndseymedford.substack.com.

Hello and welcome to Crumbling Empires, an ongoing conversation about how we live here and now, in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I’m Lyndsey Medford, author of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires.

My guest today is Courtney Ellis. She is the author of Present, The Gift of Being All-In Right Where You Are. And this conversation was so enjoyable, so inspiring and equally practical, which is such a sweet spot for the first episode of this show. I’m really excited to share it with you.

If you are listening to this podcast via a Substack email, please know that it is being distributed through all the quote-unquote regular podcast channels as well. So if it’s more convenient for you to listen via your Apple Podcast, Spotify, whatever other app you use, you can go ahead and subscribe to Crumbling Empires there. And if you have found us via Apple or Spotify or any other podcast app, you are welcome to join us at my Substack newsletter where you’ll find some of these reflections whether in other episodes you can read them. You can keep up with me and join the community there. So with that housekeeping done, this is my interview with Courtney Ellis.

Hi, I’m Lyndsey Medford and this is the Crumbling Empires podcast. I’m here today with Courtney Ellis. She’s the author of the new book, Present, The Gift of Being All-in, Right Where You Are. Thank you so much for being here, Courtney.

Courtney: Thanks for having me, Lyndsey. This is so fun.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I’m really excited. I was so excited just to hear that you were writing this book a while back when you were writing it. I know in your book you quote The Wisdom of Stability by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. And I read that book in grad school and was like totally blown away by it. I was feeling this sense, I was living in Boston in grad school. I’d heard a lot of people around me sort of bemoaning the transient nature of that city. Everyone there is like in school or on their way to somewhere else. And I was really feeling the strain of moving from state to state a bunch of times. And so when I read The Wisdom of Stability, I was like, oh, there’s a whole Christian tradition of caring for one place, being with the same people in the same place for decades at a time, and seeing that as a way of witnessing to God’s work in the world. And I found that really comforting, even though I was not able to plant my roots in Boston and stay there forever just because I had had this revelation.
So you also, you write at the very beginning of your book about what you call the transient nature of our current culture. I would really love to hear you expand on that and your experience of it and what that means to you.

Courtney: Yeah. So my husband and I have been married about 16 years and the first eight years of our marriage we had moved six times. And people asked us if we were in witness protection. We’re like, no, we’re just in graduate school. This is graduate school and entry level jobs and moving around. And I heard someone preach a sermon on the blessing of stability and kind of this monastic practice of stability. And for the first time, realized that I’m a child of the church, I grew up in Sunday school and heard so many sermons about, go into all the world and preach the gospel. Go, go, go, go. But it turns out that the Greek there is not travel far afield. The Greek means as you go about your life, like in your normal, like, as you go to the store, as you go to the market, as you go to the river, tell people this story. And it really transformed my understanding of what it is God calls us to do. Sometimes God does call us, you know, across the country. And I think our culture and our generation, I’m a bit older than you, but I’m just going to lump myself in with our generation, Lyndsey.

In large part due to things like schooling and jobs that move us around. But I think part of the key to a book like Present and understanding this wisdom and blessing of stability is blooming where we’re planted for as long as we’re planted there. And sometimes that invitation is to, you know, one of my best friends is in the military and she moves all the time. But she said, you know, I live ready to leave but I could live ready to stay until the army moves me again. And that’s a very different thing, kind of plugging in, putting down roots where we can, when we can, and it can transform our experience of the world and the difference we’re able to make in the world and the difference that we’re able to cultivate in our own souls. And that’s the difference that we’re able to make in the world and the difference that we’re able to cultivate in our own souls.

Lyndsey: Yeah, I’m curious about this too. You’re a pastor and I think pastoring itself has this kind of nature and then potentially, I’m not sure, but it sounds like maybe where you live has a bit of this culture and just structure as well where people are going in and out of your life. So you are in one place, you’ve been there, I don’t remember how long, but several years now. So you have the same challenge from a different perspective where people come in your life. Sometimes they tell you, I’m here for six months and sometimes they tell you, you know, you’ve known them for a long time and they’re like, I’m moving to the rest of the country next week. Tell me more about how you live with that. 

Courtney: Yeah, that can be a really painful part of pastoring and ministry because you love your people, you know, even the difficult people, you love them. Eugene Peterson calls them the faithful opposition. You love the faithful opposition.
But it is hard because people do, people move. We’ve been at this church now for eight years. My husband’s a pastor on staff as well. We’ve been here eight years and, you know, people die. And when you’ve known people and ministered to them and loved them and, you know, sung next to them in the choir for eight years and they die, like, it’s a significant thing. A few Sundays ago, a woman who, she’s on our prayer ministry team, she’s super involved, came up to me and said, “Hey, you know, my, my children are in Nashville and, and I’m moving to Nashville this summer.” And I felt this internal instinct to like start pulling away because it’s gonna be painful to stay connected because I love her and now I miss her already. But I think that the deeper call to us is to not shy away from that grief that love causes and to stay connected. It’s one of the hardest things but it’s also one of the most beautiful things that God calls us to both in the church community and outside of it to find ways to be connected faithfully for the time that God allows.

You know, the person one pew over who plans to stay in this community for another 40 years could get struck by lightning and die tomorrow. Like we don’t know how much time we have. So with the time we have, with the people who are in front of us, how can we stay connected?
and it’s a challenge. It’s a constant constant challenge. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, is there a way that you sort of think about that grief or process that grief that helps you kind of stay in the almost cycle here of loving people and letting them go? Or how do you stay there? 

Courtney: I love the biblical invitation to lament because I think the solution is not to say, this doesn’t hurt, it’s fine, I’m good, no problem. And she’s moving for a good reason. She’s not coming to us saying, I’m really mad about that sermon you preached and I’m out, we get that sometimes. This is not that. But to give that grief to the Lord, that that grief is is born out of love and connection and care, and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. But that’s the flip side to joy and connection and love as it opens us up to great loss. But that’s one of the only ways to be really alive.

Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah.

I really, I love that about the title Present because I think a lot of your illustrations in this book come from your experience of staying in one place, but you’re also talking about like you’ve said already a wider experience of choosing to be all in whether you know that you get to stay there or not. And you want to stay where you are, but like you just said, you don’t know if something is going to change.

And so I really appreciate that presence is something—even stability in a way—is something we can practice whether we can control our living situation or not. 

Courtney: And that’s a big piece of it. I mean, we live in a world of immigrants and refugees and people who are forced from their homes it’s not just a choice it’s not a choice for I would say for the majority of us between job changes and transfers and educational requirements and living in a world where people are forced from their homes. So it’s less a, there’s a way to do this properly and more a, when God puts you somewhere, when your circumstances put you somewhere, how can you be present in that place for as long as you’re in that place? 

Lyndsey:Yeah, and you brought that up with having, where you live there are wildfires in California. 

Courtney: Not my favorite time of year.

Lyndsey: Yeah, where I just moved from, we had hurricanes and then some people are, of course, more permanently removed from their homes for different reasons. 

I think one thing also that I have found to be really true is that if there’s like a flip side where we think that if we close ourselves off from being totally all in or start to pull away from people when we’re not sure if they can stay in our lives, we think that we are avoiding risk or an avoiding grief. But there’s also becomes this like, it becomes hard in its own way.
Whether you move to a new place, like as an example with moving to new places, whether you go somewhere by choice or by circumstance that you didn’t choose. If you, when I have not really fully decided to find what I love about a place, explore what there is to explore,discover whatever is unique about that place, whether that feels like home to me or not. When I don’t do that, then I start to kind of lose my sense of literally of where I am in the world and then even of who I am and all the places start to seem interchangeable. And for some reason I’m trying to avoid using the word “shallow” because…It’s really easy to just like point at the world and be like, everything is so shallow. But there is a real loss when we lose a sense of place or when we lose a sense of connectedness to other people just because we’re trying to avoid something. 

Courtney: Absolutely. I think over time it makes us smaller. And it can make us smaller spiritually when we live in this kind of self-protective posture. There is a cost. 

We have three fairly young children and we’re kind of those, we’re not full-on free-range parents, but we’re the parents who are at the playground and we’re letting them play in the bushes and we’re letting them climb the trees and they’re off the official playground equipment and they’re doing their own thing. They’re off-road and every once in a while I’ll see a parent go up to our four-year-old and say, you know, where is your mommy? Are you okay? Where is your mommy? And I’m like, okay, first of all, I can see her from where I’m sitting like, we’re good. I’m giving her a little freedom. But I think it in the same way that that parenting example kind of illustrates the you can keep your kids really, really safe. But at what cost, you know, what cost to the expansiveness of their soul and the, you know, the big pokey sticks you found in the bushes and the fact that she had a little adventure on her own? And there’s risk to that. But there’s also growth that happens. 

And I think the same is true with us when we’re a little bit more relationally and spiritually and emotionally, there’s potential for really beautiful payoff. 

Lyndsey: Are there really specific places also that you find a really strong sense of safety that allows you to take those risks? 

Courtney: Yeah, I think one of the things, you know, silver linings of the terrible pandemic we all lived through was I really deepened friendships with people across the country because it didn’t matter whether we were in the same place or not. Even those of us in the same place, we’re not hanging out together in the same way. And so I think those deep relationships that travel with you can be a really wonderful way of grounding when you have to pick up and move.

And that doesn’t mean you’re not going to invest in the community right in front of you. And I think there are real things to be gained from gathering in in-person worship—even though we could all worship at you know the biggest fanciest church in New York City every Sunday from the comfort of our own sofas, because that physical presence with people really does matter. 

But having those relationships mediated digitally over a Marco Polo or over the phone or over text where those friends can travel with us throughout the course of our lives, even if circumstances move us on is really a tremendous, tremendous gift. My three dearest, closest friends that I talk to almost every day live nowhere near me. They live nowhere near me, but we talk every day. I feel like I see their life. I know their life. It’s a tremendous gift and we can be present to each other when we’re not present to each other. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, that has been so interesting for me as well. Keeping up with people outside of a really long phone call has not come naturally to me in the past, but it’s starting to be something that I am willing to prioritize a lot more because of what you’re saying. The older I get—here at 32—the more I realize that people are not interchangeable. And I almost got some sort of an impression at some point in my life that, well, sometimes you leave your friends and you get other friends and then you just have different, like, Lego people friends. But that’s not really how it works.

Courtney: I totally agree. I was a guest speaker at a church a number of years ago, and they said, you know, we had these small groups that have been together for 10, 15 years, and the people really loved each other. And they said, we can’t do that. We got to bust up those small groups. People have to make new friends. And I was like, these people have been through cancer treatments together and the death of spouses. And, you know, like, you can’t do that. I understand the impulse to break up clicks and you want to be welcoming to newcomers. And all those things are important, but you can’t trade the depth of relationship and just decide, like, you’re going to, you know, go from this group of friends and reattach to this other group over here and it will be exactly the same. It won’t. People are different. Every person is unique. Every relationship is unique. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, that’s true. When I was a kid, there was some sort of push to make all small group programs be the same and they had to break up all the time because of what you’re saying to avoid cliques. But I’m just not sure that’s how human beings operate. It might be a cool system in theory. 

I’m curious, as you’ve lived this, as you’re starting to see the book go out and the idea you’ve preached on these ideas and shared them with people, how does this practice of being present in ways—like especially in your book, a lot of your illustrations and the things you’re exhorting us to are hyper local—

How do you see that way of being or those actions beginning to change the wider cultures or the wider world that we’ve been lamenting a little bit here? 

Courtney: Yeah, I think all change is local and all hope in a way is both universal and local. I often, I’m an introvert and I’ll often say to my husband, you know, I like people in general. And he’s like, you can’t like people in general. And we are each a part of a particular community. 

And I think, you know, as authors, we talk about platform and what’s your reach and how many people are you encountering? And, and yes, authors want to sell books. This is how I pay for swim lessons, swim lessons are expensive. And I want my kids to live. And it’s also about this local presence. And that in many ways is the biggest difference we can make is the conversation at the mailbox with a neighbor who’s going through grief. It’s the getting to know the name of the person. One of the biggest prides in my life is that when I go into our local donut store, I know everybody’s name and they all know my name and I’m there way too much. But that idea of local community where you are known and where you know others and where you walk together through this difficult and beautiful and hopeful life that we have all change at the end of the day is local. 

It’s getting that crosswalk put in so kids are safe walking across the road. It’s realizing, you know, our church partners with a local elementary school, it’s a Spanish immersion school. Our kids attend it, but they’ve worked to have a community garden there. And now, you know, I can believe all the things I believe about the environment and stewardship and creation and caring for the earth. But the fact that we’re growing green things in this garden and sending them home with kids, many of whom are food insecure is more than any meme I’m ever going to put on social media. More in many ways than any donation I’m gonna make to any environmental organization. It’s making a difference in the lives of these families right here. And I think sometimes we get so global in our scope, we get paralyzed, but everyone can weed at the community garden for half an hour. Like we can do that and that can make a huge difference, a huge small difference. 

Was it Mother Teresa who said, we don’t do great things; we do small things with great love? I’m paraphrasing, I’m paraphrasing Mother Teresa. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, I was laughing because I never get tired of seeing you post about the donuts. Right. And also as a fellow gluten free person. I think it probably brings me a special delight because I also can’t eat gluten. So I just share your sense of utter thrill when you find anything that not only that you can eat, but also taste good. 

Courtney: Right. They make regular donuts. They make vegan donuts. They do it all. Yeah, they’re my favorite. JD Flannel is in Orange County. If anyone listening lives out here or is going to visit, I’ll buy you a donut. 

Lyndsey: Hmm. Maybe I will visit soon.

Yeah, I I really got the impression like in my early 20s and when I was starting to learn about these like some of, you know, the true scope of climate change. You just mentioned the environment, or and food insecurity, these huge issues. And in church circles, sometimes we call it charity versus justice, where charity being these acts of love that take place in our lives with our neighbors on that smaller scale. And then justice being looking out towards the systemic problems or attitudes or cultures that are causing the issues we’re trying to solve with our acts of charity, right? 

And I got this impression from a lot of people that these were almost like opposed. That if you wanted to do one, you could not do the other. Which to be fair, we all have limited resources and limited time and that there, some of us do have to choose where to focus. And I think some of us are going to naturally lean towards one or the other in our gifts and our interests. But since I’ve been in more activist circles and started to understand how governments and local governments work, I become more and more convinced of what you’re saying about change being local. And at the very least, without the local change, the systemic change and the big things, big acts of legislation or organizations that look important actually become sort of hollow and ineffective really quickly. 

Courtney: Yeah, for sure, for sure. And by all means vote or march or protest or all of those things, but I think there is a trap where we believe because we’re not the person up at the podium. Where if we’re not making this profound tremendous national change that then we’re kind of off the hook or our little actions don’t matter. And the answer is both. You know, God calls people to be Dorothy Day, but God also calls people to be the unknown person in my neighborhood who is working to make sure that the recycling goes to where it needs to go, that the world needs both. And in different seasons, we may be called to different things. You know, there are times where God calls me to speak really clearly from the pulpit about something in front of hundreds of people. And then there are times where God calls me to weed the garden. And that’s true for each of us. 

I think the part of the call is the willingness and the availability, but also an understanding and acceptance of our own limits. The middle section of the book of present is about accepting our own limits, that limits actually can be a grace from God. And, you know, we were the parents who we had our first baby and were like, this baby isn’t gonna take us down, we’re just going to do everything the same way we did. And then we’re like, we’re so tired, we’re going to die. It’s like, maybe, maybe in this season, God has given us these limits. And instead of spending all our energy fighting against them, we could accept them and realize that there is something different for us in this season. And it is not going to be, you know, the, the national speaking tour, it is going to be the play date.

Lyndsey: Right. Yeah. And just to make another note here, we do the same thing in church, where we’re like, well, how many new members did you get this year? And are you gonna get on the denominational national speaking circuit anytime soon? And meanwhile, and we like to preach, like I think church is a place I’ve heard a lot, that like the person that cleans the bathroom and holds the babies is really important. But do we just kind of say that as an idea from the pulpit or do we figure out how to practice that more? 

Courtney: Right. And what does it mean that we are all called to different things in different seasons and to kind of accept what God hands us in different seasons? I went through a four-month period this year where I lost my voice. I had no voice. I saw every specialist under the sun and it turned out to be a whole combination of factors. But I was like, who am I as a pastor, as a speaker when I don’t have a voice. And it was a very clear limit. You can’t really pastor by email. I tried, you can’t really pastor by text. But in this season of limits, I learned more about my community and who I could lean on. And I was the one going up for prayer in a Sunday morning rather than offering prayer in a Sunday morning. And there was such painful grace in all of it. 

I recently was interviewing a bunch of beekeepers for an article I wrote and one of them told me that one of the beautiful things about B is unless you’re the queen or one of the males that mates with the queen, your job in the beehive will change through your life cycle. So at some point you’re cleaning out the cells in the beehive and then at some point you’re guarding the beehive and then at some point you’re the one who’s going out and gathering the pollen and then at some point you’re caring for the young and I just love that idea that it has to work in such synergy and precision but the jobs are not always the same and I think there will be a season where we may be called to speak out more. There may be a season where we’re called to a quieter way of life and of being, and God can use them both.

Lyndsey: I love that so much. I could talk with you about that for another hour. But I, before we wrap up, I have a burning, burning authorly question. Did this book— Present: the Gift of Being All in Right Where You Are. How directly did this book lead to your birding book?

Courtney: Yeah, they’re very connected. My next book will come out sometime 2024, and it’s about birding. And I think Present was my gateway into birding. I wrote Present about two and a half years ago, which is right at the start of my birding practice. And in fact, for any birders out there who read my book, I was so brand new to birding that I write about a bird and call it by the wrong name. It doesn’t, the bird I write about in the book doesn’t exist. So I’m waiting for emails from birders who are like, you wrote about this bird, it doesn’t exist. I didn’t know what I didn’t know and my editor wasn’t a bird or so she didn’t catch it. So that’s a fun little Easter egg. 

But yeah, you can’t be a birder unless you’ve learned how to sit still a little bit. And birding has actually been one of the most influential facets of my spiritual life because I am a person on the go. I’m a person on the move. But when you’re birding, you’re sitting still, but you’re sitting still in expectation. You’re sitting still and you’re watching, you’re sitting still and you’re listening, and that’s what prayer is. Really, I used to throw all these words at God and God is teaching me little by little to sit and to listen and to look and to wait.

Lyndsey: I love that description of birding and of being present because I think sometimes we talk about presence and rootedness and centeredness and they start to sound like these things that weigh you down and I love that you’re talking about watchfulness and expectation. Like the point is not like to change ourselves into these like super solid rock people, but to be open to what is going on around us and connected to what is going on around us and in the flow of what is changing within and around us. 

Courtney: Mm-hmm, yeah. Learning how to pay attention, which I think is at the heart of what it means to be human and what it means to practice any spiritual practice, to learn how to tune in to what God is already doing all around us. We, during the season of Lent, we do a practice here at our church on social media called “a bird from the Lord” where you sit still for 10 minutes and look for birds. And I love the feedback I get from folks in the congregation. Someone wrote to me, I did your bird from the Lord thing down at the harbor and God sent me a crow eating a Del Taco wrapper. What does that mean? It’s not like an omen, you know? It’s like, learning how to sit still in a way that’s still active, I think has been really transformational for me and for a lot of folks I’ve encountered and talked to. 

Lyndsey: That’s wonderful. Beautiful. Del Taco. Delicious. I had two closing questions real quick. How do you define hope? 

Courtney: Oh, I love that question. Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, according to Emily Dickinson. I have a little podcast out there about birds and hope called the thing with feathers. I think hope is, I mean, for me, really hope is the thing with feathers.

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just because birds bring me hope, but this idea that it is light and it is beautiful and it is present and it it perches in our soul even when we don’t expect it to be there. I think hope is the great gift of God that keeps us going on the path that God has set before us. It’s energy and grace and light and life and there are days where we run out of it and that’s one of the reasons I’m a pastor and such a big believer in the church is there are days we need the hope of the person sitting next to us,and they will hope on our behalf. 

Lyndsey: Wow. So in the midst of these crumbling empires, in the midst of our transient culture and our sometimes unraveling ecosystems, how do you seek out that hope in a really concrete way? 

Courtney: Yeah, I keep going back to that. I’m a one-trick pony with the birds. But that really is a piece of it for me. We’re in the middle of a spring migration, and the fact that these birds come back year after year, that hummingbirds migrate, that sparrows migrate. It keeps me tethered to the reminder that the Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. And we are called absolutely to work for justice and to struggle against injustice and to stand up for one another and for creation for the planet. But at the end of the day, the work is the Lord’s and that gives me tremendous hope.

Lyndsey: I’m so grateful for that reminder and I’m so grateful for you, Courtney, and your writing work and your pastoring work and your friendship with me. So thank you for being here and thank you for blessing our listeners. 

Courtney: Lyndsey, it was such a joy to be with you and all of your listeners, if they haven’t yet, need to pick up your book because it is a phenomenal read and it has the prettiest cover of any book I’ve ever seen. And I was so excited that our books were coming out the same day because we’ve been on this journey together for so long. So what a delight and what a gift and thank you for having me today. 

Lyndsey: Yeah, well, we have been on this journey together and I really feel strongly that these two books just are siblings in so many other ways as well. So get them both. Present: The Gift of Being All in Right Where YOu Are has been so helpful and precious to me in my writing and  living of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires. So thanks Courtney. 

Lyndsey: Thank you so much for joining us here at Crumbling Empires, our fledgling podcast. To use a bird metaphor. If this conversation made you think of someone in your life, go ahead and text it to them. I know that always makes me feel so special and seen when other people send me resources or shows that they really enjoyed. And it’s a really easy way to tell a friend you were thinking about them. 

If you are new to these parts and I would just love to see more of you over at Instagram or at Substack. I am Lyndsey Medford—Lyndsey with a Y—You’ll find me. And we’ll see you another time on Crumbling Empires!

Buried with my own hands five of my children in a single grave…No bells. No tears. This is the end of the world.

Agniola di Tura, Siena, 1347, quoted in Connie Willis Doomsday Book.

Of course it was the end of the world. The world ended. Then it kept going.

Isn’t this the impossible task of grief, to watch the ended-world keep going?

One day my knee swelled to the size of a volleyball and I didn’t know it, but my world had ended by then. Ever since then, I’ve been a sick person. Worlds end all the time.

In White professional-class culture, you spend a lot of time trying not to sound overly dramatic.

I wonder how things would be different if we acknowledged that life is inherently dramatic. That phrases like “the end of the world” can be tools that help us accept and cope and carry on into the next world and the next end.

At the end of the world, it’s far more reasonable to be honest than to demand that each other live in pretended worlds.

Coming to grips with the end of the world, continuing to live with clear vision and broken hearts and wild voices, that is the grown-up thing to do.

More than that, it is how we and our children survive.

This Sunday I’m preaching about Mark 9:33—10:16. This section feels disjointed: “The first shall be last,” letting strangers cast out demons in Jesus’ name, cut off your limbs to avoid a fiery, wormy hell, divorce. It’s all bookended by Jesus’ insistence that little children will lead the way to the kingdom of God.

To me, each of these snippets is illuminated by the image Jesus quite consciously creates: he literally draws small children from well outside the circle of discussion into the privileged center with him. In his way of turning a paradigm inside-out and upside down mid-argument, he cedes the place of teacher and leader to the ones everyone has forgotten, ignored, and disrespected.

This passage is asking more of us than to make theoretical statements about what children are like. Jesus doesn’t just use the child as an object lesson. He connects with them—and he praises anyone who would “welcome a child” as welcoming him, as welcoming God. As the cutting-off-limbs tangent implies, we ignore Jesus’ love for children at our own peril.

It’s all very well to say that “no one cared about children back then,” but most of us don’t have a very clear-eyed view of children’s place in our own society.

The evangelist’s decision to have Jesus welcoming children at the beginning and end of this passage reminded me of Black feminist scholar bell hooks’ classic All About Love. It is ultimately a sprawling book—it addresses feminism and men, romantic love, self-love, love in families and communities, and love and justice in all of society. But it begins with an examination of how we teach love to children:

Every day thousands of children in our culture are verbally and physically abused…They remain the property of parenting adults to do with as they will.

There can be no love without justice. Until we live in a culture that not only respects but also upholds basic civil rights for children, most children will not know love. In our culture the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized sphere that can easily be autocratic and fascistic. As absolute rulers, parents can usually decide without any intervention what is best for their children. If children’s rights are taken away in any domestic household, they have no legal recourse.

bell hooks, “Justice: Childhood Love Lessons,” All About Love. (emphasis mine)

I think it is tempting, in the interest of understanding or making kind assumptions, to view the recent emphasis on “Parents First” as merely misguided. But I find it chilling, and I think it’s calculated on the part of certain scary people, to invoke children’s needs while erasing children.

It’s not only deeply anti-child; it’s reasserting a fascist logic of ownership and control over other human beings. It’s a deft move to normalize the same worldview allowing neighbors or distant relatives ownership over a grown woman’s pregnant body; allowing trans bodies to be pathologized; allowing refugee bodies to be imprisoned and abused in violation of international law.

Jesus is not asking us merely to protect children from the world, but to reshape the world into a safe and honoring place for them.

Love is as love does, and it is our responsibility to give children love. When we love children we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights—that we respect and uphold their rights.

Without justice there can be no love.

bell hooks, “Justice: Childhood Love Lessons,” All About Love.

Part of the total inability to comprehend time over the last couple years has been that I didn’t do much. Early in the pandemic I committed to not accomplishing much. Sickness asks something from us, most fundamentally that we rest, and the world was sick.

This week, though, I’ve been compiling some pieces I wrote over these years, and it’s been surprisingly healing to look at them all. These were emails I wrote, things I dash off and only lightly edit and soon forget about.

But in recovering them from the depths of the archive, I discovered that as little as I’d accomplished in These Times, I had left a record after all. Here was me surviving. Here was me resting. Here was how so many experiences and griefs had been metabolized, and sometimes even become something that mattered to someone else.

Creativity became survival in a new way over these years. Finding a way to make things even while trapped at home, even while the world moved on without me, was an outlet and a balm.

Only now am I learning that those things I did are still mattering. The record is there in the book I wrote. The record is in the bad art I’ve made. The record is in the mirror I rescued from the trash and refinished.

There I am. That was me surviving when it felt like I had dropped out—been forced out—of adult life. Even then, we are changing the tiniest corners and moments of this world, after all.

Theologians are supposed to have things to say about Easter. But my faith life has felt complicated, small, fragile lately; it has made me feel like a much older person; it seems to need protection, not to be prodded and ransacked for the right words. Theologians say too much.

Among all the made-up Easter words, only this song by Andy Gullahorn, introduced to me by David Dark, has mattered much to me this year. It’s called “Even Hell is Not a God-Forsaken Place,” based on the Eastern Orthodox tradition that Jesus spent Holy Saturday emptying hell.

In the afternoon I went to see Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s a movie about a lot of things. For me it was about things falling inexplicably apart; about getting way too tired of trying to make it all make sense; about the Internet and the fracturing of our selves; about losing each other, about losing hope and going on anyway, about becoming humble, about what is impossible and what is merely improbable.

It was a melodramatic film and Easter is a melodramatic day. For my own melodramatic part, I feel quite often lately that I’m dropping into various universes where I’m supposed to agree that certain things matter—suppressing a sneaking suspicion that those things are actually rather arbitrary and that particular universe is on the verge of imploding.

I love the conclusions of the film, but it’s not the rebirths that are compelling to me this year.

It’s the sometimes-quieter truth that even Everywhere All At Once is not a God-forsaken place.

Whenever I spend time with my friend Jacara, we end up talking about the different personalities and patterns that are rewarded by our capitalistic, U.S., and even our progressive or radical movement cultures. We are two people who quickly get wound up by our frustration with “the way things are”—not just because we don’t like it, but because it so often seems to keep people from imagining other ways things might be.

I have another friend who’s been betrayed by a culture and an institution that couldn’t, wouldn’t make room for her. I looked at her and basically said, “I think you have to create your own space and start your own things.” I partly said it because she’s excellent at creating spaces and starting things.

But that’s not an easy answer for everyone who doesn’t fit in—who’s too introverted, too creative, too thoughtful, too neurodivergent, too wounded, too disabled, too radical, too evenhanded, too analytical, too sensitive, and of course the list goes on.

The world deeply needs people willing to create their own experiments and claim their own space. But it also needs us to support each other, to organize ourselves as more than atomized units, and to develop the skills of interdependence.

For a while I thought we just needed the right language to be able to find each other. But language changes and is coopted so quickly now, you never know who is using and misusing words that once represented thick concepts and wisdom that could only be lived.

(I know I’ve been guilty of finding a shiny new word and running with it before I really understood its contexts and nuances.)

Somehow we have to find each other by practicing radical welcome.

And we have to respect the fact that it takes time to build—and test—the trust needed to grow new things together.

Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” Sister Outsider

When I think of my biggest mistakes, I think most or all of them have had some root in deep fear of myself and the great human capacity for feeling. Other times I have walked head-on into my feelings but still found myself afraid to express them—to let them move through me—because that might mean confronting my life, letting erotic wisdom change the way I live.

Instead, I look to what I’m “supposed” to be doing or what will make someone else comfortable, precisely in order to avoid being accountable to my body, heart, to the Spirit who speaks only in the present moment. My regrets are the times I have tried to be right when I could have been honest, tried to be agreeable when I could have been kind.

Publishing words like this still make me nervous. Doesn’t this talk of feelings and desire sound selfish? Even if it’s not, is it irresponsible to say things like this when they’re so easily used to excuse selfish behavior?

A sentence I had to read several times:

When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.

Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic”

Maybe “using others’ feelings” is consuming their experiences because we are afraid of our own. We are pretending to go with them into a place we are actually unwilling to enter ourselves. In abandoning ourselves, we abandon each other.

I have abandoned many people out of refusal to stay with myself.