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- [00:00]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
Hi, this is Sarah Perkins Sabie, one of the authors of the Bible Storybook. We're so excited to have partnered with Faith Matters to bring you beautifully told Scripture Stories as a podcast that you
- [00:11]
Tish Harrison Warren
can listen to with your kids and
- [00:12]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
share with your friends and family. We're making half of the stories available completely free is a podcast called Scripture Stories for Little Saints, and the other half are available to donors and friends of Faith Matters as a thank you for your financial support that makes this collaboration possible.
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Tish Harrison Warren
If you have trouble accessing them, you
- [00:31]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
can email faith matters@infoaithmatters.org and they'll be happy to help. Thank you so much for your generous and ongoing support. We're so excited to share these stories with you and can't wait for you to hear them. Now onto the podcast. Hey everybody, this is Aubrey Chavez from Faith Matters. Today we are so honored to share a conversation with Tish Harrison Warren on her brand new, beautiful book, what Grows in Weary Lands. From the very first pages of this book, we felt like Tish gave us language for something that is so familiar. She writes about aridity, these seasons of spiritual drought, exhaustion or distance from God, when prayer feels flat and faith feels heavy, or when the life that once felt nourishing suddenly feels barren. And then she introduces the idea of acedia, what the desert fathers and mothers sometimes called the noonday demon. It's this restlessness and a belief that life with God would be easier somewhere else, some time else, with different work, different people, different church, or a new set of circumstances. It's a restlessness that wants to esc the ordinary demands of love in search of some imagined future where spiritual highs are constant and faith feels effortless. But Tish says that these experiences of aridity and acedia aren't signs that something has gone wrong. In fact, they are experiences that Christians throughout time have understood to be normal, even necessary parts of spiritual maturity. And in this conversation, she helps us see that the invitation in these weary seasons is not to force our way back into those spiritual highs, but to stay with prayer, to stay with the ordinary practices that have formed disciples for centuries, often staying with imperfect relationships and communities even after the shine has worn off and the brokenness becomes visible. She makes the case that maturity looks less like finding the perfect place and more like learning how God meets us in imperfect places through patience, repair, and the slow work of love. Tish is an Anglican priest and author, probably best known for her award winning books Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night. This new book, what Grows in Weary Lands, was just released this week, and you can find it wherever books are sold. We are so grateful for Tish for coming on the podcast, and we hope that you enjoyed this conversation. All right, well, Tish, welcome to the podcast. We're so excited to finally have you on. And I was just saying this is my favorite book of yours, but it's also just, I feel like, in a personal way, this book has been so deeply nourishing, and it's just such a gift to get to have you on, to really pull apart some of these ideas that have been so moving and genuinely influential already. So welcome, and thank you so much.
- [03:06]
Tish Harrison Warren
Yeah, thank. That means so much to me. Thank you.
- [03:09]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
We. I want to, I think, just start with this question for you. I think one of the things that really, like, brought me into this book so quickly and so deeply is this idea that every spiritual tradition has vocabulary for these seasons of languishing like these seasons of spiritual drought. And that's something that I have felt has caused a lot of suffering for me personally. And I think a lot of that suffering came from the fact that I thought that I was doing something wrong, that, like, something had gone wrong and this was an obstacle along my spiritual path. And so I think it is a gift right out of the gate to be able to understand that sort of the context of this experience and also maybe the inevitability of the experience. And so I'd love, if you're open to it, to just starting there and maybe give us some of the ways that other traditions have explained these seasons of drought.
- [04:03]
Tish Harrison Warren
Yeah. Well, I love, I love that resonated with you because it resonated with me so deeply. It was part of why I wanted to write the book is that I, you know, I faced this season. I, I'm. I think I'm still in it, but I actually, and this was not true when I finished the book, but I do feel like in the last few months, there's been some sort of shifts in that, in really good and beautiful ways. But. But I went through such a deep time of. Of drought, aridity, desolation, however you want to talk about that. And I think part of the pain of it for me is that I didn't know how to name it, and I didn't know what was happening. And I felt unprepared for it because I felt like this wasn't something that we talked about often. It wasn't something that I was told to expect or that, like you said, was inevitable. I think that we're not told that struggle with faith is normal. Not just normal, but necessary. And. And so I, you know, grew up in a sort of adjacent to a pretty evangelical context.
- [05:26]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
And.
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Tish Harrison Warren
And there was so much sort of emphasis on coming to Jesus and discipleship. And I didn't understand a sense of God's absence as part of that discipleship. It felt like a. Something had. Was. Had gone wrong. Either. Either faith itself wasn't working, wasn't worth it, wasn't true, or that I had done something wrong. And it's interesting because I draw in a lot of different voices, including John of the Cross from centuries ago. And he says, when you experience the dark night of the soul, people will tell you that sense of God's distance is because you're doing something wrong. So apparently this is not a new phenomenon to feel this way. But then as I started kind of poking around in the Christian tradition, in the history of the church, this experience of languishing, burnout, weariness, exhaustion, faith, feeling difficult things, feeling kind of in a fog or confusing or shifting in different ways. Not necessarily, like I say in the book, like suffering. Suffering was something that I expected in life and had been. I mean, I feel like there's a lot of resources out there, but things that felt like weariness or desert, like the desert. I just hadn't been told to expect that. And when I. And when people did talk about it, it seemed like a short season. And this just felt like a really long season. And I didn't know where I was or where I was going. So the fact that was, like, talked about in essentially every single Christian tradition and so many different types of personalities and so many different typ. Types of people in so many centuries felt like, oh, my goodness. It just felt this thing that I didn't know how to describe. I suddenly found, like, a library about. And that just felt like a kind of a miracle and a gift. And so I really wanted to give that to other people. So I'm so grateful that you also resonated with that.
- [07:45]
Aubrey Chavez
I wonder. I would like to talk at some point during our conversation about this sort of the things that are unique to this experience of languishing in our modern world, because I think different things can bring it on. But before we get there, I would love to hear any more that you have to say about some of the voices from, you know, those early Christian mystics or, you know, the desert fathers and mothers or anyone that really connected with you and led you to feel like this is a universal experience.
- [08:13]
Tish Harrison Warren
Yeah, well, I'll just say briefly like it is touched on in essentially every. So Catholic saints. I mentioned John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Teresa de la. So. So it's talked about there. But then there's Eastern saints. A lot of the really ancient voices I draw on would be kind of Eastern. Have influenced a lot of Eastern sort of Christianity and thought. Certainly the desert fathers and mothers have. But then even like reformed folks, like Puritans talked about this. They called it desertion or drooping spirits. And so you have Eastern thought, Catholic thought, Protestant thought. It. This just came up again and again. I don't feel like there's a lot on this in modern evangelicalism, but I. I think burnout and weariness has been such a. It's such a universe. It's such a national sort of epidemic right now that that might change. But that was part of why I wrote this, is that it felt like there's. This is talked about almost like a stage, an important stage of discipleship in all of those traditions. But I had not really been exposed to this as a step in the. And faith. Recent voices have talked about it. Merton talks about this a ton. He's constantly talking about the desert, but he's. You know, he was a Catholic monk. And so that is this very specific tradition where he's drawing from voices of the past. So the kind of part of what this book is framed around the desert fathers and mothers. These were men and women, and there were actually more women than men, but there were lots of both. And they were kind of the earliest Christian monks they went through. Third to fifth century is kind of what we're talking about in. And they literally. They're called the desert fathers and mothers because they went out to the desert to live lives of prayer and had these rhythms of work and rest sometimes, a lot of times living on their own, sometimes living with others. Often even when they were on their own, they would be. They would have other people living kind of in huts or caves around them. So it slowly formed these little Christian communities. And they constantly talk about aridity, which is from the word arid desert. They constantly talk about this kind of spiritual experience of God's distance or struggle with faith. They talk about weariness. They talk about boredom and irritation, exhaustion. They also talk about flagging faith, flagging energy. When you read that, you go, oh, this is what we would call burnout. Or this is what we would call kind of exhaustion today. And they didn't use the word burnout, obviously, but they're describing, like, a very modern experience that a lot of us have not to say it's exactly the same thing that people in the desert had 1700 years ago, but there's so much common humanity in that. And so I really pull a lot from them and frame each chapter around them, but partly because a lot of these other guys, like Merton, but John of the Cross, a lot, all of these other folks who came centuries late, millennia later, were often reaching back for this. The language and words, even the concept of aridity, is because these guys were in the desert and they looked around at this picture, the hot sun over this sort of place where nothing seems to grow. You can't have agriculture out there. People don't move out there. And they named this spiritual experience after that. After what? Of these times that don't. Where it doesn't seem like there are times in the Christian life that feel abundant and flourishing and fruitful and things are happening. And then there's other times that feel like a desert. And so aridity, I mean, literally came from that. And they saw it as this absolutely essential part of discipleship that they would talk about how because the desert is useless to man, you can't grow things there, you can't build cities there, you can't. That it is, even partly because of that, is useful to God. And I think it's the same, and metaphorically, in our life, these parts of our life that feel like, man, what is happening, I feel off, or I don't feel successful, or I feel like I've tried and failed, or I feel like things just with my kids or my husband or my friends just feels sort of hard. Not necessarily, you know, tragic or lost, but things just feel like life just feels heavy or hard right now. I think that looks really useless to man, to mankind, to humankind, and maybe precisely because that is really actually quite useful to God.
- [14:03]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
Wow, I love that thought. And I think that's part of what was so reorienting about your book, that in. In my experience, when I've had these seasons of drought, I feel this panic to resolve it, to get back to. To this feeling of flourishing and these spiritual highs and this feeling of being in relationship with God, where things feel stable and secure and you feel hopeful. There's more positive feelings in those seasons. And so I feel this panic to figure it out. And usually that has translated to more of something more. I don't. More of whatever my practice is, do it better, do it deeper, do it more often, you know, and it feels like that's maybe not the invitation in these desert seasons, but I feel like that's still hard to grasp. It's. It feels to me like everything's out of control. And because I don't have a solution, I'm sort of flailing ineffectively. And I wonder if that's part of why it lasts, if I'm refusing the invitation by just making myself so busy that it's not quite so painful because there's a sort of false hope that you create. I think when you get really busy, I'll just exhaust myself trying, and it will sort of delay or numb the serious discomfort of not knowing what to do next. What does it look like to just recognize that, yes, this is where I am, this is my season, and I don't know what to do. And I can feel this impulse in myself to just get busier.
- [15:32]
Tish Harrison Warren
Yeah. Oh, man. I. So. Okay, I. Can I say. I want to address what you said and then answer your question? Sure.
- [15:40]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
Yeah.
- [15:41]
Tish Harrison Warren
I just want to say I so identify with that. I'm like. I feel like we must be very similar or the same idiot or something, but because I totally get. I think, get the desire of what can I do to quickly learn the lesson I'm supposed to learn from this desert so that I can get through it and feel. And I. I so identify with that. And I think one of the biggest risk. It feels like for me, one of the biggest risk I took in this book as a writer is to not end it all wrapped up and thank God that's fine and I'm out of the desert. I just felt. Because that's how we want book. Christian books to go. But I thought if I did, I just didn't want to be like, here are the five steps to get out of the desert and back into feeling awesome about your faith every day. Like, I didn't want to hype it, and I didn't want it to be like, do these five things and you and the Christian life will feel vital and Jesus will always feel close. I wanted there to be. I wanted there to be an honesty to it that when I finished the book, I was still very much in the desert. Not to say that there hadn't been growth or progress. There'd been profound growth and progress. That's the whole what grows in weary lands, not what dies in weary lands. But. But it wasn't done. It wasn't like, oh, and thank God I put in the right formula and got out on the other side. And I just. I think that I. That might make the book not marketable. I mean, I hope that it doesn't. I Hope people resonate and like that. But I do think that Americans or us in the west are. We're so results oriented, we want a particular outcome. And so we're like, just tell me how to get to the outcome. And I think part of what the desert does in us, part going to the second part of your invitation is God looks at us and says, you know, are you clinging to an outcome, even a spiritual outcome, a spiritual feeling, or are you clinging to me? And I think often I am clinging to an outcome. And maybe that doesn't look like, you know, being rich or powerful or famous or whatever the culture is, but I think that there can be a spiritual version of that. John of the Cross talked about spiritual avari. We can use even spiritual things or religious things because we want to control God. And maybe we know that we can't control God to, you know, make all our dreams come true or whatever, but we want at least to think that if I put in these in inputs and they're inputs the Lord has given us prayer, scripture reading, church, that the outcome will be this, a spiritual high, closeness with God, love for prayer, fruitfulness in ministry, like whatever the outcome is. And I think part of what the desert does is just teach us. It is teaching me in a deep new way that I do not control God. That I. It is not a smartphone or all the technology that we're sort of like trained that you can do the right thing and very quickly have a result or very quickly have an outcome. And. And I do not even control this spiritual experience. I do not control my own discipleship. And that is frustrating. And so that doesn't mean give up on the means of grace we've been given. I think we are called. I mean, one of the points of the book is to go to the things that we have done. Prayer, scripture, the church, the sacraments, the things that have made disciples and Christians for thousands of years, the things the church has given us to keep at them, to persevere, to have resilience. But it's not like the end of that will necessarily be therefore the thing we're expecting from God or timeline or. Or controllable in some kind of way. I think a lot of what the desert does is wean us off of what our expectations of life and God and the spiritual life are that we prob. Don't even know and haven't articulated until we, you know, are in a place that feels like a drought. And then it's. It feels like a crisis. And so it shows us kind of what we most seek. And yeah, it is not that our longing for God or is wrong. I mean, I think our longing for God is right, But I think so subtly a longing for God can shift into a long. For a particular spiritual experience, or a particular experience of community even, or a particular way we thought the life with God would look like. And when that is taken away, do we still want God? And that is a deep, deep work. If we can't control God, if we can't control the spiritual life, can we keep walking in it as people that aren't in control of it? And I think that I'll just speak for me, that's something that I have learned. I do think everyone's invitation in the desert's a little different. It's hard for me to say this is what the desert will teach you specifically, because I think it depends on who you are in your personality. But that has been something that has. Of course, I would have said I don't control God. But I think that I thought, well, if, you know, if you do these things that the Lord has given us, I held on to what the outcomes, even internally in my own heart, would be about. That I'm just not. I don't steer the ship here.
- [22:10]
Aubrey Chavez
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this term that you contrast with aridity, acedia, which is a term I had never heard before. But the chapter where you started talking about that really resonated with me. I think you said something like, you tend to get overwhelmed by the number of texts or emails you get in a day. And I was like, oh, yep, me too. I just can't even. Sometimes I will just tell you I have this fantasy that's always in the back of my head that is, someday I'm just gonna, you know, make enough money where I can just quit my job and I'm going to literally shut down my email, I'm going to change my phone number, I'm going to not have any responsibilities whatsoever. And then I can finally. I don't know what the end of the story is exactly, but it's like, be happy or I'm gonna meditate a lot, or I'll finally, you know, live a spiritually fulfilling life that I sort of don't have time to live right now because there's just so many things coming at me at once. Could you help me?
- [23:05]
Tish Harrison Warren
I guess, yeah. Well, also super identify with that, too. Yeah. Sadie is such a helpful concept. And I mean, it was essentially, it is one of what the early church called the Eight pressures on the soul or the eight wicked thoughts. This translated to what we now call the seven deadly sins. They lost one, they took two, and they merged them. This would now be called the sin of sloth. But sloth is a terrible translation for it because sloth in our culture means a particular thing which can be like, I don't know, skipping work or not working hard. And so it can even feed into workaholism. Right. And which is totally different from what acedia meant. It's difficult to even describe in the English language. So when theologians or writers talk about it, what they end up doing is just piling words on words, just having long list of things. This is. But it's usually described as boredom, torpor, listlessness. It's called the noonday demon. These early fathers and mothers, desert fathers. Mothers called it that because it was. The idea is that it would tempt the monk, assail the monk midday when the sun is highest in the sky. So it's that, oh my gosh, this day is taking forever. Work whatever your work is, whether that's being a stay at home mom or being in an office or whatever, checking your email. Prayer is difficult relation. It just is like where everything feels like, oh my gosh, how, when can I skip all this and get to the end? Well, exactly what you're saying. When can I skip to the moment where I'm rich and can shut down my email and never have to remember a password again in my whole life? And. And it would tempt monks specifically to give up prayer and give up spiritual practices. Give up the, and give up their work. Give up the work they were doing, the prayer they were doing. And it tempts them in different ways. But fantasy is a big one of those. Is like thinking it's. There's a description of it, of looking back and thinking of all the other places that you would be able to serve God more. So it's not even fantasy of, you know, I'm gonna go to Vegas and whatever, go do bad stuff, whatever. But it's. I could serve God better elsewhere. I could be better elsewhere. People, my community would be kinder elsewhere. This is literally how they talk about it. Like the fantasy that everything in your past, there's a nostalgia to it. You used to be more spiritual or happier. There's a future to it, oh, someday I could be more spiritual or happier. But you hate your present. It's. But I can't do that here. I can't meet God in the email or in the task or in this hard Relationship or in staying at home all day with kids or whatever it is. And so there's different ways this has been described. Rebecca DeYoung, who's a great writer and theologian, called it a resistance to the demands of love. And then John Paul ii, who I quote in the book, said, it's a. It's like a profound sadness that the good is difficult. We just want things to be easier. We just want, like you were saying, Tim, like, even the spiritual life to be easier. It's not always bad things we're wanting, but we just want it. We just, in our fantasy, want it to be simpler, easier, somewhere else other than where we are. And they saw this as the. The most difficult temptation to overcome. They saw it as the meanest, harshest, most difficult. And the solution. This is different than aridity, because in aridity, you can really long for God still and want to know God, but feel like God is distant. Or it can just be, like, a general sense of sort of, like, energylessness. In Acadia, spiritual things often seem, like, kind of repulsive. Ugh. I don't want to have to go pray, or I don't want to have to go to this Bible study, or I don't want to. I don't want to have to deal with these people. I don't want to have to reconcile with my husband. I mean, a great example would be, like, the times that you. You and your spouse or your roommate or whoever are on different sides of the house. You know, that what love requires is like. And this is Rebecca DeYoung's example is like walking over and apologizing. You're not even really mad anymore, but you're just kind of. Oh, my gosh, it takes so much energy to have to go do the right thing right now. It's easier. I think I need to look at Instagram reels for the next hour instead. So that sort of, like, resistance to the right thing or to the. The spiritual thing or whatever.
- [28:38]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
Yeah.
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Tish Harrison Warren
And so they talk about the. If there's a quote unquote solution or way to fight this, it is the same as aridity, which is why I kind of put them together in the book. They're different things. But the solution for aridity was, continue in your practices, wait on the Lord. And the solution for Acadia was the same. It was like, go into your cell, which is the place of prayer and work, and stay there and don't indulge the fantasy that elsewhere you'll be more effective or more spiritual. Don't go looking for distraction because in the cell, we're alone in prayer and work. And so they would go around, you know, and don't go back to the city that you moved from. Don't go backwards. Don't live in a fantasy about what's ahead, and don't go looking for distraction, but give yourself to the practices of prayer and of seeking God and of your work. Like, in the moment that you're in the place that you're in with the people you're in, stay in your cell, essentially. Stay where. And give yourself to prayer and to the things of God. And so both of them end up being a call to resilience and perseverance. That's kind of the only way to resist this particular, you know, noonday demon is to. It's. It's just to continue in the things that God has called you to in the moment that you're in, which, in that moment, when you are struggling with Acadia feels like the hardest. It feels like the hardest thing. You're like, oh, please call me to, you know, I'll be a martyr for you. Call me to. Call me to Africa. Call me to Iran. Please do not call me to have, you know, this parent teacher conference with my child's teacher this afternoon. Anything, you know. Do you know that. That moment where you start to fantasize about all the things you want to do for God, but you just don't want to do the thing that's right in front of you to do?
- [30:52]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
Yeah.
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Aubrey Chavez
I think for me, the temptation to else else, when maybe you'd call it, is as great as the temptation to elsewhere. I always imagine some future state I will be in in which, you know, I don't have to do the, you know, one more zoom call or whatever it is anymore. I'm thinking about my own work, you know, and that's when I'll finally be able to live out this spiritual life. And one of the things you said. I think this is a little bit later in the book, but one of my favorite lines, I think you said something very similar to an ordinary life can also be a life of contemplation, you know?
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Tish Harrison Warren
Yeah.
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Aubrey Chavez
It's like, permission to just integrate that right now.
- [31:28]
Tish Harrison Warren
Yes. Yeah. Because I deal with very similar is I. I don't have normal fantasies, I think, in the sense of. I mean, I'm sure I have some, but I don't. I'm not like, oh, my gosh, I want a really nice car or I want to really. That isn't my. My thing is, yeah, I want to Go, where's the forest that I can walk in and just live in silence with God in prayer weeks on end, you know, And. But I quote Henri Nouwen in the book. He goes to this monastery and he tells the Abbott, I just dream of the day that God would so appear to me, that I would be, like, free of sin and have this profound encounter. And then Abbott, instead of being like, oh, man, that's such a good. He's like, yeah, I mean, okay. But that fantasy is keeping you from meeting God today in the way that he is showing up for you. Now, my fantasies can be this. This contemplative thing, which feels like that can't be in my ordinary life. But I really think it's a trap. The contemplative life can't be something we can only live if we are living in a forest or a monk. We have to learn what that looks like in our own life. And by contemplation there, I just mean being open to the presence of God and his work and love for us and movement towards us in the actual moment we're in.
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Sarah Perkins Sabie
I wanted to ask you also, though, about rest as a spiritual practice, because I can definitely feel that sometimes there's a genuine imbalance that's making these seasons feel especially acute. And I think it might have something to do with the fact that I keep defining spirituality as this doing thing. And you really explore this quite a bit in the book, this idea that the point of rest isn't productivity. It's not that you rest so that you. You, like, check that box, and then you can be more productive again. I'll rest so that I can, you know, have a clearer mind or. Or more energy. And I think you've really helped me start pulling that apart and. And rethinking what weariness feels like when what your soul is actually asking for is just genuine rest. And that. That can be good just in and of itself, not. Not to fulfill some other purpose.
- [34:03]
Tish Harrison Warren
Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, I think it's interesting that I liked that you said, I feel like I need to have productivity as my goal to justify rest. But the idea that I want to say, and what I'm trying to say in this book is rest doesn't need a justification. The justification is you're a human being and a creature that is made to rest in God and that God himself demonstrates this for us. Obviously, on resting on the seventh day, he didn't rest because he needed to gear up for more activity. He's God, infinite resources. He rested because rest is a good in and of itself. It's an end, not just a means. And so when I'm saying live in the life you're in, you know, do the thing that God is calling you right before you, that doesn't mean always be busy. I mean, I actually think one of our things that keep us from rest is that we fantasize what rest would be if we had an ideal life. So I'm going to take. This is not in the book. I'm just pulling out an example from my real life, which is that we don't have family around to take our children. My mom lives close, but she has Alzheimer's. She can't watch my kids. And then we don't have other family that live close to us to take our kids. And so I'm constantly fantasizing about how much more rest I get if there were family around to take instead of figuring out, okay, but that's not my life. And so how do I rest in the family I have life I have, with the limitations I have, I still have to find rest. And so just like I think a life of contemplation can seem like another life, a life of good rhythms and rest we have to actually embrace in our own life. And I think one of the broad reasons that we have so much burnout and exhaustion in our culture right now is because we don't really know how to rest. We don't have a healthy understanding of it. The rhythm in scripture is work and rest. And what we have is toil, pushing ourselves sort of beyond our limits with work and then collapse. And that collapse often is into screens or binge watching because we are just so energyless, we don't know what else to do. But that doesn't really restore us. I mean, at the end of a day of binge watching, and I've certainly experienced that, you don't feel rested, you feel like a slug. You feel glutted. Right. And you feel kind of twitchy and sort of anxious and. And still exhausted. And so I think we've. We don't know the healthy, good rhythm of work and then how to embrace good and healthy needed rest. And so we. Now that I'm saying this, I'm like, this would have been a really good thing to put in the book, but I do collapse.
- [37:23]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
I mean, yes.
- [37:24]
Tish Harrison Warren
Yeah, I do touch on it. Yeah. And I touch on the need for healthy rest, knowing one's limits, but also on delight on experiencing beauty and having fun for the sake of having fun and having enjoyment for the Sake of enjoyment. And I'm not saying that never comes from a screen or watching a good movie or something, but I think a lot of that comes from encountering beauty. So beauty in the world, beauty in a good meal, beauty in a hike, but also a good nap. So I. I talk about the duty we have to delight, and that helps me because I do think it can feel like I have all these other responsibilities. Rest is this sort of splurge that I'm trying to fit in as opposed to. No, we actually also have a responsibility to rest, and we have to make that. We have to make delight a priority, because as people of faith, we want to be formed in a God that is delighting in the world, that is joy, that is not just calling us to be kind of worker bees, but is calling us to be people who. Who relish creation and who. Who embrace our creatureliness. I think this sort of constant drive for productivity in our life is a really hard master. And I think God is calling us to a gentleness that our culture just really doesn't have a vision for.
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Sarah Perkins Sabie
Yeah, Yeah, I really love that.
- [39:21]
Aubrey Chavez
I know we're already getting about close to the end of our time here, but I feel the need to ask you about. So you mentioned this concept of staying in your cell in this conversation. It's something you spend quite a bit of time on in the book. And you say that the call to stay in your cell is not just a call to continue in prayer or in other faith practices, but also a call to stay put. And I think for lots of our listenership and, you know, us included, we. We've found ourselves in situations where we're looking at the community or the institutions or even some of the practices around us as adults, you know, who are developing and saying, oh, actually, I'm gonna. I'm sort of questioning if that's a good thing, or I'm seeing brokenness in the things that used to maybe seem really nourishing. And there is a. I don't know if I want to call it a temptation. Certainly I don't mean that in. In the stereotypical sense, but there is an urge in many of those cases to say, you know what? I'm out of here and on in. I think for many people, that feels like a moral decision to separate oneself from that brokenness. And so I would love to hear you make the case for staying in your cell as staying put as part of these communities and. Or institutions that you see as broken or imperfect, at least.
- [40:38]
Tish Harrison Warren
Yeah. Yeah. This is a hard thing to talk about because, of course, there's a range here and you have to have discernment. So I'm not saying if you're in an abusive situation, you need to stay in it, or if you're in a place of, like, exploitation, extreme brokenness in that sense, that you should stay. I do not think you should. Do not think you should stay in exploitative or abusive marriages, institutions. So there is a range here. And I am not saying that, you know, you have to stay in every job you have, or you have to stay in every church you are in, or. I mean, I have not done that, and I'm not saying that. That said, I do think our culture is one where if something is broken, we bolt instead of seeking repair in it or being patient. And we have so much mobility as a culture and we have such a high value for individual choice and freedom. And there's great sort of privilege in that. A lot of what the desert fathers and mothers talked about is the power in remaining and in embracing the kind of confinements, even disappointments in your own life. Again, all the caveats I just said of there's limits to that. But I think we need the culture really forms us that if something is not totally fulfilling to you, and particularly if there are things that have seasons of unfulfillment, like prolonged seasons of unfulfillment, that therefore there. Something is wrong and something is off and you need to escape. But I think that's a. I think that a lot of that is a lie. I think that the reality is that we, when we encounter something, faith, institutions, a relationship, and it's new, there's excitement about that or there's joy in that. And that maturity actually does look like encountering the brokenness of that disappointment. I'll take a community. I mean, my husband and I talk about this in the book. Have moved way too much. And you think, oh, this next community, this next church will be everything we longed for. And you get there and it's exciting and it's new. And then you encounter the brokenness. You encounter the fallenness, you encounter annoying people. You encounter things that are genuinely hard or complex or even sin in it. And you think, well, it's time to eject and find something better. But every community you find will be broken. Every institution you find will be broken. It's kind of a weird purity culture. I mean, we almost have sort of an institutional purity culture that if things are not perfectly pure, the way that we handle that is to distance ourselves from it. So that we are perfectly pure. But then what we end up with is just a lot of individuals defending their own self righteousness as opposed to community. Churches, schools, like non profits for profits, things that like could actually extend to our children and our children's children. And I do not mean we look at the brokenness and sinfulness in our community, whatever that looks like, and say it's okay, or not talk about it or not deal with it. But we have to seek God in the place we're in and we have to seek repair in the place we're in. And I do think as a culture we don't value the virtue of patience and we don't value the virtue of fortitude. We much more value splashier things, whatever speaking truth to power or being activistic in various ways. Justice is a virtue, all of those things are virtues. But also patience is too. And also resilience and fortitude is too. And so I wanted this book to kind of give light to some of the unsung virtues. If our culture's message is, and I do think this is our culture's message, if you feel uncomfortable in your life, if you are unfulfilled, then you're doing something wrong. And usually it's we have a product that can help you. We have a good, like a better church, better community. If you find a new spouse, get this app, have this kind of new parenting strategy for your kids, everything can get better for you. And it keeps us on the hook for the always looking for the next best thing. This happens spiritually by the way too, because it's easier to sell a Christian book even if you call it the next best thing. Or you spend your whole time talking about how the old thing was terrible. But there's a consumerism in that. At the base of that whatever, however that's, whatever language that's wrapped in that is a lie. And so we need counter formative practices that say no, we can experience unfulfillment and we can wait in that for God, for God to give us the next step of repair, the next way that we maybe contribute to the unfulfillment or brokenness in this institution that we can repent for in the next kind of work of God that he's calling us to in that. So I think this has to be so nuanced and it takes so much discernment and so much community even in that. But I think we have, we're just never going to get to maturity if we're jumping from rock to rock, looking for the better Place to land. The place of maturity is learning, patience and resilience in the spot that we're in.
- [47:20]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
Yeah, that you put that. That you put that so well. I maybe just to close us out. I would love to know. For me, the pain on this exact point is that if you're doing aridity and it feels like you're doing it alone, if you're doing aridity in a community that is not also doing aridity can feel very isolating. And I'd love for you to just talk about what is the value of doing these hard seasons and in community if it's not necessarily everybody's experience.
- [47:49]
Tish Harrison Warren
Yeah, that is such a good question. No one has asked me that, and I do think that's true, man. Well, one thing I would say is that if you are in. If you have a friend group or church group of any size, it is very unlikely that you are alone. I mean, as even since this book has started getting kind of coming, people are talking about this book and it's coming out. I cannot tell you how many people are like, this totally describes me. I am so weary. I am so exhausted. But I don't think we talk about this. I think. I think it's easy to say. This is one of the pain that I experienced when I was feeling. This is. My last book was about tragedy and loss and when my father passed away, when I had a miscarriage. That is something you can share with your community. And it's not easy, but it's something that people have categories for. You share that. And people know, oh, they're going through grief, they're going through loss. And sometimes people are terrible about that. But oftentimes, I think in Christian communities, people respond to that grief, get that. But if you're. If you don't have. If you're just like, I'm just spiritually struggling. I feel like God is distant. I feel like life is hard, but I don't. I can't. There's not sort of an event I can point to making it that. I think that's. People don't talk about that. I think it's a lot harder to share. But at. So I hope this book, if anything, will start conversations about that experience in. In among people of faith and maybe among the culture as well, because I do think it's so much more common than we talk about. If you live 80 years or whatever, 70 years, and you are a Christian for any length of time in that this is something you will experience and. But why we don't talk about that, and so I, I really, I hope people will. But the other bit of that is I do think we need Christian community that is vulnerable and honest. And that I think because maybe even because of consumerism, we're afraid to share the hard parts of the Christian life because we, we want our neighbors who don't know Jesus to desire this, to not be like, oh, that looks. Those look sad all the time. But I don't think that we can get there by sort of making the faith look like this happy clappy thing that is always perfect because it's not real. And I think when then people come to faith and they face experiences of disappointment or disillusionment or church hurt or thinking that their life would work out one way and it didn't, and we make atheists because we told them that if they just do X, Y and Z, that everything will work for them. And, and so I think being honest about what the life of faith over time actually is and feels is actually better. I think it's better and I think it produces more joy. I am not saying that all there is to the Christian life is a slog, but I am saying we need to be vulnerable enough as a community to talk about aridity and talk about the desert and what that is and what that does in us. And, and then the last thing I just say is, even if you go, Tish, I've talked to every single person in my community and they have no idea what I'm talking about. There are so many Christian voices over thousands of years who describe this and who describe this experience. And I have come to see some of these Christians in the past as my friends in, in that I read their journals or I read the sayings of the desert fathers and mothers, and there's parts of it that are just so relatable. And so I think one of the great things about learning church history is you see you're never alone. That all the struggles you have now, but all of them, even in the Internet age, even in the age of just deconstruction, that Christians have faced all these struggles before and they've articulated them and they've written about them and they've had, they bear, they bring wisdom to them. So I don't think anything that we face is new to us.
- [52:45]
Aubrey Chavez
Yeah, well, thank you so much, Tish. We, we genuinely did love the book and think it speaks to something that is so real and universal, and we do think it's going to start many conversations. So we're excited for people to read it and appreciate you spending time with us.
- [53:00]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
Yeah. Thank you so much.
- [53:02]
Tish Harrison Warren
All right.
- [53:02]
Sarah Perkins Sabie
Thanks so much for listening. We hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Tish Harrison Warren. We're so grateful to Tish for joining us and for all the wisdom that she shares in this book and in this conversation. If the conversation resonated with you, we highly recommend picking up what Grows in Weary Lands and spending time with her other writing as well. Tish brings honesty, depth, and hope to the hardest parts of spiritual life, and her work has been a gift to us. You can find links to her books in the show notes. Thanks again for listening.