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The SkyePod
The SkyePod - The World Born in You
00:22:54
Skye Jethani shares the introduction and first chapter of his new book, The World Born in You. He talks about how his relationship to his own name, his family, and his ethnicity changed and reshaped his entire view of empathy—and how radical empathy...
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- [00:00]
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If I'm not Sky, then who am I? Hello and welcome to the Skypod, brought.
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To you by Holy Post media and Happy 4th of July. This is a long weekend. It's a vacation season. I hope everyone is enjoying themselves with friends and family. Our team is largely out this week. Phil's out in Michigan, John's off, I.
- [00:34]
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Think somewhere in Wisconsin.
- [00:36]
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People are just, you know, laying low, taking things easy. So we decided to do the same with the Skypod, and we're going to do something a little bit different this week. So let me explain what's going on. Hopefully you know about my new book project.
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The book is called the World Born.
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In Letters to a New Generation of American Christians. I'm actually writing this book a little bit differently.
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I'm releasing it as a serial.
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I'm releasing one chapter a month exclusively on Holy Post plus for subscribers. The book is comprised of seven letters to my young adult kids about what it means to follow the way of Jesus in today's pluralistic post Christian culture.
- [01:12]
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I did a Skypod episode about this.
- [01:14]
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Back in May, so you can go check that out if you really want to know the background of the book and how I've been thinking about it for six years and my experience in Christian publishing and why I'm exploring this kind of alternative way of releasing a book. But to cut to the chase, this is the most vulnerable book I've done.
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Certainly the most personal book I've written.
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It shares a lot of lessons I've learned, the things that have shaped my faith, good and bad and ugly, and how those lessons now apply to the world that my kids and really the world that all of us are entering into as Christians. So the World Born in youn we.
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Released the introduction, I think, back in.
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May, and that's available for free for anybody who'd like to read it and go to theworldborninyou.com or Holy Post. You can get it there. And then we released chapter one in June. Chapter two is about to be released on Monday, July 11th. I just finished writing it this week, so I'm literally writing this book as we go. And there's a bunch of other stuff we're doing, like live streams with people as they read it, and we're releasing some sermons and topics that I preached on related to the topics in the book, all that. So if you want access to that book and kind of join me on this journey of writing it over the.
- [02:27]
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Next seven months, you can go to.
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Holeypost.Com and sign up for Holy Post.
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Plus and this is really important.
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Use the promo code book and you'll get 20% off your Holy Post plus subscription. And of course, you don't just get my book, you get access to everything that we're doing at Holy Post plus, which is a lot. Okay, so what does it have to do with today's episode? Since I've already talked about this before? Well, a number of folks after they started reading the book were asking if we were going to release an audio version of the book. And we heard from a number of people that really love audiobooks and really were hoping we're going to do that. And since we do produce podcasts and do audio all the time, we thought, yeah, let's do that. So I recently sat down and recorded audio versions of the introduction and Chapter one. I will be doing an audio version of chapter two later in July, but the intro and chapter one are now ready and we thought we would share.
- [03:16]
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Those with you today.
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So this episode is going to be the introduction and Chapter one, the World Born in youn My Audio Version. So if you've not yet read the book, or you're just eager for an audio version, or you're curious what it's about, this will give you that introduction. As always, the first half of this Skypod episode is available to everyone, but the full episode is only for Holy Post plus subscribers. So if you want the full audio version of the Intro in Chapter 1 without any interruption and to access the rest of the book as I write it, then headed over to holeypost.com and sign up. And don't forget to use that discount code book for a 20% discount. Okay? I hope everyone has a safe, relaxing, enjoyable holiday weekend with friends, family, neighbors. I'll be back next week with another Sky Pod. We have something really fun coming next week. Hopefully a little different again. A summer kind of thing, but very entertaining. It'll be a nerd fest that I think some of you will really enjoy. I'm looking forward to it, so so be sure to join us next week on the next Skypod and sign up for the World Born in youn@holeypost.com Use that discount code book and thank you for everyone who's participating in this project with me. See you next week.
- [04:37]
A
The World Born in you Letters to a New Generation of American Christians by Sky Jutani how do you tell the story of your life, of how you were born and the world you were born into, and the world that was born in you? Frederick Buechner Introduction My children, the world is Wide. On our travels, you have seen incredible beauty and unspeakable brokenness. You've walked beside me through slums, refugee settlements and segregated townships as young adults. You can now travel without me, and I hope you will. But there is still one place that only I can take you. The world within me. You know my outer story well enough. The essential facts, locations and people. You've seen the old photos and heard the memories around dinner tables. But like everyone, I also have an inner story. The unseen drama beneath the surface that propels a life. Most people give no attention to this inner world until they have to. We accept the illusion that what can be seen is all that matters. And even those with the courage to turn their gaze inward rarely see this other world fully. I certainly haven't. But what I have seen, I want to share with you. In the beginning, our inner worlds are formless and void. We are born creatures of chaos and instinct. But as we grow, voices speak that bring order to our inner world. The first voices belong to our parents and family. Later, voices from our community and culture shape how we think, perceive and process. These voices create categories amid the chaos. By separating right from wrong and the admirable from the contemptible. They empower our imaginations and fill our inner moral landscapes with goals and ambitions. Ultimately, the topography of our inner world determines the choices we make in the outer world. It serves as our map. It tells us which roads to take and which to avoid. What sort of life is valuable and what sort is foolish, where to invest our efforts and where they are wasted if we are fortunate. The voices that form our early inner world are benevolent. That was true for me. I had loving present parents and a safe community. But how terrible it is when voices of anger, abuse or neglect shape our young inner life. Even in these painful cases, however, there is still hope. In everyone's inner world, there is another voice with the power to counter and correct the deforming ones if we have the ears to hear it. Long before any words of hatred hurt us or any message of worthlessness wounded us, before a coach or teacher praised or criticized us, even before our mother or father blessed or burdened us, that voice was with us, declaring an everlasting matter. Although we have talked frequently about God and faith, I haven't shared much with you about my inner world and how God's voice has shaped my perceptions and priorities. I trusted you would either find my way of life worth emulating or not, without knowing the script behind it. Just as we can dance to the rhythm of a song without knowing how to read the sheet music. I still believe that. But as you enter adulthood, the world around you is also experiencing dramatic changes. That's why I feel a new urgency to share what I've only communicated implicitly until now. You are maturing in a time of contradiction. Few people today identify as religious, but more are engaging in spiritual practices. Religious attendance has declined steadily for decades, but sales of the Bible have never been higher. And while messages about the harms caused by religion and its outdated ethics fill our culture, those raised in secular households show higher rates of depression and anxiety than adolescents in faith filled homes. By almost any measure, your generation is the least committed to faith, but still longs for the gifts that previous generations received from it. Gifts like community, tradition, meaning, perspective, resilience, and hope. Our secular age has yet to find a reliable alternative source for these human needs. Sadly, those who do find their way into religion today are often exploited by the unscrupulous or opportunistic. No doubt this has contributed to the decline of organized religion and the rise of those who mark none of the above on census surveys. These two trends, the declining reputation of religion and the failure of our post religious culture to replace its benefits trouble me greatly. It means the two most traveled paths offered to you are equally perilous a floundering secular culture incapable of addressing the deepest longings of your soul, and a corrupted Christian subculture that has traded its spiritual birthright for the porridge of money and power. To entrust you to either of these paths is unthinkable. But I cannot hold you in perpetual adolescence either. Since your births, my prayer for each of you has been the wisdom not wisdom as defined by the world, but the wisdom that comes from God. His wisdom cannot be taken it can only be received. However much God has given to me, I now offer it to you. In the letters that follow, I share how God's voice has shaped my interior world and in turn has guided my journey through the outer world. My goal, however, is not merely to look back because the world I was born into has passed. Instead, I want to imagine the world ahead and what it requires of those determined to hear God's voice and follow his call. With that goal in mind, each letter considers a different facet of wisdom, a virtue rooted in God's character, revealed in scripture and practiced by the faithful who preceded you. Woven through the letters to illustrate these virtues is the story of Naaman from the Hebrew Bible. After years of reflecting on Naaman's story and my own, I believe these seven qualities are what a new generation of Christians needs to navigate the shifting landscape of our increasingly post Christian culture. These facets of wisdom are hardly innovative or novel. Still, in its short sighted desire to reflect the culture more than shape it, much of the American church has either forgotten or minimized their importance. Today, some Christians even mock them as signs of weakness or sin. When those claiming the truth of Jesus reject the way of Jesus, it only accelerates our culture's movement away from experiencing the life of Jesus providentially. However, these virtues don't simply benefit those who claim allegiance to Christ, but everyone in a world burdened by anger, anxiety and unchecked appetites. In other words, as we seek to practice these virtues, the blessings cascade even to those who do not. In this way, our effort to follow Jesus becomes an expression of love for our neighbors, regardless of their identity or beliefs. This matters because I have two goals for these letters. I want you to know the true blessings of faith, but I also want to see the world blessed through you. God has made us to be his co creators and his representatives upon the earth. In the opening pages of Scripture, God creates the man and woman in his image, invites them to name the animals, maintain the garden, and extend its beauty and abundance to the ends of the earth. This mandate was not lost when they left the Garden of Eden. As Rabbi Joseph Slovitchek says, those who belong to God received the Torah from Sinai not as a simple recipient, but as a creator of worlds, as a partner with the Almighty in the act of creation. Just as bees create hives and beavers create dams, humans create worlds we cannot do otherwise. It is our vocation. The kind of worlds we create, however, will be defined by the worlds created within us. Through his presence and words. God wants to tune our inner world to resonate with his wisdom and echo his love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness and self control, so that the world we create is filled with his own glorious music. But there are also malignant voices seeking to distort our inner worlds with fear, anger, jealousy, greed, division, urgency, depravity and self centeredness. Therefore, as your father, my concern is not just for you, but for those who will be impacted by the world born in you. You will shape communities, industries, countries and families in ways that are unforeseeable. Your restless generation and those still to come will be defined by the inner lives of its artists and activists, shepherds and servants. Most people assume huge events and culture. Shifting spectacles drive the world, the external dramas captured by cameras and shared on social media. But that is not the case, the world is moved by the unseen dramas unfolding within us. Our inner world is where the butterfly flaps its wings, which ultimately causes the storm or calms it. As I said, I can only offer what I have received, and that is far from sufficient to navigate what is ahead for each of you. You need other voices beyond mine speaking into your life, and none more than God's. So I encourage you to read my letters with discernment, incorporating what is valuable and discarding what is not. Above all, continue to open yourselves to receive God's wisdom, because my small arms cannot hold its fullness. That is why I have surrendered your lives and futures into his arms as I have surrendered my own. Let's begin. Letter 1 Empathy I didn't know my name until I was 10. I had been called Skye since birth, but it wasn't my real name, a detail my parents never felt important enough to tell me. Maybe they enjoyed introducing their little boy with the androgynous name sky, but shortly after starting school, I came to hate it. The name alone would have been tolerable, but when combined with my ethnically ambiguous appearance, it provoked questions about my identity. Teachers often asked about my nationality before I was old enough to understand what they meant. I'm American, I would say. I've often been misidentified as Latino, Middle Eastern, or vaguely Mediterranean. One could imagine Ralphie's father from A Christmas Story saying, giatani. He must be Italian. The name sky has become more familiar in recent years, but in the 1980s it was odd and a liability. In elementary school, boys behaved like packs of predators on the schoolyard Serengeti Wood, looking for any signs of weakness or divergence. When spotted, they could pounce with speed and lethality. This fear drove us to carefully curate our clothing, shoes, speech, and playground activities. Conformity was the currency of the realm. Still, some things are beyond one's control, like the kid with the large cranium that the pack nicknamed Peanut, after the Charles Schulz cartoon characters of similar proportions. That moniker adhered to him so fully that to this day I cannot recall Peanut's actual name. He moved away in middle school, leaving us to wonder whether it was just his good fortune or a deliberate family decision to escape the bullying. Another was Gross Bill, a nickname he acquired thanks to a glass eye and an unfortunate moment of public flagellance. Gross Bill moved away in third grade. These victims, and many more explained my discomfort with my name. While not a physical trait, sky remained a mark of distinction and therefore potential bait for bullies. How I desperately wanted to escape the fear and blend in with the Alpha pack of White Brians and Davids. So you can imagine the conflicting emotions I felt in fourth grade when I discovered sky was not in fact my given name. On the one hand, dumping sky opened the possibility for acceptance that I desired above all else. But on the other hand, the discovery meant grappling with questions of identity that most 10 year olds are not ready to answer. If I'm not Sky, then who am I? Why was this knowledge kept from me? What other secrets do I not know about my origin? There was a comic book intrigue to it all. At least that's how my 10 year old self saw it. Being told one's true identity can be heroic, like Clark Kent discovering he is Kal El, the last son of Krypton. Or it can be tragic, like Luke Skywalker hearing Darth Vader say I am your father. My revelation occurred when my aunt visited from India. As usual, she brought an assortment of gifts including Matai and identity bracelets for my brother and me. The engraving on my bracelet read Akash. What's this? I asked her. That's your name, sweetie, she said. No it's not. I assumed she'd given me the wrong bracelet. Of course it is. She insisted. You're Akash. In Hindi it means Sky. I shot her my what you talking about Willis? Look and then turned to my parents for backup. She means in India my name is Akash. But here it's sky, right? I asked them. No. My dad said with a chuckle, finding my annoyance amusing. Your real name is Akash. We've always called you sky because that's what it means. Sky is your nickname. I understood the risk immediately. The pack of Brian's and Davids must never learn of this. I thought to myself. Like my comic book heroes, I had to keep my true identity a secret. But unlike Batman or Spider man, concealing my real name was not to protect my loved ones. It was to protect myself. Akash was a significant step out of conformity that would immediately put me in the ridicule Red Zone with Peanut and Gross Bill. The bracelet remained hidden in my underwear drawer. Discovering my legal name in fourth grade introduced me to the complexity of identity. Before the bracelet, I was just Sky, a name I did not like but which I believed to be as immutable as my darker skin, brown eyes and black hair. There was a childish simplicity to my sense of self. After the bracelet, however, I understood that my identity was not singular. It couldn't be fully captured with a single name or label. Legally I was Akash, but I also remained Sky. I told my teachers I was American, but I was also of South Asian, Scandinavian and English descent. At just 10, I was starting to grasp that identity is layered, mutable and never singular. It changes based on context or function, allowing some aspects of my identity to be hidden and others to be emphasized depending on the setting. The truth is that we each carry many identities. We have all been given more than one name. Every person is more than a single story. I like how Walt Whitman expressed this. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. I this matters because how narrowly or broadly you define your identity will also determine your capacity for empathy. And empathy is a subject that is increasingly debated today. You are entering adulthood as influential voices argue that America has become too empathetic, while others claim the country suffers from a growing empathy deficit. Before we dive into that, let me define what empathy means. The simplest definition I've heard is from Brene Brown. She says, empathy is feeling with people. This is different from sympathy, which is feeling for people. I can have sympathy from a distance, but empathy means entering into another's struggle and helping them carry the burden. Empathy occurs when there is proximity and a connection, when we share something in common with the person in pain. In other words, there is a link between empathy and identity. A team of researchers in the United Kingdom studying football fans showed that when a fan encountered an injured person wearing the jersey of their favorite football club, they stopped and helped 92% of the time. However, if the injured person was wearing a rival team's jersey, don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post subscriber. So head over to holeypost.com skypod and sign up for just $5 a month. Not only will you get uninterrupted episodes of the Skypod, which means you'll never have to hear this dumb announcement again, but you'll also get access to everything else at Holy Post plus, including episodes of Getting Schooled by Kaitlyn Chess, bonus interviews, live streams, the Holy Post Book Club, exclusive merchandise, and a whole bunch more. And you'll get the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you're supporting our work of creating smart, pro neighbor Christian content. So head over to holypost.com skypod and subscribe.