Journeying Towards A More Embodied and Authentic Faith

EPISODE 131 | JOURNEYING TOWARDS A MORE EMBODIED AND AUTHENTIC FAITH

[00:00:00] We want to see healing in our dysfunctional relationships, etc., etc. So, the focus goes from being understood to being more lived. We will find ourselves thinking like, what's the point of understanding something intellectually if I cannot incarnate it in my daily living? Like, if I can't make this real in the world, make my faith real in the world, what difference does it make, right?

[00:00:25] INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Becoming Me, your podcast companion and coach in your journey to a more integrated and authentic self. I am your host, Ann Yeong, and I'm here to help you grow in self-discovery and wholeness. If you long to live a more authentic and integrated life and would like to hear honest insights about the rewards and challenges of this journey, then take a deep breath, relax, and listen on to Becoming Me. 

[00:00:54] Hello, hello. In today's video, I would like to talk about the experience of our faith becoming more embodied, okay. You might be wondering what are you talking about? And what does it mean to have an embodied faith? Well, that's what I'm going to be talking about. I'm going to talk a little bit about what I mean when I refer to faith being disembodied or embodied.

[00:01:31] But before we go there, I just want to say that for the longest time, I had no concept that faith could be embodied or disembodied. Faith was just faith. And I think I operated on the assumption, not just the assumption, in the sense that the way I knew and understood faith was just the way that it was and it turns out that it was a rather disembodied faith.

[00:01:56] And it was only after I have really begun the work of interior integration and healing that I began to experience faith differently. In a sense, faith, it's not just something that's there, beyond me or out there, but something that's inside me, not just in terms of what I believe or what I feel, but it became incarnated, really enfleshed in everything that I was going through, including the messiness of what was coming out in my healing and that there wasn't this separation anymore between faith and life, right?

[00:02:37] In the past, I knew conceptually that that could be the separation between faith and life, but I never experienced how it could be integrated. So, that's why, today, I'm going to be talking about what it's like to have your faith become more enfleshed or more embodied, okay?

[00:02:57] The structure of today's sharing would be first I'll talk a little bit about what's a disembodied faith, okay, what is that like and then briefly, why would we have a disembodied faith like. You know when I realized that my faith was kind of disembodied or not really embodied, why is it that that was the way I learned faith or that's the way I knew faith to be?

[00:03:22] And then finally we'll look at three signs that a disembodied faith is becoming more embodied, more enfleshed. Okay, so, quite literally, a faith that is becoming incarnated in our life, in our bodies, becoming real. You know, it's like taking on the stuff of real, of matter no longer just something that exists abstractly in the realm of the ideal.

[00:03:52] WHAT IS DISEMBODIED FAITH?
So, a disembodied faith, one way of looking or thinking about disembodied faith is that it is a faith that is intellectually understood and assented to like, I believe is a content of the faith, you know I believe in God. I believe in the trinitarian God, etc., etc. But even though I understand what I believe, my beliefs or my faith, even my relationship with God, somehow, it's just very intellectual.

[00:04:19] It's divorced from my emotional life. It's divorced from my body. It's, it's divorced from my mental health. It's like, these all exist very separately. Okay, so, they're just disconnected. That's an example, or one way of looking at a disembodied faith. So, in a disembodied faith, I can know a lot about my faith.

[00:04:42] And when I just think back about my journey, I learned, I read, I studied so much about my faith. I really wanted to deepen my faith. And the only way I understood at a time to know what it means to deepen my faith is to learn a lot more about it, learn more about what the truth is church fathers, you know, the saints, great theologians in my tradition, what they have said about God, what they have said and written about what it means to be a believer in the Catholic faith - all of that, right?

[00:05:15] So, not that that was wrong, but, you know, it was just kind of like one dimensional. I understood a lot. I grew a lot in my understanding of my faith, but at the same time, it was possible to remain emotionally immature and wounded. It's like, I know an ideal. In a sense, you know, what a live faith should look like.

[00:05:38] And my life looked nothing like the ideal. And there was this big gulf and I didn't quite know how to bridge that. And also, it was like, when I was in prayer or participating in faith kind of things, I could feel close to God. I could feel proud of my faith or proud that I knew and understood my faith.

[00:06:03] But once I'm out of that space, it's in the mess of my life. It's like I want to keep those two realms separate almost because the messiness of my life, my broken relationships, the dysfunctional patterns in my life, they just didn't feel like they were worthy of my faith or worthy of God, right? So, that's what I mean.

[00:06:27] In one way that it really manifested in me is my relationships in my relationship with my family of origin. For the longest time, I was stuck in there, couldn't transform, even though I was growing older into adulthood, even though my faith, in some sense, my relationship with God was growing, the relationship in my family of origin, the dysfunctions. And then how that impacted my other relationships and especially my relationship with authority or close relationships. 

[00:06:55] It was almost like there were parallel tracks and it was so frustrating when I realized that after so much time and so much learning, so much effort in trying to deepen my spirituality, my relationship with God, that in my actual life, I was still stuck, right?

[00:07:13] So, my faith was still not embodied. It was still disembodied then. So, disembodied faith is easily compartmentalized. So, my faith or my spiritual life can exist on a completely separate plane from my work, my family, my social life, my hobbies, my entertainment, everything else, okay? And there's a dimension which this makes things easier because, you know, it's just easier to keep things in their compartments.

[00:07:40] I know what I'm supposed to do in each compartment and it can be rather convenient. It felt a little bit more comfortable in the state that I was in, which was a fragmented, broken kind of like state, right? But that was what I knew. So, having some sense of control, compartmentalization is a form of control, made me feel easier.

[00:08:03] And another thing about a disembodied faith is that it is usually rigid and inflexible because precisely it exists primarily in my understanding it is not enfleshed. So, when something is just conceptual and you don't have any matter like literal - like matter right? Incarnated with this concept - when it's just a concept, it's easy to keep it very tidy very clean, very black and white very rigid and inflexible because it's conceptual right? So, a faith that's like that a faith that's disembodied in this sense can be very binary it can be very textbook and ideological, okay? We can be very, very passionate and convicted and about how things have to be, ought to be, must be.

[00:08:52] And it's easy to remain convicted of that as long as we remain in the realm of concept and reason and don't allow this faith to become embodied and in touch with the matter of our life, with the flesh of our life, right? With the body.

[00:09:12] So, finally, a note about what a disembodied faith is like is that it struggles with nuance then, right? Since it can be so rigid and ideological, it struggles with nuance, with context, with messiness, with imperfection, with paradox, ambiguity, all these things that make up the stuff of real life. A disembodied faith will struggle with it.

[00:09:34] A disembodied faith is one that usually we experience it as we want to keep it pure. We want to keep it above all this mess. In fact, we like that it's above all this messiness of life. We can escape into a disembodied faith and for a while feel like we are safer, feel like, you know, things are in control, live in the realm of the ideal, right?

[00:09:57] But we can't always, we're not actually living there. And so we find that there continues to be this divorce, this disconnect between the way our lives actually are, our inner state, our beings really are, our affective maturity, our wholeness, our relationship with people, even with God and with the church or with ourselves, all these things can remain broken and fragmented.

[00:10:19] While we try to in a sense, force our messy lives to fit the perfect ideal of faith in our minds. And often that just yields to more experiences of shame, of feeling unworthy, of feeling like we're such a failure because it's impossible. I mean, the messiness of life cannot be forced to fit the abstract ideal of a disembodied faith.

[00:10:47] WHY IS OUR FAITH DISEMBODIED?
Okay, so, why does our faith get disembodied? You may wonder, right? And my bet would be that a lot of you who are watching this video or listening to this on the podcast may recognize some of what I've described about a disembodied faith in your own life and you may be thinking well, why is it like that? Why is it that I experience faith in a disembodied way?

[00:11:08] Well, I want to say it's not actually because of your faith. It doesn't begin with your faith. Our faith is experienced as a disembodied faith because in the first place, we have become disembodied people, okay. It's like we are no longer integrated and whole we experience ourselves in the rest of our lives, even when it doesn't have to do with faith per se, like beyond faith. 

[00:11:31] We we're living in our heads a lot of the time. We are numb to our emotions or we're dissociating from our emotions. A lot of times, this is also because of being wounded or trauma in our life that may have happened from our very childhood.

[00:11:48] Complex trauma is something I often talk about these days in my content because attachment and relational issues that we developed since our childhood and our families of origin that follow us into our adulthood. A lot of times those issues come with disembodiment, okay? Because we don't feel safe in our bodies anymore, we don't feel safe. In our emotions, we have not experienced what it's like to be safe within our bodies and our emotions. 

[00:12:16] And so, we are constantly just reacting, often out of our insecurities, our fears, trying to protect ourselves, trying to keep ourselves safe. Sometimes that is through aggression like out of fight response.

[00:12:28] Sometimes it's through the flight response. We just want to avoid or escape, right? Sometimes we freeze, we numb. So, these are the language of trauma. You know, talking about trauma recovery. You don't usually hear these terms when we talk about spirituality and faith, but hey, they are very related because, you know, we're human beings having relationship with God and others and ourselves, right?

[00:12:52] Our spirituality, our faith has to happen in the context of God, our humanity, our life. So, if we are disembodied, if we are constantly trying to escape or acting in aggression to try and control the situation so that we'd be safe, the way we approach faith will be affected by that. Some of us will begin to see faith as a way to have control in our lives.

[00:13:21] It becomes an instrument, a means for us to feel safer through control, through very rigid adherences to, let's say, a moral code or, you know the church teaching or a very particular way of exercising and practicing our faith that may give us a sense of control, that makes us feel a little safer in a very unpredictable world.

[00:13:41] And when we don't feel whole and secure within ourselves. For some of us, faith is a place to escape, to flee, right, into aesthetical maybe experiences or prayer or wonderful worship sessions or retreat sessions where we end up seeking the consolations of God more than we seek the God of consolations, right?

[00:14:06] But it's understandable too because we're suffering and this gives us some kind of reprieve, right? It's a natural response. But a distorted one, a distorted experience or incomplete experience of faith. It's a disembodied experience of faith. So, our faith is disembodied because we are disembodied and we don't feel safe within ourselves.

[00:14:28] And the thing is, when we begin to embark on the healing journey and we begin to integrate and become more whole, that helps us to reconnect with all different parts of ourselves that we have not been connected with before. Our experience of being in our bodies change. Our experience of being ourselves change.

[00:14:48] This is healing, it's transformation. We're becoming more human, more fully human. And as that happens, our experience of our faith will necessarily be impacted. Because we are becoming more embodied as human beings as a person. And so, our faith will also have to become more embodied along with us, you know it’s part it's part of us.

[00:15:11] It's part of our experience and that's why, you know, that's why we have experiences of a disembodied faith and why for those of us who are on this integration journey, we can expect. That after a while the way we experience our faith changes and becomes more embodied.

[00:15:27] THREE SIGNS OF DISEMBODIED FAITH
So, now I'm going to talk about three signs of disembodied faith, our faith becoming more embodied, okay, like what it can look like and what it can feel like.

[00:15:36] PREOCCUPATION WITH UNDERSTANDING THE CONTENT OF OUR FAITH
So, the first point is that you begin to notice and care about the way faith is lived rather than just being preoccupied with understanding the content of your faith. Okay, so, at an earlier stage, I think for many of us in the development of faith as well, and especially because most of us are disembodied already, a lot of the emphasis on growing in faith is about understanding the content of our faith.

[00:16:05] And later on, as we deepen our faith, and especially when we begin to reach the point in our journeys where we experience God calling us to healing and integration, we will become less enamoured with the brilliance, the theory, you know, the reason, or the truth, or even the aesthetic beauty of our faith.

[00:16:27] All these, they remain there, but they're not enough for us anymore. We begin to feel the need to know how to enflesh our faith in our actual lives. We want to see change in the way that we're broken. We want to experience healing. We want to see change in our dysfunctional relationships, right?

[00:16:48] We want to see healing in our dysfunctional relationships, etc., etc. So, the focus goes from being understood to being more lived. We will find ourselves thinking like, what's the point of understanding something intellectually if I cannot incarnate it in my daily living? Like, if I can't make this real in the world, make my faith real in the world, what difference does it make, right?

[00:17:13] DISCREPANCIES START TO BOTHER US
This begins to bother us. The lack of coherence in the way that my faith is preached. So, whether it is the way my faith is taught, written about, preached from the pulpit throughout history, the lack of coherence between that and the way I see, for example, my church historically live out the faith, that begins to bug me.

[00:17:35] The way I see the discrepancy between that and the way they actually handle real life issues, sin within their own ranks you know, etc., etc. The way that I see church people or church leaders treat those on the margins all these things that maybe in the past may not have mattered as much to me as a point of faith, right?

[00:17:59] I may care about them just because I think those things are important, but I may not see these as crucial essential elements of me living my faith now. I begin to be bothered by them, not just about the discrepancy or the lack of coherence in the community I belong to or the church I belong to. I see this discrepancy more and more in my own life.

[00:18:20] In fact, usually that's where it begins at least for me where it began was, I saw the discrepancy in my own life, actually so starkly, so painfully. And as I began to address that discrepancy to integrate and to heal, my eyes begin to be opened more and more to the incoherence and the discrepancies that exist around me, whether it's in my family of origin, in my culture my society and in my church as well, right?

[00:18:47] So, we reach a point when you're on this healing journey that you just can't accept that lack of integrity anymore and you feel like you have to do something about it. And this is not something that can be dealt with in the abstract realm of ideals. This is something that has to be dealt with in the real, right? In the flesh. It has to be something that's embodied.

[00:19:10] And as this happens, we may find that the people that we look to for guidance, for inspiration, for hope - these people begin to change. Earlier on in our journey, when we're still more used to a disembodied faith, we could be very enamoured by people who could argue very eloquently and convincingly about the truth in the abstract, right? The truth as in the abstract, the truth of our faith or why we're the one true church - all that kind of stuff.

[00:19:39] WE ARE MORE DRAWN TO PEOPLE IN TOUCH WITH THEIR HUMANITY
At this point, when we become more integrated, we're experiencing more integration. We begin to be drawn more to people and leaders who are in touch with their own humanity, who are in touch with their own wounds, as well as the wounds of others who in some way, we experienced witness to us, in an authentic way, the compassion of Christ.

[00:20:03] Maybe we see in them a degree of integration and authenticity that we do not yet have and we are drawn to these people, right? That they're real, that they are authentic. That they don't stand on pedestals. Even if people try to put them on pedestals, they are free enough to call a spade a spade.

[00:20:24] They're not so concerned about remaining very correct or, you know, they are not preaching so much about perfection as about what is real, what is love. And because we are experiencing in our own journeys what is real, and what is love, God's love for us is not something that happens in the abstract.

[00:20:49] We will also begin to feel more drawn to those who are more embodied in the way they talk about their faith. In the way they, not just talk about their faith, but in the way they witness and live out their faith. So, that was the first sign that, you know, your faith could be getting more embodied.

[00:21:06] YOU CAN'T FORCE ON YOURSELF THE "RIGHT THING"
The second sign here would be that you can no longer force yourself to just do the right thing, if doing the right thing means that you have to spiritually bypass your emotions or your body, okay?

[00:21:18] So, what I mean by that is, if let's say you want to go to mass because going to mass is the right thing. And all of us would have experienced before maybe times in the past where we really don't want to go to mass and there could be a myriad of reasons, right? The point is, when we have a more disembodied faith, I don't think we even really listen to what's going on in our bodies.

[00:21:40] Or in our emotions, why is it that we're resisting going to mass, for example? Most of us or at least I would say, you know for speaking for myself I'll just try and tamp down the emotion or numb that emotion and just you know, tell myself, well, you know what you're supposed to do. Just do it. Just do it. Like, fulfil the obligation, you know? Go to church, go to mass.

[00:22:00] At some point on this journey though, I found that it became harder and harder for me to do that. It was like I felt like I had to listen to what was going on in my body and in my emotions, even if I didn't understand why I was feeling that way.

[00:22:17] You know, what I found over time is that there actually is a reason. The reason may not be apparent in the moment. But when I keep denying and suppressing and bypassing how I feel, the reluctance or sometimes not just the reluctance, the deep-seated resistance or even physical sickness, the feeling of physical sickness in trying to force myself to do something that I don't want to do, right?

[00:22:43] For example, let's say going to mass, I do not feel that I am attuned or in sync with God and I begin to be more convinced that that cannot be how God wants me to live my faith, right; to just bypass my body and my emotions to do the right thing, that there must be something more than that and there must be some space for me to figure out what this is with compassion and not from a place of fear, not from a place of really like fear literally. 

[00:23:12] You know, fear of doing the wrong thing of being in sin and all that. So, as we become more embodied, not just in matters of faith. We find that the way we approach things that have to do with the faith, whether it's spiritual disciplines or you know, commitments in mission or in service, all of that, we begin to include that in the process of our integration and we don't bypass our bodies and our emotions anymore, okay.

[00:23:37] So, as we go on this journey of holistic integration, I begin to prefer, or you find that we begin to prefer an imperfect, messy process of making my faith real, right? So, I prefer the messy, imperfect process of making my faith real in my whole person, in my life, rather than having a perfectly understood faith and you know, a perfectly executed, a performed faith that requires me to numb my emotions in my body.

[00:24:09] BEFRIENDING OUR EMOTIONS
So, as I become more embodied, I find that I want the messy, the imperfect, but that which is real because God is in the real, over that perfectly controlled, performative, externally pleasing, correct, righteous performance of faith that actually is not in touch with my reality. And this is because I've begun to repair my trust in my emotions and in my body, right?

[00:24:41] I have begun to learn to befriend my emotions. Remember I mentioned earlier on that the reason we are disembodied in the first place is because we don't feel safe in our bodies? We don't feel safe with our emotions now. As we heal, we begin to feel more safe in our bodies and our emotions. We begin to trust that they're trying to help us that all these parts of us that God created are meant to help us be human.

[00:25:03] And, you know, for good or ill, there's something that they're trying to signal to us when, especially when we have distressing emotions and sensations in our body, right. So, the relationship with our emotions and body changes from one that I'm suspicious of them that, you know, anytime I experience emotions or sensations that make it hard for me to do what I think is the right thing, what I know is the right thing, that that must be a spiritual warfare, that that must be from the evil one.

[00:25:33] I don't have that kind of very rigid and almost fear driven narrative anymore, right now. I see me. In fact, I ask myself, what is the Lord saying to me through my body and through my emotions? So, instead of trying to control, like perfectly control my emotions or override them, I learned to be humble and compassionate in letting them speak and entrusting that in God's love for me, I can have the space and the room to figure this out.

[00:26:10] You know, without fear. Okay, so, that's holistic integration and as this happens, I expand my consciousness of my own humanity and I'm experiencing God's presence in the hummus, right? Like the hummus, the root word for humility, the earth, the soil of my wounded soul and healing being - my wounded but healing being. Because now I'm experiencing God in the messiness, in the process of my becoming.

[00:26:38] I no longer think of God as someone who will only look at me or allow me to approach when I'm worthy. You know, when I have a disembodied faith, even if conceptually, I know that God loves me unconditionally in reality, the way I approach Him is often that, which I, I don't want to come near You unless I am in a state of grace, for example.

[00:27:02] Oh, I must do all the right things, go to confession, and then I feel like I can talk to You properly again, right. But as we get more integrated, we realize that, hey, the conversation with God is always ongoing. And even when we're in the muck, when we're struggling, when we're falling into sin, we still can have that conversation with God. In fact, that's when we need Him more than ever, and that He is there with us in the muck, right? So, that's holistic integration.

[00:27:31] NOT BEING AFRAID OF CRITICISM
The third and the last sign that I want to talk about that may indicate that your faith is getting more embodied is that you are less afraid of being wrong or criticized in matters of faith because now, your knowing is grounded in something deeper.

[00:27:47] When our faith is more conceptual and theoretical and we need it to be perfect and pristine and you know it's like, there is this competition almost about the best understanding of the truth of our faith. And that the clearer we are about it, the more eloquently we can argue that our view or our perspective of the faith is the true one, is the right one that somehow translated to a better faith. I mean you can see my facial expression if you're watching this on video, is even as I say that it's kind of strange.

[00:28:18] I mean, it wasn't strange before when that was where I was, but now where I am, it's kind of interesting and strange that at one point, I actually believe that a better understanding or a clearer, more certain understanding of my faith, I just want to be really sure what is right, right. And if I can reach that, then therefore I have a stronger faith.

[00:28:42] It's so disembodied, right? But that's where I was. I think that's where a lot of us went through. That's where a lot of people still are. And I'd say I sometimes, with a bit of frustration, but also with understanding and compassion, because we are where we are. Okay, so, but as we get more integrated though that changes because the security of our faith, the sense that that my relationship with God is secure, or that my faith is secure, it no longer rests in a perfect understanding or a perfect execution of the practices, or, you know, the rituals, practices, or traditions of my faith.

[00:29:23] It's not so much about the performance anymore or even the understanding the security of our faith now rests in God's Unconditional love for us, which is not anything that we can do. It's not about anything we can do, anything that we can improve. It's actually more about what we can receive of this unconditional love, right?

[00:29:45] So, as we get more integrated, our capacity to receive this unconditional love of God grows as well. We become more convinced of the unconditional love of God not just convinced intellectually. I want to say it's like our bodies, our whole being rests differently because it knows it is loved by God, right?

[00:30:09] Not just cognitively knowing, but in the bones, in the nervous system, knowing that we are loved unconditionally by God and that's such a game changer because then, the focus again shifts from how perfectly I can do all the things that are right and acceptable whether what I say about what I believe about you know, God or what the church teaches, that there's a lot more room now for me to voice my doubt or even dissent and still know that I am loved.

[00:30:42] SECURE IN LOVE
And because I'm growing and I'm changing, I'm in process that it's normal for me to ask questions, to struggle, to fight, to wrestle, to doubt. In the past, when faith is disembodied, all these things are hugely threatening because if I doubt, if I struggle, if I wrestle, if I question, if I dissent, it detracts from what I imagine to be my faithfulness to God. Now I know it isn't.

[00:31:10] Just like in any intimate relationship, the more intimate you are with someone, the freer you are to give voice to whatever's in your heart. The more confident you are that the other person remains with you as you work it out, and you work it out together, you know? And that new confidence, that new, you know, sense of safety is very different from the curated safety that we try to take for ourselves through our coping mechanisms and, you know, controlling things and controlling our understanding of faith or how we or other people practice our faith.

[00:31:49] This new confidence is a different kind of certainty. It's not certainty about what we believe, about the content of faith, or it's not certainty about how we should live. It's just certainty that we are loved. It's hard for me to use words to describe it because it's so much more than an idea, precisely.

[00:32:07] It is embodied, right? So, it's the unconditional love now. And now I'll faith is no longer just an idea or an ideal, which then becomes very easily an ideology, right? That things have to be a certain way. Our faith is now more and more a living relationship. And when it is a living relationship with the living God, especially, right, there is space, there's a growing capacity for nuance, for context, for messiness, for ambiguity, for uncertainty, for questions that have no answers, for things being undone, space for deconstructing things that worked for us before but now don't make sense anymore, you know? Because our faith doesn't rest on the certitude of ideas anymore.

[00:32:58] We're not threatened in the way that we used to about any of these things being questioned. We realize that God is so much bigger than all of this and His love envelops everything and all of all of our questions. And we can ask and that asking and challenging and doubting even are signs of intimacy and love even when we don't understand what it is that's happening.

[00:33:28] Okay, so, now there's this allowingness, instead of a very tight, rigid space within which faith must fit, there's this expansiveness, not just in terms of like physical space, but in terms of time. We know that it takes time for ideas to mature. It takes time for faith to mature, right? It takes time for our healing, our integration to continue to happen.

[00:33:53] And that along the way, a lot of things can be very messy and look really wrong and there's no rush. Because we are in the process, and well, in the past, the desire to remain in perfect righteousness comes from a fear driven, fear driven mentality. We don't dare to take risks. We don't want to move. So, in a way, while we are very concerned with how, we perform in our faith, interiorly the reality continues to be very fragmented and unhealed.

[00:34:26] But now, because we're less concerned about how it looks on the outside, we're more concerned about what's really happening on the inside, we allow things to evolve. And while things are messy and disturbing and, you know, and uncomfortable, and we may find that other people don't understand and criticize us and tell us that we're wrong and that we're regressing in our faith and all that.

[00:34:51] In time, when we keep doing this, when we are on this journey, we find that we do grow in capacity to really love, especially love where, loving where it's so difficult to love before. Accepting what is really, really difficult for us to accept in the past, including people, especially people in our lives, or the state of our families, or the state of our world, or our church. Where can this new capacity to accept the imperfection in others come from, to love in a way that in the past we couldn't love? That is the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

[00:35:29] But this comes really slowly as we evolve and even as we evolve in some dimensions and we grow in capacity, we're also at the same time dealing and being very honest in acknowledging where we can't accept, where we are angry, where we want to resist, where we're not ready to go somewhere, you know? It's just really real and messy. And embodied.

[00:35:57] Okay, so, now, in this space, we're less afraid of even being in sin because we realize, and this is a, that's something that I saw recently. And one of my favourite figures in the last few years, that has been someone that has given me guidance and hope through his writings and his talks is a Jesuit priest called Monty Williams.

[00:36:20] He's stationed in Toronto, Canada. And there's this talk that he gave and he said, you know, there's this very popular term that we are loved sinners, right. It is a very commonly used term that you and I were loved sinners. But you know, he said that's a better term, that he hopes that we would use better than loved sinners, and that is "trapped lovers".

[00:36:40] He said, and why is that? Why does he think that's a better term? He says, it's because when we say we're loved sinners, it's like the core of identity is that we are sinners, but we are loved. But when we think of ourselves as trapped lovers, the fundamental dimension of our identity is not sin, but love.

[00:36:59] We're lovers. We're lovers who are trapped. We're lovers who are trapped by our wounds. We're trapped in a sense by sin, but fundamentally, we're not sinners fundamentally. We are lovers. We are beloved and we are lovers, right, with God and of God. So, when the shift in our own identity moves away from this fear of being in sin to the hope and the confidence of being loved and trusting that this love of God is strong enough and powerful enough to free us ultimately from the grip of sin and death, well, the whole experience of faith just really shifts.

[00:37:38] Okay, and we begin to be able to embrace all the parts of ourselves, including the emotions and our bodies; things in the past that seemed just too difficult to keep perfect. Now we embrace that as part of ourselves and our faith. So, as we integrate and our faith becomes more embodied, we will often find that we struggle in new ways. 

[00:38:01] Because the old paradigms and narrative and language that we used to have about faith, they no longer help us experience God where we are. So, that's the sharing for today; you know three signs that your faith is becoming more embodied.

[00:38:17] This journey has been a long time coming because it's taken me a long time to integrate what I was experiencing into myself, to live it, to get a sense of what it's like, and then to reflect upon it. And then now finally to be able to articulate it in some way. And I really, really hope so much that this is helpful to you, that it helps you to see your own evolving experiences of faith in a new light. 

[00:38:44] This is particularly the case for those of you who are on the healing journey or have begun to experience that dissatisfaction of the old way of understanding faith and living your faith when, you know, maybe you're getting to see that lack of integrity and it's really bugging you.

[00:39:01] But at the same time, it seems the way to move forward is to move into, it's like descend into ambiguity and lack of clarity. And I just want to say that's okay, because life is ambiguous and messy and full of paradoxes but it's the fullness of our humanity that is a gift. You know, the fullness of our humanity is the gift from God and we really can't know Him intimately and know ourselves intimately without entering more fully into our humanity.

[00:39:34] So, here's praying that we will all be unafraid to continue to step into this journey of integration and into a more embodied, incarnated and fleshed faith. Thank you for listening. Bye!

[00:40:00] CONCLUSION
Thank you for listening to Becoming Me. The most important thing about making this journey is to keep taking steps in the right direction. No matter how small those steps might be, no matter where you might be in your life right now, it is always possible to begin. The world would be a poorer place without you becoming more fully alive.

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