Unleashing the Language of Faith

Letter 1: Dear Sarah, I don’t know how to speak of the sacred anymore.

The following is the first letter in an ongoing series on unleashing the language of faith. I find that the most powerful conversations I have are the most personal—the ones shared over dinner and across coffee tables while crying or laughing. So in the coming months, I’ll occasionally be writing letters to friends of mine and sharing them publicly here with you. I’ll also be sharing their responses with you. As you’ll read below, the way I express my faith has been changing for a long time. I am still a follower of Jesus, but how I express that journey is morphing. For me, it is a must. What you’ll read below is a glimpse into my own grief over the loss of language I once found more than familiar. I hope you’ll also glimpse the grace of letting life change how I speak of the sacred. I don’t have answers for how to better communicate Love in a world that often looks so loveless, but I am finding—across tables, through tears witnessed and stories respected—that Love still speaks.

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Dear Sarah,

I struggle to speak of the sacred these days. And it’s not that I no longer experience divine presence.

Yesterday I listened to an interview with my friend (and a fantastic author)

Jonathan Merritt

and the renowned author

Marianne Williamson

.¹ The moment I started really listening was when Marianne confessed a moment, decades ago, when she was judging another woman. It might even be more accurate to say she was disgusted by that woman. Her voice was like nails against a chalkboard to Marianne. Why is she talking like that? Marianne thought. Here was an internationally bestselling author who writes books on loving one another, and she was judging the woman beside her. (Relatable.)

What struck me most wasn’t the judgement; I know that sense well. It was what she did with it. Marianne prayed.

She asked for a correction of her own perception. “I surrender my bitchy, judgmental thoughts, and I am willing to see this woman,” she recounted.

Marianne described believing that Christ fully responds to our slightest invitation for help to see the fullness of the human being in front of us. She says our minds can be flooded by grace. When we ask for love to enter the hole of our hate or disgust, it can flow through us like a river. It can wash over us like a wave.

“God’s loving thought is extending itself into your mind every moment of every day,” Marianne said. “The purpose of your life is to allow that love to extend through you to the person you are thinking about or encountering.”

Moments after Marianne prayed, she overheard some of the woman’s story. She grew up a hostage in her own home, locked in a basement by her father. She hadn’t learned to speak until she was freed. Her voice sounded harsh because she was still learning how to form the sound of her own voice based on anything other than the sound of hate.

Why are they talking like that?

There’s a thought I have often.

I know you know that, because it’s how we became friends. Those perfectly warm days on the banks of the Frio River feel a little like a dream, but I’m glad they happened. I’m glad that before I entered another season of solitude, recovering from yet another surgery, that I got to make friends with you.

On the first morning of that retreat at Laity Lodge (my first time there), I wrote in my journal:

Last night we gathered in front of the Great Hall and as I met person after person, I could almost see the web connecting person to person, friend to friend.

There are threads of tenderness, tying us to hope, and sometimes we get to see in flashes what is usually hidden.

During the reception that evening, as friends hugged and laughed and made introductions, I was watching that web as though I could see the mycelium under mighty redwoods. Everyone seemed connected. The space between souls nearly glowed. But I also felt strange, to be so immersed in sounds I had not heard in over a year:² the sounds of Christian symbols, or what on my most judgy days I and many others refer to as Christianese.

You walked up to the hospitality booth with your sister and greeted someone with an f bomb dropped in, and I lit up. Those four little letters sparked like a match against flint and showed me I still belonged.

Later, we were sipping on those yummy pink shrub drinks and huddled around new faces, all of whom our mutual friend Taylor Leonhardt already knew and adored, and someone asked what we hoped for from the weekend. I said something about language—that being there at Laity, surrounded by Christians felt like coming home to a place where my native language was spoken, but that it no longer felt like mine. It felt like a foreign tongue. It felt like my lips were struggling to form the syllables of speech that used to flow without a second thought. And I wanted to be able to hear what was good from Christians again.

The Frio River from the Great Hall at Laity Lodge at sunset that first evening

You overheard me, and later sought me out over dinner (the best salmon of my life, by the way), because it turned out, you felt the same way.

We both bring different experiences to our own loss of language—and loss might not even feel like the right word to you. But we bonded over drastically different griefs that have wildly changed the way our mouths make meaning of the wild reality that Love is still here, life is still beautiful, and the space between us still vibrates with holiness.

During the teaching sessions at that retreat, I often had to leave the room, because it just felt too loud. I think you stayed and listened, maybe even took notes. But you said you felt similarly. Often, when I am around other Christians, especially evangelicals, or when I read books published by Christian publishers,³ the language mostly feels too loud, in a way that frankly bores me. And, sometimes, it actually hurts my ears…and heart. It’s like being packed into a party with too many people inside who are all shouting over each other so loudly that no one is actually listening. I’d rather sit where it’s quiet. At dinner that one night, in between those strangely sacred stretches of silence when we both just held eye contact and cried, I told you that when it comes to faith, “I need fewer words.”

Why are they talking like that?

I sit there and hear Christians talk about God’s sovereignty or attribute a good thing happening in their lives to the kindness of God—or, hand me a puke bag, “a God-wink”—and I wonder if they really know or mean what they are saying. What do we really know of the actions of God? I think. Why do we so easily claim to know God did something or didn’t do something? Why do so many people feel the need to baptize their bruises with belief instead of just letting a bad thing stay a mystery?

As you can probably tell, I relate to Marianne Williamson’s story because I too have a jar of judgment in my gut, and it sloshes around more often than I let others see.

I too need prayer to pierce a holy hole in my hate and hardness—over and over and over again. Words sharp with Christian spirituality have been used to cut me and people I love too many times for me to simply hear most things without suspicion that there isn’t a sword behind any ever-flapping tongue.

I don’t want to speak Christianese ever again, but I want to learn to speak the language of love in ways my own pain can’t silence. I want to practice patterns of speech that show others who are as brokenhearted as me that our lives still hold a mirror to the heavens, somehow reflecting back that God is love and we are loved right here right now.

Yesterday I started reading Valarie Kaur’s Sage Warrior. Her first book, See No Stranger, was both fire and water to me when I read it two or three years ago. Kaur is Sikh, and the way she writes of our oneness—of which that web I saw at Laity is a part—carries a uniquely wielded power to join back together that which seems too polarized to ever unite. She writes:

“You can look at anyone or anything and say: You are part of me I do not yet know. And that means no one is outside our circle of care. There are no monsters in this world, only people who are wounded.”⁴

When I think of the election in November and the differences of ethos and values that are creating chasms in even my own family, her’s is the kind of voice I most experience as holding the power to heal. A Sikh woman is showing this Christian the mind and heart of Christ, who makes all things and all people one. (Even bluntly naming that theological belief is bordering on too much for me. But it still rings true, so I’m not erasing that sentence.)

After I read the first chapter of Kaur’s new book, my husband

Ryan Ramsey

and I went out for Pho in our neighborhood. It was the first cold day of the season, and a steaming bowl of soup felt exactly right. While I slurped up wide rice noodles, he talked about an essay he had just published on his substack (on a similar topic, “When Church Becomes a Substitute for Inner Work.” Hello, 🔥.⁵). One meme he shared in it depicted exactly what I also feel, here on the outskirts of the Christianity I was taught is “faithful”:

The fishbowl of faith, where one must use the right kinds of words or phrases to fit or be seen as trustworthy or worth knowing now feels much too small. The language of my former evangelicalism feels like a small fishbowl in a large ocean. Why would I stay contained in the glass of that bowl when God created the whole sea?

I want two things at once.

I want that fishbowl to crash to the bottom of the sea so more of us can swim free.

And I want—I pray—for Christ to become my consciousness so that my judgement of those who do not speak like me, who do not vote like me, who might not yet have suffered like me, who perhaps have not shared privileges I have had, who see my language as heresy or my heart as deceived can also be held in unending connection and love.

I think again of that web of connection—I think you know I’m a mushroom nerd. I think of the mycelium under the surface of the soil in the forest—more vast than any highway system on this continent—and I wonder what ways of speaking, what ways of writing my books and talking on the phone to my Republican parents or replying to a rude comment on my Instagram might carry nourishment along that web instead of cutting it off as only for those who speak and act in symbols like mine.

One square cubic inch of mycelium hidden in the dark of the dirt stretches more than eight miles.⁶ The hidden connections between each human being and every living thing on this planet are more vast than we can even imagine. How can we let love travel down those threads to every person and community in need of nourishment? How can I let language out of the small cages and containers of my own pride to flow to everyone who deserves love (which is, everyone)?

I’m asking questions that are too large for anyone to answer, but I think you’ll understand. I too am still learning how to speak, how to form the sound of my spirituality based on more than the sounds of fear and hate. I am trying to recall the genuine sounds of grace in the language of my childhood faith. I am hooked back on phonics, sounding out syllables moment by present moment instead of presuming I know what it all means. I am more often filled with wordless awe than worship lyrics. I am carrying quiet reverence into most days, and all of those days involve pain that may not ever make sense.

One thing is clear—I can only begin to send nourishment along the threads of connection in my life when I begin by speaking love toward the judging parts of my own damn and precious self.

How about you? I wish we could go back to Laity Lodge and let silence say everything—particularly over that Hawaiian coconut passionfruit desert, my God—but I think we can try to speak from our own inner silences into the sacred I know we both still see.

Tell me, tell us, how is your language of faith changing? Tell us what words and worship are coming to mean to you. Tell us—is the Word-Made-Flesh still speaking through you?

With love,

KJ

Taylor, Sarah, and me at Laity Lodge in July 🥰

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In Case You Missed It—here are recent essays from Embodied:

• Change Your Definition of Success: and other shit sickness keeps teaching me

• The Time Tetris Transformed Me: Play is the Polar Opposite of Trauma

• We can do hard things, but we don’t have to make them harder. (Or, when self-care looks like a stairlift.)

• Hope is Too Heavy to Hold: let it hold you instead

• Traumaversaries and the Truths Our Bodies Tell: On the Anniversary of Almost Dying, I was admitted to the hospital

• The Suffering Olympics (a new poem)

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1. And then I promptly ordered Marianne’s new book, The Mystic Jesus. (Affiliate link to fund my reading habit.)

2. I realized that weekend on the retreat that though I have attended some church services, I had not spent that much extended time in a gathering of Christians in at least two years—in large part because I’ve spent the last year mostly sick in bed.

3. And, yes, I am aware that I’ve written three of them, all published by one of the biggest Christian publishers of them all, Zondervan. Here’s a link to my latest.

4. Valarie Kaur, Sage Warrior: Wake to Oneness, Practice Pleasure, Choose Courage, Become Victory, (One World: New York, 2024), xxii. (Affiliate link.)

5. Please read the fire emoji as both an indication of the essay’s essential beautiful BURNing power and the fact that his mind is hot. Please also remember all the theobros who love to add anecdotes into their sermons about their smoking hot wives and give me this tiny moment to flip the patriarchy’s faith script by lovingly nearly objectifying my husband in public. It is late. These jokes are bad. Points to you for reading a footnote, though.

6. https://q.sustainability.illinois.edu/a-fungal-estrangement/#:~:text=It%20permeates%20nearly%20all%20land,mycelial%20mats%20spring%20to%20attention.