Yearning for wholeness

It has become a cliché to say we're living in unprecedented times. Yet many of us feel overwhelmed by the intersecting crises shaping our world—climate change, political polarization, economic instability, and mental health struggles. These overlapping challenges, that some are calling the "polycrisis", leave us feeling fractured and fatigued. Despite our efforts to live with hope and integrity, we find ourselves repeatedly drawn into patterns of self-sabotage, driven by our seemingly ineradicable tendencies towards greed, anger, and envy, which plague not only our personal lives but are also embedded in our social structures.

My guest today wants to offer resources that she has found helpful in navigating this treacherous terrain. Elizabeth Oldfield has spent her career trying to lever open space for deeper conversations – about what it means to be a human being, where we can find wisdom and how we build a society where we hate each other a little less. Elizabeth has worked at BBC Radio 4, led a Westminster think tank, and is now the host of The Sacred podcast, speaking to guests like Nick Cave, Sally Philips, Rabbi Sacks, Rainn Wilson, Sathnam Sanghera and Krista Tippett about their deepest values. She lives with her family in an intentional Christian community in South London.

In our conversation, we discuss her latest book, Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. Elizabeth discusses the role of religion in providing wisdom to help address a broad range of challenges that characterize our contemporary predicament – wisdom that can benefit even those of us who are not religious and who might even have been burned by religion.

She leans into the aspect of Christianity that most people tend to reject outright – the concept of sin, which, following Francis Spufford, she calls our "human propensity to fuck things up." Each chapter focuses on one of the seven deadly sins, suggesting pathways toward wholeness. She examines, for instance, how to move from polarization to peacemaking and from avarice to gratitude and generosity. She also discusses the transformation that she and her family are continuing to experience as a result of choosing to live in community with another family, sharing life and possessions in common, developing a monastic routine in a busy city, and inviting people from all walks of life to regularly share in their meals and rituals. The book is less a how-to guide than an honest sharing of her own experiences and struggles. It treats the reader with respect and tenderness; it is no triumphalist screed, but serves as a humble invitation to wholeness.

In our conversation, we talk about:

• The existential anxieties that our turbulent times produce
• Sin as our propensity for sabotage and disconnection
• How to become peacemakers in a polarizing world
• How to cultivate generosity and gratitude to counteract greed
• Finding freedom in the constraints of communal life
• Wrestling with the concept of God in a secular age

You can listen to our conversation in two parts below, or watch the full video. An unedited transcript follows.

Brandon: Hey, Elizabeth. Thanks for joining us. Great to have you on the podcast.

Elizabeth: It's really nice to be here.

Brandon: I usually like to start by asking guests to share an experience of beauty that they had in their childhoods that remains with them till today. Is there a particular memory that the word beauty evokes for you from your childhood?

Elizabeth: Yeah, what a beautiful question. What came to mind was that I always used to dance on the beach. I did a lot of dance classes, anyway. Dancing was a big part of my childhood. But every time I went to the sea or the beach, the expanse of wet sand just in front of whether the waves come in would draw me with this very intense sense of needing to move, and needing to move in this kind of swooping and looping, non-choreographed, expressive dance moves just on the edges of the sea. It became a sort of joke in my family that we couldn't go anywhere near the seaside without me kicking off my shoes and needing to dance. And I don't know that, before you asked me that question, I would have necessarily categorized that as beauty. But that is what came back to me in response to your question.

Brandon: What about it do you associate with beauty today?

Elizabeth: The embodiment, the sense of the awe-inspiring power of the sea, that the wildness of the natural world and where it comes crashing up against civilization. It was from when I was quite young, sort of very unforced childlike response to it, was to want to be almost in sort of the kind of conversation that you're in when you're dancing.

Brandon: It really strikes me that it's not just a participatory reception of beauty, but you're actively engaged in it, right? And so the response you have is almost a delight expressing itself in some kind of participation.

Elizabeth: Yeah, kind of responding to beauty with creativity, although that's not how I would have analyzed it at the time. But the delight wanting to spill over in some way.

Brandon: Yeah, that's amazing. Great. Well, listen. I'm really delighted that you're able to join us. I want to talk about this new book you've written, Fully Alive, which I highly recommend. I loved reading it a couple of times, actually. Really profound book. For the readers and listeners and viewers who are not familiar with your work, could you say a little bit about your journey? I mean, you've had a really interesting career. You worked for the BBC. You started a religion think tank. Say a little bit about your story and what led you to write this book.

Elizabeth: That's not an easy question. As someone who cares a lot about stories, you could frame that in many ways. I think the thread of my life has been ironic in interest in stories, in the stories that shape us, particularly in the kind of cultural narratives and the way they create imaginative space. They create the social imaginary, is what Charles Taylor says. I started just like a nerdy, bookish child who read a lot of novels. I told a lot of stories, just a sort of instinctive, interesting stories, as many children have. Then through studying literature and history and then going to work at the BBC, and they were like right in the heart of this media story production machine. I've really seen how those cultural narratives of the air that we breathe, and they make some things seem legitimate and some things seem illegitimate. They kind of frame the goodies and baddies for us. They encourage particular choices. They sort of reflect our mimetic desires back to us. I said, that's the thread I've really been pulling on. I made radio and television programs really trying to get to these deep questions. What is a human? What is a good life? How now shall we live? That was a thread that I was pulling on through leading a think tank and now writing and speaking. But it's been a strange, zigzagging career. And I think that's the thread that I've been following.

Brandon: And it comes through certainly in the book as you — I mean, you talk about the decisions you've made along the way, the interesting journey you've had from having profound religious and spiritual experiences, to giving up on faith and returning to faith, and then living in now an intentional community that is a fairly countercultural, if not radical, decision to make these days and one that probably doesn't make a lot of sense to people but I Imagine would resonate with a lot of our yearnings in what you call turbulent times. We'll get back to talking about some of these threads. But could you say a bit about the turbulent times in the subtitle of the book? What are you trying to speak to in our contemporary culture and the situation we're in?

Elizabeth: It might be helpful for listeners, I'm realizing the more I talk about it, that that phrase "intentional community" is not always understood. It's a bit jargony. People can think of it as a micro monastery. We are two families who've decided to move in together with shared rhythms and rituals and practices, driven partly by this sense of turbulent times and this honestly existential anxiety that I am having to grapple with, and I think many people are having to grapple with, particularly people in the rising generation who are inheriting a world which looks just deeply, deeply unstable. The combined unsettling of the climate crisis, right? This wicked existential threat that we have really struggled to reckon with in any serious way, with the kind of geopolitical trends, growing division, withdrawing trust, and accelerating advances in AI that raise all very deep questions about what a human is and how we live together and what kind of work we value, whether we value work.

That sense, certainly, the cultural story I was raised with in the 1980s and 90s, was really that end of history cultural story, right? We've come out the Trente Glorieuses, 30 years after the Second World War. There was a little bump there with the Cold War, but we've sorted that out now that the Berlin Wall has fallen. Generally, in the West, we are in this sun lit up plans of reason, democracy, prosperity. Free trade has saved the world. I think I grew up expecting life and the world to go on largely as it always has. I had a very safe middle class, middle of the road childhood. The idea that life is going to go on largely as it has done is not the story that is being told now, right? The sense that change is accelerating beyond our capacity to keep up with it, and we might actually have set fire to our only home is a significantly different story to wrestle with and reckon with and know how to live within.

Brandon: You're reminding me of the German sociologist, Hartmut Rosa, who talks about dynamic stabilization. Strange term, but he means that we're in this context in which what is stable is the constant acceleration, right? You have to keep increasing profits year on year. They can't be stable. GDP has to keep growing. Everything has to keep growing, and that's the only thing that we can see as a constant.

You also draw on Byung-Chul Han in talking about this context in which everything that is solid melts into information. There is an interesting tension that he lays out between information and narrative, right, that information doesn't give us meaning. Information doesn't give us orientation. These are things that, typically, we've found in religion. But there's so much baggage around religion, around God, around the concept of sin, when these are the things that people like to discard very quickly, and you're leaning into these concepts. Could you say a little bit about your choices to sort of rely on the very things that people have discarded about religion in order to address this turbulence, this sort of strange context we're living in?

Elizabeth: Honestly, it still surprises me. I am not someone formed in tribes that would go looking to religion in general, Christianity in particular, as a source of wisdom. Maybe religion, as long as it's "eastern."

Brandon: Right.

Elizabeth: The sort of sense of my life going off script is very strong for me. Where I was raised — middle class, middle of the road, largely secular —most of the people raised in the way that I was raised have no interest in religion and no faith. They went through university at the tail end of the secularization thesis, this idea that we're right at the end of the long, withdrawing roar. The tide of faith is so far, we can't even see it anymore. But this accident or, I don't know what you'd call it, this fork in the road in my life of being taken to a Christian youth festival by a friend's youth group and having a very powerful, ecstatic experience is the kind of sociologically acceptable way of putting it, has shaped everything else. Maybe it's the inciting incident in my story, and this sense that there is something beyond us. There is something beyond what we can see, that there is more to this world than just increasing my status, comfort, convenience, aspiring to what nice holidays in a fancy kitchen island and a nice job title. That there is more meaning to be had has really dogged me, and it's dogged me through attempting to be an atheist, having these major faith crises, deciding that only stupid people could possibly believe better and then circling all the way back to finding it, this surprising, humane, psychologically astute source of the wisdom that I think we might need right now.

Brandon: Your book is laid out as a journey from series of polarities organized along the seven deadly sins. Could you say a little bit more about the idea of sin as the human propensity to f*** things up? Why is the concept of sin perhaps useful to us today, especially people who are either tired of religion, walked away from it, are done with it, or people who may not even be interested in it, or people from other faith traditions perhaps?

Elizabeth: Are you saying that I'm allowed to swear? This is the first American podcast where they have not bleeped out the word.

Brandon: We'll probably bleep it out.

Elizabeth: Yeah, it was a big discussion with my American editors. The British edition has the full letter word in its glory, and the American one does not.

Brandon: Right.

Elizabeth: So for the sake of your future editor, the human propensity to F things up is from Francis Spufford, who is this amazing, award-winning literary novelist. He really set me on this journey of wanting to reclaim this concept, this, I think, kind of known and lived reality of human beings that we mess stuff up, right? We break things. We can't call it the crooked timber of humanity, as not what I'd inherited as the story about sin. I thought sin was of no use to us as a concept, because it was either this hellfire and brimstone kosh to beat other people with, right, that it was about imposed guilt and shame, and it was psychologically crippling. Or, it was this kind of silly, naughty calories and cream cakes and like the cool, liberated Halloween costumes, whatever it was. But at heart, I think we all need to grapple with the sense that we might have these principles and these values and these aspirations about the life we want to live and the kind of people that we want to be, and we largely fail to live up to them, right? It's really hard to be brave and honest and loyal and kind and selfless and to treat other people equally and to really love anyone other than ourselves at any depth. Maybe it's just me. I don't think it's just me, but maybe it's just me.

And so this reality of my tendency to disconnect, which is another way I really think I've seen disconnection, withdrawal from relationship, with my own soul or my own deepest self, if you prefer that language of what it really needs, which is usually not what it's craving in the instant moment. Disconnection from other people, from deep relationships, intimacy and trust and respect with other people. And yes, connection, withdrawal from the relationship with love divine and the connection beyond us. What's been interesting about writing the book and speaking about it is, I'm realizing that this concept of sin, even for those who don't know what they think about the metaphysic, explained as disconnection, withdrawal and fracture makes all kind of sense because I think we see it in all our lives.

Brandon: One way to approach it, people might say, is our disconnection from ourselves, from nature, from others around us is just a function of our social structures, right? We are living in late capitalism and late modernity, whatever you want to call it. There's just a product of social structures. And if we recreate society in a different way, we don't have to deal with this problem, right? I think some of the romantic era had this sort of idea that are fundamental state of natures.

Elizabeth: Real serious and clean slate, yeah.

Brandon: Exactly. What would you say to people who feel, look, the reason I can't connect is, nothing's wrong with me? It's the STEM world. It's the structures we're in.

Elizabeth: Too big a question for me to have very tight pieces on. But my intuitive response is, can it be both? One of the things I do is, I'm a chair of an organization called Larger Us. It's about the kind of way collective psychological forces are affecting the political world. The phrase we use a lot is this: "Our states of mind create the state of the world, and the state of the world creates our states of mind."

Brandon: Amazing.

Elizabeth: And so I think if we see this deep tendency to disconnection in ourselves, we would expect to see it in the world. And if we see it in the world, we would expect for it to be forming us, right? This cultural story is part of our formation, which is one of those old concepts from my religion that I have found to be remarkably helpful. It just means who we are becoming and the fact that we have some agency in that. But in the religious sense, who we are becoming is not — we just need to strip off all our bad programming and heal from all our trauma and make all the systems just. None of those things I think are bad, by the way. But it's not, we need to get back to this pure state of the 'tabula rasa' — humans are default good, and it's the systems that are bad. It's that we inherit a complicity and an entanglement with disconnection and fracture and sin. We need to move forward and towards love and towards connection and towards healing and towards restoration and reconciliation. That helps me, because it's not that I think I'm this terrible, fallen. I'm not a Calvinist who's total depravity. I know enough about myself to not think deep down, left on my own, I would naturally make good and loving choices.

Brandon: Yeah, that's great. So I love the way you've organized the book, along the lines of that kind of development into becoming a different kind of person. I appreciate especially the vulnerability with which you've shared your own story and your own struggles on all these fronts, and moving from polarization to peacemaking on the sin of wrath, and then moving from suffocation to gratitude and generosity when it comes to avarice, from distraction to attention, from status anxiety to belovedness, from numbing to ecstasy, from objectification to sexual humanism, from individualism to community. Would you say that these are universal longings? Is this what it means to flourish for all people, like we all want to have these inner movements in order to flourish? Is this a particular conception?

Elizabeth: I'm just not at temperament to claim anything as universal, to be honest, Brandon. I'm just not sure that's knowable by the human mind. Insufficient data, and always insufficient data. The book is a funny thing, right? It took a long time to get the courage to write it because the model that we have for non-fiction books is basically claiming universal thesis. So this is something we haven't understood. This is a new lens on the world. I find those books not always that helpful. The things I find helpful are honest, human stories of how we all wrestle with these deep, metaphysical things woven with ideas. And so all I have really felt able to do is tell my story of feeling very existentially overwhelmed a lot of the time by our concept and where I went looking for steadiness of soul, and where I found a sense of actually some agency and some relief in these very, very old spiritual pathways. The reception of the book and the people that have read it, my guess, is there's a lot that we share in these longings. I think probably we are made for a relationship and deep connection with ourselves and other people in the world. And yes, God is what I think is probably universal. But that's my theological anthropology speaking.

Brandon: Sure, yeah. I'm in the middle of, well, finished data collection for this project on spiritual yearning among scientists. We're looking, in particular, in scientists who are not religious. It is an interesting question that we're trying to get at is whether these longings for connection are universal or not. Because there are some people who tell us, "I don't even know what you mean by connection. I can't even imagine what that would mean." So maybe some people are on musical, as Max Weber would put it, when it comes to religion or spirituality, or it's just that we don't have the right way to articulate an experience that is happening.

Elizabeth: So I would love you to go away and do this bit of work that I'm not qualified to do, which is that my current working hypothesis is it's about hemispheric formation. I am very influenced by the work of Iain McGilchrist. I think that when I'm talking about connection and relationship and interdependence, it's a very right-hemispheric model of the world. He would say that's the master, right? That's designed to be the master. That hemispheric form of attention is designed and is able to give a more accurate picture of the world as it really is, right? This is key. We live in a world that encourages left hemispheric forms of attention. And because of neuroplasticity, the more you use one form of attention, the more that strengthens, you lose touch with the other one. And for people who say, "I don't even know what you mean by this connection," I would love to find some way to test have they had many left-hemispheric forms of attention. Is it actually they've lost, yeah, probably lost a connection with the mother tongue because of what they've been paying attention to, rather than it's not inherent in all of us? But obviously, that is because I want to prove my thesis and I might be wrong.

Brandon: I think there's something to it. I know Iain McGilchrist's work is a bit debated as to whether those hemispheres actually map on to how the brain really works. But I think there's something to that. I mean, there's some literature on absorption that Tanya Luhrmann has talked about in her work. It seems that some people are more naturally inclined to spiritual experiences, but others can learn it, as she did. And so maybe this is a capacity that is underdeveloped.

Elizabeth: That's where I'm landing on it, and it's why the God bit is at the end of the book. Because I want it to be useful to people who don't know what they think. Most of my friends are atheists. I have a soft spot for them. I think there's wisdom here, even if the god bit is really an open question for you. But it is, if you want to believe and currently don't, which more and more people are admitting to me, that the practices and the postures and the rituals are forms of attention that might actually make it easier to believe. It's not that it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It's that something about the way you pay attention changes what we're able to believe or not, what we rule in or rule out.

(break)

You're listening to Beauty at Work. This podcast is made possible through support from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

Brandon: Say a little bit about some of those practices, because you talked a lot about practices in the book. Are there things you might recommend to people who are in that position of saying, "Gosh, I'm intrigued by these spiritual experiences that others are having. I've never had anything like it. I don't think I can get myself to believe there's anything more than that in some molecules. What do I do?"

Elizabeth: Honestly, my advice is so basic that people find it quite shocking. Go to church. The Christian bit is massively off putting for you. That's where I'm coming from. That's my mother tongue. Go somewhere else. But go to a religious congregation and be there for a while. I think the way we think about spirituality in the west at the moment is hyper individualized. This is very, very, very unworked out. But the next thing I want to be working on is how central the collective is in religious traditions and, therefore, how collective formation is the thing that really changes us. I think when we pay attention, in the same way with other people, it has massively more power than just like lighting a candle in our room. I'm not dismissing any of this. Meditation is good. Those mystical forms of prayer, all good. I think if you really want to develop this capacity on yourself, go be with other people. That's what Pascal said in Pascal's wager, which is not really about heaven and hell at all. It's much more this very honest, beautiful — I mean, I had this huge intellectual crush on Pascal. It is beautiful. He's having this argument with himself. This evidence points this way. This evidence points this way. What should I do? He's basically like, go to church. Go be with people who believe. Because we know that beliefs are caught, not taught. Or everything we know about, how we come to conclusions, is in relationships, et cetera, et cetera. So basically, don't try and do it on your own. Join something.

Brandon: Yeah, I was really struck by that part of your book. I wasn't aware of that aspect of Pascal's life. I think, as he put it, it was something like, go spend time with people who've solved the problems you're trying to solve. There's something about that modeling yourself after those who have shown the path in some way, right?

Elizabeth: Yeah, we have this like, it's a legacy particular kind of Protestant evangelism. We have this kind of, I can't show up in a religious congregation unless I believe these following things. But frankly, half of the people in that religious congregation won't believe all those things on any given day, anyway. I don't. Like not half the time but some of the time. It is much more about, what am I committing myself to pay attention to? Who do I want to be becoming, and where am I most likely to be becoming that person? On the days where I don't believe any of this, I still go to church because I think that is the path that's going to help me become the kind of person the world needs and the kind of person I want to grow up into. But there's this beautiful line. He says, okay, go to church. Be with people who already believe this. But what are you afraid of — so it's this dialog between himself — that, in so doing, I will come to believe? Basically, isn't that what you want? There's this like, "I don't want to be conned. Isn't that fake? Shouldn't I be able to get there on my own?" Again, I think this understanding of what attention is like and how we actually change our mind, which is not usually working out a hypothesis in our head but in relationship and in community and through the testimony of people that we trust, really helps people just relax in all of that.

Brandon: There's a lot in what you're saying here that I think applies to one aspect of our current crisis, which is polarization. There's some interesting research by the Polarization Lab at Duke that has tried to expose people to different perspectives, and it seems that they only get more entrenched in their beliefs if they're exposed to other perspectives. I want to ask you a little bit about how we become peacemakers and how we move from just hanging out with people like me to people who are not like me. You say a lot about that in your chapter on wrath. But I want to first ask you for that excellent story that you shared about getting onto the bus and being confronted by this lady while you're sitting with your child. Could you share that story? Because I just found that incredibly striking, and there's a lot that we could learn from over there.

Elizabeth: Yes, I think I'm understanding how much we all have this instinctive preference for people like ourselves. It's called homophily in the literature. I call it "people like me syndrome." By how much is exacerbated and accelerated by fight or flight and by, frankly, being tired and grumpy and having low resources. And so this was one day when our kids were quite young, and we didn't have a car. I was picking one of them up from nursery and one of them up from school. They were maybe even younger than that. I got on a bus, and it was empty. I sat one child on their own seat either side of me. A woman got on the bus, and she was so rude. She said, "Move your child." I was like, "Well, there's free seats. There's another free seat there." She said, "I want to sit there. Move your child." I was just like, wow. Okay. I dragged my very large toddler onto my lap and said — I'm really embarrassed about this. I was so snarky. I was like, "I am trying to teach my children good manners. You could use a please or a thank you." Then she sat down, and we sat there. I don't know if you've ever had this, but I was just so full of rage. Just like, how dare you? I wish I'd said no, you know, muttering to myself, basically. I could feel her tension and her annoyance. There was both of us in this confined space, super stressed.

For whatever reason, I'd been reading about this parenting technique of do overs. I knew we had a while to go on this bus, and I thought I don't want to sit here feeling this disgusting rage and resentment. So I just said, "Should we start again? My name is Elizabeth. What's your name?" And it completely transformed the situation. She laughed. It discharged some of the stress hormone, I think, is what it does. It's unexpected. She told me her name. I said, where do you live? We got chatting. She'd been to the hospital, and she was in pain. And her particular type of pain, I have experienced. So we had something in common, right? Then vulnerability gets in the mix. We had a really lovely, lovely, lovely conversation. Towards the end of the bus journey, the bus had super filled up. I don't know if you have this. But on London buses, there's an area where you park your buggies, strollers. Then someone had got on, and there was always two strollers. Someone else had got on, and they were like shoving the stroller around. They're like, who's this, who's this? I couldn't get out because I had a kid on my lap, and it was too crowded in. The woman next to me just was like, "Would you give her a minute? She's doing her best."

Brandon: It's amazing.

Elizabeth: So we left the bus having completely transformed it because of this very simple thing of just being willing to change the dynamic a little bit.

Brandon: How have you seen that kind of transformation play out, either in the communities you're in or elsewhere in the world? How can we actually, in these polarized times where you don't want to trust other people, we've got fixed opinions on the US, now we have elections coming up pretty soon — I think this is intensifying — is there any anything we could learn in terms of moving in that direction?

Elizabeth: Yeah, lots. I mean, there's this podcast that I host that we're trying to model this. I think it is one of those strange things that's actually a really simple thing in us and we can take very simple steps, but there is no scaffolding for it and there is no teaching around it. I'll summarize it. The two things you need to know is homophily, which is people like me syndrome. Everyone prefers people who remind them of themselves. It's a constant across cultures and centuries. It doesn't make you a terrible person. You have to keep an eye on it and be deliberately spending time with people not like yourself and listening to people not like yourself, and noticing in you the ridiculous preferences of people who wear the same glasses as you or remind you of — you know, I saw someone on the train the other day is using the same brand of pen that I really like and seek out. My brain went, they seem like a good person. Right? It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous but we all do it. And we need to keep an eye on it and the way that fight or flight increases our homophily accelerates our desire for people like ourselves.

And so the way that we change that is we notice when we're triggered, and we do this thing that Jesus talked about which is turning the other cheek. Turning the other cheek is a really enigmatic phrase. If you're not someone that gets hit in the face, like it comes from, when someone strikes you in the face, turn the other cheek. It's really famous, but it's really hard to know how to apply if you're not regularly being struck in the face. I came to understand it as a very deliberate, quite badass way that we can respond to any situation of threat, social discomfort, conflict. Because when someone attacks you, demeans you, disagrees with you, dismisses your identity, or your tribe, or your group, or your political position, we get a flood of stress hormone triggered into fight or flight. I won't go into freeze and fawn. The natural reaction is, therefore, to attack back or to withdraw into our tribes and our parallel communities. And what turning the other cheek means is keeping the conversation open, keeping the relationship open, keeping the connection open. What that often cashes out into is rather than responding with anger, asking a question. Help me understand. I can hear you're angry. Or, would you like to come for dinner, which is where I usually land.

Brandon: That's great. I want to ask you a little bit about the move from greed to generosity and gratitude. This, again, I think is one aspect of our crisis we're in. And going back to Hartmut, he talks about this constant situation we're in of wanting more and more things to be available to us and then accessible and attainable, right? So we're in this rat race because we're constantly chasing after attaining those things that are increasingly becoming accessible to us in the world, right? There are many ways in which I think you're suggesting that religious communities and practices and traditions can help us put a stop to this constant chasing. Could you say a little bit about the practices and decisions you've made in order to make this move from avarice to gratitude and generosity?

Elizabeth: I mean, I feel like I'm a hypocrite in all these areas. This is the worst. I feel like such a beginner. The way we've set up economic story to be repeatedly accelerating our avarice means, I think, we're all formed into being hypocrites. Oliver James, who is not religious at all as far as I know, talks about this a lot in Affluenza. That one of the key ways that this, he talks about affluenza as a virus, this insatiable hunger for more and more and more and never being satisfied with enough, having no concept of enough. That forms of religious practice are one of the only known antidotes to affluenza. Because the claim, and it's a truth claim, of my tradition is not only that money won't make you happy, but that it is dangerous for your soul.

Christianity, in particular, is like radically ambivalent about money and wealth in particular. Love of money is root of all evil. There's ways you can nuance these verses. But if you look at it as straightforwardly as you can, the accumulation of wealth is bad for us. I still want to accumulate wealth. But I, at least, am attempting to be formed by a story that is calling that into question and reminding me what actually helps me flourish, which, again, we know from the positive psychology literature which basically agrees with religion, which is deep relationships, being in community which, again, collective religious practice helps you with, sense of meaning and purpose in your life, a level of freedom and health which, actually, randomly, religious people do tend to be healthier. We're not quite sure what the mechanism is there. So yes, that kind of the way religion has some claims about what a good life is and what's important and it's not getting rich, and then continually remind you of it and gives you rituals and practices and forms of attention to be acting as some kind of antidote to the economic story is where I think it's paralyzed in this area.

Brandon: It's really helpful for you to talk about the way in which, again, living in community with other people forces you to share details about your economic lives or even make decisions to tithe. I think you had mentioned you would stop buying new clothing, for instance. Those are all very challenging practices for, I think, most of us to think about. But yeah, I do think something like that seems to be needed to put the brakes on the constant hamster wheel we're on. I want to ask a little bit about pride and the movement out of individualism. You quote Oliver Burkeman who says that, "Freedom is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community, participating in forms of social life where you don't get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it." It sounds really paradoxical, right? How do you achieve freedom by submitting to constraint, especially almost subjecting yourself to other people, right? Again, it seems, in our individualistic times, this is really an affront to many of us. But what has your experience been of living in community and how you found freedom in this experience?

Elizabeth: Yeah, it's one of the most entrenched lies that we tell about what a good life is. More autonomy. Another thing that Oliver Burkeman says is that the way that cash is out in our society is the freedom to never see your friends, right? All that autonomy lives us immensely lonely. And as I believe, we are made for each other, and we are made by each other. We are relational into our bones. You can do that through your Trinitarian theological anthropology, but you can also do it through sociology, understanding the mirror neurons. There are many, many ways that we are coming to know that we are, that there is a myth of the individual, just we're more like those trees with all the roots connected under the surface.

So living in community has involved releasing some autonomy over my time. We have some really quite rigorous commitments to each other. We get up and do morning prayer. We do compline. Wednesday night is house night. Friday morning, we read the Bible together. Once a month, we have a house day that we spend together. Monday evenings, we host big open table dinners. Like, I'd say a third of my time every week is spent with commitments to this very small community and what we want to do together, which restricts other bits of my life. But I have felt like I've grown up my soul more living in community for three years than the previous 20 years. It is one of those claims of religion that doesn't make much sense outside that imaginative world. But my experience is that, in creating some covenant commitments to the things I want to be defining my life and the things I want to be being formed by, I feel more free. It's weird.

Brandon: I think it's a challenge, even for people in religious communities. One of the research projects we did, we found that people who were really active in their faith communities in the US, anyway, rarely share their personal struggles and problems with others in their faith community. And so there's maybe a desire to keep up appearances or just no clear sort of practices, right? No sort of mechanisms by which one would do that. Where we found some variation there, we found that it was the Catholic and Jewish communities that did the worst. The best were the African-American protestants, black Baptists in particular, who have practices of coming together and asking for prayer and receiving prayer. So you don't share problems as venting but as an experience where someone loves you. I think we have a lot to learn about the kinds of practices, even in faith communities, that are genuinely going to foster connection and vulnerability. Because the church can be a really alienating experience for a lot of people.

Elizabeth: Yeah, can I offer a hypothesis about that?

Brandon: Yeah.

Elizabeth: I think you should do some cross tabulation around economics. Because I write about it in the avarice chapter. I think that one of the things that disconnects us is — the reason that money is warned against is for, I'm sure, reasons that I don't understand. But I have come to believe that it's because it relationally distances us from each other because we don't need each other. We are designed to meet each other's needs. And what kind of this state of capitalism does is it encourages us to be able to meet all of our own needs and find our own safety. Because other people are annoying, frankly, and it's difficult being vulnerable and asking for help. And if, as my understandings are correct, the kind of black Baptist populations in the US have historically been poorer, then the context of interdependence that's economic may be as important as the practice and the postures and the theology for helping them actually show up and know themselves and see and be seen, and love and be loved.

Brandon: Yeah, that's something for us to look into. Yeah.

Elizabeth: I'm sorry. I'm just giving you tasks to obtain things I'm interested in.

Brandon: No, it's very helpful. This is, I mean, yeah, we're trying to figure out, make sense of the mechanisms too and to understand, would we find differences in wealthier communities and maybe more of a desire to keep people away? Certainly, their houses are bigger and further distanced from each other, so that itself communicates something.

Elizabeth: Yeah, and that envy status thing, like, we are formed by a story about not wanting or needing help. I think that's what we've seen is, really.

Brandon: Right, yeah. I mean, you've had a lot of people in your community who come to your dinners are not people of faith. Are there ways in which people who are believers and non-believers can learn from each other when it comes to this longing for wholeness, living a fully-human life?

Elizabeth: I just think listening is the heart of everything good. It's annoying because it sounds so boring, and it's really not boring. I believe that a good, honest question is a holy thing and that asking each other real questions and then really listening to what is beneath the surface of each other. I have almost no tolerance for small talk. It means I'm quite intense in person. I think I'm sometimes a bit too intense. But the thing that happens at our dinners often is that we just get into actual heart-to-heart conversations about the things that mean the most of us. Then we listen to each other. No one is like, I am right and you are wrong, and turn or burn. It's much more, we are meaning seeking creatures with these longings. We don't always know what to do with them, but we're probably better working out together than we are doing in part.

Brandon: You leave the God question towards the end of the book, and you have God in square brackets throughout. Could you say a bit about that choice? Perhaps, how do people who may have been hurt by religion or by a concept of God, what do you recommend for people who are in that position?

Elizabeth: Oh, it's such a tender thing. I have much of that in my story. Some days, I'm like, how can there be any goodness in here given the absolute institutional carnage and the repeated failure of Christians in public and then Christians like myself, right? I put the God word in square brackets because it is the most semiotically dense three letters in the English language and, I think, assuming that everyone means the same thing by it, is foolish. We're all dragging our associations into that gap. I'm really aware that, for a lot of people, I sort of want to have a duty of care to the reader. I remember what it was like when I was at least trying to be an atheist. I remember what it was like before I was a Christian. You can set off an emotional firestorm. This question of, is there love, is there a logic of love in the universe? Like, am I seeing, is there justice? It doesn't look like it a lot of the time, right? These are very tender, complex, intimate, private questions. And so I left it to last because I wanted to build up trust in the reader, that I wasn't going to take those bruises or those risks glibly and that we would treat it with care and with, I hope, appropriate humility, of so much I don't claim to know any of it. I think having been out of the church and then in it and then out of it and now sort of slightly reluctantly and grumpily but properly in it again, I always come back to, to whom else shall we go? I've sort of looked everywhere else for wisdom. This path seems to be the one most likely to make me feel fully alive and fully human. That there's treasure in the rubble, and we can focus on that bit.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. I realize you have to run. Is there any anything you'd like to add, in terms of maybe a question that you wish people would ask you about the book that people haven't yet, or anything else you want to leave us with?

Elizabeth: No, we don't have time for it. But it's hilarious to me that I've written a whole chapter on lust, which is very direct about the Christian sexual ethic. I wrote it very frank, and no one is brave enough to go there. So I would say, if you are interested in sex, go read that bit. But otherwise, no. Thank you for your beautiful and thoughtful questions. It's been really fun.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. It's been a delight. Where can we direct our viewers and listeners to your work?

Elizabeth: So I have a Substack, morefullyalive@substack.com, The Sacred podcast, or buy the book.

Brandon: Perfect. Yeah. Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive. I highly recommend it. Thank you so much for joining us again. It's been such a pleasure.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much for having me.