Podcast

Make Saints is a podcast by Drew Downs.
Because (eternal) life is hard.

Eternal
Episode 5 of the Make Saints podcast.

Grab your phone. Go ahead. This shouldn’t be long.

Now open your photos app. You probably have the most recent photos at the top or bottom of the screen. I’ve got mine open and aside from the picture I accidentally took of my screen while playing last week’s /On Being/ podcast, I’m looking at pictures I intended to take. The most recent are from Saturday. Just a few days ago. I went with my family down to New Harmony. It was a lot of fun.

I have pictures of us goofing and the sign outside the Roofless Church.

I keep swiping and I see a video my wife took when she stole my phone, some pictures of the kitten, some of the church I took a couple of weeks ago, more kitty pictures, a sign I wanted to remember, and you know, all the other stuff. So many pictures of family, moments, and things I wanted to remember.

Looking through my photos, arranged as they are in reverse chronological order, I can travel back in time to experience again some truly incredible memories.

Of course, not everything is incredible. Some of it I can’t even remember.

Time Travel

This really is a form of time travel. To use our memories to re-experience the past. And because the past exists in our memories we actually change the past every time we remember it. How does this happen? Because every time we recall a memory, we /engage/with it. We are creating a new experience in the present as we reengage with that moment from the past. Our present experience overwrites the memory on our mind’s harddrive!

In other words, we don’t just travel through time, we travel through time and can’t help but change it.

This leads to a couple of essential ideas:
1. We are all locked into the present.We can’t actually dwell in the past or be focused on the future because our minds keep us always rooted in the present. But our past also, isn’t only what has happened. It actually only exists as memory. Which then means…
2. Our sense of the past keeps changing as we change it.That idealized past gets rosier and rosier. The terrible events get…terribler. Because we are not re-experiencing the past each time, we are re-experiencing a re-experience of the past. This is why our memories are not reliable sources of information. Even eyewitnesses.
That’s the past. What about the future?

That you and I live in an eternal present doesn’t just mean that we experience the past in the present, it is also how we experience the future.

Those of us who struggle with anxiety know this better than anyone. Thinking about the future brings a present response in our bodies. Often a tightening in the chest and a foggy brain.

This is, in part because our present selves look at the past to interpret the future, so it draws on those re-experienced re-experiences to predict what tomorrow will look like.

To protect our bodies from danger, our brains create obvious physical responses. But we aren’t born with these canned responses. Nor do our bodies maintain the same responses, unchanged throughout our lives. Our bodies learn from each stressful situation, remapping the neural pathways in our brains and even rewriting the epigenetics in our DNA. Traumatic experiences traumatize our bodies and transform them at the cellular level. Changes that we can pass on to our children through our DNA.

In other words, victims of abuse, enslavement, and great trauma pass that trauma onto their children and their children’s children. So the descendents of enslaved persons may today bear the victimhood of their ancestors.

Past and Future collide in our present.

Which is both scary and strangely comforting. Because it means that we are capable in our present to deal with our past and invite a future that is healed from its trauma.

This doesn’t happen when we ignore our past or pretend it was different. It happens when we seek to be healed from our past and refrain from revictimizing ourselves and our loved ones.

We can embody Margaret Meade’s famous guidance: that we become the change we want to see in the world.

This is the human context for the word “eternal”.

A word flush with spiritual significance and metaphysical certainty. We prop it up with heady concepts about the perpetuity of existence and the changelessness of the cosmos.

As a philosophical concept, the way we usually define eternity and eternal existence actually resembles an existential prison, trapping the imperfect now in an imperfect forever. It is also a kind of prison of the mind in which our present awareness is replicated out into a potential never ending perpetuality.

And then we have the audacity to think that is comforting. Even as we read stories with vampires who crave the death they can never experience—cursed by immortality which has them experience over and over the agonies of life without the relief of life having an end. We recognize that this vision of eternal life is torture.

Defining eternal as perpetuating our present imperfection forever is not just a mental prison, but a spiritual one as well. It stunts our growth and discourages an awareness of our persistent need to change. We become locked in who we think we are while our body and world changes around us.

But…if we remember that we experience eternity in our present life, in our bodies, and in our experiences with other people, eternity takes on a whole new meaning.

It sounds like living. In the now. And choosing to become who we dream to become. Because none of us ever stays the same forever.
Nov 11, 2021
Complexity
Episode 4 of the Make Saints podcast.

The problem with complexity is that it can feel overwhelming.

The problem with feeling overwhelmed is that we are willing to take shortcuts to make the pain go away.

Here are three ways we usually deal with complexity:
1. simplify
2. harmonize
3. give up
In this episode, I offer us a different way to look at complexity

When you wake up with a mental to-do list that makes you feel like staying in bed is really a better option.

Or you’re trying to figure out how to literally be in two places at once…because…family.

Or the thing you’re trying to solve is one you just know others have solved.

The problem isn’t merely the things we’re avoiding. It’s all of this. What we’re wrestling with isn’t just a thing. But the whole thing.

In other words, our problem is often complexity itself.

We are all familiar with the idea of complexity. That everything about life is complex and complicated. We all have a thousand things we’re all trying to do at the same time. And much like civic engineers try to figure out how to get all of us to where we need to be as quickly and safely as possible, our minds are trying to do the same thing with our existence.

And sometimes we can get a little overwhelmed. It all feels like it is just too much.

There are basically three ways of dealing with complexity.

The first is to simplify the problem.

This is what we do when we try to take a really complicated problem and make it _less s_o.

Simplifying a problem is a direct relief on the brain because it goes straight at the pain and discomfort caused by complexity. When our brains are on fire, simplifying the thing that is causing the fire feels like a bucket of water. /Ahhh. Relaxing./

The thing about simplifying a complex problem is that doing it well is really hard. And to make up for that, we usually take short cuts. In other words, if simplifying complexity were simple, we’d all just do it. This is a bit like telling yourself to just be happy when you’re sad. It actually can work. It just doesn’t usually work that way.

Essentially, there are two methods of simplifying complexity: the summary and the theorem. Or, if you like, the Reader’s Digest vs. The Expert.

One way of simplifying a complex issue is to imagine turning a novel into a paragraph. This is usually what we do when arguing with each other on social media. /Here’s the big issue and let me turn that whole big messy reality into a single, important idea…/

This is obviously an effective strategy for whittling complex issues down, but a lot of what we cut away doesn’t stop being important just because it didn’t make the executive summary. Often, it is the governing by executive summary that leads us to miss essential details that continue to cause problems.

The other method is what we usually /think/ we’re doing…or at least what we expect out of each other. Expertise in an area and familiarity with the material leads us to make decisions about what stays and what goes. Unlike the executive summary, it is expertise that leads us to pithy conclusions and brilliant analogies.

Of course, we can’t all be experts, so expertise relies on trust—that they really do know what they are doing. That we really can expect certain outcomes. And just because we rely on…financial experts, for instance…that doesn’t mean we won’t see a market crash.

The thing about simplifying a problem, regardless of method, is that it relies on taking shortcuts. And shortcuts have a way of leading to unexpected places.

The second way way we deal with complexity is to harmonize the problem.

Imagine a hundred voices singing at once. Unless they are all both 1)singing the same song 2)at the same time, it will be a cacophony—the musical form of chaos.

Harmonizing brings order to the chaos of complexity by imposing structure to the problem. In the case of all those singers, it means ordering them all to sing the same song at the same time, and most importantly, in a complementary way. In very real terms: to harmonize.

This is a pretty solid idea to bring order out of chaos, isn’t it? Well…at least if you actually have control over picking the song and the timing and the parts that everybody gets to sing. If you don’t, then…you’re really imposing an order that doesn’t inherently exist. So it might solve one problem but introduce another.

Another example of this comes from a really old problem with the Bible.

As those early followers of Jesus were sharing gospel stories and settling on what would eventually become the Bible, they quickly discovered a problem: four different gospels telling four different stories about Jesus. A lot of it matches, especially among three of them. But nowhere near everything.

When we think of the Bible as authoritative about Jesus’s l_ife_, what do we do with what looks like conflict or incompatible conditions? For some, the answer was simple: harmonize them. Make it so there is no conflict.

How exactly did they do that? It generally meant making up rules that would allow for conflicting truths to be real at the same time. So, for instance, Jesus heads to Jerusalem and goes to the Temple at the end of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. It’s part of the big climax we call The Passion. But John has Jesus visit at the beginning. So, to harmonize the four gospels we can simply say /Jesus visited twice/, even though the story only appears once in any one gospel.

Another famous example is how Mel Gibson rendered the last words of Jesus in his movie /The Passion of the Christ/. Jesus says different things from the cross in each of the gospels, but Gibson includes all of them in he movie.

Unlike simplifying, which often ignores the stuff we don’t want to deal with, harmonizing has a way of writing over that stuff like its a previous draft on the hard drive. It helps relieve the anxiety of complexity by artificially changing the problem itself.

This leads to the third way of dealing with complexity: giving up.

Complexity isn’t just overwhelming. It can feel insurmountable and eternal. And for many people who realize that we’ve too often oversimplified the problem, relying on shortcuts that keep leading to dead ends, or we’re surrounded by people trying to harmonize a complex problem that doesn’t want to be harmonized, we see no other way out.

This is especially true when we’ve spent so much time deluding ourselves or striving to make things better without the clear eyes of why the situation is complex to begin with. We can easily feel defeated. But at least it lets us be honest, right?

Well, I do think we need to face the prospect of giving up before we can face the truth.

Complexity is fueled by dishonesty and avoidance. It is the quintessential “easy way out”.

So the only way out of complexity is to _stop_making it so complex. Stop avoiding, lying, taking short cuts.

And start doing the work.

Because your life is full of complexity. But certain things do feel pretty simple. And I would argue that it isn’t because they are (everything is interwoven—everything is part of complexity), but because you’ve gained enough insight to transform that complexity into something we call simplicity.

Mathematicians master complex algorithms by doing the work. And then, over time, what happens? Complex ideas snap into place.

There is no real secret to solving complexity. Quite the opposite. It’s all the secrets that we think are there that make complexity into a bogeyman to frighten us, an adversary to outwit, or a monster to overcome.

And the solution is the thing we’ve been avoiding the whole time: the work.
Nov 4, 2021
All (Saints)

What it means to look past the saintly.

Episode 3 of the Make Saints podcast: “All (Saints)”

the episode script

November 1st is All Saints’ Day. The day we honor the saints of the church.
November 2nd is All Souls’ Day. The day we honor everybody else.

For many churches, the focus is on All Saints’ Day. And we tend to just sort of…throw it all together into one big pot and hope the stew turns out.

There are the official saints and then there are those people in our lives we think are saintly, so we throw them in there. And yeah, maybe your Dad was kind of a pain in the butt, but you know, you also don’t really want to imagine he’s in the bad place, so you may as well toss him in, too.

This is what I’ve experienced in the church myself around this particular holy day. People want to remember the people they have loved living among the saints in heaven.

Which is kind of an interesting remix of the two days together if we think about it.

—

Some parts of the church have rebranded All Souls’ Day as All the Faithful Departed, which sounds pretty regal and dignified, doesn’t it? And let’s be honest, a lot less bleak than “All Souls’.”

But there’s a move there that we should notice: it shrinks the pool of candidates. It changes the mix and the purpose to lift up those loved ones while boxing out others.

All the faithful departed implies only the faithful who have died. So yes, your blessed grandparents and your Dad and, yes, even that no good, deadbeat cousin. He got dunked for Jesus, so he’s good to get in. But the billions of others? Suddenly we’ve stopped being interested.

So those grieving the loss of family and friends this year, they can really step into this All Saints’ deal with gusto knowing that these faithful departed are indeed among the saints.

Which…again…is not quite it.

—

What is the word that All Saints and All Souls have in common? All. I know, crazy.

The point is that these are different days in which we hallow our saints—honor them as holy—and then the next day, we turn all of our attention to honoring all souls. Not just the people we love. Or like. Or tolerate some of the time. All of them.

We do these separate so that we can take time to honor our saints. And no, we don’t have to be canon lawyers about it, but if we only talk about fishing trips with Uncle Steve, it is hard to see the multitude of voices who have displayed the love of God to the world.

And if we don’t get the time to pray for the whole world and all of creation, we are bound to place ourselves: our needs, values, and commitments: above our neighbors.

And worse, we’re bound to see our dead neighbors as collateral damage to our supreme cause.

We already have a problem with only counting our country’s own casualties in war. Now add to that all of the coups, global supply chains, economic coercion, and the multitudinous ways we other our neighbors and call them less than us.

We don’t need yet another day to remember the people we always remember. We do need reminding that all souls are worthy.

—

If we can’t keep these celebrations separate, then we must strive to recognize what we’re trying to name with pairing these ideas together.

Yes, your favorite people can be numbered among the saints. Yes, that is great and true and I hope you find peace in this.

But let us focus less on the saint and more on the all.

Nov 1, 2021
Halloween

Halloween is a holy day.

I was an adult before I realized that some Christians boycott Halloween. For me, Halloween was something everyone did. You dressed up, roamed the neighborhood looking for porchlights which equals nice people who give you candy.

We also brought our costumes to school so that we could have parties and parade around the school. I had one friend who didn’t participate, but he couldn’t participate in /any/ celebration. His family was Jehovah’s Witness, so he had to spend our elementary class parties in the school library. I don’t remember /anyone/ else not joining in, but I’m sure there were.

The thing about not digging on Halloween is that I do get it. Watching my pre-adolescent friends try to outgross each other, dressing up as fictitious mass murderers so popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s – it is hard to say these are examples of high moral standing.

And the principal event itself, of going around begging for things that have no nutritional value while threatening to “trick them” in some way if we do get our way – we’re teaching our kids both greed and extortion.

Of course, none of us /really/ sees it that way.

—

The irony for all of this talk is that Halloween is a Christian holiday. Well…sort of.

Halloween, Hallowe’en, All Hallows’ Eve is the evening before All Hallows’ Day, better known as All Saints’ Day. And All Saints’ Day is pretty self-explanatory. It is the day Christians celebrate the saints.

Now, I’m making this podcast called Make Saints and I’ve got this plan to never explicitly define or speak at length about what a saint is because, well, it’s a bit on the nose.

But this day is the day we honor them. Actually, we /hallow/ them, which means to honor as holy.

So we /hallow/the saints on November 1. What then is the Hallow’s Eve about?

Well…it’s about playing dead.

—

The thing we need to remember about Christians is that they are obsessed with death. Now, you might get the exact opposite impression from some of the people you know who yammer on about life, and really they aren’t all together wrong. It’s just missing this /other/ thing.

There’s a reason the people thought the first followers of Jesus were freaks and cannibals. They were always going on and on about this dead guy, eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and dying to themselves.

If you went to church on Easter, which, of course was inside someone’s house, you’d see people being dunked underwater, which is probably no big deal because we’re all familiar with baptism. But we might be a bit horrified by the pool being shaped like a sarcophagus. And we would get the very real impression that people were intentionally being drowned by the priest.

And what you would hear is that they were dying that day to be reborn.

Death and life are intertwined…and inseparable.

So if we fast forward to the medieval era, with more macabre tastes and experiences, you’d see yet another vision life and death.

So Christians started to play on All Hallows’ Eve – not unlike Mardi Gras and Fat Tuesday, preparing for the holy day ahead. And, with a bit of the same bite.

—

The idea of play, acting, telling scary stories: this stuff that is at the heart of Halloween: is a beautiful and rebellious act of learning and growing. In it, we explore our dreams and nightmares in ways that allow our waking minds some level of safety that only our unconscious generally affords us.

It allows us to face our demons in real life. And regard them as nothing but children in costumes.

Halloween gives us the chance to laugh in the face of evil and death and say /you can’t actually hurt me/.

And, as to all of that blessed candy we’ll accumulate and of which we will devise creative ways to dispose, our children will be treated to welcome and generosity.

As traditions go, there are few more fundamentally faithful than this.

Happy Halloween, all you ghouls and goblins

Oct 30, 2021
Perfect

Who do you look up to? That act that we look up implies that they are above us. Whoever “they” is. Above. Better. And…well…perfect.

We aren’t supposed to be perfect. Even you.

We think saints are perfect.

Perfectly patient.
When we see the most obnoxious person in the entire world and we see their spouse gazing up at them, what do we say? She must be a saint.

Perfectly patient and kind.
That same person doesn’t just put up with the most obnoxious person in the world, but they make sure the waiter knows their work is appreciated.What a saint.

Perfectly patient and kind and beyond reproach.
They don’t screw up. Ever. No broken fuses. Or dirty dishes in the sink. They are on it all. the. time.I wish I could be like that.

None of this makes a person a saint. Saints aren’t perfect. That’s not even close to part of the deal.

Saints are flawed, messed up people who also happen to stand up when others sit. Zig when others zag. Yes, they can be kind when others are mean. But few saints are any more kind than the young person working the drive-thru at Chick-fil-a.

Saints aren’t perfect. So don’t even try to be.

—

I don’t understand where this even comes from. A quick glance at a collection of saints and perfection is not what should come to mind. Sacrifice is the far more common denominator. To qualify for sainthood, one doesn’t have to ace the goodness test. Like at all. One of the easiest ways is to die some gruesome death while being persecuted. Which, I feel contractually obligated to tell you is not desirable.

Other things that are saintly involve writing, composing music, or preaching well. Let me tell you, there are a bunch of us using that lane to achieve sainthood. So, it’s pretty crowded.
You could give your life to a serious cause to end human suffering. Or come up with a revolutionary theological insight. This is probably where we get that terrible idea about perfection. These people are brilliant. Or incredibly lucky. In other words, these are the reason you hope God isn’t grading on a curve.

Saints come in all different forms. Human forms. Normal people forms. Not perfect. Or impossibly good. Just…People. Like us.

—

I recently read that perfectionism isn’t what we think it is. It isn’t about being perfect, but it’s an expression of fear. Fear of bringing a project to an end. Fear of letting other people judge our work. Like intending to start a podcast seven years ago and never doing it because you don’t have the “right” idea. It isn’t just right. Needing it to be perfect is avoiding the heat of actually doing something well.Perfectionism, like a lot of things in life is a name we give a phenomenon to send ourselves off the scent. Our interior selves, the detectives on the case of self-awareness, know where to look. They see us working over and over on a project.

Something that once made us excited and now…its dragging. We watch ourselves go over it again and again. Trying to get it just right. And then we have the diagnosis: perfectionism.
But our brains are really quite skilled at self-deception. The pursuit of perfection is what our brains want us to think. That’s how it covers its tracks. That’s why perfectionism as a fault sounds like the thing you say in a job interview. When they ask you what is your biggest weakness and you say “I work too hard” or “I care too much.” It’s a way our brains hide a negative behind a positive.

Being imperfect isn’t a negative though. Our brains are totally misguided about this one. They are protecting us from the pain of realizing our imperfection; of being vulnerable.
It is a way of living in a land of make believe.

That thing we call perfectionism is a way of not showing up.

—

Perfect isn’t an option. We aren’t striving for perfect. We are striving for good.

We desire to show up. To be there. To make good things and do good work. We desire to help people and make a difference in the world.

None of that takes perfection. It takes owning up to what’s inside you. Something better than perfect. The real you.

Oct 29, 2021