In this episode Chad and Charlotte discuss Charlotte's experience with COVID-related phantosmia, an olfactory disorder which causes for her the sensation of smelling smoke that is not actually present. Chad then introduces us to various philosophical takes on our perception of reality before inviting us to deeper reflection on how we perceive the Divine and whether we can reliably communicate those experiences to each other. Chad: One of the benefits of recognizing the limits of our understanding, especially through perception, but maybe just in general, is it should give us, number one, a little more humility- I am not seeing the world as it is. I pretty much assume that, and so I need to take a step back, because I could get things wrong! And again, I'm hearing you saying this: and be open to other people's experiences because they might see something I'm not seeing, so I can learn from them.

This episode is a live recording of a sermon on John 21:1-19 preached by Charlotte Elia at Chester Presbyterian Church on April 7, 2024. "All of those Peter stories reflected in this text, all of those experiences, all of those lessons to be learned and Peter doesn’t know why Jesus keeps asking if he loves him. It’s Peter’s denials; it’s Jesus’ crucifixion, and it’s Peter’s feelings that are hurt. Oof. But those are the old stories, and this is a new chapter, a new life. That’s what Peter’s really missing, and that’s the real pity here. You see, Jesus is inviting Peter not just to reconciliation but to participation in the resurrection. Jesus is inviting Peter and the other disciples into a new life of astounding abundance, daring love, unexpected joy, and yes, inexplicable danger. Jesus is literally calling the disciples to the other side of the boat, directing them from the waves to sure ground, inviting them to a bonfire- not in the evening shadows, but in the brightening dawn- to warm themselves not in secret or shame among suspicious strangers but in the joyful company of dear friends- a bonfire centered not on fear and humiliation but on the affirmation of love and a commitment to service in that love. That’s what Peter’s still missing, and that’s the shame of it, and that’s what you and I had best not miss ourselves."Check our Charlotte's recently published "Coloring in Prayer: 40 Conversations with God" at Amazon.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia discuss Requies Divina, a practice of divine rest that Charlotte has been developing. They also speak more broadly about the difficulties of beginning and establishing habits of spiritual practices and the crucial need for the Church to share its wealth of spiritual tools. Charlotte: I had been thinking about the pandemic… Congregations had been, since at least the mid-20th century, basing programming on Sunday morning worship, maybe a mid-week Bible study. There’s Sunday school, but it’s primarily academic in nature, and then fellowship events... So when the pandemic happens and churches can’t get together, what are the tools that I have at home as a Christian to actually practice this religion? The church was generally failing because we never taught people how to pray! We didn’t! And then there’s this terrible, terrible thing that’s happening that is scary, and it’s not just the pandemic. It’s the moment that’s unveiling just how bad our health care system was and what huge economic disparity there was in this country and racial inequality and just everything that was happening during that year, and the church had not equipped folks with tools to deal with that in anyway on their own. It’s like, “Christianity happens Sunday morning.” Well, I’m at home, and I’m freaking out, and I don’t have Christian tools to deal with this because we hadn’t been sharing spirituality. So that’s also part of my push because I think the Church, or at least the Mainline American Protestant church, absolutely failed that moment, and they failed it decades before that moment. You can experience a session of Requies Divina with this recording from our podcast feed. You can also access some 3-minute guided meditations produced by Charlotte Elia at Chester Presbyterian Church's YouTube Channel. Charlotte: When we talk about starting these other practices, it’s one thing if I intend to put aside ten minutes every morning to sit in silence, but there’s always going to be an excuse for me not do that… but coming to the building, sitting, and then being led, making that commitment to the time, I think is useful for them too, and I hope it leads to them doing more contemplation and meditation. I am hopeful that giving them a basis of positive, tangible experience from that is going to encourage them to broaden their practices. Please consider subscribing to us on your favorite podcast source and on our Substack where you'll find lots of additional goodies.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia talk some more about spiritual practices in the Christian tradition, but this time they get a bit more practical. They discuss specific practices and their experiences with each, and they make some suggestions for finding space for God in our current context.Chad: One thing I’ve learned in keeping up a practice of contemplative prayer, of just sitting, (at this point I do twenty or thirty minutes), is eventually there becomes this space between what’s happening in the world and my reaction to it. I don’t know if that makes sense. Because what you’re doing as you’re sitting in prayer is you’re watching thoughts go by, and you’re not clinging to them, right? You just try to let them go. If you start thinking about the laundry— And I’ll share a trick that I use. If I’m sitting there trying to be aware of God and I start thinking about the laundry, I will simply say to myself, “I’m thinking about the laundry,” and the moment I name it, I can let it go. But when you nurture a practice of letting thoughts go, you begin to realize, “I am not my thoughts.” You know, thoughts come and go all the time. I don’t have to cling to them. I think that’s part of what creates a space between what’s happening in the world and my reaction to it.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia chat about the purpose and theology of spiritual practices in the Christian tradition and some of the various approaches folks have taken as they sought to enact our faith in the world.Charlotte: Spirituality in the Christian tradition has a goal of union with God through imitation of God, either imitation of the divine attributes, things that we know about God- love, goodness, kindness, mercy- or through imitation of the life of Christ, of the example that God has given us. So there are a couple of approaches there, but I think what we're really talking about is how we enact our faith. What does the Christian life look like?

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia celebrate Valentine's Day by discussing love in the Christian tradition. This episode also serves as something of a preview of the manuscript Chad has written on this topic. Chad: The one thing that always remains the same in our love relationships is constantly we want what is good for the other person. I think that gets closer to what is essential to love. When we love another person, we want what is good for them, regardless of how we feel. And we can turn that around. If we don’t want what is good for the other person, do we really love them? […] Love and the good are intimately related. When we love ourselves and when we love others, we are wanting what’s good for ourselves; we are wanting what is good for others. […]Love is a whole life-orientation toward the good.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia talk about the themes and significance of the liturgical season of Lent, share some reasons why it is important to them, and offer guidance on how you might observe this penitential time.Charlotte: These particular spiritual practices are ways in which we enact the faith in the world or in our personal lives, so they are outward expressions of the faith. They are also specific things, in those cases, that Christ has asked us to do, so we’re following specific commandments. But those acts of love not only transform the lives of the people to whom we offer them, but those acts of love are ultimately transforming us. Love is transformative, not only to the beloved, to the object of our love, but to ourselves. And those are concrete ways, not just biblically, but historically, Christians have sought to reorient themselves through love, through acts of love, because our God is love.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia discuss Chad's work with Francisco de Osuna's Third Spiritual Alphabet. Chad has been posting monthly on our Substack on each letter of the Third Spiritual Alphabet as both a way of introducing Francisco de Osuna's thought and of exploring the practice and concept of recollection. Chad's posts on Osuna are collected here. Charlotte: And as Osuna says, it's wonderfully egalitarian. I don't need anyone to do it for me. I can just sit, and I could do that anywhere and anytime I needed to. Chad: And as it should be. The presence should be accessible to anyone.Charlotte: Anyone should be able to have contact with the divine because, as you say, the ubiquitous nature, and God is closer to us than our own breath. Chad: Why would we not want to be intimately aware of that presence?

In this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss the tools and perspectives used by Origen, Cassian, and Augustine in the interpretation of scripture. Chad: The thing that impresses me most and has really kind of changed the way I think about the scriptures is this idea that you see in the early church that in coming to the scriptures I can encounter the risen Christ, the person versus an idea that I learn about Jesus in scripture, which is certainly true obviously, but I encounter the living, risen Christ in it. Charlotte: I think all three of these thinkers would look at the historical-critical method and say, "Okay, that's fine, but it's not enough. It's lacking something." It's lacking faith seeking understanding, ultimately. I mean, because it's really a set of tools you can apply to any text, ancient, modern, etc, but we're coming with different questions as people of faith, of what claims those texts or Christ within those texts have on us.

Charlotte Elia offers this sermon on Matthew 22:1-14, commonly referred to as the Parable of the Wedding Feast. "This is a parable that like Jesus’ teachings, a parable that like Jesus’ life, shows the absurdity, the lies, the ultimate ineffectiveness of supposed power. Power seeks only to maintain power, and power is maintained through cruelty, manipulation, violence. Power serves itself, but love offers itself, empties itself in service. And love can’t be overcome while power is often its own undoing."This sermon was preached by Charlotte Elia at Chester Presbyterian Church in Chester, Virginia on Sunday, October 15, 2023.

Join Charlotte Elia for a time of guided contemplation and centering prayer for spiritual rest and renewal. Put on some comfy clothes, settle onto a mat or bed, and give your breath, your body, and yourself to God. During our practice you will be invited to focus on an intention, for healing or wholeness, for yourself or someone else, something that you want to release to God’s care. You might take a moment to think about an intention before your begin. You don’t need to search your mind for something. If nothing presents itself, you may simply choose the intention of rest for yourself. If you should fall asleep during our practice, that’s okay. Don’t fight that. It’s what your body wants. It’s what your mind wants. It’s what God wants for you. You are safe here in this space, in this sanctuary. Receive the gift of peace, of rest, that God grants you."You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You." -Augustine

On this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss the relationship between faith and science. What threats might they pose to each other? Could they possibly enhance one another? Are there even ways that science might bring us to a deeper understanding of faith? And what might we do when faith and science seemingly come into conflict?Charlotte: These folks are in a position of protecting a particular reading of scripture because it has become their god. That’s the thing that is at risk, right?Chad: The scriptures have become god, yeah. Charlotte: Like we’ve talked before about this confusion between the word of God in scripture and the Word of God in Jesus, and there’s not a one-to-one relationship. Not only does that seem to exist, but it seems to exist around a particular reading of scripture, so that what science is threatening is the whole faith itself, so that’s why there’s this kind of crusade energy against it. And I think the distinction there between the way that those folks are reading scripture and the way that we’re reading scripture is that as science informs my worldview more and more through what I learn or through new discoveries, then I’m realizing that the thing that I might be modifying is my own understanding of scripture, again with all of those variables that I’m bringing to the table, and one of those variables is always how much I know about the world, right? And that’s okay for me because the whole scheme isn’t going to fall apart. It’s the one little piece of it that I was grasping in a particular way and now have a different handle on because I’m trying to fit these pieces in some congruent way. But it’s not going to threaten my idea of the existence of God because I haven’t hinged everything on my one particular understanding of a piece of scripture. I wish this didn’t sound as condescending as it’s going to, but here it goes: One of the things that I think ultimately is so sad about folks who are rejecting science in favor of a scientific reading of scripture is that they put themselves in a very defensive position and that, I think, is antithetical to our faith, to be clutching onto a particular idea, whatever it is, but being closed to one another, to the world around us, ultimately to the Holy Spirit. And it’s not just defensive; it’s a defensiveness that manifests itself in a very combative way often. Chad: And it can be so rigid that instead of adjusting, it just breaks. Charlotte: Exactly. Exactly. You took that right out of our podcast description, I think. Chad: That’s right. I actually thought about that when it occurred to me.

In this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss creation care. Why have so many Christian absolved themselves from the dominion mandate or chosen to interpret it in a destructive way? What's lost in relationship to the faith when parts of creation are marred or destroyed? And why aren't we in constant lament for the destruction of our planet?Charlotte: Just the idea that creation is a reflection of the Creator… It just has to be. I mean, we think about that with art and other things. You know, like, this is an expression of somebody’s personality, of somebody’s mind, right? And you want, of our great artists and musicians, you want the fullest expression of their art to understand that person and to understand their art in context. There’s this kind of skepticism, on one hand, around that saying, “Oh, no, then you’re worshipping creation,” or something. I think we’re all smart enough to distinguish between the two, but there is something all around us that’s reflecting the Creator’s mind, the Creator’s face, within everything because that’s who made it! That’s just almost too simplistic, but destroying any piece of that is destroying part of the reflection. It’s primary source material that we’re throwing out because it’s inconvenient or somehow not worth saving, but it’s God’s handiwork.

In this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss apokatastasis, a form of Christian universalism prevalent in the early centuries of the faith. What are some primary features of apokatastasis? Why was it championed by so many leading figures in the early church? Charlotte and Chad consider these questions and others as they exam a more hopeful and loving account of Christian faith.Chad: They don’t jettison the whole notion of hell, (well, hell of course isn’t actually in the Bible), the notion of an age of punishment. The thing is the punishment is cathartic, versus purely retributive, because God is always trying to separate good from evil. And so what happens is, if you enter the next age and you’re still, as Gregory of Nyssa would put it, welded to evil, you’re going to be separated from that, partly because you will be drawn to the good, which you’ll have a clearer apprehension of, but that will be painful because you’ve welded your nature to evil… It’s a process of purification. I think the caricature of universalism is that I walk into heaven and there’s my grandmother, who was a saint, and Hitler playing checkers together. It’s like everybody dies and goes to heaven. If you’re welded to evil, you’re going to be separated from that, and that’s going to be painful. It’s going to cause suffering. Charlotte: So there’s still real incentive for me to do as much of that work as possible now in this life, as well as incentive for me to help others do as much of that work, so it’s not an antinomianism. Chad: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia discuss recent actions by the Southern Baptist Convention to further suppress women. They then look at the scripture most often used to justify this misogyny and consider some of the absurd non-biblical arguments raised. Chad: Here’s the thing: Paul is writing letters; he doesn’t see himself as writing scripture. And at times Paul makes explicit that what he is saying is his own position, not the Lord’s. You know, this is not coming from the Lord. In 1 Corinthians 7:12 he said, “This is from me, not from the Lord.” And I think the question we have to ask ourselves is does he qualify that every time he gives his opinion? Probably not. And so I think the onus of responsibility falls on us to discern if what he is saying is from the Lord or his own opinion. And the example I always give is which sounds more divinely inspired to you? “In Christ,” Pauls says this, “In Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek.” Okay? Or, “I don’t let women speak in church because Eve was deceived and Adam wasn’t?” I mean, clearly to me the more inspired statement is “In Christ we are one.” This idea that the way that we carve up humanity in groups is- it causes division, and it’s about power. It has nothing to do with the kingdom.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia discuss a recent church service in Nuremberg, Germany that was organized and led by ChatGPT, and that leads them to muse on the nature of preaching, our capacity for creativity, and what it means to be human.Chad: I mean, the computer is just a program. I don’t know if people need to hear that. It’s encryption all the way down, turtles all the way down. There’s no understanding there. There’s no agency, desire, will, goals unless it’s programmed into it obviously. But not the desire and will, the goals are obviously going to be programmed into it. But it doesn’t have agency, and it’s not aware of its own experience in the world. Charlotte: Maybe that’s the angle, that love of neighbor presumes love of self. Love of self presumes self-awareness. Chad: Yeah, the ability to be aware of my own experience and then equate the experience of others with something similar, you know?-----------Charlotte: But they’re only returning what we’re putting into them, either through those prompts or the information that we’ve fed to them and through the programs that we’ve written for them. And in that way, they actually reflect more on us as their creator than as some other entity.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia talk about Jesus' sayings in Matthew and Luke regarding the "sign of Jonah." Here they revisit the story of Jonah, investigate how it illuminates Jesus' work, ponder how Jesus might have understood Jonah's story, and ask what bearing these comparisons have on the work of biblical interpretation. Charlotte: What I love about Jesus’ interpretation of Jonah, shall we say, is he’s kind of doing some midrash here. He’s filling in some blanks in the book of Jonah… You wonder why would you have been so taken with this person, this Jonah, that you would have responded.Chad: Unless you saw him come out of a fish.Charlotte: Unless you either saw him or that word got around. And that word probably would have traveled faster than Jonah, wouldn’t it have? I mean, that word gets on the trade routes before Jonah can figure out his way to get to Nineveh. So I like to think that’s what Jesus is doing, is filling in this part of the tradition… It’s certainly not the effectiveness of Jonah’s speech. Probably more compelling than Jonah’s speech is “That’s that guy what got thrown in the water and the storm stopped, was in a whale and got vomited on a beach. I’m curious what he thinks about things.”…Charlotte: From the beginning, literally in the beginning, Genesis 1:1, it’s a story about us and the world, us and creation, not as just actors on a stage of creation. And part of our responsibility then of caring for creation is to be mindful of all of our impact on creation, the fact that everything that we do impacts creation.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia chat a bit about the doctrine of the Trinity, what they most value there, some challenges it presents, and their favorite analogies of the Trinity. Chad: There's something about the idea of this perfect identity of diversity in unity that hits a lot of high notes for me. I mean, the creation reflects that. We live in a universe that is a diverse unity, that's a nice reflection of the creator. And I think there are moral implications, which I think you've already touched on, but this idea that any efforts toward homogeneity or uniformity or pitting one group against another because of inherent differences does not reflect the nature of God who is inherently diverse and one. What reflects the divine nature is diversity working together in love as one. The diversity isn't lost in that process. ...Charlotte: I think that anytime we cut ourselves off from groups of people, we're cutting ourselves off from knowledge of God.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia take a look at the section of the Nicene Creed that addresses the Church and try to unpack the wealth of meaning there that can almost be obscured by our familiarity with the text. The sound quality for this episode falls far from our own expectations. Charlotte called in to record from what sounds like the bottom of a trashcan, and we'll not let that happen again. Charlotte: The church is one. How is the church one? It sure seems like there’s a lot of division and confusion within the church, right? But the church is unified by acknowledging one Lord, confessing the same faith, or the core of the same faith, maybe the faith as described within this very creed. The church is born of the same baptism, and so forms a body and gains its unity through the unity of the Trinity. That’s its strength. But, like the Trinity, within that unity is a multitude or great diversity that mirrors the diversity of humanity, so saying that it’s one doesn’t mean that it’s uniform. Chad: I was thinking of keeping that same thread we started in the first episode of God being one, this idea that the divine love is always one, does not change. Divine goodness does not vary. Divine mercy and justice are not incompatible, but they’re one. The divine intention for a good creation is one. It never changes. And so that opening statement reflects that unity and tells me that is the divine intention for the corporate body of the faithful as well- this idea that the effect, in some significant sense, resembles the cause or reflects the cause. The one, holy church is- this might be controversial- is one and holy insofar as it is unified in love and reflects the nature of the divine goodness that never changes and brings it into being.

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia take a look at the section of the Nicene Creed that addresses Holy Spirit incarnation and try to unpack the wealth of meaning there that can almost be obscured by our familiarity with the text.