TOKENS PODCAST: S3E8
A frequent guest on Tokens Show, Audrey Assad joins Lee to discuss her new memoir Doubt Becomes Wonder: Embracing the Loss of Everything You Thought You Knew. They discuss healing from childhood wounds, and the consequent navigation of doubt; and Audrey’s experience as a woman in the church. PLUS: two live studio performances.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Audrey Assad, singer/producer of a unique brand of sacred pop music for the contemplative soul, has been music in Nashville, TN since 2008. Her debut album (produced by Marshall Altman) was featured as an iTunes discovery download, placed on the front page of iTunes on every Apple computer in the country, and named Amazon’s “Best Album” in the Christian Music category on the year of its release. Her second independent album, Inheritance (produced by Assad and Daniel James of Canon Blue) sold 8300 units in its debut week and has consistently enjoyed strong streaming and sales. Her independent music has been lauded in the New York Times by author/columnist David Brooks. Audrey is Dove Award nominated and has played in nearly every state and in 7 countries, opening on tours for her genre’s top artists, including Chris Tomlin, Matt Maher, Rend Collective, Tenth Avenue North, and more.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee Camp: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Audrey Assad: There's no official moratorium on doubt and religion. Doubt itself when transformed by curiosity, and joy, and exploration, becomes something more akin to wonder.
Lee Camp: That's singer-songwriter Audrey Assad.
Audrey Assad: I've had to do a lot of recovering and reclaiming of things. Even the things I'm learning now.
Lee Camp: Audrey is a frequent musical guest here at Tokens Show. On today's show, we share a conversation Audrey and I had at Nashville's Sound Emporium, discussing some of the subjects she explores in her upcoming memoir, Doubt Becomes Wonder: Embracing the Loss of Everything You Thought You Knew. It chronicles her experience with faith and doubt, and the processes of healing from various wounds, whether religious or cultural.
Audrey Assad: If what I've been taught is true, that God shows himself to people who want to see, well, I do want to see.
So I just decided it was better to risk it and figure things out a little bit.
Lee Camp: All this, as well as two live performances from Audrey and yours truly, coming right up.
Part 1
Lee Camp: We've got Audrey Assad here in the studio at Sound Emporium. Hello, Audrey.
Audrey Assad: Hello Lee.
Lee Camp: It's so delightful to have you back again.
Audrey Assad: Thank you. Good to be here.
Lee Camp: It’s been too long. I don't remember when we were together last, maybe at a Ryman show in either the end of 2019 or 2018.
Audrey Assad: Something. Or yeah, we taped something with masks on somewhere.
Lee Camp: That’s right. We did, that's right, during the COVID. During the online stuff. That's right. So anyway, great to have you back again. So as those of you who have followed our experiments for a while, you know that if we get yet another brilliant musician, singer songwriter, around then I want to sing with them. And so Audrey came in and I thought, I wonder if Audrey knows this hymn.
And it turns out that she didn't know this hymn 30 minutes ago. But now she does.
Audrey Assad: I do now.
Lee Camp: And I asked if we could sing it together. So here it is.
That song is special to me because when I was in grad school in South Bend, our house was literally next door to the church. And I was on staff for this church and did youth ministry for a couple of years. And it was both a wonderful church community and a crazy church community.
We had some really crazy difficult things happen, including like a murder suicide in the church. And yet some of the dearest friendships we had ever had. People were in our home all the time.
Audrey Assad: It sounds like a BBC television show.
Lee Camp: Yeah, I mean, that’s what it was like, you know, so it was beauty and tragedy. And then doing grad school and theology also for me was tumultuous, marked by both the beauty and the pain of it, because you're doing this kind of rarefied, theological conversations. While also before I started that program one of the professors who's now Dean at Yale Divinity School at the time was at Notre Dame.
He had coffee with me before I started the program and he said well, you should know that whatever character defects you have, you will be so distressed by the experience of grad school, that you will have to learn to deal with them because it will be like a crucible by which you have to learn to deal with them.
And he was exactly right. And so I remember these occasions where I would go up to the church building, like I said, next door to our house. And I would be in these places of kind of mental distress. And I would sit alone and I would sing that hymn by myself. So I've always loved that hymn. And so I feel honored that you would play it and sing it with me.
But I think the reason that I thought about that hymn and that story and knowing that we were going to get to talk, is that knowing some about your story. And I don't want to put words in your mouth or reduce it in any sort of way, but at least I've seen these elements of you're kind of in certain ways, obviously coming from, nourished by, sustained by, the Christian tradition.
While at the same time, struggling with, frustrated with, knowing what you can and cannot hold onto from the Christian tradition. And so in that vein and knowing that you've been working on a memoir, that's coming out what next year maybe?
Audrey Assad: Yeah, in about a year from now.
Lee Camp: You have a title yet?
Audrey Assad: Yeah, it's called Doubt Becomes Wonder: Embracing the Loss of Everything You Thought You Knew. That's the tagline.
Lee Camp: It's a beautiful title.
Audrey Assad: Thank you. It's from a song of mine, actually.
Lee Camp: Oh, really?
Audrey Assad: Yes, called “Evergreen.” And as I had written the first draft of the manuscript, I thought boy that feels like what I'm trying to say. Not that I'm going from doubt to wonder, but that doubt itself when transformed by curiosity, and joy, and exploration, becomes something more akin to wonder than it feels like the word doubt sort of conjures up images of angst, frustration. Skepticism maybe. And I've been to all those places, but I've sort of moved inside them to a more curious and open space.
Lee Camp: Doubt becomes wonder, that's lovely. And I relate to some of what you just said, in that, I remember in my seminary years before this health vineyard and learning about maternity and the enlightenment, you know, one of the philosophical models they talk about in epistemology is philosophical foundationalism.
And so the idea of being that in order to make any truth claims, you've got to find some foundation that, quote, all rational people agree on. And you build this foundation, and then you can build up your ethic or build up your doctrinal system, you know?
Audrey Assad: That makes sense. I get that.
Lee Camp: But I remember a crisis moment for me in the seminary was being in this little prayer meditation space, and being in one of those periods of doubt and finally saying I can't damn well know I know anything that I know, I know, I know. I know. You know, and so then it was a sort of like, well, if I can't absolutely know anything, then I can't make any kind of claims and everything's up in the air.
Audrey Assad: That resonates. I've been there.
I get there all the time still. I'm like, oh, even the things I'm learning now. I mean, it's just my experience. At the end of the day, I can't really know anything.
Lee Camp: So I want to explore that a little bit more in a moment, but let me go back to the notion of it. As you look back, what are things that you've experienced that you still think of as nourishing in some way? So let me start with that.
Audrey Assad: Oh man. Well, I think that the number one experience of Christianity that I still both feel fondly about in retrospect, and miss today in my daily life, is corporate singing. I think it's the most spiritually biologically wise practice of faith traditions, probably above anything else. Just on my limited understanding of what it does for the psyche, for the body and for the group. It's a really fantastic healing mechanism to sing in a group with people. To blend in, to harmonize, to hear voices lifted in song about things that are bigger than we are.
And there's also these biological realities at play where you know, when you get onto, and this can happen with any kind of music. So it happens at Tokens Show all the time, I think, with the house band being as able to drop into flow state as they are. When you get into flow state with a group of people, there's a phenomenon called collective effervescence that takes place. And this can be induced in other ways, other than music like dancing, which is why I think in many, many indigenous traditions of faith, you see dancing and music as the sort of cornerstones of practice.
And when you get into that state with people, you get into sort of a sympathetic, meaning a shared nervous system state. It's very soothing to the body, to the mind, or your heartbeats start actually sinking up with people given enough time. And so there's something very real happening there in the body that I think is reflected in a state of mind that can happen after singing.
It's very soothing and I think physically healing. It's shown. And so like in my work. Years ago with dementia patients. I used to do music just as a volunteer at a nursing home. And it's amazing people cannot tell you things or communicate how they're feeling. But if you play something that they know, it lights their brain up and they're able to communicate with you with their eyes and sing words, even if they're not talking.
I'm such a believer in the power of that. My experience of it has been very nourishing. And I still miss that. I grew up in a hymn singing tradition and I miss…
Lee Camp: Y'all were an acapella tradition?
Audrey Assad: … that. We were, yeah.
Lee Camp: My tradition was as well.
Audrey Assad: Yeah. I miss that a lot. I found that to be very nourishing.
Lee Camp: Some of my fondest memories of growing up are precisely that very same thing. Both in kind of more formal worship gatherings, but also that was, that was one of the things that we would do sometimes on a Friday night to…
Audrey Assad: My family was similar. Yeah. Friends, family. Yes. Lot of singing in my upbringing and I really miss that.
Lee Camp: But what's the phrase again? You just said, what effervescence?
Audrey Assad: Collective effervescence.
Lee Camp: Collective effervescence. What's a resource on that?
Audrey Assad: I mean, there's a couple of papers out there on it. You can just Google collective effervescence.
Lee Camp: Yeah. I want to check it out, I've had this notion about exploring something like that for a while, so yeah. I'm grateful for the phrase.
Do you imagine that as far as one of the struggles or frustrations that one of the primary things has been what you mentioned a moment ago about certainty or the inability to frame doubt in a means of possible engagement with life, as opposed to a threat to a good life?
Audrey Assad: I think any critical thinker is frustrated by that inside religion, and I mean, it's all, so much of this is anecdotal. There's no official moratorium on doubt and religion, you know, I mean, other than, than maybe in the book of James where it says like the man who doubts is like a.
What does it say?
Lee Camp: Wave of the sea?
Audrey Assad: Yeah. So there’s that, and that does get weaponized against it. But what I remember hearing a lot from people was there's good doubt. And then there's bad doubt. It's sorta like good doubt is just double checking. It's like, oh, you know, I just want to be sure that I'm really using my mind here and I'm not being swept away by my emotions.
Right? But the bad kind of doubt is when you genuinely begin to question the givens, that all of it is built upon. Such as God needed to make things right between people and God. If you start questioning that one, well, that's, you know, a slippery slope to hell my friend. And so I thought eventually in my life , well, why shouldn't I question that?
I mean, what's the fear on the other side of it? The worst thing that could happen is I find out that it is true. Like it's sorta like what if it's not true? And if it is, then I'll find that out. You know, if what I've been taught is true, that God shows himself to people who want to see, well, I do want to see, I do want to know.
So what am I scared of exactly? And what I realized is what I was terrified of is that it was all some kind of elaborate psychological mechanism we had, you know, dreamed up to medicate our own pain. And I wouldn't say I land there now with religion, but that's what I was scared of finding out, but I kind of had to know.
So I just decided it was better to risk it and figure things out a little bit.
Lee Camp: For me as well. Certainly, well, a couple of things come to mind. One is that the sort of ways in which, and this is, has been documented by lots of historians. Like I'm thinking about George Marsden, who did most of his work in Notre Dame. When he looked back at, when he wrote kind of one of the preeminent histories of evangelicalism and fundamentals in the United States, one of the arguments that he makes is that fundamentalism is the flip side of modernism. And that they're both grounded in this sort of quest for certifiability that you can't doubt, which is fascinating to think about, you know. That the fundamentalists and the modernists are both kind of doing the same thing, but just in different ways.
Audrey Assad: It sure is. Makes a lot of sense.
Lee Camp: Yeah. So they've got that sort of quest for certifiability.
And if I assume that that possibility of certifiability is what it means to have faith, and then it gets questioned, then it just threatens to all fall apart.
Right? And nothing left at all.
Audrey Assad: Yeah. You can unravel it really fast if that's the foundation of things.
Lee Camp: The way this preacher, when I was a kid, who used to say, you got to know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, what's right. And finally was like…
Audrey Assad: Easy.
Lee Camp: Yeah, right. And so then it was like, well, hell, that you've set me up for failure.
Audrey Assad: I can't do that.
Lee Camp: Right. Because I can't do that with anything.
Audrey Assad: No, we can't do that with anything.
Lee Camp: Right. And so then it becomes a sort of different way of construing what might be true and trustworthy.
Audrey Assad: Yes. And you have whole communities of people who are basically working at all times, maybe in the background of their rational consciousness to convince themselves that everything that they believe is the absolute truth. And then it's difficult to un-entrench people from that because they're wrong, their whole system is going to fall apart, which is terrifying for us, right? So we act in ways in the world based on that fear, that hurt people.
Lee Camp: Defensiveness? Attacking and so forth.
Yeah. So going back to that kind of foundational list, that, that metaphor of a foundation. I'm drawing a blank on who the philosopher is at the moment. But he suggested that a more helpful analogy for thinking about convictions was not the building metaphor of a foundation, but the metaphor of a net or a web. And he said, consider a conviction as something that's held up in a web and each strand that holds up that conviction might be some various thing. It might be because your mother told you, it might be because your church told you, it might be because you read it in the Bible. In my culture, you read it in a philosophical treatise, it might be because you had this experience. And all of those things might be holding up a conviction. And typically our convictions don't fall off just one of those. If it's a substantive conviction, it doesn't immediately just fall. Just like that. It takes a lot of things to happen to cut those different threads.
And then finally the conviction may fall. Isn’t that a great analogy?
Audrey Assad: That’s a great analogy. And it is interesting how some things do fall and some things dont. As you quote, unquote deconstruct stuff. There are things that still stand. You know, I'm still not killing anybody. I'm still not. There are things that I believe, or at least that I experienced and trust to be true is such a hard word, but maybe worthy of faith, worthy of holding onto. Not everything disappears.
But it's amazing how much does sometimes when you allow those threads to be cut, that's very interesting.
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
If you've not yet done so, please subscribe today to the Tokens Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Noticed on our analytics that we've had folks listening recently from Vatican City, Columbia, and Norway -- welcome to you all!
We do love hearing from you, and are always pleased to hear some of the things you'd like to hear more about. You can email us at podcast@tokensshow.com. Also remember you can sign up for our email list, or find out how to join us for a live event, all at Tokensshow.com.
This is our interview with Audrey Assad, singer-songwriter and author of a soon-to-be-released memoir entitled Doubt Becomes Wonder: Embracing the Loss of Everything You Thought You Knew. Coming up, we'll hear more from Audrey about some of her specific points of deconstruction, as well as a live performance of her song "Evergreen" from Nashville's Sound Emporium.
Part 2
Welcome back to Tokens Show and our interview with Audrey Assad.
Lee Camp: For me in that process, I look back on my life and I think it was pretty much in my undergraduate years and my seminary years, where a lot of the intellectual deconstruction and then trying to reconstruct some of those things began to happen. And so I had really good professors that put me to really good resources, that helped me not be afraid of the deconstruction, and helped me with the reconstruction that I'm really thankful for. That doesn't mean that I didn't have other subsequent moments of ready to throw everything out, throw out the baby with the bath water, so to speak.
That was key for me so that was kind of an intellectual processing. But I was surprised to discover that a lot of the stuff emotionally didn't get deconstructed because I wasn't aware of how deeply it was in me, emotionally. The shame in particular, until I was maybe late thirties, early forties. And then even later in my later forties, but do you relate to that kind of duality of processing?
Audrey Assad: Very much so, you know.
There's a great book. Maybe you've heard of it. It’s called The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk. I think it's sort of the seminal work on how the body holds our story. And the things that have happened to us, and the things that we have believed in, and the things that we have internalized in ways that may not be obvious to our conscious mind.
And those things manifest themselves often when we have not given vent to them, with our consciousness, by understanding and seeing. And so there's this kind of, there's a word I'm looking for? It's almost like skiing. Like where, if I think of one arm as my rational mind and the other as my body, they're working at different paces at different times. And sometimes I'm working with them together. You can't see this, those of you who are just listening, but I'm using like skiing motions. Right and left, and then both arms together. Sometimes they're working in tandem and you sort of get the understanding and you heal what's in your body, but sometimes your body will manifest your fear for you.
For me that started happening in 2016 when I sort of began having these horrible anxiety attacks every time I set foot in a church building. And at that point I still hadn't really questioned anything. I mean, I just kind of started the idea of hell, for example, as a place of eternal conscious torment was something I was beginning to unpack and look at and sift through.
And then I started having these panic attacks and then physical ticks in my hands. And what I came to realize through a trauma therapist I ended up working with was that, that was my body sort of giving me an alarm that things were not emotionally okay around these topics. And that I needed to do some excavation and some healing.
And so that was what ultimately woke me up to it, was my body's manifestation of my emotions. I had not really dealt with any of that from my upbringing. I knew it was there intellectually, but it's not always easy to think yourself out of things that your body is holding.
Lee Camp: Yeah. And the experiential moment to get that exposed or to be able to see it for what it is and different ways of getting at that. I'm wondering about, for you, anger. In what ways has anger played or not played a part in your own experience and or processing of your experience?
Audrey Assad: I'm smiling to myself because I think I'm still yet to find that out, to be honest. I have the type of temperament and I don't know if this is nature, nurture, or some combination of both. It was reflected to me by a friend recently that I try to hold the whole world's intention and unity. Meaning from Ted Bundy to Mother Teresa, I'm like, how can I make room for both of you as human beings with a soul?
And you know, and so there are things in my past that I probably have every right to be angry about. And if I'm honest, I probably am angry about them. But accessing that anger is difficult for me. I have to go through a lot of grieving to get to feeling mad. I don't think I've ever yelled at a person in my life.
It's just not my way, but I am aware now that some of that may be repression. So I'm working towards it.
Lee Camp: So, God help the one that's on the front end of that…
Audrey Assad: Yeah, let us pray that it's like a stuffed animal. I bought a thing the other day called a dammit doll. It's a stuffed doll but it's kind of firm in the hand, it's not super soft.
So like it makes a really satisfying thwacking sound. So you're supposed to hit things with it and say, damn it. And I bought myself one, cause I was like, you know, I'm going to try it on, on a stuffed animal and see if I can maybe keep it directed at inanimate objects. But I do genuinely think that maybe this is a gift of mine.
I think I do really desire to see everyone, even people who have potentially, you know, abused me as a whole person. That is, you know, they're independent of me and of my experience of them. And so. I'm still learning about anger, but I think it's a very important emotion to listen to. Very important to hear anger and what it has to communicate because anger, my friend, she's a psychologist named Dr. Hillary McBride and she says, anger reveals to us what we're trying or what we're afraid of. And fear represents what we're trying to protect. You know? So what was unprotected in me?
Lee Camp: Similarly, I've heard it said that anger is often triggered when there's a breaking of some sort of boundary, either real or projected boundary of some sort. And so that helps me frame anger as a very important, helpful communication to myself.
Audrey Assad: And it's really not rewarded inside religion. At least in fundamentalist evangelicalism. Anger would probably be reserved for the pulpit, discouraged in a parishioner. It's sort of like a…
Lee Camp: That's interesting.
Audrey Assad: ...gain control of yourself, you know? But also then you're hearing God's wrath preached at you. And it's okay when you're mad at someone else for something they've done you know, in judgment. But when something has happened to you that's been painful, I don't think it's really allowed in the same way, maybe particularly for women. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure it's the same for a lot of men too. So, very important. And it's not a negative emotion. It just is.
Lee Camp: And it strikes me that so much of we've been talking about doubt and we've been talking about anger here most recently. But for me, the key, and I always tell my students this. Especially when it’s paper, writing time. I always say nuance is your friend. Right? And avoid over generalized statements. And so it's like, even in the New Testament, you got the angry, sin not. There's times to be angry, but just don't fall into a pit that's going to take you down with it.
Audrey Assad: Maybe bitterness is something we'd like to avoid, but anger doesn't always lead to bitterness. Sometimes anger leads to liberation and peace.
Lee Camp: Yeah. And similarly with doubt, I mean, it's like, you know, Thomas Merton had this line about doubt where he said, you know, the way to deal with doubt is to go through it.
You know, it's just a part of what it means to be living as a human being. I've often said that people who have been through periods of doubt have reflected upon the nature of what they're seeking to live by in a way that those who have not been through periods of doubt, perhaps have not.
Audrey Assad: Absolutely, and I feel that way. I also feel that people who have questioned the nature of reality and who are at peace with whatever they have found or not found, are people that I trust. If someone has really never questioned the nature of reality, it's not that I don't love or trust them. But more so that there might be a threshold of trust that I don't easily reach with that person for them to advise me on life and life's existential dreads. You know, it's sort of like questioning the nature of reality is a part of having your eyes open, I think. And so that could be framed as doubt, I suppose.
Lee Camp: I mean, I think it relates to. I'm much more likely to quickly find rapport with someone who's able to share with me their own places of brokenness or ways they've screwed up.
Audrey Assad: Yes.
Lee Camp: I think the vulnerability in that then invites vulnerability in return and similarly with doubt.
Audrey Assad: Actually, to doubt, to question the nature of reality, to confess your own brokenness, all of those things are very vulnerable things.
Lee Camp: Yeah, that's right. So what has the process of writing been like for you?
I guess the question I've gotten in the back of my mind, again, not wanting to put words in your mouth. But the only way I get through writing and do writing generally, well, that would be an overstatement. Let me put it this way. Sometimes, and a lot of times, I experienced writing, especially if I'm reflecting upon a memoir-ish kind of stuff. It was very much as a sort of spiritual discipline where I end up seeing things I didn't see or might not see otherwise. And St. Augustine has this line where he says, I write in order to understand. And I think that when we're doing writing about ourselves, or when I write about myself, I can discover certain frames or a new narrative framework to make sense of things that I didn't see unless I did the act of writing.
Has that been your experience at all?
Audrey Assad: Very much, so much like songwriting. I mean, I've been a songwriter for a long time, but I've, I've actually written essays and short stories for longer than I've been a songwriter.
And I think I've always written to understand, I mean, that's how I survived my childhood, you know, was to sing, play, write, in order to feel my own resilience. In order to find compassion for others, in order to attempt to heal my tormented relationship with a God that I believed was sort of a glorified Santa Claus, checking his list at best, you know, at kindest.
And so. Yes. My experience of writing this book has been like that. And I also see why authors often get driven to the drink. Cause it's sort of like, I'm in an airport lounge drinking my second double mezcal, you know, pulling my hair out. I don't want to write about purity culture. You know, like I don't want to know more about, I don't want to think about it anymore, but it's like, it's been a very fruitful life giving experience to examine those stories with that type of lens.
Lee Camp: Yeah. So a moment ago you said in talking about anger, the suspicion of maybe this is different for men than it is for women. Which prompts me to ask. Talk to us a little bit about the last decade or so of what you're seeing about or coming to understand about being a woman. I know that's way too broad of a question.
Audrey Assad: In three minutes. Give us the, give us the rundown on being a woman today.
Lee Camp: Because I mean clearly…
Audrey Assad: In the church?
Lee Camp: … yeah, clearly that relates to the Christian tradition. Right. But it's not just the Christian tradition, it's the American tradition.
Audrey Assad: Yes. Which is arguably, that's also the Christian tradition. It's sort of like they've bled into each other a little bit. I think that I mean, I've questioned the nature of everything, including gender essentialism over the years. I've dived into feminism and there's different waves of feminism to understand them a little bit more and what they do and don't believe about gender and sex and how they're related. And, you know, that was something I was taught, never to question.
It's sort of like, here's the body part? That's the gender. Here are the things that go with it, both aesthetically and you know, spiritually meaning virtues or assigned to the genders. Differently. I don't know if that was your experience, but that was my experience.
Lee Camp: That was definitely my experience.
Audrey Assad: Women need to be meek. In my tradition, it was total silence, you know, in any spiritual environment. Meaning no reading scripture out loud, no praying out loud, no singing in front of the church as a woman.
So there were very strict rules around that. So of course I started to question it because they were so extreme, that I couldn't help it, you know, with my mind being so curious.
Lee Camp: Yeah, I was actually laughing about comparing, you know, one-upping each other. And I said, well, we had this episode in one church I was in where we had a deaf ministry. And the woman was interpreting for the deaf. And finally, she was told that she could no longer interpret for the deaf, because that was a form of speaking before men.
Audrey Assad: There's so many things inside that that I don't have time to get into about all kinds of issues. But I mean, yeah, no, it resonates, you know. I think that questioning the nature of all those things is important because there are so many people in my own life even, who live in between those worlds. In various ways in between those directives. I'm one of those people, you know. To look at me now, people who follow me on Instagram or have seen me in person know that I don't really exhibit femininity in a traditional sense in certain ways. And it feels more natural to me to sort of blend. I don't know if I go full androgynous, but it's very inspired by people like David Bowie because he played with those things so whimsically. It invited me into a conversation about, oh, like maybe being a girl doesn't mean X, Y, Z, automatically. And I think that's valuable conversation, really healing conversation for a lot of people.
Lee Camp: and you don't have to go very far into exploring that, to realize there's all sorts of socially, relative identification with regard to your arbitrary stuff with regard to gender.
Audrey Assad: I mean, I drop my son off at pre-K when he was in pre-K in person a few years ago and noticed that they started immediately with the blue and pink pencil cases. You know, it's like, that's totally arbitrary. Color is just a frequency that we're interpreting with the cones and rods in our eyes.
There's nothing essential about it.
Lee Camp: Well, and one of our most popular podcast episodes in our first season was with Lauren Smelser White, giving us a kind of a crash course on the history of feminism. And she said at some point in that interview, something like well, you know, that 150 years ago, the men were wearing high heels and wigs and pink.
Audrey Assad: Yes, they were, and pink satin.
Lee Camp: No, I don't know that.
Audrey Assad: Read the Scarlet Pimpernel, it's a great book and a great movie as well. But yes, that was the fashion of the time. It just evolves with culture as always. And so to answer your question, my experience of being a woman as a Christian was damaging in most ways. Growing up I did not have an experience of that, that affirmed or uplifted my gender. I've had to do a lot of recovering from that experience and reclaiming of things. And even just as a Catholic, when I was, you know, heavily in that world, Mary being held up as the Paragon of virtue. Well, Mary is considered by the Catholics to have never had sex. Her labor was probably painless according to Catholic tradition.
It left me feeling like, I have to be a disembodied half person to be like the most virtuous woman there was. And I know a lot of people will feel offended by that perspective on it. But that's how I felt sort of hearing her lifted up as the example. The primary example of virtue and goodness. It was like, but she didn't go through, according to tradition, go through the things that make us feel human.
You don't have to have sex to be human being of course, but that it was considered heresy to believe she did have sex, you know, ever in her life was so strange to me and disembodying. And yeah, I just I'm ready to live in my body, like a real hands in the dirt human being.
And I'm kind of willing to take some risks of perhaps stepping over a line here or there to do so. Because what I know is that I lived for so long on tenterhooks and biting my nails at every possible misstep that I didn't experience most of my life in embodied reality. So gotta be another way, right?
Without becoming a total, uh. I don't even know if there's anything wrong with hedonism. It's just, I don’t know if that's what I want to do, you know, but I want to be real. I want to be salty and I want to live in this body.
Lee Camp: One of the, the major traditions that's been a major framework for me intellectually that's helped me deal with getting over moralisms and legalisms has been the virtue tradition. Virtue traditions in which any so-called moral is always geared towards an end, and some sort of vision of what it means to be flourishing as a human being. As opposed to just, there are these rules, you got to keep for whatever reason, you know, because they are the rules. And virtue tradition, typically any virtue, let's say courage is, you know, a mean. Not an arithmetic mean, but it's between two vices.
There’s cowardice that doesn't have enough of it. Or there's foolhardiness that doesn't pay enough attention to fear. So the coward pays too much attention to the fear and gets paralyzed and the foolhardiness refuses to pay attention to fear.
Audrey Assad: I love that.
Lee Camp: Isn’t that great?
Audrey Assad: Yes.
Lee Camp: And I think that that's so helpful in thinking about as well. My own kind of periods of growth.
It's like if I've been pushed by a tradition so far down into one of those vices, then it's almost like part of growing is you're probably going to make mistakes on the other side of the virtue.
Audrey Assad: And that’s part of the healing.
Lee Camp: And in time you want to come back to the space there. There's the mean, right? But sometimes like, for me, for example, when I realized that I was conflict averse. That meant that sometimes I was a jackass, by the way. I started talking to people, and dealing with conflict, but I could see, okay, well, I hadn't gotten to where I wanted to get to yet. Because I want to figure out how to deal with conflict in a way that's not me being a jackass, but that me acting that way sometimes was actually a step forward because it meant I was willing to lean into the direction I needed to lean into.
Audrey Assad: Absolutely. I love that. And it's part of the healing when you grew up with the idea of a God who would smite you, you know, for any infraction of the rules. And so, yes. And so when you begin to experience mistakes and recovery and repair, you begin to be a whole human being and you know, God never smoked me so far.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Well, and you know, and the very word that we translate in English, sin, is this Greek word amartía, which is granted in virtue tradition because amartía was a word for archery, which was hitting the target. Right? So you can miss the target in all sorts of ways. But it wasn't a legalistic idea of you break the rule and so you get it.
And even in Greco-Roman literature, non-Jewish, non-Christian Greco-Roman literature, the amartía of a character was what finally could kill him.
Audrey Assad: I see
Lee Camp: If you keep falling into this, then this is going to take you down. That's your amartía. Again, it's a very embodied, practical, this stuff can kill you. And this way you can live a life that's flourishing. And of course, then there's ongoing questions about how you narrate those or give account for those and so forth.
Audrey Assad: Wow.
Lee Camp: I find that a much better way to try to make sense of the world. In reality, then I've got to satisfy some divine being, because I've been given this list of rules and if I don't keep them then.
Audrey Assad: A little more explorative, a little less obsessive maybe. Yeah. I love that. In between cowardice and imprudence somewhere there lies the promised land.
Yeah.
Lee Camp: Well, it's always a delight to be with you.
Audrey Assad: Thank you. Same.
Lee Camp: I'm grateful for you and rightful for your honesty and your gentleness and the way you keep asking good questions and your own vulnerability. And I'm grateful that you're here in Nashville and grateful that I get to call you a friend.
Audrey Assad: Thank you, Lee. Same here.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to our interview with Audrey Assad, taped at the Sound Emporium in Nashville, Tennessee, discussing her new memoir Doubt Becomes Wonder.
Audrey mentioned early in the interview that the title of her book comes from her song “Evergreen,” so sitting there at the piano, I asked her if she would sing that for us. So: enjoy.
“Evergreen”
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life, and our interview with singer-songwriter Audrey Assad on her new memoir Doubt Becomes Wonder: Embracing the Loss of Everything You Thought You Knew.
Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and refer us to a fellow podcast listener. Got feedback? We'd love to hear from you. Email us text or attach a voice memo, and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, and Tom Anderson. Engineer Cariad Harmon, with additional engineering by Joe Trentacosti at Nashville's Sound Emporium. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feelings Studios.
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