Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to singer–songwriter Audrey Assad. 07/06/2023
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deepest values, the ways we can better navigate our very many differences and disagreements, and the people behind the positions who shape our common life. Every episode, I speak to someone with some kind of public voice or platform, basically someone who other people listen to. And I try and dig in to what is sacred to them – by which I mean, what principles are they trying to live by. I try and listen in a curious and non–adversarial way, seeking to understand them, understand their story, seeking to understand how they think about how they use their voice and the responsibility of that, and really, how they’ve ended up where they are today. I’m interested in people of all beliefs and identities and postures, and if you listen long enough, you should hear people you really relate to and feel really aligned to, and you should also have people who you really do not. Part of the point is to challenge our conceptions of people who are not like us. You can think of this podcast, if you like, as a sort of antidote to the rest of your content consumption, which will for almost all of us be playing voices back at us which we already agree with, who we already feel some similarity and some affinity with. And in listening more broadly, I hope to expand my own capacity for empathy and curiosity, to challenge my own very deeply held “tribalisms”, which I hope we all have. And really just to get out of that bubble. One of our former guests, Eli Pariser, was the person who came up with that name “filter bubble”. I want to break out of the tiny world that, if I’m not careful, I can end up locked in and understand more of the people outside it in all their fascinating and beautiful polyphonic diversity.
In this episode, you’ll hear a conversation I had with Audrey Assad. Audrey is an American–Syrian singer, songwriter. She is the first musician that we’ve had on a net in a really long time. And for most of her career, she was known well in the contemporary Christian music scene, although as we hear, that is complicated. We spoke about her childhood in the Plymouth Brethren. We spoke about what draws her to music, what role it plays in her life. Her very public deconstruction – and we will unpack that term a bit for those of you not familiar with it, and what she believes now. And I really hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? Audrey Assad’s answer.
Elizabeth
Audrey, we’re going to attempt to go deep fast, which is not always easy on digital platforms and with people that we don’t know well, but I hope worth the effort. And before I get to what is sacred to you, I’d love to know how you feel about the word: how does it resonate to you? What’s its texture? Is it off–putting? Is it on–putting?
Audrey Assad
Oh, I have been on a journey with this word. And so at the moment, it does feel extremely pleasurable for me to think about it. I think of it as signifying the highest of intimacy with something or someone. And so, when I feel into the word, I feel memories come from my childhood, and I feel imaginings come from the future, things that I… I don’t know, it is a very pleasurable and inspiring word to me. So I was really excited to receive this invitation.
Elizabeth
And having sat with it a little bit, what bubbled up as something that might be sacred to you?
Audrey Assad
So, the first thing, the largest, the biggest one, was my body. That was number one that came forward. Should I give you the overview, the list, and then we’ll go into each one? Or should I say…
Elizabeth
However it comes.
Audrey Assad
Okay, I’d like to list them. So I didn’t find very many, but there are a few, and one is my body. And two is other people’s bodies. So bodies, maybe that’s one. Nature. My relationship to nature and the earth is another. And then my role as a mother is a big one. My role as a mother and having children and what that entails. And then the fourth one… I mean, they all bleed together, but music and creativity, and like the erotic lifeforce in each of us that that plays in that. And then, my relationship with my partner is on the list as well. So, that was what I came up with. And there are more things that I hold as values than that. Those are not even really values, they’re more like areas of life, relationships that I have. And so, I have principles, but I don’t have very strong beliefs. And so I try to go back to these thing when something is in question and I need guidance and clarity. These are the places I return to consult, and so that is why they are the sacred places for me.
Elizabeth
Tell me a little bit more about body. You’re the first person in five years who said that one. And I’m always interested in when something sort of peaks up above the clustering of sacred values that we’ve heard.
Audrey Assad
That’s fascinating. I could think about that all day. The fact that no one has ever said that on this podcast is fascinating. Not surprising to me either, because it’s new for me, and I’m going to be 40 in July. And I’m just getting here, so I’m not surprised. Sorry, say your question one more time because I got side–tracked by what you shared.
Elizabeth
I’d love to hear a bit more about it. Sometimes what I find helpful is asking “how has that thing that’s sacred to you shaped your life?” Maybe in decisions?
Audrey Assad
Yeah, thank you. So, these days, if I’m feeling confused or flooded in my nervous system – let’s say, by something, a situation a stressor, a trigger, a sadness, like whatever, a big feeling of some kind – I’m learning these tools to help me navigate that confusion that don’t really involve thinking my way out of it. So what drove me here, I think, is that I was diagnosed with OCD in 2016. And the type of “pure O OCD”, where it’s all up here in the mind. I didn’t have physical routines as much, it was all sort of thought loops, self–inflicted suffering through these mental rabbit holes and mazes that I would put up for myself. And especially around conscience, and religion, and God, and that sort of thing. And so that’s known as “scrupulosity”. It’s a condition known as scrupulosity. And I a therapist that I’ve seen, a trauma therapist, said, “I think you have this, this might explain some of your angst around all of this”. Because I was having panic attacks walking into any church building or space. I had to cancel a whole season of shows because I could not go into the churches, it was giving me so much anxiety. And there’s so much to that story that it would take the whole hour to tell. But I think it suffices to say that I was feeling like I had hit some kind of limit and I didn’t even really know about what. And so, because I have this condition of “monkey mind extreme tormenting mental space”, in this way of trying to think my way through this problem. I had to go into the body to heal and solve and to soothe. And I had never done that. I’d always been in talk therapy, which was helpful, but it hadn’t really alleviated my actual symptoms. And the same therapist said, “I believe you have CPTSD”, which is Chronic Post–Traumatic Stress Disorder. Meaning no one main event, but many, many small events contributing to symptoms consistent with PTSD. So I’m like, “What is going on? I don’t know. I’ve talked about everything. I’ve talked about my family problems. I’ve dug into all this. What am I doing wrong? What am I missing?” And it was all embodiment that I really needed to reach some healing and some peace in those places. And so, that was what started me on my journey towards it was a therapist – who was a Christian, by the way, and is – and I had come in and was like, “I can’t even say the word God. I can’t even say it, it sends me into panic”. So she said, “Okay, we’ll go with ‘Higher Power’, if that works for you”. So I said, “I think yes, I think I can do that”. And so, we go through this whole journey together over 10 months. And that’s what brought me into my body as another locus of divine wisdom and intelligence.
Indoctrination, compliancy, and upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren community
Elizabeth
Sorry, that was so beautiful. And I muted myself occasionally, because I have bad hay fever so I didn’t want to snuffle all over you. There’s so much that I’d love to unpack there – and I hope that we will – but I want to wind back a little bit first, and just hear the beginnings of that story, maybe? Could you tell me a little bit about your childhood? And in particular, any big ideas that were in the air – religious, political and philosophical – that were formative for you?
Audrey Assad
Yeah, I really found it interesting thinking through this question. Because what I found – I’ll give you the my thesis first, and then I’ll back up. But what I found was, there are things that I was sort of, not just taught, but indoctrinated with, I would say. And I think that’s actually the term we would also have used. So this is not an accusation of anything, it’s just sort of a statement of the way we thought about the truth, and beliefs, and what they meant and how to impart them. We were studying charts of a dispensational post–apocalyptic future and learning the scripture in large, large passages. Just very much like “this is the world I’m in, this is the water I drink, this is the air I breathe”. And there are things that I was taught that I do not believe now, I do believe something different, or I feel another way. And yet, I am still so formed by those things that I have an inner conflict with myself over so many questions, because I have such a strong and steeped schooling in this way of thinking over here, where I’m from. And yet, I have seen beyond it, and it includes my “seeing beyond it” includes it. Like, I don’t reject it. It’s just, I see beyond it, I feel. And so, I have an inner conflict because that voice, those voices and those beliefs that formed me as a child, are still with me, even if I don’t hold them the way I did. So it was an interesting thing to try to think through. And, yeah,
Elizabeth
Can you say a little bit more about what that community was?
Audrey Assad
I was gonna say – I think it would be helpful to sort of paint the picture, because I was raised (and I’m sure you’ll have heard of it, because it’s pretty active in England. Although it is different in the States, but it’s related) in The Plymouth Brethren. Are you familiar at all familiar with them? And so, I was raised in a community which… We did not live in a community the way a lot of the ones in England do, but by all other intents and purposes, we did. We were not encouraged or permitted to vote, or to marry outside of the denomination, or to… Going to college, it happened, but there was a lot of suspicion about that. But yeah, perhaps most interestingly, we took communion every Sunday, which is unusual for a Protestant denomination. But we didn’t allow people who were not Plymouth Brethren to receive it. And if you wanted to receive Communion there, you could be under observation by the Elders for years before they decide if you are really in the fold.
Elizabeth
What does “under observation” mean? That feels…
Audrey Assad
Yeah, so that’s where it gets interesting. We have these things, ‘observation’ and ‘discipline’, and kind of unusual for what modern churches are like, I would say. Like, a person would have to submit themselves to the authority of the Elders of that church for observation, to determine whether or not they truly believe and adhere to the teachings of, not just the Bible, but what they believe is the only way to interpret the Bible, which is Plymouth Brethren doctrine. We didn’t read any books, really, religious books outside of that. We had our own bookstore, a Plymouth Brethren bookstore, where you could get just approved texts that you could read. And while it wasn’t living in a commune, where I couldn’t escape literally, it might as well have been in some ways, I think, a commune, because I was so sheltered from everything else, in certain ways. There are exceptions to that, which I’m grateful for, but yeah. So I was raised in a high–control, very hierarchical [environment] – in the gender sense, very, very, extremely. And so it was kind of a rigid place to be raised.
Elizabeth
And had both your parents always been Brethren?
Audrey Assad
My mom had been, and her mom had been, I think. Her father was raised Pentecostal Holiness, which is like snake–handling, Southern, kind of very different than the Plymouth Brethren, extremely different. But he had an experience in his teens, I think, where he had a very spiritual experience and he felt that that was where he was led to go. And then my dad was raised Christian Missionary Alliance in Syria, where he grew up. And then when he came to the States, the man who sponsored him as a child – he was a sponsored child, for lack of a better term, as in Syria because they were so poor. And there was a man who had sponsored him and he met him when he came here. And he introduced him to the Plymouth Brethren community that that I grew up in.
Elizabeth
How much was that kind of Syrian side of your identity alive in your childhood? Or was it crowded out by the strength of that Brethren culture?
Audrey Assad
Well, it was quite alive. And what was actually really beautiful about the Plymouth Brethren culture I was in, was that it was extremely ethnically and racially diverse, and included a lot of Arabs and Black people. My church was not a very homogenised place in that way. And so, our culture was very much part of our lives. And my dad’s brother and his family, and his sister and his family, all lived nearby, and my grandmother, and so I was around a lot of Arabic family on a very frequent basis.
Elizabeth
This is gonna sound like cod psychology, but I assume this has come up in your talking therapies. How much do you connect your scrupulosity and the PTSD to that time, or not? I know that’s an impossible question.
Audrey Assad
Oh, I know. It’s a big one. And I am I’m still curious about it. But I think I have a handle on it, generally. Because that is the big question, right? does faith breed the feelings, the symptoms, of something like that? Or does that breed an engagement with faith that is like that? And I can tell you what I know, which is that – I don’t want to call it mental illness – these sorts of mental difficulties run in my family on my mom’s side. So I think that I have some genetic or ancestral, whatever you want to call it, kind of tendency toward it. And I was raised in a high control, very binary and harsh (in some ways) religious culture, and I think they were a perfect match for each other. Like, perfectly matched. And so, I think that it’s both for me, that’s my best guess. Yeah.
Elizabeth
And so, presumably, you showed up as a fairly compliant child. Is that how it showed up?
Audrey Assad
Quite, yes. And my mom still… I’ve told I’ve talked to her about it, and why it kind of gives me a little… but she will always say like, “Oh, you were just so compliant”. Like, if someone asks what I was like when I was a kid, that’s what she says first. And that’s what my dad says first. And so I think that’s very interesting, and that is how showed up.
Elizabeth
You wanted to get it right.
Audrey Assad
Yeah. And I mean, that version of me is still with me. I’m still her. Not entirely, of course, because I’ve been other versions since but she comes with me through every transition and every decision still. So I’m learning to work with her, work with that.
A dichotomous relationship with God: spiritual experiences vs religious dogma
Elizabeth
So, what I want to do now is do what I sometimes call “dropping the G–bomb”, okay? Which is hard generally, and it can be very disruptive. But because of what you said earlier about your therapist, I was just wanted to check that asking about how the “Higher Power” was… your experience of that in your childhood, that you’d feel okay, answering that?
Audrey Assad
Yeah, yeah, I would.
Elizabeth
Did you believe in God? What was your sense of the presence? Was it very much outward performance?
Audrey Assad
Yes. What’s really hard for me is that I want to ask you all the same questions, because I see…
Elizabeth
We’ll book a call just to discuss the two of us.
Audrey Assad
Okay, that sounds great. I would love that. So, it’s like thinking about an ex–boyfriend kind of thing. Like, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, he did that. Oh, yeah.” I had like an interestingly, dichotomous relationship going on. So, there was this kind of rigid, scared, “walking on eggshells” side, to my relationship to God. But there was also this other side, which I didn’t really know how to make sense of, and I was a little scared of, if I’m honest, because I would have these experiences that I couldn’t really explain. And they happened in music, sometimes. They happened in my dreams, they happened at night before I fell asleep. And I can explain more about that. But I couldn’t explain them, and it felt like God, but I felt like I was worried it was demonic. So I was like…
Elizabeth
Say more about what those experiences were.
Audrey Assad
So, the best way I can put it is “visions”, that came without warning and without permission. And I would have these experiences and sort of be like, “I don’t know what they’re even for. I don’t even know what the takeaway is”. It’s just like something happened and took over my field of consciousness or my field of awareness so much that I felt like I was somewhere else. And I felt like I was so worried that that was something untrustworthy, or dangerous, and I never told anyone – anyone – about it. Because I felt terrified of what would happen, because we were also a community of non… Like, we believe that there were no spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues and visions and dreams was not active and alive anymore, because of where we were in the dispensational history of things. And so I was like, “Well, then something is deeply wrong with me”. But it felt like God. So it was such a conflict. This is terrifying, kind of confusing.
Unexpected success, and the emotional and healing force of music
Elizabeth
So that’s helpful that there were two things at play. Tell me a bit more about music. You said some of the experiences happening in music. What’s your earliest kind of music memory as someone who’s devoted your life to this art form?
Audrey Assad
My earliest music memory – is not a vivid memory, like “I remember this moment, really”; it’s more like flickers and flashes of things – but being probably five. And I loved to read. And I love to play piano. And I would climb up on there and play with one hand on the with my right hand on the keyboard. And on with the left hand, I’d be turning the pages of a book on the music stand of the piano. And I would just kind of wile away the hours like that sometimes. And that was my relationship to it as a child, which was really… I mean, I think it saved my life, probably, in some ways.
Elizabeth
When did the idea that music might be the thing you were going to do emerge?
Audrey Assad
I was 19.
Elizabeth
Wow, quite late.
Audrey Assad
Yeah, I mean, it didn’t even consider it as an option, because I thought I would… Well, I was going to do exactly what my mom did, and get married at 18 and have kids and not work and not go to school. That was my plan. And that was kind of what I thought I would do. And then in high school, I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll go to school for something”. My uncle was in fashion, and I wanted to be in fashion. And so I thought about going to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. But then I decided “No, I’m gonna go pursue music for a second”. And that was when I was 19. “I’m just gonna see”. And I had a sense that I was called to it. And I had been raised in a church where women couldn’t speak about spirituality or God in front of males over the age of 12, or 13, essentially, because it would be considered to be preaching or teaching if they learned something from you. And so, I was not permitted to sing in front of the church as a child, as a young person, because that would have been wrong. So, I didn’t even see it as an option, I think, until something kind of told me, “Wait, I don’t know. Maybe you are called to go over here.”
Elizabeth
And what was the draw? What was the thread that you were pulling on with music? What was your heart leading you towards?
Audrey Assad
I think it was such an outlet for expression of so much angst and pent up creative energy, pent up spiritual angst. I had a lot of existential angst. I didn’t realise that was the name for what I was thinking and feeling, but just a really worried time. Like, really worried – really, really worried and concerned. Like, as a young person in my high school years, were just… I don’t know. I have all these journals. I have the gift of having journals probably from when I was 12, till about 25. And I’ve been reading through them the last year or two slowly, just picking a little bit at a time. And what strikes me is how anxious, and sad, and tormented they are. And not all of it, but so much of it. And really heart–breaking words. Like I would say that, when I was 22, I gave a guy a foot rub because he asked me to give him a foot rub. And I went home and wrote in my journal about it, and I was like, “I am I’m such a whore. I’m such a slut. I think I should get up on a life–size cross until God purifies me of this thorn in my flesh.” Because I felt an attraction to this person, and I was physical with them in that way. I mean, I didn’t even kiss anyone till I was 26. I was so petrified of everything to do with… I don’t know, just scared, worried. And so that was my overall relationship with it all. But there were these experiences. And music, it led me into that feeling of connection, a feeling of stillness internally that I couldn’t really get without it. It was like it bypasses the mind and went into the body and into the realm of the unconscious as well. That sort of undercurrent underneath all our actions or behaviours. There’s this undercurrent of the unconscious ocean of whatever is inside us. It’s like the void. And that could come out through music in a way that no other event could do than that. And I think that probably healed a lot as I was living, as I was growing up, in that I probably could have sustained even more trauma from the experience had I not had that.
Elizabeth
And you became quite well known for singing worship songs, hymns, your own music, and particularly beloved for reworking beautiful old spirituals. How do you think about that time now, and what was going on in you, and what people were connecting with? Because suddenly you had an audience.
Audrey Assad
I’m sitting with your question, scanning was my eyes. It’s like I’m looking at a map of my life and thinking what’s worth saying… So the first time that I really felt like “Oh, this is happening” was, I went on tour with a guy named Matt Maher – and he’s well known in the Christian world for writing, and also working with old hymns, actually, and kind of making new versions of them. And “Lord, I need you” is a good example of one of his songs. And I went on tour with him in 2008, and I could just feel how people were responding. I was burning CDs on my old laptop that didn’t even stay standing up. I had to prop it up on something, and it was like, wires were coming out. But I was burning by hand my little EP I had made, and selling them at such a rate that I was spending the whole day, every day, doing this and hand drawing all the covers. And it was hand cramps, and I was like, “I didn’t think I was gonna have this situation”. I thought I was going to be like, “I’ll do 20, and then I’ll have a couple days’ worth” instead of selling 70 or 80 of them a night. So I’m having to make all these. The guys in the band were helping me. It was such a sweet… Everyone was so excited for me. And I felt “What’s going on here?” I didn’t know, I didn’t even know, I didn’t expect that, I don’t think… And right away, I could tell that I was able for some reason – it’s something about the vibration and timbre of my voice and the things I’m saying – it brings people to a place of self–compassion and release. And I’m like, I’ve always held that sacred, no matter what version of me I have been. And so the hymns and all of that, at the time when I made a record called “INHERITANCE” – which is still my most successful record by a 100 miles, and it’s all hymns and two originals. And if I had a guess as to why, I think it’s because when I made it, I was tormented by the fact that my beliefs were shifting. My faith was changing, my identity as a certain type of believer was crumbling. And I was so scared, because I was like, “What does this mean? I didn’t ask for this happen. I didn’t want to deconstruct anything, and yet here I am doing it. Oh, my God.” And I made that record in that time because I could not write a worship song to save my life at the time, because I was so conflicted about what do I think, what do I even believe about this. And so I thought, “Well, I could sing the songs that I have a relationship to.” Because Plymouth Brethren, for all of the things that it might have left in my life that have made my life harder or more complicated, we sang. We were a singing community. And we sang in four part harmony, and we sang all the time. And I look back at that, and I’m like, “That is powerful, and healing and medicinal.” And so, I hold that very sacred, those hymns that we sing, even though I don’t believe some of the ideas. Some of them I don’t believe them anymore. However, that music, that sound was extremely healing. So I was clinging to that as a life raft at that time. And I think you can hear it in the music that I was going through a deep and rich experience, trying to wrestle with these ideas. And so, people resonated with that. And as I traverse what’s now, it’s very interesting. I don’t know what’s going to happen but, I’m so grateful that I have had that time and that chance to meet people in that way.
The physical and mystical, the power of embodiment, and conversion to Catholicism
Elizabeth
We’ll get to deconstruction, because I think it will be a very familiar phrase to a lot of people, and completely new to a bunch of other people. But before we get there, you converted to Catholicism, and I would love to know what triggered it.
Audrey Assad
Oh, yeah. I did when I was 24, and it was about two years of study and kind of figuring out what I thought about it, and then going through the rite of initiation, which takes six to eight months or whatever. And so, I met a Catholic who was 17 or 18 year old. I think I was probably 21/22 at the time, and I was in a coffee shop. And this guy came up to me, who looked to be about 16 years old, and he said, “Hi, you don’t know me. My name is Dan. And I have seen you at several worship night things around town and really enjoyed it. And I was wondering if you’d like to come and sit with me and my friends over there and hang out.” And I looked at them, and I was like, “I don’t know why I’m saying this, but okay”. At the time, I was a little bit guarded with people when I met them, and I just felt this compulsion to lean in for some reason. And so they were Catholics. And I was raised in a very anti–Catholic Church environment, very, very: the whore of Babylon in the Revelation is the Pope, and the Catholic Church is the dragon consuming the baby… I mean, we were like, “No, no, no, no…” So I was just fascinated. I was asking them a million questions. They talked to me so late, that they missed their curfew and got in trouble. I just was like, “I want to know everything. What is this?!” And so I went to mass with him the next day, a morning mass at a nearby church, and he explained to me, “You’re not Catholic, so you cross your arms and you receive a blessing”. And I went in there, and there was a family in there that had a son who was an adult with Down syndrome, and he went up and received communion, and there was something about it, that just broke me open. I was like, “It’s not about what you know, it’s not about what you understand. There’s something physical going on here.” It was like an early version of my embodiment journey came to me through that experience, where I was like, “Oh! Oh! The sacraments are like of our mystical place, they are a mystical, but also physical. All of them have a physical aspect: the oil and the Anointing of the Sick, and all that kind of thing.” So I was just so drawn to these physical embodied spiritual moments and statements. And so that’s what pulled me into that. And I look back at that and think, “Gosh, I still resonate with all of that. There’s nothing in me that rejects that that the Earth can be where the Divine is met and encountered.” And the Catholic Church took me from a place of all mind into a more embodied version of faith than I had ever been part of. And that was what drew me to it.
Fundamental deconstruction, the limitations of language, and an expanded understanding of faith and spirituality
Elizabeth
Any of these questions, we could spend a whole hour on, so I’m having to be very disciplined. I’m gonna ask about – and I don’t want to say “where you are now”, because you’ve been so wonderfully straightforward. You said something about your literary agent saying “change is your brand”. The journeying and the questing, and the changing, it’s not “You were there, and now you’re here”. This is how you live. For this moment, you have used the language of deconstruction. Could you just say kind of what you mean by it? And how you think it’s often used for people who it will be completely foreign to it?
Audrey Assad
Okay, my opinion on deconstruction is very subjective. It’s mine, based on my experience. A lot of people define deconstructing your faith as, essentially, more or less taking your beliefs and your ideas off the bookshelf and looking at them for a while to decide, “Do I still think this? Has my relationship to it changed?” And that’s all part of it. But for me, there was a deeper, more foundational change, where I underwent kind of a core level shift in philosophically how I view the world, the universe, the soul, the body, nature, God… It’s like I experienced a complete taking apart of, not just my beliefs, which are based on these deeper foundational kind of held knowings or whatever, foundational stuff; that changed. And so, everything else changed because that changed. It wasn’t totally intellectual. Was it partly intellectual? Absolutely. Do I have intellectual objections to certain things? Absolutely. But what deeply happened underneath that was a shift in my view of the big things, and how I look at them, how I think about them.
Elizabeth
This is a really horrible question, but how would you narrate how you look at the big things now?
Audrey Assad
Yeah, I would like you to, as your homework, unpack why you’re sorry for asking me that.
Elizabeth
Because it feels like it’s one of those things that might be beyond many of these things, as with anything that’s sacred is. it’s not easily nettable.
Audrey Assad
But here’s the thing: I have accepted that, and I am a lay student of the tantra world lay student. I’m not like an academic–level studier of that. But one thing that I love about it is that they teach about this, about words, and trying to describe the sacred. And that while words are inherently not capable of describing it, because they inherently sort of create opposites: it’s only the moon because it’s not the sun, and it’s not the sky, and it’s not… There’s a certain duality to language that is unavoidable, and therefore, it cannot fully encapsulate what is beyond duality. That’s why it’s hard to put it into words, because you can’t put it into words, because the minute you do you, you create sort of a prism that refracts the light into a rainbow. The pure light is now seen in colour because of your words. So the thing that’s special is, because it cannot put it into words, we refract the light into colour, which makes it something we can experience, because we’re able to say something about it, even if it’s not perfect. So I love talking about it. But I think I just know that I am part of nature. I’m not above it. I came from it. And because that’s true, I am finite. And I am earthly, and I am decomposing already, and I will die. And what changed is that I now see that all of the stories, and beliefs, and structures, and institutions that we build, they’re not bad, but they’re not the whole picture, and they are not as objective as we believe. And I think that’s what changed for me. I felt so small all of a sudden, when I started to come into touch with this feeling. Like, I’m an ant, on an ant hill, on a planet that is hurtling through the galaxy that is one of millions of galaxies. What do I know? What the hell do I know? I don’t know anything. And it felt like freedom, because my trap is the mind. It’s prison, I have to have to have one to be here, to live here, and talk to you. That’s necessary. And I love my mind, I don’t hate my mind. I’m not anti–mind now. But I just know that all this thinking about what’s out there, and what’s making all this go and believing things about it, and building churches based on it is, it’s fine. It’s not wrong. It’s just not the whole thing. There’s something deeper than that underneath it and it’s in everyone and in everything. And that is what changed: I believe that God is in a blade of grass, just like God is in me. And I was coached away from that type of thinking, of course, where I was brought up and warned of the dangers of that. And it has only healed me and enriched my life. And that includes Jesus and the Cross, and Christianity, and everything that I was raised to believe. And I think really learning not to reject it but instead to embrace all. That’s how I view it now.
Breaking tribalism with Love: vulnerability, change, and the experience of connectedness
Elizabeth
Thank you. That’s very beautiful. There’s been a sort of powerful vulnerability about your public voice for a lot of your journey, I think, and it’s probably partly why you’re very beloved by people who love your music as well. But when you started talking more openly about this process for you, maybe particularly when you kind of announced – I think you’re careful with your words – not currently being a practising Christian, rather than I am not a Christian or whatever. How was the reaction and how did you navigate that?
Audrey Assad
I think a lot of people were not shocked. So there was not as much blowback as you would imagine. Because by that time, I had been slowly, steadily, I think, scaring people who felt very concerned about my beliefs changing, because they could feel I think the shift going on. I was never overt about certain things, but I did get… In 2014, I got really political in a way I had not prior to that, and that was because Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson here. And there was something about that particular one in a long and unending string of events like that, that are not “newsworthy” to people. I recognise that, but that was the one, for whatever reason, that opened my eyes to the situation in my country and in the world. So when that happened, I started to speak up about that. And that started to sort of shake certain people off and scare some people away. And then I was sort of being more vocally compassionate about LGBTQ stuff, and saying “Happy Pride”, and that was like, a big deal. That was probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, was when I said that the first time online. So by the time I got to the “I’m not a practising Christian” thing, I think a lot of people were like, “Yeah, we know.” And the ones that stayed behind, overwhelmingly the majority, were supportive and understanding, even if they don’t currently share the same perspective shift. But there are obviously the people who are making it their business to react, to be upset, and I just felt like I felt compassion. I feel compassion for that. Because I get it. I know. And it’s okay. That’s their journey. And like, I’m on mine, and I think that has died really hard for me, but it’s dying, that “people–pleasing” kind of worry. But it’s died.
Elizabeth
So I am fascinated by tribes and the way we… There’s a guy called John Yates, who wrote a book called “Fractured” in the UK. He talks about PLM, which is “People Like Me” Syndrome, and this sort of baked–in instinct in us to feel more comfortable with people like ourselves, to receive more warmly messages from people like ourselves. And I think it’s probably universal. I, as a Christian, might just call it sin. And it’s one of the things that I see Jesus actively calling us out of by being quite actively disruptive around tribalism. But that instinct in us to feel antagonism, or tension, or fear around people who believe and behave differently from ourselves is so baked in, and we live in a world that’s continually forming us further into it, and we have to find the practices that help us resist it. And you’ve been in a lot different tribes: you were a Plymouth Brethren when that was an unusual thing in the world, to navigate the world like that. And then you were a Catholic, in particularly the Christian music scene in which there weren’t many Catholics. And you are someone who has traversed different places. What have you learnt about what helps us continue to see each other as fully human beyond and across our tribes, or even – I think sometimes this is a hardest – someone who used to be in our tribe, and we feel has rejected it?
Audrey Assad
I think this one is harder than the rest for some reason, to describe the way that I view this. But I’ll just say, I think I’ve come to such a sense of the deeply, and intricately, and unavoidably woven together strands between me and you and everybody who disagrees with everything I think. I just know how connected we are. I understand it. I feel a sense of this web with humanity, such that when a strand is tugged on the other side of the world, sometimes I feel that. I believe that we’re so connected in ways that I’ll never really understand. And so tribes are a way, I think, that we can feel that feeling. But I’m learning to feel it without needing a tribe. And I mean, I believe in villages. I believe in that. I actually have more of that than I have in a long time now and with my friends, my chosen family and such people who I commune around these ideas with, we need each other. And we’re so connected that, I guess when I receive blowback, especially from Plymouth Brethren people still, that will sometimes find me and send me a letter or whatever, I’m just like… I don’t know if this is dismissive, I hope not, but it doesn’t matter that you feel this way. I’m still connected to you as much as I ever was. Even if you don’t feel it, I feel it. I feel it. And I don’t know how to account for that. I’ve had that experience several times in some very visceral ways, where someone is coming at me with this energy of fear and anxiety and stress about what I think and how it’s changed, and what my heart feels is just, like, “I love you”. I’m sorry, I get it. I really do. I understand. I have been there. I have felt that I’ve said that to someone. I’ve done this. And I understand. And I don’t expect you to be any different. And I don’t expect you to see it. And it’s not because I’m above you, or because I’m smarter, or because I’m more in touch with God than you. That’s not my job to know, or to think about. “Well, am I hearing the real truth and they’re not?” It’s not up to me to know that, but I just feel like I feel love for that. And I’m grateful to be there because I have this experience a lot.
Elizabeth
Audrey Assad, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Audrey Assad
You’re welcome. It’s such a pleasure.
Conclusion and Outro
Elizabeth
So I have been listening back and pondering to that conversation that I had with Audrey. And the first thing that struck me is, she said “I didn’t come up with very many sacred things”, and then listed five. And I think for a lot of my guests, getting to one or two is really quite difficult. And I think that that speaks to the amount of time that she’s spent in reflection about her beliefs and her life, and how she wants to orient herself. She says something about sacred values, that they’re the things that she goes back to when she needs clarity, when she needs to make a decision. So, something like the things that she consults when she needs clarity. And it really chimes with the way I’m increasingly thinking about this evolving concept of what our sacred values are what the sacred means to us is. It’s all kind of orientation and geographical metaphors that come to mind, of things that are a compass for our life, that we check in. We’re wandering in this world and we can sort of get a bit lost but we check our compass. And if we know what our True North is, if we know where we’re headed, if we know what the values we want to live by are, then we can reorient ourselves to them. And they can be a kind of map, they can be things that keep us on the path on which we want to be. The other way I sometimes think about them is “What would you want someone to say about you? Or say about your life on your deathbed, or at your funeral? What was your life defined by?” I want someone to say, “Elizabeth’s life was so clearly defined by her relationships”, because that’s my primary kind of guiding sacred value. I wonder what yours are. I’d love to hear more.
I want to pause on what Audrey said about scrupulosity and OCD, because it’s not a topic we’ve covered on the podcast before. I actually don’t think it’s a particularly well known condition/difficulty/challenge. And I’m going to point you actually to something. The reason I know about it is from a very good piece by a woman called Susanna Black who is one of the editors of Plough Magazine. And Susanna writes about a later–in–life conversion, and how that connected with OCD. So I think both with Audrey and Susanna, there’s particularly interesting things about how scrupulosity – which is really, I think, these mental loops that are very fearful and very anxious about doing things right, and getting things right – can interact in very difficult ways, with religious belief in particular. The more I think about it, I think it could show up in all kinds of things: in activities around social justice, in people’s politics, that kind of tendency or temperament. And I have found thinking and reading about it very interesting and very thought–provoking. Because of this idea that we have – I think that there are good ideas or bad ideas, or liberating ideas and constraining ideas. Because there’s another layer, and it’s about how it interacts with our own temperament and tendencies. And Audrey who had had real honesty and self–awareness of the mix of a very high–control, hierarchical… she was using language like ‘observation’ and ‘discipline’, ‘compliance’. When you have that tendency towards conscientiousness in the Big Five personality test, or if you have something more extreme like scrupulosity, that can be a very, very difficult mix to handle. Whereas for someone like me, who doesn’t have especially high conscientiousness, doesn’t have a shame trigger that is very sensitive at all. Ideas, for example, within my faith that feel to me obviously liberatory, obviously life–giving, the same thing can be heard really differently in a different person, can land really differently in a different person. And for anyone communicating ideas, whether they’re political or philosophical or religious, just that awareness of the different ways they can land and the different ways people can hear them, I think, it’s so hard for them. People always say, “The way to peacebuilding, the way to engage with our differences, is to acknowledge how much we all have in common.” And I would give quite a strong “Yes, but…” to that, because we do have loads of things in common and I always want to start with those, but also what it shows me is just how different we are. How particular every person is. And often it’s in understanding that particularity of those differences, and dignifying those differences, that it’s easier to connect with each other.
I really loved that Audrey… So many people who do this thing of deconstructing publicly, which is the current way lots of people are talking about moving away from… I hate all the language. There’s no good language. I even have trouble with the word ‘fundamentalist’. But moving away from beliefs that they’d received, or moving away from faith communities that they had previously been part of, or not believing the things they used to believe, do seem to have come from quite intense places. I think probably if you’re raised a liberal Anglican, you don’t do so much deconstructing. When I had mine – and I had a real major… I became a Christian a bit later in my teens, and then became an atheist. And at the time the word “deconstruction” wasn’t used. It was just like a “crisis of faith”, a “dark night of the soul”. Looking back now, I understand why that language, because it did feel like my house was falling in on itself. The place I’d built my home, the foundations were not at all solid, and I was falling through the floor. But yeah, it seems that deconstructing often is from these quite intense backgrounds. I’m interested in it as a phenomenon, and where it’s helpful, and where it’s not. But the thing I really loved about Audrey is, it’s very easy when you’ve experienced pain in a community, or changed your mind about a set of beliefs to carry a lot of pain about it – and that pain can present in in bitterness, or in anger. And honestly, I think probably those things can be healthy to, in seasons. But Audrey has landed in this beautiful place where she’s so careful to name what was good about her childhood in this faith community that she’s so careful to say it’s a place that was beautifully diverse. It’s a place where we sang. She can name what she found difficult and name the gifts that it gave her, too. And there’s just a sort of beautiful maturity and a steadiness, and a she’s just been very careful, having left one tribe, not to descend into just a different type of tribalism, which is very easy for all of us to do as we change our minds on things.
I loved her what she was saying about having these visions and encounters with the divine. And I’ve been reading Maslow, Abraham Maslow recently, and when he talks about ‘peak experiences’, he has this thing where… Peak experiences now usually used in this sort of secularised way of like, when you do something very fulfilling. But in his writings, it’s clear he also thinks kind of mystical, unselfing–type experiences are also part of those peak experiences, these ecstatic experiences. And his argument is that religion accrues around those experiences, and then kills them, basically. He was an atheist, so he wouldn’t necessarily call them encounters with the Divine, but they sound like encounters with the Divine to me, frankly. But then, they’re tamed by institutions and structures. And the first thing is sort of “true religion”, in his sense. And the second thing is “false religion”. And as Audrey was talking, you could hear… she doesn’t use true or false religion, but she just talks about these two very separate things: these intense ecstatic experiences, and then the structures and the stuff that she was receiving at church and as though they were two things. And I think often we feel like those two things can’t co–habit, and we are temperamentally drawn more to one or the other, with someone who actually quite likes structure and rigour and grounding things, we might be drawn more to institutional religion or indeed, other forms of kind of structuring ideas and beliefs and principles. And if we’re someone who does have these ecstatic experiences, then we can chase after those and reject any structure around them, any accountability. And we see that in the excesses, I think, of both the religious ecstatic forms and in some of the least regulated areas of what’s happening around psychedelics at the moment. And those things are very, very individualised and very private and wild. I think, as Audrey was talking, I realised something about myself, which is, I value the places where I can hold those two things together. I sort of lean my faith expression… I don’t know what it is, honestly, but it at least has a big dollop of a kind of charismatic Pentecostal Christianity in it. And I like the fact that I can have those ecstatic emotional experiences, but have them in a container of ritual and community and accountability. I had a very funny thing the other day, where I went to St. Paul’s Cathedral for a lunchtime service with someone who is a friend and also professional contact. And we were going to be having a professional meeting, and this friend has kind of had a renewal in interest in their life in Christianity, essentially. As soon as we sat down, I realised it’s really intimate to go to a service with someone. Like, when are you silent? When are you chatting? You’re sitting really close to someone. We’re in St. Paul’s Cathedral, into this giant dome. Sociologically, this is just fascinating. Immediately my brain went, “Oh, the white marble, it’s so Imperial. And the gold… But isn’t beauty important?” Like the low church part of me and the high church part of me at war in my mind. And then throughout this very beautiful, but very austere, ritualised service, I felt my hands shaking, and I felt this sort of strong bodily experience of the love of God. And I felt really out of place and a bit embarrassed, in some ways, but also, it kind of summarised where I feel most aligned, when I am able to have that slightly more intense ecstatic experience within a container, and the container of this very old, very tested service. Sorry, that’s a big segue into me. I hope it’s relevant.
And we’ll just land with Audrey’s kind of rigorous non–tribal response to people who don’t agree with her. I think the idea that someone could write you a letter that carries a lot of pain and anger, because we do often feel betrayed when people who we had felt tribally aligned with change their mind. It’s really easy to feel angry with them, and for us to feel a bit abandoned. And when she receives those kinds of responses, she said this lovely thing, she went, “I know, I know. But we’re still connected”. And that stayed with me as just a beautiful posture to try and inhabit in ourselves, whoever the people are who we feel are outside our tribe and who might be angry with us, or who we feel angry with.
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