Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Welcome to Becoming Church, the podcast where we discuss how the message and movement of Jesus is not just about becoming Christians, but about becoming the church. I'm your host, Kristin Mockler Young, and my guest today is David Gate. David is a poet, although some people call him a prophet for our times. But no matter what you call him, I hope you'll take a listen today with an open mind, because what I believe David is the best at is making people think. Here's my conversation with David Gate.
David Gate, welcome to Becoming Church.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's fun to be here.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: So excited to have you. What's funny is we. The very first time I met you, we had dinner together.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Which isn't normally a thing.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: A really nice place.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it was a very nice place.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Courtesy of Aaron Moon. So big shout out to her for making that happen.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: For sure. Yeah. You came down to Charlotte, down the mountain, I guess. To Charlotte. For Aaron's book tour here in Charlotte.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Yep.
Yeah, it was shooting distance. There was a hurricane on the way. But I thought, nah, forget it. Let's just go see Erin. And Because I'd never met Erin before either in real life, we've been online friends for a long time. So, yeah, I wanted to grab that opportunity and support her book and got to meet you in the process.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: That's awesome. And now you have a book coming out, so I'm very excited to talk about that as well. But I realize you are the first poet that I've ever had on the podcast, so what an honor. Talk about that.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Hopefully not the last.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Hopefully not the last. Listen, I feel like I'm finicky. Finicky, picky. I'm not sure what the right word is with poetry. I like yours.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Both works.
[00:02:02] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Thank you.
I like. Like, I. I try and be like a gateway drug.
So for people who perhaps have avoided poetry because it's, you know, can be quite dense and quite difficult to.
In. In many ways. And so definitely most of my work leans on the more understandable end of the spectrum. So I like to think that people will hear my work and they want to go and find people who are much better at it than me.
That's the hope.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Well, your poems are short and to the point. I think they're quite clear in whatever the message happens to be. But the very first one, Erin probably shared it. I probably found it on her feed. But the first one that I. I was trying to see if I could find it in the book here real quick.
It was. It was layered with Faith and also a tiny bit offensive. And I was like, ooh, I like him.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: That's. That's pretty much sums up my.
My oeuvre is layered with faith and a tiny bit offensive.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: I was like, I like that guy. So how did this happen? How long have you been writing poetry?
I know when you started it just kind of took off, but how did you get into it?
[00:03:21] Speaker B: So I've been writing songs for years. Like I had, I started writing songs when I was a teenager and then had a number of songs published when I was 16 years old.
And that really gave me the confidence to think, oh, I could write things and people might, you know, listen to them and engage with them. And so that was a huge encouragement very early on in my life as a writer.
And so I really concentrated on writing songs for the next 10, 12 years and then over time got more confident and more opportunities to write lots of different things. Like I would write articles, blog posts. When blogs were a big thing in the early 2000s, I was a big blogger.
When I say a big blogger, and nobody followed me. I, I was a big blogger and I wrote a lot.
I didn't, I, I would write a lot. I wasn't a well known blogger and, and then I was always writing stuff in for work. So when I worked for churches in my 20s and early 30s, and so I'd write devotionals and I would write sermons, all sorts of things. I love the art form of a sermon because it's so unique. You know, you just do it once and there, there it is gone. Yeah, it's such a, such a specific art form.
But so, yeah, I would write all that stuff and then, and then like on the side secretly I would write poetry and, and I would, I kind of thought that po, you know, you, you had to go to Cambridge or Oxford and have a, you know, or like a Masters in Fine Arts to be a poet and you had to write things that were really heavy and dense and you know, so hard to write poems about like the Second World War and stuff like that and like, just very serious poems. And so it wasn't really until like 200020202021 where I kind of loosened up a little bit and was just collecting all these little pieces that I'd written. I didn't know what to do with them in my notes app and eventually just thought I should share these and started with the Enneagram Beatitudes that I wrote.
And, and I did that because it would force me to write nine poems and share nine poems and that would get me started and, you know, I wouldn't have to think about what to write about for nine weeks. And yeah, did it and started to have a few people follow me and kind of took off from there. Like, I just got the bug and got the confidence.
I mean, flimsy confidence at first for sure. To share things online. And.
Yeah, just started and kept going.
[00:06:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Now I want to circle back. You said that you were writing music. Do I remember that you were part of a band?
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Okay, so, so let me, let me talk to you about my bad history.
So I was part of, like, worship bands when I was younger, and then I was part of a few other bands.
You know, we would play. I, I, at one point, when I lived in, in Belfast in Northern Ireland, I was in a band, very serious post rock band called OV Burning Cities.
[00:07:15] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Which always was really heavy post rock.
But yes. So currently I, I'm not part of a band, but I'm part of a collective group called Common Hidden. So that is.
So some of your listeners might have heard some of the, the music. Common Hymn makes some, some of its worship music. A lot of it isn't, but is really at the intersection of spirituality and justice.
We call it protest and praise. And there's a. Yeah. And I'm involved in, in that. Yeah. Helping those songs.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: So that's great.
[00:07:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: We, we love, I love Common hymnal. We love Common Hymnal over here and all the work that they're doing. I think that' like, your stuff too, because it aligns really well. Where I feel like, David, you stare, like, straight into the face of what's not right, of the reality that we're living in, with both, like, a steely hope that we can make it better as well as acknowledging what's real and raw and happening.
I think in a world right now that we live in, it's easy to swing into either, like, utter despair or naive positivity.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: How do you hold on to both? Because I feel like you do that well.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Okay. So I like what is called a dialectic approach to enter fully into the opposites. So my problem with, you know, kind of online posting and commenting and writing that leans towards, like, despair and cynicism is not that it's not hopeful enough, is that it isn't actually cynical enough and isn't actually truly approaching the actual void and the actual destruction that we're witnessing. So that's my problem with it. And the same with positivity is that my problem with, like, online positivity and wellness is that it actually doesn't capture any real hope. It's more like a facade on the, on the, you know, a brave face in, in difficult times and trying kind of positive mental attitude your way to, to a better life like I. Or a better world.
It's.
It's not hopeful.
[00:09:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: For me it sounds good, you know, like anything.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's just, it's not positive enough for me, is it just. It doesn't have the. An understanding I. I think of that this life in this world is, is utterly beautiful and is sometimes most beautiful at its most broken, fragile, messy, and even in the midst of suffering and cruelty can often you can glimpse the most beautiful things. And so it's, you know, so to me, it's just not positive enough. Like, it, it doesn't, it doesn't take it. So, yeah, that's my issue, basically.
No, neither side takes the things to their logical conclusion. And so, and if you do, I think on either end, you should really, I think take them both to their logical conclusions and you should end up with a, with a sense of total mystery and majesty and beauty of this life. Yeah, that's how I've approached it.
[00:10:53] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: You wrote in the, I guess in the first essay you said, often I can feel myself inching closer to the lip of despair. Maybe you can too. I was like, yeah, yeah, I can sometimes.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: But then you said, but I'm not ready to give up just yet. I still want all of this life. And I feel like that captures, you know, everything that you just said.
I also like how you write about cynicism because especially in the church world, in the faith sphere, you know, cynicism is very much seen as like, oh, it's negative. Don't be a cynic. Don't spiral.
But you would you say that the cycle of cynicism has actually helped you hold on to what's true.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I talk in the book about you.
You can't stay before cynicism. You, you can't, you know, kind of get ahead of it and think, well, I'm gonna again, just positive mental attitude my way and wellness my way through this life. And it doesn't, it doesn't work.
You. And that is a kind of, I guess, an innocent state, but also you can't, I think, rise above cynicism and think, I'm going to take the high road. I'm just going to live up in the clouds. And like, to me, that's naivety. Like, I think you actually have to go through the dark night of the soul, go through deep despair, cynicism, stare the void in the face before you can get to what I call in the book, like a second tenderness.
[00:12:24] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Like, it's. It's, you know, we're tender when we're born. And I think you have to go through the real dark reality is to get to the second tenderness, like your tenderness reborn. And I. I've been a very cynical person. I've been a very critical person. I'm very good at it.
I find that those. The words to be critical and cynical come very, very quickly and easily and often. That's my best words.
But I think you have to come. You have to keep going through that. And I think if you keep going through it and keep, you know, what's underneath that cynicism, and what's underneath that is, I think very often in cynical people, what's underneath that is a person that cares incredibly deeply. And, you know, this world is just so relentlessly cruel that, like, I think a lot of that deep caring gets channeled into cynicism. But really, if you keep digging at it, you'll find a person that usually is very, very caring.
[00:13:33] Speaker C: Yeah.
Yeah.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Because that's why I think people become so cynical, because their hope is so high, right. They're like, I really do want for the beauty and the good things. And then they get really disappointed. Disappointed when they can't find it or when other people in the world are like, no, we're going to overlook this.
What do you think it is that keeps people from breaking through and getting through to that tenderness on the other side? Like, what keeps them from entering the dark night of the soul to get there?
[00:14:07] Speaker B: If I'm really. To boil it down, I would think pride and vanity, really.
I think the sense that the only way to exist in this kind of cruel environment is to be. Is to protect yourself with cynicism and criticism.
And it's far harder, but far much more rewarding to live totally earnestly in this. In this world. I think earnestness is very rarely considered to be cool or artistic even, or whatever, you know, you're kind of hoping to portray to the world as this, you know, as we want to. We want to portray ourselves in certain ways.
And I think earnestness kind of eats away at that perception that we want to put out to the world.
And so really, it's kind of a kind of pride, a kind of vanity. And I think if you can let that go and just think, well, I'm going to be really Earnest and tender and gentle in, in, in this world, then regardless of how that's perceived.
Yeah. Then I think you can, you can get through to the other side, but you really have to let your ego go. Yeah, I think, you know, and certainly for the cynical person who thinks that they have the answers and, you know, like, sees everything that's wrong with the world and has a fair idea about how to fix it, you know, like, because it's often not as complicated as it looks.
Yeah. I think you kind of have to let go of that a little bit, like that ego and, and really embrace your own own earnestness.
You can't be afraid to be cringy in this world.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: You'll never get anything done if you, if you're not.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: Do you think there's some self protection there too? Do you think there's a fear of, like, being hurt if they're not putting up that very cynical or strong, you know, prideful front?
[00:16:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I, I think certainly so much of it is self protection. I think, you know, the vast majority of our negative behaviors are some form of self protection, whether that comes from fear or shame, you know. Yeah, agreed. In many ways it's like that, this fear of not having what we need, you know, so, yeah, I think a lot of it is that self protection measures. Yeah.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: Well, your book A Rebellion of Care. Thank you for sending me a little early copy here.
I love that. It's called the Rebellion of Care. And so I want to know, why did you choose the word rebellion? Like, what are we fighting? What are your poems fighting back against or what are they fighting for?
[00:17:10] Speaker B: So a number of things.
I, for me, the rebellion element of this book is as important as the care element, maybe even more so in, in 2025.
It's, I, I think to, to live totally earnestly, to be tender in this world, to care not just for yourself and your little family unit, but for, you know, your community and for the world and for the earth that we live on requires a certain rebellion to the way things are.
And so to act as a caring person and to create caring communities and processes in this world requires you to like, rebel against making as much money as possible. It requires you to rebel against having all the possessions that you want right now, today. It requires you to rebel against seeing boxing friends and, and people into, into the tiny boxes and instead seeing them and all their, I think I say in the book, all their complexity and absurdity.
It, it requires a real rebellion in that regard. And so you know, if you're getting to like the, the politics and the socio economics of it, it really is for me a rebellion against both a kind of capitalist way of capitalism is a default way of living, but also very in, from my point of view, very much like the patriarchy and that way of very hierarchical, oppressive ways of leading and controlling.
It's in total rebellion to that as well. And doing so, looking after one another, totally sharing our possessions with one another and making sure each other have what each other needs really does undermine that system.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I totally get that. I mean I've, I think I'm more drawn to the rebellion part than the care part, even though I know they very much go hand in hand.
Because it does feel rebellious to be like, hey, no, actually I'm going to vote and use my, whatever influence and platform I have and my voice to care for people who are not being cared for. Because as a Christian who's following the way of Jesus, like isn't that what we're supposed to be doing, you know?
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Yep, yep.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: And it does. And it's, it's crazy that it feels like, you know, not only that we have to ask the question like, what kind of Christian are you, but the fact that it feels rebellious to go, I'm out here trying to follow the teachings of Jesus and what the Gospel says. Why does that feel rebellious?
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's such a strange thing. Like a lot of the people, you know, there's, you know, that term deconstruction, which really describes a lot of what people have gone through.
I don't tend to use it very much, but like a lot of people have, have been through that kind of experience over the last five, 10 years. And what's fascinating about it to me is that the many of the church leaders and institutions and denominations view what's happened across the board as, as some kind of apostasy or some kind of leaving the faith. You know where I think the genesis of most of the people deconstructing that I, I've encountered is that actually the where they were was not anywhere close to enough to a Jesus life. You know, like a life that, that or communities that resembled, you know, Jesus and Jesus ways of living. And so most of that deconstruction actually comes out of this.
It. No, it's not that, like, oh, this doesn't fit in with the life I want to lead. It's more like this isn't anywhere close to, to what I have read in the Bible and what I understand about Jesus and what you know, the. The values that I were brought up up in that deeply resonate with me that I carry on throughout, you know, like helping my neighbor and, you know, looking after the. The least of us and, you know, loving others as I love myself and, like, all these ways of living. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that it's born out of a frustration that these churches are like that.
[00:22:14] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Well, I know you are speaking straight to so many of the listeners of this podcast because we have a lot of people that they DM me all the time and say things like, you know, I haven't. I haven't been in church in years.
I deconstructed all of the things. But they continue to listen to the conversations we have here for those same reasons. Right. Because we're not criticizing deconstruction and saying, how dare you? I actually think it's a beautiful thing when people can look at the parts of their faith that don't seem to line up, kind of unlearn that and then relearn.
Not that. Not that everybody does, but I think a lot of people do kind of relearn what Christianity or what faith can look like, whether or not they end up finding a church community near them that also reflects that.
So, yeah, we can jump ahead, too, because I know you have a whole section in your book called Haunted and Exhausted, and you said. I'm going to quote you to you again.
You said, I am haunted by a holy ghost who gets a kick out of telling me not to abandon every spiritual practice, especially if I intend to resist.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: So I want to know, David, as someone who used to be a pastor, kind of what you're sort of. Sort of. So you were in ministry.
Listen, you were in a Christian band, so that counts.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: It does.
I just hate being called pastor.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: That's fair. That's fine. You were.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: It's an American thing that's like.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Well, what title do you prefer?
Oh.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: David, I don't. I don't.
I'd rather be a prophet than a pastor for sure, but I don't even like that because of how other people use it.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Right.
Well, taking your experience in the church.
[00:24:10] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: To rephrase, what do you think Holy Resistance looks like right now in this weird 2025 era of Christianity, specifically in America?
[00:24:22] Speaker B: I think about it in two ways. One is the kind of protest element, which is about being noisy and about whole, you know, the publicly agreed values that, you know, whoever you're standing with, you know, whoever you're sharing these values with, human dignity, justice, truth, you know, and that you're standing up for those values in the face of not just one political party, but often both political parties. And, you know, you're, you're saying who to whoever's in charge of whatever municipality you're in, we're standing for these values. And so you're, you're.
There's an element of noise, there's an element of loudness. There's an element of table flipping. There's an, you know, that is part of it. I think the other side of it is not relying on either political institutions or religious institutions to meet the, the, the actual present needs of the people around you. And we have to look after one another. And so for me, that's the big, that's the far more costly element. I don't think it's that costly for most of us to, you know, speak out online.
[00:25:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Or go to a city hall with a placard and standing there and, you know, saying things like, there is a certain cost to that. There's a time cost to that. There's a potential, you know, societal, cultural cost of that that, you know, and if you're really doing it properly, like perhaps some legal trouble too.
But really the real cost is in how we actually look after each other and our willingness to do that for one another. Because all that's unseen and all, all of that is not very Instagramable and all that is not very.
It is really, you know, things that often appear mundane, like, you know, laundry and picking up your friend's kids and taking them to the airport and, you know, house sitting and meal trains and, you know, just every day looking after stuff. You know, it's a lot of mutual funds, it's a lot of gofundmes for, you know, cancer treatment. It's all that stuff and really committing to that, that's that element of community life.
To honestly, to rebuild community in America, I think is vastly important. So that's the two ways I think about.
I would think of like, you know, Christian resistance, Jesus esque resistance. That's how you're thinking about the, the church in Acts and the epistles. You know, these are the things that I think about.
[00:27:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: What do you think the breakdown of community is? Do you think it's that people are. I mean, I know we talked about the pride issue earlier. Do you think it's that, that people are so inward focused? Do you think it's because our lives are so busy? Do you think it is that we're only trying to do things for, you know, capitalist gain? Like what do you think the breakdown is?
[00:28:00] Speaker B: So I think a lot of that comes in in terms of highlighting and shaming individuals for their choices. So it ends up being, you know, you're too consumeristic, you're too isolationist. You just want to sit on your screen and watch Netflix. You just want to, to you know, isolate more and more.
[00:28:26] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: You, you are addicted to your phone and scrolling, you're addicted to social media and it can often come across and that and, and I think because we all have like certain kind of guilts and shames over that kind of behavior to varying degrees depending what our addictions are and how we engage with that behavior. Like it's very easy for us to respond, you know, like oh yeah, I do need to just stop scrolling more. I need to do this. You know, I, I, I don't tend to lean towards that kind of analysis and I lean towards the structural which is that the governments and corporations of, of this country greatly profit.
[00:29:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: And flourish under our own isolation.
So if we it rather than having, you know, having a lawnmower that you share between three houses or five houses, you know it, you know, you each buy one.
[00:29:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: How you know, it's that, that isolationism certainly for the tech companies is huge. Like all they want you to do is to watch short form video, you know, videos that last between 4 and 30 seconds and then watch another one, then watch. And that's all they want you to do with their lives because that's how they make them, you know, is ads in those spaces. So, and then in terms of it work and the isolationism comes from we want you to be at perpetually not enough money, perpetually, you know, worried about health care in order that you then take whatever job you can get and work however many hours we tell you you have to work and you know, get paid whatever we tell you're going to get paid. And so I think a lot of it, that kind of individualism isn't because we're like these terribly vain creatures, but so much as this is this system and you know, there's things within the system that we could more easily resist and that our vanity stops us from resisting celebrity culture's very obvious one, you know, where like our certain vanity we get lost in these celebrities and live our lives vicariously through people we see on our screens.
You know, like we could, you know, that is us that's doing that.
But by and large I think the system leans towards forcing us apart, forcing us to be alone, forcing us to rely on money. And therefore, employment in order to survive. Yeah.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: And there's an underlying, like, forced scarcity mentality too. Right. Of like, no matter what job you have, it's not going to be enough. No matter how much money you make, it's not going to be enough.
And there is a cost of it.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. And we live in this ridiculous scenario where we have enormous amounts of food waste.
I saw a thing the other day where we have, you know, globally, we have enough clothes for the next eight generations.
[00:31:48] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.
[00:31:49] Speaker B: And we're just making more and more and more. And like. And like, we add a generation to that list, like, every two, three, three years. So it's like we're producing so many clothes and so much of them just get thrown away and wasted or they're from Xi' an. And.
[00:32:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: You know, lost, you know, five wears. And it's, It's.
Yeah, we live in this absolutely insane with.
So there's actual scarcity and then this, like, total abundance. But it's not good abundance. It's food that's made terribly and it's clothes that are made terribly. And so, like, we have more of everything that we've ever had before, and yet we don't have anything that lasts. We don't have anything that's good for us. Organic food is the most expensive. You know, like, it's, you know, the things that are better for us are out of our price range. And so it's a.
This is the system we have. And, and so mending clothes, looking after them, making your own clothes, thrifting clothes swaps, and that's just fashion, you know, in terms of food production, like growing whatever you can in your. Your own little space, wherever you can get it, and supporting those who are, who are doing that, swapping, you know, the skills you have with. With other people, all that stuff massively undermines the system because none of that's taxable too. So it's, it's a total rebellion, resistance to that kind of isolationism.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: And I do think that. I know fast fashion was one for me. I rent my clothes, which I'm like, okay, that's a little bit of help and sustainability, because I'm not keeping it. You know, I'm passing it on.
At our church too. We've got this group of, like, families with young kids, and so they're forever swapping clothes. I take my daughter's clothes, pass it down.
But for me, I had to, I mean, just to be honest, talking about, you know, the ease of everything, I had to stop shopping at the fast fashion places and websites because I'm like, man, it's so much easier to drop a smaller amount of money, get lots of kids. Like, my kids are going to be set for the whole school year.
But yeah, once you really know not only the way that it mass produces, but the way they treat their people and things, it does.
It makes it harder. It makes me have to like, go out of my way to find better quality things.
But that's what I've chosen to do and I hope that my little part helps, you know?
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And like, I. I have no problem spending more money in terms of quality of material, where that material comes from, how ethically it comes from, and quality of craftsmanship and making sure the people who make it get paid well, you know, it for things that I wear every day. So yeah, whether boots, jeans, jackets, I will spend more on those things. You know, T shirts you can find or wherever, like shirts here and there, you know, but boots, jeans, jackets. Yeah. I'm like, I will make sure that the material is good ethically made, and that it's good for the environment, but. And also that it comes from, you know, people are getting paid well and people who know their craft.
[00:35:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: So I don't mind doing that. And like, that just means I have less.
It's like that one jacket is gonna have to become my whole personality.
That's just how it is.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: And that's okay.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: I'm not going to be able to have 10 personalities.
I'm going to just have one, maybe two, and that's fine.
[00:35:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:40] Speaker A: And that's okay.
[00:35:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: Yeah. That's more than okay. I think it's actually a better way.
[00:35:46] Speaker A: Of living and still abundance, in a sense.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:35:50] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: For sure.
[00:35:52] Speaker A: Well, I also want to talk about Section 8 in your book, which is. I must also feel it as a man because I think there's a lot of talk about masculinity right now. What it is, what it should be, how it's broken.
What do you hope that these poems in this section will kind of get people thinking about.
[00:36:11] Speaker B: I really want to get more men to understand how a patriarchal worldview is. Is oppressive for men.
[00:36:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: And how being emotionally illiterate, being, you know, emotionally incompetent really hurts men and hurts in. In the. In the lives they want to have. It hurts them in the careers they want to have. It hurts them in the dreams they want to see fulfilled. It hurts them in the relationships and their love hurts them in the children like it in their Parenting, like, certainly if you're a leader, massively impacts, you know, more people. So an emotional competency is really what I, I am pushing for in that chapter and in my poems, which, you know, I've avoided the term emotional intelligence.
So emotional intelligence is a phrase that I used to hear a lot in church world. Right. Like, so, you know, we need leaders that have emotional intelligence.
And what that doesn't mean is that there is someone who is doing an incredible amount of inner work.
What that means is finding someone who can manage their own emotions and particularly manage the emotions of other people, usually women. Right. Like, and so it ends up being, you know, the people that I do. Who spoke the most about emotional intelligence. Well, usually the most manipulative, you know, that they. They use that as, like, I need to. My emotional intelligence is me managing someone else's emotions. Me. Me, like, and also like, me managing mine so I don't get too angry, you know, and, and so forth publicly.
[00:38:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:38:03] Speaker B: Really. To gear me up for success rather than deep inner work, you know, So I kind of delineate emotional intelligence, which is a. Which is, as a phrase, in and of itself is fine. But like, the connotation for me is always, you know, something that is more about management than about deep inner work and healing and, and growth and about being.
Healing in order that others may heal.
And so, um.
Yeah, but emotional competency is what I'm hoping people will draw out of it.
[00:38:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: I feel like it's a. I feel like it's a very.
I don't know, for some reason I'm like, that's. I feel like you're going to get the most resistance or pushback on that section. Um, I don't know if it's because guys are more taught, developed, whatever, to, like, fight it.
I don't know.
[00:39:02] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I think it really is.
You're fighting a culture.
[00:39:10] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: You know, you're. And you're fighting.
It's so hard for. For a man to appear weak and vulnerable in this world.
And.
But we are weak and vulnerable.
[00:39:22] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: And so being able to be perceived. Being okay with being perceived as you are is actually incredibly liberating.
But everything in the culture fights against it. So you, you have to work for it. You have to, you know, do the work of being.
Being seen as vulnerable and weak.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Do you think there's anything that women specifically can do to help men in this area who are trying to maybe handle their masculinity?
[00:40:04] Speaker B: Yes, I do.
I don't really like telling women what.
[00:40:08] Speaker A: They should Do I'm out. I'm asking.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: Okay, you're asking.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:40:13] Speaker B: So one of the things that, that stops this from happening in men is a, a fear of humiliation. Right.
And I think one of the most powerful tools that women have, I'm talking many in, in certainly in like heterosexual relationships, is the ability to humiliate.
And that humiliation just in general, like, as a, as a use, you know, like trying to humiliate maga folk and all that stuff. I just find humiliation rarely gets the results you want. Yeah, it doesn't like it. There can be a certain kind of pleasure and a certain kind of power in it, but it rarely gets you what you, you want. And obviously within power dynamics, you know, like, there is, you know, the kind of punching up kind of thing as well. But, um, yeah, I would be. One of the things that absolutely stops men from being seen as weak and vulnerable is that they're absolutely afraid of being humiliated. And so if they're in a relationship where they feel like that person is going to jump on their weakness and vulnerability in order to leverage power for themselves and to change the power dynamics, which I'm sure often unhealthy in these relationships, it can really hinder any kind of progress that, that a man's going to make. I don't want to put the emphasis on women have to do this, you know, like, like, it's not a woman's responsibility to like, elicit this out of men. Like, really, men have to take responsibility. But yes, I, I, as much as you can, avoid humiliation as a tactic and as a, a leverage of power within your relationships with men, would be my advice.
[00:42:09] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:42:09] Speaker B: Well, thank you for answering the question respectfully and humbly.
Yes. And I offer that humbly.
[00:42:15] Speaker A: Yes.
Well, before I ask you the last question that I ask everyone, is there a favorite part or section or poem or thing in a rebellion of care that you didn't get to chat about?
[00:42:28] Speaker B: I am really grateful for the extra space that a book offers, far more than an Instagram square.
So there's something I found really interesting and creatively satisfying in crafting things that fit in the Instagram squares, which are now no longer squares, they're little rectangles, but makes my whole feed look terrible.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: I feel it.
[00:43:04] Speaker B: I have used that in order to really hone, you know, being able to say things in really small, concise, try and get as much beauty and truth in a handful of lines as possible, and I've really enjoyed that. But being able to, like, expand a little bit into, you know, the Essays. And the. The longer poems, particularly the longer poems for me was really satisfying. Like, the two longest poems in the book were my favorite to write, which is the opening poem, a manifesto for a rebellion of care, and then the last poem of the book, which is Give Us Back Our Lives.
They were my favorite to write. And.
And they're, you know, pages long, each of them, so.
Yeah.
[00:43:52] Speaker C: Yeah, well.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: And I loved that you have grateful for the essays in here because, well, like you said, while there is something fresh to be able to read and, like, get your point really, in a couple lines, you start to read and then you hit that last line, it's like, oh, man. Yeah. But the essays, hearing longer form from you is really cool. And you're writing on substack more as well, is that right?
[00:44:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Yes.
Coming to these essays in the book was a real shift for me because I'd been writing pretty much only poetry for like three or four years.
And so when I came to writing the. The book and I was going to do these essays, it took me a. A long time to kind of get it right and find my voice and get confident in. In the. In the essays. But I spent so much time, like, really, I. I ended up reading a lot of. Of essayists that I loved. Like, I read a lot of Joan Didion, I read some David Foster Wallace, I read some Clive James, a bunch of Kurt Vonnegut's essays and stuff. And they were all geniuses. So it was, you know, I set the.
The bar high for myself in terms of, like, you know, how. How to. To get going with this. But I really enjoyed this different form. Yeah. In the essay form. And so coming out of that, I did have a newsletter already, but, like, I really doubled down on, like, I'm gonna write an essay every week, not just like, my loose thoughts on a newsletter, you know, like, so that's kind of what I would do in my newsletters is like, maybe I'll talk about two or three things and I would, you know, I would. I've really kind of honed in now with Substack is I'm going to talk about one subject each week, and I'm gonna really do my best with it to express something conceptually, philosophically in those essays every week. And because I enjoyed just doing it for the book so much, and now there's part of me that wishes I could go back and rewrite the essays in the book, because I've got. I think I'm getting better, you know, Like, I think these substacks are really good. And, you know, like, I think I've grown even in the last year as a writer, so I'm looking forward to the next book, you know, which maybe be more essays than this one.
[00:46:21] Speaker C: Awesome.
[00:46:22] Speaker A: Great. Well, we'll link up your sub stack.
I know one of my favorite ones lately was about, you know, do we have grace or do we punch a Nazi? And I was like, I love it. I just think it's so, so good.
[00:46:34] Speaker B: That's what I've been wrestling with. I've been wrestling, like, as someone who. Yeah, well, I mean, I've really been through a period of my life of really taking the kind of pacifist, non violent approach of Jesus Christ very seriously.
And now I'm.
I'm living in a different space. And so what does that mean? And what, you know, it's like, I don't think I should go around punching every person in a red hat that I see. Yeah, you know, I don't think there's that.
But ice.
[00:47:09] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:47:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I, I think there might be, you know, some cause for physical intervention. And so, and, and what I conclude in that essay is that it's down to your own conscience. You really have to make that decision for yourself. And, you know, what you feel okay with.
Well, which is scary.
[00:47:34] Speaker A: I think you're making, you're making the world think, David. And I think that's very important.
I think that's a skill a lot of people are missing. So thank you. Thank you for your words in that.
My last question for you is because the podcast is called Becoming Church, how can people listening become the church to the people around them?
[00:47:53] Speaker B: This might sound weird, but I think you have to start by being church for yourself in so much as you. I think a lot of us have entered into a certain kind of consumeristic attitude to, in regards to church and church life in terms of what we get out of it. And I think you have to understand that primary. I am primary, primarily responsible for my spiritual needs.
And so therefore, I need to look after my own spiritual needs and not just default that to a pastor or a podcast or a worship album or whatever. You know, they can be part of your. Your thing, but like, the responsibility is on you. And you have to be the church for yourself and for those closest to you, which I tend to think, you know, to me, in my mind, it echoes what Jesus said about, you know, you go into Jerusalem and then into all the world, so you look after what's close to you and then in the surrounding areas and then out into all the world. Like, it's.
You have to be that for yourself first. Don't worry about changing the whole world. Like, change yourself. You know, make a difference to those close to you and then see where that goes.
[00:49:22] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love that. And as a pastor, I'm like, yes, that is not a bad answer. That is not a wrong answer.
[00:49:30] Speaker B: Good.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: Yes. Yes. Thank you, David. Thank you so much.
Friends, this book comes out on July 15, which is coming up, so we'll put a link in the show notes.
Go get it, read it, follow David.
[00:49:45] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:49:45] Speaker A: On Instagram, substack all the things, tell.
[00:49:48] Speaker B: Me what you think. If there's any post poems you love, then tag me in them online. I'd love to see the ones you love.
[00:49:59] Speaker A: We covered a lot of ground in this episode, which is exactly what David does in his book A Rebellion of Care. We talked about sustainability and patriarchy and church culture and just how to be a complicated person in a complex world. I'd love to know your thoughts and what part sticks with you. So send me a message through BecomingChurch TV or come leave your thoughts on the social media posts that will go up this week to highlight the episode and we can process together.
Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, keep becoming the church to the people around you.
