52 episodes

Recording & compiling conversations about spiritual de/reconstruction, curating them by topic, and releasing them in episodes. Let’s stop having detached debates on social media and really talk.

The Airing of Grief Derek Webb

    • Society & Culture
    • 4.5 • 204 Ratings

Recording & compiling conversations about spiritual de/reconstruction, curating them by topic, and releasing them in episodes. Let’s stop having detached debates on social media and really talk.

    Verse

    Verse

    THE FIRST EPISODE IN OUR MULTI-EPISODE SEASON FINALE!

    With music being so integral to this podcast, running in parallel to the conversations and correspondence we feature, it’s not surprising that the conversations themselves start to sound like music in their own way. They flow like the components of a song. Verses, choruses (etc) repeating.

    The more you listen to these stories, the more you can’t help but see their intersections—where they share space, and where they diverge. We’ve weaved together a lot of conversations, but nothing we’ve ever released has ever been at this scale or scope.

    The idea is to expand to a larger dialog than ever before. To extend our “choir,” that cloud of witnesses, beyond any statement we’ve ever been able to construct. These stories will be told over more than a single episode, with different people having more or less to say at different points along the path.

    “Verse,” this first part, is the one dealing with our points of origin. It’s not about where we are now, or even how things crumbled to get us there. It’s about where we came from, and how that shaped everything.

    • 36 min
    Refrain (A Meditation for Your Cells)

    Refrain (A Meditation for Your Cells)

    This episode specifically roots us in the sciences of process. A conversation with a molecular biologist invites us to probe deeper… smaller… into our very cells. To find what they have to say about release, surrender, context, and adaptation. How we’re sustained by the things we let go of along with the new things we grasp. In commitment to process, the patterns of evolution emerge — weaving unities within diversities, and teaching us about how our experience changes us.

    • 30 min
    Reprise

    Reprise

    It’s easy to view our growth as a separate thing from our grief.
    …Impatiently, we might perceive the process of grief as something that we need to “get through” so that we can “move on” to growth… But in reality, growth is happening alongside grief as we adapt.

    There’s some comfort to be found there. People a bit further down the line will tell you how much they learned in grief. And if you’ve had a harder season, where grief has seemed all-encompassing, it’s good to know that you aren’t in stasis. You are still in process and progress. You are still moving forward.

    AND AS WITH SO MANY OTHER THINGS, VIEWING ‘DECONSTRUCTION & RECONSTRUCTION’ AS SOME SORT OF BINARY ISN’T ULTIMATELY HELPFUL.

    • 34 min
    Come Home (To Your Body) Part 2

    Come Home (To Your Body) Part 2

    One of the key benefits to embodiment is that it’s substantial by definition.

    In a room (sanctuary) or a nation where many people are prone to detachment and disembodiment, a lot of hollow ideas and promises get promoted as answers, and hope is placed in vapor. A community in which on-the-ground advocacy is discouraged while prayers for intervention abound is no place in which to be fully alive. 

    Maybe you are the miracle you need to see. 

    This episode, we continue with a meditation not only on embodiment, but groundedness, real advocacy, and life beyond the limiting narratives and labels placed upon us. 

    • 38 min
    Come Home (To Your Body) Part 1

    Come Home (To Your Body) Part 1

    Some of the most resonant stories in our culture are about either finding or coming back to a place where you belong. Home. But the ultimate home to come home to is yourself.

    Part 1 (of 2) in our return to the theme of full embodiment, which is central to recovery and reconstruction.

    • 32 min
    Plain Sight

    Plain Sight

    There’s a Sufi proverb from Rumi which says,

    “I SEARCHED FOR GOD AND FOUND ONLY MYSELF.
    I SEARCHED FOR MYSELF AND FOUND ONLY GOD.”

    Whatever a ‘divine spark’ might be, it seems to be carried within our humanity. And yet many of us are healing from teachings and communities which suggested otherwise—which sought to divide us from ourselves, and to keep all the good things in external compartments… So we couldn’t own them. Couldn’t feel their affirmation or their embrace or their warmth.

    Much of Christianity loves to talk about something like incarnation, but only in the sense of what it might say about God. It misses the equally scandalous dynamic of what such a concept might say… about us.

    It was Jesus who said something about not building a house on sand, where the foundations could not handle a storm. When the storms come, often the unfortunate inadequacies of our constructs and - let’s say our sheltering, are laid bare. From within those shelters, we knew the roles we were required to perform. We knew how we were meant to appear. Many of us carried all of it out meticulously.

    But the storms came. And the masks we wore came down with the rest of the house.

    And yet free of the illusion of those shelters protecting us, a burden is lifted. We sense the things that were there all along, however buried, or stifled or censored in us. And in rediscovering the things that were hiding in plain sight, creativity is ignited to build something better, with all of our resources intact.

    • 48 min

Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5
204 Ratings

204 Ratings

Mary Frances/Erie, Pa. ,

Fascinating and Universal

I’m a life long agnostic and I’m binging the Airing of Grief. The experience of your interviewees is universal in that so many of us have de-programming that simply must be tackled in this lifetime to realize our ultimate loving purpose. Your hosts and guests are so thoughtful and intelligent, I’m getting so much from this podcast. Thank you.

aaroon22 ,

What Happened??

For the first two seasons, the theme music leading into the episode overview and program calls was on point. It really set the mood. Hearing the lead-in music this new season has really made it hard for me to want to listen to this season’s episodes. I’m sure it’s just my sensibilities but going from the fast paced jam session music to talking about grief in all its myriad details is kind of a hard transition for me to make. I actually really LOVED this show!

Hxcrobert ,

Much needed conversation and exposure

The whole church age has a difficult and painful history that largely has leveraged political power and force to implement incredible damage to itself, those seen as outside of, and overall- all creation. To know God or to claim Christianity and to turn a blind eye on this increases the likelihood of continuing this damaging tradition. And these conversations bring to the forefront a significant part of the damage in our generation.

If you know God or claim Christianity, I encourage you to resist any defensiveness to listen, to truly hear what is being said, sit with it, feel the pain of the stories, let Christ speak through these voices, these experiences, these lives that are precious in the Trinity right where they are on their journey. Examine the fruit of the approaches that have traumatically effected their faithful expressions and identify the rotten fruit that has been handed out, and consider the life in what is being developed that is providing nourishing fruit.

Top Podcasts In Society & Culture

This American Life
This American Life
Stuff You Should Know
iHeartPodcasts
MeSsy with Christina Applegate & Jamie-Lynn Sigler
Wishbone Production
The Viall Files
Nick Viall
Shawn Ryan Show
Shawn Ryan | Cumulus Podcast Network
Freakonomics Radio
Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher