Discipline as a Necessary Struggle – Aaron Solberg

Episode 78. 
Father Aaron Solberg joined me to talk about his personal experience converting from the Orthodox Judaism of his childhood and his current practice of Christianity in a remote Canadian village. These are experiences few of us have, so it's wonderful to hear his stories. Although Aaron is a priest, he is not speaking here as a representative of his Anglican church. 


Highlights:
·       Jewish practice seen as "legalistic," leading to feelings of obligation and guilt.

·       Importance of structure and discipline.

·       Appreciation for communal aspects of both Jewish and Christian services.

·       Shift from fear-based obedience to love-driven practices in Christianity.

·       Human struggle with discipline and imperfection.

Bio:
Father Aaron Solberg is an Anglican priest, composer, husband, and father living in the Canadian North. A convert from Judaism, he originally worked as a conductor and cellist in Germany before feeling a calling to ministry. After studying theology, he served in Baker Lake, Nunavut, (in the Canadian Arctic) and now leads St. John's Anglican Church in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. He is the father of two young boys and writes about family life and faith, fostering a deeper understanding of spirituality within his community. In his free time, he focuses on writing and composing new music for various ensembles. 

Social Media links for Aaron:
Website – www.thesolbergs.family
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/theanglicanfamily/
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/theanglicanfamily
TikTok – https://www.tiktok.com/@theanglicanfamily 

Social Media links for Méli:
Website – Talking with God Project
LinkedIn – Meli Solomon
Facebook – Meli Solomon


Transcript:  https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1851013/episodes/15900688-discipline-as-a-necessary-struggle-aaron-solberg


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Transcript

Aaron Solberg transcript

Discipline as a Necessary Struggle

Méli [00:00:05]:

Hello and welcome to Living Our Beliefs, a home for open conversations with fellow Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Through personal stories and reflection, we explore how our religious traditions show up in daily life. I am your host, Meli Solomon. So glad you could join us. This podcast is part of my Talking with God Project. To read about that research, listen to past talks, or invite me to give a talk at your organization, go to my website, www.talkingwithgodproject.org. If you'd like to learn new words from our 3 religions and keep up to date on the project and podcast, sign up for the twice monthly newsletter. A link is in the show notes.

Méli [00:00:58]:

Today's episode is number 78, and my guest is Father Aaron Solberg. Though he is not speaking today as a representative of his Anglican church. Rather, he's joined me to talk about his personal experience converting from the Orthodox Judaism of his childhood and his current practice of Christianity in a remote Canadian village. Few of us have had these interesting experiences, so there's much to learn from Aaron. 

Hello, Aaron. Welcome to my Living Our Beliefs podcast. I'm really pleased to have you on today.

Aaron Solberg [00:01:37]:

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Méli [00:01:40]:

A lot of what I am interested in, a lot of what I talk about with guests on my podcast is how the past connects to the present, how they observe an ancient religion in 2024, or how what they did as children is related to what they do now as adults. And it's with that lens that I'd like to talk about your transition in that way. You have converted from Judaism to Christianity. I'd like to just hear a little about how you were raised, and then we'll get into, you know, what caused the conversion. What was that all about?

Aaron Solberg [00:02:25]:

So I was raised in a very Jewish household. Part of being raised in a very Jewish household is the idea that my parents had mixed backgrounds, and so they really wanted to emphasize the Judaism so that we would have an identity as a family. A lot of when we were raised, it was about being Jewish. What it means to be Jewish wasn't necessarily a religious thing. It was about, you know, we worship in in a certain way. We belong to a certain family, we gather together on Friday nights for Shabbos dinner, for singing Shabbos songs. My recollection from my childhood was a very culture based, religion. And my parents went different directions.

Aaron Solberg [00:03:05]:

My father became very, very orthodox and my mother became, I would say, very traditional in her in her practice. So for me then converting to Christianity, moving into a very different venue. I had a couple of years in there where I had no religion at all or where I was just, I guess, you could say culturally Jewish. I had a friend who was a rabbi. I'd help him out sometimes in the synagogue, but that was about my only only Jewish connection that I had at the time. But I still felt culturally Jewish. I didn't really wanna convert anywhere else. I didn't really even see the need for any kind of religion.

Méli [00:03:40]:

How old were you when that happened?

Aaron Solberg [00:03:42]:

So I got my first girlfriend, I'd say, my first serious girlfriend when I was about 15, And I was in the music business at the time because when my family is musicians, my mother's a musician, my dad's a musician. And that's about the time I realized that having payos or side curls, as you know from the orthodox Jews, and not being able to work on a Friday night was sort of not conducive to my career or to, the dating world that I was trying to be in. It was a slow progression out. I first, I I wore them behind the ears, my side curls. And then I I I would wrap them up so you couldn't see them and put them behind my ears. And then I started wearing them under my hat so you wouldn't even notice. And then I started cutting them shorter and shorter and shorter. By the time I was 16 or so, I'd completely abandoned the faith.

Aaron Solberg [00:04:30]:

I can remember exactly the moment I did. I was with my brother, and I I made a sandwich in the microwave on the Sabbath. I used electricity on the Sabbath, and I can remember that moment very, very clearly. I still look like an orthodox Jew. I was wearing a white shirt and and a tzitzit, and and I still had the small side curls behind my ears, but I broke the Sabbath consciously.

Méli [00:04:51]:

So what was that about?

Aaron Solberg [00:04:53]:

The breaking the Sabbath part? Mhmm. It was just I think this moment of breaking free. It it's not easy to be an Orthodox Jew. There's there's no doubt. I have friends who are Orthodox Jews, and they make fun of me. They said, oh, you took Judaism light when you became a Christian. It's a lot easier to be a Christian than a Jew. And and there is some some truth to it when it comes to physical practice of Orthodox Judaism.

Aaron Solberg [00:05:15]:

I think there was that moment of you were 16. You wanted to be free. You didn't want to feel these obligations. So I'd I'd broken the Sabbath many times up until that point, but never intentionally or with passion. Because up until then it was you failed here, you failed there, you you're not supposed to carry, for example, on the Sabbath. So you had something in your pockets, you forgot you forgot about it. You know, you made mistakes and then there was the guilt that was associated with that mistake. And this was the first time it was really a conscious break the Sabbath without guilt.

Aaron Solberg [00:05:45]:

Passionately break the Sabbath.

Méli [00:05:47]:

Yeah. Interesting. So I'm actually hearing a 3 step transition up to 15 or certainly up to 14. You might make, as humans do, an accidental mistake. You leave something in your pockets that you just forgot about. That's an accidental thing. And then you shifted to some minor intentional mistakes, as it were. I'm putting mistakes in quotes.

Méli [00:06:13]:

And then this, Shabbat, the Sabbath day, where you used, the microwave oven, that was really a very conscious, even aggressive crossing of the laws of Shabbat. Is that a reasonable interpretation?

Aaron Solberg [00:06:34]:

Absolutely. When I turned 13, I had to put on tefillin every day. I had to put in the phylactery every day. That was our obligation. You you get up in the morning. You do morning prayers. You know, even if you were on the road somewhere, you know, if you were on a plane, it was irrelevant. You had to get up and you had to put on on these these these things on your arm and on your head, and you had to do these morning prayers before a certain time of the day.

Aaron Solberg [00:06:54]:

I remember I was very attracted to the Hasidim because the Hasidic Jews worship much later in the day always. So you didn't have to get up as early. Because I I would remember I'd get up and I know, you know, you have to pray before the sun is at a certain place in the sky. And I feel this immense guilt because I didn't I didn't get the flak traits on time. I didn't put them on it on time for the morning prayers. I didn't say my morning prayers. I didn't say it at the right time and with the right devotion. I hate to use a Christian term, but I'm gonna use a Christian term. For me, it was really legalistic as the Christians would call it. Right? It felt legalistic, and that's how I I felt as a teenager about it.

Méli [00:07:28]:

It's interesting that you think legalistic is a Christian term to use for that. Frankly, that is not I don't know what word I was expecting you to say, but that's not it. You know, I'm a conservative Jew raised with nothing. And one of the things that's always very apparent to me and I think about a lot is the level of do's and don'ts, the positive and negative commandments that are in Judaism and that anyone who is practicing Judaism hopefully is thinking about, like, which are the ones that are meaningful. And what I'm hearing you say is I'm hearing a lot of guilt, a sense of, oh, I didn't do that, and now I feel guilty, and so I'm going to rebel. Well, you were also a teenager, so that's quite natural. But what I wonder about with the rebellion is besides wanting more freedom, was there a sense of rebelling against God or against your parents or just I don't want so many strictures in my life?

Aaron Solberg [00:08:38]:

You know, I I wanna say I was a really good kid. I think I was a good child for the most part, and I think that I mean that both religiously and as a child of my parents. I wasn't someone who was looking out to rebel massively. I I, yes, rebel. Sure. I I had my fights with my mother. I had my fights with my father. I had my issues with God on occasion.

Aaron Solberg [00:08:58]:

But I don't think I was really rebellious in the standard sense. Someone would think just your standard small teenage rebellion. So I I don't know if it was really a rebellion in that sense. I I was looking for some freedom, I think. And I was living a very structured life anyways at the time because I was I was doing music. We did our family was music. Right? Everything in our family was music. Music requires a massive amount of structure, a massive amount of discipline.

Aaron Solberg [00:09:21]:

And there's just a certain point when you you hit 15, 16, and everything is about discipline. You start to feel a lot of pressure. Didn't watch TV growing up. I was one of the last ones to have a smartphone. Discipline was very, very, very, very strong for a long time. And because of that, it took me a long time also to recover later on in life to recover that discipline. I'm still struggling to recover that discipline partially because I had so much discipline. I still struggle with the idea of discipline at points even though I know it's what I need and I know it's right and I know it's important.

Aaron Solberg [00:09:49]:

Discipline is still a struggle for me. Prayer is still sometimes a struggle for me. That structured prayer. Even though I know the importance, I see the value. I feel the value. Deep down, there's still a real struggle with that discipline structure from religion and from being in that music world, I think.

Méli [00:10:06]:

Makes sense. Right? A very heavy hand of discipline and, for you, some guilt that came with when you didn't do it right or soon enough or, you know, what have you. There are a lot of ways to go wrong when you have what Christians like to call a high control religion. Some level of rebellion makes complete sense to me.

Aaron Solberg [00:10:32]:

I think it's also it's it's it's a it's really a breaking free in a way too. I mean, in religion, you take what you know and you and you apply it to everything else in life. Right? So there's a course that we offer here in in in my church. It's about healing from trauma. They talk about their relationship with God the father, and they talk about it in relation to their relationship with their own father. If you live in a world that is disciplined and you see discipline from a musical perspective, I think that's something that I saw a lot growing up. My mother, I remember I can I could probably sit down and sing to you all the finger and etude exercises my mother would do at 6 o'clock every morning? That was the sound of my childhood with my mother practicing. And there is no mistake in music.

Aaron Solberg [00:11:13]:

You go and you perform and you you you're giving everything and and a mistake is a disappointment. That's very different in a relationship with a forgiving God and a loving God. Right? If your view of discipline and your view of structure comes from, that kind of a place, same way someone who might have a, I guess, an abusive father would probably have often the view of God the father as a sort of a disciplinarian. Right? So I think that definitely played largely into into the way I saw religion and sometimes sometimes still do see religion that way. You know, sometimes I still do see that discipline, that that structure as as something that I need to break free from. There's a quote in the New Testament Saint Paul writes, I paraphrase, I do the things I don't want to do and the things I want to do, I can't do. And he's talking about, like, the spiritual struggle that he's having. And that's very much the same thing, like, I want to be disciplined.

Aaron Solberg [00:12:06]:

We want discipline. We want that structure. Like, we know we even need it, but yet we go and we do unhealthy things like live unstructured days and unstructured ways and unstructured faith practices.

Méli [00:12:19]:

And that's such a human experience. I'm really searching my my mind of all the people I know. And even among those who I see as really in command of themselves, they still they don't do what they say they're going to do or it's a real struggle. They have some kind of failing somewhere. I mean, I I think that is the nature of being human is we are not perfect. Right? God has the card on perfection. Being human is not about being perfect.

Aaron Solberg [00:12:54]:

Absolutely.

Méli [00:12:55]:

But I wanna pick up on something else you said, Aaron. You talked about a loving God. So I'm curious about when you shifted from Orthodox Judaism to a Christian faith of Anglicanism, how did that shift your sense of God?

Aaron Solberg [00:13:14]:

It's a good question because I'm not really sure of the answer of it. God was God. I was born and I was raised and there was God. God was a was present. There wasn't really a question. Actually, growing up, Hashem was present. The name was present. Right? I know a lot of people who come from Jewish backgrounds who who became Christians who talk about, well, once they found Jesus, they had a personal relationship with God.

Aaron Solberg [00:13:39]:

They saw this you know, it's much more personal for them. For me, it's not the case. I mean, my father did a really beautiful job of raising me in the faith. Teaching me, for example, the Shema to say the, you know, the hero Israel every evening. Felt like I was in a personal relationship with God. I do think I always even when I wasn't sure what I was believing, I was always somehow praying. There was always a prayer in there somehow. When I came to to Christianity, I struggled a lot with the idea of sin.

Aaron Solberg [00:14:04]:

And I think you just highlighted a really good point. You said, well, no one's perfect. Only God can pull that card. And there's 2 ways of viewing it. I think there's a way of viewing it that says, he saved the wretch like me, you know, the line from Amazing Grace. And you can view that in 2 ways. You can read it, he saved the wretch like me, or, like, I I am such a wretched person. Oh, woe is me, and I'm so terrible, and God saved me.

Aaron Solberg [00:14:23]:

Or you can say, look, this is the human condition. We are burdened by sin. We are burdened by stupidity and living a life that is often off the derisk, as the Jews would say, off the path. It's missing the mark. There's a loving God, and we see the loving God through Christ, you know, offering that sacrifice. It's it's hard to imagine something more loving than that. Right? And and in that case, okay. Yeah.

Aaron Solberg [00:14:48]:

I have that human condition. I am sinful. But that's that's okay. I have God who wants to save me. He wants me. So my obedience then flows out of God's love versus towards God's love, wanting God's love. So I'm not obedient to receive his love. I'm obedient because he loves me, which in Judaism often felt the other way around.

Aaron Solberg [00:15:08]:

Even though I know deep down theologically, not necessarily true, but growing up in the faith it often felt, you know, the other way around. As a child, 8 or 9, I would, every once in a while, have a problem, with wetting the bed. And I used to always think if I didn't say my Shema, my hero Israel, I would wet the bed because I didn't pray my prayers so God would allow this embarrassing thing to happen to me. And that is certainly a a a very wrong sense of God, but often the sense of God that we do get. This obedience and fear-based obedience in God.

Méli [00:15:41]:

So to make sure I understand, as a child within Judaism, it was important to be obedient out of fear of God. And now as a Christian, it's you want to be obedient because God loves you.

Aaron Solberg [00:15:56]:

Absolutely. Yeah. That's definitely that's definitely a shift that happened. And I I, again, I wanna preface, I I understand from the outside, Judaism often does look like that. It looks very much from the outside that it can be an obedience-based religion, that you you you win God's approval through obedience. It it can seem like that from the from the outside perspective. And I know it's not necessarily like that always on the inside. But definitely for me, I often felt that way that I needed to be obedient to God to to win something at the end of the day or to be accepted or approved in God's eyes.

Aaron Solberg [00:16:27]:

I still think like that sometimes. Again, it's the human nature in us, but my Christian belief teaches me otherwise. My Christian belief calls me into another way of understanding my relationship with God that the things that I need to do are a out of love because God loves me and I'm I'm I'm being obedient to him. And secondly, because he loves me, he gives me these things to live a more fulfilling life. Like the structures, like we talked about the structures. They're not always exactly what I wanna do, but I don't need structures to make God happy. But God gives me structures so I can live more fulfilled.

Méli [00:17:00]:

Right.

Aaron Solberg [00:17:00]:

So I have a quote at Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Faith is not the clinging to a shrine, but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. It's a growth process. There was a period in time where I said, well, I was a Jew and now I'm a Christian. And I've come to now learn, no, it they're very interconnected and there's no escaping the 2. And my Jewish identity and my Christian identity are one identity that are very closely tied together, and not everything that I saw God to be then and everything I see god to be now is often to do with the way my heart is placed.

Méli [00:17:31]:

Yeah. And as as someone who was raised in an interfaith, albeit non-observant family, I can really appreciate that struggle of going through a period of wanting to say, I am this. I am this x clear singular identity, and then realize, yeah, but life is a continuum, and faith is a continuum. I'd like to now shift to what is your life like now, but bringing along that history. Right? Because as you just said, it is entwined. Your past comes with you into the present. I'm curious about what aspects from your early Jewish life are now present in in your life, in your practice?

Aaron Solberg [00:18:21]:

For one, my love of prayer books. And I just throw that out there because this morning, I got a shipment of new prayer books, and they're beautiful. And they look like the little they look like the little ones we had in synagogue when I was growing up. A a lot of things do cross over. A lot of things and and we talked about this, and it's not quite on the topic. But it's the idea of, you know, Christianity has floated away from its sometimes it's Jewish roots. And so sometimes coming from Judaism, I miss things that were very important to me, like community worship. I live in a very isolated have lived in a very isolated context for the last four and a half, five years.

Aaron Solberg [00:18:56]:

I live in the center of Canada. It's a tiny little town that you can only fly to over a couple of planes across the tundra. It's the middle of nowhere. And I was there during COVID when they wouldn't let planes in or planes out. Very isolating from a faith perspective. I certainly missed that that community idea. I still loved going to to synagogue. I have a friend.

Aaron Solberg [00:19:18]:

He's he was a Satmar he was a Satmar, Hasidic Jew, very good friend of mine. And I saw him last summer in New York. And, he's not a Satmar guy anymore, but he still has his side girls. And I and I said to him, so well, you know, he kept them. He said, well, you know, I like to put on my shtrimel and my big fur hat and my and my, you know, my kid with my long silk coat and go to synagogue on on Saturdays every month or so. And I said, why sides? Just because it's a lot of fun to be in worship. And it's true. The Jewish worship is a very enjoyable experience.

Aaron Solberg [00:19:48]:

That's something that I've lacked in my Christian journey being in such an isolated area that we often lack that, yeah, lack that daily worship, that daily community that we had in in in Judaism.

Méli [00:20:00]:

Again, I'm a little surprised. I understand about missing the community, especially since you now live, as you say, in the geographic middle of nowhere in Canada, but also that Judaism is so community oriented. It is so different from the Christian personal relationship with Jesus. But I think a lot of Jews would be surprised to hear you say, oh, well, services were so enjoyable. You know? And what surprises me is that from my Jewish perspective, I see a lot of Christian services as really being about joy and it's song and it's it's enjoyable. And so that's why I'm so surprised.

Aaron Solberg [00:20:46]:

I mean, obviously, there's multi levels to to Christian services and multi levels to Jewish services, and they also have, to a certain extent, different purposes. I think one thing is, obviously, Sunday is still the 1st day of the week for Christians. It's the 1st day of the week we celebrate the resurrection on Sunday. Saturday is still the Sabbath. Right? And so so they also have very different they do have different different sort of different reasons behind why they worship. Obviously, the idea of the Eucharist and everything in in our tradition, liturgical tradition, this idea of receiving the grace of God and receiving God in the Eucharist is a very spiritual and ceremonial faith practice, very different than the Shabbos morning. But I I will tell you, if I have an opportunity to go somewhere on the Shabbos morning to a synagogue, if someone gives me the opportunity, I will be there. Because there is something warming about the worship, and there is something about that community understanding that you have in Judaism.

Aaron Solberg [00:21:41]:

I'm convinced that part of it is the persecution that Jews have suffered, that the Jews have needed a certain kind of community life to continue. Anywhere I go in the world, I'm gonna find a church. I'm gonna find Christians. You know? If someone says, oh, I'm a Christian, it's not surprising. I mean, maybe now it's becoming less. We're we're seeing we're seeing the church slowly, you know, in certain parts of the world, the church decline, but it's even I still do it now. I look I look at a list of names where I'm somewhere and say, oh, Goldberg. There must be Jews.

Aaron Solberg [00:22:11]:

I wonder what a Jews doing up here. Let me go talk to them. You make a connection. There's an immediate connection. There's something there's something about that with Judaism. And I think that's something that maybe Christianity has lost because it's just so widespread. It's so you know, it should be like that, I think, in Christianity. But I I love that about Judaism.

Aaron Solberg [00:22:29]:

There is that there is that connection. There is that uniqueness that we sometimes we miss here in Christianity.

Méli [00:22:35]:

Yeah. A point well taken. The persecution element, but it's also being an extreme minority. Making connection and and looking for that connection in whatever community you're in, even if you're a visitor, is something that all minorities do. It's it's a safety thing. It's a finding a home. It's so valuable just human to human. So I think both of those things are at play, and that is certainly something that that is a value to me of being part of a Jewish community, of being part of a synagogue community, and attending services.

Méli [00:23:12]:

Absolutely.

Aaron Solberg [00:23:13]:

It's what the New Testament is all about. A lot of the New Testament talks, at least in the acts of the apostles, is a lot about community. It's about them getting together for Shabbos. I I I love this one line. It's it seems almost arbitrary. And I think maybe Christians who don't have a Jewish background might not get it, but it talks about Peter going up to the temple at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I'm going, oh, he's going to daven Mincha. It's very obvious what he's doing.

Aaron Solberg [00:23:37]:

What I do love and what's important for me is we have these unison worships. We have these ideas that we chant the prayers together. It's a beautiful tradition. We do retain that idea of praying together has power, and that is something I really value for my own personal faith. There is great great power and great value in praying from the heart. Closing your eyes, putting your hands out or whatever and or laying your hands on someone and just and just praying from the heart has great value. But there is also an incredible amount of power of being together and praying the same words together. For me, like, every single day, we pray morning and evening prayer in in the Anglican church as part of our tradition.

Aaron Solberg [00:24:19]:

My wife and I do that. You know, even if no one else comes, we open up the church, and we do that together every single day. There is something very, very powerful about about praying in unison together.

Méli [00:24:30]:

So were you saying that you see that praying in unison both within Judaism and now in Christianity?

Aaron Solberg [00:24:39]:

Yeah. Except that the Jews sometimes pray. I find the Jews pray always off by about a half a second.

Méli [00:24:44]:

Yeah. But that's an Orthodox thing.

Aaron Solberg [00:24:45]:

That is an Orthodox thing.

Méli [00:24:47]:

I mean, in my Conservative synagogue, one of the things that I love, and this is echoing my teenage years in choirs, is that we are together. We are in unison, and there's melody. I know from talking with folks who attend Orthodox synagogues that that's quite a different tone. So there are these varieties.

Aaron Solberg [00:25:09]:

And I think there should be a middle a middle path between the 2. I often think of, taking all the pews out of the church and putting tables and chairs and to get a shtiebel concept. You know? The idea of a Jewish chapel. There is something heartwarming about that idea of worship together in that way that sort of we're all worshiping next to each other.

Méli [00:25:30]:

So I'd like to come back to this question of your current practice and what it's like to be a practicing Christian in this very small town in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully, no longer with the COVID isolation. Could you say a little about what the challenges are in that situation for you?

Aaron Solberg [00:25:54]:

Just back to the very beginning of our conversation, the idea of structures and discipline. I love being an Anglican because an Anglican has a lot available to to him. We borrow from a lot of different traditions. We have our own tradition, but we're friendly with a lot of other churches. We're friendly with a lot of other traditions. We do have a little bit of room to borrow. And we have our book of common prayer. That's our daily prayer book, which has morning, afternoon, evening prayers, and compline, late evening prayer, plus the Eucharist and pastoral rights like baptism and so forth.

Aaron Solberg [00:26:24]:

That's our prayer book and we have them, which is a beautiful thing because the idea of Anglicanism is, like, that's all you need is a prayer book and a bible, and you can go anywhere and and worship God. And it gives us a certain structure in our life, morning and evening prayer. If I don't do it, there's something wrong with my day. It's a rule of life, and that's that discipline. It's that prayer life. Even if I don't want to pray, I don't feel like praying, I still end up praying because I have to pray morning and evening prayer. It's part of my discipline. So that's that's the one thing.

Aaron Solberg [00:26:50]:

You often find yourself needing to calm your mind. I think the more the more quiet you are, the more quieter places you will find that the more your mind functions or over functions. And I think in my in my job, you have these lulls. It's beautiful weather and everybody goes out hunting or they go out, you know, they go out on the land. They go boating or or, you know, we're in the middle of the nature. Beautiful nature. So it could it could be that you have weeks where you just don't get a minute to yourself, and then suddenly there's nothing. You know, you've come to a kind of quiet moment, and your mind is over functioning and over-exerting itself.

Aaron Solberg [00:27:25]:

Meditative prayer has become very important to me. The rosary, for example, we have different variations of the rosary that we pray from the Orthodox Church. The Jesus prayer is just repeating the words, Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner, and it's repeating them together with with a breathing pattern. Then it's just this idea of focusing the mind on God, contemplation prayers, meditative prayers to calm the mind, to calm the soul when it's just really just disquieted from all the things around you.

Méli [00:27:55]:

Okay. So I'm hearing challenges of actually, what you just talked about were a lot of benefits. It was an interesting mix of benefits and and challenges.

Aaron Solberg [00:28:07]:

Well, the challenge is the discipline, I suppose. Right? The challenge is doing it, actually. Right? I find a distraction in a way, right, from doing what is good and wasting your time, not being a good steward of your time. Where we are now, we have quite good cell service and quite good Internet. But in our last community, if it got a little too gray, you'd lose all service and all Internet connection. That was great because you couldn't distract yourself with, you know, videos. You couldn't distract yourself with movies. You couldn't distract yourself with with any of this nonsense.

Aaron Solberg [00:28:33]:

And you just had to buckle down and focus. What helps me and what has helped me a lot in all of that is to make sure that we as a family are worshiping. My wife and I, each of us, have our own devotional times where we do our meditative prayers, our rosaries, our our prayer ropes, you know, and then together our morning evening prayer, but also time together where we pray with our children. They're little kids, but my son sits there and he goes, It's a beautiful thing, and it's this idea of building a life that is is surrounded by prayer and surrounded by meditation. And I realized that it takes discipline. It takes a massive amount of discipline to do it. Sometimes at breakfast, you wanna talk about things and not pray. You wanna listen to the news and not pray.

Aaron Solberg [00:29:15]:

You you don't wanna pray because the kid's screaming and you just had a short night, but it's the right thing to do because it's what draws us closer to God and it helps us ground ourselves in a relationship with God and in the path that we're on in this life on that, you know, that pilgrimage that we are on this life. So it's very challenging because that discipline is very, very hard. And it is very easy to fall into that obedience-based idea, you know. I gotta be obedient to God. God, I have to pray because God said I have to pray. No. God invites me to pray with him. God invites me to have a conversation and to meditate on his word.

Aaron Solberg [00:29:45]:

So it's finding that very fine line, that balance, and I have not always found it.

Méli [00:29:49]:

Again, it's part of the journey, isn't it? Absolutely. So in closing, Aaron, you mentioned just now an invitation. So I invite you now to tell me and to tell the audience by extension, what is something that you would like others to understand, to know about the uniqueness of your practice or of being a Christian in your environment?

Aaron Solberg [00:30:22]:

I think Christianity is about especially, in my environment, it's about practice. We talk about practice often in faith, like, I'm a practicing Jew. I'm I'm a practicing Christian. I mean, practice in the sense of we're working towards something. We're working to towards growing and in our relationship with God. And it's about in that growth having organic change. Fertilizing the ground of our lives and having an organic change in our life. I heard someone say you can't staple roses onto a dead rose bush.

Aaron Solberg [00:30:49]:

They need to grow naturally. And it's very true. And that's I think I think that's every religion, but I think for me, so very important this idea that it's okay if I don't put tefillin on tomorrow, if I forget or I oversleep because I'm practicing. I'm practicing on becoming holy. You know, be holy for I am holy, it says in Exodus. I'm practicing. I'm practicing on being different, on being set apart on on growing in my relationship with God. And it's a practice, and practice takes time.

Méli [00:31:17]:

Yeah. Amen to that. Well, thank you so much, Aaron, for this wonderful conversation and for coming on my living our beliefs podcast. I really appreciate it. Clearly, we could go on at some great length, and, perhaps we can do this again and go into other areas. But I do wish you all the best up in the frozen north and that we continue this conversation even if it's not on a podcast.

Aaron Solberg [00:31:42]:

Thank you so much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Méli [00:31:48]:

Thank you for listening. This podcast is an outgrowth of my Talking with God Project. If you'd like to keep learning together and keep up to date on the project, sign up for the newsletter at www.talkingwithgodproject.org. A link is in the show notes. Thanks so much for tuning in. Till next time. Bye bye.