Episode 301 - Ian Morgan Cron, "Navigating Spiritual Growth"

Welcome to Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. Join Michael and Ian Morgan Cron as they delve into the profound topic of spiritual growth. Ian shares insights from his new book, offering a raw and unfiltered look into the existential turmoil that plagues the human condition. They discuss the paradox of powerlessness as a catalyst for true change and unveil the profound impact of consent in spiritual transformation. 

From the depths of vulnerability to the nuanced nature of addiction and recovery, this conversation is a powerful exploration of the soul's yearning for wholeness and its unwavering resilience.

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Transcript

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Welcome to restoring the soul. I'm Michael John Cusick, and it's another conversation with my longtime friend, Ian Morgan Cron. Ian, welcome. Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here. We have the joy of sitting down, and we're talking about a lot of different things that are close to our heart today. It's the question, how do people grow spiritually? And you have been very busy writing a new book, and I'd love for you to talk about it and to read this one section that addresses this question of spiritual growth. Yeah, well, this is the first time I'm actually reading from it, and this is an unedited version of the book. This is how fresh it is. So this will all be different, I'm sure, but it's just a short segment, I hope short, that just describes a little bit about what might be called the existential nausea or disease that is just warp and woof of the human condition. Right. So it begins like this. I begin with the assumption that, you know, you're broken. Why would you buy a book entitled the Fix if you weren't? Did you buy it for your partner, for your mentally maladjusted mother in law? No, you bought it for you because there are days in your life that scare you when you feel crazier than a rat in a dumpster fire. You secretly worry that if the authorities knew just how daft you were, they would pluck you out of the general population and place you in a secure location to protect the innocent. Don't fret. You're not alone. I have so many disturbing voices in my head, my counselor has threatened to charge me for group therapy. Thankfully, most days you pass for harmless, along with a general populace of reasonably functional, garden variety neurotics who can make fun of their kooky peculiarities and laugh them away. Yet if we're honest, we'll admit we can't banish the gnawing feeling that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. As Marcellus warned in Shakespeare's hamlet, we're uncomfortable in our own skin in the world around us, troubled by a sensation of incompleteness, as if there really is a hole in our soul, as countless spiritual masters have taught. Then I go on and I describe a little bit about how sometimes, how do we cope with that feeling at the center of our persons. I said, the Buddhists have a word that perfectly describes this human condition, dukkha. In Pali, this word translates to suffering, the source of which is an underlying feeling of unease, dissatisfaction, and in quietude. But I prefer how author and teacher Ethan Nichter translates the word dukkha. It's the feeling of not at home. Not since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden and the prodigal son flipped off his father, have any of us really felt at home in the world? We are fractions yearning to become whole numbers. We have unnameable desires and unattended sorrows we don't know what to do with. We are filled with an inconsolable longing for what poet Anne Porter and christian apologist C. S. Lewis call that far off and half forgotten country that we have. Remember, a land we know exists but we haven't yet visited. In short, you and I were made for paradise. But we feel like we're stuck in a motel six on the border between heaven and earth. We suffer from the feeling of not at home. This feeling of spiritual homelessness also comes to us in the form of the inescapable pain that comes with living in a cocked up world. We struggle with unresolved childhood trauma, unfulfilled needs, grief, resentment, fractured relationships, self contempt, a confidence deficit, insecurities that rob us of the lives we want to enjoy in disappointment, not only in ourselves, but in those who we think should have loved us better but did not. Life shouldn't be this. We cry. No, it shouldn't. But here we are. Wow. All right. Microphone drop. That was remarkable. I've walked with you through the writing of that, but man, that is good. It's got your hilarious, beautiful prose. It's deep and it's so incisive because it nailed me. I love the wording of I feel like a fraction, but I'm longing to be a whole. Yes. Yeah, that really is beautiful, Ian. And I think back to your original question about how do people change spiritually? Seems to me that it begins with the wide eyed, acknowledgment, acceptance that this is how things are. This is how it is. And to own our powerlessness in the face of these facts, which opens a door to the possibility of God, then being able to move in and dismantle some of the crazy strategies we come up with for living in a world in which we feel not at home, which I think would lead us naturally, obviously, into a conversation about addictions, perhaps, but into any number of other avenues of conversation as well. Ian, will you unpack that statement? This, essentially, is how things are. This idea that that's the beginning point, the starting. Mean. Maybe this is the Enneagram four in me. Right? But I remember when I first years and years and years and years ago read Scott Peck's book, the road less traveled, and he had that very famous opening. If I could find it, I would read it. But it to me is such a beautiful description of where we come to at the precipice of growth and change spiritually. Right. It's that section of the book again. Peck opens with it. I'm actually scrolling to it right now. Because the part where he says life is difficult. Yes. Just that I'm going to read that one little thing because it's such a great. Sorry, this is turning into an Ian Cron book reading, but whatever. Hey, we'll take it. You asked me on. You take the hits. But he says something to the effect of, life is difficult, and the sooner you accept it, the easier life gets. Because once you accept that it's difficult, then it's no longer difficult. Right. I think, listen, life is really hard and you can't do it by yourself. And by the way, if I know anything about human nature, the moment that you try to come up with your own treatment plans for living in a broken, riven world that bypass God, then you're in trouble. Right? I mean, you are not on a good trajectory. For me, the beginning of change is powerlessness, surrender, accepting life on life's terms. It's hard. It's difficult. It's beautiful. It's terrible. It's all the above. And I'm not in control. And that's the beginning of real change. Yeah, we've discussed this so many times. I appreciate that, by the way. You're not giving me a technique or our listeners a technique, but we've discussed so many times the serenity prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And then the second half that most people don't know of from Reinhold Niebuhr, where he says, living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, and then the next line, accepting hardship as the path to peace, taking this sinful world as he did, not as I would have it, but as it is. And that's so hard to pray sometimes, but it's also so liberating because then I don't have to control things and the pressure is not on my shoulders and I get to exhale and I don't have to try to manipulate the world for everything to be great all the time. Well, I mean, Michael, here's the thing again. The spiritual life is freighted with. You know, that's how I know God's somewhere in the room when there's a lot of paradox, that I'm in the face of paradox. And powerlessness is a superpower. That's a paradox. So when you are able to say, I am powerlessness, I am powerless. I give up, I surrender. I'm out of ammo. As a friend of ours once said, I am out of control of this situation. I am not nearly in as control of my life as I would like to think, or as I'm out in that moment of surrender, which feels humiliating, then God, in his mercy kind of has now this opening. And it's through that opening that grace moves and you feel this dilation in the chest and this opening up and this suddenly, okay, now we have something we can work with. It's as if, okay, now we can get somewhere, spiritually speaking. But until we put down our tools, our crazy tools for managing life in a world where none of us feel at home, we're in peril. Yeah. And there again is why it feels like the addictions that we've had, though I would not go back and do them again. I wouldn't trade what I've gotten as a result of the healing and the restoration and the recovery, because I don't think I could get these things without failure and coming to a place of unmanageability and blowing my life up in so many different ways. Yeah. So this is so important on the spiritual journey. Right. We tend to fixate on the problem. So we think, okay, well, drinking is the problem, or overeating is the problem, or sex is my compulsive need for porn or whatever. That's the problem. It's not the problem. That's the symptom of the problem. Those were merely self prescribed treatment plans for trying to make living life in a world that is messed up doable. What happens on the journey too, is realizing, oh, that wasn't the problem. I remember when I first got to aa, it was like, okay, these people are going to tell me how not to drink. Right? That was not what happened. Like, what happened was, oh, yeah, that's just the symptom, buddy. What we're going to be talking about here has to do with what's underneath it, which I think is what I talked about early on in that reading. Right. Which is dukkha. It's that feeling. And by the way, that's a very christian idea, too. That's not like a buddhist idea. That's just a human idea that we have this fundamental sense of disease. It is a product of what happened in the garden and this feeling of disconnection and alienation from God, from self and others. And it is when that metastasizes and takes grip on a person's life in the form of. And it could be people pleasing. Doesn't have to be alcoholism or drug addiction or overeating. It could be people pleasing. It could be workaholism, it could be spending gambling. I have a list of things that people do to feel better while living in this crazy world that end up making things feel worse, ultimately, right. The spiritual journey is when you put all that stuff down and go, I'm done. I'm just done. I give up, I surrender. And that's why those are the first three steps of our twelve step programs, which to me is a blueprint for the spiritual life that has no parallel that I know of in terms of a proven program for living that has saved millions and millions of lives. Anyone can use them, too. Right? And that's the hope with your book, is that the message goes to help people that are in recovery programs, but also so much broader than that, because it is such a robust spirituality. That's really a spirituality that resonates with the heart of Christ and his teaching. Yeah, it's just the gospel and compression what it is. It's just the gospel spelled out. In brief. You mentioned putting things down, and we are so prone as human beings, I'm so prone to put things down and then pick them back up. Would you say it's the case that even for somebody that goes to recovery or some kind of treatment for addiction, that even if they get sober and recover and begin to get real freedom, that it's just a matter of time until there's something else in life that we surrender? And not necessarily a classic addiction like food, sex, alcohol, drugs, et cetera, but learning to put down resentment, learning to put down irritability, judgment, that's one of the things that I have to admit every day that I'm powerless over, is just the automatic reflexive way that I can judge people so harshly with a smile on my face that you would never know it. Mike, I think everybody's an addict, so let's just start there. I don't think that people who have identifiable chemical or behavioral addictions are like in some sort of set apart subset of the human everybody. Gerald May, the great christian psychiatrist who wrote the wonderful book, we both love addiction and grace said, to be human is to be addicted. And to be human and addicted is to stand in need of grace. It's just our condition. And that can take the form of repetitive thinking, black and white thinking. It could be. I remember years ago when I was in treatment, someone saying to me, you can't get out of bed in the morning without tripping over one of your addictions. And it's true. Right. I have other addictions that over the years, I've had to, one by one, lay down. And some I've picked back up and put down again. It's just part of the journey, man. It's just part of the journey. Yeah. And it's part of the journey. And it's our human nature, which is not said to excuse it, but to give an accurate context that that's what we do. And to think otherwise is really either to be in a delusion or to pretend that it's going to be otherwise. Yeah, absolutely right. I think now, at this point in my life, I expect to fail a lot. When I was younger, I didn't expect to fail as much as I do. And I carried all the bravado and the cockiness that comes with that kind of mindset in its worst form, wrapped in christian religion, which is that feeling of like, you know what, man? Of course I failed. And that's okay, because I can see it. I can make amends. I have tools for dealing with it. When I'm dealing with things, when I fail, and it's perfectly fine, I don't get down on myself. I just go like, well, I remember Anne Lamott. She used to say that she had a prayer, let me see if I can get this right. She'd get up in the morning and she'd say something like, oh, yeah. She'd get up in the morning and she'd look at her counter, she'd say, whatever. And then she'd go to bed at night. And her closing prayer was, oh, well. And I don't mean that to sound like I'm resigned or you have to have a sense of humor. I mean, the word humor derives from the same word we get humility from. And you have to be able to laugh and be able to go, yeah, oh, boy. There's four things I would do differently tomorrow, but I have the tools now. And maybe also just the blessing of perspective. Yeah. It doesn't feel like resignation or giving up or cavalierness to say whatever, and, oh, well, it feels like a choice to live light, to live free and to accept things as they are. Yeah. And I think in our previous conversation, I mentioned this feeling sometimes of a low drone. I can hear a drone of contentment at the base of my life. It just seems to be running. And by the way, I think that drone is God. I think it's the song of God in my heart. It's just a low, quiet drone. I don't notice it unless I really focus on it. And I think that what happens is knowing that it's there, that note is there and ringing all the time. It gives you freedom to fail. Right? Because the floor is not going to fall out from underneath you. It's always going to be there. And that has been a great source of consolation for me. So, Ian, you were a pastor for many, many years, both in a youth ministry context. And then you started a couple churches, and you're currently a priest, and you're still involved from a distance in parish life and serve as a priest. When people's lives are going well and they don't feel this palpable pain or discontent, how do they grow spiritually there? Do we say to know? Just wait until everything's screwed up? Is there a prophetic role of helping people to see that things are not actually as good as they like? In America, people can seem to be together for a very long time. How do we help people go below the. You know, I think you just ask some really good questions. Right? First of all, it's true. We live in a world that is just a bubbling distraction machine that can distract you from that low grade feeling of not at homeness, that feeling of Duca, that feeling of sort of angst. We can be distracted. And I think, though, it doesn't take much poking to get people to admit, because people often look good and seem good. But you and I know, man, sometimes they've just rolled the turd in glitter. That's all they've done. You know what I mean? Once you get them to look past the glitter, more often than not, people will admit, I got some stuff. Now, some people can go a long time. They can have pretty charmed lives and live a long time before they hit something that makes them aware of their own need for God and for change. And oftentimes that happens in midlife, in some cases later. But I don't know. When I meet people who have it seemingly altogether, I'm no longer fooled. Not at 63. I sort of look at them and I go, okay, I bet you if I had a 20 minutes conversation with you and you could get honest with me. I could probably get down to what's really happening here. It's everybody, man. It's everybody. And it's okay. People have to come in their own time when they're ready, and I'm not in charge of that. Right. And it's my own insecurity sometimes that wants or requires or demands other people to do it on my timetable. Right. Because then somehow I can feel okay about myself. Yes. So other than twelve step rooms of recovery and being on that journey, what's the one practice that you would recommend to people if they wanted to grow spiritually? Oh, boy. Well, I'm going to recommend something that I'm not doing very well right now, so I need to say that so I don't feel like a hypocrite or like a snake oil salesman. But every day when I get up, the first hour to 90 minutes is dedicated to the development of my spiritual life. And that takes the form of prayer and reading. And when I say reading, it's not just necessarily sacred text. It could be books, like we talk about journaling. But it took me a long time to get to a place where I felt like, where I really look forward to it. It's like my most wonderful time of the day. Early in the morning, light the candle, light the incense, feed the dog, sit down. And one of the practices there that I think is of absolute preeminent importance for me. Some people would call it centering prayer, some people would call it mindfulness meditation. Whatever variant of it that works for you is fine. Because for me, I think the way a person grows is not through trying, but through giving consent. And now that is a robust theology of grace. But I honestly believe this is true. When you open yourself up and give God consent in the context of a regular meditation or centering prayer practice, God begins to do inside of you that which you could not do for yourself. And you find all of a sudden, wow, I'm changing and I'm not even trying. When I was a young man, I just tried so hard to be a good Christian. I tried so hard and I had to do lists and things I was going to do and memorize and blah, blah, blah. And it was all well intended and also very, I don't know, I was going down a path. I guess we have to go down to learn. Oh, by the way, Ian, you can't really change yourself. You can cooperate with change after you give God consent, to really surrender, to really open the heart and say, please change me. It's so easy. We make it hard. It's goofy, but it's so easy. We make it hard. And this will drive some legalistic christians crazy. Reformed friends. Well, my reformed friends actually would probably feel this was actually pretty good, even though I don't identify at all as a reformed person. But I feel like, and you've heard me say this a trillion times, Christianity is something that gets done to you. It's not something you do. Right. Which isn't to say. Actually, let me put that a little differently. It's not something you earn, right? You do something, but not with the mindset that that is going to earn you anything. Right. But for me, man, at this stage of my life where I've arrived is to say, man, my job is to just give God consent to change me and to do all the things that I can do, the very few little paltry things I can do to open myself up to the possibility of that change. Yeah. And there's another paradox in what you're saying. That the creator of the universe actually asks for our consent. Yes. It's lovely, isn't it? Yes. We are left with our own agency and now life circumstances can make consent a lot easier. Right. When you hit the bottom, then the idea, and there's nowhere else to go, then the option of consent looks really attractive, though maybe not, but it's the only way. Right, if you're going to survive. Right. Anyway, that's just me. Everybody's different, I guess. Temperaments, personalities. I make space for people to. To find their own path. I just see across traditions and in the writings of the best people I know. It's so much about just showing up and saying, yes, yes to God and.