Introducing the Podcast - Part 1

This kick-off episode of the Soul Sojourn podcast introduces this new podcast to the podcast world, exploring aspects of the host's personal story of moving from rigid, certain faith structures to a place of increasing freedom of the soul.  Soul Sojourn is a podcast that seeks to encourage conversations that will lead to greater flourishing in our world and deeper spiritual discussions.  

Thanks so much for taking the time to listen today. The life of our soul is a journey with many twists and turns. This journey has times of discovery, growth, disruption, examination, perplexity, and harmony. Soul Sojourn is a podcast that plans to explore this journey of the soul; considering the different segments of the journey, the different stops we make along the way, and the divergent paths that we can take as unique people with distinctive life experiences. Soul Sojourn hopes to provide room for diverse expressions of faith and welcomes questions and doubts about the journey of the soul. It recognizes that so often there is mystery in life and faith, questions that have no answers, and deep levels of uncertainty and precarity that are present in our lives. I look forward to what is to come, what future stops we’ll take along the journey together. I’ll see you at the next stop.

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Transcript

Introducing the podcast  - Episode1

The life of our soul is a journey with many twists and turns.  This journey has times of discovery, growth, disruption, examination, perplexity, and harmony.  Soul Sojourn is a podcast that plans to explore this journey of the soul;  considering the different segments of the journey, the different stops we make along the way, and the divergent paths that we can take as unique people with distinctive life experiences.  Soul Sojourn hopes to provide room for diverse expressions of faith and welcomes questions and doubts about the journey of the soul.  It recognizes that so often there is mystery in life and faith, questions that have no answers, and deep levels of uncertainty and precarity that are present in our lives.  

Hi, my name is Jenn Pedersen.  I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast for awhile and recently was inspired to take the leap.  I am a regular podcast listener - I have learned so much over the past 5-10 years from a variety of podcasts.  Podcasts have been a lifeline for me in times when I felt very alone on my soul sojourn as I’ve been able to find other people who are experiencing similar evolutions in their lives, even when I didn’t know many people in real life who were wrestling with the things I was wrestling with. Increasingly, I know more and more people in real life who are on a similar journey and I’m so thankful for that.  Because I know there are so many great podcasts out there that have been such an encouragement to me, I honestly questioned whether there was space for another.  But I recently met a couple new friends who shared that they didn’t know others that they could share about their soul journey with, that they couldn’t find safe spaces to explore the spiritual part of their life.  Through our conversations I was encouraged that perhaps this is the right time to share my perspective and open up a place to dialogue about other’s perspectives as well.  So here I am launching Soul Sojourn.

It was on my 24 hour travel journey home from a trip to Barcelona, where I met these amazing new friends, that I began brainstorming about this podcast and the ideas flowed almost more quickly than I could write them down.  My hubby asked, as we were traveling together, if the podcast was going to be about patriarchy - a topic I’ve been studying and brainstorming and railing about a lot lately.  There’s been a lot of “smash the patriarchy” talk in my world recently and we had a pretty amazing “smash the patriarchy” experience in Barcelona with our new friends, but that’s not the primary focus of this podcast.  While patriarchy will definitely be a part of the conversation and certainly casts a shadow over much of our spiritual experiences and conversations, I want to go a bit wider than that one topic in this podcast.  I hope to talk to a variety of people who have been on their own soul sojourns and learn about other’s experiences.  I hope to explore what a healthy spirituality looks like in our lives.  I plan to talk about toxic theology and how that affects our lives and our relationships and our culture and world.  I plan to share about books that have been an instrumental part of my journey.  We will talk about a huge passion of mine right now, which is exploring ways to build inclusive communities of harmony where all are welcome and truly loved.  I hope to have conversations about how to have peaceful, productive dialogue with those we disagree with.  These are just a few of the ideas that are bubbling up within me as I begin this podcast..  

Sojourn is a word we hear occasionally, but as I was preparing to start this podcast, it was interesting to learn more about the true meaning of the word.  I had generally thought of sojourn as just another word for journey.  But according to Merriam Webster, a sojourn is a temporary stay or residing in a place for a certain length of time along a journey. My life over the last 30 years has been just this - a temporary stopover for my soul in various places with different perspectives as I have been on a larger, overarching journey to finding soul freedom.  For this opening podcast I’m going to share some of my own journey with you so you can get a better understanding of where I am coming from and hopefully this will give you a glimpse into my heart and who I am.

As I reflect on my life I realize that I have been on a sojourn of the soul for over 30 years.  I’m approaching a big birthday later this year, the big 50 and it’s wild to think that I’ve been on this big beautiful planet for that long, but as many of you know the years fly by.  My journey is one from a background of rigid, certain faith structures, to a place of increasing freedom of the soul.  I’m learning to embrace the uncertainty, the precarity of life instead of always seeking a buttoned-up, certain answer to my questions about the deep things.  I am fascinated by the way this journey has shaped so many of our lives.  I have many friends who have been on a similar journey and in them I see hope for a better world.  I see the possibility of forging a better way where we can truly acknowledge the reality of life in this time; where we can learn to love those around us well and lean into making the changes that our world truly needs to be a place of flourishing for all.  I am passionate about the power of this journey to bring about positive changes in our lives and our communities, and ultimately our world.

I grew up in a conservative Christian setting and church was a central part of my family life and my family history.  In so many ways I was nurtured and loved well in this setting, and I want to acknowledge that.  There were and are amazing people of faith, mainly women of faith who poured into my life and modeled for me what it looks like to love and serve others well and to commit your life to community.  

I think of my Grandma Betty who lived on the next farm over during most of my childhood years.  She poured her life out for her family as a farmer’s wife.  She was a school teacher in a rural schoolhouse in Nebraska before getting married and having children, and as I think about her life there was a love for learning within her that came through.  She was an animal lover who usually had a couple of dogs out on the farm and was always feeding and loving on a whole bunch of barn cats - I inherited my love of cats from her and my other Grandma.  Grandma Betty was an amazing gardener who had a large garden each summer and a huge pantry full of preserved foods and she was always cooking for her family.  She was very active in the church - serving on women’s circles and teaching Sunday school - for years she taught an adult Sunday school class with both men and women (something that would not be allowed in her church today).  She and my grandfather started a craft business in their retirement years and traveled all over the US selling their handmade items, and they traveled internationally as well.  Grandma Betty was an amazing woman - strong, quiet but caring, faithful and determined. 

I think of my great aunt Joyce, who lived just a few miles away from the farm I grew up on, with whom I also spent quite a bit of time as a little girl.  Joyce was a school cook at a rural school (the school my husband attended years before I ever met him).  Joyce was the most hospitable person I’ve ever known, outgoing and welcoming and loving.  She made every person who came into her home feel like she was thrilled to have them there - and I think she truly was, she loved people so well.  She was an amazing cook and many in our family use her recipes to this day - but find our end product never tastes quite as good as Aunt Joyce’s did.  Joyce was also a farmer’s wife and a committed church goer who offered her time and talents to others with generosity and graciousness.  My husband attended her church, a country church 15 miles from my country church, and has wonderful memories of her and a number of my other extended family members who were a regular part of his church life - investing into others and loving others well.  

I think of my Grandma Loretta, who is 90 years young, and an amazing woman who raised my mom and aunt and then pursued her own passions - working as a nurse and then as a tour guide with tours all over the US and into China and Europe.  She backpacked across Europe with my grandfather when she was in her 50s and she kept apprised of news and politics and helped to re-build strong relationships with family in Denmark that we had lost touch with for over 50 years -relationships that are going strong to this day.  Grandma Loretta is a bit unconventional, not loving cooking or baking like my Grandma Betty or Aunt Joyce.  She is always thrilled when I bring her my cinnamon rolls, usually from Aunt Joyce’s recipe.  And I love that about her - she’s not one to always conform to societal norms.  Grandma Loretta, or Gigi as the great-grandchildren now call her has always inspired me to stretch my perspective a bit.  As a girl,I would often spend a week in the summer in Minnesota with my grandparents and just loved that time, and as young marrieds my hubby and I loved to go visit my grandparents in the land of 10,000 lakes and always had so much fun with them.  In recent years, since my Grandpa passed away I have enjoyed some special visits with my Grandma.  I’ve been blown away just in the past year with her grace and love toward my family as some major changes took place in our lives.

There are so many good things I can reflect on and amazing people from the tradition I grew up in - beautiful, life-giving things that these three women lived out so well in their lives.  But as I entered my teen years I began to question some of the constructs of the setting I grew up in - my soul began to struggle with the restrictive nature of the tradition.  As a teenager, I was told this was just my sinful, rebellious spirit.  And I will acknowledge, I was rebellious - I wanted to explore the world beyond my little farm community, I wanted to experience life, and I began questioning the messages I had been receiving about the rules of life.  In my 20s and 30s, these struggles continued as I became more aware of the theologies of exclusion that were core elements of my faith background - theologies that said God only chooses certain people to be in relationship with, theologies that said some people were not considered qualified to lead because of who they were, theologies that said my faith tradition had figured it all out and now had “thee” correct interpretation of sacred texts discounting interpretations from thousands of years of Christian and Jewish history and current interpretations that don’t fit with “thee” correct interpretation. 

These questions were present  as I went off to college and entered my 20s.  I was married at the age of 20 and then finished my college degree in music performance as a young married - something my new husband encouraged me to do even though I didn’t really think it was necessary.  I knew that my career would not be the primary focus of our marriage - I had heard that message just as my husband had - both growing up in the same faith perspective.   But he still encouraged me to complete my bachelor’s degree so I had something to fall back on if something happened to him.  

Both my husband and I tried to conform ourselves to the roles we were supposed to follow - him as the breadwinner and leader in the home, and me as the submissive stay-at-home mom and wife.  This is called the complementarian perspective of gender roles.  The roles never fit us well.  Our personalities and birth order didn’t reinforce the roles we were supposed to fill.  I was a first born and outspoken, a take charge kind of person, who is comfortable with conflict when it’s necessary.   He is the baby of his family and is more likely to seek compromise and avoid conflict.  My husband has a  very kind heart he didn’t ever feel quite right about lording things over me or telling me that he had the final say.  And trying to conform to these roles that just didn’t fit us well had a negative impact on our relationship, on our communication and intimacy and so much more.  We are still working to overcome this narrative and find a flourishing relationship where we treat one anothers as equals, not because we don’t believe that we are both valued and loved individuals, but because of the messages we received for 30 plus years of our lives about the roles that men and women should fit within.   

The rumblings of these struggles settled firmly into my awareness in my 30s amidst the demands of motherhood - the role I was told should be my only focus.  Like a good evangelical I started having babies just a few years after I married.  My children, as most do, took a lot of energy and time.  I had my first child when I was 24 - a daughter who we named Isabella.  Isabella was a happy, easy baby and I quickly got back to life pretty much as I’d known it before - teaching piano and voice lessons part time, serving in the worship and women’s ministry at my church, and being a homemaker.  But my life getting back to “normal” was short lived as quickly welcomed new children into our family.  Luke came along 18 months after Bella and Seth 23 months after Luke.  So for about 6 months we had 3 littles under 3 years of age. That in itself would have been crazy enough but then we learned that our boys had some challenges in their lives.  At 3 months of age we found out that Luke was deaf, and at 15 months he received a cochlear implant.  Seth was a very challenging baby from the get go, and we learned within the first month of his life that he also had a hearing loss and vision issues.  But his challenges continued and seemed to compound and at the age of 2 ½ after basically begging our pediatrician to give us a referral,  Seth was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the Mayo Clinic.    

In the midst of all of this there wasn’t much time to consider what my own aspirations were - mainly I was trying to keep little ones alive, line up therapies, get kids to therapy and try to maintain some semblance of normality for our daughter - something I’m not sure I succeeded in.  My children needed my complete focus and I’m thankful that as a family we had the means with my engineer husband’s job for me to stay at home and focus on meeting their needs.  But this was not the mothering journey I had imagined, in the midst of the rush of treatments, therapies, and surgeries there was a lot of grief mixed in - a tricky emotion to acknowledge and deal with when it is a part of your relationship with your children - children I love so much.  It has taken me years to really see the grief and start to process it.  I once read of special needs parenting that within it there is a cycle of grief - you process an element of the grief surrounding the challenges your child is facing, but then new issues arise and you have to loop back around and process more grief.  I have found this to be true in my journey as a mom.   There was and is a lot to process, even to this day.  My sons are beautiful, amazing young men and their disabilities will impact them throughout their lives and are a hindrance to them.  In this there is sorrow and grief that comes up and needs to be dealt with.  

As I look back on my early years of mothering, I realize I got a bit lost in the midst of the demands and challenges of providing care to my children, as many moms do.  I lost who I was outside of wife and mom and really didn’t have the energy to dream about what I wanted to do with my life - and I was told over and over by the religious system I was a part of, that I wasn’t supposed to dream of doing anything other than being a wife and a mom.  Honestly, the idea of my career aspirations being considered equally to those of my husbands was a completely foreign idea to me.  My husband’s career was the focus and as an engineer, pragmatically could support living life much more easily than my career focus of music

But I did dream of doing other things be.  I dreamed of music and learning and teaching.  Even with 3 little ones, I read and studied and led women’s Bible studies and a community moms group.  I led worship in the church and I kept teaching a few music lessons each week, trying to fulfill the undefined dreams of my heart. My dear friend Lori and I talked almost daily during these years about life and our kids and theology.  We joked about being the theology moms as we dove into deep issues of our faith and evolved in our understanding of different perspectives of faith.  We were both voracious readers and would share aspects of what we were reading about with one another and process these new ideas together.   

These early years of parenting were filled with shifts in faith and more and more questioning about the theologies I had always taken for granted - theologies I now realize were as much or more political than biblical. My husband and I became a part of a small group with friends from the conservative church we were attending who challenged our largely Republican Christian perspective.  They lovingly encouraged us to consider what the Bible actually said about caring for the poor, for the marginalized and welcoming the foreigner and stranger.  We lived in a rural community in Iowa that was surprisingly diverse with a large immigrant population from central and south America, Africa, and Asia.  We had opportunities to learn from our Honduran neighbors, who became dear friends, of the discrepancies in immigration law, making it much, much harder for people of color to immigrate to our country than for people with white skin.  This blew my mind and made me angry.  We saw all around us the ways that “the other” - the immigrants in our community were marginalized in various ways.  

One of our small group friends challenged our perspective that all people have equal opportunities to succeed in our country- a favorite perspective of conservative Christianity, which is simply statistically untrue.  Where you grow up, the resources and generational wealth you have access to, and the color of your skin to name just a few - are factors that are set for you at birth and affect people’s ability to make a life in our country.  I came to realize that not everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make an amazing life for themselves - some people don’t even have bootstraps or boots.  But still I have friends and family who cling to this notion - that all people have equal opportunities and can succeed  - I call this Bootstrap Theology, and it’s just not true.  

Still a part of a conservative Christian community and serving faithfully in my church, I dug into the Bible with new eyes to see all the places that we are told to care for the immigrant and foreigner.  How Jesus told us to care for the poor, that they would always be with us.  And I started seeing with fresh eyes how Jesus elevated the marginalized during his time on earth.  He surrounded himself with people who were on the margins of society - not the powerful leaders of the day.  He spent time with the outsiders of the time, with Gentiles and lepers and tax collectors and women - a revoluntionary action that got him in trouble with the religious leaders of the day. He had a motley crew of followers - people who were largely looked down upon by the culture - simple men who were fishermen and tax collectors - not flashy professions in that culture, not the power brokers of that time.  And he had some female disciples as well, but they don’t get much play in the Bible or in sermons - a topic for a future podcast.  Throughout Jesus’ ministry he turned empire on its head and modeled a life of caring for the least of these and of service and sacrifice.  I didn’t see this being modeled consistently in the church culture around me - there was a lot of vying for power and elevating of people with the flashy professions and status in our culture who happened to be involved in the church.  

As I grew in my understanding of God’s heart for the marginalized I became passionate about justice and making the world a better place and as a result when our biological kids were 7, 9 & 10, we became a foster family and had 10 children in our home over the course of the next 7 years.  I look back on that time and question my sanity, as many of our friends and family did at the time, but I felt convinced that God was calling us to love on kids in our community in this way.  And I grew in my understanding of the challenges of other families - families that didn’t have the resources and education and generational wealth that I was fortunate to have.  I met parents who loved their children every bit as much as I loved mine, but just didn’t have the tools, knowledge or resources to parent them well and my heart went out to the parents often as much as the children.  A part of my foster mom journey was engaging with the parents and doing what I could to help them grow and learn.  

I look back on that time and question my motives and my methods.  Did I as a white, middle class Christian woman believe I knew better than these parents who were struggling?  At times I did believe that. My religious background of certainty had influenced me into thinking I had all the right answers.  One of our foster children who came to us at the age of 7 became our adoptive son when he was 9, and I look back on his time in our home and know that I didn’t get that all right.  I made major mistakes, I didn’t understand the trauma he had experienced and I didn’t always respond in ways that were helpful for him.  Those years were hard, hard years - our son was hurting and acting out and I didn’t always respond with patience or love - I became traumatized and trauma on trauma is not a great combination.  I wanted him to just know that he was loved and safe and okay - but it’s not that easy - love is not always enough.  He left our home after 5 years of trying harder than I’ve tried at anything.  I’m thankful for friends who stepped in to provide him a safe place to land and I’m thankful for forgiveness - the forgiveness he has extended  to me and that which I’ve extended to him.  We keep in touch a little and he’s a young adult who is making his way in the world and doing far better than I would have imagined 5 years ago.   

I can now look back on my journey of parenting and the various sojourn stops along the way, and see that I was doing the best that I could - with good intentions, most of the time.  I can give myself grace, knowing that I had my own hurts and struggles that I brought to parenting, just as all parents do - which influenced how I parented.  

My belief in the lie of bootstrap theology was deeply reinforced during our years of fostering as I met families in my community who had grown up very differently from me, with very little resources available to them.  Parents who simply were not going to be able to pull themselves up and create this amazing American dream life that our culture touts as a possibility for everyone.  And my heart broke and I railed against those who said they just needed to work harder, be more committed, get a better education.  They were working hard in minimum wage jobs that would never provide enough to make a good life; they were committed to their families and friends as much as they could be - they were doing the best they could; and they had tried to gain the best education they could but had significant obstacles in their way that kept them from being able to engage in learning due to social-economic issues and issues of instability in their own home lives as children, cycles that were repeated as their children had to come into the foster care system.

For today I’m going to stop at this sojourn of my story.  It’s been really interesting and cathartic to reflect on my journey and on the many sojourn stops along the way.  I’m so thankful for all the people who have walked with me along this path - for the many people who have shaped my journey and I’m thankful for the opportunity that we all have to grow and change throughout our lives - so learn and see and know more and do better.  There are many more sojourn stops to come and I’ll share more of my story in the next episode.  Thanks so much for taking time to listen to the pilot episode of Soul Sojourn.  I look forward to what is to come, what stops we’ll take along the journey together.  I’ll see you at the next stop.