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"Forgiveness Can Happen" with Esther Lightcap Meek · The Weight

• 0:00
  Eddie Rester: I'm Eddie Rester.
• 0:02
  Chris McAlilly: I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
• 0:04
  Chris McAlilly: Today we're talking to Esther Lightcap Meek. She's a contemporary philosopher known for her work on epistemology, that's the study of knowledge, how we come to know. And she wrote a piece for Comment Magazine that we came across
• 0:17
  recently called "Forgiving: a Glimpse of a Farther World," and we're talking about that today.
• 0:22
  Eddie Rester: The first thing I noticed about Dr. Meek while we were even talking beforehand, she's joyful, but she's also got an incredible depth to her in how she applies her understanding of philosophy, epistemology, how we come to know, to forgiveness. I think is important, because she compares it to kind of the aha moments we have in life, that time when we're grasping to pull a lot of different things together we suddenly have the moment when it does all come together, when there's this great joy, that forgiveness is kind of like that. We grasp around, trying to figure out what it means, how to do it, if the words matter, and then eventually, as we pursue it, it happens.
• 1:06
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, it's a deep conversation. There, she's bringing in some philosophical resources to help us think about forgiveness in a new way. And one of the ways I would maybe just describe it would be oftentimes, when something has happened where forgiveness is required, you're looking backwards at what has happened, a past that's been shattered or broken or frayed or fragmented, and wondering, how do we put the pieces back together? You know?
• 1:34
  Chris McAlilly: How do we move forward? We're stuck in this present. We can't go back. Maybe we can't even forgive the things that have happened because there's not justice, or things are just not right, or, you know, there's still kind of wrong.
• 1:49
  Chris McAlilly: One of the things that she does is she offers us the opportunity to maybe not look backwards or even down, but maybe look forwards into a new horizon, what she calls a farther pattern. And we'll unpack what she means by that. But it really to me, is remembering that God is out there in the future, coming to us, breaking in in surprising ways, and sometimes that can give us the hope we need, perhaps that the future will be different than the present, that allows maybe a new possibility for forgiveness.
• 2:20
  Eddie Rester: I'm thankful for this conversation. If you are in this moment struggling with forgiveness or what it can mean, then this is a conversation for you. If you know someone that needs this conversation, send it to them.
• 2:33
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, and we'll be posting this in the wake of Easter and so we've just been through looking at the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus, and this is a way for that story, the story of our faith, maybe, to impact and offer you some new possibilities within your relationships today.
• 2:50
  Chris McAlilly: So thanks for being with us on The Weight. We always are glad that you're on the journey with us.
• 2:56
  Chris McAlilly: [INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise, it requires deep wisdom to navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems, and unwarranted hope to inspire durable change.
• 3:12
  Eddie Rester: As Christ-centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the academy, and the marketplace, we all carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.
• 3:23
  Chris McAlilly: But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition offers us centuries of wisdom if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.
• 3:34
  Eddie Rester: That's why The Weight exists--to create space for the conversations that challenge our assumptions, deepen our thinking, and renew our spiritual imagination.
• 3:43
  Chris McAlilly: Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness in tradition, and responsiveness to a changing world.
• 3:51
  Eddie Rester: So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a non profit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of Christ centered leadership today.
• 4:04
  Eddie Rester: Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
• 4:08
  Chris McAlilly: We're here today with Dr Esther Lightcap Meek, who is an American philosopher who works in the area of epistemology, the area of how we know what we know. And we're here today for a conversation about an article she wrote on forgiveness. Thank you so much for being here. Dr. Meek.
• 4:26
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Yeah, it's very nice of you to have me, and it's great to make your acquaintance and hear a little bit about your lives and work, too. So.
• 4:34
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, we came across this piece that you wrote for Comment Magazine on forgiveness, and it was an interesting, an interesting take on the topic, because you were bringing some of your expertise to bear. Everyone knows that the topic of forgiveness is difficult, but I wonder if you might set up, you know how you approached it in the piece?
• 5:02
  Esther Lightcap Meek: I'll try.
• 5:02
  Esther Lightcap Meek: So my questions in life have had to do with doubt and skepticism.
• 5:06
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And so, you know, what I thought at first was sin turned out to be epistemological. And so I've really been on a lifelong quest to offer a responsible account of knowing, and then also of reality that's consonant with my biblically based Christian belief. And a breakthrough early on for me was finding the work of this philosopher, scientist turned philosopher, Michael Polanyi, who was a premier discoverer at the beginning of the 20th century, and his account of how we know, which I I really have cottoned pretty simply on to those words,"subsidiary focal integration," which I talk about in the piece and can explain. Actually, I think my explanation in this article may be the best one I've ever done, and I've done it all my life.
• 6:10
  Eddie Rester: Yeah, why don't you offer that up for us? What does that mean that?
• 6:14
  Unknown: Well, I will do that.
• 6:14
  Unknown: But anyway, so it's that account of knowing that seems to make sense of lots of things. And in this case, it seemed to make sense of forgiveness, especially because I also have, in my fat book "Loving to Know," I've got two chapters engaging the work of James Loder, and then later I was asked to review a collection of essays by his students, in which I found that one by Haddon Willmer. So it was really Willmer's piece that made me link forgiveness with this subsidiary focal integration. So I think that answers Chris' question. And so can I go on to Eddie's?
• 7:00
  Eddie Rester: Yeah, please, do.
• 7:00
  Eddie Rester: Please do. Yeah.
• 7:02
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Well, I'd like to read to you. Could I read to you what it says in the essay?
• 7:08
  Chris McAlilly: Absolutely, I think that would be fantastic.
• 7:10
  Chris McAlilly: You could just read the whole essay. That would be fantastic.
• 7:12
  Chris McAlilly: But no, read the piece that you were thinking.
• 7:14
  Esther Lightcap Meek: You could maybe make copies available for your readership. Let's see, where is it?
• 7:20
  Chris McAlilly: We'll definitely do that. We'll definitely link to the article so folks can reference it.
• 7:24
  Esther Lightcap Meek: No, I was looking... Oh, there it is.
• 7:27
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Okay, so let me just read this, if I may. So it's just a paragraph. Okay, so this would be on page, oh, I don't know what it is, but it's subtitled"The Act of Coming to Know.""Michael Polanyi, a premier scientific discoverer in the early 20th century, made a series of philosophical arguments that bear fruit with regard to these questions about forgiveness. And the question I pose is, when do you feel forgiven? Which isn't necessarily when you utter the words. So he taught that discovery can never be merely a matter of amassing information.
• 8:08
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Just think about the many moments you've had, an aha moment, honed a skill, deepened your perception. Discovery, the act of coming to know, involves, at its heart, a dramatic breakthrough of insight, a moment of epiphany. You initially feel blind to any further reality as you stare at disconnected pieces before you, but then some of these pieces start to point beyond themselves, pregnant with a hidden meaning. You start to climb into what are now clues, groping forward from them toward a still hidden farther pattern.
• 8:52
  Esther Lightcap Meek: "There is no surefire, linear adding of information, only this scrabbling to connect the dots.
• 8:57
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Insight, when it arrives, comes from beyond." Then I have an example of bike riding. I will skip that over. Let's see.
• 9:10
  Esther Lightcap Meek: "Palanyi calls this..." No.
• 9:10
  Esther Lightcap Meek: "Life brims with examples of this pattern of discovery.
• 9:15
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Polanyi calls it subsidiary focal integration. We think we are staring at a mess of disconnected units of meaning, only to experience a surprise reversal. A fresh pattern comes into view. The clues are integrated into coherence.
• 9:29
  Esther Lightcap Meek: You're picking out an odd pattern on a leafy woodland path, this is personal experience, when you suddenly see a copperhead snake quietly staring up at you from your feet." So and so I go on from there.
• 9:43
  Esther Lightcap Meek: But this idea of subsidiary focal and get creation is that all knowing has these two levels, from and to, and you rely on one to focus on the other. And you actually, in advance of the pattern, you kind of scrabble subsidiarily toward it, and then you're blessed with this epiphany of insight breaking through. So
• 10:11
  Chris McAlilly: You skipped over the bike riding example, but I do think it's helpful, because, so my daughter is seven, and we've recently been working with her on riding a bike. And so when you're with children, you get a sense of how, I mean, it's, yeah... I don't know. It's an epistemological playground in some ways, because children are coming to know the world for the first time. It just, it's just so amazing, and you get to kind of remember what it's like to know something for the first time. And so there's nothing like it. This is my third child, and each of them, the moment of discovery, when a child, when all the pieces come together, and a child puts together the pedaling and the balance and the momentum...
• 10:54
  Eddie Rester: And the steering.
• 10:54
  Chris McAlilly: And the steering and all those things, there is something very powerful that happens in that moment, and it In a way that they didn't know they could connect the dots. I is a deeper knowing than just information. It's an embodied knowing that does involve some words, but it's connecting the dots in this coherent...
• 11:15
  Chris McAlilly: think that's, as I think about the particularly...
• 11:18
  Chris McAlilly: One hundred percent.
• 11:18
  Eddie Rester: Coming to know you're not sure that you can ever do it until it sneaks up on you and it's there.
• 11:23
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, that's right, and so, and then you talk about it being all of those parts coming together so that you can perform the act of bike riding.
• 11:30
  Esther Lightcap Meek: My father wanted me to learn to ride a bike. I didn't own a bike. He borrowed one that was too big for me. He took me, and I was a skeptic, right? So he took me to the the back of our back yard and put me, you know, at the top of this grassy hill. He put me on this contraption, and he pushed me. And he yelled,"Balance!" Well at that point, the bike made no sense. My body was not working out for me, and his words were, you know, mysterious, right? So that's this disparate, disconnected looking at, that would be focusing on what somehow you've got to come to subsidiarally indwell.
• 12:19
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And when you subsidiarily indwell it, and put them all together like your daughter, right? Then the performance, the pattern of bike riding, opens to you. And so it's that shift from looking at to looking from, to a farther pattern, that that's what I pick up on to talk about forgiveness.
• 12:38
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah. And I think what's helpful about it to me is that you can, I mean, all of us know these places in our life, these fissures, or these broken dimensions, or shattered dimensions of relationships, where one person has harmed another, there's been a wrong that has been wrought. And if you're looking back... The reframing, I think, is from looking back. Like, you can't ride a bike if you're looking backwards. There's no way to do it, you know. Or if you're looking down. You know, and just kind of paying attention...
• 13:11
  Esther Lightcap Meek: That's right. You're doing this so well, Chris.
• 13:13
  Eddie Rester: He's a smart one.
• 13:14
  Chris McAlilly: Well, it's forward looking. You know, having your eyes out to the horizon allows you to see more clearly. And if you can see a larger pattern, you can begin to put, you can make sense of the pain, the trauma, the fissures, you know, the wrong, the wrongs that either you have done or have been done to you. And there's, I don't know. There's this connection that I see you making between forgiveness, knowledge, and healing, I think is what I would call it. And I just wonder if you could unpack that a little bit.
• 13:49
  Esther Lightcap Meek: I would add reality too, because I think reality is lively, and that's how it comes to us.
• 13:56
  Eddie Rester: Yeah, say a little bit more about that connection, though, this particularly the farther pattern of forgiveness.
• 14:03
  Eddie Rester: That's the phrase that really captured me in the piece, is that there's something beyond us, something that we have to stumble into, discover. So what is it that we begin to discover about forgivness?
• 14:19
  Esther Lightcap Meek: It's also nice that, I think the picture that they sketched on the front of the magazine is of that farther shore, which I thought was pretty cool. So I'm sorry. I was thinking about the picture.
• 14:29
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Say it again, Eddie, what was the particular question
• 14:33
  Eddie Rester: I was just saying that image of the farther pattern of forgiveness. This piece that breaks into our current reality that we begin to know. Say a little bit more about that, just in terms of how we begin to free, because I think most people, they know they're supposed to forgive.
• 14:50
  Eddie Rester: They know the words of forgiveness. They know that it can be good in some way. But talk a little bit more about what begins to break in. As we begin to see, see what forgiveness can become, or what we can become as forgiving people.
• 15:10
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Well, if I may preface it by saying, to fixate on the, "I'm sorry. I forgive you," transaction can be focal in a way that blinds you to reality. See, that's part of the deal. If you're reverting to fixate on like your foot on the bike, the pattern goes away. And so the words can actually block you, blind you to the larger pattern. And then I would like to point out that I also talked about how the Lord is the God of farther patterns. He's the one that, you know this definition of the holy as "the gracious in-breaking possibility of new being." And that is what we cry out for and in help. You know, cry for his help and for his deliverance. And in grace, He comes in our need. And so, you know he's the one that can open a new world to us.
• 16:17
  Esther Lightcap Meek: So but I think what happens is, you know, we talk about letting go. There's that great Lewis Hyde quote about giving up attachment to our wounds. But then what happens is, whatever the betrayal or wrong done, it comes to be just a piece of a larger picture. And it can be a strategic one, like for Joseph, and through Joseph, for all of us. The saving of his people is our hope, too, you know.
• 17:00
  Esther Lightcap Meek: So it can be... Like, the the fissure, the thing that was the horrible, horrible break that in the larger picture, it invites a larger picture that it doesn't, in a linear way, reduce to what the issue was. It's almost like the issue opens a door to a transformative vision. And and in that transformative vision, so in "Longing to Know," I say the pattern transforms the clues. It makes them into what they were really meant to be. So he's able to say, "You meant it for evil, but I'm going to let
• 17:40
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, I think the you know, just narrowly, you that go, because I'm so excited to see you." It's like that, so, but God meant it for good. So it's like the grievance can come to occupy a far less weighty, fixated sort of a thing, because it's just part of a larger...
• 18:00
  Chris McAlilly: Almost like it opens a door to this farther reality in which it's got a proper significance.
• 18:16
  Chris McAlilly: begin by kind of talking about the the language that we normally associate with these moments where there's been something that shattered and is beyond repair, these grievous wrongs, where we know the thing to say, which is, "I'm sorry,""I forgive you," and you say, that's not wrong to say. And in fact, that can be, that can almost be like a sign post of a future, even if...
• 18:38
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And a catalyst.
• 18:39
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, and a catalyst. That that language actually can do work. But it also, I mean, you say it can feel like a band aid on a jagged knife wound. And there's a sense that, I think, especially in cases where things are ongoing, where there's a wrong that's been done, and then forgiveness may not seem like the right action, because the wrong is still ongoing. I mean, you think of cases of abuse, or kind of an ongoing and perpetual harm, or complicated cases where we're talking about whole communities that are involved and, yeah, I I wonder kind of how you would begin to think about that.
• 19:22
  Chris McAlilly: I mean, somebody that might read your piece and think, you know,"This... I just, I'm struggling with it." I mean, you can talk about the future all you want, but if you don't, if there's not justice that's been done or honesty that's been explored about what has happened in the past, there's just no way to move forward. How would you respond to that kind of
• 19:41
  Eddie Rester: While you're thinking, let me offer something criticism?
• 19:41
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Well, actually, I was thinking about this in advance of our conversation. And I really am no expert when it comes to like the counseling around forgiveness.
• 19:58
  Esther Lightcap Meek: But people, for example, distinguish between forgiveness and reconciliation, and I do feel as if sometimes reconciliation is just not possible, but forgiveness can be and needs to be as part of the healing of your own story, right? So, you know, I think we can all think of stories and books and movies and stuff where this is a thing.
• 20:41
  Esther Lightcap Meek: from the article that I think was so helpful that speaks to this, where you talk about the void, where we start sometimes the holy at the other end, and you say there are two wrong
• 20:53
  responses to the void: to deny it and to make your bed in it.
• 20:58
  Chris McAlilly: That's powerful.
• 20:59
  Eddie Rester: "The right responses to cry out for help.
• 21:02
  Eddie Rester: Asking for deliverance is the first truthful move of hope." And I think sometimes what we see, particularly in our world today, is we see those two extremes. People will go,"nothing really happened. I'm not worried about it. I'm moving on." Or "I'm going to live in this place of pain, brokenness, shame, loss, forever." In both responses there, to deny, to make your bed in it, deny any larger pattern of the future, of the hope that God may have for us.
• 21:34
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Yeah, thanks for summarizing that.
• 21:36
  Esther Lightcap Meek: That's, I think that's so important, and so Loder's, horizontal, vertical, you know, four dimensions of human is that void-holy dynamic is the cry out for help. Like, I mean, I need help. This is all through the verses of Psalm 107 you know, they, the people get themselves into some kind of pickle, and then they cry out, and the Lord delivers them, right? So it's the truthful speaking of our need that, if any, it's like the only thing that's going to invite the holy to come.
• 22:17
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, and you, you reference the loss of a loved one, addiction, betrayal, rejection, being grievously wrong, near death experience.
• 22:24
  Chris McAlilly: But also, you said, the fun scare at the top of a roller coaster, monster wave, even boredom. Those are ways in which we brush up against what Loder called the void that is described as the possibility of not being and that that, I think we can all live long enough and you're going to have one of these brush ups, where you experience, I mean, you know, in Scripture, there are other images, the valley of the shadow of death comes to mind, or exile, or, you know, the desert or the wilderness. These are images, scriptural images of this moment...
• 23:07
  Esther Lightcap Meek: At the Red Sea.
• 23:08
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, exactly.
• 23:08
  Chris McAlilly: All of those are moments where, you know, it seems impossible.
• 23:11
  Chris McAlilly: It seems like we've been undone by the things that we've done, you know. And when you're in those moments, yeah, it's... Why is it that crying out for need, for help changes the game? You know, from I guess, because you're not just an epistemologist, you're also a person of deep faith. How do you think about that? I mean, as you're reading scripture, as you're navigating the world, as you're trying to navigate it with students and friends, how do you help folks... I don't know. How do you help folks get to the place where they're they're willing to speak honestly?
• 23:58
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Well, let me tell you that behind what I wrote there are two wise men that I can name to you. One was John Buswell, and the other was John Stanley. And they said to me, personally, both of them, that there is one prayer that the Lord hears, and it's the cry of help, you know. And I've had my own trauma in my life, and they were, at least one of them, was speaking into that, you know. And, godly, trained theological types, you know, and they're saying one prayer that God hears is the cry of help, so.
• 24:50
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And then John Stanley, I'll tell you about him in particular. He is a Church of England priest in Australia now. But when I met him, it was in my hometown. I lived upstream here in Alaquippa, which was a typical post-industrial town. It still is. And John had a church, army, evangelist outreach that was a cafe, Uncommon Grounds Cafe.
• 25:17
  Esther Lightcap Meek: It's still there. And I took copious notes, listening to what John was doing, because Aliquippa was my hometown, and I just was longing for the presence of God there. And what the thing about Aliquippa, you know, it's a mill town. The steel mill there was the largest in the world, and it kind of raped the town when it left.
• 25:49
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And so you've got a town he would say that is numb. It's numb, and it can't even speak its own story truthfully. And people who would come into the cafe, like people who were struggling with addictions and stuff like that, they can't speak truthfully. They can't tell their story truthfully. But what the cafe was was a listening space, and so the volunteer training involved listening. Like, listening: number one, number two, and number three, right? And, you know, the thing about, you know, as I listened to John, I thought, well, this, it's a little bit like when those old fashioned pumps to pump water out to get, you know, from the ground. Well, when you start pumping, all this crud comes out, you know, it's dirty water, and you've got to pump till the water runs clean.
• 26:43
  Esther Lightcap Meek: So my analogy is, you got to listen. And John would say this too, you've got to listen until finally people tell their own story truthfully. And then he would say, they saved themselves, right? Because they finally have said, really the story of their need and cry out for help. So... Does that address what...
• 27:09
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, no, it's super helpful. And you know what I... The truth, telling your story truthfully is a dimension of understanding what has happened. And you know, in the piece, you reference Haddon Willmer, who talks about Desmond Tutu's work, "No Future Without Forgiveness." And that, you know, Desmond Tutu...
• 27:34
  Eddie Rester: "No Forgiveness." Oh.
• 27:35
  Chris McAlilly: It's "No Future Without Forgiveness." That's Desmond Tutu's piece.
• 27:39
  Eddie Rester: I was just a line further, but we'll get, we'll get to that.
• 27:41
  Chris McAlilly: I'm trying to set it up.
• 27:43
  Eddie Rester: Okay, I'm sorry.
• 27:44
  Chris McAlilly: You just broke in.
• 27:44
  Eddie Rester: I just broke in.
• 27:45
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Y'all are fighting!
• 27:46
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, no wwe're fighting. I apologize. Dr. Meek.
• 27:49
  Chris McAlilly: I need to take a moment to deal with this in a way that is forgiving. And...
• 27:54
  Eddie Rester: That's right.
• 27:55
  Chris McAlilly: I don't want to hold a grudge.
• 27:56
  Chris McAlilly: Will you forgive me?
• 27:57
  Chris McAlilly: I forgive you.
• 27:58
  Eddie Rester: There you go.
• 27:58
  Eddie Rester: Thank you.
• 27:58
  Chris McAlilly: Look-a there.
• 27:59
  Chris McAlilly: There you go. So the...
• 28:01
  Eddie Rester: This is what I was getting excited about.
• 28:02
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, it's exciting, exciting to think about, because there's this sense that if you don't have a conception of the future that is breaking in, something from beyond, something that's coming towards us, "Your kingdom come." It's very difficult to tell the truth about the past, you know, to be honest about what has happened if you don't think there is a future. And so, you know, one, so it's both...
• 28:32
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And if I could stop you right there to interject, in that sentence you just said you can see maybe the shift from focal to subsidiary too. So if you're just in the past, right, you're fixated on what ought to be subsidiary to open reality to you.
• 28:49
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, so there's this need for forgiveness, to be engaged, to have a picture, an image, a horizon, a farther pattern of what could be, or that what will be, beyond the negation, beyond the pain, beyond the cycle of retribution, the vengeance, the grudge, all of those things. And the line that I was struck by is this,"'Your kingdom come' is the ground that gives validity to the prayer, 'Forgive us our sin.'" Oh, my goodness, that is so rich. That's such a powerful sentiment. "Your kingdom come" is the ground that gives validity to the prayer, "Forgive us our sin." What? How do you understand that?
• 29:34
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Willmer wrote that?
• 29:36
  Chris McAlilly: Yes.
• 29:37
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Okay, yeah.
• 29:38
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, I think, I don't know that that's...
• 29:40
  Esther Lightcap Meek: I would say, ordinary knowing, the act of coming to know, and this whole subsidiary focal integration thing is, is a fabric of hope, right? So you...
• 29:59
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And, that part of what Palanyi was saying is, if you want to discover things in science, you gotta believe that they're there. You know, you have to have hope. And then, you know what happens is you can actually kind of grope toward it in in light of that. So it's, and here's what I wrote my dissertation on, and I can't remember. It's the beyond word in that piece. I was a skeptic.
• 30:25
  Esther Lightcap Meek: I felt like I had no proof that there was a world outside my mind. So, I mean, God was just one of the things. You know, it was really you too, you know, I wasn't even sure you were there.
• 30:43
  Esther Lightcap Meek: So what, here's this discoverer, Polanyi, and he would say things like this, and no other philosopher at that time had I ever heard say this. "You know you've made contact with reality," you ready for this? I already have chills. This is what I wrote my dissertation on, and it's still the water of life to me. "You know you've made contact with reality when you have an unspecifiable--that means you can't put into words--sense of indeterminate--that means you can't put into words--future manifestations. Now, who talks that way in a modernity addicted to certainty? But possibilities.
• 31:32
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Possibilities is that farther world that draws us in hope.
• 31:40
  Esther Lightcap Meek: It's what draws us in hope. So I would say the future is essential to knowing.
• 31:45
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah. So this indeterminate manifestations, these subsidiary clues that don't yet have a pattern, they can be pieces that help us, you know, find our way into discovery. It's not a logical deduction. It's this, and, I mean, it's like, yeah, you're groping or you're riding a bike.
• 32:05
  Chris McAlilly: You know, I think that just this bike riding image is so powerful because it I just know what it feels like to be on the bike in this personal, embodied way.
• 32:12
  Chris McAlilly: It's, you know, knowing is context dependent for Polanyi, and in that space, you can kind of look forward towards the horizon. You can find this larger pattern of meaning.
• 32:28
  Chris McAlilly: And that does...I think it's just a really helpful framework for coming back to this, just the difficult reality of forgiveness, because if you don't, if you can't imagine a future, if there's no possibility, if we're stuck, you know, and this is the reality, and there's nothing coming from beyond. There is no God. There's no transcendent dimension that's breaking in from the future that's going to give us something different. It's very difficult to imagine a world, that's other, or a relationship or community that's other than it is. And...
• 32:57
  Esther Lightcap Meek: It's also a refusal. So back to the two wrong things to do in the void.
• 33:01
  Esther Lightcap Meek: One is a refusal to consent to reality. Well, they're both a refusal to consent to reality, right? So consent is this big philosophical word, and so in a way, to say "I forgive you is" a baby step of consent to a larger world. Wouldn't you say?
• 33:26
  Eddie Rester: There's more...
• 33:26
  Eddie Rester: That there's more at work than simply the hurt that we've come to or the brokenness that we've come to. I'm sitting here thinking about, as you think about trying to allow this understanding, this power of forgiveness, to break into your knowing. I'm thinking about just the power of the other subsidiary pieces of worship and prayer and scripture, these things that allow you to begin to sense and know that there's something bigger and greater, that there's a future beyond where we are. In your
• 34:05
  Esther Lightcap Meek: What occurs to me as I listen to you, understanding, what's the role of some of our spiritual disciplines in helping begin to, helping us, begin to awaken to forgiveness and the power that it has, or the future that it has for us?
• 34:22
  Esther Lightcap Meek: is, in a way, all the spiritual disciplines are about contemplation of Christ, and so to behold him is to see. You know the Hebrews 12 passage you know, for the joy that was set before him. He endured the cross, despising the shame. So the worst possible evil that would be unforgivable was committed to him was, you know, perpetrated upon him, right? And if any, if Joseph said it, in a way, Jesus, did, you know. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. Right? And so we've got in our contemplation of him, which is, I would think the main reason for any spiritual discipline is to to show us Christ and to fall in love with him. And then we've got in him the very pattern, and then can look to him for the hope and the strength to to enact it in our own lives.
• 35:26
  Chris McAlilly: You've already mentioned this line, but I was so struck by because I think it's so true, is that one of the most difficult things when we've done wrong or we've been wronged is our attachment to our wounds.
• 35:35
  Chris McAlilly: And what I'm thinking about as you're talking about spiritual disciplines, is the sense of opening us up to contemplate the person and the work of Christ, particularly Christ going to the cross. How do you give up your attachment to your wounds? I think is a question that I found myself thinking about when I was reading your piece.
• 36:06
  Chris McAlilly: And I think perhaps an answer might be that you contemplate the wounds of Christ. And this is strange, in a difficult, kind of way, to kind of actually give somebody access to but I think, you know, there's this line in Isaiah that we come back to, "by his wounds, we are healed." How would that work within your framework, that in contemplating the wounds of Christ, we may kind of gain the access to give up our attachment to our own?
• 36:41
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Well, you know, I would say that's also you can see that as a matter of focusing beyond, rather than fixating on your... The attachment to wounds, that's lingo of fixating on what ought to eventually be subsidiary.
• 36:58
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, yeah, there's... This is rich, because I do think fixating on our own wounds, how many of us have just, how often have we not done this? This is such a human reality and to change, to change the focus from fixation to gazing upon the wounds of Christ that have the capacity to bring healing. It's just a powerful idea.
• 37:23
  Eddie Rester: One of the...
• 37:25
  Esther Lightcap Meek: That's so cool, but I do want to say, I think, you know, with my own experience of trauma, it's kind of like your body had major surgery. And I don't think you heal from trauma any faster than your body heals from surgery. So there should appropriately be a time where you know that you are just mutilated, right, and you are scattered, but I think what we want to avoid is the refusal to consent. So, you know, I would say there'd be a long period of time before you even felt like you had an option about consent or not consent.
• 38:12
  Esther Lightcap Meek: But then when that comes, you know, to say, "Help," that's consent. "This is not right.
• 38:18
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Help." Right? Or to say, "I need help."
• 38:24
  Eddie Rester: Right.
• 38:24
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Or, you know, "Lord, help." You know, just, "Lord, help me." You know, that's a consent for the reality. So it's no longer a refusal, right? But I do think we have to, you know, give ourselves permission to feel utterly like the pieces of us lie all over the place for a
• 38:51
  Eddie Rester: I think one of the things our culture tries to push long time.
• 38:53
  Eddie Rester: us to is forgive quickly and move on. Forgive and forget. Go ahead and do this thing that Jesus called us to do, and then it's over. It's done. You've done the thing. You've done the thing. And I, when I preach about forgiveness, I like to remind people that forgiveness isn't a moment. It's process. It comes over time. That that breaking in of forgiveness, that future that you're talking about, that breaks in as we forgive, it takes a season, maybe multiple seasons of life, maybe even years of life, before you finally allow the attachment to the wound is released. You still have the scar, and you know it's there. You can feel that scar sometimes, and it reminds you of what God has done beyond that, to heal.
• 39:46
  Eddie Rester: But I think that even scripture, I've said this before, that when Jesus talks about 70 times seven or 700 times seven, whichever translation you want of that passage, that we think about this repetitive, quick nature, but maybe what Jesus is really getting at is this long, slow season of forgiveness that allows that greater work, that greater future, to really set the pattern for us. That's how I think about that.
• 40:21
  Esther Lightcap Meek: That's wonderful. Thank you for that.
• 40:23
  Chris McAlilly: You do reference, I mean, you mentioned your own recovery from trauma, and you mentioned this in the book, I mean, in the in the essay, and you're talking about a piece by David Brooks, "Tales of Super Survivors," people that have recovered from PTSD, who have undergone what you call post traumatic growth. And you say it's... Yeah, so that's Brooks's phrase, but there's this sense of recovering from trauma he says mainly an exercise in storytelling.
• 40:55
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Yeah.
• 40:56
  Chris McAlilly: What does that mean?
• 41:02
  Esther Lightcap Meek: You got to write a larger narrative. And I, like I said, I think that lingo, which may be more familiar to us than subsidiary focal integration, is really what the larger pattern is, right? So, you know, Dan Allender's work.
• 41:17
  Esther Lightcap Meek: He's made a ton out of, you know, recovery from abuse by retelling your story. So he's got a whole center involved in in retelling your story. So...
• 41:33
  Eddie Rester: I'm going to go back to something you talked about earlier, where sitting and letting, priming the pump, letting people get the sludge out and then the wastewater out, and tha slow telling of the story, in safety. I think that's what I'm hearing, Chris, in that is that it allows more to happen, more to flow out. Is that where you were headed with
• 41:56
  Esther Lightcap Meek: That's lovely. That's true. And you that?
• 41:59
  Esther Lightcap Meek: know what, I came to kind of enshrine listening as I've got in "Loving to Know," my big fat book on what I think the paradigm of knowing is. I've got a chapter called "Inviting the Real," which I call an epistemological etiquette. You know, so best epistemic practice is to invite the real to come.
• 42:25
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And having argued that reality is person-like. But active...
• 42:30
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Listening, we need to see is not passive. It's active. So it actually brings reality to be.
• 42:35
  Esther Lightcap Meek: So in that , that act of listening, first of all... You know, so one psychiatrist, like quote, somewhere, says people don't have a story until you listen to it, until they tell it to you. Right? So you as... And he was big on putting together these active listening groups.
• 43:01
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And so then what actively--and I would think this goes on at AA.
• 43:05
  Esther Lightcap Meek: So you know, you have hearers that bear witness to your story.
• 43:10
  Esther Lightcap Meek: But then also this particular psychiatrist, Gendlin, that I have in mind, he also said it's also kind of a groping for the right word to put on your felt body sense. So active listeners can listen to the story. They can commiserate. They can bring your story to be, but then they can also say, "You know what?
• 43:37
  Esther Lightcap Meek: You're not afraid. You're angry."
• 43:40
  Eddie Rester: Right.
• 43:41
  Esther Lightcap Meek: And what this guy, Gendlin, said was, once you've got the right word, you actually feel your body shift. It goes, "oh." So in my situation that happened. I, you know, I can't tell you, it was the darkest of the dark, and I, in the middle of the night, read something online that had a particular term in it, and in an hour, I could breathe more deeply.
• 44:17
  Eddie Rester: I think what you're describing is that you continue to grow. You continue to kind of look and pull and read and see and listen, and as you talk about consent, it's almost giving people consent to speak into you what they're hearing and seeing as a part of the process of forgiveness.
• 44:36
  Chris McAlilly: I wonder, I wonder if we... We're kind of drawing to an end. I love the way that you end the piece. I wonder you've read a portion farther up. I wonder if you would just read this last bit, the Dallas Willard quote.
• 44:50
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Oh, isn't that fantastical!
• 44:51
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah.
• 44:53
  Esther Lightcap Meek: I have that in my Bible.
• 44:55
  Chris McAlilly: Would you mind just reading from, "The new world proves to be ours now"? Is what I have, all the way to the end. Would you mind reading just that last quote, and then your last couple sentences? I think that would be a great way to end.
• 45:09
  Esther Lightcap Meek: Oh, that's lovely. Thank you so much. I'm still searching for it. Okay, got it. So this is the last
• 45:17
  paragraph: "The new world proves to be ours now." I'm going to cry. "Hear the simple confidence of the wise Dallas Willard:'When we enter the life of friendship with the Jesus, who is now at work in the universe, we stand now in a new reality where condemnation is simply irrelevant... As for the condemnation we may receive from others, I endeavor not to receive it, to just ignore it or drop it... It seems only intelligent just to have done with the whole condemning game.' Forgiveness is difficult for there is no going back. But you wouldn't want to, for a profounder reality has come and is here. Let us entrust ourselves in hope and seek the gracious and breaking of this larger real."
• 46:17
  Chris McAlilly: That's lovely.
• 46:17
  Chris McAlilly: I'm so thankful that you've written the piece and shared your time with us and kind of unpacked it and opened it up for us. I will be thinking about this as we move through. We're recording this here towards the end of Lent, as we move into Holy Week and anticipate the resurrection hope of Easter. And my hope is that as folks engage the episode and think about these realities that we pass through, that these practices and the story that we share as the body of Christ, as we continue to push it forward, it'll offer folks an opportunity for a farther pattern, something beyond what they're experiencing, and open up a new possibility. So thank you so much.
• 47:05
  Esther Lightcap Meek: I thank you, too, for finding the peace and taking it seriously and shedding your insights on it and going to the bank on it. Thank you so much.
• 47:13
  Eddie Rester: Thanks, Dr. Meek.
• 47:13
  Eddie Rester: We appreciate you.
• 47:14
  Chris McAlilly: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
• 47:16
  Eddie Rester: [OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.
• 47:25
  Chris McAlilly: If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweight podcast.com.
• 47:30
  Chris McAlilly: [END OUTRO]