Brené Brown on Jesus and vulnerable spirituality

Capture

What the episode is about

Last episode of the first season of The Spiritual Life, the podcast of the Jesuit magazine America. James Martin, S.J. talks with Brené Brown about her faith: how she became Catholic at seven, why she left the church and later became Episcopalian again, what she means by being a "mystical Catholic", how she prays (the examen, her own versions of the Our Father and the Hail Mary), why Jesus is "tricky" for her, and how her finding on armor and courage leads her straight to the cross. It ends with the pickleball injury behind her book Strong Ground and her answer on how to return to faith after a long absence. After the interview Martin and his producer Maggie Van Dorn talk about false images of God and explain the examen. The episode is 1:00:36 long; the interview runs from 4:38 to about 51:30.

Before the interview: Martin on coming back to faith

The listener question (from Nick): how can one return to an active practice of faith after a long absence? Martin's first point: any desire to return to faith, practice or church comes from God. "How else would God call us other than by awakening the desire in us?" Taking that seriously makes it less confusing, because you can trust that God is calling you. 2:06
It's natural to come back differently than when you left. Some people have to distance themselves from the faith of their childhood in order to "reappropriate it in an adult way"; it's fine if you don't see God or the church the way you did when you were younger. 2:30
Last advice: find a welcoming parish or faith community. 3:00

Raised by a wild pack of Jesuits

Baptized in the Episcopal Church in San Antonio, moved to New Orleans at two or three, which she calls her real spiritual formation. She went to Holy Name of Jesus Catholic School. Her line: "I was raised by a wild pack of Jesuits." 5:30
Her house became a way station for Jesuit liberation theologians travelling back from Central America; her mother and her friends were involved in the parish and the school. What she remembers: "a lot of good New Orleans food and a lot of cocktails and a lot of debate", with a very conservative father. Martin: "three things Jesuits like". 5:59, 7:05
In second grade (she calls it "a questionable Catholic experience") a bishop pulled her out of class and went through the Nicene Creed with her line by line, asking questions. Then he gave her an envelope for her parents: from that point on she was Catholic, not Episcopalian, and they needed to get on board. Her parents took conversion classes. She was seven, and she loved it. 7:36, 8:36
That's where her lifelong internal conflict with the church started. She loved God, the back and forth of the liturgy, Mass (in Latin once a month); she didn't like rules used in punitive ways. By fifth grade she understood that the discrepancies had nothing to do with God, and they mirrored the ones she saw in her parents: "You love me but why are you behaving like this? God is love but why is the church behaving like this?" Her summary: "From a very early age God was irreducible in my life. The church felt optional." 9:36, 10:11

Leaving the church, not God

The family moved to Houston. Her high school had the highest suicide rate of any high school in the country: first-generation professionals, a Trans Am with a bow on top at sixteen, drinking, drugs. A deacon she liked, a Jungian analyst, spoke about the suicides in the community one Sunday, and they never saw him again. 10:52, 11:31
Her mother, "very Jungian" and progressive, got angry. Brown tells the rest for the first time on air ("I've never told this story"): the deacon was her mother's therapist, her parents divorced badly, and her father blamed the deacon. 12:00
At St. Mary's University in San Antonio (a Marianist college) she was a poetry major. Her favorite professor was gay, tormented by conservative students and not protected by the faculty. That's when she decided she was done with the church and "pretty done with Catholicism". She thought she might be done with God too, "but that just elicited a chuckle from God". She asked if she could just pretend; God's answer, as she tells it: "Do what you need to do. I'll ride shotgun through your pretending phase." 12:53, 13:23
In her early thirties, after her first daughter was born, she wanted her children at least to have an understanding of God. Both went to Catholic high schools; she became Episcopalian again. In the Episcopal Church she has "less reconciling" to do: 200 priests in vestments around the Texas Capitol over gun laws, people protecting LGBTQ folks. Still, "my heart will always be Catholic, and probably some level of mystical Catholic" (she googled the term before the podcast: there are a couple of pieces she can't abide). 13:55, 14:22
Martin calls it a grace to be able to separate what the church does from God, "because the church is not God". Many people throw God out because they had tied the two together too tightly. 14:40

Mysticism as a lifelong street fight

Her three thin places at church (she says she hasn't gone since before COVID, maybe): passing the peace, being at the rail, singing. Mostly because she does them with people she'd like to punch in the face, and in those moments it doesn't matter. She doesn't drink from the common cup: she's a germaphobe and she's sober. 15:01
Her definition: "Mysticism for me is a lifelong street fight with faith as the only path to really understanding God. I don't need it to be easy." 16:00
Where the fight is: early in her formation she heard she must find the face of God in everyone she meets. That doesn't mean respecting their opinion, voting for them, dropping boundaries or being friends with them, but she does have to find it, "and that just feels like a big fat bummer sometimes". 16:33
Martin brings up Mother Teresa, who called the poor "Christ in distressing disguise". 17:10
Brown means people with an agenda antithetical to her beliefs and to "what I think godlike care for others means", maybe wanting to harm her politically or personally. From her Dare to Lead work, "living BIG": "What boundaries need to be in place for me to be in my integrity and generous towards you?" Finding the face of God in people "has made me a less nice person and a kinder person." 17:45, 17:59
Martin: in the Jesuit tradition this is the "presupposition" of the Spiritual Exercises, always trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, "the plus sign". 18:11
Brown asks: isn't God in the wrestling? Martin: God is everywhere, so God is in the wrestling too, like Jacob with the angel. The way to see God in a difficult person is to come to know them through their stories; that's why Jesus taught in stories so often. You don't understand someone from their CV. Many parables are about not seeing people as "other", like the Samaritans for Jews in first-century Judea and Galilee. 18:41, 18:59, 19:14

How she prays: the examen and her own words

She is "a huge daily examen person". It fits her research on emotional granularity, naming what she feels. She has an hour-long recorded version and a 15-minute one; she does the 15-minute one. Her son, at an all-boys Jesuit high school, did it in five minutes: "they knew their audience". 20:17, 20:46
She listens to the recording while walking or on the mat: a list of questions she answers, with music. Her favorite part: "the God around us, the God between us and the God within us". Then she prays for the next day. 21:27
She changes the words of every prayer, even at church, and her kids were mortified ("You need to follow the rules"). In the Our Father she doesn't say "deliver us from evil", because evil makes her think of the villain in the Frosty the Snowman cartoon, top hat and mustache. She says "deliver us from fear and shame", "because I think we are not good as human beings when we're in deep fear and shame. And a combo I think is lethal." 22:19
Martin: the evil spirit (Satan, the devil, "however you understand it") moves us towards shame and fear; that's why Jesus says "fear not" all the time. He quotes 1 John 4:18, "perfect love drives out fear", and turns it around: "perfect fear drives out love". From his work with LGBTQ people: if you're afraid of the other, you won't be able to love them. 22:44, 23:03, 23:29
In the Hail Mary she takes out "sinners": "Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us that are screwing it up." She explains it with social psychology: "If you tell a lie, you're not a liar." A behavior can change; she doesn't want to take on an identity. "I'm not 100% bought on" the "we're all sinners" thing. Martin says it's an insight for him, and offers the Jesuit phrase: we are "loved sinners". 24:06, 24:23, 25:04

Jesus is tricky

Martin's question, the one he always wanted to ask her: Jesus is the model of the vulnerability she talks about (naked on the cross, crying at the tomb of Lazarus). Who is he for her? 25:45
"He's got a lot of main character energy for me, but he is very tricky." She grew up in a "God-forward Catholicism", less "Jesusy" than non-Catholics; Jesus helped her understand God in the flesh and the hard daily decisions of a God-filled life. She saw a bumper sticker in Austin: "Jesus, deliver me from your followers." Martin has it as a button. 26:10, 26:58
Like water sports, football and patriotism (she's an avid football fan, loves skiing and tubing, "a real patriot"), the far right "owned" Jesus too. When she says the word "Jesus", she automatically creates distance between herself and people she loves and fights for. 27:06
She loves Richard Rohr's "cosmic Jesus". And: "When I pray, I never talk to Jesus." 28:04, 28:14
Martin separates the Jesus co-opted politically from the Jesus of the Gospels; she likes that one. He brings up René Girard (they had talked about him before recording): Jesus as the scapegoat who accepts the punishment, doesn't pass it on, doesn't let it embitter him, and so the cycle of scapegoating ends with him. The crucifix some people find violent is also an image of vulnerability. 28:40, 29:10
Thinking out loud (she says she's in a season of life where she doesn't care about doing that on air), she quotes a line attributed to an AC/DC roadie: "God is the blanket we throw over mystery and faith to give it a shape." Jesus would have been easier for her "if there hadn't been so many pictures of him", the way MTV ruined songs by giving you the video: "that's not what Hungry Like the Wolf is about" (her father ripped the cable out of the wall halfway through that video). 30:05, 30:21, 30:36
Same with communion: is it the flesh and blood of Jesus? She's not sure, but she will break bread with people she doesn't like at the rail. "I'm for the Jesus in the Gospels"; her relationship with him is "contemplative at best". Martin: "That's the real Jesus." 31:09, 31:29
Martin says that in spiritual direction people usually have more trouble with God than with Jesus: God as judge, or, as a friend of his put it, "the parole officer". His tool: "Joe's God" (judgment, vindictiveness, a transactional God) versus God. He asks people about their last experience of God; they describe calm, peace, awe in nature, and he tells them "that's God". 31:59, 32:24
The commandment against idols: most people think they have none, "but sometimes the idol in your mind is this sort of false image of God that has to be destroyed", so the real God can shine through. 33:52

How she experiences God

She gets emotional. It's "like asking a fish to describe water": she can speak about separation from God more than about presence, because "I never don't feel it". 34:17
What it means to feel it: "a very confident understanding for me that we are inextricably connected to each other by something greater than us. And for me, that thing that's greater than us is God. And that in God's purest form, God is love. God is good." She doesn't have a parole-officer God. 34:52
Before she had any theology (kindergarten at four in New Orleans), she thought being human was magic because she never felt alone. As a child in the back seat, looking at another child in another car at a stoplight, she knew they were connected through something bigger, though she wouldn't have called it God. Faith later gave her "language and a scaffolding" for the feeling of never being alone, even while hearing her parents fight through the wall. That's the origin of her mysticism: something unseen that she feels "no urge to figure out, only to get more of it. I don't want it figured out for me." 35:26, 36:00, 36:40

Armor, vulnerability and the cross

95% of her work now is with leaders in organizations. Her biggest "aha" was being wrong about her own hypothesis that the greatest barrier to courage is fear. Studying 150 transformational leaders, one said what all the others had said: "If you're making a list of brave leaders and you're defining brave as never being afraid, don't put me on your list. I'm afraid every day." 37:27, 38:14
"It's not fear that gets in the way of courage. It's armor": how we self-protect, the armor and weapons we're drawn to when we feel uncertainty, risk and exposure. Fearlessness doesn't exist and fear can be healthy; the question is what our armor is, because "they move me away from God. They move me away from my values." With her upbringing, she couldn't write that sentence without immediately picturing Jesus on the cross ("reflexive Catholic school"). 38:30, 39:17
Martin: God comes into the world without armor, as an infant dependent on his parents, and leaves it without armor, naked on the cross, spat upon. "His whole life is really about disarming people." 39:42
Brown: "He was not a sweet guy. He was a tough dude." She doesn't need a nice Jesus: "I don't really trust nice people. Nice feels performative to me. Kind, compassionate, loving. That's the real deal." To be kind you have to be tough enough to say "I see your humanity. This is a no for me." 40:08, 40:22
Catholics of her age didn't get much Bible education, unlike evangelicals who quote chapter and verse "like football plays". But in the Gospels and in a good homily you see why Carl Jung called paradox the deepest spiritual gift given to humans: in Jesus, strength and vulnerability in equal measure. 41:02, 41:13
Martin agrees: he turns over the tables in the Temple, says "Get behind me, Satan" to Peter, calls the disciples "you of little faith". His anger is always on behalf of someone else (how the Temple and the poor are treated), never "you're offending me". And as a carpenter he was probably physically tough too. 42:14

Strong Ground: the pickleball injury

Thirty years of tennis; during the pandemic friends pushed her to try pickleball. Two games and she never picked up a tennis racket again: six days a week, two hours a time. It's about identity, being an athlete again, competitive ("I'm gonna make people regret their life choices"). 43:44
On her first serve in a game with better players she felt as if someone had stabbed her from behind, and couldn't get up for 30 minutes. A month later she went to a trainer, Tony, asking to "move some heavy". His test: 10 out of 22, physical age "late 70s", no core. She had a compensatory injury: weak large muscle groups, small ones doing their work. When she asked to lift: "No, we're not going to build on dysfunction." 45:08, 45:27, 46:00
Everything Tony said tracked what she saw in C-suites: organizations with compensatory injuries because they have no core. Probably the church too: "I want to come to you, break bread, feel God, sing with strangers, go to the rail. I do not want your advice on the people I should vote for." That, she says, is a compensatory injury to the church and to her. She sees the rush to AI the same way, as building on dysfunction. Strong Ground is "above all else a leadership book". 46:26, 46:49, 47:29
During a lat pull-down that hurt her shoulders, Tony told her: "Brown, I want you to find your ground." Not the floor: "Use your mind to tell your body to find the ground. Push your feet into the ground." For her it was a very spiritual experience. Martin connects it to one of his favorite definitions of God, "the ground of all being" (the phrase is Paul Tillich's; Martin doesn't name him). She writes it down. 47:57, 48:40

Brown's answer: returning to faith after a long absence

She can only speak from experience: she always finds her faith there, "open arms, no judgment". If she talked with her faith about her absence, it would say: "I love that you followed where you needed to go. I'm here." What you bring back from the time away can deepen what you build together now. 49:26
What became clear to her during this conversation: "Nothing about my faith life is punitive. People are punitive. God is not for me." Be clear about why you're going back and what you want, and be open to it being completely different. 50:13
"I don't want to solve the mystery. I want to live in the mystery." Martin: God (or faith) "is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be pondered". She had never heard it. 50:40, 50:53
Her thanks to Martin: for "great questions and fewer answers. Those are actually the people I trust." 51:30

After the interview: Martin and Van Dorn

Van Dorn liked that Brown took her time, said "I don't know, let me think about that", and admitted struggling with the church and with images of Jesus: a model for people who think they need answers ready at the snap of a finger. 52:19
Martin adds what he didn't say in the interview: images of God are often tied to the authority figures in our lives. Demanding, exacting parents or teachers, love that feels transactional ("I'll only love you if you do this"), get projected onto God, who becomes the parole officer or the judge. You sometimes have to smash that idol. That doesn't mean everything religious teachers said about God is wrong, but a false image can keep us from meeting the God "who really wants to meet us as God is". 53:05, 54:20
Van Dorn: intellectuals like the three of them can bypass the fact that the experience of God isn't "nestled in the intellectual, but it is felt". Martin: it's both; knowing who Jesus was in the Gospels matters, but it can't stay in the head. He attributes to Thomas Aquinas "if you can define it, it's not God" (the line usually quoted is Augustine's, Sermon 117: si comprehendis, non est Deus). 55:17, 55:54
Martin explains the examen: an end-of-day prayer, sometimes done in the morning, looking back at the last 24 hours. Start with gratitude, a couple of things you're grateful for. Go through the day: where did I meet God, where did I turn away from God, where did I fail or sin. Ask forgiveness in your own way, then ask for the grace to meet God the next day. Over time you see patterns ("I noticed God in my interaction with Maggie"), and the next day you're more attentive to them. It shows where God was, which helps you see where God is and will be. 56:22, 56:53
From Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, former Superior General of the Jesuits, in Martin's book How Can I Find God?: it's easier to see God looking back. Moses asks to see God's face; God says no, but you will see me pass (Exodus 33). 57:28

Quotes

"From a very early age God was irreducible in my life. The church felt optional." (Brown) 10:11
"Mysticism for me is a lifelong street fight with faith as the only path to really understanding God. I don't need it to be easy." (Brown) 16:00
"Finding the face of God in people has made me a less nice person and a kinder person." (Brown) 17:59
"Deliver us from fear and shame, because I think we are not good as human beings when we're in deep fear and shame." (Brown) 22:19
"Perfect love drives out fear. But I sometimes say to people, perfect fear drives out love." (Martin) 23:29
"God is the blanket we throw over mystery and faith to give it a shape." (attributed to an AC/DC roadie, quoted by Brown) 30:05
"It's not fear that gets in the way of courage. It's armor." (Brown) 38:30
"His whole life is really about disarming people." (Martin, on Jesus) 39:42
"I don't really trust nice people. Nice feels performative to me. Kind, compassionate, loving. That's the real deal." (Brown) 40:22
"Nothing about my faith life is punitive. People are punitive. God is not for me." (Brown) 50:13
"I don't want to solve the mystery. I want to live in the mystery." (Brown) 50:40
"Sometimes the idol in your mind is this sort of false image of God that has to be destroyed." (Martin) 33:52

Exploration

Ideas

"God irreducible, church optional" is a clean way to name a split many people live: the God she trusts and the institution she doesn't. Martin calls the ability to keep them apart a grace. The cost shows up in the rest of the episode: no church since COVID, no talking to Jesus.
Nice versus kind. Nice is performance and avoidance; kind needs boundaries and the toughness to say no. "Living BIG" (boundaries so I can be generous) is a practical version of finding the face of God in someone who wants to harm you.
Her finding on armor reads like a theology of the incarnation without her meaning it to: Martin's line that Jesus comes in and leaves without armor makes the cross the opposite of self-protection.
"Joe's God" versus God: the image we carry is often a projection of parents and teachers. A test for my own image: what was my last real experience of God, and does it match the God I fear?
The examen as granularity: naming moments and feelings precisely, every day, so patterns show up.
"We're not going to build on dysfunction": first the core, then the load. Applies to habits as much as to organizations.
Behavior versus identity: "if you tell a lie, you're not a liar". Martin's "loved sinners" keeps both the honesty about sin and the identity that rests on being loved.

Questions it raises

Can you have a mystical faith without a community you actually show up to? Her thin places are all communal (the peace, the rail, singing), yet she hasn't been to church in years.
- Not for long, I think. Everything she describes as a thin place happens with other people in a pew. Without going, the mysticism lives on memories.
Is dropping "sinners" from the Hail Mary a healthy refusal of shame, or a way of not needing grace?
- Her point about behaviour and identity is real, but dropping the word drops the reason for grace (Romans 5:8, "while we were still sinners"). Martin's "loved sinners" keeps both.
If evil is renamed "fear and shame", what happens to the evil that isn't inside us?
- It drops out of sight. Fear and shame are real, but injustice and cruelty done by others don't fit inside them. Martin keeps the evil spirit and treats fear and shame as what it pushes us towards, which holds both.
Why does she never talk to Jesus, if she's "for the Jesus in the Gospels"? What would change if she did?
- She doesn't say why. If she did, the "something greater" would have a face and a name, which is what the Gospels give.