The Empathy List #131: That Darn Still, Small Voice
Spiritual autonomy... and an invitation to join my book launch team. ;-)
Hello friend, Liz here.
Imagine how easy it would feel to try to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor for the cookies you’re making for you and her… except your neighbor is distracted because her house is currently burning to the ground. That’s what it feels like for authors to try to sell and market books at this moment in time in the Fing United States of Fing America.
TLDR; I’m asking you to join my book launch team, which will actually be an early-reading book club. You’ll get free art prints, an early digital copy of the book to read, and you’ll meet Christians who don’t suck. Have I sold you yet? ;-)
You sign up by preordering my book, taking a screenshot of your receipt, and then filling out this form, pretty please.
I have a friend who, on his very large platform, habitually squawks about the political nightmare, often calling out commentators, politicians, and preachers by name. He has built a career on this, and mostly, I enjoy tuning in. He’s passionate and charismatic and funny. But he and I got into an argument recently in which I asked him about the end goal of his organization and platform. He answered: more Christian left media and organizing. Saving democracy. Being louder and more convincing than our conservative opponents. Becoming a trusted voice.
Many people set goals like these, and they are good goals. But I will tell you right now, that is the exact opposite of my goal.
With my writing and activism, I am not trying to build institutions, to teach Christians on the left or right to allow any authority to make decisions for them, or to conquer anyone. I’m not playing a winning and losing game in my work, and I have no illusion that my voice can save democracy.1
Rather, what animates my writing and activism is not an abstract ideal, but a practical reality of restoring voice and agency to humans, especially to Christians, and extra especially to Christian women. We must claim our spiritual autonomy.
What do I mean by spiritual autonomy?
I do not mean spiritual isolation. I do not mean retreating from Christian community, necessarily, or that we should throw out hundreds of years of careful thinking and commentating about the story of God as recorded in the Bible so that we only hear our own thoughts about God from here on out.
However, I do think that white American evangelicalism has conditioned us—and especially as women—to mistrust ourselves. We have learned to undermine our gut knowledge. We have learned to bury and mistrust our emotions. And we have learned that we do not have the authority, knowledge, or ability to interpret God —or even our own lives—rightly on our own.
But this is a form of spiritual gaslighting, my friends, and I say that it ends here. You can trust your experience of God.
I suppose this is why Genesis held my attention: the authors record the earliest known encounters with divinity. Usually God appears to an individual rather than to groups, and usually God is just a disembodied voice. God is a knowing. In one sense, God only exists in one person’s experience of the divine.2
When my family and I went through dramatic faith shifts and my husband stopped going to church, I had to reckon with stories like these. What did it mean for our marriage that our faith practice wasn’t perfectly aligned? Were we allowed to have different beliefs? Were we allowed to experience God differently?
Yes. We were. In fact, even at our most complementarian, when we were the most conservative evangelical we would ever be, even then, we weren’t perfectly aligned. Our understanding and experience of the deity that we believe became embodied as Jesus Christ had always been distinctive. My husband and I are unique, and so, too, is the way we practice and experience our Christian faith.
We stand before God as individuals. We have power and agency as individuals throughout our lives and there is so much we do not control. I have come to understand the practice of faith as heading out into the desert alone, without a map, and naked, like St. Mary of Egypt.3 This is spiritual autonomy: recognizing my unique spirituality as mine alone. That is, a journey that includes only me and God, because God is journeying alongside. God sees and calls each one of us, just as God named and called Hagar in the desert.
The beauty of claiming spiritual autonomy is that attending to our own wisdom makes space for creativity. We can find unique ways to approach and relate to God. We can interpret newly. We can explore with reverence, knowing that God’s care for us upholds us.
Of course, we also hope to find community on the road, other travelers headed toward the Great Beyond whose experience of God may intersect with ours for a season. Whether we experience those voices IRL or we find historical mentors to guide our experiences of God, we can be free to read and explore without fearing God’s wrath in our wandering. In fact, discovering that others have experienced God differently over time gives us permission to widen the circle of voices that teach us.
Ultimately, the journey is ours, singular, to complete. And I believe the slow, winding journey that art brings us on is what connects us most powerfully with God—and with ourselves. But we can only do this inner work when we embrace quiet.
Creating art, as I’m sure you can imagine (or that you know personally) is a grinding, methodical process. Engaging art can feel similar. And of course, when you compare the rush of dopamine you and I receive from getting angry on the internet to the work of attending to the pace of art… well, attention is not a commodity easily won. In fact, artists lose attention to the fascist demands of instant media every time.
So I admit, I feel trepidation about releasing a weirdo poetic theology book in a time like ours. What hubris to imagine you might sit with my words for more than a few seconds at a time! That my words can make any meaningful interior change against a backdrop of fascism! And what hubris to imagine that this could become a career, that I could, perhaps, turn a profit on a few pieces of paper glued together! Sigh.
But can I make a humble proposal?
In the next few months, schedule in times for slow attention. Build your schedule around the activities and people that mean the most to you. Set aside time to think and feel and listen for the voice of the Divine.
It’s possible that the work of art my husband and I created might help tune your attention during that time of stillness. (No hard feelings if it’s not your jam.) I hope, if you do read or buy it, that it does, and that you’ll tell me about it.
But ultimately, my goal is not that you find answers from me/us, but that you yourself find your spiritual voice.
Learn to trust the Voice of God as Love speaks to you. That still, small voice will be our lifeline in the next few years. When fear threatens to consume, I encourage you to get quiet, to listen, and to think your own thoughts. And God will arrive.
Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant
An Invitation to Join an Early Reading Book Club (aka Launch Team…)
Friend, if you plan to buy and/or read my forthcoming book, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible (available for preorder now!), I want to invite you to an early reading book club (aka Launch Team).
In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept, a book launch team is a grassroots hype club for an author releasing a book. ;-)
My goal for this launch team is to hear from you about this book! Writing is lonely, and I want to hear your thoughts and feelings about the strange ancient text we call Genesis.
Over 4 1-hour meetings during the weeks of December 30,2024 - January 25, 2025,4 we’ll be reading and discussing from a digital copy (via Net Galley) that my publisher is offering to all you early adopters.
In between our book discussions, we’ll have other fun stuff such as:
-a publishing Q&A,
-a chance to meet Jeremy, the artist behind the book and my life partner!
-an “Ask Me Anything” (or two? depending on time?),
-a chance to win a 12-oz bag of my favorite fancy coffee (I’m a third-wave snob),
-and a surprise in the mail (spoiler: it’s art! I’m sending you risograph prints of the art! They’ll be so pretty! And we just found out Jeremy’s fine art collages in the book were recognized as exceptional by an industry magazine 🥹).5
To join the launch team / reading club, there’s a few prerequisites (listed in order of priority):
Pre-order and try your best to read Knock at the Sky. ;-)
Attend at least 1 out of 4 Zoom book club meetings between the weeks of Dec.30 -Jan.25, 2025, hosted by yours truly and my hilarious therapist friend, Ashley Ward. (Each will last for 1 hour.)
Share about the book with 1 IRL friend.
Review the book on the site where you preordered (Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc.) during launch week and if you have an account, copy/paste your review to Goodreads, too.
If you cannot commit to a launch team or a four-week book club, THAT’S OKAY AND I STILL LIKE YOU.
Here are other ways to support me and the book:
Like and share my posts about the book on your social media channels.
Request your local library to stock the book.
Host an IRL book club with 2-4 friends. (Or suggest to read the book with your long-running book club.)
Suggest the book to your church leaders as a resource or potential curriculum tool for your church.
Convince your church small group to read the book.
Invite Liz to speak to your organization or church.
If you’re a writer, write a review of the book wherever you publish your words (blog, Substack, social media channels, IRL community newsletter, etc.).
I’d love to have you join the early reading club. Seriously, I enjoy you all so much and I cannot wait to see your faces!!! (Um, hi, I’m an extrovert.)
But even if you cannot join, please know that you are a gift to me and I’m delighted you’re part of this Empathy List community. Really, thank you.
I personally do not know what version of democracy even the Democrats, whom I vote for, are working to save. I will never forget that democracy gave us this newest administration, and democracy allowed for the subjugation of entire nations of humans from Africa, and democracy allowed us to colonize Native Americans. Of course, I have a clear enough idea of what freedom and peace could look like if Jesus were actually in charge, but I do not kid myself about my power to bring about that reality.
Obviously, I care how you vote and my faith in Jesus informs how I vote. In theory, democracy is a political system that gives opponents equal voice and provides equal opportunities without discrimination. That’s the dream, right? Each human being treated as a worthy human. But I do not know if our nation has ever attained that goal, and it certainly does not reflect that goal today.
I do not mean to say God is not an Ontological Being—I believe God exists outside of our perceptions. However, our perception of God is often the only certainty we have to rely upon to prove to ourselves and others that God has appeared, is working, and exists. Worshipping an invisible deity is complicated.
Read more about this truly wild (insane? traumatized?) woman of faith: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09763a.htm.
By the way, for those interested in joining the launch team, I want to hear what dates work for you! I realize doing this around the holidays is COMPLICATED, so I’m hoping to catch that early January energy that we’re certainly all gunna have (right? We’re all DEFINITELY going to get a third wind by then, right? Please, God, may it be so!).
Here’s a glimpse of that award, in which Jeremy won Bronze for commissioned art in Contemporary Collage Magazine’s recent contest. (Can you tell I’m proud?!)
The spiritual gaslighting ends here!! It ends with us. Appreciate you.
Just joined your launch team! Exciting times!