Episode 17 // Navigating Inner Turmoil: How Personal Peace Fuels Global Change with Thomas McConkie

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In this episode of the Proclaim Peace Podcast, hosts Jennifer Thomas and Patrick Mason are joined by Thomas McConkie to discuss the urgent need for healing and peacemaking within ourselves in light of recent global conflicts. The conversation delves into ways we can use mindfulness, connection to God, and principles of inner peace to cultivate peace within ourselves as we try to create it in our outer world. Tune in as they explore the principles of the gospel and the teachings of the Book of Mormon to inspire listeners to become better peacemakers.

Timestamps

[00:02:49] Becoming people of peace.

[00:05:15] Tethering yourself to Christ.

[00:07:30] Cultivating inner peace.

[00:11:01] Defining peace and tension.

[00:15:40] Meditation and inner peace journey.

[00:22:00] Trusting our inherent worthiness.

[00:23:28] Right relationship with God.

[00:28:45] Alma's mighty change of heart.

[00:31:48] Changed hearts and grace.

[00:35:54] Inner peace amidst global conflict.

[00:39:34] Contemplation vs. Action Balance.

[00:45:29] Retreat to advance in life.

[00:49:21] Mothering the World.

[00:52:12] Collective trauma and time perception.

[00:58:19] Omega Point of Divine Love.

[01:00:11] The heart as an antenna.

Transcript

(00:03-00:06) Jennifer Thomas: Welcome to the Proclaim Peace Podcast. I'm Jennifer Thomas.
(00:06-00:16) Patrick Mason: And I'm Patrick Mason. And this is the podcast where we apply principles of the gospel and read the Book of Mormon to become better peacemakers. How are you doing, Jen?

(00:16-00:24) Jennifer Thomas: I'm doing okay, Patrick, but I am really looking forward to this particular podcast because on this particular day, I really need it. So today I will be hopefully the healed as much as the healer.

(00:25-02:16) Patrick Mason: I think we all need what we're going to talk about today. And I actually want to kind of introduce it with why I think we need this so much. So, as you know, I got a master's degree in international peace studies from the University of Notre Dame from the Kroc Institute there. It's one of the the great programs in the country in terms of training peace builders. They have an email listserv that has all of the graduates from the Crocs Institute over the past 30 plus years that it's been in existence. This is literally hundreds of people. who have gone through this program, gotten advanced degrees in peace studies. These are incredible people from all over the world. Like, I think in my year, we had 24 students from 20 different countries. I mean, it's just a truly global group of people, and they are doing truly impressive things. And so most of the time, the listserv is just like, hey, here's a job, or hey, does anybody have any advice on this? So a lot of times, it's pretty quiet and not a whole lot going on. But then at the end of last year, October 7th happened, of course, when Hamas attacked Israel and took all of those hostages. And then, of course, what precipitated the conflict that's been going on since then. And when that happened, this listserv kind of pardoned the metaphor, but it like blew up. There are Israelis and Palestinians who are part of this, who are graduates of this program. So that's always been a tense thing. But after this, this listserv just completely imploded. I mean, it wasn't just that people were disagreeing about what was happening, but it was a level of vitriol and personal attacks. And just like the language that people were using, I thought I was reading Twitter, not a peace studies listserv.

(02:16-02:27) Jennifer Thomas: Well, and I think it's been interesting to see how that this particular conflict was so escalated by social media. So people just formed opinions immediately and they were hard.

(02:27-03:37) Patrick Mason: Yeah, and again, I wouldn't have been surprised if it were somewhere on social media, but this was a list of people who had gotten advanced degrees in peace studies. And it really made me, and who are like genuinely doing incredible work, all different kinds of peace building all around the world. And it just made me reflect on like, what's happening here? And it made me think, and I've thought about this a lot over the last few years, that we received excellent training in terms of international peace studies. I can tell you a lot about how international conflicts happen and theories and concepts of peace and mediation and peace treaties and how to address terrorism. I can tell you lots of these things. There was a lot of knowledge that was imparted and skills that were imparted. But I think one of the things that we lacked so much, and that's what became apparent on this listserv, is that we had not done enough, like the program had not done enough, and I think on an individual level, we had not done enough to become people of peace. So we knew a lot about peace, right? But we hadn't done enough to become people of peace.

(03:37-04:53) Jennifer Thomas: I think that must have been a really unsettling experience because these are the people that are, to some degree, really tied to your identity as a peacemaker. This is the source of your credibility as a peacemaker. And then suddenly to see that implode, I think that would have been uncomfortable. And I have to be honest that I have felt the same thing in the last few years in terms of politics. you know, in politics and public policy. Because while there are a lot of good people trying to accomplish good things, it's been clear to me how much people have been making decisions that haven't tracked with what I would have thought of their character. And part of that, I think, is because they were driven by turmoil, fear, anxiety, they weren't able to access the sort of inner peace that would allow them to make a divergent decision, right? One that said, I can sit in what is right and I can find core peace for that. And I think that, so what I've seen is that so many people who've got into the work of politics or public policy for the right reasons and people who I would tend to admire are kind of pushed by this absence of inner peace into doing things that then you can tell are leading them to a place of pretty significant conflict.

(04:53-05:04) Patrick Mason: Yeah, there's a way that like just our situations can just take over, right? Yeah, exactly. Whatever our best intentions or whatever, just completely get swallowed up by the conflict we find ourselves in.

(05:04-06:06) Jennifer Thomas: And I think, you know, so much of the work of the Book of Mormon is trying to obviously, we're talking about it systemically, we're talking about the way it plays in peace. But at core, the message of the Book of Mormon is tethering yourself to Christ, and finding a way to operate through your life from that point of real peace, hope, charity, and connection to him, right? And I think there's a great example of this that we want to talk about today. So we're going to be talking a little bit about Alma and in the book of Alma. And at the very beginning of his story, he's serving as both the chief judge and the prophet. As we can only imagine, I truly cannot imagine even in a simpler society, the demands of both of those things. He obviously himself is feeling that tension because the society is fracturing and it's like, how do I solve both of these problems? It's so illustrative to me that he gives up the judgment seat in order to full-time devote himself to the ministry. He makes the decision.

(06:06-06:11) Patrick Mason: That's the choice he makes rather than the other way around saying, I'm going to solve all of this just through politics.

(06:12-06:59) Jennifer Thomas: Yeah, and you would think, we're sometimes oriented to think that the way to solve the problems, the position of power would have been the high priest, or not, sorry, the chief judge, right? And while I don't think we want all of our politicians to quit and become priests or ministers, I think they'd actually be quite bad at it. And I think we are seeing some of the problems in our society when priests and ministers bleed into politics. I do think there is a broader lesson about priorities that we can gain from these chapters. So Alma has made his choice. He goes out on a speaking tour to the various Nephite cities. And what he's obviously prioritizing is calling people to repentance, but it his message isn't one of it's not like a haranguing repent or die. It's it's something else. It's something quite different, actually.

(06:59-07:41) Patrick Mason: Yeah, and I see this. I mean, he gives a series of sermons, right, as he goes out on his kind of whistle-stop tour. But kind of the first one and the main one he gives is in Alma chapter 5, and that's the one we'll focus on today. But it's such an interesting chapter because he asks just this very long series of questions. Fifty. Yes, 50, who's counting? And I think maybe the most famous of these comes in verse 26. This is a verse that I think a lot of people would be familiar with. And now behold, I say unto you, my brethren, if ye have experienced a change of heart, if you felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?

(07:44-08:26) Jennifer Thomas: I don't know about you guys, but even as I hear that, it hits me right at my core, right? It's such a profound, direct question that gets at the heart of where we are spiritually. And I think it's so interesting to me that the Nephites have just come out of a huge armed conflict and their ongoing wars with, you know, some of their own people, and then their ongoing wars with the Lamanites in the background. And so there's plenty that Alma has to talk about in terms of peacemaking with these people, like trying to reconcile them and trying to reconcile them to the gospel. But what his message focuses on is this individual relationship with Christ and this, you know, how have you, are you really grounded in this relationship that is going to give you inner peace?

(08:27-09:08) Patrick Mason: Yeah, and of course, you know, this is not to discount the importance of peacemaking at every other level, right? At the international level, at the national level, at the community level, the family level. But I think what we want to just think about today and talk about is this idea that all of those other levels, all the kind of structural peace building that we might talk about, it'll just be inherently limited unless we also attend to the human heart. I think that's exactly what I saw on my listserv. All the expertise in the world, it's important, it's essential, but it's just gonna run up against limits if we haven't attended to the heart.

(09:09-09:30) Jennifer Thomas: And what's interesting, those limits sit within each of us, which means that both we can be the problem, but with individual work that is within our control, we can also be the solution. So if we want to have international peace or even interpersonal peace, if we want to get along with our friends and family, then there is no substitute for cultivating inner peace.

(09:30-10:46) Patrick Mason: Exactly. So to help us think through this, we couldn't think of anybody better to help us in this conversation than our friend Thomas McConkie. And we're so grateful that he's agreed to join us. So just to introduce him, Thomas Wirthlin-McConkie is an author, a developmental researcher, and a meditation teacher. As a teenager, he met his first teacher and has been practicing for over 25 years under masters in the traditions of Sufism, Buddhism, and Christian contemplation, among others, all while being rooted, you know, especially as an adult in his own Latter-day Saint faith. He's the founder of the Lower Light School of Wisdom, which is a nonprofit organization committed to sharing ancient and modern teachings from the world's wisdom traditions. He's currently at Harvard, one of your neighbors there in Massachusetts. And he's researching and writing on the topic of transformative spiritual practice at Harvard Divinity School. He lives with his wife, two kids, and rescue dog. And we're also really excited that he is about to launch a new podcast with the Faith Matters Podcast Network focused on contemplative practices. So we're just excited to have him and welcome Thomas. All right, so Thomas, welcome to the Proclaim Peace podcast.

(10:46-10:48) Thomas McConkie: Thank you. It's really great to be here with you, too.

(10:48-11:01) Patrick Mason: Yeah, we're so happy to have you. Well, we always start by asking our guests the same first question, and it's a deceptively simple one. How do you define peace?

(11:01-11:33) Thomas McConkie: I don't often define peace, so I appreciate this invitation to try and define it. For me, it's in a way it comes in two parts, pieces like eyes open orientation to the world, to like, what's the situation? What's so and to trust that I can respond to it in the appropriate way and the most loving way possible. Maybe. Let's see if that definition holds up over the next hour.

(11:33-11:35) Patrick Mason: I like that. I like that.

(11:35-11:37) Jennifer Thomas: I like that element of trust that you've introduced.

(11:38-11:39) Thomas McConkie: Cool.

(11:39-12:01) Jennifer Thomas: I'm wondering, actually, if you would be willing to walk us through a little bit of your life story. We're interested in what's brought you to this point, especially as a teacher of meditation and contemplative practices. Many Faith Matters listeners might know you very well, but some of our other listeners might not have ever encountered you in your work. So we're wondering if you would introduce yourself a little bit more in depth beyond just the typical bio that we've just read.

(12:02-12:58) Thomas McConkie: I could go in any number of directions, but for our purposes for this conversation in terms of if I can stay with the through line of peacemaking. I grew up in like a very faithful Latter-day Saint family and culture and for different reasons that I don't actually come to understand, I just couldn't quite get with the program from a young age. Like the church thing, the family culture, it just wasn't making sense to me. And so I dropped out of the program. I rebelled. I kicked back, however you put that. But it actually introduced a lot of tumultuous years ahead. And I think from a young age, about the age of 13, if I were to put my story into the language of this podcast, I had to figure out how to make peace in a situation that felt impossible to me as a 13-year-old.

(12:58-13:23) Jennifer Thomas: I think this puts you in a really relatable situation with many of our listeners, where sometimes the tensions that come into our life and the lack of peace is there because we can't reconcile parts of our lives, right? And we're struggling to find ways to do that. And often we want to do that, but don't have the resources or like you said, the explanation for why we're in tension and figuring out how to resolve that. It is always a challenge.

(13:23-14:15) Thomas McConkie: I love how you said that, and maybe we pick this up in the conversation or maybe not. But, you know, I heard you say reconcile the parts of our lives that are in tension. And as you said that, I felt immediately the sense of also reconciling the parts of ourselves. that we're in tension with. And to the I found that the extent to the extent that I'm in tension with myself, I'm going to be in tension with other people around those same themes. If I'm in tension, for example, if I have If my personality type easily goes towards anger, but I don't have an honest relationship with that fact, maybe I'm in tension with other people who express anger and I'm constantly judging people who I call angry. So that's just I really love the wording there. I think there's a lot of ground to till in terms of how we make peace. So.

(14:16-14:34) Patrick Mason: And maybe you can talk a little bit about your subsequent spiritual journey. But but but was it would it be fair to say that partly it was it was a search for for peace, for for bringing together, knitting together some parts of yourself, your identity, your experience and looking for that in the world?

(14:34-15:34) Thomas McConkie: 100 percent. I mean, I certainly experienced that that way from an early age. And you two might know this about me, but like as a teenager, that led me kind of intuitively into a path of meditation where I'm going to learn how to just sit still and be with myself. And that was excruciating. Nobody warned me how awful an experience it was to just sit still and do nothing for 10 minutes. But it also revealed to me what parts of myself I was in tension with, what parts of myself I hadn't accepted. And over time, I would say through God's grace, I started to get insight into the ways that I wasn't very embracing of the people who were closest to me. So that stillness created a context and a backdrop where I could see more clearly where I was struggling, where I was reactive, where I was not accepting of myself and others.

(15:34-15:40) Patrick Mason: And you had to find some of those practices outside of Latter-day Saint context, right?

(15:40-16:14) Thomas McConkie: Yeah, and that… I mean, in some ways it was, it just kind of happened, you know, in the neighborhood. I moved into my first apartment for my first year in college, and there was a Buddhist Sangha, just a community of practice just a couple blocks away from me. I don't even think I knew the word Buddhism, literally. Like it just was not on my radar, but it was this living, breathing community in my neighborhood. And I started there, and I'm glad I did. It bore good fruit. It's borne good fruit thus far, I think, if I'm adequate to judge.

(16:15-17:28) Jennifer Thomas: Well, and I think there's probably a reason that that was counterintuitive to you. There are so many wonderful things about LDS practice and our faith tradition, and this is a broad sweeping generalization, but I'll just comfortably make it having announced that. I think we are much more an active doing people than we are a sitting You know, contemplating people and, and I think we're trained to go and do, and we're not trained to sit and ponder so much right and and so I, but I think what you're describing is something that we could all use and all desperately need, right? So so I would love to hear a little bit more from you about this idea of inner peace. People talk about it. I think we'd prefer to have it. But what does it look like and how do we cultivate it, especially when, you know, pieces of ourself or intention? And I ask this question with deep personal pleading because I have a whole cacophony of monkeys that live inside my brain that are always chattering. And one of my great challenges in life is finding a way to be able to be still and be at peace. So I'm so interested to hear from you about how you've achieved this.

(17:28-23:06) Thomas McConkie: Achieved it is really stating it strongly. Let's slow down here. Engaged with this. Yeah. There's so much richness in that question, and I want to just take a deep breath with it. so as to not just start to spout out like glib responses as if I know like the answer to any of that or what piece even is. And I know this is bad radio when we take long pauses and the listeners are like Wait, did the line go dead? What's going on? But it's really meaningful to me, like the pregnant pause, because the moment you pose the question of what have you done to cultivate peace, inner peace, how did you achieve it? And then the moment I open my mouth, I think most of us will hear this conversation as though maybe he's going to say something that will finally help me access inner peace. And I'm not finding fault with that at all. I'm pointing to like an insight I had in my own process, which is that there's a part of me that deeply believes that like what I need is not right here and that I have to reach for it and that I have to strive for it and that I'm not going to be OK if I let up at all in my striving. And I think there are a lot of good things to say about that aspect of ourselves. But since we're talking peace here and since you asked me my particular approach, what has been like revolutionary for me is first noticing that part of myself that thinks like whatever I'm missing, whatever I'm lacking, whatever I'm needing, it's somewhere out there and I have to just search for it. And what I've found in the practice of like really making a relationship with stillness is that if I listen very closely to my heart's yearning and everything I've ever wanted in life, there is a mysterious and awesome way in which that is already here. Period. Hard stop. And that that doesn't mean that I stopped striving. Here's the paradox. And you guys can help me hold this paradox in this conversation. I had so many fears. I remember, like, for example, the first several years of like sitting still because I kind of picked this up as a daily practice as a teenager. I think the first several years I had this nagging one of the many monkeys and my monkey colony of a mind was constantly saying, you're wasting your life. This is the least productive thing you could possibly be doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. Like this whole litany of insults and attacks. Like, why are you sitting still? And thank goodness I didn't fully trust that voice because I sat through it. And over time, I realized That is a part of me, not the deepest part of me, certainly not the wisest or most compassionate part of me. It's the part of me that's actually very afraid of not being worthy. The part of me that feels like I need to earn love. The part of me that feels like nothing's OK and like the sky is going to fall unless I find a way to prop it up. I started to see through these kind of personality structures that I think universally we share in our own ways. And some of us have more pronounced monkeys in our colonies than others. But I started to see through those structures and realized like, oh, actually, that's just anxiety speaking. And, oh, actually, that's just fear speaking. And actually, that's a sense of unworthiness that's speaking. And if I go even deeper into what I would call something like the self of selves or my heart of hearts, there's a trust. Like we started the episode with that word that I trusted myself. And that was radical. I don't say these words lightly, like to to trust ourselves and to trust our own basic goodness is a quantum leap in the spiritual journey. But I found myself by grace just making that leap a little, you know, small leaps at a time. Like, what if what if I'm already worthy? What if God's love is so radical that I I can't earn it and I can't comprehend it? If I sit through that restlessness, rather than like being driven by it, rather than constantly striving to avoid that sense of not being worthy, what if I sit so deeply in that sense of being unworthy that the bottom falls out and I come into something even more true, which is, no, you don't need to earn it. That's not what this is about. That's not the situation. Then I found myself motivated from a new place. I was actually striving more than ever, if we want to use that word striving, but it was coming not from a place of lack, like I got to earn this or like, you know, all is lost. It was like, wow. Divine love is so radical. And it's inspiring me to live a life, the best life I can, and that's really my privilege to get to express that love in my own unique way as best as I can. That, in a word, was a lot of my process. It's a lot of what, you know, still sitting and contemplative life has taught me.

(23:06-23:58) Patrick Mason: Wow, that feels really right to me. It feels really amazing. there is a sense of peace that can come, especially when we feel, like truly feel, and again, coming back to this word of trust, trust that we are in right relationship with God, with the universe. And it's shifting the paradigm from one of achievement, right, to go back to another word, We said that I have to earn certain badges and medals, you know, I gotta level up enough and then that's when I'll be in right relationship. But I already am. And that's, I mean, that is a revolutionary shift.

(23:58-24:25) Thomas McConkie: Yeah. And I can tell just like being present with you right now that you know that in your own life through your own process of maturation. And it's my belief that God and all the angels in heaven celebrate when a single soul realizes this. We shift from the sense of lacking to this sense of like, my cup runneth over. Like, what can I give? How can I help build the kingdom?

(24:26-25:08) Jennifer Thomas: I think it's worth acknowledging that for a lot of people, that can feel a little scary, because we are raised in a striving space, culturally, socially, and I think there's this fear that if, for some people, that if we just say, oh, I'm good enough, God loves me, that the motivation will disappear. And I love that what you're sharing with us is this idea that that isn't something to fear, because on the other side of it is a more profound, really healthier motivation to more deeply be right with God and engage. So I think I would encourage our listeners to not be afraid of that process, right?

(25:08-25:15) Thomas McConkie: Yeah, I love how you articulated that, and I hope we can include the joyful play of a four-year-old in the background here.

(25:15-25:16) Jennifer Thomas: We can, absolutely.

(25:16-25:19) Thomas McConkie: If that's coming up. on the mic.

(25:19-25:24) Patrick Mason: I think it's mandatory for a podcast, right? That there has to be a child noise or dog noise.

(25:24-25:29) Thomas McConkie: Yeah, we should have those sounds canned in case we need to like, you know, bring the energy up.

(25:29-25:35) Jennifer Thomas: If the conversation looks like that's absolutely mandatory. We welcome the wee ones.

(25:35-27:14) Thomas McConkie: I love what you said, Jennifer. You said it can be a little scary. I think, yes, it can be from a little scary to downright terrifying, depending on our own personality, the culture we were raised in, our family patterns, etc. But I would also really point out to people listening and considering this that the thinking mind is too shallow a place to take this fear on. Like, we can't think our way out of a sense of like, I'm not good enough, I need to strive more. We can work with thought and that's an important aspect of it, but certainly my experience and working with a lot of students in this space. My experience is that over time, we can cultivate the courage to encounter our deepest fears that are held in the body, in the gut, like right down to our marrow. Like the sensation is so real that I'm not good enough or I'm not doing enough in life. I'm not successful enough. Whatever our story is of lack, That goes so deep that if we don't really encounter that at a somatic and embodied level, that energy will inform all of our thinking. It will drive our behavior our whole life. So there's something about the practice. However we do this, people do it different ways, but to actually feel what's so difficult to encounter in ourselves. For me, it was terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying. And not for a day or a week, but for years.

(27:16-28:45) Patrick Mason: So I want to anchor this for a moment in a text. One of the things we're doing this season is sort of going through and using the Book of Mormon to help us reflect on some of these principles of peacemaking. And one text that we were thinking about as we thought about this topic of inner peace is Alma 5, one of the lengthier sermons or speeches that we get in the Book of Mormon. And it's unique, or at least distinctive, in that so much of it is a series of questions that Alma is posing to his listeners that I think he really wants them to be introspective. He wants them to really think hard about who they are, their relationship to God. And you talked about this word of worthiness, which of course is so prevalent within Latter-day Saint culture. I've sometimes heard Alma 5 talked about as the kind of equivalent to a Temple Recommend interview or something like that, this series of questions where we're supposed to self-assess. How do you, when you come to this particular text or a text like this, How do you approach this? I could imagine, for instance, that those 50 questions that Alma asks could lead to a lot of inner anxiety, actually, to the opposite of inner peace. But maybe there's other ways to read and interpret this litany of questions that he's going through. So how do you approach this text?

(28:45-32:31) Thomas McConkie: Yeah. Oh, thanks. That's a really interesting question. And I hadn't thought of Alma 5 in this way until you framed it as such. Where my attention goes is not so much the content of the sermon, the questions, although those are certainly worthy of pursuit. Where my attention goes is the place from where Alma seems to be speaking. And what I mean by that is I'm really struck by the verses where he's talking to the people whose souls he's very much invested in calling back to God. and saying, like, did you know that my father had this mighty change of heart? And that from that mighty change of heart, he spoke to your fathers and your fathers had a mighty change of heart. And he goes on to say, like, Have you been born again spiritually? Do you realize that you stand to be converted in the same way that like you too can have a mighty change of heart? And in fact, that's what God is eager for you to have if you would, if you'd be willing. And this, of course, tell me if I'm getting this right, but Alma is speaking from a place of deep, deep experience that he is, in some ways, the poster child of a change of heart in the Book of Mormon. In a way, it's been pointed out by many people that really resembles the change of heart that Paul experienced when he was struck blind and laid as if dead over three days. And they're born again in the Spirit. And what I want to say about this, I've noticed in Latter-day Saint culture that there's a tendency to interpret like Paul's experience of being just so overcome by God's presence that he can't, he's paralyzed as if dead for several days, or Alma's mighty change of heart. I found in our culture we, I think very understandably, tend to interpret this as like, oh, This is a person who's like really cleaned up their conduct. They stopped swearing. They're serving at a soup kitchen on Saturday. They're doing all the things. And that I find is a dangerous misunderstanding of what I what I think is going on here, which is. Yes, Paul and Alma, if you'll go with me here, if they had a problem cursing or needed to do more community service before their conversion, then after that behavior was just forthcoming, it was a spontaneous expression of that change of heart. But I find that the challenge we run into in our contemporary culture is that we try to reverse engineer it. Like, if I just do all the right things, I should be OK. And it can work that way, but it can also make us even more anxious. Like, no matter how much I do, it's not enough. So what I want to observe about Alma here in this sermon is that he's speaking from a converted heart. If I tie it back to what I was saying earlier, I believe he's speaking from a place of like, If I could paraphrase Alma's sermon, like the context of the whole thing he's saying, if you had any idea how much God loves you and how much he wants to claim you for his own, you would not even be able to believe it. It's so much grace. It's so much generosity. So like, could you give me just like a sliver of your attention? Could you open up just a little bit? That's the entire chapter to me. It's actually the changed and converted heart out of which all of the sermon is flowing. That's what hits me.

(32:32-33:20) Jennifer Thomas: I love that because I agree. I think you could read this as Alma leading people saying, OK, you've got to do step A, step B, step C. But in fact, I think what he's saying is, no, there's this expansiveness that I have felt. I have felt this absolutely transformative, redemptive light in my life. But he also recognizes that most of us aren't going to get access to that because we go through this, you know, experience with an angel, which I also want to note was an experience of for both Paul and Alma of just pure horror before it became an experience of light. Right. So he's offering us a pathway to sort of get to this light and get to this peace. But he's saying you can do it without the level of pain I experienced. But I want you to feel the level of joy I experienced.

(33:20-33:23) Thomas McConkie: Yeah, I love how you said that, absolutely.

(33:23-34:43) Patrick Mason: Well, I think that is such a useful way to read it, to recognize that all of these questions are coming out of a heart of grace rather than trying to engineer a life of total perfection, right, of earned grace, which is a contradiction in terms, right? And I do think there is, and of course, anytime you're speaking to an audience, I mean, let's imagine Alma speaking to a few hundred or a thousand or whatever people, whoever's in front of him. Some of those people have already experienced that heart of grace. Others are kind of tough nuts to crack. right? And some of them have put shells around that heart. And he's trying to crack through that. He's trying to get through those layers and layers of calcification that they've put on that. So it's always the difficulty, and you know this as a teacher, any of us know this as a speaker, right? Or when you speak in church or you give a lesson or something like that, the people in the audience are coming at this from different ways. So how do you use the same words the same language to accomplish multiple effects in diverse kinds of people. So I see there might even be different kinds of moves that he's making within the same sermon trying to accomplish some of those things.

(34:44-35:08) Thomas McConkie: I think that's so intuitive and insightful and it brings me right into the scene where as a teacher, you know, I have my like bat sonar going where I say something and like I feel the echolocation like, oh, that was like a really awful dead spot in that room. Like I've completely lost that wing of the room. I got to pivot and say something new. Yeah, I love that read, Patrick. I think that's spot on.

(35:09-36:29) Patrick Mason: I mean, it's interesting to me the context for this sermon. It's right after this terrible bloody battle between the Nephites and the Amalekites, however you pronounce it. I mean, tens of thousands of people are killed in this battle, and Alma's response You know, of course, he's both a political leader and a religious leader. He gives up his political power to go on this preaching tour, and this is the context that he's in. So how do you, as you think about cultivating inner peace, You know, we live in a world in conflict. There are conflicts raging all around us. Some of them, certainly there are violent conflicts around the world. There's plenty of violence, of course, in our own country, in the United States, in different ways. There may be non-lethal or non-violent conflicts, but still very destructive conflicts that people find themselves in, in their homes, in their communities, in their wards, certainly in our politics and so forth. So how do we bridge this conversation about inner peace to a world that is raging in conflict? How do you think about that connection?

(36:29-38:30) Thomas McConkie: Yeah. And again, just a sober pause here, because I don't pretend to understand. how we would reconcile those opposites. But I will say in my own view, in my own experience, it's been very meaningful for me to treat this seeming duality as a unity. In other words, like to whatever extent I feel genuine peace in my heart, that is the world's peace. That is peace that is available in the body of Christ to heal and to redeem. In other words, it's not as though, if I relate this to another kind of polarity that's come up in the call, contemplation and action, or has that come up in the call? Am I just imagining that we've spoken about that already? At any rate, let me say historically, there have been a lot of polemics around contemplation, deep prayer, or action and engagement in the world. And I found it very meaningful to actually treat those as a single occasion. Once again, the contemplative aspect, the peace, the inner peace, is actually resourcing me and providing me the new source of motivation to show up in the world differently. To whatever extent I am in reactivity to the wars in myself and the wars in my home and the wars in the world, what can I do but add more reactivity to the battlefield? Whereas to the extent that I've reclaimed any peace in my own body and heart and family and community, it simultaneously translates as a peaceful response to the world. So I really hold that view, that the inner is the outer, and that that can change the way we orient.

(38:31-40:14) Jennifer Thomas: I will say one of the hallmarks of the ways that we do advocacy at MWAG, which is quite different, is a lot of advocacy organizations treat the people working for them as sort of, they put them at the point of the spear, right? They're the people out there trying to get things done. And one of the things that we've tried really hard to do, and this is grounded in the gospel of Jesus Christ, is this idea that anytime we're asking women to do something, we also have to be building them up and restoring them so that this isn't a process that diminishes them, but it's a process that actually builds them up. And I think the key to that in many cases is this peacemaking, is this both doing this work as a peacemaker, but also doing it from a place of very distinct inner peace. But that is so, you know, it's just hard to obtain. One of the things that I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on is, particularly as a woman, we've got this constant tension and we've got this very, this story that women, Christian women through centuries have loved or hated, which is the story of Mary and Martha, where they come before Christ and One of them is essentially trying to prepare for him and care for all of the people that have come in in his retinue. And the other woman, Mary, is sitting at his feet and learning. And I think it's such a beautiful example of the tension that we might feel, you know, between being doers and between being hearers. And I'm just really interested in your thoughts on that, because we need doers in the world. How can we be doers while also retaining being a hearer, right? How can we balance those two things? Because the hearer is necessary for peace.

(40:15-42:47) Thomas McConkie: Yeah, thank you. Awesome. And actually, as you presence that scene from the Bible, I'm realizing that before we started talking on this podcast, you had mentioned that this was an interesting story, too. And I think that's why I was thinking about the words contemplation and action. And I'm also feeling kind of a a through line in this conversation, a theme that's just shaping up organically. Back to, if I can put it in these terms, this question of motivation. When I read this scripture, this account in the New Testament, I see Mary and Martha as, there are different ways to take this. I'm not saying this is the way to take it, but I see them as the same being, and or two aspects of our own being. The one who is going about busying herself with things that they need to get done. We can't just not do them. And depending on how we read Christ's words, we could say like, oh, is he rebuking Martha for, you know, being so busy? And shouldn't she just sit at the feet of Jesus and take in the word? I don't read it like that. I actually I don't have the language in front of me, but essentially you know, when I read Christ's words saying like, there is one thing that's needful and Mary has found it. And he's saying like, take a page from Mary, be like Mary. But I don't see him, I feel Christ reconciling opposites in that moment, saying like, it's the parallel teaching of like, seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, And after that, all things will be added unto you. Like first, establish yourself in the word, establish yourself in peace and presence and an overflowingness of resource and love for neighbor and for God, and then get super busy. Right. But if you get super busy first, It's a burnout recipe, because you're going to be resentful, and I can't believe all Mary ever does is sit at the feet of Jesus. But if my cup runneth over and then I'm doing the dishes, there's a fragrance to it, like what a joy for me to be engaged in the world in this way. So I see Christ potentially, if we give it this kind of reading, it's a sequencing problem. It's not that Martha's doing the wrong thing, it's that like first really ground yourself in God's abundant love, then get as busy as you can engaging the world.

(42:49-43:51) Jennifer Thomas: I completely agree, and one of the ways that that reading has become very meaningful to me is that I think Christ is also reminding, you know, that Martha is a stand-in for those of us who really want to believe that our problems can be solved temporally, and he's reminding us that the temporal solutions to life's problems can be taken away from you. Like, there is no security and safety in that place. And he's reminding Martha that Mary is grounded in the thing that cannot be taken from her, right? It cannot be extracted from her. It's only that she could give it away. And so I think I agree there's that duality that he's saying, start from the thing that no one can take from you. which done well as a relationship with me and then build out from there. And you can do things, but don't ground your hope and your faith and your, you know, spiritual engagement in things that that can be taken from you, whether it's your prosperity or, you know, the temporal manifestations of your belief.

(43:51-43:55) Thomas McConkie: Right. Right. I love how you phrase that. That really resonates. Absolutely.

(43:56-45:29) Patrick Mason: Well, and you mentioned doing the dishes. One of the texts that I often assign and teach and talk about with my students is a couple of different books by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and teacher. It's great books like Being Peace and Peace is Every Step and lots of different writings. But he talks about this, about the a kind of presence and a kind of mindfulness of being in the moment and actually finding peace in very mundane things, like doing the dishes or driving. He talks, you know, when we're driving is oftentimes the most, one of the most anxiety, you know, ridden things that we do. But he says, what if we can invert that? What if you can transform that into a moment of being peace and finding peace. So it's not just sitting under a tree, but actually there's a kind of peacefulness and a mindfulness that can be done in the tasks that have to get done, the driving, the dishes, the parenting, the meetings, all of those kinds of things. So that to me has been very helpful. So how do you How do you think about that and how do you teach that time? It's sort of finding peace in the midst of activity. So it's not retreat and engage. Sometimes that's going to be the case, right? And we see Jesus retreat and then sometimes engage. But how do we, how do we, how do we seek peace in the midst of engagement?

(45:29-47:49) Thomas McConkie: Yeah, no, you, you hit it right on the head for me, Patrick, um, and named another polarity. We hear about meditation retreats and, you know, modern culture, but we don't talk about like meditation advances where We retreat to advance. If there is such a thing as retreat where, you know, Jesus was like want to search, seek out solitude and, you know, take time in prayer before he would come out and go about his healing and his ministry. I think in a contemplation naive culture, if I may suggest that term, that possibility that we're a little naive to contemplation, we focus almost exclusively on the withdrawal, but we don't often appreciate that if there is a time that's needful to withdraw, it's in order to advance, it's in order to reconnect, with our spiritual source, to resource ourselves and engage even more passionately and fully in life. And to me, this is the essence of Christianity itself, the Christian message, the good news, certainly in part. one interpretation is that God loves the world so deeply that God completely gave of himself by way of the sun to take up a body. In other words, to sacralize all of matter, all of creation. Christianity is a story about the sacredness of matter and its critical role in growing up spirit. And this rhythm of contemplation to withdraw to touch into our Source in order to go even deeper into the Incarnation, to the aching particulars of our personal lives. We need to do that. And if we're not resourced, if we don't take that time to retreat, to withdraw, We might always be advancing, always be doing something, but from a place where it's quite anemic, it's not resourced. It's doing it out of fear that, oh, if I let up on this, you know, it's all over for me, like we pointed out earlier. So I think there's yet again, this pair of opposites that's playing out in a way that can really bring incredible wholeness and vitality to our spiritual lives.

(47:50-49:19) Jennifer Thomas: So years ago, when I was pregnant with my twins, my obstetrician told me that I was not taking my prenatal vitamins. And I promise I'll get somewhere with this story. And she said, you really have to take these. And she said, and I'm going to tell you, she said, mostly we lie to mothers and tell them they have to take them for the baby, because that's how women, we can convince them to take these. She said, the honest truth is, babies are parasites, they're going to take out of you what they need. They said, you have to take these for yourself, right? Because otherwise, at the end of this, you're going to be left to shell. And I think one of just to name another fear that I think people listening might have is this idea that if I So much of this, you know, this idea of retreat is can be seen as a manifestation in our culture of just hyper self care, hyper self indulgence. And I love the way that you frame this for our listeners and remind them that this is that life will suck out of you everything, and then you are not capable of giving more, right? And so I love framing this idea of stillness and doing the deep work of gaining inner peace as a step that you can take to be more Christ-like, to be more able to sacrifice, to be more able to give and follow His redemptive path. You know, that without it, we're actually become unable to do the work.

(49:21-49:54) Thomas McConkie: I'm really struck by that metaphor, but in a way it doesn't even feel like a metaphor to me, Jennifer, like the mother's giving of herself, her vital nutrients to the child. And I think my impression in the moment is that in a literal way, you know, we're all mothers to the world in that sense. Like the world needs every bit of goodness we can muster in ourselves. And that's such a vital parenting role we all play. So I'm just, I'm so touched by that framing. Thank you.

(49:55-50:06) Jennifer Thomas: Yeah, and just reminding ourselves we don't need to be left to shell by that, right? We just need to do the work to ensure that that we stay resilient and strong and able to continue to do that.

(50:07-51:18) Patrick Mason: Yeah, I mean, because there can be a certain aspect of the activist mentality. And I don't just mean that the kind of political activists could be the religious activists that, you know, that the activist and in each of us, that contemplation and searching for inner peace and these things that these are luxuries. that the world is suffering, and there's no time for me to do this. And the fact is, there is suffering in the world. It's all around us. There are people suffering in our immediate context. There are people suffering all around the world. But what I'm hearing here is the message is that we should be attuned to that. We're called to be attuned to that suffering, but we will be better at serving and giving what the world needs from us. if we're not empty shells, as Jennifer said. If we have restored ourselves, if there's a constant restorative aspect to this, so that we can also be giving. Is that what I'm hearing from you? Does that sound about right?

(51:19-52:52) Thomas McConkie: You're asking me? I'm keeping off Jennifer here. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm just following Jennifer's lead on this. But yes, absolutely. That's that's exactly what I'm pointing to. And if I if I could up the ante a little bit as you're speaking, Patrick, I'm reminded of a of a teacher who has really, you know, left an impression on me or had an influence in my life. He talks about the phenomenon of collective trauma. trauma that we share as humanity, that like it's difficult to have a body, it's difficult to come to this earth and try to make sense of our lives with all of the suffering, all of the agony, and ecstasy and joy as well. But trauma, you know, we could define it as this like sense of overwhelm, like in a given moment, we don't feel adequate or resourced to respond to the awesome demands of life. And he points out that one of the hallmarks of trauma is this feeling which becomes a belief that there's not enough time. I don't have enough space. I don't have what it would take to respond to this situation. So by upping the ante, I want to say like that voice that we all hear that like, I don't have time to sit still. I don't have time to do nothing. What if that's actually a manifestation of some of our deepest wounding as humans, this belief that we don't have enough time or space? What if we have all of the time and space and God's infinite love to resource ourselves to do something real in this moment? So just to flip that on its head.

(52:52-53:29) Jennifer Thomas: And I would even add that in addition to trauma, that could be an adversarial voice that is trying to keep us from a close engagement with Christ. Because, you know, again, in this Mary and Martha story, he's saying to them, Build first on what nobody can take from you. And that voice is asking us constantly to build on the things that are temporal and temporary. And so ignoring that voice and saying, no, no, I've got to go to the place, to the resource, to the relationship with Christ that will endure all of the torments that this world will throw at me, we're then in a better place, I think, to move forward.

(53:30-53:48) Thomas McConkie: I love it. Two of the three of us on this call are calling in from Massachusetts, and I'm thinking of our transcendental father, Henry David Thoreau. He said it so simply that I have no time to be in a hurry. And sometimes the simplest way is the best way. There's real wisdom there.

(53:48-54:17) Jennifer Thomas: We just want to thank you for your insights. They've been remarkable. Mostly, I have to tell you, Thomas, I appreciate you just slowing me down. Just even having this conversation with you, you've embodied this slowness that I need. And I hope that our listeners feel that. I have felt my heart rate going down. I have felt myself saying, OK, this is good. I can do this. So thank you.

(54:17-54:25) Thomas McConkie: Cool. Well, just to be clear, just to go on the record, that is not virtue. That's a lot of disposition. I've always been slow.

(54:26-55:37) Patrick Mason: Well, I will say on this, I mean, I was talking with this student recently and he was, you know, he's a new freshman, worried about college life, a high achieving kid, right? How do I do all the things, right? And how do I speak in class? And sometimes I'm not always ready, right? So there were a lot of monkeys going around in his mind. And I said, you know, we live in a microwave culture and there's nothing wrong with microwave dinners, right? Sometimes we need them, I eat them, we serve them, right? And some of them are all right. But there's something to be said for a slow cooker meal as well, right? And there's the kind of slow eating movement and all these kinds of things. But again, there's nothing evil about a microwave, but if that's the mode that you're in all the time, That's maybe not healthy. Maybe it's time to cook a little bit differently, to get our nutrition a little bit differently. So maybe that's what we're trying to offer here is maybe bringing a little more slow cooking to Jen's microwave.

(55:37-55:43) Thomas McConkie: Patrick, this is a modern day Buddhist sermon. I'm going to steal your metaphor, but I will cite you.

(55:45-56:30) Jennifer Thomas: It's actually really good for me because that will be a very visceral thing. I don't want a microwave life. It's a good way for me to benchmark. I know I don't want that. But as we close, I would love to ask you a question and maybe ask it in a little bit of a different way than we've asked our guests in the past. We always close by asking where you personally seek and find peace. But I'm wondering if you could include in that for listeners who are sort of just generally just gently testing the waters of trying to find inner peace through a slower meditative spiritual engagement. If you could help us understand maybe just some of the logistics of that, give them some early baby steps that they could take that worked for you to help you start to find peace in this way.

(56:31-01:01:10) Thomas McConkie: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'd love to do that. One thought comes up prior to responding to you directly, Jennifer, as I hear my four-year-old in the background still, but he's not about to break in, so we'll have a few more minutes of peace. There's relative peace, and there's what I might call absolute peace, the peace that passeth understanding. Like you said, Jennifer, the peace that cannot be taken away from us. At a relative level, I seek peace by getting out the tablet and putting on an episode of Bluey for my four-year-old so I can just like take a breath and chill out like I'm drowning. Thank God for Bluey. Yeah. And like you said, Patrick, the tablet and the Bluey and hopefully wholesome programming, that's the equivalent to microwave food. Well, Bluey is better than microwave food. Trader Joe's microwave food. You know there's relative peace and there are moments where like if we've had a really hard day like to just like you know turn on some k-drama on Netflix or whatever our guilty pleasure like to just give ourselves some grace and it's okay but if all we ever do is go for the superficial relative peace like I'm just trying to um self-soothe self-soothe, exactly, then that's not long-term sustainable. I believe the soul really yearns for the absolute peace. It cries out for it. And that peace is more than willing to receive us. So I think that gets more to your invitation here. I find tremendous peace. I'll offer a bit of a visual here that comes from a theologian, a writer, a scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. who was a Jesuit priest who lived halfway into the 20th century. But he had a really unique way of thinking about Christ and writing about Christ. And as a scientist, he wanted to make sense of like, who is Christ and what is this phenomenon? And he imagined it as, he called it the Omega Point. And he actually very, in an unusual way, referred to Christ as, one of the names he gave Christ was Christ Omega. And we we don't hear that terminology in Latter-day Saint theology, but I find it quite lovely, this Christ Omega. I mean, Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, but the Omega, it's conceived as this energetic node, like a like a North Pole. And the energy is love itself. It's divine love. And that divine love is working on all of us right now, just like a magnet needle points north, Christ's love is this omega point and it's drawing on us. And when I pause, and here's the pointing out, just the one, two baby steps that are actually gigantic steps in some ways, it's everything. But to notice that throughout the day we tend to really get in our heads, got a lot of energy, a lot of blood flow up here. And to like take a pause and like, it's as if we're like taking an elevator two stories down and just really feeling our awareness and presence in the heart. And at this point, you know, the heart, we can think of it almost like this antenna or this sensitive instrument that just immediately picks up this signal of Christ's love, this energy, that's this Omega point that's exalting us and drawing us all up into him. If I let go of any thoughts about that, but like really just feel that buoyancy, that exalting divine love working on me, even now, in the same way, like, you know, if we're bouncing around and holding a compass and like trying to find our way to a trail or out of the woods, like the compass needle can't stay put. But if we just slow down for a moment and let that compass needle, it just knows where north is. And I know in my heart that there's just something so awesome that's just working on me and all of us. And I have deep trust in that. And I find absolute, boundless peace in that, knowing in my heart that that's true.

(01:01:10-01:01:12) Patrick Mason: That's gorgeous. Thank you very much.

(01:01:12-01:01:13) Jennifer Thomas: Thank you.

(01:01:13-01:01:15) Thomas McConkie: Yeah. Thank you.

(01:01:18-01:01:42) Patrick Mason: Thanks, everybody, for listening today. We really appreciate it. We just want to invite you to subscribe to the podcast and also to rate and review it. We love hearing feedback from listeners, so please email us at podcast at mweg.org. We also want to invite you to think about ways that you can make peace in your life this week. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

(01:01:42-01:01:58) Jennifer Thomas: Thank you for listening to Proclaim Peace, a proud member of the Faith Matters Podcast Network. Faith Matters holds expansive conversations about the restored gospel to accompany individuals on their journey of faith. You can learn more about Faith Matters and check out our other shows at faithmatters.org.