Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.

Barrett 0:00

Your soul child is your essence. That essence is the part of you that is incorruptible, the part of you that's made in the divine image of God. It makes me think of so many different Scripture passages. So we're in the middle of a Psalm series right now, so I can't help but think of the Psalm 42. It's a very interesting Psalm that says, as the dear pants for streams of water so my soul pants for you, O Lord.

The Psalm speak to this nature, that we all have a soul that connects to God in a spiritual way that either the physical world can't, or our mind can't. Jesus talks about this as the greatest commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart and your soul and your mind and your strength. What we were doing in this Vacation Bible School is singling out the idea that you're so is embedded deep within you. It is at the core level of every single person from all across the globe.

Seth Intro 1:15

Welcome back to the Can I Say This At Church podcast. I'm Seth, your host. I am excited that you're here. I'm so thankful that you decided to download and listen to the episode. Before we get started, please email me your thoughts on any of the episodes that you've ever heard. And if this is your first one, welcome to the show. I really do want your feedback. That email address is CanISayThisAtchurch@gmail.com. Please remember to rate and review the show on iTunes. on Apple podcasts on Google Play. Spotify, SoundCloud wherever you happen to be listening, please rate and review the show. It really does help tremendous thank you to the support of our patrons. The blessed few of you that continue to drive the engine of this show. If you were listening, you felt at all mood in any of the prior episodes. I don't even know what number I'm on anymore half the time. please consider donating as little as $1 to the furthering of this show. I am appreciative.

I would extend to thank you in advance today is more personal for me than many of the episodes. I have become acquaintances and friends with many of the people that I've interviewed on the show. However, today's interview is with someone that I am a physical, personal, weekly, interactional friendship with. So I was able to speak with my own pastor from my church at First Baptist here in Waynesboro, we talked about when we're born, that there is an essence that is me. That the Seth that exists right now is not the same Seth that was birthed, and was created in this universe; and that each and every interaction that I have or anything that causes me joy or pain or anger, or grief, or strife, I begin to build a shell around myself to protect me from being hurt again the next time. That act changes who we are and part of the process of reconnecting in a very deep way with who we are called to be, is unraveling that. So Barrett Owen, and and I sat down and we discussed that a bit. I very much enjoyed this conversation. Here we go.

Seth 3:49

Barrett, my pastor, so excited to have you on the Can I Say This At Church podcast. I know you and I have discussed doing this for I don't know the better part of the year I haven't been doing the show for a year. But as long as I've been doing the show, I've been talking about trying to do this. And so I'm glad that we're finally in the middle of the year making it happen. But thank you for coming on.

Barrett 4:11

Oh, you're welcome. Seth, I love this podcast. I love the energy behind it. I love all of the conversations that you're having. So it is an honor to be here.

Seth 4:19

You want extra tithe money. I see how this is going.

Barrett 4:23

I do need that, I do.

Seth 4:25

(laughter) As I said earlier, so you're my pastor at my church, and everyone else that listens to this show has heard me reference you in a bad sentence that I tried to say that you say about unasked questions and bad answers. And that it's okay to say those. And so, for those listening, kind of tell us a bit about yourself. What would you want people to know that way they when they hear me say that again will kind of know the man behind that madness?

Barrett 4:55

Oh, sure. Well, I grew up as a preacher's kid. Who grew up as a preacher's kids, I'm a third generation Baptist pastor. And I like to think that my calling was my own, but I'm sure I had some influence of watching my granddad and father do it and my brother is also a Baptist minister.

So it runs in the family, for sure. I love the church, grew up in the church. Definitely have process and wounds that I had experienced because of the church. But I never have allowed that to be a universal pain that was always just a localized contextual angst that I have seen within either the church in the west or my own church growing up, or racism in church, different things have caused the church to be a problem. But I have always had this underlying hope that the church is still a necessary presence in the world. And so I followed that call to college and became a Christian Leadership major, started interning at Baptist churches, fell in love with it, became a minister, when I was a senior in college started preaching summer camps during the summer and fell in love with preaching. Gell in love with the stories of the gospel, fell in love with the historical critical method, I was fortunate to go to a very, a very progressive in the sense of biblical education, college that introduced me to historical critical method. Introduced me to how to think critically about paradoxical thoughts and ideas, Christian doctrine, and then also to apply a parallel spiritual road that allowed me to think about my own spirituality in the midst of this new conversation of Biblical studies and theological discourse.

That propelled me into seminary and I have never stopped loving the church. It is the best expression of the Kingdom of God on earth when healthy. And so I have found a great sense of joy to be involved in the local church and to participate in offering other people glimpses of that joy.

Seth 7:15

What is the history…what did you call it? The historical Biblical…

Barrett 7:17

The historical critical method?

Seth 7:20

What is that?

Barrett 7:23

That is taking science, reason, literary structures and literary study resources, and applying them to the Biblical text. It is a catch all title that scholars use to help frame conversations like if you're doing a social scientific study of Scripture, if you're doing a form criticism, study of Scripture or a canonical approach to studying Scripture. Each of those are different ways of approaching the Biblical text and they have since fit under this framework of a phrase that scholars use called the historical critical method, you use history and criticisms and apply it to your Biblical Studies.

Seth 8:07

And the opposite of that would be, quote unquote, what I would call it a flat reading of the Bible of this is what it says! Absolutely, six days has always meant six days.

Barrett 8:18

Right? Even though the idea of what we understand to be a day didn't start till day four. So what was the first three days? You know, those type of questions are in the Hebrew Bible, there's no, you know, definite article, so it could be read in a beginning, or what does that mean? You know, so it's a, it just sends you down these roads of questions that you use criticisms and very structured, intellectual criticisms that help you make sense of Scripture.

Seth 8:44

Yeah, I like that. Oddly enough, I hadn't planned on saying that but on the way up, I was listening to a different Hebrew scholar and talk about just on the way up, I say that on the way up, so I just came back for those listening from vacation and so on the way back while everyone was asleep, If I was, as the nerd that I am, I was listening to Hebrew theology. And and the man was talking about how Amos when they're talking about Edom, and the prophetic words to Israel as it relates to Edom, that the Hebrew texts for Adam are the same letters for Adam or Adam. And so when Paul is talking about those later in Acts, and in Galatians, and in Ephesians, he's talking about you know, you can take the words from Amos and then say that you know, what the reconciliation and the grace and the hope and all the different prophetic talking in Amos, instead of just Edom also works for Adam. And I hear that when when when you say, you know, context and cultural in the history…

Barrett 9:50

Well, you're doing the historical critical method right there. You're taking word studies you're looking at root words, comparing them to other forms of root words in other locations of Scripture and and just asking the question, “What do we do with this?”

Does it matter that it exists? That this new thing that I now know exists? And does it change the way that I read the Bible?

Seth 10:07

It does, but it usually makes it harder and prettier at the same time. So

Barrett 10:14

Oh, absolutely!

Seth 10:15

Yeah, about a year ago, last summer. So during our vacation Bible school, we did an adult version of Bible School, which I like, cuz I'd never done it before. And we talked about a lot of things in that and one of the things that we talked about was, there's a nice diagram and for those listening, I will link that in the show notes, but you probably do want to hit pause, go and at least get it printed out, hand draw it if you want. It's not a hard diagram, but basically, that there's a center line, and in that center line is me. And then I can either go to the north of that line or to the south of that line, but either way, I'm going to go one way or another. And I'm saying all that poorly. So talk to me a bit about what that means if I can fall upward. What that center line represents and kind of that idea around that.

Barrett 11:05

Full disclosure. The larger conversation we were attempting to have was we were, we were making a very theological claim, Vacation Bible School, that every human being has a soul. Which seems silly at first to say that that, of course, every everybody has a soul. But we even took it a step further and to make the theological claim that every single person in the world was born with what some scholars call a “soul child”. That you have an inner being, that is pure essence.

It is the part of you that is made from the same material as the stars. It's the part of you that God intended to be in this world. It is the full reflection of the Divine and it is in everyone. So I'll pause there and say, that's a big claim. And essentially, what we're arguing is that every human being, because of their soul, or their soul child, they are made in the image of God, the Imago Dei—they matter. They are made of divine matter, they are an extension of God's presence in the world.

As Christians, we say we are little Christ. And that plays exactly into what we're saying here that we are an extension of the Divine, or at least from birth. We were made from that same substance of the Divine. That fits really well into Adam and Eve, the story of obviously, the first two humans to walk the earth and that they were made in the image of God. That they were breathed out of the dust that God created and so we're making that claim that every single human being matters. Now, that is the line that you were talking about, the horizontal line. It represents your soul or your soul child. And if you were to live a perfect, sin free life, or at least a pain free life, you would just ride out that timeline until your death.

And so if you can develop good practices, if you can develop a spirituality of faith that gives you the tools, it is possible to return and to connect with that soul that is assuming you have disconnected from it. So that is where you are saying that you can either go above or below the line.

Seth 15:09

You said a minute ago that you could stay in the center of the line if you could somehow you know live a perfect life. Which I can't…just not gonna happen or avoid pain. Why does that matter? Why should pain play into this?

Barrett 15:26

Yeah, I your soul is…it does not wrestle. It connects with God. It is very delicate. It needs to be protected. And when you first introduce pain into your life, all of a sudden your soul becomes exposed. You feel like you need to protect it. And pain is one of those…it is…I have to figure out how to say that right it is one of the quintessential moments of our life, in which we introduce the ego. And so playing off like people like Richard Rohr, playing off people like Henry Nouwen, really integrated spiritualists, that speak through things like the enneagram. They would argue that every single person has an ego.

It is that outer shell that we build that is not made out of divine matter. It is not made from the image of God. It is made out of the self. We build it. It's not from God, it's human made, but we build it to protect into encase the fragility of our soul, because we feel like we have to. And so that ego is birthed out of pain. So, I'll give you a really quick, funny, kind of funny story, but my very first memory in the world. I am two years old, and I am apparently sleeping in a twin size bed. I don't know what my parents were thinking. But I'm already transitioned to a twin sized bed because the nature of our house and our how many kids we had sharing room with my brother who was three.

So I'm two years old. My very first memory is one of just extreme pain. I wake up in the middle of the night and cannot go back to sleep. Because I cannot forgive my parents or cannot understand why my brother gets to sleep in the soft bed and I have to sleep on a hard mattress. It is uncomfortable! And I felt wronged for that. I had memories of this I have intense memories of feeling. I'm not getting what my brothers getting and it is painful. That is the earliest memory I have.

I bet if you ask any single person, ask yourself, your wife, your kids, what their first memory is, I've done this 100 times, nine out of 10 of them will tell you a story of pain. Why? Pain is memorable. Pain, it hurts. Pain exposes our weaknesses. And so we try to cover them up. And so that's a funny story. But it gets a lot worse when you start dealing with significant traumas in your life. You start in encapsulating your soul with a very thick callous layer that Freud or anybody would call your ego.

Seth 18:42

Well, if I think back as you say that and, and I've given this a lot of thought since last summer, I have four or five first memories and they're all hurtful, not emotionally hurtful. They're all physically hurtful, like I didn't feel wronged.

Barrett 18:55

Yeah, and so I mean, so the argument here is pain introduces you to the damage that life can bring. It's is the eating of the fruit by Adam and Eve it is noticing that sin exists or that the world carries evil. It is the wrestling of death or divorce or trauma or abuse in some way. And you're left with figuring out with “Who am I, I thought I was this precious soul child that was connected to God, but apparently, pain exists and it can infiltrate my soul and it hurts”. So you cover it up, you try to protect it.

Seth 19:38

If I build a husk around my, my essence, two questions on that is, how can that not be sinful because I'm building it. And from that young of an age, I don't know that you have enough wisdom to build a good show. If you're thinking about foundationally, a two year old or four year old or a five year old just can't have the knowledge required to make something I think lasting and good? And then secondly, how can I trust that then if if I know that the five year old version of myself was probably intelligent, but not very smart, and I think that's a good, a good distinction?

Barrett 20:14

Yeah. I mean, I think that's it's great. I mean, those are those are very, those are very logical questions that a two year olds not going to ask. But ego fixation is the sin, that you become so preoccupied with making sure you protect that outer shell, that you just start investing in a false image of who you are. I mean, it's the parable of the prodigal son, you just take what's yours, you leave you form your own identity, and all he's doing out in the world is just encapsulating that soul. He's too fearful to go home. He's too fearful to be a part of what his soul child longs for to be reconnected with his dad. So he builds an ego stays fixed on it until it just all destroys. That fixation is the sin.

Ego is not a sin, ego is is the human condition. It is the natural response to being in pain. I mean, it's no different than an animal who fears pain and runs away. I mean, it just, it is a mechanism that we all apply in order to try to protect ourselves in the world. Because we think our soul needs to be or we're not trained to connect with what our essence really is. So we think we have to build an ego because the world is too scary otherwise.i

Seth 21:48

Is it necessary because I hear that and think I should do everything in my power, as a human, to protect my children from all pain. Is it now necessary that I shouldn't do that because a: disclosure I'm not gonna do that. I'm pretty, pretty terse with my kids. You've seen that. But I feel like some hearing that will hear Okay, so if pain is the problem and pain is what builds that shell that can be a bad interpretation of us. Should I not? Am I not called in to protect my dependents from that?

Barrett 22:20

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. I mean, you know, these metaphors to break down some points. But I think what I would say to what I hear you saying is like, not kid is I'm gonna watch him experience pain, what role do I have and to help protect him from that? And is that not also creating some sort of fail or ego around his soul child? And yeah, I mean, it is it ego is not the sin. I can't stress that enough. Like we have to live in the world, just like we have skin over our bones like there is going to be a layer that emerges that protects us or keeps confined in this world. I think we develop that at a subconscious certain level early in childhood.

I mean, any sort of adolescence studies, I mean, you're gonna, you're going to bump into this by the time kids turn seven to nine years old, they start wearing their hair the same, they start dressing alike because they finally have arrived at an emotional and mental space where they start seeing themselves as the world sees them. Previous to that, they just don't have the ability to see themselves as the world sees them. So it's not their fault that they're building an ego, but they're doing it subconsciously or unconsciously. Because pain still exists, because three year olds still know what it's like to be told. No, you can't play on my phone or you can't play Nintendo we and all of a sudden, you're the worst parent ever. Absolutely.

Seth 23:49

I'm a bully. So getting back to the charts and which paths is the good one?

Barrett 23:57

And so your question is which path should you take?

Seth 24:02

Well…which one's better? Is there one that's inherently good? Should I care?

Barrett 24:06

Yes, so for people listening it. The way that diagram is drawn is that as soon as you are traveling along your, your kind of x axis, your horizontal line, you experience a bout of pain. It's so intense that you have to develop an ego and that ego distances you from the soul child, it becomes a new horizontal line, a new alternative way of living, that protects you from that initial burst of pain. And so, you just take a like worst case scenario, that child loses a parent, either to divorce or death and creates a callus around who they are they become a different entity in the world because of this pain. And so they're left to figure out what is life look like they're never going to forget that pain, but they will move forward in life, trying to figure out, how can I protect myself from experiencing it again. So the way that that drawing is-you have two options. You go north, where you go south, the South is the path of the oppressed. And that's typically a feminine approach. And I'll explain that in a minute. Or you go north, and that's the path of the privileged. And that is typically seen as a more masculine approach. So you tell me which way you want to go?

Seth 25:39

Let's go feminine because I always talk to the male aspect being that I am one.

Barrett 25:44

Yeah. And so I mean, you see this quite a bit in women, but it definitely manifests itself in men as well. It's not a male female thing. The path oppression is that when someone experiences a jolt in life or a painful moment that is so increasingly difficult that they fixate on the ego, they move further away from their soul child, and they fixate on a new identity. And this identity could be something like the obedient wife. It could be someone who just doesn't have an opinion and chooses to live, however submissive that they need to live, to suppress all of their gut instincts and just be the obedient, dutiful wife.

What that does, is it creates a safe way of living that is not intended to be the way God wanted you to live. But it's safe, and it avoids the pain of whatever you experienced. But it is a human created way of living, it is distancing yourself from your essence. And it's really sad.

You know, I've heard Richard Rohr actually, Parker Palmer, I've read in Let Your Life Speak. He makes a quote that says

it is possible to live a life other than your own.

And that is a very depressing thought that you could live out the time you have on this earth, you could live it out, and you could live a life that was not intended for you to live. And I would argue with this image is that pain forces that on you, because you your essence gets damaged, and you become a new ego fixation, and you forget who you originally were born to be. And so you become a persona like the obedient housewife or subservient employee. Someone who just takes it on the chin every time who just always is number two, and just give up their self interest for the interest of the group to a point where it destroys their soul. That way of being is tragic. But it happens all the time.

Seth 28:17

So that sounds a lot like, hopefully what the SBC will not be any more under JD Greer. But will who knows that that sounds a lot like that. And it also sounds a lot like the way our economy is driven, that you're married to your family or to your spouse and you're a family man or family woman. But the expectation is that if your boss calls you come to work, just drop everything and you come to work. You bend the knee to the paycheck.

Barrett 28:44

Yeah, what I would say is, as your ego would say, of course you do. Yes. That's the way you have to live to sustain some level of stability or some level of pain free living. Because the goal of the ego is to not experience pain. Even if you have to build a false idol, even if you have to create a God in your own image, and hide behind that image forever and always, it least keeps you from experiencing pain. And pain is the destroyer of, of our being connected to that soul child.

Seth 29:20

If the feminine is taking on the pain, learning how to deal with it, and learning how to just put on a happy face, and just, you know, keep calm and carry on what is the masculine version of that? Or is it not necessarily a version? Is it just different altogether?

Barrett 29:34

Yeah, no, well, it's…I think I think every single person goes path of the oppressed or the path of the privilege depending on the type of pain or the context that you're in.

So let's say that you're traveling down your soul child you experience an unhealthy amount of pain to the point where you have to feel like your ego needs to fixate on it, cover it up, and you take on the form of the path of the privileged. These are your ego testicle narcissists, that instead of feeling oppressed, they feel enraged, they feel empowered, they feel that they can create a whole new system that avoids the pain that they were led into. And then they somehow convince others of it. And they are lifted up because of this ego fixation. And so there's there's a zillion examples. But does that make sense the difference between the two? it does, but

Seth 30:38

It does but…

Barrett 30:38

You’re talking about the response to the pain, you either you either fold, or you balloon and you become a narcissist.

Seth 30:49

Maybe this is maybe this is because that path speaks more to me but it seems like a person that goes that way be either male or female, can abuse that narcissism and I assume that person has to be charismatic because the other person is meak and then I can they abuse that position of power to make the other person even more subservient?

Barrett 31:08

Yeah, and their abuse takes on so many forms. I mean, you can just be verbal abuse, physical abuse and their their narcissism can can lead to very unhealthy relationships and unhealthy systems and patterns and family dynamics and it can take on different personas of alcoholism or, or sexism or men, there's just a million different, just different anxieties that can be produced because of it.

But here's where I think this kind of research that I'm talking about is so fascinating is that both paths are born out of woundedness. Narcissists at the core of who they are, are wounded because of a pain in their life that separated them from the person they were meant to be. And they are lashing out at the world forcing us to live by rules that we were never intended to live back, but so are the path of the oppressed. They also are living out of their woundedness. But instead of fighting back and creating a false sense of self, they just fold and they become a shadow of themselves.

Seth 33:00

If pain is what causes the formation of an ego, and I agree with you, I think it does. So when I say if I just I'm trying to collect my thoughts, that's, that's my ‘um’ for the evening. So when that happens, so it's been my experience and I would like to hope that some portion of my life I've begun to shed whatever bad versions of myself existed 10 years ago or 20 years ago. I find that the moment that something changes in your mind and you can't see things the way you used to that that is painful because you the basement falls out. So how then does that not want to say it right, how does that not further exacerbate the problem? I feel like when the basement falls out, I can get worse. And I'm not 100% certain that I can fall closer to center.

Barrett 33:53

Yeah, here's the, and what I think is helpful about this research in this image, is every single time you expect serious pain, you move further, either south or further north, from that x axis and you become an even smaller version of your essence. And you form a new identity. But here's the thing about ego. It's not God made it is man or human made and we intend it to be a false idol. Because we are trying to mask where are we are in this world so we can protect whatever view of ourselves we're trying to protect or woundedness that we have. But every time we experience pain, we move another click further away from that x axis. And if you experience enough pain, or enough recreating of this self and your own image, you can get so far gone that you don't even know where your essence is.

You are so gone to sin that you could never get back yourself. It makes me love the Scripture passages of Jesus who leaves the 99 and goes out and finds that one sheep and brings them back to the fold. When we are so far, fixated on our ego, we become that lost sheep, we can never return on our own. We need Jesus, we need a shepherd to come and find us and bring us back. And so it does not matter how far gone you get from your soul child. You're never too far gone for you to experience the grace of Jesus. Jesus can find you no matter how far you've gone, but you can't find you eventually you lose sight of who you really were. You become something you no one wanted you to be people who I mean, just think pedophiles or child abusers or you think of parents who gave too little too late to mid they are living out of this narcissism or this oppressiveness that is forcing them to live a life that is not their own. And it's sad. Now Jesus can save them. That's, that's the Christian claim, Jesus can come find you. But you're so far gone, you're not going to be able to redeem yourself.

Seth 36:28

I had a conversation recently via email with a listener. And they asked me when deconstructing any worldview, but faith is what we were talking about, but anything and when it was enough, I said, well, eventually you have to stop or you're going to make it where you you can't have faith and hardly anything like you have you have to stop. And so I hear that same caution here that eventually you just got to give it up and have some faith in the redemption, grace, of Christ. Is there is there a culture that does it better that inherently has less ego?

Barrett 37:04

Oh, I hope that because we here we are quite egotistical in America and in the West, so I would, I would maybe a different time period had it better. Maybe I mean, I'm just not a world traveler enough to know. But I would, I would assume this is the human condition that add that makes a lot of sense to me that every culture across the globe struggles with ego fixation. Yhat they mask their woundedness and that masking becomes human may distances themselves from their soul child and that causes them to distance their relationship with the divine.

Seth 37:42

You and I have discussed the enneagram in the past, and you referenced it at the beginning, and I am begrudgingly learning that I think that they're more than more than enough portions of it that are true that it it. Here's the thing, Barrett it pisses me off because I read it and I don't like labels. When they're pointed at me.

Barrett 38:03

Yep, and it's spot on man, you are a 5! (I’d like to note that Barrett saw this way before I did…like years before)

Seth 38:05

I'm sometimes a five apparently and eight, five and a two. When I talked about this with Suzanne Stabile, and she's like, well, and she rattled it off and I was like, I don't, I don't, you don't know me well enough to be talking about me like you do, and I don't appreciate you. So which so if we think about those that have engaged in the enneagram and that is a lot of people today because it's become in en vogue, which I would caution people, as Suzanne does it, it's not a parlor trick if you're going to do it, do it, do it.

Barrett 38:36

Right. And I shouldn't have said you are a five you should never label someone.

Seth 38:39

I'm happy to be a five because yeah, I think I'm a five when I get stressed. Is that number my soul child if to get very simple, or is that my ego?

Barrett 38:50

Yeah, that's a great…that is a…that's the million dollar question. And so I will full disclosure, I'm a part of a cohort with the Institute For Conscious Being where we are taking the enneagram and studying it in depth and applying it to spirituality. I think the enneagram is inherently spiritual, but you don't have to use it that way. It can just be a fun tool personality tool for group dynamics or staffing and that's fine if you use it for that, but I think there's so many layers to it. I think that enneagram introduces you to levels of consciousness that that's when it becomes spiritual, that you can be a disintegrated number and that's very egotistical.

I'm a three and when I am disintegrated with who I am, I'm still a three but I'm acting out of my threeness with very manipulative behaviors. And so the root sin of three. Well, there's a lot of them mainly, we will see just deceit. But we will lie, cheat, and steal to control the narrative. We are the kind of leaders, the CEO types. And if lying keeps the narrative consistent to what it should be in our mind, then we have no qualms about it; we’ll just lie. So that is a very disintegrated three.

Now I could be an integrated three. And when I'm integrated, that is a different level of consciousness. And I'm experiencing the grace of vision and hope and eyes to see something beyond themselves. And when I'm living integrated, and so that's why I never want to say that your number is the ego. But I do believe this and all the research that I've done. I think your essence is the fluidity of being able to move in and out of the enneagram I think the most brilliant part of the anagram. It's built on a circle. There's no beginning there's no end. It just keeps flowing. It is a spiraled like spiral dynamics.

It is just intended for you to keep moving through the spectrum of life, and engaging the different aspects of what life can bring. There are different holy ideas that are connected with different numbers. And so I think a fully integrated person, or someone who's living out of their soul child to connect these ideas, is living out of all nine of the enneagram types. Your number is the entry point. But it doesn't mean I mean, an integrated person would say, I think I'm a father two and an eight, a disintegrated person would say I'm a five and I'm nothing else. But the fact that you've been said that you are an eight and a two shows that you're willing to take on the giftedness and what other entry points offer.

Seth 41:40

Well, I don't know that I'm willing to say that I am. I am begrudgingly admitting it appears that I am.

Barrett 41:47

Yeah, it’s the level of consciousness that separates that from me. So it's not just linear that it is vertical too.

Seth 41:56

Yeah. So the reason I asked that is I was going to follow it up and I don't think it makes sense anymore. I was going to see the soul child is zero, before anything has been impacted, but it doesn't know it that's maybe it is I don't know,

Barrett 42:11

If you follow, if you really get into enneagram studies and you follow your research and you've already you follow the research and and you start really buying into the idea of the triads and arrows and what you know if you're a gut or heart or head triad, and then you start paying attention to where you integrate and disintegrate to with the arrows. Anytime you see a picture of the enneagram there's always lines like a triangle in the middle and then there's a five line star like thing.

And so it it's moving you on a path. I've had someone tell me this and I think this is fascinating that I'm a three and so when I am when I'm integrated down, move to a six and become a loyalist. And I really am loyal to the system, I'm loyal to the people in the system. And so my, my leadership then takes on a new form of identity and I find strength in numbers. I find strength in, in the church, it’s why I love the church so much from the very beginning. Not because I want to necessarily lead it. Now my ego wants to lead the church, for the best parts of me, the integrated parts of me wants to participate with others in the kingdom of God. And that to me is the local church that move wherever you think your number is, what you would integrate towards is your soul child number.

So I would be a six. My soul child wanted to be a six, pain came to me in the world so I had to move to three to protect myself. Does that make sense?

Seth 43:53

Yeah it does.

Barrett 43:56

I have to be the CEO or the pastor because if I were anything else, pain would still exist. I can trolled the pain with the role that I play in my number.

Seth 44:07

Oddly enough, that makes me think so I asked a 90 year old a couple years ago, on his 60th wedding anniversary, it was the month of that. And I asked him at my desk, I said, How do you stay married that long? He said, First off, I just don't argue anymore. It's not worth it. But he said, secondly, it's realizing that the first thing she says isn't true. The second thing that she says is what she actually wants and needs.

Barrett 44:25

Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah, it's a great connection.

Seth 44:28

Last question, but for people that are willing to wrestle with shedding the worst parts of themselves. How do I know when I've come to a place that I'm close to being where I need to be.

Barrett 44:42

Yeah, to be…this is going to sound paradoxical or maybe oxymoronic. That you know, you were doing it when you start reliving the pain that you tried to mask in the past.

Seth 45:01

I don’t like this…

Barrett 45:03

I know.

So let me explain. If you use the image, this makes sense that towards the end of the of the x axis towards the end of your life, the way that it's drawn is that you can return to your soul child. Here's the problem. If you're going to do that hard work of returning towards your soul child, you're going to be the prodigal son who comes home. You have to face the pain of what you became when you decided to leave home.

So the son has to, he has to, he has to walk the that shameful road home and he has to stare at his father who he abused and left and betrayed. He has to face the betrayal to get to the redemption. The same is true for us. If you're going to return to your soul child you have to return through the pain of each of those levels. I mean think about grief. I mean, if someone suppresses all of their anxiety or all of their fear, and then if you're going to be redeemed from that, you're going to have to face your fears.

I mean, this is no different than what you see in movies when heroes have to overcome some, some cosmic battle. And it has they have to do some sort of inner work in order to accomplish something or discover something about themselves that propels them to move beyond whatever the the evil forces that they're trying to overcome. I mean, movies depict this beautifully, but the reality is, if you want to return to your soul, child, you've got to re-enter those points of pain, work through them, realize they don't control you. Seek healing from them, or repent of them if they're sinful, and you will begin moving back towards your soul child. It gets easier as you go but you have to re confront those things that you tried to avoid so desperately in life.

So think about the path of the oppressed, the feminine path where you become the oppressive housewife or subservient employee, you are going to have to re-engage with the pain that made you feel not good enough. You are going to have to re engage with the anxieties that forced you to become a shell of your identity. This is, if you really love Richard Rohr, this is what he means by the phrase falling upward. You have to go north, you have to return to your soul child. And the way you do that is by accepting your belovedness. Reclaiming that there was a soul child in you to begin with. Reclaiming a sense of identity and owning that as I am a child of God. Just like in mark one when Jesus was baptized and the heavens opened and a dove like Spirit said, that Jesus was God's child and whom God is well pleased. You are reclaiming that Seth, God is saying the same thing to you, and you have to return; and you have to do the path of the ascent, you have to go up, and reclaim more of who you are. That you have buried so much of you, that you are going to have to regain it and claim it. And it's hard. It's very hard when you spend an entire life feeling like you don't matter. You don't measure up, that you don't belong in human existence, that you live with some neurosis of some psychic manifestation that you should be rejected at all cost.

You're going to have to claim your belovedness that's very Henri Nouwen. Now take the the path of the of the privileged now, this is what redemption is seeking through forgiveness. If you are so narcissistic, or you have created this ego, that is so out of bounds with what everyone else is experiencing, and you're forcing your worldview onto others where you're a bully. You're just an aggressive narcissist that has no empathy at all. You have to return through all those painful moments, the rejection of your parents, or the the divorce of your spouse, or whatever caused you to create this ego. And you have to repent of all of the ways in which you have tried to rise above that pain.

You have to repent of the person that you become You do not take a path of ascent, but you have to fall. And that's where like, you go to the foot of the cross. That's where you admit that you have sinned before God and that you lay it at the feet of Jesus. And so the path of descent is one where you have to seek forgiveness. The path of ascent is where you have to claim your belovedness.

So there's, I think, throughout church, I think especially in the evangelical world, we really fixated on the descent path. And we've told everybody, you just need to be forgiven, be forgiven, you need to ask God to forgive your sins. You're just a really sinful person. What we were doing was was causing people to create an ego fixation that went south, that denied themselves—denied the beauty of who they are, and we were telling them you need to be as subservient employee before God, and then you also need to seek forgiveness. So the resolution we were telling people who had lost all form of their soul child was to go further south. And that only strips you further from your soul or your essence. And so I think that's where the evangelical world has really gotten it wrong.

We told people they needed to feel oppressed, because they weren't good enough and they were sinful. And then we told them, the path that they could be forgiven for that is by going further south, and asking for more forgiveness. And it just creates this cycle of oppressiveness. The way in which you return when you are on the feminine path is by ascent, you reclaiming that you do have a soul and it is beautiful, and it is made in the image of God evangelical world and know what to do with that.

Seth 51:57

So where should people go then so there's Falling Upward. by Richard Rohr…and where else would you point people to, to begin to do this work because it's not, it's not a weekend job,

Barrett 52:11

You know, like the enneagram, you're going to enter into this conversation for different entry points. So it just really depends on where you are. It none of this matters, (laughter from Seth) this whole hour of conversation does not matter if you can't get on board with the fact that you were made in the image of God.

And that that image is good, and it is a light that is still within you. If you can't get on board with that. I would read Henry Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved. That's where I would start. If you're already on board. I think Everything Belongs by Richard or would be a better entry point than Falling Upward, Falling Upward is a very astute form of spirituality that any anybody can get to? I just wouldn't start there. So that, uh gosh, there's so many…there's so many good reads. I think you just you buy one of those books and then go to the bibliography and and read all of those books. Which you would do…you're a five you would love to do that!

Seth 53:17

That's that is actually what I do. Barrett it has been a pleasure. I know we've talked around this in the hallways at church off and on in bits and pieces, but thank you for your time. And for those listening, I really hope that that you do engage with this because if our country is going, if evangelicalism, or the church is going to succeed in the future, our children have already shown that they have no interest in the the way that we do it now; and it's going to cause us to have to face the monster that we've created.

Barrett 53:55

To fit with a narrative evangelicalism is the ego fixation that we have crafted to force an ideology that is that isn't distant from our soul child. I'm not interested in raising and creating a system or a least feeding system that our kids are forced into a brand like evangelicalism. I want our kids as they grow up in church to realize that they are made in the image of God. And that image is a lovely one, and they can connect to it. And they can be connected to the deepest parts of this world, and that they can want to live by Christ in the world.

You know, I mean, if they become more evangelical because of that experience, that's fine. I don't care. I'm just not interested in the brand. Evangelicalism is the ego.

Seth 54:43

Well Barrett. Thank you again, so so much, I appreciate it.

Barrett 54:46

Oh, you're so welcome Seth. Thanks so much.

Seth Outro 55:10

So there you go.

What are we called to do? The work of unraveling pain and hurt is hard. The work of recognizing narcissism and bad tendencies in ourselves is hard. But recognizing naming it and working through it is sanctification in some way, shape and form it is making us and our relationships and this world that we live in and interact in a better place. So let's do that. I encourage you to wrestle with the concepts of a soul child to think on it and try to remember back at different stages of your Life, the portions of your life that have impacted you in a way that you still remember that you dwell on to think on the changed you. And let's work through that.

The music throughout the episode was provided by the Silver Pages with permission, extremely appreciative for their allowance of their work in this production, I'll talk with you next week.

Blessings to you all.