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.

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Paul Thomas 0:00

We fundamentally, tragically, misinterpret what the Bible is when we treat it like a big scrap pile of dogma that we get our religious rules from. And what I believe with all my heart is that the Bible is the love story of God wooing humankind to be his bride in a world where we've lost the plot. It's an ancient Jewish motif, one that runs from Genesis to Revelation, and I want to dedicate a portion of the rest of my life to sharing that message in the most powerful ways I'm able.

Seth Price 0:59

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Can I Say This At Church podcast, I am Seth, your host. I am happy that you were here and I thank you for downloading this episode. Before we get started, please remember to like and review the show in iTunes and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. You can find all those links in the show notes.

Today's interview is with author and poet Paul Thomas, I will let Paul kind of introduce himself in the interview. But here's kind of the theme of the show…most of the time, we are taught to think of the Bible as sort of a guidebook or the rules or the driver's ed training, to riding on the avenues in the interstate that is life, and we forget to look out the windows. We don't look left to right. We don't give enough thought to the themes, the culture, the genre, and the intent of the words—not just the cultural and historical context, but the emotion behind the words, the setting of biblical stories and the reason that certain stories are told in a certain way. So that's kind of what we discussed. We discussed just the Bible as an overarching plot and love story of the Divine God loving and cherishing us in a way that we still are unable to comprehend. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Let's roll the tape…

Seth Price 2:50

Paul Thomas, thank you so much for joining the Can I Say This At Church podcast if I'm honest, your name was not one that I was familiar with until previous guests of the show Alexander Shaia had said, “Hey, Seth, you need to, to look into Paul and see what he's doing”. And the more I engaged in what you're doing at your website, and your poetry, and your words, and I liked it a lot. So I appreciate you taking the time to come on today.

Paul Thomas 3:18

Thank you so much, Seth. It's great to be here and thank you to Alexander for recommending me. Yeah, for much of my adult life. I've kind of been hidden out and working as a missionary drilling water wells in Central America. And so my name's not floating around all that much.

Seth Price 3:35

Who do you do that with or is that just you and a shovel and a village?

Paul Thomas 3:39

It started out as me going off to live in the poorest place I had ever seen just really believing in a ministry of accompaniment and like the incarnation; that's our thing, right? And so I became a bean farmer in El Salvador, and I ended up in the hospital a couple times with kidney problems. So I was just this guy, leading a Bible study under a mango tree in the poorest village I'd ever seen in my life. But we found ourselves hauling water from a trickle. There was a crack in a rock, you'd stick a leaf in the crack of the rock, and then that trickle would produce five gallons every 35 minutes. Then you put that on your shoulder and haul it back home. But anyway we ended up in the hospital ended up learning how to drill wells from an ordinate some some people in an organization that was then emerging is and is now a big one Living Water International. So anyway, started an autonomous Salvadoran ministry and incorporated it into living learn international later.

Seth Price 4:41

I don't know if you've ever listened to the Relevant podcast. They make me laugh. Jessie Carey specifically makes me laugh. And one of the things that he did not long ago and it wasn't with that water organization, maybe a year ago, he basically put himself in a room and watch Nicolas Cage movies that were crowd sourced so not the good ones like not national treasure like The bad ones, not not raising Arizona but the bad ones. And he did it on repeat with no rest for 24 hours straight. And I think he did the same thing the next year and he listened to only Nickelback on repeat in the shower while he slept it never shut off to raise money for an organization called Charity Water. Which I think does similar type of work where they come in and they help people get a clean source of water. Yes, I think…do you still do that?

Paul Thomas 5:30

I still work as a freelance writer and communications and fundraising consultant with various water organizations or nonprofits.

Seth Price 5:41

That's cool. Yeah, water is is life giving like it is. I said this in a previous episode at the end of the anti ride episode as as I was trying to raise a little bit of money for charity water and I said if you don't think that it's life, giving the just don't drink any today, and we'll talk about it tomorrow morning. If you think water is not important. Just don't drink in today and and we'll talk about it tomorrow.

Paul Thomas 6:03

It's the root of everything, you know, and it's a health issue. It's an economic development issue. It's an education issue. I mean, it's behind so many problems and by the way, something that the church could just solve. I mean, not that it's that easy but the church has a billion people you know, one in nine people doesn't have safe drinking water that the other eight can give a hand you know, that it's really within our reach. And I'm glad that it's in the vision of people like Scott over at Charity Water and Living Water International and it's so it's, it's also just a lot of fun to get into and hear the stories behind it.

Seth Price 6:38

So a bit about you now then. So you now I assume you're in Are you in the States, are you in…where are you at, in Canada?

Paul Thomas 6:48

I’m in San Antonio, Texas.

Seth Price 6:50

I'm from Texas.

Paul Thomas 6:51

Oh, where in Texas are you from?

Seth Price 6:53

I'm from Midland, Texas, which is further west. So I don't know if you know where Midland is or not.

Paul Thomas 6:58

Oh, yeah.

Seth Price 7:00

Yeah, it's um, it's hot there today and I'm sure it's hot in San Antonio. So we'll then before I get started then I asked everyone from Texas to same question because I'm biased so if you have to choose right now are you going to go to In and Out Burger or Whataburger?

Paul Thomas 7:13

You didn't really have to ask that it's Whataburger every time!

Seth Price 7:17

Every time! Good and well because I just banned people if they say In and Out Burger I banned them. They're no longer allowed to have we just we just end the conversation. So what do you what do you do now, Paul? What, what is kind of what you see your trajectory trending towards? And I know you're working on a book, you do poetry. So you do a lot of things. And so what does that look like now?

Paul Thomas 7:43

Yeah, I'm kind of a middle aged die. I spent the first half of my adult years helping bring water to people in Central America. And then after that helping living water international do that in 23 countries around the world and kind of the term that I've taken. I've always been a literary guy. I love literature. I love it and it was what my college degree was in. And my role in life now is to help myself and others find ourselves in a love story and get engaged because I believe that that's what Scripture is. All that time leading the Bible study under a mango tree in El Salvador, through all the Bible geeking out that people like me and you do is led me to that, that we fundamentally, tragically misinterpret what the Bible is when we treat it like a big scrap pile of dogma that we get our religious rules from.

And what I believe with all my heart, is that the Bible is the love story of God wooing humankind be his bride in a world where we've lost the plot. It's an ancient Jewish motif, one that runs from Genesis to Revelation. And I want to dedicate a portion of the rest of my life, to sharing that message in the most powerful ways I'm able.

Seth Price 9:12

So if I sit down and I pull up my Bible, and as a Protestant, I've just got 66 books. And so we'll just talk about that one. Although recently I've been reading the Catholic Bible and I've been falling in love with the book of Maccabees, because it's something I've never read before and didn't know I was allowed to read those things. So it's, well, I was, I guess a part of me always knew that I was, but I just I, they're not at quote unquote, Lifeway bookstore. So I didn't have that option. How should I when I sit down? How should I approach the text if I if I'm going to read it correctly and I'm going to try to find the themes and the reasoning behind the words that are written there? How should I approach it?

Paul Thomas 9:51

In the same way, that the message of Jesus is that God is incarnate in Jesus Gods longs to be expressed through flesh through real stuff, right? In the same way the Bible is so embodied. So the way to look at it is not to look at it like it's a scrap pile of dogma that we extract religious rules from, but it is the most important library or treasury of literature that our species has ever encountered, or ever will encounter. And so you take each of those books for what they are and it makes it a lot more fun to if you just pretend like the Bible is something where God momentarily took away the freewill of an author and then wrote down what he really wanted us to read, and they gave the freewill back and it's like God Himself saying, then you really diminished with the Bible is. Psalms are Psalms that was a literary tradition in Egypt and in Babylon, and among Hebrew people letters are letters to laments are laments, read them for what they are find out what genre is this, you know, there's about a dozen different genres represented, what's going on at the time? What are those things that would have just been contextual to people at the time that they didn't have to be explained? Think through what that stuff is like. And I tell you, it just gets more and more interesting and just that never ends.

Seth Price 11:24

Can you give me a few of those examples like of the 12 genres, and things that would be just commonplace, like if you and I and I know we've talked about this in the chat before, so like, if I say that the door squeaks open, and it's dark outside, and it's a full moon and you hear a wolf howling, and all of that was written down behind the conversation that we have, we will be having a quote unquote, spooky conversation or like a campfire type conversation. And I agree, we do miss that. So what are a couple of those things specifically, genre based either in the Old Testament or the New Testament or maybe that flow between the two that we miss?

Paul Thomas 12:00

This is partially genre and partially context. So much of the Bible is kind of like a rap battle. Like it's riffing off the ancient stories and myths of other cultures. And in that way, they're like slinging these just beautiful, you know, poetry in real life back at the culture around them. So an example is in the genre of a gospel, the gospel. It's an announcement of the good news of Jesus. It's part biography and it's got that rap battle feel.

When people in the Bible call Jesus, the Son of God, Savior, Prince of Peace, King of kings, as you probably know, those are all titles that were applied to Julius Caesar then to Tiberus Caesar in Jesus lifetime. And they were on the Divi filius, Son of God; that's on the coins in everybody's pocket. That's a proclamation that's people saying, This is the Son of God. Caesar is not.

And if you don't know that context, then it feels like what I grew up with was just thinking like, these are brand new words in the history of the world. And it decontextualizes that and so you can see that in all the ancient stories. An Old Testament example, would be say, the creation story, composed in Babylon. That is a story that the context is a story of the god Marduk, defeating Tiamat and it's violent and everything. And then so what we get in Genesis is people riffing off of that and say, No, no, no, no, here is the character of God expressed in this story.

Seth Price 13:57

Can you touch on that a bit, I don't know. Those two names.

Paul Thomas 14:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah. margin is the main god of Babylon, the Babylonian people. So in the Bible itself, if you grew up like I did, then you grew up thinking, Judaism is the most doggedly monotheistic religion in the history of the world. And we're Christians. So we got that money, museum theism, right. And that's what makes us different and better. And it's always been like that. And basically everybody in the Bible believes and what I believe (Sarcasm) but I’ve got the full story like whereas they didn't in the Old Testament that you read about in your Bible. I mean, I'm talking about in Chronicles and Kings and everywhere, people, they're what they called polytheists, they believe in lots of gods, they believe in regional God deities, largely, you know that that's just a product of the Bronze Age.

So the God of Babylon was Marduk, and it was believed that creation happened at the site of Marduk’s temple. So picture the exile. These people were marched 900 Miles to Babylon to be relocated, they looked up at Marduk’s temple, they looked up at the ziggurat in the center of town and they saw something seven times the height of the Temple of Jerusalem in its glory under Solomon. They were like what?! They're like, yeah, this is the house of the God Marduk. And people contextually there, they believed Marduk ruled this place (and) Yahweh rules that place.

That's why it's so mind blowing when Ezekiel looks up in the sky, and he sees he, you'll notice, everybody that drives the Bible's story forward, they're never the people who are looking backwards at the Bible saying you got to obey the Bible. No, no, no. They're people like Ezekiel, who loves looking up at the sky and saying, whoa, man, I see intersecting wheels and they're covered with eyes. God is perfectly mobile, perfectly all seeing even here in the land of Marduk. That's the proclamation made in that vision. And that's what drives the story forward; the Bible is a story and in a story story, the plot unfolds. And in this story, the way the plot unfolds is towards an ever larger, more expansive, more beautiful understanding of who God is and what he's doing in the world. Which is real different within what Marduk was doing, which is just blessing one little Empire that is gone now.

Seth Price 16:37

Yeah, and when I hear you say that and basically it's a whose buildings bigger which let's make this not to get political, but it's a good turn of phrase it's let's make whatever God great again or make whatever country great again, or make this bigger, greater than yours ziggurat and we're going to measure this. And then I hear Paul, you know, going in, in all of his missionary stuff, saying, No, no, no, no, you're missing the entire point. Like we've been doing since These were written down it God is not in this building. He's more than that. And, you're doing it wrong, that it's not this, these four walls, this beautiful architecture has nothing to do with God or the will or the heart of God. But I hadn't really put that together till just now, but I do like that.

Paul Thomas 17:21

Yeah. And what you see in the unfolding, evolving understanding of God in the Bible, and one of the benefits of understanding it as that unfolding understanding is that you see that the roots of our belief that is still in there, that's how powerful stories are, the roots of the belief that God's glory is reflected in the size of your empire, the size of your building the size of your enterprise. And by the way, that always reflects the dominant power structure of the day. So it's an empire in Old Testament times. It's an empire. higher in the third century when Constantine says, oh this Jesus thing catching on, let's conquer in his name. It's an empire for much of that time.

Seth Price 18:08

I mean, it's still an empire now.

Paul Thomas 18:11

…in a sense, but you also see, say, in some of the Protestant traditions, when in Europe, the dominant power structure of the time was the court system, post enlightenment times, then the church starts to reflect the language of court flattery, instead of the language of Imperial flattery—or here, it's churches everywhere across America, we're using the same metrics you use in a corporation to measure things. That's why we want to talk about growth. That's why we think growth matters and all that sort of thing.

Well, what you see when you understand the Bible as a story you see that the roots of lots of those things that when you read about, say the Ark of the Covenant, God wanting to live in a temple at all, that's always God accommodating what the people want. Why do they want it because they're looking around at the Canaanites. They're looking around and they're going Marduk is blessing Babylon way more than Yahweh is blessing us? Let's do what they do. That's the roots of all of these things.

And you'll see a God who is Spirit who is love trying to woo humankind to be his pride and going, Oh, I can play house with you and a temple. And if that's the way to win your heart, I'll do it. I'll do it! But it's not what this is all about. What this is about is the salvation of the world.

Seth Price 19:24

How much of Scripture, and this appeals directly to what you're looking to do with the rest of your life and career it sounds like, how much of Scripture is poetry as opposed to say history or what's the word I'm looking for? Like a factual, factual, I'm telling you this a means this B means this and there is no other thing. So how much of Scripture is poetry? And then to build off of that, poetry is extremely subjective like you and I can both read, you know, Frost or we can both read one of my favorite poetry book is actually The Rose that Grew in Concrete. It's a it's a bunch of poetry from Tupac Shakur. That is, it has nothing to do with his rap. But I find it beautiful. So if I'm reading Scripture, and if it's subjective, when I read it, how am I supposed to then do that? So I guess that's it. That's too many questions. I'm gonna break that up again. How much of it is poetry and then how do I then go forward from that?

Paul Thomas 20:25

Yeah, yeah. Two very important questions.

I'd say all of it, the tradition itself, is poetic. I've heard people make estimations, this is where you look down and you go, “Okay, this is intended to be a history”. There are parts of histories that where you go, yeah, this is a book of history. Joshua, parting the Jordan just like the Red Sea parted and the waters piling up upstream in a city called “Adam”. That's poetic in a historical book. So I've heard people say, “oh, I've broken it down. And 30% of the Bible is poetry” in the sense that it's poems or has poetic intent, but the meaning is what I would say it is always poetry.

I kind of referenced this earlier throughout Scripture, you see two groups of people. One are the poets and writers and storytellers and prophets, who wrote Scripture and about whom scripture is written. And there's always these religious dogmatists they're in there throughout the Bible, too. And it's always the case that that latter group, the religious dogma trainers—that's the Pharisees slapping Jesus hand. And so in the Old Testament, it's the people going “you got to obey the Bible look”, and as opposed to the people saying, “Well, God is everywhere. Look at those wheels in the sky.”

So the big events that turn Scriptures plot if you look at it as a story, the big upturns and downturns of the story itself are what give the whole story meaning, and those always have poetry within them. When Jesus multiplies loaves that's reaching back to Elijah. Like it's always the triumphal entry that's poetic guerrilla theater, a hundred percent in the tradition of Ezekiel and Isaiah…

Seth Price 22:30

What is poetic guerrilla theater? I'm not familiar with that phrase.

Paul Thomas 22:35

(Laughter)

There are some crazy things that the prophets did, you know, like to warn of imminent siege Isaiah walked around town naked, just buck naked for three years.

Seth Price 22:50

That's a heck of a sunburn,

Paul Thomas 22:52

Right! That's street theater, to warn of Army attack. You know, God tells Ezekiel “Make a camp and cook your food on human excrement”. And Ezekiel says No way, man, that's gross. Can I at least use cow dung? But he does this like he's out there, this is how we're going to be. They're giving messages because they're clued in, they’re woke, to what's going on and what's gonna happen and what God wants to happen.

And the way they express that is through something that looks like theater and often that theater has roots in other parts of the Bible. So when I was a child, I read the triumphal entry, Palm Sunday story. It's just this thing that happened, you know, but then now if you read a contextual link of what's going on here, and you'll look for the way that Jesus and his cousin John constantly, poetically, with their actions, refer back; say John, on the Jordan wearing a camel hair cloak that is 800 years out of fashion. He's clearly saying “I’m Elijah”, this is Elijah. And that's a call back.

Likewise, the triumphal entry the last time someone had entered Jerusalem, to claim his crown in an uncontested manner, was Alexander the Great, who captured the imagination of the entire Greek speaking world, which is not an insignificant thing. The gospels are written in Greek, not in Hebrew, not in Aramaic. That is the dominant cultural imagination of the time. So he's referring to Alexander the Great, you couldn't have thought of triumphal entry in Jerusalem in Rome, without thinking of Julius Caesar coming into town after he’d slaughtered a million Gauls, his face painted red like the supreme god, Jupiter.

And so those people that go out to Jesus, where he's coming in on the donkey, where David had left, and he's coming back to claim his crown in Jerusalem were a real King of the Jews would claim his crown. Not a fake King of the Jews like Herod who wasn’t the real deal. The crowds out there, even the cheering crowds are a poetic proclamation that this is what our true king looks like. It's poetry expressed in words, but also embodied in flesh as God always wants to do, because God is incarnational. So fid that answer the question? There was a second part.

Seth Price 25:31

So yeah, that does answer the question. But the second part of the question is, so poetry is a lot like music in that I can hear what I want to hear. And so when I hear, I don't know, Penny Lane from you know, Paul McCartney, and I hear that and it speaks to me in a different way than it speaks to you because that's the intended thing and music to me is just poetry set to a rhythm. I'm probably wrong, but that's what it is to me. And since it's poetry, I get to be right.

So if that is true, and so I'm reading it and I'm hearing these themes, and I'm seeing these themes. And the more I read, the more I go back and read again. And then that changes the way that I read this in the New Testament. And then I have to go back to the Old Testament again. So how do I do that well, without really screwing it up, and then that would also cause me to then possibly screw up those that I have influence with that trust my judgment, say, Well, hey, when you read 1 Corinthians or when you read when you read anything? And I ask this because I will try to have those conversations now and you can see people's eyeballs just glaze over. Like they asked a question that I think they thought they knew what the answer was going to be when you try to give it context. The eyes just glaze over, like they don't really want to know and so how do I how do we do that? How do I or you or someone else, begin to learn that truth or begin to learn the truths the many the multi-level truths in Scripture and then share that?

Paul Thomas 27:03

So the first part of your question had to do with poetry being so subjective that that every individual human can come to it and have a different interpretation of what Robert Frost or the Apostle Paul wrote. That's true not only in poetry, it's true of all of Scripture. It's true of dogma. It's true of laws. And I could and I bet you could to justify any ideology imaginable with the Bible, whether that ideology is following Jesus for the salvation of the world, or whether that ideology tells you that that means smashing the babies of your enemies against rocks, or killing your enemies, or slaughtering whole peoples. You can take that from the Bible.

So the the task at hand is to ask yourself, am I understanding things in the tradition in which This is written in my understanding this in the tradition of the poet's storytellers and prophets who wrote this book and about whom it's written, or am I understanding it in some other way, and what cultural influences have led me one way or the other. How is Jesus understanding this? Is he just quoting Old Testament laws and saying, you got to do this dog gone it, or does he have another way of being in the world teaching?

Seth Price 29:04

I just came back from vacation at the beach and I gave a lot of thought to our conversation today and a few other conversations that I've had since then, and on the way back about four hours in, I thought to myself as I was just thinking, the whole family's asleep, and I'm just thinking, and I know at least I think I know and correct me if I'm wrong. Like when Paul was out talking. He's not walking around with these scrolls while he's spreading the gospel to the world. So he has it all memorized, and I can't help thinking that if he came back today, was here, walked around, and he sees all of these Christians running around Bible thumping and flipping pages and quoting and trying to speak to him. He's like, No, no, you're getting…wait you read. No, you're doing it wrong. That is not how we talk about Jesus like, you don't memorize this.

Like you can't know it at the level that you need to know it if you don't engage with it in such a way that you can just rattle it off like you could the story of you and your marriage, or when your kid was first born or that, you know, the beautiful poetic moments in our life. And I don't know that I will ever be able to say that I can do that. But it does give me an amount of gratitude to one of the people that that has influenced the church so much that that they could speak about Scripture in such a way that they could just paraphrase it when need be quoted when need be and have it all memorized, and have it all on demand when they need it to be.

Paul Thomas 30:26

And even as your listeners hear that what they're imagining is consulting their Bibles and habit and having it all memorized and doing the kind of scholastic like work of getting it memorized. And for Paul, I don't think it was quite like that. A lot of people say “what” when you say Paul didn't have a Bible, like what we call the Bible. The gospels there's no evidence Paul ever looked at a gospel, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. He was writing letters. He didn't have what we call the New Testament.

This was a living tradition that you incorporate into your lives and live it out. A lot of Paul's ministry is reinterpreting the story and going, “whoa!”, that's the work of the whole New Testament. When you think about it, God's love story scribes had put down their pens 400 years ago. I mean, we can include those those books like Maccabees, but Jewish people they too; they're just like “ahh”, like Jewish people have to look to a Catholic Bible to find Hanukkah. And that's because the tradition in some sense. It ended man, it was like, forget it.

Now these Greeks came in, they're destroying us. And we got nothing to say it's just getting destroyed by one imperial power after another and here comes Rome. And so that tradition had gone and when people picked up their pens. It was going, “Oh, that's what it all meant”. Through the death, resurrection, and imbuing of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. They look back at the entire tradition and they reinterpreted the whole thing. And that's what we're called to do to, in light of our context.

Seth Price 32:07

You had a longer than normal video and for those listening, pause right now, and then just scroll down to the show notes in whatever way you're listening to this and you'll find a link to Paul's YouTube channel. And you'll find 10 or 12 videos there, but one of them is called Metamorphosis, and I believe it came out right around Pentecost. I think that's when it came out.

Yeah, that poem, that spoken word, or whatever, I don't know what it's called. It's probably genre bending as well. I like it a lot. And I've shared it with others who will write back and say, you know, I needed this today. This brought me to tears or this is what I needed to hear. But you did that and then I know you also went off on a trip and on purpose intentionally didn't speak to anyone correct.l, at all?

Paul Thomas 32:52

Yeah.

Seth Price 32:53

Was that only for a portion of the day or was it all day like 24 hours (of) no speaking at all, we're done.

Paul Thomas 32:58

Yeah, 24 hours a day for 10 days.

Seth Price 33:00

Can you talk a bit about that? That poem that you'll find on YouTube and I can't encourage people enough, go and listen to it it is very good, especially when you think about the poetry of Scripture and the life changing ability of something that is being transformed or I would call that salvation or sanctification or theosis, for lack of a better word. You talk a bit about that poem, metamorphosis, and then its impact on and the impact sense of just silencing yourself for a portion.

Paul Thomas 33:32

Let me step way back and give the context for that poem, metamorphosis and for other poems that people will see on there.

What I've been up to for the past seven years of my life is rewriting and rewriting and refining and rewriting the book that I believe is going to be the magnum opus of my life. It's called The Butterflies in God's Stomach, and I subtitled it the Bible's Love Story recomposed as a romantic adventure in poems and prose.

So it's a creative retelling of scriptures story from in the beginning to all things new as the love story of God wooing humankind to be his bride. And I found poetry to be a really helpful tool in that book because there are parts of the Bible and especially the parts where God is driving the story that you don't want your reader caught up in a cultural debate. You don't want them saying you have to believe this, and know a thing happened, or else you're going to go to hell, and you don't want them to be like, (in haughty academic tone) “no, this is actually a part of an ancient Mesopotamian flood story, tradition”.

And so I found poetry to be a way to tap the reader on the shoulder and say, “Hey, we're doing that thing that's a part of this ancient Hebrew and Christian tradition where there's resonance with everything else”. So Metamorphosis is the poem that communicates the event of Pentecost, which is really the climax of the whole biblical story. If you look at it with through the lens of a screenwriter, screenwriters divide up a plot into 15 beats and three acts it's very, there are formulas that screenwriters use to keep you at the edge of your seat when you're watching a film. And, Pentecost actually is the third at climax. That is the big thing. That's when God hands the story off to us to bring it to its final image, which is the wedding of God and the church in an Earth that Heaven joins, and the water of the river of life flows out and God and his bride say, “Come all who are thirsty and drink”. That's how the Bible ends! The Bible doesn’t end with people getting like “left behind” and “zapped away” somewhere else, that just doesn't happen, it's not even in there.

So yeah, that's what Metamorphosis is. And I would love if people would go listen to that, and I've got a bunch of other offerings and more that will be coming out there, if you subscribe to the channel. Then you had related that to my retreat. My retreat there was/is something I've done periodically throughout my life. And it's actually a meditation tradition. It's a non-religious tradition that taught, it's always you hear me stuttering, it's a Buddhist tradition. And I hesitate to say that because that means something that it doesn't really mean to so many people. But it is a practice. And it's just the practice of sitting in silence, observing breath, and then observing sensation.

And the reality is all thoughts, everything you think, say, and do arises from sensation in your body. It's a way to get deep into your mind and it's the tool that has helped me bear the fruit of the Spirit more than any other practice in my entire life.

So I’m at a crossroads in my life I wanted to kind of it's a way I hit the reset button, it's 10 hours a day of sitting meditation 10 days a week where you don't speak at all. And you it's a way of getting everything that's between you and God, out of the way, is the way I experience it. And I happened to go to this retreat center, there's retreat centers all over the world in this tradition, and in the time that I could get away and get babysitting for my kids and everything. There was only a spot at one center in North America and it was in Canada. I went there, and I had just released this Pentecost poem, Metamorphosis, and I go to the one place where there was one spot available. And I take a walk in the woods and it sounds, in broad daylight, like it's raining. And I was going “What is going on?” and I looked around and that sound that sounded like rain was the sound of caterpillar's chewing on leaves about to metamorphosize. It was a fun like, I had this ongoing having the poetic mind that I do an ongoing metaphor throughout the 10 days. And it was pretty remarkable.

Seth Price 38:10

I don't find that as coincidental at all. And I also would… this show is…you can say the word Buddhists on the show. I've said before to someone, I was humbled enough, I was interviewed on a different person's podcast about my story, which still not 100% confident in because I like to be on this side of the mic. I like to ask the questions. I enjoy that better. It's less, I don't know what the word is. It's less terrifying. But I am not prideful enough to think that Christianity has a stranglehold on all truth, that there's not something that I can learn from, you know, Hawaiian traditions or Maori traditions or Buddhist traditions or Islamic traditions there's a lot of truth in a lot of religions. And that doesn't mean I don't take the most beautiful parts of that and use it to see Jesus.

Because again, I don't see Jesus as rectifying only humanity. I see it as cosmically rectifying everything created, ever.

Paul Thomas 39:14

Yes.

Seth Price 39:16

And so I'm not offended at all by intentionally slowing down, as well as the more that I've dug in Jesus did that, and Elijah did that, and Paul did that and then and everyone did that.

You know, Paul being a dogmatic person, and then leaving for a time and going back and I'm sure I have to think meditating on scripture and refiguring out okay, well, my world just changed. I think it's important to especially in today's age of Facebook and constant news cycles and angst and pain and anger and finger-pointing that you need to disengage and Sabbath from everything that is not important for a time. So I wouldn't be afraid at all to say the word Buddhist. If I had been born in a different country, I may be a Buddhist, and that's fine.

Paul Thomas 40:06

And not only are you not prideful to think that you have a monopoly on truth, God is not impotent enough to fail to express any truth through 99% of people except this one tiny Ancient Near Eastern population group that handed the baton to me as a Christian. And often the belief is as a Christian of my tradition, you know, when people get so attached to their dogma they're often imagining a God, who became incarnate and Jesus died, resurrected for the salvation of the world, and then waited as people just got it wrong, and got it wrong. Dark Ages got it wrong, Middle Ages wrong and finally in 18, whatever the Southern Baptist Convention is founded and Jesus and God in heaven says, nailed it finally!

Seth Price 40:59

They finally understood, and they wrote it down in the right language. So people understand for time immorial. I want to take a quote, and you actually sent it to me, but I do think it's pertinent to the work that you're trying to do in the book that it sounds like you've written seven versions of it; well, maybe more than that, I'm sure.

And so when I asked Professor NT Wright at the end of our episode, and for those listening, that would have been the week before July 4, what we could do better as Christians (and) what we could learn from Paul to make the world, or Christianity, move forward in a progressive way, he said that

maybe there's a new vocation for people today to think theologically, to write poems, which will go to the very heart of the matter, and which will appeal to people not just intellectually, but emotionally and culturally enable them to praise and worship in rich Scripture fueled ways.

And so with that being said, that sounds like the work that you're trying to do. And so, when is your book coming? Because I feel like that would be helpful. And people like you who else would you point us to that are doing work this way in a more contemplated intentional, deeper than surface level of vocabulary way. But when is Butterflies coming out?

Paul Thomas 42:16

That's a good question. And I would love to appeal to your audience to join me on the journey as I try to get it there. As I pitch it out to agents, what happens is they say, “I'm such a fan”, one agent that I pitched it to set, “I closed the office and brought it home and read it to my wife.” They love it. They say acquisitions editors love it. And marketing teams shoot it down. And it's it's a similar reason to why the shack which went on to sell 20 million copies could not it wasn't picked up by any Christian publisher. He had to self publish that.

And the reason is the Christian publishing industry. They're looking for what works. They're hurting This world of online culture and self publishing, and they know that people with giant platforms are the ones who are going to keep their marketing teams from having to make the expenditure to do the work. So basically what they're saying is Paul, you need to build a platform. And so it's a lot of fun just getting the work out there. And that's what I'm doing. If you want to join me on the journey, I'd love to just give a gift to your audience. And you can go to butterfliesbook.com, and just download the free stuff there. It's in audio and in PDF, so you can read it or listen to it as you prefer.

That'll put you on the mailing list where I can keep you informed on the adventure and I’m not hitting me up for anything. It's just I'll give you some free gifts over the next year and you can join the ride as we try to get it there because I think NT Wright is right. And the reason NT Wright thinks that it that we need to bring those poetic and storytelling voices into this is because it's a poetic and storytelling tradition that we come from and desperately need to recover. Because the consequences now of misinterpreting Scripture as a big pile of dogmas crap that we fight over between denominations, the consequences of missing the point like that are higher than they were in Jesus time, or any time in the history of the world, and here's why.

The Bible tells the story of the origins, history, and destiny of all human civilization. It was composed over the most important 1500 years in the formation of human civilization. And it points to the desired final scene that God wants, which is the unification of God with his bride-humankind. Earth and Heaven joined.

It's up to us to get us to the final scene, because it's God as a lover who's saying, I need this love to be reciprocated, I gave you this world because I love you, you can love me back by taking care of it or you can just reject my love by not. But now we’re in a time in human history, where technological progress is growing at an unprecedented rate and it doesn't grow linearly, it grows exponentially history itself is accelerating. And the choice is ours, whether we accelerate that towards death and destruction, or towards the Bible's final scene. And the only thing we as humankind really add or subtract to the story is love that's our contribution whatever you do, is is as a member of the body of Christ, which is bigger than people are imagining. The task is Really the salvation of the world, which doesn't mean individual soul is going to happen. We could destroy this world through environmental degradation through nuclear war through artificial intelligence gone out of control. Unless we find ourselves in a love story and get engaged. We're not going to get to the right final scene.

Seth Price 46:23

Paul, where can people find you? I know you're on Facebook, and you're on YouTube. Where else are you?

Paul Thomas 46:27

The main thing I would love for people to do it this stage right now is go to butterfliesbook.com and download that free stuff. And then that'll get you subscribe to my email list. And I'll let you know as stuff comes out. I am on Facebook Paul Thomas Author. And the main reason I just love for you to join me on the journey is so that you can see as this fall is Summer ends, kids are back in school, I get back to rhythms. You can join along for the ride. As you see somebody who I'm fundamentally kind of a any you'll see this from my writing, that's my sweet spot and this look at me stuff isn't my sweet spot, but I'll let you know as it comes out. It's a business that I'm getting into out of necessity because I believe so strongly this message.

Seth Price 47:11

Well, I enjoy the stuff that I've read. And I appreciate your time today, Paul, very much. Thank you so much for coming on.

Paul Thomas 47:17

Thank you.

Seth Price 47:50

I really do hope that at the end of this, you will go to butterfliesbook.com and download the sample chapters. They're beautiful.

It's concepts and thoughts about Scripture in a way that usually we don't engage with them and it's free, like you, you literally have no reason not to. So please do that.

I am overwhelmingly grateful to each and every one of you that takes the time to rate and review the show on iTunes, follow and engage the shows on Twitter, and Facebook, and especially especially a huge tremendous thank you to each and every one of our Patreon supporters. If you have not yet done that, please consider doing that today. Today's episode featured the music of Kings kaleidoscope. You can find all of their information and links to their albums at KingsKaleidoscope.com

Talk to you next week.