Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening and is transcribed from Patreon version of the conversation. 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.
Amy Frykholm 0:00
Silence allows something new to occur. And so when I sit in silence or when I was on this trek and I would very often just pause I just stop. And I would just stay in silence somewhere. It was an attempt to allow something to happen that I wasn't certain enough. And I think it's fairly similar for me like when I sit in silence now at home in my comfortable little safe place, I'm still trying to make some space for something that's not me. That's not me centered. Not from the nerdy No, are already think, to be born in me to take new shape.
Seth Price 0:52
Hello, there you people, how are you? I'm good. It's, um, well, if you're listening to this on the day it came out. It's Monday. If not, it's whatever day it is. And I hope that you're having a good day. Hall, man. So this week, I wanted to try things slightly different. So we'll do some of these announcements at the beginning, instead of at the end. So I'm going to try to make a habit of this. There are transcripts for these shows. And if you would like to read along or whatever, you hear something you're like, oh, man, yeah, that was good. Just know that if you click in the show notes, there's transcripts there literally every episode. Now I'm having an issue with the website, where for some reason, it won't show the archive of transcripts, even though I can see them, which is really stupid. But they're all still there, find the episode you want. Click the button for transcripts, and you should see it if you don't let me know. Another request as well. I asked a few weeks ago for Hey, who would you want to have on the show? You all flooded the inbox with with emails. And I love that I found some people that I'd never heard of that are writing some cool things and doing some some amazing work and that that was great. So continue to do that just contact at can I say this at church calm. And let me know that new music this week as well. In this episode, you'll hear some slightly different tunes that is from provoke wonder. And I am thankful for their permission and generosity in using their music in this week's episode. This week, I talked about Mary of Egypt, not marrying the mother of God, not Mary Magdalene, and not any of the other Mary's that you're like way that Mary No, not that Mary. So this book written by Amy for home, was really eye opening to me. It has context that is foreign to me, and and moved me in different ways. And I will say our conversation does not do her Tech's justice, then I don't quite know why that does not mean it's not a good conversation. It is it's very good, I enjoy doing it. But what I will say is, at the end of this, you really should look towards getting the book, if anything in this call to you. And I will say it does to me i i Slowly read her book, wild woman, and very, very good. very impactful. So with that said, let's rock and roll with Amy free calm.
Amy freecom welcome to the podcast 11 and a half months late, and that's my fault. It's not 11 and a half months, but it doesn't matter. But no Welcome to the show. I forget what our time differences. I feel like it's two or three hours, but I'm happy to spend a bit of time with you this evening. How are you?
Amy Frykholm 3:48
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. It's really fun.
Seth Price 3:51
Yeah. So. So you had said that you listen to a little bit of an frn did you get
Amy Frykholm 3:57
about? I don't know. 20 minutes was good. I mean, I would have kept listening for sure. Well, you know, I don't listen to very many podcasts and so
Seth Price 4:05
I only listened to podcasts that are not religious. I yeah, I listened. I listened to many podcasts. None of them are religious or theological. Be a lot. Yeah. theological is the word. Yeah, I felt like I do enough of that. So yeah, probably when people ask you kind of what or whom, or how or whatever you are, what do you say to that?
Amy Frykholm 4:28
Um, I would say that I'm an intensely curious person. And I kind of spend my days asking questions and, and running around trying to find answers to them. So I would say that that really defines me. I grew up in a my dad is a Presbyterian minister, and he and he'd both my parents they met at a very fundamentalist Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. And and then they kind of went on this path together of, of education. and learning and practice and then I grew up in South Dakota. My dad is a was a college president who's a college professor and biblical scholar. And just job search took him to South Dakota to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. So that's where I grew up. And I now live in a tiny little town in the mountains called Leadville, Colorado. It's 10,200 feet. And yeah, and I've lived here for 2021 years.
Seth Price 5:30
How I don't I'm not good with so I live in the mountains, air quotes of Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains, which is it a mountain range? I don't know what our elevations are. So like, can you kind of so I've seen like, mountain San Francisco, I think we went my wife and I went out to Arizona, which was the tallest or San Francisco maybe? I don't know. Anyway, it's by the Grand Canyon. So how big are those mountains? Just For cons? Yeah.
Amy Frykholm 5:57
So right outside my office window. They're the two biggest mountains in Colorado, the two highest mountains of Colorado, Mount Elbert and mountain massive and they are just over 14,000 feet. So I think I think Albert is 14, one to five. And so and I'm at 10,000. So I look up at the two highest mountains in Colorado. It's pretty cool. It's a cool place.
Seth Price 6:21
Now, I'm curious what our elevation is. I'm gonna look it up. It has nothing to do with anything. But now I'm curious. Because I feel like I have mountain envy.
Amy Frykholm 6:31
Well, wait, it's really hard to breathe up here. It's in some people's heads expand or like, you know, like, they get really bad headaches. You're because the air is so thin. So it can it can cause problems.
Seth Price 6:43
not that high. not that high. I'm not even gonna say it because it's gonna say it because it's embarrassing. not that high. But again, they're called mountains anyway, not why I've been there. They're beautiful. They aren't beautiful. That's my backyard. Yeah, well, part of it is anyway, not why I brought you on. So you've written many books. I've only read one of them? Well, no, I've read two of them. But I only remember a good chunk of one of them. Because I've read it more recently than the other. And I there's only so much space in my in my head. Yeah. But I would like for you to talk a bit about it. And I would wanted to start with a bit of an anecdote about it. So I was reading it on a Kindle, I set it down a few weeks ago, I was at my daughter's gymnastics, set it down, walk away, take I forget what I was doing, taking a picture or something like that. I come back and I started a conversation because someone could see the cover of it. They thought I was talking about Mary, Jesus's Mom, we had a conversation that I was not. And then he started, he asked the question he asked me he's like, Well, you're Protestant, aren't you? To which I had a lot of responses to that one of which was, why does that matter? But I'm curious, just in a, in a really general sense. What is wild woman? Like, what, what is that book about for you?
Amy Frykholm 8:01
Yeah, I mean, it's so it's about this woman who lived in the, you know, I think she'd probably had been the fifth century and she's called a saint in the Orthodox tradition. And, and so it's about my search for her. So I started on this path, many, many, many years ago. And I was intensely curious, as I mentioned about this woman, and I started exploring all kinds of different ways to understand her story, because it was having such a profound effect on me. And I wanted to know more. I don't consider myself to be a saint follower. I'm not, you know, not the kind of person who gets really interested in saints. I'm also a Protestant I wasn't raised in a saint oriented tradition. Ranta tradition, but, but this woman really just caught my attention. And eventually, after many failed attempts to understand why she had become so important to me, I, I decided to go look for her. So the story of wild woman is about my search for Mary of Egypt. And what I mean by searching for her because, you know, it was clear from the beginning to me that she may or may not have ever lived. So searching for her wasn't like I expected her to just like, appear as a, I don't know, ghost or something. It just meant that I was trying to understand her life. And I was struggling to understand it in time. So I decided to try to understand it in space. So I crossed the ocean. I went to Egypt, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan and kind of traced, it took this seven century document that that was the story of her life, and I turned it into a map. And then I followed the map. Hmm,
Seth Price 9:33
yeah. Yeah. So Mary of Egypt. And I want to be clear, when I when I read the email and then started reading the book, I figured it was a different Mary. How many you know if you surveyed say, 1000? Christians, us Christians? Sure How many? How many are familiar with Mary of Egypt and why do you think that is?
Amy Frykholm 9:57
One maybe one out of 1000 Maybe Yeah, just me. I mean, I would wanna. Yeah, I mean, anybody who spent any time in Orthodoxy like, either, you know, have, but that's not very many American Christians for sure, right? It's she's super popular in any kind of Greek or Russian Orthodox tradition. She's well known there. But in in the American context, I think there's one church, I think it's in Tennessee that's called St. Mary of Egypt, Orthodox Church. So there's one church in the US. Yeah, I don't think anybody would know about her.
Seth Price 10:34
Yeah. And do you feel like that's a subset of just the Protestantism of the United States? Or is that a subset of we're not interested in that type of a faith?
Amy Frykholm 10:43
I think it's both for sure. I think it's both. I mean, Mary of Egypt was an incredibly popular saint in Europe in the Middle Ages. But with the Reformation, that's those stories just kind of disappeared. And we've not really had any reason to recover them. And we've had, we have our own heroes and celebrities and people that we follow. And, you know, we haven't needed to reinvent them, or recover them necessarily, but it's a rich tradition. And there's lots to discover. If you start getting, you know, caught up in that sort of thing.
Seth Price 11:14
Yeah. So, at the beginning of the book, or towards the beginning of the book, you talk about whether or not Mary of Egypt actually exists. And there's a part where you say, Well, I thought that's because she's a legend, or not actually a person. What is the difference between her needing to be real, or a legend or a myth? Because I feel like Legend and myth are used for different reasons.
Amy Frykholm 11:40
Yeah, so she ends up I think, being kind of a layered figure, right? So there's the there's the legend of Mary of Egypt, which is not a I think, for me, the difference between a myth and a legend might be personal connection. A myth tells me something about how to live or it opens up some world view for me and a legend is a story that's interesting, but maybe doesn't have as personal an effect on me. And so legend is how she's treated and a lot of like American scholarship. And myth, I think is what I was sort of after, were the the mythic elements of this, like, Who is this person and a mythic level? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know that. I think that's how I see the difference.
Seth Price 12:24
Sure. So I grew up in the desert of West Texas, which is by no means the desert, that you went on this, this pilgrimage, trying to retrace Mary's Mary's steps. But desert does have a different form of beauty. And and I would assume, being in Colorado, if you ever come east and you driven, you're familiar with the desert that I'm speaking, but not necessarily dead. And that's a good way to put it when not dead. Yeah. As I read through your story, and I've read other stories similar to yours, where there is a pilgrimage going away of things that are so convenient. Why do you feel like it is necessary to strip away all the things that we call normal? Or, or convenience or whatever, in a quest to do spiritual things? Because people will do pilgrims of other sorts where they don't strip away all that stuff. And it's a pilgrimage. But it doesn't, it seems to be always there at
Amy Frykholm 13:24
Graceland or something. And yeah, and you get a really good steak dinner. And then you go see, see the animatronic pilgrimage where you don't have to strip away anything.
Seth Price 13:33
Yeah, yeah. Why for religious tracts? Why do you feel like there's there needs to be a stripping away? Or why should there be?
Amy Frykholm 13:41
There's this great line, I don't know, I can't remember exactly where it comes from. But it comes from the ancient or late ancient pilgrimage tradition around the time where Mary of Egypt was also a pilgrim. And it says that if any Pilgrim is found with a coin in his pocket, or if any pilgrim dies on the road, with a coin in his pocket, he shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. And it's a pretty, you know, it's kind of harsh, in a way kind of harsh, saying, like, well, what pilgrim doesn't plan for his or her next meal, or, you know, try to know what tomorrow might bring, you know, but I think the idea here is that a pilgrimage in this sense, and this kind of spiritual sense is like you spend it all, there's no holding back, you get to the place of discomfort, you give up what you know, you let something else happen to you that you can't control. And I think in a lot of cases, our our pilgrimages today are a lot more like tourist adventures, where, you know, kind of everything's already planned, and you get on the bus and they take you somewhere and they're like, now you have an hour and a half and you get off the bus. But you kind of you're handed an itinerary six months in advance, and you know, where you're going to eat and where you're going to sleep and so on. But the tradition of pilgrimages To give up a lot of that stuff, to give up that sense of certainty, and to not know what you're going to do next. And I think that is what I guess I think the spiritual life often asks of us is to give up what we know, and enter into what we don't know. And Mary of Egypt is a challenging subject on that.
Seth Price 15:20
What is the role of silence in spiritual practices?
Amy Frykholm 15:25
For me, I mean, it's a really practical thing, that silence really does just make a space where something can happen that you don't already know, or you haven't already figured out. Silence allows something new to occur. And so when I sit in silence, or when I was on this trek, and I would very often just pause, I just stop. And I would just stay in silence somewhere. It was an attempt to allow something to happen that I wasn't certain enough. And I think it's fairly similar for me, like when I sit in silence, now at home in my comfortable little safe place. I'm still trying to make some space for something that's not me. That's not me centered, not something I already know, or already think, to be born in me to take new shape.
Seth Price 16:19
Yeah. Can I? So I want to ask a few. So I haven't Here we go. I have a son, that's 12. And there's a part in the book towards the beginning, I forget, it's hard to know what the page numbers are. On his Amazon Kindle, let's say, let's say 27. I don't know where there's, yeah, I can tell you what it says location number. So there's a part there. I don't know if you're telling the story, or because you've got some parts towards the end, where you've translated a lot of the stuff around Mary, that it says, you know, she left Alexandria at the age of 12. And do all that stuff. And now my son turns 13 in April. And that seems absolutely blew your mind. Yeah, I so. So first off, culturally, is that normal for a 12 year old to leave the family and go do other things, regardless of gender? And then what does that kind of say about Mary? And why would Mary do something like that?
Amy Frykholm 17:20
Why would you do something like that, it was not normal for someone to leave home at 12. And especially not for girl, it might have been somewhat more normal for a girl to be given in marriage at that age, to, for example, a much older man. And so that could have happened. So it wasn't completely unknown for a young girl of that age to be married, or to be, you know, have be sent into marriage with her family. But it certainly would have been incredibly weird for a young girl of that age to leave her family. Because in that society, family was everything. I mean, family was your safety. It was your welfare, it was there weren't people wandering around who didn't have families, you know, everybody had a patron, everybody was under somebody. And so for her to leave home, in very dire circumstances, we don't know what they were. But to make that decision to run away, would have been, and I can only think that it would have been one of the more one, maybe a more violent or more shocking set of circumstances. You know, it could have been that she was going to be married off to somebody who was incredibly violent. It could be that she came from an incredibly violent family, and she figured she was better off on her own. It could be that she was sold into some kind of slavery, including maybe sexual slavery. That was not unknown. Augustine actually talks about that. And one of his sermons about finding or recovering a ship of girls that had been sold by their families into sexual slavery. So yeah, it wasn't a known, but it would have been something extreme.
Seth Price 18:59
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Augustine brings a lot of that sexual baggage to his whole theory of original sin. That's a different book, though.
Amy Frykholm 19:07
Different book, I haven't written that book.
Seth Price 19:08
That's a different topic altogether. I want to hone in on the sexual part. So there's a phrase that you use throughout the book of sleeping in doorways. Is that what it is? Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't quite understand what that meant. Until I saw I think it's about halfway through the book. And I finally sat down instead of just continuing to read highlight, read highlight. And and all I could imagine is someone literally, out of exhaustion, trying to have sex with someone just falling asleep, right where they are. Am I in the right, am I in the wrong mind frame there for what that means? Or is it or is it mean something different than that?
Amy Frykholm 19:43
Well, I think I mean, I think it means on the one hand, did she was homeless, she basically didn't have a home. And so she slept in doorways is kind of like the ancient way of saying she didn't really have anywhere to sleep. But this was one of my early questions. And one of the things I went to Egypt to see I feel like I don't get it. How does a person sleep in a doorway? It does turn out that you know that classical architecture a doorway is much more what we would might call a portico, or an entryway, something like that. So I think there were actual places like that where people and you still see it today, right? People sleeping, maybe on the porch of a church. That would be something like Mary of Egypt, sleeping in doorways. But she would have really had no home after she left her family in Egypt, in, you know, when she was 12. So for at least, well, for the rest of her life. She never had a home.
Seth Price 20:37
Yeah. So the way that you write about Mary, she seems to really enjoy
Amy Frykholm 20:44
sex. That's what the ancient documents tell us. Yeah. Well,
Seth Price 20:48
I can't read though. So I'm saying the way. Yeah, I can't read those. I barely know English. So I don't I don't know how to talk about that aspect of Mary, about how to learn from it about how to discuss desire, in a healthy way. In the culture that I currently live in, wrapped up with the trauma of like, purity culture, and that type of stuff. What would you say to someone like me asking it mostly? Because I am asking that question, but like, I don't know how to hold all that at the same time.
Amy Frykholm 21:28
And I have really, absolutely struggled with it. Because on the one hand, you know, why would I trust this seventh, this, you know, seventh century patriarch from Jerusalem, you know, a celibate priest, patriarch of the church, to tell me what a woman feels like when she has sex, and what she feels like when she has sex with strangers for money. Like, why would I trust him to know what that was like for her. So when I encounter that document, I already have kind of a lot of suspicion and a feeling like I don't, I don't know if this guy knows what he's talking about, I have no idea. And plus, we're talking about at least at the beginning here, a 12 year old girl, which is just creepy. Like, I mean, I think we can all more or less agree on that. So I think it is an aspect of Mary's life that I don't fully understand. And I'm not sure what to make of it. But but on the other hand, I don't want to take this idea that she was having sex because she liked it away from her either and turn her into a victim because she makes it pretty clear that she's not a victim, and that she doesn't see herself that way. And so I struggled to know how to talk about it as well. But the one piece that does kind of make sense to me, and that has made sense to me over time, is that her desire, whatever that was her desire for other people, her desire for sex, her desire for a bigger world, her desire to travel, whatever that was. It led her into a more and more open, more, wholly, more full life. And I think that's worth paying attention to.
Seth Price 23:13
I want to connect, actually, no, I have a tongue in cheek question because it's been bothering me. And it's the only thing that I highlighted in pink. I don't know why I think it probably is. So there's a part when you're at you're at the church for the Holy cellblock or you're in between, and you go one day and you leave empty handed, you come back the next day. And there's a partner where you say, you know, the next day, your mother and you went back to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre determined to find Mary's chapel. This time every other person in the church seemed to be rushing, rushing scrub to the courtyard, follow priests around kissed icons took selfies, and then you write in here. Maybe it was special Russian day at the church. I've continued to worry about that. Like, what why so many, I was taken aback I was reading you, about you being in Israel, and all these Russians are here. And there was another aside as well, if that's the Russian mafia hotel right there, like, what is going on here is a special Russian day or
Amy Frykholm 24:03
since there's so many Russians in Israel, so many Russian pilgrims. Here's another cool thing about I don't know if I know the answer to this to this question. But yeah, there's just Russians everywhere. And so it used to be that these Russian parishes in like rural Russia, would send one old lady on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to take to bring back fire from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And then they would put that fire into their church. And now according to sources that I read while I was there, there are like whole jets on you know, in Tel Aviv, just packing full of flames of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre whatever, that they're getting back to Russia, and I don't know if that's true. How
Seth Price 24:49
do you anyway,
Amy Frykholm 24:51
I don't know now that I'm saying out loud. It doesn't make any sense to me at all. So
Seth Price 24:56
that's like the Olympics but backwards.
Amy Frykholm 24:59
But backwards? Yeah, I have no idea. But yeah, there are a lot of Russians in Israel. And I mean, this the Chapel of Mary of Egypt that I eventually did find, was built by Russian pilgrims, it was clearly a Russian pilgrimage site. And so I think, you know, Mary has a special relationship with, with Russians.
Seth Price 25:20
Yeah, I want to. So let me go back outside of my random question about Russians. So at the beginning of the text, you talk about a friend Ali, and she's, she's speaking with some form of alternative medicine person, your friend had cancer. You know, which cancer is son of a bitch. Anyway, I'm burying my father, a year and a half ago to the I just hate cancer, anybody has cancer. It's it's not it's not fun. But there's a part in there. She says, the person that Ali's talking with you let them get the get the flower in you. And I'll dig for the root. And then towards the back half of that book that you've written here. As you're hiking, you keep seeing flowers. And I'm curious if there is an intentional putting together there of flowers and roots, or if that's subconscious, or? I don't know, it's just a question.
Amy Frykholm 26:14
I don't think I don't think I saw that. That connection. I I know that when I was hiking in the desert, and we were, you know, all but dying, because we didn't bring enough water. And because it was a super long day. And because I'm a really slow hiker. I mean, the thing I didn't say in the book is that the fact that our poor guide almost dies is because of me because I am so slow. But anyway, along that track, those little tiny flowers that grow in the desert, you know, they have no water, you got to wonder how deep their roots are, because how can they grow? And yet, you know, there are these little tiny flowers. And I think I might have thought of them as maybe metaphors of Mary herself, of like this incredible flower of a human being that grows out of soil that really shouldn't produce a flower.
Seth Price 27:27
A question that I kept thinking about, as I read through is, what does our church today have to learn? From not only iconography, because iconography, I think, is as well as is kind of foreign. But from someone like Mary, because the correlations that I kept coming back to my head were Mary reminds me a lot of John the Baptist. I don't know why. Which makes me wonder if she was a seen because I'm convinced that that John was I can't prove that, but I've read enough that I feel like possibly. But what is there to learn? Like, why? What is there to learn from me?
Amy Frykholm 28:07
First of all, in the tradition, she's often set up like that with John the Baptist. So like, if you walk into the church of, oh, what's it called Theodosius in Bethlehem, they've got kind of like, all these women lined up on on one side, and all the men lined up in another. So they're all these images of saints. And all the men are dressed kind of in these, what you would think of as sort of a saint robe type thing. And sure, you can picture in your mind. And then there's John the Baptist, he's got like, this wild hair, and he's mostly naked. And, you know, he's wearing these barefooted and, and so he stands out. And then if you look on the women's side, the women are all dressed in very, what we think of as a kind of iconic figure of Mary, the Mother of God with the drapery, you know, head covering and long rope. And then there's Mary of Egypt, and she's dressed almost exactly like John the Baptist, except just slightly more clothes on. Hmm. So is that kind of mirroring
Seth Price 29:05
mirroring? And so that would be intentional to serve what purpose though? Yeah,
Amy Frykholm 29:09
I think, I think she's that wild element. You know, that wild element of, of the Christian tradition that gets so easily covered up or, or plowed under, by the things we want the church to look like, or things we want it to be, and I think she's just that she's that renegade figure who doesn't fit and isn't ever going to fit. And we have to kind of go out to find her, we have to go out of what we already know, to find her and when we find her, we figure out that you know, at the root of all of this is love. And that's what she's doing in the desert is she's being in love with the world with God with she's in deep communication with the elements with her own nature. And I think that, you know, she kind of is the route in that sense. And that route is love.
Seth Price 30:08
Yeah. So I want to read a little bit of your book to you, but I'm going to read it out of order. Because it honestly, it helps for the question, but it's the way that I read it as well, because it's the way that I read. So there's a part in here where you leave Bishop Isidoros. And I'm not sure if I'm saying that correct. You see, Dros I'm going to go with that. You leave because you're you're in a place and you're vulnerable, and the entire place is empty. You talk about the emptiness also in you that you've been carrying carefully. And then you quote somebody named Goethe or go eth again, I'm not sure how to say that word either, where you say die and become, and then you say, but he left out what happens in the middle, in the between the old life has to be released. And in the middle of that releasing, there might just be an empty chapel, a place to remember in a place to forget a place to lay down the past at a broken altar, and allow what had been to liquefy to empty to let go. Now, I'm not sure what that is you and what that is him. But circling back to right before that you say anything in the process of becoming has to become empty. What is becoming?
Amy Frykholm 31:19
Yeah, this is one of the mysteries of this whole process. It started for me, then got this really great way of not answering any of your questions. When I was at the monastery of St. Anthony, and this is where that that line die and become. And I think the whole quotation goes something like die and become until you learn this you are but a troubled guest on this earth, something like that. So dying and becoming this poet, this German poet and I'll say it, I think the way you say his name is Berta way wrong. So says die and become an AI. Okay, so I'm at this monastery of St. Anthony. And the priest says to me, this priestess father, Lucas, he's taking us around really cool guy, dentist, I really liked him. And he was saying, you know, nobody dies here at the monastery of St. Anthony, we just translate. And I'm like, come on, you just showed me a whole bunch of Crips where a whole bunch of people are buried. And you've shown me all these dead people and these dead people for centuries. And people die here, just like they die everywhere. And it was even more personal to me, of course, because I was like, and my friend, Allie is dying, and she's gonna die. And I can't stop it. And so I was a little bit almost angry at his denial of death. And and this idea that people at the monastery of St. Anthony are somehow different from the rest of us, and they don't die. That's how I took it at the time. But as I went along this journey, I just, I started to observe it everywhere, that we are always dying, and we are always becoming. And it's always happening all the time. It's, it's in every process of our lives. It's happening to you right now. It's happening to me right now. It's everywhere. It's happening mentally, it's happening emotionally, physically, we're in this process of dying and becoming and until we learn that hunger to says, we are but a troubled guest on this earth. In other words, this is fundamentally what life is this dying and coming. And so when I went to the chapel of Mary of Egypt, what had been empty for 60 years, I didn't know what to make of the fact that it had died. Really, the chapel had died. Pilgrims didn't come there anymore. And it wasn't and you know, then Bishop assy Dros sweet, sweet, sweet man points, you know, at the construction materials like well, we're thinking about doing something with it. Kind of like sure you are, you know, in another 150 years,
Seth Price 33:53
or however, that was one of my questions. Cuz she referenced that. Yeah,
Amy Frykholm 33:57
no, they of course they haven't. And, and I mean, I think they were storing stuff there. I don't think they really had a plan. If you've ever been there. I mean, it's the craziest place ever. Things are dying and becoming there all the time. You know, it's just a place of content. Of course, it's the place where Jesus died and became right. So it's, it's this place, an incredible process, but I don't think they were actually doing anything with the Chapel of Mary of Egypt. Now, maybe because I was the first person in 60 years to ask, and maybe more people will go and ask, maybe there'll be like, Yeah, we should have a chapel. We should reopen it. But I was not under the impression that was happening.
Seth Price 34:34
Hmm. So what does it say about the state of possession ship and the church that it takes a Muslim to be there at that, at that, at that chapel at that church to ensure that people play fair, I'm not sure that I'm saying that right. Well, what, what does it say about our faith that
Amy Frykholm 34:53
that that's been true of our faith for so many hundreds of years? Yeah. So quickly, I'll just fill everybody in that and maybe Many of your listeners know this. But at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is the site that Christians honor the death and resurrection of Jesus kind of in this one spot where both the crucifixion and the resurrection were said to have happened 4000 years since the types of Well, more like 1500 years, they've had a Muslim doorkeeper, in front of the church and the keys to the church have been given to one Muslim family that lives in the Old City, and then passes those keys down generation to generation. Because the Christians who are in that building can't get along or agree about anything. And so in order to protect the hole, they have to give the keys to an outside entity. So this Muslim doorkeepers, who are like really amazing human beings and who I really enjoyed when I was there. But yeah, and even inside the church, there are so many different entities, and they really don't know that much about each other, or really spend any time together. So if you ask one of the Greek Orthodox priests, something about the Coptic priests, they don't really know. They're like, well, they kind of they're over there, and they'll send you in that direction. But it's not like there's a lot of communication. They don't have, like, you know, monthly committee meetings, like where everybody comes to table like that. What should we do this month? It's not like that at all. They just kind of go their own way. And it's pretty chaotic.
Seth Price 36:22
Sad. Yeah.
Amy Frykholm 36:25
Unity is not a strong strength of us Christians. We are not. We're not big.
Seth Price 36:31
Not doing it. Well. Yeah. It's almost as though they're all on their own little merry pilgrimages, pilgrimages, unable to enter the space of exam. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of what I got in reading the book of you know, everyone has a pilgrimage to do. And then you should have permission to enter spaces or figure out why you don't have permission to enter the spaces that you should, those those liminal spaces of holiness. Why did you feel led to have to translate the entire, or what you could gather of Mary in the back of the book, I can't even imagine the amount of work that goes into that.
Amy Frykholm 37:09
Well, it all started that started for me. Okay, so a couple of books ago, I was writing a book about Julian of Norwich. So the first woman to ever write a book in English, and I was I was trying to enter Julian was, Julian was the first woman ever to write a book in English, that we know of the first book we have, huh? Yeah. And so I was, I was reading her and I was struggling with a lot of her story as well seems to be something that I do, like I entered the story, I don't get it. Bleeding crosses, weird stuff, illnesses, what's going on, I don't get it. And I found actually, I can pull it off my shelf. It's really awesome. I found this edition of Julian's work in Middle English. And I started reading it even though I don't have any training in Middle English, but it's a great addition. And I was able to look at a lot of the footnotes if I was confused, and I was able to use other translations. But I felt like for the first time I heard Mary's voice, or I mean Julian's voice, and I could really get it because I could hear her through the Middle English. And so when I, when I started exploring this Mary of Egypt story, I, I thought, well, you know, what I really need to do is just read the text, I just need to do the same thing I do, Julian, I need to take the text as close to the original as I can get and read that. And then I'll get it. And so that's when I started studying Greek. And moving on to patristic Greek and then translating the story of Mary of Egypt with the help of my dad, I should say, he was a Greek scholar. So I was not out there on my own on this. But we, you know, we just kind of one thing led to another, we read it, we translated it. And that's what's at the back of the book. But it didn't have anywhere near the effect that I wanted to. In fact, it just made me more confused. And I was like, of course, Mary of Egypt didn't write a book. Like when I read Julian, she wrote that that's her voice. She put that onto paper. Mary of Egypt didn't write a book. She didn't even read and write. And so the fact that I can't uncover or discover her voice, obviously makes perfect sense. But I had to get pretty foreign to the text. And this work of translating it before I had that kind of aha moment. Oh, yeah. You're not gonna get anywhere this way.
Seth Price 39:34
Yeah. What? What is a good practice for so at the beginning of the book, for those of you that haven't read it, there's a part where you're taking a poem or you've turned it into a poem of Mary and you talk about stripping away words that really didn't have any didn't wasn't really doing it for it wasn't really wasn't really holding it there. What I think that that's an important practice of of sifting. When we're when we're dealing with God, how should one approach something like that?
Amy Frykholm 40:05
I love that. I mean, I really did it by a kind of gut level feeling. And I think that is probably the right way at the end of the day right to stay in touch with you to kind of strip away all those voices that say, it should be like this. Or maybe it you know, you're doing it wrong or whatever, and just try to listen for what really is speaking to you. What is in here that and I think this practice happens in Christianity, like with Lectio Divina, right. So when you do Lectio, Divina, you read the text, and you sit with the text, maybe you read it a couple of times. But eventually you're just listening for I think they I think other people have called this glimmerings like those little sparkles that are in the text that are just for you. And when it glimmers like that, if you take enough time with it, and you really listen, you begin to creep toward what this text is doing in and for and with you. And that's kind of what I do with Mary of Egypt. Although I certainly at that moment didn't have that kind of language to describe what I was doing. I was just acting completely on instinct. This fascinates me, I don't understand why. And I'm going to copy out the parts of it. I like and leave everything I don't like, I don't think that's probably the greatest way to go. But that's just where I was, you know? Yeah, it's just very was
Seth Price 41:28
Yeah. And there's also nothing that says that you don't reread it and copy different copy different words, there's a book that I read almost annually, and I highlight different sections. And it's fun to watch what I highlighted years ago, because the highlight of a legend at the beginning of what year I use yellow, and what year I used pink green book is going to tell us, I can remind me, I'll tell you at the end, it is a long book. But it's a good book. But actually, I think you would enjoy it just from reading this book. But it's fun to see what I highlighted years ago, and then reflect and be like, I do remember that version of me. Obviously, I'm thankful for that version of me.
Amy Frykholm 42:11
But what is so amazing each time you're new each time you're a different person. And the text then is a different thing. And of course, I mean, yeah, after that initial moment of encountering the story of Mary of Egypt, and then stripping out all the stuff that I couldn't make any sense of and really zeroing in on this is the part that speaks to me. And for me, it was that encounter between Zosimus who kind of like, represents the church and marry this wild woman out in the desert, and it was their encounter the meeting the two of them together. That spoke to me, that's what I was somehow looking for in myself and and then that's what I copied out. But then of course, after that I learned Greek for goodness sakes and read that
Seth Price 42:54
you still use that today on a daily like you learn all that to translate this one thing, and then you're like, Yeah, I'm just gonna keep rocking and rolling with a Greek.
Amy Frykholm 43:01
I mean, I have a Greek New Testament, and whenever I encounter something, and I'm like, I want to know more about that, or I, you know, I'm exploring it. I'm grateful to have the Greek to be able to read certain things and like, look at it. But no, I mean, I, you asked me to sit down and translate Mary of Egypt right now. I mean, I couldn't do it couldn't do it. Yeah, I'd have to start Oh, I'd have to practically start over at the beginning. Yeah,
Seth Price 43:23
neither can I. I couldn't do it either. I know what the little I know is I'm hopeful that other people knew because they told me and I memorized it. But I think that's what all translations are of anything that they're this old. So I haven't asked you this question this because I wanted to save it for one of the last ones. So what is a wild woman in the spiritual sense that you're like, what does that look like? Both for Mary, but more importantly, for today?
Amy Frykholm 43:50
I am still trying to answer that question. And I answer I feel like I turn it over and over in my head all the time. And I don't always get to the same place, which probably is the essence of a wild woman. So to start with a wild woman is an archetype. So it's a kind of representation of a way of being in the world that matters and is layered on with other ways of being, I would say. So for me, it's a kind of essence, it's a, it's a person who's been stripped down to the essence of their being. And they are in deep contact with the elemental aspects of life. They're in contact with the wind and the water and the air and the ground. So it has some it has an elemental aspect to it. And then it has a willingness to go out into the unknown, to to risk to step out of what makes a person comfortable and go into what is uncomfortable. And so I would say those are the two maybe key pieces For me, the abandoning of the known for the unknown, that willingness to venture out and, and see things in the most elemental way that you can?
Seth Price 45:10
Do you think that the church in the country that you and I live in are perfect or are prepared for anyone of any gender to present themselves with that? posture?
Amy Frykholm 45:25
No, I can't really imagine it. Um, but you know, I think I, you know, I work for this magazine called The Christian century. And next, next month, we're going to be publishing a, an issue that's has desert stories in it, of people who have gone into the desert to do different sorts of things. And there's a beautiful essay in that written by Belden lane, who's written a lot about the desert, and he writes about going into the desert to mourn his son. And there's a kind of similar stripped down, elemental willingness to suffer, and be in pain and face what he didn't know about himself. In that landscape, that I think speaks can speak to all of us because we're all you know, life, we're always dying and becoming, I guess it comes down to that. And that is not a peaceful process, or, you know, an easy one. Yeah.
Seth Price 46:25
What are a handful of things that you think the church as a whole unrelated to the book, need to intentionally be allowed to talk about, or question or doubt in our congregations? And if we can't, then the churches we know, it really has no hope for a path forward?
Amy Frykholm 46:41
Well, that's a big question said, I. Really. I know if you've read it, when you read my other books, you'll notice that I try really hard never to speak of the church. I don't have the faintest idea. But
Seth Price 46:53
it's the one question I use as a play on words of the name of the podcast. So those things that we should do,
Amy Frykholm 46:59
and shirts, right? Um, gosh, I'm so I, I don't know, I don't know the answer. But I, I go to this little church here in Leadville, Colorado, but is a really strange place. And it always has been a really strange place. And I, I don't actually know very much about other churches, because I don't really go to them. So I kind of just have this one little tiny church that's that I call the land of the Misfit Toys, you know, like the the jack in the box, whose name is Charlie. That's kind of
Seth Price 47:41
isn't there a bird with firetruck wheels? Or something? Or like a
Amy Frykholm 47:45
yeah, there is definitely wheels that are involved in some weird way. For sure. Um, and so I feel like one of the things that I've read, the reason I am at this church is because people said really inappropriate things there all the time. And I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen in other places. So like, there was this one day where Allie was preaching, she's barefoot, she's sitting. She she often preached barefoot and sitting on the altar right there. And on the steps leading up to the altar, and she was sitting there, and she was preaching on amazing man who had the Met, the man who had unclean spirit. And in front of me was sitting this guy named Derek, who was an alcoholic, like really hardcore alcoholic, and he was drunk that day. And as she was preaching, he raised his said, Yes. And he said, Am I an unclean spirits? And there was some silence, you know, it was pretty awkward. And I could tell that Allie was sort of struggling with herself over that, like, should she say? No? Should she say yes? Should she say let's talk about this later? And I think I think what she said, if I remember right, was, that's a really interesting question. So we proceeded from there. And I think that is one of those things that I I do think was missing. If, if I have any idea what's going on out there in the church, writ large. We're missing that moment of meeting people in those raw places where they they are not fully themselves, maybe but but it really hurts there. You know, and I think, St. George, this place in Leadville, has been full of those sort of awkward moments where people say more than maybe they meant to or maybe they should, and it's been treated with with dignity and treated with honesty. And so I think that without that experience, I think it would have been pretty hard for me to take a wild woman journey like the one I took because I was here writing that with me? Yeah.
Seth Price 50:01
For you, Amy, when you try to put words to whatever God is, or the Divine is, what is that?
Amy Frykholm 50:15
Love? And that's a trite answer. But it's only when I really have you know that, that at the root of this is love, that what we're doing is love that this process of dying and becoming is love that all of it is somehow in some mysterious way. Love that we are being welcomed into that we are being taught that we're being changed into love. I think that for me is the divine. No, the holy
Seth Price 50:49
Yeah, God. Yeah, I like it. I like it. It is it's an ease. It's not. It's not a trite answer. So I've asked that question of everyone for almost two years now. And into the end of the year, the last episode of the years, just that answer mixed together, there is none of me. It's just that repetitive does back to back to back. And they are people that say they're freakin powerful. But I've had people that are sick on this show and atheist on the show, and it doesn't matter. Everybody gets the question. It's just so fun. So cool. Yeah, it's
Amy Frykholm 51:23
picked up. When I at one point I did. I had people I was at an event and I had people do little mini book reviews of wild woman, and one to one woman got up and she just took a passage where I had written about God, and she just inserted the word love. And she just asked the people in the audience to notice what's what's the difference? What what happens when I did that? And that was kind of fascinating.
Seth Price 51:46
Yeah, where would you direct people to, to, to do all the things that that are aiming to follow what you do to read the stuff that you edit a Christian century? I think editing is what you do, like, where would you direct people towards?
Amy Frykholm 52:00
Oh, gosh, um, well, for sure. The Christian century, you know, the magazine itself, Christian century.org. And it's an it's an amazing magazine with a lots of fascinating takes on religion and culture and politics. And it's been around for a really long time. So it's a century, at least a century, I think the century they're referring to is the 20th century, from the perspective of the 19. Yeah, but that breaks the joke, and also didn't really work. I mean, the 20th century wasn't much of a Christian century anyway. But um, anyway, I also my website, Amy for combs, calm. I don't I don't do a lot with it. But you know, the basics. You can find the basics there. And yeah, I would say,
Seth Price 52:42
Yeah, good. Amy, thank you for your time tonight. I've I've enjoyed it quite a bit. And thanks for the book as well, yeah.
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