A Bigger Story: Recent Episodes
Bruce Cole
Welcome to A Bigger Story. Host Bruce Cole serves as a guide to help discover a spiritual framework that can lead to the thriving and flourishing of all, that respects all, and that can lead to happiness and healing for us - individually and in our world. Our goal is to uncover a spirituality that helps heal and unite a broken world; and that doesn't require us to check our brains at the door.
A new season of "A Bigger Story" is here. Faith, hope, and love abide these three, and the greatest of these is...empathy? To support our work at A Bigger Story, check us out at https://abiggerstory.substack.com/. Thanks!
This is a rebroadcast of the very first episode of A Bigger Story from season 1, "Lost In Translation."
When you were a kid, did you ever play a game called “Telephone?” Maybe it was at a party just for fun. Maybe it was at school because a teacher wanted to teach you and your classmates how easy it is for words or ideas to get lost in translation. Much the same way, it can skew our understanding of religious or spiritual concepts when the words used to describe them get lost in translation. Join Bruce in this episode for a look at how that “lost in translation” can happen and how we can peel back the layers in service of a life-giving spiritual understanding and practice.
We'd love to hear from you: abiggerstorycommunity@gmail.com. Also, please consider becoming a digital subscriber to A Bigger Story at abiggerstory.substack.com. Or just follow the link. It’s easy to do and it’s the best way to support our work at A Bigger Story. And if you have moment more, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
As the series Ted Lasso on Apple TV+ winds down after 3 seasons, Bruce zeroes in on the second to last episode - Season 3, Episode 11 - to talk about the concept of grace and how stories of forgiveness and redemption lead to transformation and radical kinship.
We'd love to hear from you: abiggerstorycommunity@gmail.com. Also, please consider becoming a digital subscriber to A Bigger Story at abiggerstory.substack.com. Or just follow the link. It’s easy to do and it’s the best way to support our work at A Bigger Story. And if you have moment more, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
We'd love to hear from you: abiggerstorycommunity@gmail.com. Also, please consider becoming a digital subscriber to A Bigger Story at abiggerstory.substack.com. Or just follow the link. It’s easy to do and it’s the best way to support our work at A Bigger Story. And if you have moment more, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
To contact Adam Gray at Riverside Church at Park & King in Jacksonville, Florida: adam@thinkgray.net.
A monk...a Buddhist teacher...a silent monastery...a distillery...and a few other pieces come together to help us consider when we might want to speak up on behalf of others, when we might want to be silent, and how we dwell in the paradox between the two.
Show Notes:
- The "A Bigger Story" Community Substack Page for more about the emerging "Bigger Story" Community and how to get updates, more content, and how to support the work.
- The Abbey of Gethsemani
- The Thomas Merton Society
- SGI Buddhism and the teachings of Daisaku Ikeda
- Thomas Merton and Dialogue with Buddhism by John A. Coleman, S.J.
- Martin Niemöller Quote from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website
Here's the link to the amazingly deep, fun, and theologically-nerdy podcast "Homebrewed Christianity." And here's the specific show link to the conversation between host Tripp Fuller and theologian/philosopher Philip Clayton, "Philip Clayton: On the Meaning of Life." I rarely miss an episode of this podcast.
Bruce fills in the blank in the episode tile: "Don't Go to [_?_ ]" and talks about expanding the circle of compassion. Plus, a nod to the incomparable Nina Simone on International Women's Day.
Links to people Bruce credits in the show:
Homeboy Industries and Father Greg Boyle - https://homeboyindustries.org/
The Center for Action and Contemplation to learn more about the work for Father Richard Rohr and mysticism teacher James Finley - https://cac.org/
Cynthia Bourgeault - https://www.cynthiabourgeault.org/
The introductory episode of A Bigger Story Season 2 - "The Sump Pump Sessions." Bruce talks about the different approach to this season from Season 1, who the podcast is for, and the "Why" of this podcast.
Music fans: Every show ends with a rock and roll nugget that some how keys to the episode theme. Just a snippet - not allowed to do more.
Here's a link to Ezra Klein's interview with pain psychologist Rachel Zoffness that Bruce refers to: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-book-changed-my-relationship-to-pain/id1548604447?i=1000600805466
Here's the link to the New York Times "First Person" podcast interview about "the orthodoxy of maximalism" with Maurice Mitchell, National Director of the Working Families Party, a progressive political party known for cross-endorsing candidates through fusion voting. https://nyti.ms/3INMfQr
The 19th-century poet and novelist Robert Louis Stevenson was somewhat sickly as a child. One night, he was looking out his second-story bedroom window to the street below. He noticed the lamplighter lighting the oil-filled street lamps one by one and exclaimed, “Look, he’s punching holes in the darkness.”
"Tenderness is the strongest thing there is. If love is the answer, community is the context, tenderness is the methodology - the delivery system. Tenderness is the most reflective of the kind of God we have." ~ Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ
The story of Ebenezer Scrooge is about so much more than only Scrooge. It's even about so much more than those of us who have a house, and heat, and food, and runnning water.
"Spirit!...hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been…I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” - Ebenezer Scrooge, "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens
There are two different versions of the Christmas story in the Bible, and their messages are different.
On the occasion of what appears could be a case of Christian terrorism, wherein Bruce pleads with some Christians to stop it. S-t-o-p, new word, I-t. Stop it. Power substations shot out in North Carolina...a drag show..."they're coming for your children!"...a former U.S. Army PSYOP officer. This one is juicy!
Bruce talks about the admonition from grumpy Christians to "put the Christ back in Christmas," and offers a bit of a different take.
Bruce clarifies some ideas from S1 | Ep24 and suggests the possibility of "evidence-based" Christianity.
A key quote included in this episode:
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.” ~ Thomas Merton
“When we require that all people must say the same words or subscribe to the same creeds in order to experience God, we underestimate the scope and power of God’s activity in the world.” – Rachel Held Evans
The world is on the lookout for people whose first instinct is to love and to serve - radically enough that their love and service somehow disrupts the status quo.
From Bruce:
I want to visit Longyearbyen. It’s a Norwegian settlement in the Arctic Circle. Permanent population - 30. It is the northernmost settlement in the world. And for 2 and half months every winter, it is dark 24 hours a day. Why? Because Darkness and night are beautiful. The darkness holds revelations for us. It draws us more deeply into mystery. Into quiet. Into contemplation. And if we’re attentive enough, the darkness even opens us to new realizations accompanied by a calm…a peace…a reorientation of our souls…that might be just what we need for such a time in our world as this.
What if the spiritual journey we’re called to isn't marriage, it's public transport? You're not waiting for "the one" who's absolutely perfect: you're getting on the bus, and if there isn't one to your destination, you don't not travel - you take the one going closest.
For any of us who are depressed or confused and concerned about the divisions we see all around us - close to home and far away - the path to human thriving and flourishing involves in part a recognition that the flow of Divine Energy and Intention for love and healing in our world shows up most dynamically - most powerfully when we sit with, get to know, and build relationships with those who are most different from ourselves.
In the late 20th century, a priest was excommunicated for proposing the ideas Bruce offers up in this episode. And yet, Bruce thinks this may be the most important "A Bigger Story" episode so far.
The first thing that tyrants do is eliminate any possibility of humor in relation to themselves.
If “church” is wherever the Divine intention for healing, wholeness, justice and reconciliation are happening - really happening - is that what churches are actually communicating?
With thanks to a quote from a guy named Zach Lambert, Bruce talks about the radically inclusive love that should characterize communities of faith but that, sadly, too many didn't experience growing up.
Have you ever bought or sold a house and the contract included a contingency. That idea of "contingency" can teach us something important about God that runs counter to what many think about God. Bruce explains.
Phyllis Tickle was an author and keen observer of the overarching trends in Christianity and churches. She observed that Christianity makes a fundamental, radical shift about every 500 years - like clockwork. Guess what time it is?
In a world that prefers microwaved, give-it-to-me-in-a-sound-bite answers, speaking tentatively and searchingly seems unsatisfying to many. Yet, it’s a way of being that’s open - wide open - to having our answers questioned. It’s a longer, more circuitous road. It requires more humility and more patience. And it’s a road less traveled. But that road less traveled is ultimately a richer path, and it leads to a richer, more redemptive, bigger story.
Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Distinguishing one from the other can help us locate ourselves within a bigger story.
Bruce talks about the idea of an "examined life," using this quote from Parker Palmer as a jumping off point: Our world is in desperate need of leaders who live what Socrates called an “examined life”. In critical areas like politics, religion, business and mass media, too many leaders refuse to name and claim their shadow because they don’t want to look weak. With shadows that go unexamined and unchecked, they use their power heedlessly in ways that harm countless people and undermine public trust in our major institutions.If you value self-knowledge, you will become leaders we need to help renew this society. But if for some reason you choose to live an unexamined life, I beg of you: do not take a job that involves people!~ Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything
Somehow we have to find ways to speak what our deepest souls believe and at the same time to model the power of universality…the power of coming together…building trust…living with generosity of spirit.
Bruce talks about the overarching stories - the metanarratives - that have been provided by religion, how they've functioned positively and negatively, and what it looks like to navigate a world marked by the breakdown of metanarratives.
Is it possible that there's a bigger story to the crucifixion of Jesus than we've learned in the past?
Bruce shares a few ideas about prayer, including this quote from Pope Francis, “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.”
Bruce talks about how physics and a classic rock song point to a path to greater unity in our world..
Bruce was asked if there is a spirituality for agnostics? The short answer? Yes! Bruce unpacks the meaning of that word, "agnostic," and how it even opens up a possible pathway into a deep and useful spirituality. The links below are to Ilia Delio and her book, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love (Orbis Books: 2013) and to Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation.
When you were a kid, did you ever play a game called “Telephone?” Maybe it was at a party just for fun. Maybe it was at school because a teacher wanted to teach you and your classmates how easy it is for words or ideas to get lost in translation. Much the same way, it can skew our understanding of religious or spiritual concepts when the words used to describe them get lost in translation. Join Bruce in this episode for a look at how that “lost in translation” can happen and how we can peel back the layers in service of a life-giving spiritual understanding and practice.
A Bigger Story with Bruce Cole is a podcast for any who struggle with organized religion or know someone close to them who does. Bruce offers a take on spirituality - especially but not exclusively Christian-based spirituality - the points to the thriving and flourishing of all.