And Sons

We’re stoked this week to bring you a conversation with Bart Gavigan. Bart is screenwriter, mentor, Holy Spirit-following firebrand. One week, Bart might be hanging with the higher-ups of the BBC, working with the Hollywood A-list, or passing up on a conversation with David Oyelowo at the pub. The next, he might be helping nonprofits with tiny film projects. Best of all, he’s had a chatty relationship with God his entire life, a relationship that’s taken him, as he puts it, into worlds of beauty and worlds of horror. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about Bart’s youth in slums in Ireland and London, his experience visiting 60 countries in 5 years to make films—during which he witnessed a deaf and dumb school healed en masse, met child soldiers in Sierra Leone, and entered the worst orphanages in the world—and his life passing up on fame to pursue intimacy with God. Sometimes, it takes a storytellers eyes to help you see your own story afresh. This is a conversation to give you a new vision of the world.

In this episode, Sam and Blaine revisit fathering a year and a half into the game. It turns out, fathering is like most relationships, only more so. It requires a few skills everyone should have, like a method for developing patience, a thorough understanding of repentance, and the ability to pick out strands of joy in the middle of otherwise encompassing work. Sam and Blaine talk through these and other practices, as well as some basic tenants of the relational soul, like the fact relationship comes from sabbath, and the inclination of the heart to seek comfort when what it needs is intimacy.

From fiction to film to television, cultures across time have been creating a narrative for the public. National identities, hopes and dreams for the future, ways of placing ourselves in history, all are woven into the simple and complex stories that we tell. What stories are we telling ourselves these days, and what does that reveal about our culture now?

You've probably made some assumptions by the title alone, but this episode is around conversations that we seem to keep having. "If only I made a little more... then I would be happy" seems to be a sentiment that, if not always spoken aloud, creeps in and tries to give the verdict on our lives. Happiness, contentment, joy, hope... these are all attributes that take cultivation, rather than waiting around for them to appear because the time is right.

Sometimes the easiest sages to miss are the ones already in your life—we work hard to avoid that mistake, and today we sat down with Sam Ainslie of the RH staff to talk about work. A career, specifically, and how to keep your heart alive in varied seasons of a working life. This conversation also dives into work stress (how much is too much), direction (do you really need to know where you’re going) and purpose (can you develop a vocation inside a career?).

What do two decades of friendship look like? How is it even possible these days, with travel, life changes, and the difficulties of keeping in touch with friends? Alex Burton and Morgan Snyder join Blaine and Sam in the studio to talk about male friendship, what works, what hurts, and some practical reorientations on how we should be thinking about ourselves and building a close group around us.

In Part 2, Padre joins Sam and Blaine to finish their conversation on social and personal agreements that are killing millennials, and what is possible by breaking them.

"I fear the worst has happened. You are losing heart, may have already lost it altogether." This weeks conversation with Padre centers around one of the articles written in the Winter '18 issue of And Sons, which we hope conveys the posture of love that it was offered from, rather than some assumed condemnation. As Padre writes:

"I believe this loss of heart, now sweeping an entire generation, is deeply linked to some core beliefs that have crept in. I call them “agreements” because they are ideas which have secured a deep agreement in your heart without you really stopping to consider the implications. We all breathe a cultural air; the assumptions we absorb are the very things that seem to us to need no explanation.

Which is good news, actually, because it means you can fight your way out; you can get your hope and your heart back."

We needed something lighter this week, so we thought we'd practice the act of conversation. How to ask good questions and where we go with the answers can separate a bland interaction from a profound one.

Michael Cusick is a counselor, lecturer, and the founder of Restoring the Soul, a ministry addressing sexual addiction through deep, whole-hearted restoration. His work (including two books) centers on a pair of pressing questions: what, exactly, is our sexuality for, and what does sexual wholeness look like? Safe to say we got more than we bargained for - from a definition of sexuality rooted in the Imago Dei and the creative capacity of human beings to a short list of what not to do with sexual addiction, this conversation completely reframes sexuality and offers some direction for the guy looking to be an alive, whole-hearted man whose sexuality directs him into deep union with God.