Welcome to the very first Podcast Episode of The Moderate Catholic!

Launching this has been a (good) itch in my side for quite a long time now, and it feels great to finally “scratch” the surface of podcasting.

I am including the transcript below for your listening/viewing ease.

Thank you for supporting me in this big step.

~ Christina

Episode 1 Transcript (includes links for further reading)

Hello, my name is Christina Gebel, and I am with the Moderate Catholic. This is our first episode of the Moderate Catholic, and I'm very happy that you're here. So today I would like to tell you a little bit more about myself, my background, what we hope to do here in our time, listening to the Moderate Catholic, and discussing the topics as well as what we're gonna focus on in the next episodes.

So, a little bit about me. I am a public health professional, specifically maternal and child health, and have been doing that [00:01:00] for about 11 years now. And in addition to that formal training, I have also been a doula for about 14 years now .

But that's actually not the expertise that I am bringing to this podcast at the outset.

I also have a deep love for spirituality and also my Catholic faith. So much so that I majored in theology and undergrad, and within theology, I focused a lot on ethics, particularly sexual ethics. And just developed a really deep love of the Catholic Church and many of the documents it's written, and I started to get more and more into social justice and particularly Catholic social teaching.

Some of the main figures out [00:02:00] there in Catholicism regarding social justice became heroes of mine, and I went on to try to live my life in a really intentional way.

So fast forward to today, which is a lot of years between today and undergrad, but I have remained in my Catholic faith, and one thing that has been a little bit of a challenge to me throughout these years post undergrad has been finding spaces where I can get together with like-minded Catholics and discuss not only my own thoughts and feelings, but also our faith and how it relates to the world that we're in. I noticed oftentimes that as I was moving from city to city and quote unquote [00:03:00] church shopping, which if you're not familiar with the phrase “church shopping,” it's when you go around to a bunch of parishes and try to figure out which one you feel most at home with, which resonates with a lot of your interest and values.

And granted, it's all Catholic, but for those who are Catholic and listening, you might know that some parishes have, let's say, a take on what to focus on within Catholicism. And so for me, the thing that was important to me in selecting a parish throughout these years since undergrad has been where can I find people that want to be in and of this world and also want to be Catholic and want to lead with compassion and social justice, and always putting vulnerable populations in mind whenever we're [00:04:00] making decisions that could affect them.

What I found is that, in every major city I've lived in so far, which is outside of where I grew up in Cincinnati…I've lived in St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, and now Durham. I found that, there are certainly just your run of the mill Catholic parishes with, let's say in aging population that aren't as active, but just go along, have Mass, have the sacraments, have a ladies' auxiliary function that sells, baked goods, a fish fry, all the good things that we remember, or at least I do from childhood.

But there's also some really traditional leaning parishes, and those seem to be. Very popular right now and growing in number. Those tend to be a [00:05:00] little more conservative. And also, there are parishes, which have more of a progressive, if you will, or a social justice leaning, and they might have a rainbow ministry for L-G-B-T-Q Catholics, they're not afraid to go there with the issues of the day, like immigration and so many of the hot button issues that actually we're experiencing right now in spades, they're not trying to shy away from the world or create an alternate world, or create a world as though it should be according to them. But more so a world as it should be according to the life and teaching and example of Jesus Christ.

And [in] those parishes, I feel good and at [00:06:00] home because there's a tension there, and it sounds odd in a way to say I feel good in a tension, but it kind of is, I think, where our faith lives. And that is in the tension of we have this 2000 plus year old religion, the Roman Catholic Church, and a lot has happened in 2000 years, and some of it looks familiar, some of it's slightly nuanced with different players and names and faces.

But a lot has happened, and we find ourselves as Catholics just continuing to wrestle and wrestle with taking the foundational values that Jesus laid out, again in his life example ministry and teachings, and trying to be in and of this world and apply them and. In my personal [00:07:00] opinion, as we keep going down the road in modernity, so to speak, that to me gets a lot more complicated.

Now, we're in this world where people still fight wars and people still get ill and, die and we still have widespread illnesses unfortunately.

But the way in which we confront those things has become a lot more complicated. And there's a lot more within our grasp right now that has never been available, and on the one hand that's good because it shows that we're progressing and we're using our, human intelligence and our ability to reason to solve the problems of the world.

But within it come really deep ethical questions about just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should. And that is my focus on ethics in a [00:08:00] nutshell, and why I naturally gravitated towards that when I started studying theology. And within that, I found kind of sexual ethics and marriage and family ethics, too.

And you'll come to know this about me, but I am married, which I'm very happy and proud of, to a wonderful, loving, compassionate man, who I found a little bit later in life compared to my peers, but was well worth the wait. And he grew up Hindu and it worked for me, not only because he is this incredible person, but I actually really appreciate when perspectives on Eastern theology and thinking come into my life because I think that Eastern religions and thought, enriches really our whole being, but also our [00:09:00] understanding of God, in my case, and even my understanding of what it means to be a good person on this earth and for me as a Christian to better live as Jesus intended.

So anyway, there's these parishes, there's this interest on ethics, there's the social justice vibe. It's been a journey in the modern world since then. But again, going back to why we're here today. I think that people really are craving community and spaces, and for me, there have become less and less spaces out there for so-called “moderate Catholics” who are looking to talk to each other, but not strictly within the bounds of these kind of polarized frameworks that we keep finding ourselves in today, [00:10:00] particularly conservative and liberal.

And as many good Catholic teachers and professors and priests have taught me over the years, if we really are to live into this Catholic faith, it's not going to fit really nicely into those frameworks. It transcends our secular understanding of conservative, liberal, or a lot of other philosophies that have come up throughout the ages.

So, at this point, maybe part of any of what I've just said and rambled on about, might speak to you and, I realize in articulating all of this, that, everything I'm saying is like über Catholic, you know? And sometimes I have to stop myself a little bit and be like, Christina, not [00:11:00] everybody wants to hear about everything you think about Catholicism.

But maybe there's some of you who do. And for some of you who are listening just because you're interested or you, felt guilty 'cause I encouraged you to, I'll try to stop and explain a little bit about some of the Catholic things that I keep, referring to, not only for folks who are less familiar with it, but also for folks who are Catholic themselves.

Because I'll be the first to say, I listen and read a lot of Catholic things out there, and I don't always know everything that they're referring to, to be honest with you. I would definitely love some refreshers on terms and people and all the things that's wrapped up in this like 2000 years of existence of the Roman Catholic Church and.[00:12:00]

I always love learning new things, too. There's a lot that I don't know, I don't really fully understand. I've talked a little bit already about what my focus has been within these years, but I think that was guided by the Holy Spirit, and I think the Holy Spirit helps us to figure out where our strengths lie, where the mission that we're trying to meet in the world is, and as the saying goes, marry those two things. So, you might see that reflected a little bit as well in the logo of the Moderate Catholic. So, there's a dove, which represents the Holy Spirit as a symbol, and the dove’s speaking kind of these audio tongues, you know, so it's a podcast, so it has audio things.

And then again, the Moderate Catholic piece comes from what I've started to describe, and we'll talk a [00:13:00] lot more about in future episodes, which is basically what does it mean to be moderate? And maybe that's not even the term for it. Maybe it's just that you find yourself somewhere that is not on one of the poles of the polarization, and you're just trying to do your best and live in the world and be a good person and imitate the life of Christ.

So, I wanted to launch right into, like, here's everything I think about politics right now and how, the left and the right aren't getting it right. And both of them have major flaws, but I've written a lot about that on my Substack. It doesn't always tend to go well, as you can imagine. I think one hard thing about being quote unquote moderate, and we'll just keep using that for expediency sake, is that you're always [00:14:00] gonna have somebody that disagrees with you because most people do tend to be a little closer to the left or the right, and also you don't really know how to name what you are as evidenced by “moderate,” maybe not capturing fully how you or I feel in these spaces. I think part of that is by design. Like, I think we ingest a lot of things every day that make us think that there's either right or wrong or left or right, or a person is either good or bad. And, I started having a reaction to that as a person because I really do think people are really a mixed bag and issues are really a mixed bag, and our media is definitely slanted in a variety of ways.

I think one [00:15:00] question, Catholic or not, that we're all facing right now is well, where do I stand in all of this? Because this is really overwhelming. It's at times confusing. It's triggering things in us about our values, our beliefs, our identities, our sense of justice. But yet, it all feels so unsettling.

It's like, where can I rest my head because I'm kind of drowning in the headlines and everything that's happening, so again, where I wanted to start was a place where I would talk about that, hey, you wanna be Catholic, you wanna be a good person, but how does that fit into the Signs of the Times that we're seeing, the politics, the policies and injustices that are [00:16:00] happening before our eyes, as well as the things that seem, quote unquote random, but not like natural disasters or pockets of violence that nobody saw coming. You know, there's so much there. And how do you be a person of faith and explain why these things are happening, or even more so what our response is supposed to be to them? But I think we can get there in our podcast.

And maybe just start somewhere that is a little more digestible, a little more personal. Because I do think in all of this and all of this kind of chaos for lack of a better word, that we are living in, I do think that working on ourselves…It's not necessarily a cop out, as some people might say that it is, [00:17:00] but I have thought a lot more about in this day and age. I feel very overwhelmed and sometimes powerless in the face of so much suffering and injustice.

How can I work on myself internally to really, hopefully, have more compassion? Compassion has kind of been my buzzword since January because if I really am living into this Christian calling, I need to ask myself if I am really being Christian in the midst of all of this. And it's easy, I think, to be Christian when you're around people that feel the same way that you do or quote unquote it's easy to love, but it's a lot harder when things aren't so clear cut and people aren't such [00:18:00] a clear example. And they might do really great things, and they might do really awful things.

So I kept coming back to this piece of personal spirituality and growth. And it's helped me in a way, not that I've exited the world or any of these issues, still very much in them, but it has given me a bit of an interior life, if you will, where I can be quiet, sit in the silence and think about that question that I raised earlier:

What really is my role here? What am I being asked to do?

But also I think in order to do that well, we have to really hold ourselves accountable internally. And therefore, starting out with a more spiritual [00:19:00] topic in the coming weeks, I think, it's just a good place to begin.

To better explain what spiritual topic I decided on as our start, I wanna tell you a little bit about a space that I was in roughly three years ago, three and change, which would've been 2022.

We had moved down to North Carolina in 2020. We had bought a house on a beautiful wooded lot. We had adopted our cat Stella, who you'll probably hear a lot about in the podcast. And you might even hear in the background if I'm not able to edit out all the sounds that she likes to make .

We had moved down from the Northeast, and my husband is a family physician, so he [00:20:00] continued to follow that path. And I had worked mostly from home, and most of my work is still in the Northeast, but. I found myself, like many people did after the pandemic started, being a very remote worker and just kind of plugging away at the computer with my cat.

And, my husband, he's in healthcare. He has very hands-on work, so a lot of days he's out of the house, and I started to notice, I guess, in those stiller moments where there was more silence in the house and in the woods that surround the house, that I was having kind of a particular feeling, and that feeling was really, really [00:21:00] hard for me to name.

And at this point in time in my life, I honestly had a lot of stability. Like I had a job and good colleagues and was doing good work and we were finally not renting, and we had a house and I enjoyed all my creative projects around the house, and so for all intents and purposes, things were where I had hoped they would be. We were both very happy. And honestly still are today in this current context, but I was having this feeling, if you will, of nagging, and it was not kind of your typical anxiety or depression, which I am all in favor of talking about, getting [00:22:00] all the things for counseling, SSRIs, whatever they may be. It was different than that and I knew that it wasn't that, but I also didn't know what it was, so I started talking to, my husband, my friends, people that usually are okay with me rambling on about abstract semi deep things, and I kept telling them I don't know what I'm feeling, but I have this nagging feeling of just unsettledness.

And it's not a positive feeling. It's restlessness in a certain way. So there's an energy to it there, but there's also this inertia, too. And [00:23:00] it was very, as you can tell from just that brief explanation, it was very paradoxical to me because, how can you feel restless and in art at the same time?

I went back to this phrase, which I believe is from St. Augustine: “My heart is restless until it rests in you, Oh, God.” I'll repeat that just to kinda let it gel: “My heart is restless until it rests in you, Oh, God.” And that phrase was the closest thing that I could get to articulating what I was going through.

I had a lot of really good people in my life who know me and know where I've been and how I felt over the years. And a lot of them asked a lot of really good questions. Like, well, do you think you're [00:24:00] depressed? And I'm like. Yeah, I, no, I was like, I, really don't think it's that.

It's just, it's something else. And I don't know. This went on for honestly, like probably, prior to 2022. (And I'm describing the moments in which it came to a head.) I think prior to that, maybe like 2019 onward to 2022. I had really felt this in some form and again, it came to the head in the time I was describing in, in 2022, but it was certainly there.

And it was in the background, and it would show up in different ways. And another way that it would show [00:25:00] up to help you conceptualize it, even though I'm talking about a time in my life where I couldn't conceptualize it, was I had kind of lost some of my zest for life.

It was good. Again, I was so confused because I was having all the things and doing all the things, so it was confusing to me why I felt toned down, if you will. There was a kind of lack of the fervor that I had felt for many years, and the energy that kind of came with that fervor, and it troubled me.

I guess I could have said at that point, Hey, it's probably the [COVID-19] pandemic. The pandemic has sucked all the things out of all of us who were, [00:26:00] lucky and thankful to have survived it, first of all. But, I think all of us came out a little wounded, a little worn, maybe a little bit better, but also just carrying some heavy wounds and maybe some traumas from that time.

It didn't strike me as kind of the pandemic slump that I think I did experience at certain points, but this was, again, different and again, frustrating. You're probably even just frustrated hearing me talk about this, like Christina gets to the point, what are you talking about?

What is this thing that you are struggling with? And if you're feeling that emotion right now, that's where I was. I was in this emotion of could it be this, could it be that? Not really, not exactly, but I also can't name it. And so I thought about a phrase that I came up with [00:27:00] shortly thereafter about how to talk to people about this, and the phrase I came up with was, I don't think I'm having a mental health problem. I think I'm having a spiritual problem. Lke, I think I have a spiritual problem.

It is an existential problem. It's a problem of the spirit and nothing materially is glaringly bad, but this goes deeper and penetrates into the level of the soul, you know, the spirit, the identity, who I am. Along that line of logic, I said to myself, okay, well if one has a spiritual issue, where does one go?

I was trying to like, find things to read, but I was blindly searching like I feel [00:28:00] spiritually, blah, you know, what, what book should I read? All of this to say where I settled was on a thing called Spiritual Direction. And for those of you who aren't familiar spiritual direction or spiritual directors within several denominations are people who train to be in some ways a counselor of the spirit.

They are like, in some ways, a coach in some ways, a guide, in some ways a counselor. It feels a little bit like counseling when you go and you talk to them about where you are and what's on your mind lately, what you're struggling with, but they have this kind of scope of work that is not mental health because that really is a clinical problem. But they're the spiritual health people, if you [00:29:00] will. I'd done a little bit of spiritual direction, at different times in my life throughout those years after undergrad. And I'd always gotten something out of it,

So, I started asking around and I really wanted somebody who is a writer and the reason for that was one thing that was coming up on the positive side throughout this was that I wanted to do more writing in my life and not like journal article writing or grant deliverable writing, but just like honest to God, reflective, putting it out there, putting my voice out there, writing that engages faith.

So, I set out on that journey, and I was trying to look for somebody who is a writer. And I asked one of my Catholic writer friends and she referred me to one of her Catholic writer friends, [00:30:00] And that person is Becky Eldredge.

Becky is phenomenal. She is the bee's knees in just about every way. And if you Google Becky, you will see that she's written some books, that she has a whole brand around Ignatian spirituality, which I highly, highly encourage you to support and follow. Becky, thankfully, had some time and availability to do direction with me and within spiritual direction, she led me through something called the Spiritual Exercises.

I needed to spiritually exercise. I needed to get stronger and push my boundaries and my limits and my spirit to really get at what was happening to me. And so the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola are things that Jesuits in training [00:31:00] do in order to strengthen their spiritual lives as they're going about their Jesuit journey. It's a guided experience. Becky had adapted the experience to work with lay people and lay people are people who aren't priests. She had given it to me in a way that was very accessible.

And normally a lot of Jesuits in training would do this during a 30-day silent retreat and they would meet with a spiritual director and it'd kind of be like this 30 day intensive, if you will. But there was an [19th] annotation, Ignatius wrote about that basically said, hey, if you can't do a 30 day silent retreat. It's like, yeah, dude, a lot of people can't do that, you know? Then there's this annotation where you gradually work through the exercises piecemeal and you still do them. Becky told me, she's like, [00:32:00] this might take a full six or so months, and I was like, dang, how long are these exercises? But I was like, okay, cool. And I met with her once a week and that's what we did. We went through this process.

And so, to make a long story short, 'cause we're gonna talk about it in the next episodes, it really was one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life and it honest to God, could not have come at a better time. And even a part of me wishes I had found this experience earlier.

And Becky was the right person for me to journey with. I'm so grateful to her to this day that I had this profound experience with love and tenderness and compassion and openness, and even a little [00:33:00] tough love sometimes, you know? And I walked away, not necessarily - spoiler alert - solving the problem that I had, because to be honest with you, I am still solving the problem, but I was able to name the problem, and if you've ever named a problem that you have had but can't really like name, to name something is almost like to untether yourself from its control. I really felt a sense of deep, deep peace and freedom just in the naming of it, just in saying, this is what it is, [00:34:00] and I see you. I can see, I see you, I see you there. And I was getting more spiritual freedom now that I had named it to actually understand it, and to overcome it. That is where I want to journey with you all in this series.

Because I have a haunting suspicion that, one, I'm not the only person that has felt this way. And two, I think people are feeling this way a lot, and I believe that you want a better world and you want to be better in this world . And maybe you have those feelings, too, or at least some of them that I described, where it's like the [00:35:00] overwhelm, the inertia, the restlessness, the kind of tepidness of your spirit, and if that's speaking to you on any level, I really do think that you're gonna enjoy these next episodes because we're really gonna unpack that.

I'm going to use my own life as an example of how I named it with Becky. It has a name, and I'm gonna talk more about its symptoms, how it showed up in my life. I'm gonna talk about ways that in the Catholic tradition, we are encouraged to overcome it. But I think they really extend to all faith traditions and even just normal people walking around on the street. And then we're gonna talk about, how to overcome it or at least to [00:36:00] live with it in a way that we're mindful of it, and that again, it doesn't have that hold on us, like it wants to, and we're gonna personify it, because I think that it's easier to conceptualize, like, this is a real thing, and we struggle with it.

We're just human beings having a really human experience with a spirit in our body, in a world that is very tough and also wonderful. So that's all for this episode. I really am glad and grateful if you hung in this whole time. And I really look forward to continuing this series specifically on this topic and journeying together on this road.

[00:37:00]

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