“Holy Runaways” with Matthias Roberts
Join us for an all-new episode of the Allender Center Podcast as we sit down with our dear friend Matthias Roberts, author of the upcoming book Holy Runaways: Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion.
Matthias, a queer psychotherapist specializing in religious and spiritual trauma, brings a unique perspective to the conversation. His book is a beacon of hope for those who have felt ignored, oppressed, or rejected by their religious communities and churches. It offers a clear path forward, centered on speaking truth, deep listening, and acting with compassion.
Join co-hosts Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen as they engage in a conversation with Matthias about the origins of his latest book, the struggle between staying put and envisioning fresh paths forward, and the unexpected connections between concrete and our faith. Yes, concrete.
If you’re eager to explore a fresh perspective on faith, healing, and the power of community, this episode is a must-listen.
Plus, don’t miss Matthias’s book, “Holy Runaways,” now available for pre-order on his website and coming to bookstores everywhere on October 3, 2023.
About Our Guest:
Matthias Roberts (he/him) is a queer psychotherapist specializing in religious and spiritual trauma and the author of Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms. He hosts Queerology: A Podcast on Belief and Being and holds two master’s degrees from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, one in Theology & Culture and one in Counseling Psychology.
Matthias’ work has been featured by O: The Oprah Magazine, Bustle, Woman’s Day, Sojourners, The Seattle Times, and many others. In his psychotherapy practice, Matthias specializes in helping LGBTQ+ people recover from religious and spiritual trauma so they might live confident and fulfilling lives.
Matthias writes and speaks nationwide about the intersections between gender, sexuality, mental health, and theology. His newest book, Holy Runaways: Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion will release in Fall 2023.
Find Matthias on Twitter, @matthiasroberts
Episode Transcript:
Dan: There are episodes that are unquestionably ones that we look forward to and let me state that again, I look forward to all the podcasts, but come on, there’s some, I look forward to more and it just happens to be one. Matthias Roberts. First, let me just welcome you before I start talking about you. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Matthias: It’s good to be here. Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this too, very much.
Dan: Okay, you’re going to have to endure maybe a little longer introduction because we’re both going to introduce you. But before we get very far at all, I want people to know you are an amazing author and you have a fabulous book coming out in a matter of hours, days, coming out October 3rd. It’s called Holy Runaways, rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion. Second Book Beyond Shame, creating a Healthy Sex Life on your own terms. Look, you are a remarkable human being, and as you would describe yourself, a queer therapist, you do a remarkable podcast called Queerology: Podcast on Belief and Being. You are an Allender Center facilitator. And then to just say, look, you are a brilliant, playful, kind, honest, but hilarious human being, who for me, captures the audacity of the gospel in all of its beauty and in some sense irony and in many ways oddity. So I hope you can be fully honored by being described as a lovely and odd man.
Matthias: Thank you. Thank you.
Dan: And Rachael, how would you introduce your friend?
Rachael: Oh, it’s hard to top that. One thing I would say is I do believe Matthias may have somewhat of a familiar voice to you. If you had an opportunity to listen to the podcast that Dan, Matthias, and Chelle Sterns did on Lost At Sea, the Shipwreck.
Dan: Lost at Sea. Yeah.
Rachael: The conversation.
Dan: That was one of the most pleasurable teaching realms that I have had being able to be with you and Chelle. So yes, thank you for bringing that up.
Rachael: I just feel really privileged that I get to be a part of these conversations. But Matthias is very dear to me. You are very dear to me because even just in spending time with your book, it was so fun to remember how long I’ve had just a small chance to kind of witness so many parts of your life and these kind of threshold moments. And so just, we first got introduced when you applied to the Seattle School right after college, or even I think you were still in college when you applied.
Matthias: Still in college. Yes.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah. And just I think this was named in the foreword and I will let people encounter it, but you are a trustworthy guide. You are a trustworthy pastor and therapist and thought leader, and I have known that you’re funny, but I feel like Holy Runaways really lets your witty almost like I want to be southern grandma out. I’m like the jokes you made, the ways in which you were so… I was telling Dan earlier, it is like an irreverence that’s so endearing and I just felt so grateful. Just we’ve talked, having my own story of being a holy runaway in many regards. I felt so grateful that at moments that really are touching on deep pain and exile and loneliness and shame, there were such beautiful moments of levity that I think are just very representative of just your human-size-ness and the robustness that makes you, you. And so I would echo all that Dan has said. I think he said it so very well with very poetic language. But I said this to you and I’ll say it again, like what a gift you’ve given us and it’s a real privilege and honor to host you today and for our listeners to get a taste of what they could receive if they were to spend time with this generous gift of story and brilliance and heartache, but also profound, gritty in-the-dirt hope.
Dan: So. How are you handling our lengthy introduction before we begin talking about this superlative book?
Matthias: Trying to take it in? I’m trying to let it register. I think it’s hard to sit with the goodness and yeah, I feel like I am, and I just feel grateful. And it feels like being able to sit with dear friends, but often with good friendships, we don’t get to say these kind of things to each other.
Rachael: Right?
Matthias: So, that’s really fun.
Dan: Unfortunately for the audience, they don’t get to see our faces or in certain cases maybe it’s fortune, but in this case, you are such a kind. I’d also say that so much of the humor in the book is very sardonic, but it’s infinitely far from cynical, even though there are so many reasons for you to be a righteously angry man for what you have endured. Yet there is again, what we’ll keep coming back to is there is the playfulness of the resurrection in this memoir. So let’s at least set the context of the book. And as a gay man coming in and through and with, and for, and against the conservative evangelical fundamentalist community, there is so much that you have encountered in the process of losing, gaining, regaining, redefining, reframing, but believing. And so just to give people a feel of what prompted this lovely book to come to be,
Matthias: So much of it was born out of my own questions. I think in some ways this book is the question that I feel like I have been living for most of my life. What do I do with this faith that was given to me and yet that I deeply believe? And that has evolved throughout time, but I think a few years ago when this kind of idea came to me, it was a sense of I really want to figure out healing and figure out how to reintegrate after there has been so much harm. And I think I saw that within myself and felt that within myself, but also notice so many other people seeming to be asking very similar questions. And I felt like, you know what? I think I have something to say here and have been trained in ways that not many people have been. Much of that came through both of you. And yeah, I wanted to explore those questions within those contexts.
Dan: Well, I think one of the things about the memoir is that irrespective of your sexual orientation, all of us at some level know what it means to be a runaway. And yet I want you to put words to that from the realm of your own story. Yet the reality of we live in an era of deconstruction and an era where there’s very little reconstruction, re-engagement. So you hold amazing tension, well. That’s what I meant tried to say with regard to the ability to be sardonic but not sarcastic, the ability to talk about real heartache and yet to do so with a generosity that is really rare, again, anywhere with anyone. It’s such a compelling model for all of us to be able to hold the tensions of our own heartache with the believing community, with the church, with other Christians, with ourselves. So before we jump in, how now, how have you held those tensions, well.
Matthias: I dunno that I have a great answer for that, for the how. I think there’s such tension within myself, and I think having to hold, growing up in this world where it was very non-explicit ways, but also in very explicit ways to hold I or you to me don’t belong. You don’t belong here. You actually can’t hold these identities that you hold. You cannot be a gay person and a Christian, not possible. Or if you want to be a Christian, you have to change these things about yourself. That I felt and realized I can’t change this about myself. I tried so hard and for so long, and yet still encountering so many people, my community there who were, I couldn’t deny that they were kind loving people. They were. They are. I deeply disagree and have been deeply harmed by some of those same people, but that sense of I can’t write these people off, even if I have been harmed by them, has been a perpetual tension that I’ve had to navigate and have had to look at in many different ways. At first, I thought I can still engage with them. I can try to help them see the ways they’re harming me. I don’t really do that anymore. I’ve kind of switched tactics of, you know what? They can do their own thing and I’m going to do my thing, and then that’s okay. But yeah, there’s still profound tension there.
Dan: Yeah. So in one sense, you have lived well with that tension, tension or at least had to live in the face and the awareness of it for many, many, many years.
Matthias: Yes. Yeah.
Rachael: I want to just pause here for a minute because I want to make sure people aren’t missing what you’re saying. And I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable, Matthias, but I don’t know how many of us in the places we’ve been harmed by communities, even by people that we love and could say, especially let’s say in the past, we do math, seven years with all that’s happened in our world have had the capacity to hold onto the humanity of others in the way you just named. So I’m just very struck and one of the things I have felt in spending time with your labor of love is actually deep, deep conviction in place. And I know that’s such a loaded word, but I have felt deeply convicted in the ways I have not actually loved well as a defensive mechanism. And I just want to say thank you. And I don’t want people to lose what you’re naming as if it’s like you didn’t have a choice when I think you have actually had tremendous choice at many moments. And it speaks so much to your integrity, like your profound integrity, to let the parts be honored and held together with wisdom. And I love that you’re naming, and I think this is true for lots of survivors of different forms of trauma. It doesn’t always mean staying. And that’s why I love the name of your book. There can be something really honoring and holy about leaving, about departing, about saying, I’m not actually going to subject myself to this harm anymore, and in leaving, I don’t also have to villainize you and split you off. But that’s hard, and especially when people are giving you a lot of reasons for it to be easy. Yes, full disclosure, I’m not talking autobiographically at all.
Dan: None whatsoever, but the interplay in the memoir of such rich theological reflection, amazing clarity about neuroscience and honoring of interpersonal relational dynamic therapy and René Girard. And it’s almost like we could, I could unfortunately ramble on that for a long time other than to say this reflection of your life, I do wonder what the process was like for you to write it, because I did have the privilege sitting at dinner with Chelle and Dave Stearns. It felt like it was a long labor to finish this book. I’m just curious as to what you thought and what you see now as the process to be able to create this work.
Matthias: It was a long labor. I think that night that we had dinner, I was like in the midst of, I don’t even know how I’m going to do this. I dunno how it’s going to get done. And for me, and I don’t think this will be surprising to anyone, and yet it was, to me, writing about God is difficult. And I don’t think I had any idea what I was getting into when I first wrote the proposal for this book and was like, well, here’s where I talk about God. And then when I actually got to having to talk about God and these kind of theological ideas that I play with in the book, I really had to sit with, do I even believe what I think I’m trying to write? And sometimes the answer was, no, I don’t think I do. And that made it so difficult to then try to write in a way that felt honest about my disbelief while also saying, here’s what I think I believe, and here’s what I don’t know if I believe or don’t believe. It felt so complicated and I felt really pulled towards, I can just write what I used to believe, but I didn’t want do that. It was painful at times. Excruciating.
Dan: Yeah. I think that’s part of how when I read the book, the integrity of being able to claim I believe helped my unbelief. There is that richness of not merely I believe or merely I don’t believe, but the willingness to feel within yourself, desire. And there’s a brilliant several chapters on desire, and I should say that the chapters are a plethora, but they’re brief. And yet the command of language, particularly of metaphor, this will not make a lot of sense to people until they read the book. But I want you to talk a little bit about concrete.
Matthias: Yes.
Dan: It’s a beautiful framing of the labor that you have gone through.
Matthias: Yeah, I play with this metaphor of concrete a lot in the book, and it was very unexpected to me. I didn’t expect to write a lot about the science of how concrete hardens, but here we are. But the interesting thing about concrete, if you will bear with me for a moment, is that concrete’s a material that gets stronger as it compresses. So this curiosity came to me when I was here in Seattle, we have these floating bridges that are built out of concrete, and they’re massive bridges that float on top of Lake Washington. Hundreds of thousands of cars go over them every day. And I went over this bridge and I was like, this is made out of concrete, and yet the concrete in my apartment is cracking and letting water in. How in the world, how is this true of this material? And what I learned, it grows strength under compression, but is profoundly brittle under tension. So anything that pushes on it without compressing it shatters. But when it’s compressed, it can hold a lot of weight. And as I thought about that, I realized or connected for me that that’s actually how I was taught to think about my faith. I grew up in a world where apologetics seemed to be the savior of our faith. I distinctly remember sitting in front of the TV as my parents played Ken Ham videos describing why literal seven day creation is the bedrock of our faith and how to argue with people who believe in evolution with these airtight arguments that you get out in the real world and realize they aren’t airtight at all. But that compressed, it piled on all of this weight that made the faith strong. But when tension was introduced through the means of empathy in my life, seeing people who were hurting and realizing that what they were telling me is very different from what people in my communities were telling me about those people, things started to shatter. And I have found that metaphor just profoundly helpful when thinking about faith and some of these other mechanisms that come into play.
Rachael: Oh, and I think one thing I so deeply appreciate is one, your brilliance in weaving these metaphors, Dan named this, your brilliance in taking complex theological, philosophical, psychological, sociological concepts and making them accessible. But in a, I think it’s okay to say this, in a deeply pastoral way, and the metaphor of concrete is a deeply pastoral metaphor because these places where the brittleness of concrete starts to fracture and you name so well, you move so tenderly that it’s terrifying, it’s heartbreaking, it’s disorienting. And yeah, I just so grateful for your tender engagement with these realities that is bold. You’re not shying away from how they got here and what they’re connected to. I think so many of us can relate to coming from maybe much more rigid faith structures that as soon as you got out into the real world or encountered world and encountered any kind of tension, I remember one of my professors in undergrad in my biblical studies at a liberal arts school where I had 72 existential crises at least once a week or at least every week I had about 72 existential crises. I mean so many. But he was teaching our class, I don’t even remember which class it was. He was our oldest professor and he was our Greek professor. But I think in some ways he had brought forth one of the complex passages around, Can you lose your salvation or not? And with all these Southern Baptist kids, and he presented seven different ways to read this text in different ways, what it could mean. And we’re like, surely he’s going to tell us the right one. That’s how we’ve been formed. He’s going to tell us which one we need to believe. And I remember him saying something like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I stand on the promises of God, but I heed the warnings. And so much our faith is meant to exist in tension and it’s like a tightrope. And anytime we try to resolve the tension with an easy answer or a false dichotomy, we lose the tension and the whole thing falls apart. And in some ways I feel like you’ve captured that so well, both in story and in memoir, but also in a pastoral therapeutic call.
Dan: Before we leave this, anything else that you want to bring because you really are a concrete nerd.
Matthias: I mean, something that I find so fascinating about concrete.
Rachael: There you go.
Matthias: It technically never stops hardening, and that is just mind-blowing to me. And if it’s mixed correctly, it can self-repair. And I mean that metaphor applied to my faith so much. My faith was meant to harden my faith was supposed to be self-healing. All those things that again, didn’t end up actually being true when faced with human suffering and actually listening to people with stories that are different than mine, but also realizing and recognizing my own suffering and seeing there is something wrong here. This hardness of my faith can’t actually contend with this pain.
Dan: Anything else you want to add about the Mayans?
Matthias: That they used? Concrete, you’re fishing for something?
Dan: No, no. Honestly, I learned so much about concrete that it’s like, I know this could probably be cut out, but we’re not. It’s just so rich a reality. And then to go, did you ever make the furniture?
Matthias: Oh, no.
Dan: Thank God.
Matthias: So relatable, because I won’t give too, I don’t think we’re giving anything away to be able to say, you talk about how you were actually going to make concrete furniture. And this is in part what led to the path to really going on a deep dive with concrete. But it happened at the beginning of the pandemic, and that’s part of what I loved. It was like how many of us, something came on Instagram that we were like, I’m going to start baking, or I’m going to make sourdough, and I couldn’t make sourdough. And I just loved that. Yeah, it could have been any one of those things that everybody else did, but no, you are going to make concrete furniture.
Dan: No sourdough for you buddy. I’m going to make concrete furniture. Just to leave that aside, the category of runaway, I would just love for you to think about why that’s such an important category, not only for the book, but for your own engagement with God.
Matthias: I think the category of runaway is one that I feel like most people have an intuitive understanding of. I think many of us had experiences as children where we tried to run away from home, whether that was for very, I think there’s a spectrum here. Some of us, it was kind of a playful thing. Other people, it wasn’t playful at all. It was, I need to get out of here for my own survival. But that sense of running away from something in order to find something new, in order to in some ways step into hope, I think it’s something that many, if not most people understand deeply. And when I thought about my faith and in the communities that I grew up within, I realized I have run away from this. There’s something in those places that I was like, I don’t want anything to do with this, and yet I want to run towards something I have hope for what this could be, that idea of running away from home to go pursue your dreams, that was really what I wanted to play with in that. And I talk about it that way. I talk about it in the way of also as adults, many of us have had experiences where we’ve needed to run away, where there has been profound harm and we’ve at some point been able to say, no more. I’m getting out of here. And again, it’s usually in service of trying to find something different, advocating on our own behalfs to find healing, flourishing, hope, safety.
Dan: That framework of being able to name something is not right, something is not well, and to depart in some ways it’s a different category in Genesis 12 with Abram’s and Sarah’s departure. But there is a sense in which God always seems to call us out and often into something that is unknown. And yet within that hope lies rich, if not extreme desire, that we are both systemically, theologically, but also often interpersonally opposed to and been taught to be abhorred about so that we don’t enter that desire. So as a young boy, you speak about wanting to run away and you have this very lovely but odd phrase that you only wanted to run away primarily in the winter.
Matthias: Yes.
Dan: And you said, again, not to quote every, but I don’t know why. Have you pondered that?
Matthias: I have pondered it a little bit. And what I wonder is if it was just because we were all stuck inside, so much. Stuck inside with mom, stuck inside with my sisters, just tired of being inside in the winter and cold Iowa winters. It gets cold in Iowa.
Dan: And lemme just say rather bluntly, you therapeutically, theologically are far richer than looking only at that current on the surface. So there is more, would you not say, Hagar?
Matthias: Yes. Yeah. Yes. I think that is true. And my home was intolerable at times, and I think especially these memories are pre-realizing or having language for what was different about me. But that difference was there. I did not fit the mold of what little boys were supposed to be like. And I mean, my fantasy of running away was even like, I’m going to go to Nashville and figure out how to become Amy Grant. That was the dream,
Rachael: Which I just love that little Matthais…
Dan: That is so sweet and yet heartbreaking. I think that’s when the reality of you have told the truth about your family, you have honored such kindness and care for your family and don’t wish to go any further in this other than to say that the deep distress, in some sense, the developmental trauma that you were in the middle of would put you in a position very similar to Hagar. She didn’t have a winter to go into, but the desert really was suicide. It was death. Death is better.
Matthias: Right. And yeah, I think that is a level absolutely where I think it’s true. And my mom would give me cheese sticks. She’d be like, okay, hun, here’s some snacks. She’d never say this, but essentially we’ll see you in a few hours. She’d just was like, here you go. There’s something in there that, I mean, I was so serious, but I think my mom was kind of playful in a way that looking back feels really lovely, even if there’s there undercurrent there of something far more serious.
Dan: And I think that describes what I think Rachael and I were so taken by. That is where there is sweetness and goodness. You honor it. Where there is madness and truly trauma, you honor it. And yet the ability to hold the complexity of that tension is really, as I said earlier, it’s a picture of what we’re all meant to bring with regard to the experience of both the heartache, but also the hope and the ability to hold both of those well is where the runaway has a chance to actually hold that until, and you speak of this until you in one sense reject one community and then find yourself in a shame-bind because you’ve joined another that has to hold the other group with contempt, and then you become as dogmatic as the other side is. And in one sense, it’s just a shift of contempt and dogmatism from one world to the other without that ability to bear again, the heartache of many communities have great harm and great goodness, many families have that. What’s it like to hold it together?
Matthias: Yeah. And I think that’s the difficulty. Yeah, it’s the difficulty. And I feel like I see so often folks who are in this realm of deconstruction, the first step or the first few steps is one of rejecting, saying, I reject this community. I have now found my new community, and we’re going to go and talk about all the ways that our old community is bad and hear me really well. I’m not saying that… I think we need that. I think we need those stepping stones in order to be able to leave to find a new sense of self and to develop that. But I think when we get stuck there, we get stuck in this ever back and forth kind of frothing of who’s in and who’s out, and what are the rules, what are the right things? Who are we listening to now instead of finding something that’s kind of life giving, something that brings flourishing so that we’re able to live our lives in integrated in some ways peace-filled ways that is far more grounded than who’s right and who’s wrong?
Rachael: Well, I was saying to Dan before we all joined together, that part of what has been true for me in spending time, and I’m just going to keep calling it with your labor of love because I feel that this was written in some blood. And that’s what I think about something that’s a labor of love. I think about what it is for something to be written with some blood. This is a costly labor of love that I feel like I rediscovered Jesus in ways I desperately needed. And I know some listening will hear that, and on one hand be imagining, I don’t know if I’m ready to read about Jesus. And then I know other people will hear that and be like, what we’re reading about Jesus? So it’s like, I think again, you have lived into that complexity and tension so well, but I think to the extent you’d want to talk about this, it’s rare for me with people talking about running away and in some ways acknowledging the need for deconstruction to mention the resurrection of Jesus and the literal resurrection of Jesus. And when you did, it took my breath away. And not that I was like, I didn’t expect, I know you. I wasn’t shocked that you were talking about that. It just was the way in which you were weaving this and bringing these stories of Jesus to bear. I just felt so deeply grateful. It felt like, I think you use language of a breeze, like a fresh wind of life that I just felt so grateful for, and again, was in awe of… how? that question of how. So when you say writing about God became a lot more complex. I totally can relate to the binds that were in because of these kind of shame bound polarities. But I’m wondering if you could put a little words to this resurrected Jesus that you’ve encountered.
Matthias: Yeah. I mean, I remember years ago at this point, but back in 2016, pre-2016 election, I posted some lyrics to a song that I really loved. And these lyrics are by a band called The Brilliance, and they say something, Jesus in your weakness bring hope to all the world. And that really resonated for me. So I put him on Facebook as we did back then and immediately started having people comment, what do you mean the weakness of Jesus? How dare you talk about Jesus this way. In my weakness, he is strong. And it made me realize, and not so much a defensiveness, but like a, oh my gosh, the way I think about Jesus has shifted so much from the way from what I was taught about Jesus, Jesus being this strong victor. But it kind of exposed for me this sense of, I think there’s something about Jesus’s weakness, this reality, his humanity, that Jesus was killed, right? We have these disciples who are assuming or thinking this Messiah is going to come in and overthrow the empire and usher in this new kingdom and be this strong victorious presence. And instead he gets murdered, right? And in some ways willingly chooses to be murdered. It tells them not to fight on his behalf. In the garden, says like, no. And that from the perspective of what we consider to be power, strength is profoundly weak, right? Cowardly even. And yet, I think there’s something in that, and this is what gives me so much hope that actually starts to expose through this resurrection that this kind of weakness, weakness is actually, it subverts every system of human power and exposes it for what it is, violence, death-dealing, and ushers in this other form of power, if we even want to call it that. That is love. And in this moment of resurrection. And I do believe in a literal resurrection, and I mean, I’ll say this, I dunno that this is the context where this needs to be said, but I’ll say this, I don’t really care what you believe about the resurrection. I don’t really care if you think it’s non-literal or it’s not important to me. But for me, it is literal because of this subversion that happened that exposed these violent systems of human systems for what they, that is so powerful to me.
Dan: Well, the framework then of faith that eschews all the standard structures for how to avoid shame, all the means by which we subvert scapegoating in so many ways. Again, not to get too geeky here, but your engagement with Alison, Gerard, the framing of a weak God whose strength is in vulnerability certainly stands against the Jesus of empire. That’s the Jesus that thwarts, in one sense, the engagement with shame because we become shameless like him. That is a gospel that even if it was never preached that way in some ways was the gospel below the surface. And I think that’s again, one of those elements of you haven’t been bound to that Jesus, because you couldn’t be, because your body couldn’t be, and your sense of who you were and your identity couldn’t be. And therefore, in some sense though, this will sound like it was easy, and I don’t mean that by any means, that in one sense it was easier for you to see the foolishness of that empire, Jesus, than it might have been for others. And yet your ability, again to hold these tensions, you’ve not as eschewed the seeds of your youth. Yet they have been planted in places to allow levels of flourishing, to reject scapegoating, to reject false use of shame and judgment. Again, we come back to this simple phrase, it’s a superlative labor and one that for anyone who has known what it is to feel disenchanted, disconnected from the community of faith. This is a labor of love, as Rachael has put it well, inviting us. Before we end, I wanted to just read one of your last sentences if that would be workable. “Faith is letting go of certainty, letting those concrete boxes crack wide open and crumble into gravel, then dust, knowing that soon the dust will be swept up by a familiar warm breeze and scattered across a wide green meadow where new things will grow.” It’s gorgeous. And the fact that the concrete becomes seeds, come on, man. It’s hilarious. First of all, something unliving that actually is quite living becomes the very basis that this deadly dogmatism can actually be broken apart and something of the flourishing, as you have put it well. So, Matthias may great, good come as a result of your labor of love.
Matthias: Thank you. Thank you,
Rachael: Yes. And also kindness and restoration for your body. I know books are so strange because you finish them long before they actually come out, but there’s something about them being released into the world that is a sort of ending, but new beginning. And if you haven’t gotten this, we want you to spend time with Matthias’s book, and there’s a special deal going on right now. If you pre-order his book before October 6th, you said before October 6th, even though it comes out on the third, if you order it, you get access to a webinar that Matthias and I did on healing from spiritual abuse. It’s a $49 value. You’ll get it for free if you pre-order the book. And you can find that on holyrunaways.com where you can order his book from multiple different sources depending on where you want to support and spend your money. But I encourage you to do it. There’s much work to be done. We need more healing, we need more courage. We need a lot more love and mercy. And so again, I too say thank you, Matthias.
Dan: Amen. And let’s just add that’s a great deal. It’s a freaking great deal. It any other merch you’re giving away any hats, any…
Matthias: I wish. I’ll make a hat for you, Dan.
Dan: Would you really?
Matthias: Now I just got myself into something. Sure. I’ll make you one.
Dan: I would just take a Holy Runaway hat. Great.
Matthias: See if I can figure that out.
Dan: Fair enough, fair enough. Look,
Rachael: With all your extra time.
Dan: Well look, you’re not making concrete furniture. You got a few hours, right? Again, we’ll just say this could go on forever, and we’ll just say again. Thank you. Thank you, dear friend.
Matthias: Thank you.