The Expansionist Podcast

Learning To Hear The Voice Of Spirit

• Shelly Shepherd and Heather Drake • Season 1 • Episode 10

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Awakening to a vast inner realm, we invite you to listen to our conversation where we  discuss the interplay of wisdom, spirit, and love as the bedrock of our faith journey. Throughout our dialogue, we reflect on how the spirit has been accessible to us in every season of life, emphasizing the vital role of hope in rekindling a connection with the divine, especially when our spirituality feels dormant. 

This episode is a heartfelt invitation to experience the Spirit beyond the rigid confines of religious dogma.  We delve into the transformative nature of the spirit of love, a force that can awaken us to a deeper understanding of our purpose in life. We highlight the importance of community and storytelling in deepening our connection to the Spirit, proposing a broader conversation on the often-misunderstood aspects of our spiritual existence.

Step into a sensory-rich exploration with us as we liken the encounter with the Spirit to a taste that ignites a relentless pursuit. We draw on biblical narratives and personal experiences to illustrate how the Spirit compels us to move beyond conventional boundaries and embrace a more expansive, inclusive spirituality. Through the lens of Mary Magdalene's story and beyond, we examine the omnipresence of the Spirit and challenge the notion that the divine is distant, instead celebrating its integral presence within us. Together, Shelly and I seek to understand and honor the diverse ways the Spirit moves and manifests in all facets of life, inviting you to join us on this transformative journey.

Heather Drake:

Welcome to the Expansionist Podcast with Shelley Shepard and Heather Drake. In each episode, we dive deep into conversations that challenge conventional thinking, amplify diverse voices and foster a community grounded in wisdom, spirit and love. I'm excited to talk with you about spirit. I love her.

Shelly Shepherd:

Yes.

Heather Drake:

And based on the tradition that we, both you and I, were handed, I've known spirit for a really long time in my life. What about you?

Shelly Shepherd:

Yeah, it's been quite a few years, I must admit, introduced to her very early on, maybe around five years old, five or six years old. Of course I grew up, you know, being in the presence of adults who understood and practiced the activity of being in the spirit. But I think my first, you know, my first real think, my first real exposure, was very young to that.

Heather Drake:

You and I both grew up in not the same Pentecostal tradition, but a similar Pentecostal tradition, and this understanding that if you're going to have a spiritual life, that there would be connection to the very spirit of God was an idea that was given to us at a very early age, and so the imagination that we have, how we go into situations or into actual study of the Holy Scriptures or study of God and the paths of God, we both have this framework, and what I was thinking about today was that you and I both have agreed that for us, and maybe for a listener as well, wisdom, spirit and love are a beautiful anchor to us, and I love that.

Heather Drake:

The idea is that they anchor us because as we go further in with God, we're going further into ourselves, not in an egoic way, but in a way that says we are the presence, the temple of God, and one of the things that I feel like the early church gave to me was that wisdom, spirit and love were like scaffolding, like that you were going to go above or bigger thoughts, and I love that idea for even our expansionist thinking that wisdom, spirit and love can be scaffolding, but they can also be anchors as we go deep and as we find a lot of hope in listening to the voice of Spirit.

Shelly Shepherd:

I love that image of scaffolding and I don't know, maybe this happened to you growing up too, even though I didn't hang around the Pentecostal movement, maybe as long as you did, because we moved and that church was not available after I was about 12 or 13. But this image of scaffolding, like I got this, as you were saying, it created these on-ramps that allowed myself, even as elementary and teenage years, to test the spirit, to try the spirit right To um, to try something on, like you know, to wear it like a garment and to see how it would feel, like that was encouraged and and then, okay, well, that one didn't feel so well. So I just ran down the ramp, the scaffolding and I ran up the other ramp of spirit or love or wisdom, and I just love that visual that you just painted. That really was a beautiful way of being introduced to spirit, that there was freedom in it and that I was encouraged as a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old, to really understand what spirit might be saying to me, even at that young age.

Heather Drake:

One of the things that I appreciate about what you're bringing to my memory is the fact that spirit is not something to just be learned or to get to at a certain maturity, that it can be part of our entire lives.

Heather Drake:

And if we're struggling with a religion or a spirituality that feels dead or feels not functioning, like it just doesn't match with the world and the trauma around us, then maybe we can infuse in you a hope that the spirit would breathe again into our lives and into the entire world.

Heather Drake:

This idea for me of the scaffolding was from this idea that spirit allowed me a space to, kind of like, build my life, build my spirituality, and if I found that wisdom and spirit and love could be capstones, pillars, keystones, any of those things, but for me, scaffolding and anchor for all of the places that I would stretch, all the places that I would grow, scaffolding and anchor for all of the places that I would stretch, all the places that I would grow. And so I want to encourage, between you and I and everyone else who is listening, that we would invite spirit into all aspects of our life and that we would learn to trust our intuition when the spirit leads us, that we would learn to be comforted by Spirit who allows us to know things that maybe we shouldn't even know, and not about our neighbor, but I mean, without having you know, like someone sit down and teach us something, that we could intuit things by the Spirit, that we could know things that we could trust Spirit that we could trust ourselves in following spirit into more love.

Shelly Shepherd:

Great invitation to talk about. How do we get introduced to spirit, Heather, and this is a question that you and I have thrown around more than one time in our conversations. But it seems like there's a lot of God talk and a lot of Jesus talk, but not as much talk about spirit. And do you feel like that is because we haven't seen her move as much in the last decade or two? Or is it because we only practice the season of Pentecost once a year? Or is it because the feminine spirit of God is wooing and there's just not enough women?

Heather Drake:

The first thing that I think of, when you can tear into any of those, the first thing that I think of is we don't hear enough about the Holy Spirit, in our opinion, because you can't put her into a curriculum, she won't be defined in a little tiny box where you can sell it from a publisher. You know, it's an invitation into a divine dance, it's an invitation to taste, it's an invitation to feel, it's an invitation to experience. It's an invitation to taste, it's an invitation to feel, it's an invitation to experience, it's an invitation to embody. It's not just an invitation to know, and I think that that's hard sometimes to express. And so instead of saying to someone, come and taste the spirit with me, we say here's a little box and a little piece of some words on a paper, memorize this. And I think that that becomes something that we offer to people, because it's been offered to us in that way.

Heather Drake:

But I think that is our whole life, our longing for. We want to taste the spirit, we want to feel spirit, we want to see what she sees, we want to live in ways that are full of life, that are full of joy, and that, at the end of whatever it is that we experience with spirit, that there is more love in the world, that there is more love in us, that there is more love between us, between neighbors, friends, enemies, but that love is the end of all of our following of spirit. And yeah, I think that it's hard to. That's why people called her the Holy Ghost. What do you say of a ghost? There's ghost hunters, there's people that are paranormal things, but that's very different than what we're saying. I think the ancients understood the word spirit to mean the eternal part, the eternal part of us and of the world. And we do go through cycles of birth and death and resurrection, but we look at things that are eternal and we long for them and I think that Spirit reminds us that we can live in those places.

Shelly Shepherd:

It's really good.

Shelly Shepherd:

It's making all kinds of things erupt in my brain right now that I want to say or want to ask, and one of those is I think that there's plenty of examples of how I think the spirit has been chased away or has been maybe experienced in negative ways, you know, by some individuals who wanted to say that spirit only comes in these forms, or that you can only have spirit if you do X, y or Z, like I grew up in a denomination that that really focused on that.

Shelly Shepherd:

You know you're not going to experience the spirit unless you are, you know, following, like you said, this curriculum, this pattern of thinking or this doctrine, and so well, I really want people to experience the spirit of fresh and new, and I know that sounds cliche, and I know that there have been eras where there has been outpouring of the Spirit in people's lives and in churches, and so talk to us just for a little bit about it. Maybe that's where you were going, I don't know. Has Spirit gotten a bad rap and that's just why we don't talk about her as much?

Heather Drake:

Yeah, I think, 100%, 100%. I think that we have done a terrible job as the church in, first of all, making space for spirit. When you first started talking and said, you know, maybe we didn't make room for the spirit. When I heard people talking, even growing up about the spirit in that way, and also I grew up in a tradition where they talked about spirit, spirit was entered but they demanded that there was a period or a time or a measuring of sanctification, and then you could get to this spirit.

Heather Drake:

As opposed to really. The testimony, even through all of the ancient texts, is spirit comes as spirit wills and spirit is not a flighty bird, you know, but there is. That spirit is love and spirit is going to go where hearts and minds are opened to. That receptive consent, I think, is huge when it comes to things of the spirit. And so you know, if you're closed off and you're not interested, you know, I think that those are the type of things that make the conditions less favorable for us to actually experience that. But I believe her to be so good and so delicious that, even if we have closed ourselves off to spirit, that it is so possible for spirit to come and kiss us awake, to drip some beautiful honey on our lip and make us taste the sweetness that she is.

Heather Drake:

And so for me there's so much hope in that idea that there is not a formula in finding the spirit, there is not a formula in hearing the spirit, but she is not a flighty bird trying to keep our ghosts, just having this apparition. That really the spirit is. You know, and I listened to the ancient text in the Genesis, beginning of in the first Testament. You know that the spirit of god is breathing life into creation. The spirit of god is hovering over chaos, and we see the same thing in john's telling of this new genesis in the second testament, where the spirit is there, giving life through m, giving life through Jesus, this birther, jesus. Even in gifting, the Spirit is breathing on them. So this very breath of God offers to us an embodied reception. And I think that that's also a reason why we don't necessarily know how to talk about the Holy Spirit, god's own Spirit, love Spirit. Because what is it like to talk about the Holy Spirit, god's own spirit, love spirit? Because what is it like to talk about somebody and say you'll feel her with your hips, or you'll feel her in the back of your neck, or you'll feel this knowing it'll be intuitive in your gut. I mean, that's very difficult to teach with just a curriculum. You'd kind of have to walk with somebody, you'd have to have a relationship or a further conversation, and I'm confident that that's the way that it was always supposed to be that through community, through the telling of a story.

Heather Drake:

I was thinking about this yesterday because you and I were having a conversation. I went to bed thinking about this, this idea of telling better stories, but that we tell stories in community, and I was thinking about why. We had just been to a funeral and somebody was telling a story about the person who had died and someone from a table across her said oh yeah, but don't forget about this. And then they told another side of it, and it was a beautiful side that was shadowed, because the person telling it only knew the one part. And then somebody else chimed in and I was thinking, oh, that's why we talk about God in community, so that all of the pieces can be represented, so that no one is left out, so that somebody is saying well, what about the way she laughed, what about the way she cried, what about the way she served, what about the way that she loved?

Heather Drake:

And I think that this is why we tell the better story, but this is what spirit does for us when she whispers to us, intuits to us, puts the taste of God in our mouth and tells us how to love each other in a more expansive and beautiful way. We want to pause and take a moment and let you know how glad we are that you've joined us. If you're enjoying this podcast, consider sharing it with a friend, and if you found the conversation intriguing and want to know more about what we're learning or how you can join our online community, visit our website at expansionistheologycom.

Shelly Shepherd:

This is a sensing spirit, this is a savoring spirit, this is a spirit that, once you do have this experience, once you do taste her essence or her presence, there's nothing quite like it.

Heather Drake:

I believe that to be true. I believe that you taste it and then you are after that taste for the rest of your life the sweetness of the presence of.

Heather Drake:

God of knowing to be in the presence, fully loved, fully seen, fully accepted. I think those are the kind of things that make people go to a field, find a pearl and sell everything in order to find that again. Where is this wisdom, where is this spirit? And I think that we would be amiss if we didn't talk about the fact that at the end of our following spirit, it should always lead us to more love, more expansive love. Right should always lead us to more love, more expansive love. It should always lead us to things, to experiences, to thoughts that are more loving toward ourselves, toward our neighbor, toward the world, even toward God. That the way that Spirit expands our mind is always going to be more loving, not more narrow, not condemnation, not a way to oppress anyone else, not a net to trap anyone in, but freedom, this love and freedom, and this, just this beautiful. I like that you use the word on-ramp. You know the on-ramp for the scaffolding that we are enlarging in our ideas, but also the anchors as we go deep within ourselves to hear the voice of Spirit affirm our worthiness, affirm our belovedness, affirm the presence of God.

Heather Drake:

There's an ancient text in the first century, in the first Testament, and the prophet is listening for God and is told you will hear in the sheer silence. What does that mean? I love that beautiful poetry and invitation into the quiet, into the wisdom that happens in the silence and how we engage spirit in those silent places in us. And love allow us to go on.

Heather Drake:

These deep dives with spirit allow us to imagine new, beautiful and creative ways to solve problems that are in our world, problems that are in our relationships, problems that we have even within ourselves. And spirit allows us to co-create with God. In the stories that we're telling to ourselves and to others, we become artists. Alongside of this creative spirit, more beautiful ways to engage the world, to think about issues that have plagued humankind and go. Can we imagine a world where there is no war? I need the spirit to help me imagine how that is actually going to be possible. I need the Spirit to help me imagine what it is like to live in the absolute abundance that God has already put in this earth.

Shelly Shepherd:

So I'm sitting here listening to the thoughts pour out of you and it's such a beautiful expression of who you are, and I'm also holding this tradition of hearing that, these invitations that we grew up, hearing that Jesus lives within us, that God is within us, that spirit is within us, right? I sometimes wonder if we haven't made enough room for her right In how we spiritually approach and identify her presence or her essence in our lives or in our church or in our community. And even if a person, if a person isn't a person of faith and they're listening to this the Spirit is within, the Spirit is already in us. I used to think that I had to reach somewhere and get her and bring her in, or I had to manifest in a way that other people knew that I had the Spirit. But I'm convinced now, heather, that Spirit is our whole body, it's our whole essence, it's our whole humanity, and it makes me think about Mary Magdalene.

Shelly Shepherd:

Obviously, we're in this Lenten season and we're getting to this apex, in a few weeks, of the resurrection and her involvement in that, and I can just visualize, as you're talking about, this movement of spirit. I see her and I see Jesus interacting with her right and calling this forth. That's already within her and she is a model for us. She is a model for how the spirit moves with us, within us, calls us, asks us to stretch to a different realm or a different dimension, in ways that I don't even think the church would allow. Sometimes, right, but spirit allows us to go and I don't know. I just I feel and I wonder if sometimes we haven't made enough room for her. It's very possible.

Heather Drake:

So that's actually one of the reasons that you and I are making a table and this table is big.

Heather Drake:

This table is wide, this table is big enough for spirit and for all of the expressions that spirit has, and I think that part of it comes through practice, part of it comes through having big conversations.

Heather Drake:

Part of it has always been the idea when you linger around a topic, a conversation, a delicious piece of food, an incredible smell. I was thinking when you were telling the story, or reminding us the story of Mary and the anointing, and I was thinking how often the story is told to us in such a I don't know. It feels flat to tell the story in ways with just words, because imagine the smells. Imagine that fruity smell of olive oil, of good olive oil. Imagine the smell of all the cooking and all of the spices that would have been there and bread that was being made, and imagine the smell of earth and sand and dirt, and imagine, you know, like there were so many smells in that. And if we tell a story and we forget about those things More than we want to story, and we forget about those things More than we want to imagine, but not only smells.

Heather Drake:

Imagine all the tastes that were there. Imagine what people were hearing, and not just the words. Imagine the way that the wind came through those trees. Imagine what it felt like in the cool of the day after being hot. Imagine what cool water feels like, or good wine feels like out of an earthen cup. There's so many beautiful ways to engage with the spirit that was doing all of these things, painting all of these pictures, and sometimes what's been gifted to us or given to us is a flat script, is paper and words on a paper.

Heather Drake:

When there's life, there is delicious dinners to be eaten. That Jesus, you know, even said I have longed to eat this meal with you and I want to put my hands in the water and I want to put my hands in the oil and I want to tear the bread apart. And so I see that spirit brings to us a story that reminds us that every moment is sacred, that the presence of God, the presence of good, the presence of love is infused in everything. And if we limit the story that we're telling to ourselves or that we tell to others to be words on a page, we miss the invitation to a life that is full of wonder, of love, of awe, of delicious and beautiful abundance. And I think that spirit is calling us to a much better story, to a more delicious dinner and to quench a thirst that maybe we didn't even know we had.

Shelly Shepherd:

Yeah, and I think I want that. I hope other people want that. What you just described, I know you want that and I think this table and this expression is just the beginning of inviting others into the sensing and the savoring of spirit. Like we've been missing it at our tables, or we've been missing it at communion, or we've been missing it at baptism or these other rituals. Like maybe we've been missing spirit, maybe she's there in all of those situations and in all those kinds of ways, but to actually sense and taste and see that goodness, um, thank goodness that you and I are are spreading this table of expansion, uh, to include her more, and I'm sure this will not be the last conversation that we have about spirit. But what a beautiful invitation that you have offered here in this first cast about her spirit.

Heather Drake:

I think it's essential to the work that you and I are engaging about her spirit.

Heather Drake:

I think it's essential to the work that you and I are engaging that we are not engaging a flat written text.

Heather Drake:

We are engaging a creator, a God, a love, a force, a light, an energy.

Heather Drake:

All of the ways that people have tried to put words on life, on the being that has given us life, and words fail us, and yet we often have not partaken of all of the ways that spirit speaks, all of the ways that spirit speaks, spirit offers herself to us in embodied, just in love, and I hope that when people hear this, the invitation is well, show us, show us spirit. Yes, absolutely, let us feel spirit, let us draw close to spirit and let us go so far into love that we absolutely lose ourselves, that we lose our egos and we return to the love that created us. I'm confident that when I read the words and the witness of Jesus, that's what Jesus did allowed himself to be so lost in that kind of love, so led by spirit, that every miracle was just. This extension of this is what spirit is already up to, and I think that that's an invitation for all of us that we could live in such a way that we could be connected with all of the good. That spirit is already up to.

Shelly Shepherd:

I look forward to that and also to learning and to continue to learn. Like we started this podcast, with our experience growing up, right, and as we have grown and we have moved, you know, maybe away from some of that of that tradition, um, we haven't left spirit behind, and that that's the beautiful part, I think of this conversation tonight is is we have carried her, we have carried her with us and, um, and, and she is showing herself even more and more uh to the two of us in in beautiful ways, that ways that I hope we can continue to talk about how she moves, how she breathes, how she enters a room, how she expands a galaxy, how she is a constellation that is brighter than anything that we've ever seen, that is brighter than anything that we've ever seen. Like there's pieces of her and sides of her that, wow. We have so much to discover and so much to explore.

Heather Drake:

So I'm looking forward to helping to shape this movement of spirit with you. I don't know if you could tell, but I have a lot to say about the spirit. But not just say, not just say. The invitation is to also hear, to taste, to abide in the presence of the Spirit, to learn from the Spirit, but also to stay in conversation with the Spirit, and what a great hope that would be for us. It was our joy to have you listen to our conversation today. If you would like further information or for more content, visit us at expansionisttheologycom.