Spark: Storying the Gospel with Dr. Stephanie Gehring-Ladd
In this week’s installment of the Spark podcast, I talk with Dr Stepahnie Gehring-Ladd who is a theologian, poet and artist. She has an MFA in poetry from Cornell and PhD from Duke. As an artist and theologian she has spent a great deal of time thinking about how to communicate truthfully, honestly and with beauty. She's also spent time thinking about truth and storytelling and what they mean for the practices and habits of listening to and speaking about God to oneself and to others. She has taught workshops on story and storytelling and joined us to talk about story as a practice on this week's podcast.
Part of storytelling involves setting, which she explains in our conversation and in light of that read us her version of Psalm 139
Psalm 139 SGL version
1 O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
2 You know when I sit down in front of the computer and I do not get up again,
because although I went to order diaper cream, I am now checking
whether those rock climbing pants from the ad on Facebook come in size tall.
3 You search out my path from the kitchen to the bathroom and back to the bathroom,
and are acquainted with all the ways I get irritable when Lucy,
who bless her heart wants to wipe her own bottom, uses half a roll of toilet paper again.
4 Even before I open my mouth when I find Naomi on the kitchen table in a lake of milk,
you know whom I will try to blame.
5 You surround me more than the wifi signal in all our rooms.
You can see inside our walls to touch me with your hand.
6 This is amazing. And overwhelming. And incomprehensible.
7 What if I wanted to get away from you?
How would I do it?
8 If I rode one of Elon Musk’s rockets, you’d be wherever we fly.
If I lie down in the country of death, you are there too.
9 If I learn to rise up with the dawn
if I get myself on the next manned mission into the Mariana Trench
and figure out a way to stay down there with the sea cucumbers,
10 even there you will lead me,
and I won’t have gotten outside your right hand.
11 If I say, “This is 2021,
the place where 2020 went to die,”
12 even these dark years are not dark to you;
their night is bright as daylight,
because darkness cannot stay dark with you.
13 You made my white blood cells so they can learn the protein spike on a virus;
you taught my blood to acquire antibodies from my mother’s blood
when I was still breathing amniotic fluid.
14 I praise you, for I am an outrageous creature,
wild beyond my own imagining.
And you made me.
15 You saw how all the parts of me went together,
how breath wove into my body deep inside the earth.
16 You saw me when I was shapeless.
When time had not started for me,
your book had an entry already for each of my days.
17 If it is beautiful, you thought it up. What must it be like inside your mind, God?
How huge it must be.
18 It is big enough to hold dark matter, stuff we only know about
because someone calculated that our galaxy would fly apart without it.
You will never run out.
I wake up. And I’m still here with you.
19 And God? The people who are evil— the people in charge of running secret syphilis experiments on Black men, and putting Coronavirus testing stations in all the rich white neighborhoods, and marketing formula to African moms to stop them breastfeeding, and kidnapping girls for brothels — and so much more — could you take them out?
20 Look how they desecrate the treasures you made.
Look how they curse you.
21 I’m on the right side here. On your side.
I think.
22 I hate the people who are setting your world on fire.
Those people are my enemies.
Even when they’re me.
23 Search me, O God. Look into my heart.
And my racing, racing thoughts.
24 Show me what you find there.
Make me strong enough to bear seeing.
Lead me on to be with you.
I hope you’ll join us for the podcast as we explore these themes more, and most importantly, I hope the practice of storytelling draws you closer to God, to yourself and to others.
