An interview with Lore Wilbert

starring her new book A Curious Faith

Today’s post is a gift! Happy Sunday to all of us. I reached out to my internet friend Lore asking if she would be willing to do an interview about her newest book A Curious Faith and she graciously said yes. I’ve followed Lore for some time and she is thoughtful and contemplative in her faith. You will not be disappointed if you pick up the book. Even better, read it with a friend and slowly work your way through the questions contained in the book.

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Lore, congratulations on your newest book A Curious Faith. It’s beautiful inside and out. 

Thank you! 

How did you develop the habit of curiosity that is displayed in the pages of A Curious Faith?

By nature I’m a pretty curious person. I tend to want to know how things work, best practices, and the ins and outs of complex things. But I’m also an Enneagram 9, which means my strengths lie in seeing something from many different perspectives. I’ve learned to carry this into my relationships with people by simply practicing it, like any skill. The difficulty is cultivating healthy curiosity about God, others, and ourselves, without edging over into extreme introspection or a kind of curiosity that only serves ourselves.

The goal isn’t more information, it’s more understanding.

A good rule of thumb for me has been, “Am I asking this question to merely accomplish my own ends? Or because I’m really willing to go wherever the question leads?” Asking a question is a relinquishing of control, or an act of faith, as I say in the book.

I would call myself a curious person and considering some of these questions, along with possible answers, at times made me uncomfortable. How have you grown in endurance for that discomfort? 

I’m curious about what made you uncomfortable? Was it the not-knowing? Was it the unfamiliarity of the question? That you hadn’t ever asked it before? Or was it the onus on you to come up with an answer? Or to go deeper than the answer you might immediately give?

Answering those questions helps us to form more endurance for the journey. It’s not easy to stay with discomfort, but like any journey, we know it’s part of the work of arrival. I really love a line from Denise Levertov’s poem, Arriving, where she talks about being like a dog,

“Let’s go — much as that dog goes,
intently haphazard.”

Later in the poem she writes,

 “nevertheless he
keeps moving, changing
pace and approach but
not direction — “every step an arrival.”

It’s helpful for me to think about each of those questions above as their own little arrival. It’s not the end of the journey, but it’s one more step toward it.

Many of us who have grown up in the church have been taught that emotions are bad or, at least, irrelevant. Are there ways to help us see our emotions as facts, even if the reasons for the emotions might not be facts? 

I grew up in a home where tears were anathema. We were sent away until we could “dry it up,” so I learned early on to deny not only my tears but whatever emotion it was beneath them that was producing them. I learned to deny my sadness, grief, hurt, and anger, and from my mid-teens on, actually prided myself on being placid and undemonstrative with my emotions. I thought it was a strength. There were times when the grief or anger was too much to bear, of course, and the tears broke through, but from my late twenties on, I went whole years and whole heartbreaks without crying.

But tears are our body’s way of telling us, “Pay attention to something here.” Tears are facts. Because they are not cold, hard facts, but soft and warm ones, we tend to deny their legitimacy. My question is why? Why have we said that only cold, hard things matter but soft and warm things don’t? I think we’d find the answer most immediately in the recesses of patriarchy, but even beneath that, we’d find the answer goes back to what happened when our first parents first missed the mark: hiding is in our human nature and tears are the evidence of what’s happening within, they make it impossible to hide.

I find it telling that God’s first question to Adam and Eve is “Where are you?” God knew where they were, God is omniscient and omnipresent. God wanted them to say where they were. We have to acknowledge what is true even if it’s uncomfortable or brings us out of hiding. It’s the only way we’ll heal what’s hurting. Saying where we are is a way of acknowledging a fact, even if it’s not the fact we want it to be.

How can we be most helpful to ourselves or others during a crisis of faith? Is there a way to become more comfortable with not immediately seeking answers? 

I don’t know that I can answer this unilaterally for anyone in a crisis of faith. But I know for me I had to aggressively push aside all the opinions and fear of man and worry about what others might think of me, and trust that if God was real and was who the Bible said he was, then there was nowhere I could go to hide from him. That reality really freed me up. The alternative was that God wasn’t real and it didn’t matter where my questions took me. I became okay with both possibilities and realized the only way through was to trust that one of them was true, but I wouldn’t know which unless I let go of the trappings I’d come to associate with faith.

What I learned, really quickly, is that my faith had been more in the trappings—the approval of Christians, flimsy ideas around transactional faith, or “moralistic therapeutic deism,” as Christian Smith termed it—than it was in God at all. Practicing true faith (not knowing or seeing the future but moving ahead anyway) will reveal that faster than any stayed refusal to move.

I don’t know that comfort is the goal when we sit with questions. I think if we can allow ourselves to believe there is something good in the discomfort, that’s half the battle.

If curiosity is a trait that has not been valued in someone’s life and past, how could that person attempt to strengthen their own curiosity? 

Get out in nature. Maybe that’s trite, but it doesn’t take long in some silent woods or on a lake with a loon or a mountain summit or even our own front yard to begin to notice how complex the world is. If we can see how complex a blade of grass or a fungi or the bark of a tree is, we’ll become a lot more tolerant of human complexities.

I really don’t know of a better place to strengthen our curiosity than in nature. I wish I had a better answer but I think it’s notable that God created humans and put them in a garden. He wanted us to learn to pay attention.

Nature also heals, and so for the person who perhaps has a gift of curiosity but has been squashed in the church or world, nature can help reignite wonder. Nothing is really known out there. I mean, even the things we think are known, are still too wonderful for us to really know. Did you see the pictures from the James Webb telescope? Think about it. What if that’s still only a tiny microcosm of what’s out there? How wonderful is that thought?

Thank you for writing the book. I found myself on its pages many times and your honesty about your faith and doubt strengthened my own faith. 

Thank you friend, for reading it and having me in your space today. I’m grateful for you.

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You can follow Lore on Instagram and subscribe to her Substack. She also blogs at Sayable. You can find her book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Baker Publishing, or ask at your local bookstore. She has also written another book titled Handle with Care.