Episode 119 - Am I Impure?

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hey everybody welcome to season six of the liturgist podcast a few pieces of news before we launch into the episode here first of all we're trying some new things for season six we're shortening the episodes we're going weekly and as you'll hear shortly in the intro we are pulling apart the stories that pull us apart in this season and we're pulling these stories from the topics that you all voted on and i've got to say that so far i'm really excited about this season we already have several recorded and i think it's gonna be amazing one other piece of news about season six that's a little sadder is that we won't be hearing from science mike so much on the main feed here a lot of you know this already either from social media or patreon or the website but if you've been following mike's story at all over the last year you know he's had a lot of health issues and life circumstances that have made it necessary for him to take a step back from a lot of things in his life so while we love and are supporting mike and his s science mike podcast is still on the liturgist network we'll be seeing less of him on the main feed here for now so that's sad but we love you mike we hope you get well and wish you the best during this time of rest for yourself and then one last piece of news before we launch into the episode here about the liturgist community and over the last several months we've been having all these discussions about why are we here what are we doing with this thing that all these people are listening to week after week because there's always been this like group of people and this community that's kind of organically grown around this podcast but honestly most of our organizational energy has been eaten up by just making the podcast and so often for us it's felt like a podcast that sort of has some community built around it but we've really been shifting our focus more towards seeing ourselves as a community that has a podcast as opposed to a podcast that has a community and with that discussion a lot of ideas have been bubbling up that i'm super excited about we'll tell you more about some of them uh starting next week and as the new year unfolds in the next couple months but one of the things that the community is doing is a weekly online gathering that we're calling the sunday thing and we'll tell you more about that at the end of today's episode so stay tuned for that i'm really excited about that but for now let's get into the episode i hope you enjoy this one i think it's a really powerful one personally i think you're gonna like it enjoy our world is built of stories sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other the liturgists podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart today's story i am impure welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody my name is michael gunger today hilary mcbride and i are interviewing linda k klein author of the book pure about this story this myth i am impure that so many of us have been handed and conditioned by like most harmful stories that many of us are affected by this story is not so overtly stated all the time maybe you haven't had anybody say those words to you in exactly that way that you are fundamentally impure but for a lot of us that story was the unspoken framework on which we built our view of ourselves and our sexuality and our spirituality even our views of god and ultimate reality this idea of keeping ourselves pure sexually was a big deal i had this thing called a purity ring my dad gave it to me it was gold had diamonds in it it was basically like a wedding ring to jesus until i got married and then i could well i don't know i guess get divorced to jesus so i could have sex with my wife i don't know they didn't talk much about that part of it but the idea was clear i was impure unless i followed a very narrow road and did the exact right things you know of course most of us were never able to perfectly follow this sexless dateless kissless spiritual path to the you know blissful silk pajama virgin sex ceremony of our wedding nights where jesus could finally watch us do the no pants dance with joy in his heart because our love had finally been made pure thanks to the pastor keith and the great state of oklahoma so most of us were impacted by purity culture uh in ways that left a lot of us with a lot of guilt and shame for some of us sometimes even trauma and this story even for those of us who may have left the outward uh shackles of purity culture many of us are still impacted by this story that i am impure in ways that we may or may not be conscious of [Music] here's linda i was raised in the midwest and became an evangelical christian when i was in seventh grade and utterly and absolutely fell in love with every single piece of it you know and in the early years it became my identity i really i really feel like i embodied that sort of born-again spirit of death to the old self and birth of a whole new a whole new self and then as i started to grow a little bit older i started to see some of the shadow sides of the community and in particular this unconditional love that i had fallen in love with that i wanted to be a part of bringing to the world seeming increasingly conditional and for me a big part of that was that i found myself sexualized at every turn whereas i had other friends who weren't sexualized who were desexualized because they you know didn't dress feminine enough or whatever it is right but for me the story was that i was a stumbling block for the men and boys in my community and that they would trip over me on their pathway to god because i was talking with the boys that day in a way that they perceived as flirtatious or wearing something that they perceived as too sexual and it just got to the point where it started to feel like it just didn't matter what i did right there was something about me that was always going to be bad and so this feeling of i am impure that you all introduced at the beginning of this was such an overwhelming feeling for me that eventually it had a major role to play in why i left the community and when i left i thought that i would now suddenly not struggle with any of the sexual shame or the fear or the anxiety that i had experienced growing up and in fact i found that now that i was starting to explore my sexuality and starting to explore my confidence that uh those things that shame and that fear and the anxiety was more triggered than ever and that in fact that feeling of impurity had been so deeply internalized that now that i was taking actions or even just you know exploring in my mind the possibility of taking actions you know it was triggering these things in a way that was creating these ptsd like experiences nightmares severe panic physical reactions you know falling into the corner of a bed in a heap of tears every time we even explore the possibility of sex outside of marriage taking pregnancy tests though i wasn't having sex and feeling utterly broken utterly alone and like i would absolutely never have a healthy relationship and it was then that i started to call up my girlfriends from back home in my church youth group and tell them what was happening to me really just in this desperate hope that i might not be the only one and that maybe there would be some some glimmer of recognition in someone else in a way that would allow me to imagine i could heal because my secular community was flabbergasted by me and and that ended up being the you know most life-changing decision i may have made because that first those first conversations that i had with my girlfriends you know i heard my story told in their stories over and over and over again and eventually i moved back to my hometown i did a year of interviews with all the girls i grew up with in my youth group and then that became the beginning of 12 years of interviews with people who were raised around the country primarily in white evangelical christian churches as girls which is my community and my identity but you know a much broader range of people and really started to uncover the existence of this thing that we had grown up in that i had been one of the first adolescents to have been part of this grand experiment that we now know is the purity movement oh god i have so many stories about this i was raised in the true love weights era of 1990s and early 2000s we had all of the uh purity books from the local christian bookstore we had i kissed dating goodbye by joshua harris i lost count the amount of books i read about sex about purity we were taught to wear long baggy clothing skirts down to our ankles and turtlenecks and not wear any type of eye traps certain areas to draw your eye to the chest or to the crotch most of them written by american authors most of them written by men white men that apparently see my body as something filthy that needs to be hidden then it's to be controlled so one of the interesting things about my experience of growing up as a gay person impurity culture is in a sense i felt doubly broken because i had these lustful thoughts but i also had them for the wrong people purity culture never told me anything directly to make me feel like i was impure it was always in the things that they weren't saying they would gather the girls together in youth group to have a purity talk they wouldn't talk about masturbation they wouldn't talk about pornography they wouldn't talk about the possibility that the girls might want to have sex as much as the boys did they wouldn't talk about the possibility that girls might also want to have sex with girls and when you're a teenager sitting there having all of those thoughts that aren't being discussed by your church leaders and you sincerely want to try to do right by god it doesn't just make you feel like you've fallen short of what the christian woman should be it didn't make me feel like i was a normal woman at all i didn't grow up in the church but i still feel like the message of purity and what it meant to be sexual was really prominent to this day i still get panic attacks when i try to go on dates because i think that there's something that there is something wrong with my body maybe so self-conscious it's not like my idea of sexual purity started when joshua harris wrote his book or when that culture when the purity ring idea started coming into culture there was that it was pulling on something that was already there there was this this sort of thing about sex in general or about pleasure or about physicality even that was kind of gross or kind of bad like to be good to be pure god is pure and god doesn't have a body right like that was kind of it wasn't said that specifically but it was like when we get to heaven there's no more marriage there's no more sex it's like we're now dealing with these flesh these carnal bodies and our desires and uh it's like gnosticism and so that the idea of purity being that the body and its natural desires and its natural functions is kind of impure i think i don't think that's something that purity culture came up with i think it's something that it's a strand of thought and philosophy and religion for thousands of years that it kind of it took that strand and really kind of amped it up and made an industry out of it but it's not it's not just the purity culture you can find that in all different religions you can find that even in secular people that it might not be said if you're if you have sex god is mad at you but there's maybe like kind of a be decent yeah well so first of all i think you're absolutely right the only reason that the purity movement was successful was because it was built upon a very strong foundation and i would say that that foundation was philosophical and was you know theological to be sure but there is also a second foundation which is just a global foundation of gender and sexual control and shame around sexuality that causes us to not talk about it in any in-depth way but instead to talk over it and above it you know and an easy way to not talk about sexuality is just to say don't right it's a it's a super simple way to avoid having to get into the messiness of the complexity of you know reality of life right so so i would say a foundation of sexual shame um a foundation of global gender and sexual control a foundation you know that goes all the way back to the mind body division right that was highly influential on early christian thinkers that the the body is inferior to the mind or through a theological lens to the spirit right so i would say that what we grew up with before purity culture and purity movement impurity industry you know as we describe it was this divided sense of self and hierarchy certainly within spiritual spaces that hierarchy was threefold which is that the soul or the spirit is the top top dog right and then that must control the mind and then the mind must control the body so not only are these things utterly separate from one another but beyond that there's a strict hierarchy so the body is this like sinful fleshy you're right absolutely not in heaven right only exists here in this testing ground that is earth right which has created the idea that we can be most pure by being most separate from our body so you know certainly the idea of celibacy has been present for a very long time and that theory is exactly that like how do you dedicate your energies to god to such an extent that you know you don't let anything get in the way not marriage you know not sex within marriage um not sexual feelings not sexual thoughts not anything bodily not hunger right we're even going to fast you know the the denial of the body has been a part of our history for so long that it's not even questioned it's just enough course and so it was upon that very very strong foundation that you had the white evangelical christian church come in in the particularly i would say the early 90s so josh harris's book didn't come out or joshua harris this book didn't come out until 1997 but i would say beyond earlier than that in the early 90s that's when you really start to see the white evangelical church build this much more intense version of purity teachings that hearken back to some earlier eras you know there was a time when sex in marriage made you not as pure of a devotee right you know even sex and marriage was considered impure right not right at least not as pure as being celibate so so anyway so you have this movement come in and and and from a space where you know yes our parents grew up with this idea of sex being something that needed to be saved until marriage and so on and so forth but on top of that we took this idea of sexlessness so way more than sexual assaults right like teaching people that you could become impure by having sexual thoughts you could become impure by having sexual feelings you could become impure by if you are a girl or a woman inspiring a man or a boy to have sexual thoughts or feelings about you you could become impure by any number of decisions and choices and then you bring in the courtship model and as you know as we were talking about earlier you even have someone seeing dating as something that can make you impure or damaged goods right so so the level of intensity that this movement and this supplementary industry brought yes i think was really distinct and when i talk to people who are raised in that movement they do have an utterly different experience than people who weren't and that and one of the things that's really interesting about that is you know the movement the movement just saturated the lives of a quarter of the country right you know we the evangelical and particularly the white evangelical community but it was very intentional about spreading into other spaces so with all this government funding that they you know did a lot of lobbying for for abstinence only before marriage messaging they were able to get the same messaging into public schools and into grassroots organizations and you know into aids funding internationally you know all these other places but the way it shows up in a public school you know to to kind of come back to this question of severity you know might be similar to the way it shows up in an evangelical church but at the end of the day the conditions of an evangelical church are going to be what makes it so potent so like it let's say you get the same message in your public school but it's a one-time thing all right like you hear it once a year everyone around you all your friends are like rolling their eyes you know it just doesn't have the potency that you have when you're in the evangelical subculture and you're wearing the purity rings with the diamonds in them i mean diamonds for god's sake as a young person do you know what i mean like that's how like valuable right you know you've got the purity rings and you've got the purity pledges and you've got the purity sermons and the books and the movies and the music and the nobody rolling their eyes right you know so it's a totally different a totally different experience my mom would pray with me every night it would be the same prayer every night it was her way of teaching me how to pray and what to pray for um and the last thing she would say was asking god that i would remain a virgin until i was married [Music] purity culture taught me that because i'm a woman who loves another woman that my love is not good and that my wife and i are going to hell i think the thing that about purity culture that seems to have made it such a long lasting trauma to me is how it turns your own mind against you how it poisons every new relationship it made me feel like i was stuck in a pit of black tar no matter what i did i couldn't get free it stuck to everything purity culture told me to believe that my existence was dangerous to a man i always knew that as a girl my body was irredeemably wrong i definitely still feel impure often my first response to finding out i was pregnant even though it was something i wanted was shame of feeling like i shouldn't tell my parents even though i literally didn't know what sex was until i was in my 20s as a young teenager i still felt crushingly guilty whenever i had feelings for someone i remember i would pray and pray and pray begging jesus to take the feelings away as if they were somehow inherently sinful because of youth leaders conferences books like i kiss dating goodbye i ingested the idea that my worth as a daughter of god was tied to my purity and my purity was tied to my sexuality i'm kind of scared to get married because i've been taught my whole life that you know sex is wrong and sex is bad and when i get married i i don't know what i'm gonna do with that fear there was this future husband that would be so ashamed to have me as a wife if i were so impure by the time i got to him my mentor at the time literally told me that i was disgusting for having had sex with this man that i loved i finally got married sex was almost impossible at times simply because of the guilt i felt even though i knew that i should have been okay it took me a long time to dismantle it to recognize the signs to see the body shame and the sexual shame even so now that at the age of 32 i'm still learning about my sexuality feel such self-disgust such self-hatred i would feel like i couldn't draw close to god it wasn't until my early 30s where i finally started dating and i had sex outside of marriage and in that moment it was liberating and yet it was filled with shame and guilt and that is when i felt impure and dirty [Music] there's something i want to come back to that you said linda about how how you experienced being sexualized at every turn use that language and in my understanding of of pure the purity movement it's actually a hypersexualization movement it's making everything sexualized including in a premature way that there are things that girls are doing that are normal as part of being being um a part of like a socio-cultural belonging or part of their expression of their identity and somehow these things are being being made out to be sexual and then because sexuality is immoral or impure in some way they themselves are bad i'm just wondering if you could talk to speak to that a little bit about how the purity movement is actually um in in one turn claiming to make everything cleaner so to speak as we think of the term purity being about you know being free something free from contamination free from um yeah a problem or uh something that makes something dirty in some way but is actually promoting hypersexualization yeah so there's a really amazing book that i love um by jessica valenti called the purity myth and have you read that one yeah it's so good and what i love about it is she really brings home how this purity concept um is something that is that is the same whether you're in hyper-sexualized you know um secular culture with uh you know this like what we see on the media and so on and so forth or if you're in this hyper-sexualized purity culture because at the end of the day what you're really doing is you are defining in particular a girl or a woman defining her worth by her body right and whether her body is acceptable to men so within one of these cultures it's acceptable um when it is sexualized in a way that makes them attracted to you and in another of these cultures it is acceptable when it is sexualized in a way that makes you unattractive to them or neutral to them right so in both ways in both cultures what we're really talking about is you know the sexualization and the pleasing the pleasing of men so you know so it's interesting because i feel like a lot of the stories that i've heard from people who grew up within this culture as girls there's almost always a story of the first time that they're sexualized and you know people remember it because they are having these human experiences right they're like running and playing at or praying or you know they're doing something that feels utterly human and that yesterday was fine and all of a sudden they're pulled us pulled aside and told you know that shirt that you were wearing last year that was fine last year i can't believe you're wearing that you know you know what you're doing there's this moment and i think that this is true in you know culture at large there's this moment that we realize and carol gilligan talks about this a lot you know when when um girls change as they realize that they are receiving the gaze of others and they begin to see themselves through others eyes right i see me through your eyes i see the way that you are sexualizing me and it is strange and i realize now i need to be different in order to function you know and i am less me now because i can't just look at the world through my own eyes anymore i have to look at the world through your eyes yeah if we're to to get into this this myth of i'm in pure what what would you say if i mean are we pure are we are we tackling this myth if i am impure by responding just with a kind of blanket statement no no we are pure and if so what does purity mean if not defined by our sexual activity or what someone else has decided about our body like what what is purity if not the absence of sexual activity and and then yeah are we pure or not like i'd love to hear you kind of maybe push back on this myth of that we're tackling today so for my from my perspective i feel like any time we use the word purity to reference a human being we are running into a danger zone and you know sexual purity isn't the only time that we've seen this happen right think about ethnic cleansing right um racial purity right so oftentimes when we're talking about purity and applying it to a human being what we're trying to do is we're trying to control them and make them uh like the common group so anyone who doesn't fit into the common group is you know bad impure out right so when you look at and you know the fact that i use those examples you know is not you know out of nowhere i think all of these things are deeply related right the idea of sexual purity you know is very connected to like white women's sexual purity right and this idea that as a white woman um to maintain your whiteness and maintain your like uh power to a certain extent you have to fit into this pure desexualized or unsexual category to be like the good wife right the one with privilege all of these things you know whereas people of color oftentimes are never afforded the possibility of purity historically in particular you know and today we see the sort of outgrowth of these things are remain sort of present in our lives so you've got you've got all these ideas about who is pure and who isn't pure that is ultimately about trying to create a hierarchy of who who's on top so i would say i'm not particularly interested in reframing purity to be helpful uh for when applied to humankind is what you're saying there that purity and complexity are antithetical i'm saying that purity is is is sort of um inherently part of a binary you know anytime you say pure the alternative is impure there are no degrees of purity so so so let's look at an object lesson to illustrate this so object lessons common with impurity culture one of them is um that you have a pure glass of water and then someone comes in and they put in a single drop of dye right and that glass of water will never be pure again it is utterly impure it is utterly changed in color changed in substance and that there is no there are no degrees of purity right you know it is it is impure you know um so so ultimately what we're talking about is you know you really only have two options you're on the in or you're on the out and and i just don't think that that's um that's a useful way to look at humankind my only my only thought about that or maybe kind of a gentle curiosity would be in thinking about this through the lens of the of the biblical creation story and and the creator or the source being seen as saying it's good it's all good and that being kind of the first thing that's ever spoken over all of life itself i'm wondering if it's possible for us to say to say that everything is pure without it being this kind of a binary statement or negating complexity in some way in which we're acknowledging the goodness of what is of being human of the body without it being a kind of a socially constructed phenomena around what we do with our sexuality but maybe we can't do that with that word because the word has become i mean i understand the irony of what i'm saying but the word has become impure it has become tainted the word itself has become tainted it comes with associations so maybe maybe a better phrase instead of i am impure um is not i am pure but nobody gets to decide if i'm pure impure i'm i'm good my body is good or like if you were to replace the statement i am impure with something that that feels true that that is true perhaps about us in our sexuality in our full humanity what phrase would you use i guess both of you to replace the phrase i am in i'm good it's interesting to hear both of your takes on that i was originally more i first heard your question hillary moving in that direction in my mind of like kind of equating purity and goodness or beauty or wholeness because that was kind of how it was used for me impurity was not being good not being beautiful not being whole not being worthy and um but i see the the problematic nature of using purity even as a concept like you're saying linda to uh to put people within that sort of spectrum of like that that some sort of simple disembodied mind or something is like a pure thing and the bodies are involved minds are involved and there is all this complexity but if the metaphor breaks down any metaphor you use breaks down when you're talking about purity even of a glass of water there's hydrogen and oxygen in that water life is complexity life is dissonance there's no simple like just blanket yeah just follow pleasure or just follow um temperance or there's no one thing but i i do like what you're talking about hillary as far as is there any connotation of purity that what we were looking for what i was looking for in purity culture that i can find that i can find i'm okay that i'm not just okay i'm good that my base desires my base i'm putting quotes around like my carnal desires to have pleasure to have connection to have love to experience the fullness of living in a body and as a body as an organism with chemicals and hormones and desires that that's good that it's fundamentally good and and pure in that i am what i am and and is it you know the water is the water there is no other dye in here there is no other it's what i am is the mix of all of it i am the symphony of all of it yeah you know i'm i'm just keep coming back to this idea of purity being a binary that implies there is like something without occlusion something without contamination or something that's contaminated and i don't know if the complexity of being human is a contamination of that like i think of the complexity of being human as part of the goodness as part of the vitality uh even in some ways the way that we experience suffering or pain so i don't know i'm gonna have to think about that a lot more because i like i like sitting in this tension between these ideas but it looked like you were gonna say something linda yeah i mean i listen i feel like even i am good though that is a useful thing for us to hold on to in times of need you know is part of a binary right if you know i i like the original blessing frame that you're using you know that that it is good is the beginning not not the sinful nature being the beginning so i do like that as sort of our fundamental frame of how we can look at this through a theological lens but when we ask god who god is god says i am you know and and i feel for myself too you know when i ask who i am i want to say i am right because i am good and i am sometimes like totally mean to my husband you know in ways that i like then have to apologize for you know when i'm like you know i'm like oh what you know i am right i am full of pleasure and i am full of sadness and i am full of the complexity of human life and i am and it is good right so so i would say you know when we think about the larger frame of the complexity of life right with its with its you know horrors even you know god tells us it is good now that doesn't mean horrors are good i i don't i don't feel that way and i think it's our responsibility you know to to be a part of really allowing this life to live into its goodness right and this world to live into its goodness that having been said like i just am you know yes and yeah and one of the things i want to say about this is i do a lot of like coaching for people who are raised in purity culture and the thing that i hear most often is that people are um they reject the idea at the top level but they're still holding on to the framework underneath the idea so one of the frameworks that is really hard to let go of is is a binary so you know so so for example you know it used to be if i'm on this side i'm good and if i'm on this side i'm bad and i'm going to try to stay in the good side and then at a certain point people you know don't want to stay on that good side so sometimes they'll swap it everything i used to think was good is i now think is bad everything i used to think is bad i now think is good or they'll see themselves on the bad side i am impure and they'll either self flagellate i am so terrible or their body will do it for them like those ptsd like experiences you know the body will punish them for them seeing them as impure or they'll even like embrace it like yeah yeah i am bad you know and you know so be it but there's a part of them that you know hears that bad language and you know is is might even though they're trying to embrace it might also be hurt by it you know whereas the reality is is that the binary itself the framework itself is the problem and we need to really like strip that existence of of the binary altogether so that so that we're not categorizing self or others that way through through this like this or that framework which is totally antithetical to human life and i i'm in a hundred percent in agreement with you and i think the language that i might be using to say the same thing is that there's nowhere you could go to get away from being good yeah there's nowhere and there's nowhere you could go to get away from from being which is kind of what you're saying and it kind of as a as a resistance to the idea that they're a shame saying it's good is a way to destroy some of those those old stories but truly at the root i think we're saying the same thing that we you are yeah and i want to get away from the idea that the you areness could be shameful or needs to come with shame even in your rejection of the old stories you're not going to another i'm going to be bad you can tell yourself that story but you're still good in that you're still good in your resistance look how beautiful it is that you're finding a way to do something different than was always done that's that's good but if the language the common language is that it that it is and that the is-ness doesn't include shame then i think that we're saying the same thing yeah i agree trigger warning for these next few audience stories they contain subject matter about sexual and physical abuse purity culture to me made me think that i had to marry the first man that i slept with and the second one was abusive and i stayed married to him for 10 years i spent 20 years of my life dealing with all of that came out of that so i hope that my kids never have to go through that in church they always talked about how sexual sin and temptation happens to everyone so as an unaware asexual i always felt like i had some sort of superpower but when you find yourself in a group where everyone's going around and admitting whether or not they struggle more with physical purity or emotional purity i had no idea what to say so as each woman in the circle is staying emotional emotional emotional i'm grasping at straws in my brain because i couldn't just say nothing or that i didn't struggle with either in that moment i remembered the time i had non-consensually had my breasts fondled by two guys at once and was able to acknowledge the sensation was pleasant even while wanting it not to be happening so it was physical purity right and as i say physical everyone stiffens and as i tell the story i'm realizing for the first time in over five years that i'm telling the story of being sexually assaulted and i look up realizing for the first time that it hadn't been my fault only to meet the gays of these women who i considered friends looking at me with revulsion and it turns out the only one discovering that that incident had no bearing on my character was me i was sexually abused throughout my entire childhood the first rape i remember was at age four the first time i was pregnant by rape and incest was at age 12. the first time i was trafficked sold to men by my father i was 13 and so when i attended youth group with my high school friends i heard about how being impure made you garbage made you a chewed up piece of gum made you a gift that had been given away again and again so it lost its specialness i believed it because i didn't know that rape wasn't the same thing as sex not yet and they never said or acknowledged that anything like what happened to me happened to anyone do a benediction [Music] you darling are fundamentally good did they tell you otherwise they were wrong your sexuality your emotions and your desires all the music of the divine humming through your body you are not broken you are not impure you are perfect as you are in this moment [Music] you need not give their lies any more of your attention than they've already stolen from you need not surrender any more of your heart to their fear of your power [Music] your power is the love and bliss and magic that you contain within yourself they're afraid of it and they should be because when you live from that power they can't control you anymore they can no longer use you as their pawn as their play thing so darling beloved perfect incarnation of the all pulsing with life and energy and erotic majesty lift your head up pull your shoulders back and be free free from their lies free from their rules you don't have to listen to them anymore you don't have to listen to me either listen to yourself your own heart your own body your own power your own throughout season six we will be addressing more stories that purity culture has handed us pulling them apart and for many of us pulling apart all of these stories and how they've taken root in our bodies is going to take some time but one thing that can be very helpful as we do this is to do it with each other this sunday the liturgist community will be talking about purity culture and this story am i impure and and together working towards some ways of ridding ourselves of that story and telling some better stories we'd love you to meet with us we talk on zoom every sunday the it's called the sunday thing if that sounds interesting to you just go to the liturgists.com and click join us and uh if you don't if you can't afford to be a patron uh there's a free scholarship option for you to do as well we don't want to create a barrier for anybody that can't afford to get into the community so click that join us and we'll see you on sunday all the love everybody