Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

Speaker 1: For he has strengthened the bars of your gates. He has blessed your children within you.

Speaker 2: Welcome to Scripture for your inner outcasts. It's Sunday, June 7th, 2026, the Feast of Corpus Christi. Today is a special Sunday episode of Scripture for your inner outcasts, as we are joined by both doctor Jerry Creed and Doctor Peter Malinowski, the co-founders of Souls and Hearts. They will be offering a joint reflection on today's readings.

Speaker 1: Doctor Jerry, it is good to be back with you for the solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, aka Corpus Christi, and we are here to be with each other and to be with you, especially for you. Exiled parts in our listening audience. It is so good to be with you as well. Welcome. And so we have some really interesting readings for today, as one might expect for Corpus Christi. I had a couple of lines that just leapt out at me. I'm curious what leapt out at you or what grabbed your attention. As we look through this IFS lens, especially into the needs, the desires, the wants, the wounds of our exiled parts?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, there's so much in these readings. It's so amazing. I think when we if we stick start with Deuteronomy. You have Moses like asking them to remember, right, this, this, their time in the desert. And the desert, of course, is such a.

Speaker 1: Powerful symbol.

Speaker 3: For. Right. The unconscious mind. And, and you have these parts that don't remember. Right. And so it's this sort of idea of, you know, remember how for 40 years now, the Lord your God has directed all your journeying in the desert, right. And, and, and so our parts, our exiled parts and don't actually sometimes want to remember, right? We don't want to remember what was difficult and what was painful. And yet here we're hearing about this sort of transformation that happens or not really transformation maybe, but like feeding the idea that they would be taking care of and fed in the wilderness and that, but it would be something like kind of unknown and something new and difficult at first for them to accept. Um, so there's a kind of witnessing that I think Moses is doing as he's bringing up this memory that I think is actually hard for exiles.

Speaker 1: Mhm.

Speaker 3: And, and so I love it, but why do it? And sometimes even in therapy, like people are like, well, why do I want to have to like bring up things from the past, right? That were painful and difficult. And it's like, well, it's not just to wallow in the pain of it. It's actually to see how God worked through that. And there were so many things like the manna is the food that he gave to them that allowed them to survive. And so even if the. It was a difficult journey. And even if those memories are really painful and difficult, we can look and see the work of God in each of those cases and. And in a way like. And that manna, of course, is like whatever manna exactly is. It's kind of like a bread like substance, right? And, you know, of course, link so beautifully with Jesus saying, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you won't have life within you. You know Jesus who calls himself the bread of life. And so and then they all reject that. Well, why? Because from a psychological perspective, he's inviting them into an intimacy that is powerful and profound.

Speaker 1: Mhm.

Speaker 3: And then we see, I think I want to say it's in the later reading where he says, like, I am in you like that within you remain in me and I in him. Like there's this and the one body of many parts that does come up in Corinthians. And so what he's calling us to is, yes, to remember the past. Yes. See, like in Deuteronomy, see how God was there. But then he's not just leaving you there. He's inviting the exiles into deep, intimate relationship with him, into oneness with him. And that can be overwhelming if we just start there with our exiles. Like that can feel like a lot, right where they would walk. Why? You know, these people walked away and thought the teaching was too hard.

Speaker 1: Well, I'm reminded of how, you know, especially you exiles have a very narrow slice of experience and exiles. You can really struggle to access the fullness of your memory, because different memories are much more salient to different parts. Right. And, and so I remember this being really driven home to me in an IFS training when I was in a sculpt. So I was acting out the role of a part that was disconnected from the innermost self of the person who was directing the sculpt. And I was really busy in my role, and I had no idea what was going on in the rest of the system. Like if you had asked me after the sculpt what had happened, I was so embodying that role that I didn't know. There is so much that you don't know about your experience and so much that gets forgotten as, as you alluded to, sometimes I think about parts as being like Curious George, and sometimes they just forget, you know, like they just forget. And so I, I totally resonate with that and parts of varying degrees of, I think, access to different faculties, including memory, including the intellect, you know, including, um, you know, other, other sorts of gifts and, and, and ways of working within us.

Speaker 1: So, uh, but I wanted to shift the attention just a little bit to the responsorial Psalm. I'm focusing in on Psalm 147, verse 13, where it says, For he has strengthened the bars of your gates. He has blessed your children within you. That line, he has blessed your children within you now. And one level, he's talking about this at a macro level, right? Like he's talking about this as the children of the nation of Israel are blessed. He's blessing them. Um, but I'm also thinking about it in terms of the children within each person, that macro, that macrocosm microcosm idea, like our children within us, the little parts within us, the young parts within us are also blessed. And they're protected because he has strengthened the bars of our gates. You know, it doesn't mean that necessarily our protector, parts managers and firefighters have to do all that protecting. There's ways that God protects us, that little parts of us may not really understand yet.

Speaker 3: Well, in that same Psalm, he says, with the best of wheat. So, I mean, our exiles might believe they don't deserve anything good. The only crumbs or scraps of attention. Right. But here the Psalm is saying, no, that's not what God offers. He wants to give you the best. I love that.

Speaker 1: Well, and the best of wheat this year. Here at Nourishing Acres on the homestead, we're growing. We're growing einkorn. I think that's how you say it. Einkorn wheat, which is an ancient grain. And we've had we've sampled this before and it tastes so much better. It's radically different than the wheat and modern in the modern era. And so it doesn't have the commercial properties that are great for like large scale monocropping, but the wheat is just so much more nutritious, so much more filling. Like you could have like a roll or a bun or something like that and feel like, wow, that was actually like more of a meal than, you know, wonder bread, for example, you know, to take it to the other extreme. So the finest of wheat, you know, I think about, you know, these ancient grains, that's a little nerdy on my part, you know, little homesteading, nerdy thing coming out there.

Speaker 3: So very cool.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And then I'm just curious, within the gospel, if there was anything that struck you, um, about maybe how odd this was of. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Like that, that you know. I can see how some parts might react really strongly to that.

Speaker 3: If I remember right, like even the language in the Greek of the eat is not just eat. It means nor to chew.

Speaker 1: Chew.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Like you really have to. So, I mean, we can obviously see a Eucharistic, you know, allusion there, right? Because we do eat. But I think there's another layer to what he's saying about eating his flesh. Like there's something about really joining with him. There's something about. Right. Really, um, you know, accepting our own crosses. There's something about really absorbing his teaching. There's just this unity with Christ that that is like, serious. Yeah. Yeah. And and that's not. And if you really listen to what he says, you know, he's predicting his death all the time. It's not, you know, it's kind of scary.

Speaker 1: Right. Well, and you can see the reaction. This wasn't this wasn't a reaction to the symbolic nature, you know, of of the Eucharist. It wasn't just a, a table, uh, you know, ritual or something. They're reacting to the reality of the language he's offering, right? They're reacting to that. It reminds me of when we were little, you and I growing up. I'm sure you heard this, the saying, you know, you are what you eat. That's what kind of came to mind there.

Speaker 3: Well, and also just to me, I get scholarly on it, but I think of like the, uh, the law, right? The exodus and all that where they're told specifically, you cannot eat the blood of an animal.

Speaker 1: Oh that's.

Speaker 3: Right. Yeah. Blood and yeah. And, and so the idea that like, it's offensive, it's like, because, because blood has life in it in a sense. Right. And, and, uh, and so for Jesus to eat my blood, drink my blood, right? Is, is like he's saying, I, the life I give that my blood gives. You have to consume and be part of you. Like that is radical. Radical? Yeah. To Jewish ears, that sounds even worse than it sounds to our ears.

Speaker 1: Right. But it goes back to that, you know, bread of finest wheat. You can see he's he's alluding to there to also about himself. It's not just manna in the desert. It's not just the finest of ancient grains like corn. It's himself. Right.

Speaker 3: Well, if you had eaten, if you had drank blood from some animal, you would have to go to the temple to become ritually pure, right. Again. Whereas Jesus is saying, when you drink my blood, you're going to have this whole new life. It's like a radically powerful thing to say, you know, like he's also saying, I'm the light of the world. I'm the bread. But he's, he's saying like, my blood gives you life.

Speaker 1: And sometimes you exiles are far more open to this than your managers. Mhm. Like, I don't know which parts in John six led so many people to abandon Jesus. I, you know, I don't really know, but I would assume it was the managers. I would assume it was managers that saying this is a hard saying. It's too much. You know, like we can't process this with what we think we know. We can't integrate it into our way of understanding you or understanding God or understanding the faith. Sometimes it takes our exiles to help us hang in there with your deep desire to be in relationship. That's such a precious thing that exiles bring to a system.

Speaker 2: If today's episode resonates with you, you can find similar content at Souls and hearts.com/content. Thanks for joining us and we hope to see you again tomorrow.

Speaker 1: Well, with that, let's draw this to a close. It is excellent to be with you, doctor Jerry. Such a gift. And we'll invoke our patroness and our patrons, Our Lady, our mother. Untier of knots.

Speaker 3: Pray for us, Saint Joseph.

Speaker 1: Pray for us. Saint John the Baptist.

Speaker 3: Pray for.

Speaker 1: Us.