The Soul of Shame w/ Dr. Curt Thompson | Ep. 473

Hello there, good listener. I am your host Nick Stumbo, and you are listening to the Pure Desire Podcast, your biblically based and clinically informed approach to healing from betrayal and breaking free from all forms of compulsive sexual behavior. And whether today is your first day in recovery or your 10,000th, we hope that you will hear life-giving conversations that maybe you've never had the chance to hear before. Today is episode 473, and here joining me as my co-host throughout this series is the one and only Ashley Jamison. Ashley, good to see you again.

Glad to be here. Glad to be having this conversation. It's so useful no matter what phase of life and journey people are on. So I'm excited. Yeah.

You know, this has kind of become our tradition in leading up to the summit that sometime during the summer we like to feature all of the speakers and try to create some hype and some excitement. And I really feel in some ways we've saved the best for last to feature and to promote that we get to have back at this year's summit here in 2026, the one and only Dr. Curt Thompson.

So I actually have been sharing about our upcoming keynote speakers. And when I say Dr. Curt Thompson, I have received some looks and even like, you know, I feel like this is— I'm waving my hands. This is the level of intellect that I'm used to studying under. And then Dr. Curt Thompson just bumps me up even a notch. I'm just taking notes the whole entire time. So I hope that is the experience for people at our summit.

Yeah, I feel like Dr. Curt Thompson speaks the language of pure desire without knowing it because his sphere isn't necessarily specifically sexual, sexual addiction, but he's very much into understanding the brain, how the impact of shame on us, how it traps us into ways of thinking and how it might be rooted in stories from our past or traumatic things we've walked through. And then how recovery is so much about relearning where we find the good things that God made us for. You know, he'll talk about it in today's episode that we all long to be seen, soothed, safe, secure, and those are good things that God put into us. And so how do we, in a new way of living, how do we go after those things? And I think everyone— yeah, I took a ton of notes on this one. This is actually a talk that Dr. Curt Thompson gave at our very first summit in 2020. We were getting all excited to have the first live and in-person Pure Desire Summit. And then of course COVID happened and we debated if we should even go on. But we're like, you know what, we're going to give it a swing and we're going to do a virtual summit. And Dr. Curt Thompson was so gracious to say, hey, I'll participate with you. And he recorded this video specifically for us at Pure Desire and for our first summit. And so we wanted to replay it again because I really think it's a foundational talk that is the kind of material that he will be building on in what he comes to share here at the summit. So yeah, I think it's one of those get your notebook out if you can. Open the, the Notes app on your phone and get ready just to really have a deep dive into understanding shame and how we grow, uh, out of that by really inviting others in to walk this journey with us.

Mhm. You say he said he speaks pure desire without even really— you know, he's not pure desire, he speaks it. And, and when you say inviting others in, the one line that just really, uh, stuck out for me was, our brain can do really hard things but not alone. I love when he says that. It's just like, yes, group, we need people, we need accountability, we need community and connection. Yeah.

In this talk, Dr. Curt also helped me rephrase one of the quotes that I've often used, and it's by, I've heard it from Dr. Gabor Maté, and then I think Dr. Curt Thompson attributed it to someone else who said that trauma is not what happens to us, trauma is what happens inside of us. And I've said that a lot, but what he added that I didn't know was in the quote, and it makes so much sense, he said, in the absence of an empathetic witness. That when there's no one there to observe our pain and help us process it, that's when it becomes trauma. And it just— that made so many things click for me. And yeah, Ashley and I just gave you 2 out of probably 100 examples of things you're going to want to write down from this episode. So a little bit about our friend Dr. Curt Thompson. He has, uh, been inspired by a deep compassion for others and informed from a Christian perspective. Psychiatrist Curt Thompson shares fresh insights and practical applications for developing more authentic relationships and fully experiencing our deepest longing, which is to be known. He weaves together an understanding of interpersonal neurobiology and a Christian worldview of what it means to be human. He is an award-winning author of The Deepest Place, The Soul of Shame, and The Anatomy of the Soul. And here now is part 4 of 4 in our summit speaker series with Dr. Curt Thompson on the soul of shame.

Greetings. My name is Curt Thompson, and I want to welcome you to this part of the Pure Desire Conference conversation that we're going to have here together, that I've titled "Beauty and the Transformation of Shame." I look forward to our time together, even though we're only going to be sharing it virtually, and I hope that you will find these comments to be helpful in your life of following hard after Jesus. I want to begin by just acknowledging that we live in a time in which there are lots of easily definable places of fracture in our world, and we can name them as being the result of the pandemic, we can name it because of politics and economics, we can name it because of religious differences, we can name all kinds of ways. But there's no fracture that is any deeper than the fracture that we experience internally. And it is those internal fractures that we would say then become the ways and the sources of which we express all the fractures that we see that are outside of our skin. And so today, as we are sharing this time together regarding this question of beauty and the transformation of shame, I want to invite you from the very beginning to imagine that what we're going to talk about actually has implications not just for your personal life, but has implications for how your personal inner life is going to have an opportunity to create beauty in the world at a time when it so desperately needs it. And we're going to see how evil is doing its very best to try and reduce our world, to devour our world, and by using shame as a vehicle to accomplish that, and how the Gospel, in its declaration of God's beauty through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, is intending to declare that evil does not get to have the last word. And so with that in mind, I want to begin by asking this question: What do you want? Think about that for a moment. What do you want? We could hear and answer that question any number of different ways. I want fries with that. I want a new car. I want a new job. I want a new spouse. I want a new life. I want world peace. I want any number of things we might say. Well, I want— but as people of faith, we might also say, well, Curt, isn't that really kind of a self-centered question to be asking? What do you want? I ask it because those are the first recorded words of Jesus in the Gospel of John. When John the Baptist's disciples followed after Jesus, turning and seeing the men, he said to them, "What do you want?" Or another translation has it, "What are you looking for?" "What do you want?" And today I want us to be curious about that, because in some ways that question is where we really begin. This is where John's Gospel begins after its prelude, after its introduction of what it means for them to have held and seen the glory of God. When he begins to tell his story about what the disciples were actually doing, they were curious about Jesus, and Jesus asks them this question, and he's asking us this question: "What do you want?" And in some ways, he's recapitulating, he is reactivating the same question that God asked Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when God said, "Where are you?" He wants to know, "What's up? Where are you?" But "What do you want?" is an important question. We're going to return to that question again and again in the course of our conversation today. But I want to ask us, especially in this day and age, "What do you want?" And on the surface, we might be able to offer some quick answers. I I want political fracture to stop. I want racial tensions to stop. I want all these bad things in the world to stop. That's answering the question, what do you not want to have happen? What do you not want? But what do you want? And the more deeply we probe that question, the more able we are to get to what it is that God is calling us to become. I want to suggest that ultimately, more than anything, we want to be known. Some of you might have heard some of my talks before, you've read some of the things that I've written, and so those words might sound familiar to you, but they're no less true now than when Saint Paul wrote them so many years ago, when he described how it's really significant for us in that how we love God is demonstrated by the degree to which we are known by God. It's not just, "Do I know God?" but, "To what degree am I known by God?" And so I want to suggest that ultimately, to be known by God and by each other is the thing that I am hungering and thirsting for most fundamentally. What does that mean? What does it mean to be known by others? I know people who know things about me. They know that I'm married to the same woman and how many kids that I have and where I was born and who my friends are. But we're not just talking about vital statistics here. We're talking about to what degree am I known such that I can then go on to do other things, namely to create as I have been made to create, which we'll talk more explicitly about in just a moment. But just to take a little more time to look at what this means for us to be known, my friend and colleague Dan Siegel likes to use 4 words that he describes that show up in what we call the development of secure attachment. When I'm securely attached growing up in my family, I know that I am seen, because newborns and infants first literally have to be visually seen, and they have to see that they are being seen. And to have that experience brings them a certain sense of being soothed. That's the second S word. I'm seen, and then to be soothed, because we are upset and distressed, and we each need not just one but multiple people by whom we can be seen and then by whom we can be soothed. To be soothed, then, in a community of people, as a newborn and as an infant and a toddler are in a family, they then develop an overall sense of safety, a sense of confidence within a realm in which they are familiar. We all have different domains of vocation, different domains of operation, different domains that we occupy of life in our world. We're not just engineers or teachers or physicians or lawyers or truck drivers. We are also brothers, and we are fathers, and we are sons, and we are friends, and we are carpenters, and we make furniture, and we are painters, and we are musicians, and we are many, many things. In any of those spaces, by whom are you known so well that they could answer the question, "What is there to tell me about Jim or about Mike?" Is there anything that is not known about him by this group of people? Who are the people who, if I were to ask you to give me their names, they could tell me everything there is to know about you? We long to be known this well in order to be safe, but not just seen, soothed, and safe. We also long to be what I call secure. This fourth word: seen, soothed, safe, and secure. Because to be secure means I've been seen, I've been soothed, I've been made to feel safe in this environment that I'm familiar with and comfortable with in order for me to securely venture outside of this safety net, venture out onto the ice, venture out onto the ocean, venture out into a space and a place where there is risk, where there is danger, where it is possible for me to make mistakes, where it's possible for me to screw up, where it's possible for me to get hurt, where it's possible for me to be betrayed. And when that happens, when ruptures occur, I will know that there is a space of safety to which I can return in order to redevelop and restrengthen and revitalize my longing for security, my longing to be secure enough to once again venture out. That's what it means for us to be known in those ways. But we don't just want to know things. We want to be known in order for us to know that we can venture out into the world. Many of us that are listening to this right now either A) don't have a lot of practice being known in this way, don't have a lot of practice being known this deeply, don't have a lot of practice being so known that they can be commissioned in order to do the things that they were made to do. But I want to take this one step further. I want to suggest that we are not just known in order for us to be known. I'm not in the world just to have relationships. It's true that relationships are the fundamental genetic building block of anything that happens in the world. But we weren't just made for relationships. Relationships are necessary but not sufficient, because we were made not only to be known, but to be known in order for us to make things. To be made in God's image is not just to be made as one who thinks like God thinks, who imagines as God imagines, but who also— who makes, who creates, even as God creates. And we humans, we begin when we're kids. Who of you who's listening to this hasn't been around a 3-year-old who at some point runs into the room and she has her paper and her crayons and she shows you what she's made? And she longs for you to see that thing that she has made as an artifact of great beauty. Because we were made to create beauty and goodness in the world. Now, it's important to know it's one thing for us that we long to have. It's one thing for us to have stuff. We all like to have stuff. But it's another thing for us to make things, because I love to have things. I love to create things that I can then have. I'd love to have the painting. I'd love to have the car. I'd love to have that perfect person. I'd love to have that perfect child. I'd love to have that perfect job. I want to have these things. I'd love to make in order to have. But what's interesting about the way we've been made, the way God made us in his image, is that he made man and woman and then gave them away to each other. He made the world and then gave it away to us. He is a God who makes and then gives it away in order to share in its stewarding, in its new creation, along with those with whom he's given it. And so we were made to make things that are separate from us. Just as God made a world that is separate from him, God made us separate from him, but making them in order for them to flourish. And so we long to be known in order for us to make things of great beauty that we give away in order for the world to flourish. Notice, we make things of beauty. We Don't ever make things of mediocrity. Now, it's true that we do make things of mediocrity. This happens frequently. But we don't wake up in the morning and think to ourselves, "Man, I just hope I get to make something really dull today. I hope that software that I'm creating really— maybe it works half the time. I'm hoping maybe it works half—" No. "Maybe that chair that I just made, it will last for like 3 or 4 seat bottoms to hit it." No. We long for beauty and elegance. We long to make things that are durable, wonderful, never mediocre. We can say that not just about the material world, but we say that about the relationships that we occupy. We say this about our marriages. We say this about the relationships that we have with our parents, or with our children, with our friends. We long for our relationships to be artifacts of beauty in the same way that we make furniture and that we build automobiles. And there are conditions for the creation of beauty that are inherent, that we see that emerge right out of the first pages of the text of Genesis. We see that at the end of Genesis chapter 2, the text reads, "And the man and the woman, the man and his wife, were naked and they were unashamed." There are these three conditions for being known in order to create beauty in the world. The first condition is the condition of differentiation: the man and the woman. You know, I like to tell people that when I married my wife Phyllis, now almost 34 years ago, that when we got married, I didn't really— as it turned out, I didn't really want to marry Phyllis. What I wanted to do was marry someone who looked like Phyllis but was really me. I really wanted to marry myself in her body. That's what I really wanted. You see, I love being around people who are just like me. I love being around people who think like I think, who agree like I agree, who think that the Ohio State Buckeyes are the best football team in the nation, no matter what happens in games with Clemson. Like, I— these are the things that I think I want people to be like me. If God had wanted to populate the world with everybody who got along with everybody, he would have just like made us like paramecium. But he didn't. He made us male and female. And of all of the divided groups of people who are at war with each other in the course of our world, nobody has been at war longer with each other than men and women. He made us as differentiated creatures, and we say, like, gosh, I can't really be that creative with this person with whom I have great difference. But that's one of the first and primary elements of creating beauty—differentiation. Who are the people in your life with whom you suspect you have great difference, but who are actually waiting God's opportunity, waiting for you to join with them to create beauty together? The second characteristic is that of vulnerability. The man and the woman were naked. Now, beyond the attempt of the Hebrew Scriptures to talk about their physical appearance, what the Hebrew text is really trying to get at is this notion that we humans are vulnerable. They're naked. We don't have to be vulnerable. We are vulnerable. We are the only creatures, as far as we know, who on purpose put clothes on themselves. So I've said to other audiences, there are people who put clothes on their dogs. That's weird. No dog that I know has ever asked to have a jacket put on it. But we humans, we put clothes on because if we don't, we pay a price for that. Our bodies require clothing. We are vulnerable creatures. The question is whether or not we are going to acknowledge it and live into the way that vulnerability can join with differentiation in order to create great beauty. But beyond this, beyond differentiation and vulnerability, there's a third element that we read about in the text, and that is there was an absence of shame. The man and his wife were naked and unashamed. This absence of shame is what projects into the future the possibility of creating great beauty together. Of stewarding the earth, of being fruitful, of multiplying and filling it, of loving it, of creating in it, not to hoard it, not to hold on to it, not to clutch it, but to enable it to flourish. Where are the places in your life where you want— there's that question again, what do you want— where you want to create beauty and goodness in the world, but you recognize that you still are in need of knowing what it means to be differentiated, what it means in order for you to be vulnerable, and what it means to be in the absence of shame. Speaking of which, if we begin with this notion that God wanted to create the world and then mankind, right? Let us make mankind in our image. Hey, let's do this. It appeared that God really wanted to do this. As he speaks to the prophet Jeremiah, before you were Before you were formed, I knew you. I was in love with you. I was wild about you long before you were even a zygote. God did not love you because he made you. He made you because he loved you long before you were a you that everyone else has known. Intention of God to want us to be in the world, to be with him, is anathema to evil. And evil had every intention of sullying it, of devouring it, and did so, as we all know, in that first discourse in Genesis chapter 3, that he begins with the woman in the presence of the man and his apparent great silence. Evil's intention is to disintegrate the world, and it uses shame as a way to do this. We see how it begins with one conversation with one person in isolation. Heaven forbid that evil would wait for God to come around and have this conversation together. Heaven forbid that evil would ask the man to speak up and join the conversation. It took place in isolation. And this is what happens. How many of us who are listening here today have these moments where we get isolated in the privacy of our own head with all this stuff banging around in our head, all these thoughts about our lives, our friendships, our children, our parents, our spouses, our work, our sexuality, our shame? It is in that isolation that evil does its work. And this then leads not just to what happens between the woman and the man, but it also leads eventually— where shame always leads, it leads to more pronounced violence. Because in chapter 4, we read how the shame that Cain experienced led to his killing his brother. Shame is always an act of violence perpetrated toward ourselves or towards someone else. And it doesn't just exist between individuals, but again, eventually it takes on whole communities. When we read John chapter 9, we see that the man born blind is approached by Jesus and the disciples. And the very first words that we read, when they approached and saw the man born blind, the disciples asked the question, "Whose fault is it? Whose sin was it? Who sinned, this dude or his parents, such that he was born blind?" That's the question, right? Whose problem is this? Whose fault is this? You'd think that the disciples would have seen this as a huge opportunity Jesus, a blind guy, hey, heal him, we'll take Instagram shots, it'll be awesome. That doesn't happen. We progress through that whole story and we come to find out how the blindness that was the man's initially, from which he was healed, really wasn't just his. It was really the blindness of the entire community. Shame isn't just something that exists in us as individuals. It is something that takes over entire communities. It takes over entire systems. It takes over churches. It takes over businesses. It takes over organizations. It takes over political parties. It takes over— fill in the blank. Shame is how evil intends to disintegrate the world. Some of its features that are important for us to know are, first of all, that it's important to know that shame isn't first a thing that I think about.. It's first something that I feel literally in my body. And it's important that we also recognize that we've been at this for a long time. A human being is capable of experiencing shame in our physicality as early as 15 to 18 months of age. That's young, which means we've been practicing it for a long time. And it also means that we don't have very much practice or opportunity to better understand what is this thing that I just experienced called shame. Instead, I then have to make sense of what I've just sensed. And frequently we don't have others in our corner who are able to help us better understand what this was that I just experienced. Imagine if I grew up in a house where, like one person I know who, when he was young, he would take his 92% of his math score to his dad to show him, and his dad's response was, "Oh, where's the other 8%?" He didn't beat him with a belt, but he traumatized him in ways like this. And so this is a guy who grows up, by the time he's 18, he doesn't think that he feels bad about himself because he's aware that his father is troubled. He thinks, "I'm not okay because I haven't worked hard enough to be a good enough son," because this is how he makes sense of what he senses. And so shame, first and foremost, is something that we feel in our bodies. Also, another reason why just telling people, "Don't be ashamed of that. You don't need to be ashamed of that," those words actually land in a part of the brain, my left hemisphere, my logical, linear thinking brain, that don't really have much to do in that moment with the shame that I feel. That's predominantly a product of my lower brain and my right hemisphere. In this way, because it is a felt physiologic thing, what I need more than anything, which we'll get to, is to see you seeing me. Back to that same sense of being seen, soothed, safe, secure. I need that as much as anything. Another thing about shame that we know about— many of you can feel, you remember moments and times when you've had this experience with shame— it's disintegrating. Meaning, like, when I feel ashamed, When I feel humiliated about something, it's difficult for my thinking and my feeling to connect very well together. My body and my movement— these things are not easily coordinated. It's easy for me to feel disconnected from within myself, and I feel disconnected from you. And so shame is a disintegrating, it's a separating affective neurophysiologic response. But in addition to that, once I feel it, it is self-repeating. I feel ashamed, and then I feel ashamed for feeling ashamed, and the very act of telling you that I feel ashamed heightens my sense that I will feel even more ashamed. And so I don't tell you. Instead, I hide it. I bury it. But when I do that, I only reinforce and affirm that what it is about which I feel ashamed certainly, in fact, is shameful. We'll get to whether or not there's anything such as good shame in just a bit, but for now, I just want to recognize that this whole notion of shame as a physical, isolating, disintegrating force makes it very difficult for us to just think our way out of it. Because the other thing that happens is that it leads to a sense of stasis. By stasis, I mean our immobility. Shame in its worst forms literally leads to my physicality being immobilized. And what's most important about this is that this is represented by our, by our inability to think creatively. To think creatively requires that I become mobilized. I'm going to take risks moving out into that secure realm. But when I'm ashamed, I become immobile. I don't move toward you. I don't move toward myself into those spaces within myself that really need to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure. Along with stasis, the major theme that accompanies shame is the theme of condemnation. This sense that there's something ultimately wrong with me, and that there's nothing that can be done about that. But that condemnation is just a harbinger. It's a harbinger of what's even worse, and that is this sense that we even see in Genesis chapter 3, this sense that at the end of the day, I will be seen by you as being so not okay that you won't want to have anything to do with me. For indeed, shame is a harbinger of abandonment. It's a harbinger telling me that at the end of the day, Kurt, they don't want to have anything to do with you. You're not worth sticking around for. This really gets at and reminds us of those words that we read about in Genesis 2 where God says, "It's not good for man to be alone." Of all the creation narrative, there's only this one moment where God states something that's incomplete, something that is not good. This notion that we are not okay. In being alone. Shame is all about reminding us that alone is what we are. This isolation that we feel leaves us fending for ourselves, and it is something that is lethal for our brains and for our minds. As I like to tell people, the brain can do a lot of really, really hard work for a long time, as long as it doesn't have to do it by itself. And so then, what are we to do with this whole notion of— here we are as men who've been created to be known and be connected, and connected in order to create icons of beauty and goodness in the world, recognizing that along comes this evil that is intent upon devouring us. What are we to do? Well, I want to invite us to consider two separate texts today that we're going to walk through pretty quickly. The first, I'm just going to mention it. In the book The Soul of Shame that I wrote, you'll see in the second half of the book I address this question of shame explicitly through the lens of the first two verses of the 12th chapter of Hebrews, and those verses read Thus, therefore, let us fix— let us run the race before us, having with such a great cloud of witnesses that he talks about in chapter 11. Therefore, since we have before such a great cloud of witness, let us run the race set before us with perseverance, throwing off all that is sinful, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross scorning its shame, and now sits at the, the right hand of God the Father. In that book, I unpack that verse, and I invite you, if you're open to it, to explore that there. But today I want to take it a little further and say that we're not just in the business of healing shame in order for us to feel better. It's necessary for us to have a community to do this, but what is the this that we're trying to do? And I want to suggest that what God is in the business of doing, again, is not just healing our shame and forgiving us of our sin in order to take us to heaven someday. He is doing all this work in order to recommission us, just as Jesus recommissioned Peter in John 21. He's doing this to recommission us every day to become the sons of God that we were made to be in order to create beauty in every moment that we occupy, looking for opportunities to be with those with whom we are differentiated, those of whom— with whom we can be vulnerable, and in a way that does not allow shame to be part of the conversation. And to do this, to create acts of beauty, I want to draw our attention to the 27th Psalm, and in particular the 4th verse that reads thus: One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. And I want to walk through this verse and invite you to imagine with me what it would be like if we were to embody, not just as individuals but together in our community gatherings of men, what would it be like for us to embody what the psalmist is writing about here. In a forthcoming book that I'm writing about these very issues, about the use of beauty and how beauty is an answer to shame and how beauty is a way that we are being called to live in the world, In that book, I use artwork, I use painted art, visual art, music, poetry, as a way to invite people to be curious about what ways they are putting themselves in the path of oncoming beauty anytime during their, anytime during their day. We'll come back to that question: in what way are you putting yourself in the path of oncoming beauty? And how is that action a way for us to help transform our world? We're just going to walk through this verse. One thing I ask from the Lord, one thing, this only do I seek. And I want to invite us to think about this for a second. This psalmist is saying that there's just one thing, this only thing that I'm going to seek. And I want to highlight that this is a cat who knows what it means to persevere. This is someone who knows that this is going to be a long obedience in the same direction. And I, I just want to say this right now for those of us who are listening: following Jesus is hard to do. It's joyful to do, it's beautiful to do, but it is difficult. But it's not difficult because you're a pansy. It's not difficult because you're stupid. It's not difficult because you're not working hard enough. It's not difficult because there's something wrong with you. It's difficult because evil has no intention of you doing this. It's difficult because you're pushing against the earth. You're pushing against your old self. You're pushing against old systems that you live in, whether that's your family or the work that you do. This is really hard to do, and it requires perseverance. But we must remember that Psalms were not written primarily for individuals to take home and read them. People didn't, like, pick up a scroll of the Torah and, like, tote it home. No, these Psalms were read in public. These Psalms were read for people to recognize that when We say, "This only do I seek." I'm saying I seek it, you're saying you seek it, we all say this together, and in so doing, we persevere together. I said earlier that the brain can do a lot of really hard things over a long period of time, as long as it doesn't have to do it by itself. So I want to acknowledge that the work that we're talking about you're doing, the work that you're talking about doing in recovery, the work that any of us talk about in moving away from our idolatry, from our addictions, moving away from that and moving toward Jesus— this requires great effort. I want to just acknowledge that and say that in this hard work, we're going to continue to come back to each other and say, this is hard, let's keep going. One thing I ask of the Lord, that I may dwell 'in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.' What does it mean for us to dwell? Well, there are a couple questions that we can ask about that. One is, where do you dwell and with whom? There's a painter by the name of Mark Rothko, and he paints a lot of abstract work. And I was introduced to his work a number of years ago and found that when I first sat down to look at it, I'm thinking to myself, I don't really get it. Like, 3 bands of color. If you look up his work, you will see he's famous for these large paintings of just 3 big bands of color. And you think, like, I'm not really quite sure what that's all about. Turns out that Rothko was the vanguard of people in the mid-20th century who were really recognizing that color in and of itself, color in and of itself, had a quality and a nature about it that had the capacity to move people. When you sat with the color that he put on these canvases. But I discovered that I'm so programmed and so primed to only understand life in a certain way that when I have to look at something for an extended period of time in order for myself to be impacted by it, I don't have the patience for this. It turns out that what it's all about is about dwelling. It is about remaining in a place long enough such that you can see things that you otherwise couldn't see. It's about being able to sit with a painting in which you can see not just one color, but several colors layered upon one another, one after the other. This is what it means for us to dwell with other human beings, that we dwell with them long enough to be able to see them as they are and not as they only appear on the surface at first glance. But I'm not just dwelling long enough to be with people. I'm dwelling in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. It's important for us to remember that the writer of the psalm would be someone who knows about the house of the Lord as the tabernacle. But the Jewish history didn't end with that, and by the time these psalms were being collected It was long after the temple had actually been destroyed before Jesus. But it's interesting because what we see in the Jewish history is this progression from the house of the Lord being the tabernacle, moving to Solomon's Temple, moving to Jesus in John chapter 2, in which he turns to people around him and said, "Destroy this temple, and in 3 days I will raise it up again." We recognize that Jesus is the temple, but we don't stop there. Because we move on to Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. And from there we move on to 1 Corinthians chapter 12, where Paul writes and says, "You are the body of Christ." We are the temple. And so what does it mean for us to dwell all the days of our lives in the presence of each other in order for beauty to emerge? I long to do one thing. I'm going to commit to being relationally connected in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. In order to do what? Such that I may gaze on the beauty of the Lord. Not glancing, not winking at. Gazing. To take the time that is required to look deeply upon something. To be present with. Gazing is not blinking at something. Gazing is taking the time to be present with something over a long period of time. Now, if you were to imagine the Pietà, a large 6,000-pound marble sculpture that is in St. Peter's Basilica, carved by Michelangelo, you would be in the presence of beauty, and you would have no questions that you were. I encourage you, if you haven't had the chance to see this, for you to view it online, if you haven't had the chance to see it in person. And it will take your breath away, and you will feel its weight. You will feel its mass effect, if you will, as you witness the beauty of the marble. But you will also witness something else. You are witnessing a sculpture of a woman who's holding the body of her dead son. And your mind can't escape this. And it is in this way that God begins to get to us. Because we are not just asked to gaze upon things that are easy to gaze upon. It's not hard to gaze upon the Grand Canyon. It's not hard to gaze upon a beautiful sunset. There are many things that are not difficult for us to gaze upon, but who gazes upon a woman holding the body of her dead son? I want to suggest something to us, that it is in the scriptures, and it is in the Gospel no less, where the notion of beauty itself is turned on its head. If we were to imagine what it was like on Good Friday and the crucifixion of Jesus, if it were not for Easter, we would only see what happened on Good Friday as another act of grotesque brutality. Perpetrated by the Romans. And in fact, I think it would be fair to say that if it were not for resurrection, that we wouldn't even want to think about crucifixion. Crucifixion is considered by most historians to be the most brutal form of execution that human beings have really ever come up with. There are other things that we've done that are even perhaps as heinous, but nothing that has been as heinous that has been carried out so prolifically. The Romans killed thousands of people this way. The same people who built so much glory in Rome did this. And it would be awful for us to appear and look upon Jesus as a crucified form. But we have Good Friday because of Easter. And so we look upon Jesus' crucified body in a way that is far different than we would otherwise. We in fact look upon his body through the lens of Easter, and we would say, in some respects, there is nothing more beautiful than a crucified Lord, because we know how this story ends. And so When it comes then to gazing upon the beauty of the Lord, we're recognizing that we're not just gazing upon that which we easily gaze upon, but to gaze upon the beauty of Jesus is to see him in his mother's arms as a person who's dead. And we wonder, what are the parts of our own stories that feel dead? What are the parts of our own stories that feel brutal? What are the parts of our own stories that we would not want anyone looking at? But the text bids us to do so with an eye toward beauty. Only God would see Good Friday and see the beauty that is going to come of it. Who are the people in our lives to whom we've given the freedom to gaze upon those parts of our lives where we have been pierced, those parts of our lives where the nail prints exist. Who in our lives gets to do that in order for beauty to be recognized and drawn forth in the very presence of the things about us that we hate the most? One of the things that we talk about with the people that we work with is around this question of what does it mean for us then if beauty is this important? What does it mean for us to put ourselves in the path of oncoming beauty, right? I am— I want to gaze, I want to see these things, but we are wanting to put ourselves in the path of this. So there's a couple things that we would say. First of all, especially in this time, it's really important for us to have practices in which we are looking at beauty in an active way, whether it's online, whether it's in person, whether it's in nature, whether it's in a museum, to the degree that they're open. It's important for us to practice exposing ourselves to beauty because that is something that we aren't just looking at. It is something that we long to become. Remember, God creates artifacts of beauty when he creates all that the world is and says it's good. And he gets to us and he says, look, this is very good because it's beautiful. But we are extensions of him, and we are made to do the very same thing. We are making things of great beauty because that is what we long to become. If you're a man listening to this, it's not surprising or unusual for you to consider that you've seen a beautiful woman. It's common in our culture to imagine beauty in the human form and think about women. It's not really common for men to approach each other and say, You are a beautiful man. But I want to suggest to us that there's nothing that we need to hear more than that we are men of great beauty, and not least of which in those very places where all we see is ugliness. But in the process of being gazed upon by others in our confessional communities, We can have our shame transformed. Those places where shame just only seems to me to be represented by a cruciform, others see resurrection. And so what are we doing to practice opening our eyes to beauty? Well, one of the things that we can do is to literally take time every day, whether that's in nature or whether that's online, whether that's seeing an artifact of beauty, and practicing gazing upon it. Because this way we practice getting used to looking for it. Where we often didn't see it before. And as such, we can be more open to seeing it in places where before we never would have seen it, not least of which being in those relationships in which we have great difference, wherein which we can be vulnerable, and in which we are not going to allow shame to be part of the conversation. We want to put ourselves in the path of oncoming beauty, learning then to create what we long to become. Mako Fujimura, a Japanese-American painter who many of you may be familiar with, does work in a particular Japanese art form called "nyonga." And this is a form of artwork in which he takes a lot of valuable pulverized minerals that are pulverized into a fine powder that are put together with a fine watery glue, and then that becomes the paint substance that he uses to paint on his canvases. If you were to see his work called "New Wine," you would see that these minerals capture light in ways that are just beyond belief. But the reason that they are able to be so beautiful is because they're pulverized. And it is in the very pulverization, often, of our lives that beauty most powerfully emerges. We then move from gazing to inquiring of the Lord, and there are 4 questions then that we ask about this. These 4 questions that come out of 4 different places in the scriptures. A couple of them we've already asked. One is, where are you? And who are the people that to whom you're answering that question? Where are you? This is Genesis 3:9 where God asks Adam and Eve— where— asks Adam, where are you? The second is the question that we posed at the beginning of our time today: what do you want? We have to answer that question. What do you want? The third question is this: Can you drink this cup? Matthew 20:22, where Jesus speaks this to James and John, whose mother has just asked them if they could have the right and the left seats in his kingdom when he comes to sit on his throne. And it's important to ask this question because we need to know that if we are going to be people who step into the world to create beauty and goodness, we're going to suffer. Because evil has no intention of going quietly into the night. We're going to suffer. But that suffering then leads to the fourth question: Do you love me? This is John 21, where Jesus is talking to Peter and asking him if he loved him, because he was going to make sure that Peter had no doubt that Jesus was unafraid of his shame, and Jesus had no intention of allowing Peter's shame to get in the way of the work that Jesus had for Peter to do. Jesus was seeing beauty in Peter where Peter could only imagine just going back to his old work of fishing. Who are the people who are seeing and drawing forth beauty in your life? In the very places where all you see is disgust? Who are the people into whose lives you gaze and you see the beauty that they are unable to see and won't see unless you look at them with— look at it with and for them? We are in these communities. We need these confessional communities where we are developing time with each other in order for us to create the space for us to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure. In this current time of pandemic and economic tension, racial tension, political distress, all these big things that we talked about at the beginning, we need to remember that all those things are made up of the lives of individual people, people like you and me. Without humans, without you and me, there is no political tension. There is no racial divide. What we can do is to be on the path, putting ourselves in the way of oncoming beauty, in order for that beauty not just to be a thing that we experience, but something that we become, as we dwell with others, as we gaze upon them, as we allow them to gaze upon us, such that we may inquire and ask the right questions that enable us further to go on to create even more icons of beauty and goodness in the world, that become outposts that say to the world, "This is my Father's, this is my God's kingdom." This is the place that we were made to live, and thanks be to God that we're in it. I trust that you found these words to be helpful, and I look forward to the next time we're able to be together in person.

That was Dr. Curt Thompson. We love him. And if that didn't inspire you to sign up for the Pure Desire Summit, I don't know what will. So come and join us, hang out with us in person in Nashville, Tennessee, or virtually online, and hear not only Dr. Curt Thompson but other great speakers like Dr. Sean McDowell, Michelle Mays, and the Pure Desire team. And if you are a fan of today's content, please write us a review, subscribe, share it with somebody. All of these are ways that more people can hear this life-giving content and might join us at the Pure Desire Summit. And if you want more information on Pure Desire's groups, resources, or counseling, you can visit us at puredesire.org. Journey on, my friends. You are not alone.