Episode 425: Sherry Cothran's New Book and Soundtrack - Wild and Holy

Hello friends, Rick Lee James here. I know that every week you hear me talking about my Substack page, rickleejames.substack.com. You can subscribe for free and get this podcast every week and also email updates from me on a regular basis. But there is also something special where if you become a paid subscriber, you can get free things. Like right now, I have a music single coming out on June 25th called You Are My Salvation, and you have to wait until June 25th to get that song or to be able to stream it on iTunes or Spotify or Amazon or wherever you listen to music. But if you become a paid subscriber at any level on rickleejames.substack.com, I'll give you by email not only the song where you can listen to it anytime you want, you'll also get to have the music video that we made for it in advance. You'll also get a digital file of the sheet music for the song if you're into that kind of thing. You can maybe play it or play it at Church, and you can have all of that in advance of the release, which doesn't happen until June 25th. So if you want to become a paid subscriber at rickleejames.substack.com, you can get perks along the way. I also have another new single releasing in July, but I'm gonna wait and tell you a little bit more about that when the time comes. Same thing goes, you'll be the first to hear it when you become a paid subscriber at rickleejames.substack.com. Thanks for listening to Voices in My Head. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head. Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm so glad that you are here with us today for what I know is going to be another fascinating conversation. My guest today is Reverend Sheri Cauthron. She has served as a senior pastor in the United Methodist congregations in Nashville and Chattanooga, Tennessee for a decade. Formerly a recording artist on Mercury Records, she is an award-winning singer-songwriter and author of two books. Sheri has released four solo CDs Her music has been featured in TV and film. She shared stages with hit rock acts such as Goo Goo Dolls, Barenaked Ladies, Spin Doctors, and K's Choice, and toured around the world as the lead singer of a popular rock band, The Evanroods, before entering seminary and becoming an ordained United Methodist minister. As a pastor of a multicultural urban church, Sheri began to share stories on her blog. Peddling hope and dystopia, of everyday sacred encounters with those who were labeled refugee, immigrant, and homeless. She later shared them in a book that became beloved by readers, Tending Angels: Sharing Stories from the Front Lines of Heaven and Earth. Her writing was featured in publications such as Abingdon Women, Interpreter Magazine, and Ministry Matters. She was also a regular contributor to the homiletics journal Good Preacher. She was the artist-in-residence in 2015 at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and received two grants to develop her creative writing from the Louisville Institute for Pastoral Study. Her story has been featured in various publications including USA Today. Recently, she became the founder and president of the nonprofit Beloved Woman, a ministry that helps women who are financially disadvantaged to become self-employed or find a pathway to a living wage. In her new book, Wild and Holy: Prophets, Warriors, Harlots, and Healers: Women of the Bible, Sherry takes us out into the Bible's uncharted regions, beyond those selected scriptures that have often been used to tame the feminine spirit, to meet the wild and holy women of Scripture. Blending the brightest in biblical scholarship with her vast experiences, Reverend Sherry Cauthron leads us into healing encounters with the Bible's lost stories of women who were warriors, Prophets, Harlots, and Healers. The book and original songs call us to live free, faithful, and fearless lives. In the pages and songs of Wild and Holy, you'll find new narratives from old stories and awaken to the image of a loving God within. Reverend Sherry Cauthron has stopped by the podcast for a visit today and to share about the new book and the album. So Sherry, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Thank you. It's so good to be with you today. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I am so pleased to have you, and I'm sorry about that extremely long intro, but you're a very accomplished person and there was just so much to share. It just kept going on and on, and I thought, my goodness, I don't want to leave anything so interesting out. So there was just a lot good to share to our listeners today, but I promise we'll get to to you and letting you talk here in just a moment today. I'm very excited about your new book. I haven't had a chance— just to let our listeners know— I haven't had a chance to read it all myself yet because the book just came out. And I just honestly, over the weekend, just attained a copy from Sherri. But the concept of it, I love. And I've been enjoying listening to the music. I actually put it on Apple Music just a couple nights ago and started listening through some of the tracks. So I'm excited to be able to listen and also read the book. And I've even been talking about it with my wife, maybe trying to read the book along with her. So we're very excited, and I just want to say how happy I am for you at the beginning, because having written a book and an accompanying album several years ago myself, I know that's a difficult process. And you have really— you just dove right in and really did a lot with the biblical scholarship in this. So congratulations on all of that.

Well, thank you so much. Yes, it's like, it's like using two different parts of your brain.

Yeah, it is.

But once you're finished, it's, it's wonderful, uh, to put these things in conversation with each other. Um, it's, it's— I, I always think that, you know, preaching, uh, or anything that you do biblically should involve songs and music because so much of the Bible is is, you know, the literature of song and the lyric of poetry and music. So it really helps us, I think, get into that world of Bible and that world of storytelling in which song and story go hand in hand.

Well, and you know what, that's one thing I love about this book, and one thing I think we often miss about so much of Scripture is there is actually a lot of music in Scripture, that, you know, everything from the book of Psalms, which really was— the entire book is a hymn book for the people of Israel. And I'm not sure that we even realize that today because we just see it as words written on a page. And, and I think it's wonderful when we can actually take the musical art and put it together with words on the page. So I want to, I want to start there actually, as I ask you this first question, because I was preparing for the day and I was listening through the music. I'm just going gonna call it, I guess, the soundtrack of the book is probably the best way to look at this.

Yeah, I think that's great. That's a great way to talk about it.

So Wild and Holy, the soundtrack, and I only have had a chance to start looking at the book a little bit but have been enjoying it. But I can see how it's a great idea to have a musical companion with the chapter, especially as you are diving into each of the characters. And as I've researched a little bit getting ready for today, I wanted to find out more about the inspiration of the writing of the book, because from what I understand, I think the songs came first, and you had been actually sharing some of these songs for a while on the road, but then the book kind of came out of the writing of the songs, of the songs that you were writing. So I wonder if you could kind of share the backstory, kind of the VH1 Behind the Music, so to speak, for those of us that are old enough to remember that show. Kind of the backstory of where the book came from and how the music inspired the book.

Well, I ran across the stories of these women when I was in seminary. It really was about a decade ago when I began my journey into becoming a United Methodist minister, which is a journey I didn't know I was going to take. I had come out of the music industry you know, being in rock and roll, and I was a songwriter on Music Row. And so it was such a tumultuous experience, um, being in that and then coming out of it that I wanted to just leave it all behind me. But when I got seminary, uh, a couple years in, I would just be down in the basement library at Vanderbilt Divinity And I'm not kidding you, I would walk sort of down the aisles, you know, because we have to do so much research and so much reading, and certain books would just like jump out to me, and I would take them off the shelf, and they would be these books that had been written by women biblical scholars who had really gone into Bible and looked at stories, looked at the Hebrew and the Greek, and sort of done their own interpretations. And as women became biblical scholars, because as you know, biblical scholarship for centuries has been a solely male endeavor, they found different things. They found different stories. They found characters that we hadn't heard of before.

Yeah.

They just found, they found women, you know, they found themselves and they began to write about it. And these academic books began to take me on a journey that I had never been on before because I've been raised Southern Baptist, certainly in the world of Bible story, you know, that was my world, that was what informed my world. But I, you know, Walter Brueggemann talks about how biblical stories are so overly domesticated, you know, we, we tend to read only the hits, you know, the major hits, like we don't go off-grid into the unexplored areas because we just don't know what to do with those stories. And so I learned, I just began to learn about all of these what I call stories that happen in the wild spaces of Bible, these sort of uncharted off-grid regions where we don't travel to very often. But scholars had already been there, and so I began to take this academic work, which was very dense and hard to read, um, into the language of song while I was in seminary. And I— my preaching professor, John McClure, at the time Rick Lee James, um, he was also a musician and he had written books about how we need to bring music into the pulpit and we need to let songwriting inform our sermon writing. Wow. And so under him, I actually, that was my senior project in seminary, was combining these songs with sermons.

Wow.

And he really inspired me to kind of combine the song sermon. And so in— so my senior project was taking these songs and turning them into sermons. And then I, I was, I was associate pastor at the time at the church I ended up becoming senior pastor at. And I did my whole project one summer. The pastor went on sabbatical and he said, it's yours for 3 months. So I basically did my project where I preached and sang these songs and recorded them. And then John was my supervisor, and so he— he graded me on that. And so after I did that, he actually has a studio. He's a very accomplished engineer, and he said, "Why don't you record these songs?" And I was like, "No, I don't want to go back into music. I just don't want to." But over time he convinced me, and so I went in and recorded the first CD, which was like a couple years later, and we put out a CD of like 8 of these songs, I think.

Okay.

Um, and we called it Sunland. And when I put that CD out, um, and I was, had become a senior pastor, I think the United Methodist Church did a feature story that was a global story. And then that led to USA Today, and then it led to Festival of Homiletics, and then it led to, you know, me doing a lot of these presentations of these stories. Mm-hmm. Well, that went on for years. That went on for, you know, 4 or 5 years of doing that, and then I just kind of let it go and moved on to this Tending Angels project. But this— I had the book in my mind the whole time. I had a literary agent who was really interested. We had book publishers who were interested in the book, but I just couldn't— for some reason, I couldn't bring the book forward until I had spent more time with these stories. And, and then as I spent more time, I discovered new stories. Um, I discovered like 4 or 5 new stories and I wanted to write about them as well. And so I wrote new songs. And so, um, when we moved from Nashville to Chattanooga, I began really putting that book together. And, um, took me a couple years to really, you know, focus on it and get it done. And certainly during COVID I spent a lot of time on it. And I was pastoring full-time up until about a year ago, and I finally started a nonprofit for women and decided this is what I'm going to do. And, um, so that's how the book came about. And I knew that, you know, women particularly were— I had had so many women who said, you know, we really want a book on all of these songs because we really want to dive into it more deeply. So I knew there was an audience out there for it, I just hadn't had time to really put it together. And so that's what this is, it's taking this long arc— it has been a long arc, a long narrative of sitting with these stories, and, you know, I worked with a Hebrew Bible scholar, Johanna van Wyk-Bos, who's up at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. She's retired now, but she really— she invited me to be the artist-in-residence there a few years ago, and we worked with these stories. And so she became an editor for the book and a conversation partner around these stories. And she told me, she said, "It takes about 8 years to put something like this together." And I said, "Okay, I don't feel so bad now that it's taken so long." But yeah, so that's kind of the story behind the book and how, you know, when I began to immerse myself in the stories of these women who are prophets and warriors and the hidden stories of women— there's the hidden story of the medium who helps King Saul and the hidden story of Athaliah, the woman who becomes a king of the southern kingdom of Israel. Just so many stories. The warrior women who guard the gates of the temple, you know. Um, when I began to really immerse myself in these stories as a woman, it just, um, you know, I have three words: free, faithful, and fearless. It really made me feel free. It made— it deepened my faith, and then it also made me feel fearless, um, with with, you know, whatever God calls me into, I know that I can go and not have fear because these women have gone before me and they've done amazing feats of renown that God asked them to do, even when in a time when that seemed impossible for, for women to do. So these stories are just so inspiring and uplifting and empowering. And I really wanted women to have access to these stories. And I try to lead you through the stories in a gentle and compassionate way and point out all of the kind of issues that women run up against in society today and provide a healing pathway.

Well, I want to say how appreciative I am of that because I think that there are not enough books that actually focus in on the women of Scripture. And when they do, I don't feel like they always get a very fair shake theologically. I don't know if that makes a lot of sense, but sometimes it's like very light devotional material and it doesn't— yeah, it barely scratches the surface. I think you understand what I mean when I say that. And I love that this is such a a deep dive and that you've taken such care. And I think it's great that it actually did take a matter of years, because when it comes to art and writing, um, I know in our society— and I am as guilty as anyone of this— I want to get things done, you know, like, let's get it out and move to the next thing and move on.

Yeah.

Um, but so often, especially when it comes to matters of life and faith You know, it really needs to take as long as it takes, and it sounds like you did that with this project. You know, you didn't want to just rush through it and just to throw something on a page. And I could tell even from the introduction, which I want to get into a little bit in the book, because you start in your book with one of my very favorite stories of Scripture, and yet there's— I have a lot of questions about it too. And right from the introduction of the book when you start with, uh, Jairus's young daughter who has passed away and Jesus raises her from the dead. And I only— in the last couple of weeks, it's interesting that you wrote about this. I guess it was maybe providential in finding your writing at the same time I've been reflecting on this. It was interesting that it seems like everyone in the story is laughing at Jesus at the prospect of him raising this young girl. And, um, and you, you write in the book, you say they laughed at him. Really? And I'm just going to read a little bit of what you wrote quickly. It says, you say, was resurrection funny in the ancient world? I mean, it wasn't that uncommon. There were rumors of those raised from the dead, legends and stories. And Jesus did, after all, have a reputation for miraculous. Or was it perhaps laughable that a girl's life might be worth all the fuss. And I had not thought of it in that way. I had been thinking recently about them laughing at Jesus and what that must mean, and what does that do to a person's heart, you know, when people are laughing at you for doing something like that. What you brought out that I had not thought of was, well, maybe they were just laughing at the prospect of— it's just just a little girl, is she even worth it? And I say that because you write just a few pages later of the ways that women have been treated inferiorly, um, by the church in many ways over the centuries. Not always, but many of our theologians— and I'm just going to read one more spot, and I'm looking forward to hearing you respond to this again— but you write that Tertullian thought that women are the gate to hell, a temple built over a sewer, while Thomas Aquinas believed that women are defective. Augustine reasoned that since women weren't created in the image of God, the logical pathway for a woman to obtain wholeness was through her sexual union with a man. These ideas may seem ludicrous to us now. Still, These oppressive beliefs about women reigned for centuries and became deeply rooted in our society. And I'm, I'm floored reading words like that, and that's just the introduction of the book for those of you listening. And I think it's so important that we, we focus in, and as, you know, even as myself, a male minister who who is trying not to be that way, I understand that it's sort of the air I breathe in some ways. You know, the culture that we are kind of in, it's this sort of complementarian world, you know, that women are lesser than men, and we don't seem to look at them with the same power and authority that often Scripture does, and that I think God empowers women with in the same way. So all of that long buildup there was first to say how how much that really spoke to me and made me stop and reflect just in the introduction of your book. But I fear that women in our churches have too often learned this false biblical narrative that they are inferior. And I wonder if you could maybe talk to us about that a little bit before we dive in with kind of a character study today. I wonder if you, as a woman in the church, Have you felt like your story has really clicked with these women in some ways because maybe you have felt that way at some time or another, or maybe often in the church, that women have been made to feel inferior in different ways? I wonder where you kind of find yourself in that story and the ways that you have felt over the years.

Well, I think For me, ever since I was a child, I think I just had these wild ideas, you know, like I grew up in a kind of a wild area, you know, in a very small town on the edge of the woods, and I always had this sort of natural idea about myself and what I felt that I learned about myself in my in my core family was that I was important and valued and loved and that I could do anything. But what I learned in the sort of religion of my upbringing was different, and I was always, I think, conflicted by that, um, that those two messages didn't really reconcile. And so when I began to study, you know, I went off and, you know, I was in a rock band. I was like— I write in my book, I was living the perfect untamed life, you know, the lead singer of a rock band. But my, my faith stories were always calling me, you know, they were always calling out to me, you know. And I think the only way that I could reenter that world of faith was to somehow know that God had created me as a whole person and that I had access to that wholeness in myself. And I think, you know, the things that I wrote about the church fathers saying, I think, and Jimmy Carter, I quote him as well, but, you know, his feeling about it is that we've had such— we've taken these selected scriptures, as the church fathers certainly did, and Elizabeth Clark has a beautiful book called Women in the Early Church. It's an academic book that I, that I kind of pulled from where she gives a, a very, um, unbiased view of how the church fathers perceived women. And she walks through all of the texts, um, from the first, you know, third, fourth, fifth century, and really shows a picture of how our doctrine became conceived and built through the eyes of the church fathers, which were very derogatory towards women. And so, not 100% so, but in some ways, yes, very derogatory. And so we, you know, as you look back and we have the— we have 20, you know, hindsight is 20/20. When we look back throughout history, we can see that We've really only explored a very small portion of Bible. We haven't allowed ourselves to really walk around in the fullness of biblical stories with eyes wide open and hearts wide open and said, you know, I'm going to see what God sees.

Wow.

You know, we've taken the word of mankind for it, you know. And, you know, maybe we're afraid to walk off-grid, you know, maybe we're afraid to walk into these stories because maybe we're afraid of what we might find. But to me, you know, I just think that we've only scratched the surface of biblical story. I mean, this is a book that is really, really mysterious. It is largely unexplored. We've put limitations on how God can act through the bodies and voices of women. And in many ways, as I say, we have tamed the feminine spirit, whereas that's not really what's happening in Bible. If we actually really want to see Bible and we want to explore Bible, and you know, that's what preaching is, that's what preachers do, you know, we explore Bible.

Yeah.

And we try to take what's there and bring it back into our day and our time and say, look what I found. You know, look, look what God is doing, look what God is up to. There is a new thing going on here. And I think the challenge in our culture today really is not about, um, you know, what we can't do. It's really about finding what we can do and, and how we can allow, um, the fullness of God to speak through all people. Um, you know, we're— we can't just put a male filter or male lens on God's voice because that's not even scriptural. You know, we have women who are prophesying and women who are military leaders like Deborah, and we even have the woman in Proverbs 8 who's Woman Wisdom, who says that she was with God before time, you know, and she's the presence of God on earth, building a house for the children of humanity, and that all who do not enter her house, you know, suffer death. And so, you know, we have these voices that are so rich and so beautiful, and they're calling out to us, um, you know. And these voices, these voices of women, might just be the voices that help us to move into the next iteration of what church is, you know, in our time. And we can't ignore them because they might just hold the key for us.

Yeah, well, I can tell you, I have been so challenged and inspired by so many women theologians in my life, and especially recently. It just seems like when we can break free of only the male voice, and maybe especially the white evangelical male voice that we so often hear in circles that we often are in. There's such a richness and so many different perspectives. Not that it's wrong to be male or anything. And I would never like want to say that. I always want to shy away from saying, well, don't not be who you are. But at the same time, realize there is so much out there and so many wonderful perspectives that we can get from diving deeper than we have dove in before. And the women that you write about in this book, I just quickly want to give a list, and then we're gonna— I'm gonna ask you to dive a little bit deeper in to kind of give people a taste of what they'll experience when they're reading this book and some of the things that they can find. But just to give a list of some of the women that you write about, both in the words on the page and in song, They are Deborah, Jael, Huldah, Esther, the beloved from the Song of Songs, the medium of Endor, Rahab the prostitute— we don't always like to remind people of that, but God used a prostitute— then there's Athaliah and Jephthah's daughter. And my apologies if I mispronounced any of those names, because I— when it comes to scriptural names, I'm always second-guessing myself if I said it correctly. But you've written about so many of these women, and before we started the show today, I had asked if you would be willing to pick one of these women to talk about and to sort of walk us through her story in the way that you do in your book Wild and Holy so that our listeners can get a taste of what they will experience when they're reading the book for themselves. And I believe you wanted to focus in today on the beloved that we find in the Song of Songs, or the Song of Solomon, depending on which Bible that you have today. And I wonder if you could just kind of walk us through that today, sort of the story of the beloved. And I'd love to hear more about that.

Sure. Well, the song itself that I write is called "10,000 Charms," and I'm a lover of hymns, and so I actually pulled the chorus together from that old hymn, "I will rise and wander the streets." There's an old hymn— I'm trying to think of the words now— It talks about, um, only in Jesus' arms there are 10,000 charms.

Oh, sure.

And so that, um, I will arise, I will arise and go to Jesus. He will embrace me in his arms. You know that one?

Yep, sure do.

Oh, there are 10,000 charms. So this is kind of how The chapter arises and the story itself is the story of a young woman who is chasing her lover through the streets and even endangering herself to find her lover, and she won't rest until she finds him. And it's a love poem, and it kind of goes back and forth, and I say that one of the main themes of the poem is searching and not finding. And, you know, that is one of the main themes of our lives too, is searching and not finding, you know, searching for that dream or searching for the perfect this or the perfect that and being disappointed or disillusioned. And so it's a beautiful theme. And I start out talking about the search for love being big business in our culture and how we can become so confused about love. Particularly as women, because often from a very young age we can be conditioned into codependence. And the definition of codependence meaning that you always hold others' needs much higher than your own, which is what we're taught to do as good Christian servants. You know, we're taught that loving one another and serving one another is the highest good. And, and certainly as a pastor, I talk about in the chapter, you know, that has been a pathway to meaning for me, um, serving the homeless, serving refugees, serving immigrants, and serving those that I pastor. But when I do that at the expense of never paying attention to my interior life, my relationship with Christ, or my relationship with, um, this divine love that God has placed in me, and nurturing that. And so in the poem, uh, there's a scripture where she's going to her, um, the, the ones who keep, um The Vineyard, the Watchman, and she says, "On my bed nightly I have sought my soul's beloved. I sought him but I did not find him. I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares. I will seek my soul's beloved. I sought him but I did not find him. The watchmen found me, those who go the rounds of the city. My soul's beloved, have you seen him?" So here she is, um, sort of frantically, frantically searching. And then she has this realization after this, and she says, my mother's sons were angry with me. They made me the keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept. And this line sticks out to me, my own vineyard I have not kept, because she's so busy searching, searching, searching for this other person who's going to complete her and, and make her life complete, in whom she's going to find wholeness, you know, which is the biblical narrative of women that we've become so accustomed to. You cannot find wholeness without, you know, as Augustine says, you know, your union with a male partner. And so here she is stuck in this loop in this cycle of only being able to find completeness in this other person, and it's kind of like this torture for her, and it puts her own life in danger. And she has this realization, "My own vineyard I have not kept." And so she's neglected, she's almost been forced to neglect this inner life, this inner garden., you know, to nurture this relationship with the divine. She doesn't have the time to do it. She doesn't have the freedom or the permission to do it. So that's really the crux of this story is, I think, this might be the one in which I quote— this is not the chapter where I quote Martin Buber, but it's a great quote. Where he says we all have something unique. We are all unique and we have something unique that God has put in us to develop, and this is our calling in this life. And this is not just a male endeavor, you know, women are called into this as well. And so the chapter is really about finding and nurturing that inner image of God within us all, that is this divine love that is capable of leading us and fulfilling us and giving us the overflow of energy to help others and to tend to the needs of others. And so it, it really seeks to look at the poem and and look at the, the main character in the poem, who is this young woman, and really look at what, what is it that she's really searching for. Because, you know, it's just like a great movie. We, we can look into the story and see everything through the eyes of this one character. And if we look through her eyes, we see that she is almost a tortured character searching for something that she can't find, but it really is this inner beloved that she's searching for, this inner divine, this wholeness, this image of God within. And when she begins to grasp that, then she's set free.

Hmm.

Wow.

So That's kind of— it's wisdom literature, so it's, it's deep, you know, it does go deep. But that's what wisdom literature does, you know, it seeks to help us have wisdom for living and invites us into that journey of, um, you know, gleaning from God's wisdom and applying that to our lives here on this earth. Wow.

Well, thank you for, for sharing that with us. That's a really powerful image for us to think about. And I would dare to say many of us have not spent a lot of time in that book, probably. Maybe just because of the subject matter or what we think about. And, you know, often that's one of those books that at least young adolescent boys point to certain passages and giggle at, you know, when they come to it. And I'm not sure we ever get to the actual depth depth that's there oftentimes as mature Christians. And I think it's great. I think you're one of the first people that I've ever seen actually go in depth and write about the beloved character. I know there's probably more out there, but it's— you're at least one of the first that I've seen in a while that's kind of taken this— maybe ever that's taken this approach to it in this way, just the way that you focused in on not tending to her own garden. And I really appreciate that perspective that you share with us today. And you have a song, as you already mentioned, that you wrote that is on the album, the soundtrack to Wild and Holy, that is called 10,000 Charms. And in just a few moments, we're going to close out the show today by playing that song and giving listeners really a taste of what it's like to kind of have the book and the soundtrack along with it. And would you say you encourage people to do it in that order, kind of read the chapter and then listen to the song, or do you encourage people to— you know, what's your preferred way? I know they can listen to music anytime, but when they're coming to this, you know, if you had your preference of how you wrote it to be received, what would your ideal setting be for someone to sit down with the album and listen? Well, the way I—

yeah, I use this for workshops, and when I lead workshops, I We'll play the song and then as groups we'll read the story. And I usually say I love the Message translation because it really does give you that story language. It's a little bit easier to just get into the biblical story, but you can use whatever translation you like or use a few. You know, it's always fun to compare translations. And then we walk through the chapter and then there are reflection questions and exercises at the end of each chapter.. And in the print book I provided some journal pages so you can kind of write down some of your reflections. But that's really how I would suggest. Of course there is no right way. You can go to the back of the book and work your way backwards if you want. But there are— the songs can be listened to at no charge on my website, or you can listen to them on pretty much any streaming platform out there: Pandora, iTunes, Napster. IHeartRadio. It's everywhere. So you can do that, or you can download it from Amazon, you know, and listen to it at your own leisure. So that's kind of how I would do it if I were working through it.

So very good, very good. Well, I do want to make note of that. And by the way, as an artist myself, I always encourage people if they can to buy or at least stream the music, because that does help support the artists. And we're going to make sure on, on our website at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com, as well as our Substack page for Voices in My Head, we're going to have the links to not only your book and where they can get it at Amazon and Barnes Noble and places like that, but we will also have a link to your website wildandholy.org. And we'll also make sure that we have links to where they can get the music on iTunes and iHeartRadio and Pandora and Spotify and all those places that you had mentioned before. And I did, I did just want to let people know that I will try and make that as easy as possible straight from our site to just click on and go to all those places. But that's so generous of you too, to put the music on the website so that people can follow along if they don't have the album kind of physically in their presence. But I always want to encourage people, if they can, to support artists artists too and try to stream or buy in whatever way they can as well, because that really does help. And it's a good affirmation. It's a good way of saying thank you to the artists that make the music. Well, I know that in the book you talk a little bit about— you actually say, "I hope this book will help you untame your own story, to free the girl you were told to be and find the person God created." Now, I'm reading that as not a girl, but I also— But I also wanted to say, I meant to say person, not girl.

That was probably like a typo there, but I do say person.

You know what, as many times as it's taken Liberty that all of the masculine pronouns that we have that are constantly used for God in scripture and everything, it's okay. It's all right. You can say that. It's okay for us to, as men, to come once in a while and get a taste of our own medicine when we're writing But I do think that it's going to be a great tool, not only for women who read this book, and I think it will be of great interest to the women that find this book, but also to men that read it as well. And I want to encourage gentlemen, as you're listening today, don't just pass this over because it is a book focused on women. This is as much a part of our story as anyone else's, and we need to benefit and glean from it as well. So I want to encourage everyone listening listening to dive into Wild and Holy. As I said, I've just barely scratched the surface of it myself and have so enjoyed even just the beginning of the opening chapters of the book, and I'm looking forward to diving in and finding out more. I always want to give a chance to our guests when they're on my show if there's anything that I have missed, and I know this is an exciting time with a book release and an album release, but is there anything that we haven't talked about today on the podcast that you would really hope we would talk about before the time ended, and I, and I just, in my, uh, oversight, didn't think to ask you today.

Oh, that's so sweet. I thought of something earlier and it has left me right now. But, um, yeah, I think the book itself is just an invitation to walk into these stories and really, um, be transformed by the world of Bible story because You know, my feeling is that whenever we walk into these sacred stories, we can't walk away unchanged. And there's something really holy about that process that gives us this kind of, you know, sacred glitter, I guess, in our lives. And so I would just invite everyone into the space of story. To walk around for a little while. I think I say, you know, one of the ways in which we can kind of cross that line between our overly domesticated, overly civilized, tamed lives without, you know, having to go out into the wilderness for months is to cross over into the enchanted world of story. And there are many enchanting stories in the Bible just calling out to us, and I think I've— hopefully I've collected a few of them here.

Yes, yes. Well, thank you again for the good work that you have done here. Once again, for our listeners today, the new book and the album are called Wild and Holy: Prophets, Warriors, Harlots, and Healers— Women of the Bible. The book and the album are both from my guest today, Sherri Cauthron. Again, we're going to have all of her information on our website today. We're going to close out our time together today by playing the song that accompanies the chapter on the Beloved that we already heard about today. The song is called 10,000 Charms, and you've already heard about the way that you can listen to these songs online, and you can stream them or buy them or even listen to them straight from the wildandholy.org website. But it has been a real pleasure, and I say to my guests every week, and I'm going to say it to you now, Sherry Cawthron, thank you for being one of the voices in my head. This week.

Thank you so much, it's been a pleasure.

I will rise and wander the streets looking for the one most loved. Have you seen him? Dark as a raven, with eyes as soft as stars. With eyes as soft as stars. Holy him his arms there are 10,000 charms! Let me kiss the kiss of his mouth until the shadows fade. Winter's over, the rain is gone. Now is the time to sing. Now is the time to sing. Holy, holy is the Lord. There are 10,000 shawms. 10,000 charms. Awake, Northwind and calm, blow upon my garden sweet. Let its fragrance reach my dear one. Let him come and deeply drink. Just let him come and deeply drink. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord. There are 10,000 shawms. 10,000 shawms. Holy, holy is the Lord. There are 10,000 charms. 10,000 charms.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this book podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.