A Conversation with Stina Kielsmeier-Cook, Author of Mixed-Faith Marriage and My Search for Spiritual Community

Photo Credit: Katzie and Ben Photography

Stina Kielsmeier-Cook is a writer from the cold north where she raises kids, maxes out her library card, and is usually late for church. A former housing advocate for refugees, Stina loves to talk about public policy, parenting, and her neighborhood in Minneapolis. She works as Director of Communications at the Collegeville Institute, where she is also the managing editor of Bearings Online. Stina has a graduate diploma in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies from the American University in Cairo, and a B.A. in Political Science from Wheaton College. Blessed Are the Nones, Mixed-Faith Marriage and My Search for Spiritual Community is her first book.

I love this quote from your book, although, on the surface, it can seem disconcerting. “[T]he older I get, the more Moscow [a city that has only six minutes of sunlight a day during December] seems like a metaphor for the spiritual life... For whatever reason, faith can become more distant as we travel through life, encountering disappointment and twisty turns." Do you still feel this way?

I continue to feel this way about my faith journey. That said, I recently took a canoe trip with my family in a wilderness area here in Minnesota. It’s a place where I had my most significant faith experiences as a teenager and being back there made my faith closer and more real than it has felt in a while. The Christian experience, for me, is about repeatedly forgetting, and then remembering, God’s promises. I love how Saint Benedict writes that we are ALWAYS beginning again in the spiritual life. No one has it mastered.

 

You go on to write about many millennials, and others, being spiritually nomadic. "Denominational wandering is not unusual for modern Christians, nor do I think it's necessarily a bad thing. For millennials, the schisms over finer theological points, such as child versus adult baptism, or what happens at Communion, matter less than the authenticity of the congregation and its activity on issues of social importance... Fewer and fewer of us are centered in just one denomination. We are spiritual explorers, and when the church shows its ugly underbelly, many of my generation are looking for God outside institutional religion's walls."

I’m especially interested in going deeper with your thought of what matters is the ‘authenticity of the congregation and its activity on issues of social importance…’ And do you think that this pursual of authenticity could be fueling some of the movement of Christians among different denominations?

Authenticity of the congregation is, in a nutshell, about whether people are living differently because of their faith. Anyone can find community in a CrossFit or book club, but where else than church are people called to give radically, act prophetically, and love their neighbor as themselves? Personally, I’ve been willing to jump denominations in search of genuine expressions of this kind of beloved community, whether it’s in a Mennonite intentional community, Catholic monastery, or in the homeless ministry at my American Baptist church. I can’t speak for an entire generation, but I do think many people are less loyal to denominational identity and more interested in seeing Christians live out their faith in a very chaotic world.

You write in detail about your experience with the Visitation [Sisters of Holy Mary] Monastery and your relationship with the sisters there. You describe the sisters as being "[O]rganized and persistent, having endured decades of common life in-community pre-and-post Vatican II. They are neither passive nor timid, remaining faithful to their vows. They are the hearty ones, who have stayed in the church amid decline, who have seen their traditions devalued and mocked, who devote their lives to singing the Psalms and embracing vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience."

That’s quite an endorsement! Are you still a Visitation Companion? And, at the time of your initial encounter, how much of a spiritual anchor were the Sisters for you?

Yes, I am still a Visitation Companion, though I haven’t prayed in person with the sisters since the pandemic began. I have participated in zoom prayer, virtual retreats, and attended the funerals of two sisters that died in the last year. The sisters were and continue to be a spiritual anchor because they model the relationality of the Gospel, showing me that no Christian is a Christian alone. Just like in the Visitation Bible story, Mary needs Elizabeth’s affirmation. It confirms to her God’s calling in her life. Even though my life and marriage haven’t turned out the way I imagined, my relationship to monastic women calls out my vocation as a Christian to love, serve, and follow Jesus.

 

You mention the difficulty of carving out a new spiritual path for an interfaith family. "The thing about blazing a new trail in your interfaith home is that it costs something. The path is arduous, and no one has cleared the downed trees. There are no obvious faith practices to mutually draw from; instead, you must decide on family rhythms as you go."

I’m wondering if the same doesn’t apply to anyone who moves outside of a traditional commitment to a single denomination or congregation. I’m single, so I haven’t experienced what an interfaith family would experience. But even in that singleness, there are times of massive disconnect. Especially when trying to communicate with members of the former evangelical church I attended. What are your thoughts?

Massive disconnect is a great way to put it! Many people have become alienated from the church and, in the process of trying to reconstruct their faith, struggle with rituals and spiritual practices. In writing this book, I realized that my struggles in this area are not unique to Christians in interfaith families.

 

One of the more insightful thoughts you have is on the subject of living a "solution-oriented culture, that often seems to value the final result over respect for the process. And that faith is a gift that continually evolves. I once believed that a steady, certain faith in God and the Nicene Creed and the Bible was an absolute requirement for being a Christian. But in my own faith journey, the temperature keeps fluctuating and I can't seem to control the weather."

I’m curious to know what you think about how much the “solution-oriented” culture actually gets in the way of spiritual growth? And how do we face this challenge?

Humans don’t do particularly well with ambiguity. When I was part of the evangelical tradition, the clear black-and-white understanding of faith was comforting because I thought that, if I did and believed the right Christian things, life would work out okay. Jesus was presented as the solution for all my problems. There was not a lot of room in this theology for doubt, struggle, or failure, and so, when I experienced those things, I didn’t know what to do. I was focused on the product – that I should be a new creation in Christ, fully transformed. I was scared that I didn’t have all the answers anymore. But I’ve learned that I can still work out my salvation in community by living the Christian values I do know to be true, things like service or humility. I think God cares more about how I live those values in my relationship to God, to my faith community, my family, my neighbor, than about having a “solution” for living my best life now.

 

There’s a compelling argument you make for having a more flexible margin for doubt that Western Evangelicalism seems to have. "The evangelical tradition in which our faith was formed always hammered down the importance of right belief. All it took to be a Christian was believing that Jesus was the Son of God, that he died on the cross for our sins, and that we must accept him into our hearts to achieve eternal life. Having all the right answers seemed so simple. Is it any surprise that many former evangelicals, who took this emphasis of right belief so seriously, eventually walk away when their doubts begin to feel overwhelming? Being part of any religion is less about how we feel or what we believe at any given instant, which changes moment by moment, and more about our commitment to wrestle with our faith."

I’d love to hear any further thoughts you have on this! Including what this no margin for doubt may have in contributing to the loss of professing Christians in the U.S.

Doubt is part of faith and to pretend otherwise is a huge disservice to the lived experience of Christians from across the ages. Read about the lives of the saints and you will see how many struggled with belief. I love the Bible story of Jacob wrestling with God, where he stays engaged in the struggle and refuses to leave without God’s blessing. It’s a great model for faith. I hope that church leaders teach that it’s okay, and even necessary, to wrestle like Jacob. I hope they communicate that someone can still belong to a community and engage in spiritual practices even if they aren’t always sure about doctrine.

 

I appreciate your quote from Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, founder of the Nuns on the Bus social justice movement, noting that she “has written extensively about the vows of religious life, criticizing their outdated framework. She wrote: 'What the world needs now, respects now, understands now is not poverty, chastity and obedience. It is generous justice, reckless love and limitless listening.’"

Does this tie in to what you wrote about people searching for authenticity (question #2 above)?

Absolutely. Generous justice, reckless love, and limitless listening are things not commonly found in our culture. They are infused with God’s good grace and inspire us to see God’s movement in the world. We ache for God to make all things new. Seeing the Visitation Sisters live their vows gives me courage and greater trust in God.

 

Your love for your husband Josh, who left the Christian faith, shines through in your book. "As Josh stops to identify fungi growing on a downed log near our path, I remember [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer's warning to love people more than my visions for life - whether that vision is for Christian community or the perfect religious upbringing for my kids. It's a struggle. I wonder if the work of love begins when our ideals shatter, when we're forced to sort through the broken pieces together."

The quote from Bonhoeffer is very powerful stuff! And your honesty in admitting that, at times, it really can be a struggle is well put. I’m wondering if you’d care to go deeper with your observation about “the work of love begins when our ideals shatter…” 

Josh and I are both idealists, which means we had a long way to fall when the realities of life contradicted our lofty visions. It doesn’t mean that we don’t still have ideals, or values, or hopes for the future, but we hold them more loosely. Instead of projecting into the far distance, the work of love is daily and quotidian. In marriage it’s the way we listen to each other and turn toward each other. It’s much, much, harder than dreaming about the perfect community.

 

Continuing with the same subject of your marriage. You observe: "Loving each other doesn't mean giving up our distinct beliefs or practices. Loving each other means we each seek to understand and honor what the other holds sacred.

… it's how I practice the [wedding] vows we made to mutually obey one another. Kathleen Norris writes that, at its root, 'The word obey means 'hear.' And listening in that sense as mutual obedience, is fundamental to marriage... Such intimacy is a great gift because it also contains the challenge of doing what is necessary, every single day, to maintain the relationship.'"

You point to some very solid ways to face the challenges of an interfaith family, or being spiritually nomadic. First, the idea of mutual respect and seeking to understand different beliefs without being threatened by them. And then the importance of listening, to hear what the other person is saying.

Would you care to elaborate on any of this?

Love in a marriage is not about merging identities, but about spurring one another onward in our unique callings in life. In this busy season of life, both of us working full-time and raising two elementary-aged kids (during COVID!), our biggest challenge is taking the time necessary to “hear” one another during a time of great stress. Lots of people are dealing with this tension. We are all exhausted and burned out. For me, I must make a concerted effort to continue my individual spiritual practices while being open to what Josh holds sacred. I encourage him to go for long bike rides, and he encourages me to take the kids to church. It’s never perfect, or balanced 100 percent equally, but we carry on because we have that mutual respect and regard for each other.