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The more we allow ourselves to heal rather than bury our pain, the more we honor the person God created each of us to be. The more we look like Jesus, the more fully human we become. In the HBO series Mare of Easttown, written by Brad Ingelsby, Mare Sheehan shows us what it looks like to move from the weight of buried grief and the fear of not being enough to the lightness of release and surrender in acknowledging that we don’t have to be all things to all people. In fact, we don’t have to always have it all together. We simply can’t.

In this episode, author Helena Sorensen and host Kristy Lahoda discuss Mare’s character transformation over the course of the TV series as she works to solve a series of murders. The community has viewed her as a hero since her winning high school basketball shot. Mare carries the heavy burden of their expectation as she grinds through each day, stuffing her own personal grief and fear. But it all comes to a head when she is forced to face these buried emotions. As she begins to heal, she changes not only emotionally but physically as well. As she becomes better able to recognize, face, and be honest about her emotions, limitations, and needs, she ascends from hunkered-down, self-isolating martyrdom to the lightness of self-acceptance.

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Guest

Helena Sorensen
Author and Speaker

An author and speaker living in Nashville, Tennessee. Helena believes in the transformative power of words and the power of the voices that speak them. She enjoys building dark fantasy worlds with hopeful, courageous characters, and you’ll often hear her discussing the connection between faith and imagination.

Helena's Website
Helena's Books
Helena's articles on The Rabbit Room
Helena's articles on StoryWarren
Read more about Helena Sorensen
Helena Sorensen

Host

Kristy Lahoda
Fiction Writer, Spiritual Formation Practitioner, and Fiction that Forms Us Creator and Host

Kristy is a Renovaré Institute for Christian Spiritual Formation graduate (2018-2021), has a Ph.D. in chemistry, and is a contract scientific technical editor. She lives in central Ohio with Rob, her husband of 18 years, and their three children, 14 year-old girl/boy twins and a 12 year-old boy.

Read more about Kristy Lahoda
Kristy Lahoda

Show Notes

At 10:10, Kristy reads a passage from Eugene Peterson's biography A Burning in My Bones by Winn Collier that reminded her of Mare's life.

Her point was that Eugene's first exposure to congregation was the gritty, earthy atmosphere of his father's butcher shop, and while this may be off-putting or of concern to some, one never knows what places, things, experiences, or situations God might teach us through.

“The butcher shop flowed with the routines of small-town life and was frequented by common folks without pretension or flowery language. ‘I didn’t grow up with sophisticated language,’ Eugene said. These earthy and varying influences meant that as the Bible came alive to him, it was not as some Elizabethan artifact but as a living book, appropriate for the gritty lives of butchers, cement layers, radio-preaching mothers, and the drunks who lounged in the alley behind the shop amid empty bottles of Thunderbird whiskey. ‘That butcher shop was my introduction into the world of congregation,’ Eugene said. ‘The people who came into our shop were not just customers. Something else defined them. It always seemed more like a congregation than a store.’ And while his father’s passive disconnection was palpable at home, in the store Eugene saw him—and learned from him—at his best. His father treated each person with kindness, those who became true friends as well as those who incessantly fussed over the bacon or hovered over the trimming and weighing. Don Peterson welcomed all his customers as they were, valuing them, whether they unfolded crisp bills for the finest rib eyes or fished in their pockets for coins and walked out with packages of hot dogs. He treated each person with dignity, whether an elder from the Methodist church or one of the women from the brothel a couple of blocks away …

“Eugene later viewed his father’s work as priestly work and considered it one of his dad’s great gifts to him. This priestly connection was visceral, as Eugene saw Old Testament images from church (priests slaughtering the sacrifices) woven with the work his father did six days out of the week. The butcher shop was a place, as he would later describe the church, with ‘a lot of misfits and oddballs.’ It placed him, day after day, in a context of unspectacular ordinariness—and he learned to see it as holy.

“Oddly enough, the one person who didn’t seem to fit in the butcher shop was Eugene’s pastor. He didn’t visit Don’s establishment often, but when he did, he arrived with a sanctimonious air and put-on language, which were out of place with the plainspoken character of everyone else.”

Winn Collier, A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene Peterson, Translator of The Message (Hardback) - Discover the Authoritative Life Story of the Iconic Pastor and Bible Teacher. (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2021), 19.

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All Flame by Carolyn Arends

Thank you to Carolyn Arends for permission to use her song, "All Flame", from the album Recognition, for the podcast's intro and outro. Carolyn is a singer/songwriter, the Director of Education at Renovaré, and was one of my instructors in the Renovaré Institute. She has become a dear friend.

You can learn more about Carolyn at carolynarends.com.

If you'd like to purchase the song or the album, you can download it at her web store.

Recognition album cover

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