Where Is God? Eucharist, Trauma, and Divine Presence in Poland (Ela Wyrzykowska) Ep. #227

Dru Johnson (00:00)
Where are you sitting right now? Like what city are you in and what is it like?

Elzbieta (00:05)
I’m in Warsaw, in the capital of Poland, and we’ve got beautiful autumn right now. It’s sunny and the leaves take on incredible colors. And there is an expression for that. It’s a golden Polish autumn. And so we are experiencing it right now. we are now in the season immediately following a musical feast because we’ve just…

completed an international Chopin competition here in Warsaw. It only happens once every five years maybe at the international level. Now I should know that, but it’s very rare. So it’s a lot of music all over the place.

Dru Johnson (00:52)
These

are symphonies coming in from around the world to play Chopin.

Elzbieta (00:55)
Yes, it’s a very prestigious competition to win. So whoever does that has a career open. And normally it’s rather young people competing. So lots of excitement.

Dru Johnson (01:13)
okay. ⁓

okay. And I’ve heard war start as a beautiful city as well. Would you, what, would you compare it to any other city in Europe?

Elzbieta (01:22)
No,

it’s incomparable to any other city. I actually used to be a little bit embarrassed of my city when I grew up. It has changed since then. But the reason why I was embarrassed was that I realized at some point that our old town isn’t that old actually. It’s been completely rebuilt. And you know, I think I was really, really rather silly to be ashamed of that.

Dru Johnson (01:26)
The best.

Okay.

Elzbieta (01:51)
Because today I’m very proud and ⁓ Warsaw is a phoenix of a city because it was basically brought down to complete ruins by the Nazi German occupiers and as a result of Warsaw uprising, was an uprising during the Second World War that was started by the Polish resistance movement that wanted to free the city from the German occupiers in order to be able to welcome the

Soviet ⁓ army when it approached and the uprising was unsuccessful, unfortunately, and as a result, as an act of revenge, it was completely burned down to the ground. ⁓ And it was then rebuilt, complete with its historical monuments. Not all of them have been rebuilt, but some of them are actively being rebuilt right now. But other than that, we’ve also got proper

financial city with all the skyscrapers and really beautiful other neighborhoods and areas. So it’s a very unique city.

Dru Johnson (02:58)
So, because this will figure into our conversation here, what was, you may have to look back to your childhood. Did you see the kind of spiritual, psychological scarring in your community there as you were growing? I mean, was World War II still a ghost that haunted the city or had people moved on or ignored it?

Elzbieta (03:19)
I’m now sitting in ⁓ my home in an apartment ⁓ in one of ⁓ the neighborhoods in Warsaw that existed before the Second World War. We have signs of bullets on the ⁓ walls in our courtyard. So, yes, even as a child, I was acutely aware of this kind. It was very present in the…

tissue of the city. ⁓ then I learned to recognize the signs of trauma in people’s behaviors and how they manifested their emotions. And when I was a child, we had the martial law in Poland. Poland was under communist rule from the end of the Second World War until 1989. And it was never part of the Soviet Union, thank God, but we were definitely in the Soviet orbit.

So in the 1981, the martial law was introduced in Poland, there were tanks in the streets. So as a child, you probably don’t really know what it means when you see a tank in the street. But I remember walking with my grandmother and I was very young then, but I could sense the tension in her and I could sense how her… ⁓

how she froze when she saw the military tanks and so on. So it’s just an anecdote, but it just basically shows. And I’m only talking now about the Polish side of this, but then of course there is the whole tragic history of the Polish Jews who were annihilated during the Second World War. The whole community of the Polish Jews was wiped away with only

very, very small number of people surviving. And on the urban level, the Polish ghetto, the whole massive area was destroyed. when I was growing up, already some new structures were fully functional in that place. So that was something I discovered as I grew up. There used to be a completely different city with a completely different feel there.

Dru Johnson (05:37)
Yeah. Wow. And so it occurs to me, you know, having a lot of ⁓ Jewish friends who were raised in post Holocaust communities where all of their parents came out of Auschwitz or Birkenbeil, there’s some these places that they have explained to me very carefully that it’s, it’s very different being raised by an entire community that’s traumatized. ⁓ and that, just has all these proliferating effects.

Do you, I mean, do see that in Poland still to this day? The kind of, you’re, be like third generation, I guess, down from World War II. Is that still true?

Elzbieta (06:10)
Absolutely. But I think we’re only now becoming aware with the psychological knowledge coming down to… And it’s a different kind of trauma, I think, but it’s trauma. ⁓ yes, like I said, it’s only now becoming part of the actual deepened public discourse.

Dru Johnson (06:32)
Yeah. And in some ways I feel like, you know, we think combat veterans are always like, yeah, we probably shouldn’t go to war. If we can avoid it, we shouldn’t go to war. But even then that’s just a personal experience, obviously a traumatic experience that shapes their thinking. But then I think, oh no, the people who are 40, 50, 60 years out should be the ones who should also help us think about the long psychological stripes.

that scar, the scar of the community, which is very difficult to, ⁓ get your head around. ⁓ there’s, there’s all kinds of little ways in which it manifests itself. Okay. This is really depressing, but, but necessary because I mean, you know, it’s not like we have non depressing stories of our origins in the United States, ⁓ either, but we don’t talk much about them or, we don’t like to talk about the psychological scarring of the history of United States as well. ⁓ but it’s all there. Okay. So.

You were, ⁓ sorry, you are a scholar of the Hebrew Bible.

Elzbieta (07:33)
Yes, that’s my trade.

Dru Johnson (07:35)
Which is why I I liked you when I first met you. I was like, a Hebrew Bible person, they have to be okay. Where did you train and what did you study?

Elzbieta (07:43)
So I started off as a literary scholar, would say, as my master’s degree. didn’t integrate it without the bachelor’s. So my master’s is in Polish language and literature, actually. During my studies, I discovered the Bible as both literary and spiritual literature. And after completing my master’s, I knew I wanted to move on into research.

in the Bible field. also, I’ve always been interested in the Jewish history and culture and religion. But until that time, I really didn’t have any opportunities to study that in a structured way. So I decided to continue my studies in Hebrew department of neophilology at the University of Warsaw.

So I did that for two years, starting from the undergraduate program. And after those two years, I decided that I was ready for the next step. What I mean by that is that I got some knowledge of both ⁓ biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew. And also of history of ancient Israel. And modern one too.

Dru Johnson (09:09)
traveling

to Israel or?

Elzbieta (09:11)
I went on the pilgrimage in year 2000, but then for those two years I was just basically studying in Warsaw. But after those two years I applied for a scholarship to go to Tel Aviv and spend a year at Tel Aviv University and I was accepted. So I spent a wonderful nine months studying at the Ulpan and becoming actually a fluent Hebrew speaker, which is…

Dru Johnson (09:40)
Yeah, that’s impressive.

Elzbieta (09:41)
it was amazing.

Dru Johnson (09:43)
Well, I mean, if you want to learn Hebrew, Jerusalem is like the worst place to be. But I feel like Tel Aviv is a better place to be for learning modern Hebrew.

Elzbieta (09:50)
Yes, Tel Aviv was an absolutely amazing place to do that. Tel Aviv University, Ulpan is one of the best in the world, or maybe the best in the world. So I was incredibly privileged to be able to do that. And then lots of opportunities to use the language. Although it was really tricky because once people realized that I spoke English, they immediately switched it.

Dru Johnson (10:14)
That was my problem in Jerusalem. They just hear the accent or you like, if you just stumble once, they’re like, okay, what are you talking about? What are you trying to say?

Elzbieta (10:23)
Yeah, exactly. Although my accent in Hebrew was attached to a separate set of anecdotes because some of my friends told me, look, you have such a funny accent in English. It’s confusing. Sorry, in Hebrew. It’s confusing. You are a young person. I was 25 at that time. You’re a young person, but you speak like my auntie.

Dru Johnson (10:50)
It’s because your aunt taught me Hebrew.

Elzbieta (10:54)
So because of course there is a big population of people who emigrated to Israel from Poland. Yes, so that was an amazing time and apart from the linguistic skills I also deepened the grounding in the study of the Hebrew Bible. But then I’m quite an unusual creature in terms of being a biblical scholar.

scholar Hebrew Bible because I’m Catholic and I trained with Jewish scholars. So my perspective is very different from the one that usually is represented in the field if one can say such a thing because there is such a variety of backgrounds and perspectives in this diverse field. ⁓ Yeah, but that’s part of my training. And then from Tel Aviv, I moved on to Manchester where I did my PhD.

Dru Johnson (11:51)
The UK.

Yeah. Okay. And so I’m wondering on the literary side. So you were studying literature. I mean, that also is an unusual way to come. mean, strangely enough, you would think that that would be a natural route in route to Hebrew Bible. ⁓ so I wonder, I wonder two things, cause this happened to me when I lived in Israel and was learning Israeli Hebrew, I never became fluent, but it kind of opened cause I learned Hebrew through the traditional seminary. learn the grammar.

memorize the verb paradigms, that kind of thing. And then I started learning how to speak modern Hebrew and all of a sudden my biblical Hebrew just started almost coming off the page in three dimensions. ⁓ And then I wonder also, you see the natural connections between your literary understanding of the world and what was going on with the Hebrew Bible or did you have to like build a bridge across?

Or maybe something else.

Elzbieta (12:43)
Yeah, that’s a great question. And your description of your journey in the language resonates with me very much because I actually started with some rudimentary ⁓ biblical Hebrew before I started learning modern Hebrew, but then it very quickly caught up. And this sense of the language coming off the page and becoming alive was very special. I actually to this day, I have a

problem with the scholarly readings of the Hebrew Bible passages with all the ancient, you know, the pronunciations and so on. just seems to block something for me. High five. So, yes, but coming back to your question, I think.

Dru Johnson (13:29)
Yeah, exactly.

Elzbieta (13:37)
This is maybe something that I had to overcome really. The literary training, literary scholarly training, it somehow seems to take away something from the experience as a reader. And I sort of had to unlearn some ways of reading to become responsive to the text again.

Dru Johnson (14:01)
So were you studying new criticism? I’m assuming reader response criticism was part of that training as well.

Elzbieta (14:08)
Yes,

different approaches really. ⁓

Dru Johnson (14:13)
But they weren’t making natural connections to the literary aspects of the Hebrew. Okay.

Elzbieta (14:18)
Yes, there was lot of translating involved because I learned methodology in Polish literature. ⁓ When I studied it was very focused on the historical criticism. The history of literature was a big component. But then I think I had some solid grounding in ⁓

in close reading actually, close reading of texts. So that was helpful, that part of training. But the methodology I decided to use in my doctoral research was more philosophical than literary really, which I realized in the process.

Dru Johnson (14:52)
Okay.

Yeah, well, we want to hear more about that for sure, because that’s what we’re all about, philosophical readings of the Bible. So what do mean by that more philosophical?

Elzbieta (15:19)
So ⁓ when I studied in the still Polish philology, I studied these ideas, literary critical ideas of a Russian philosopher, Mikhail Dakhatyn. Yes, and of course, because I studied in Poland, I only discovered quite a

Dru Johnson (15:36)
yeah, of course.

Elzbieta (15:43)
far along my PhD process that he used to be a big name in the English language scholarship of the Bible as well, but a decade before. So that was unfortunate. But I think ⁓ in a sense, it was a good time to engage with Bakhtin because ⁓ when I started doing my work,

In that area, ⁓ the actual Bakhtin criticism was quite advanced. And I was able to realize, thanks to the scholars who studied Bakhtin as a thinker, to realize that actually he wasn’t so much a literary scholar as a philosopher. That was project. And because he was a survivor of the system of different hardships,

⁓ he had to move between those different disciplines. Now that I talk about it, I speak about it, I wonder if it wasn’t part of his personal intellectual journey, not only the circumstances that he moved between different areas of interest.

Dru Johnson (16:57)
Sorry. Yeah. ⁓ I mean, that’s a trajectory I’ve seen, especially coming out of Eastern Europe. thank God, love, Michael Polanyi, who’s my patron saint, but same thing, horror, saw the horrors of war with working chemists and then couldn’t tolerate the caricatures and the, and the versions of logical positivism because something got turned on and war would be my guess. so anyway, sorry. ⁓

Elzbieta (17:24)
No,

no, that

Dru Johnson (17:25)
Can

you give us, for people who’ve never heard of Bakhtin, which is probably going to be 99 % of people listening to this, so what would be a nodal point in his work that for you kind of lit up your interest?

Elzbieta (17:38)
⁓ For me, think it was what really lit up my interest at first was the idea of ⁓ two ideas, ⁓ dialogical thinking. the second was the idea of polyphony, polyphonic works of literature in which there isn’t one single voice that speaks

the truth that wants to be expressed by the work of art. On the other, to the contrary, is a combination of those different voices and perspectives that conveys the meaning or the message of the work of art. So I thought this was incredibly interesting and I wanted to see how this would work out. But I ended up focusing on his early works and these were openly philosophical. And that’s where he

kind of worked on, and what I thought was especially interesting in the context of the book of Amos was that it was a combination of ⁓ ethics and aesthetics. So his aesthetics, his idea about what the work of art is, what creation is, were actually building on his earlier work in ethics. And he actually used

phenomenological insights to ⁓ talk about this in a very both kind of general and generic ⁓ way. ⁓ So I thought I would actually use his ideas metaphorically, not to really speak about the ⁓ the book of Amos, the text, but rather about what’s happening.

within the text, the relationship between God as the author of Israel, not only the natural world, but actually the nation of Israel and the ethical code that is built into this community as…

Dru Johnson (20:00)
My goodness, this is stirring so many questions within me. So I’m deciding, let me sort really quickly, which ones, ⁓ maybe give us a concrete example of a section of Amos where you see this polyphony, which is many voices, ⁓ at work. I, would it, would the phrase, you know, a rhetorical strategy of the book of Amos be correct, or is that, is that something else?

Elzbieta (20:23)
That’s a very interesting question. I didn’t end up actually using the ideas of polyphony that much in the book, ⁓ because I don’t think that would really work for that text. In fact, I think it maybe would not, because the prophetic voice would actually, yes, it’s strong and it’s the one that conveys.

Dru Johnson (20:43)
Yeah, it’s pretty strong.

Elzbieta (20:48)
the truth or the message ⁓ and so on. What I actually did use was because they are so… Okay, so I feel caught off guard because years and years since… Very, very exciting to be talking about my doctoral research. It’s been years since I worked on that and I don’t really get that much

Dru Johnson (21:05)
Sorry, sorry. No, it was kind of an unfair question.

Elzbieta (21:18)
that many opportunities to speak about that chapter in my work. So it’s very exciting. I’m a bit defensive because I don’t remember the actual references at the moment. But yes, I actually used the most the idea of God as the author of Israel, the creator of Israel. And what helped me in Bakhtin’s thought is that ⁓ he speaks about this

relationship between the creator and his or her creation. So that includes the character in a book. So that’s where I think it’s a bit confusing and where I, if I have opportunities in the future, I would do some more work about the actual relationship between God and Amos.

and the text. But the work I did, the analysis I did was about the world within the text. So ⁓ God declares that he is the author of Israel. created you by bringing you up out from the land of Egypt. So it is very much in accord with how Bakhtin sees creation. is separation from the already existing

Dru Johnson (22:44)
Gah.

Elzbieta (22:45)
things. So God takes out Israel from other contexts, removes Israel and shapes it through different experiences, but also through the laws that are given to Israel as a gift. And that is the shape of Israel. So the transgressions of the social laws that Amos speaks so eloquently against are actually self-destructive.

By not observing them, Israel destroys its own structure as a nation, as God’s creation. ⁓

Dru Johnson (23:23)
It’s anti-creational in some way like Terence Freitheim’s views of Exodus. just goes against the nature of creation. Okay, one more. I can’t help myself. This is so fascinating. So that to me actually might solve a problem that I’ve had since my PhD, which is in Genesis two and three, it has always been.

Elzbieta (23:31)
Mmm. Mmm.

Dru Johnson (23:49)
I mean, it’s clear to me that in Genesis two to three, the problem is they listened to the voice of the serpent rather than listening to the voice of God who said, eat from all the trees except for that one. But there’s no context in that story as to why they should have listened to God rather than the serpent. You end up saying things like, well, God created them. I’m like, well, I don’t know that that naturally presumes hierarchy. I mean, it feels like it does, but I couldn’t give any argument.

But it sounds like you’re saying Amos is actually making this exact argument, the formation, and they were separated out, right? He was pulled out from the dirt, given the breath of life, like the animals, separated from the animals. ⁓ Yeah, that this might actually be a deeper trope or deeper pattern in the Torah’s thinking than I gave it credit for. Does that jive? Does that rhyme with what you’re saying?

Elzbieta (24:37)
Hmm.

That’s very interesting. of course, you know, one of the things I had to acknowledge is that Bakhtin’s thinking was influenced by the Christian. Oh, yeah, of course. Also Jewish, but secular philosophers. so, so, yeah. But if we just look at the logic of it, then I think absolutely it has this aspect.

And now, you know, even thinking about it on some sort of a even more abstract level, if we assume that the main ⁓ rule of creation is love. And also that is the rule, working, the principle, the principle of rescuing Israel from Egypt.

then the social laws that are an expression of love are inscribed into the fabric.

Dru Johnson (25:47)
Okay, we’re gonna have to get off this because I can’t, my mind is running a million miles an hour now. ⁓ Because unfortunately you’re not still writing on Amos, because I think we wanna hear more from you on that. ⁓ But you are now doing this other very interdisciplinary work. And let’s talk about interdisciplinary work first as a scholar, just like in general. ⁓ What do you think are…

We’ll put the benefits to the side. What do you think are the dangers of doing interdisciplinary work? In interdisciplinary work, we just mean your expertise, you’re going into another department in the university and putting your ideas in conversation with their ideas, right?

Elzbieta (26:30)
I’m so glad you asked this question. my, using the Bakhtinian language, my situatedness in life, in vice-interdisciplinarity, because I’ve never been a part of any department as such.

Dru Johnson (26:48)
⁓ You haven’t f-

Elzbieta (26:51)
PhD work. Actually, you know, even for my PhD, I traveled quite a trajectory because I had my my master’s was in literary studies. I detoured Jewish studies department and I ended up in religions and theology in Manchester. So it already is some sort of a movement. But and then

After my PhD, I worked at Cambridge Theological Federation for a while. But since then, I’ve been affiliated or associated at the Margaret Beaufort Institute in Cambridge, which is a theological but very interdisciplinary setting.

Dru Johnson (27:24)
yeah.

Elzbieta (27:43)
And for me, the experience of collaborating with colleagues in Cambridge was my first step into practical theology with empirical approaches, which I didn’t apply then, but I was aware of that. So ⁓ I think I’m interdisciplinary by nature. And I’ve never really encountered the difficulty of having to walk through apartments and

Dru Johnson (28:11)
⁓ okay.

Elzbieta (28:13)
seminars and so on. Yes.

Dru Johnson (28:17)
journal articles where

they’re like, this isn’t quite for us. This is for this other. Yeah.

Elzbieta (28:23)
This

is where I am now. But I think you asked about the dangers or maybe costs. For me, it is… And I’m really glad you asked this question because this is what I’m reflecting on right now. I would say that maybe on a very practical level, it’s very hard to explain when people ask you what you do and who you are.

You don’t know what to put on your business card or on your LinkedIn profile. And on a deeper level, I think it is connected with the issue of identity, which translates into all sort of other practical things like where to publish, what conferences to go to, and where do I really contribute?

Right? Because each discipline has its own questions, state of knowledge, and ⁓ you want to be, one wants to be a part of something, one wants to be a part of community, of a community, and to see the fruits of one’s labor, which might be a little ⁓ stone added to a wall or a building that is being built, but the danger of interdisciplinarity is that you might

Never know what you’re building, where are you adding to?

Dru Johnson (29:50)
Years later, somebody might pick up your writing and go, this person was saying interesting things. it true? Because I know it tends to be true in the Israeli system and the German system that in European universities, they tend to want to see you go, you know, I’m to do religious studies for my bachelor’s, religious studies for my master’s, religious studies for my PhD. Do you feel that pressure in that system?

Elzbieta (30:15)
Again, this is something I’ve never experienced because I never did religious studies here in Poland. ⁓ I studied in a secular university and ⁓ but looking for employment is tricky for me right now for many reasons, one being that I’ve never been part of the system, so I’m not known. There aren’t many jobs.

But then because of interdisciplinarity, yes, it might be very difficult to prove that, for example, I don’t have a degree from a papal university. ⁓ There are some secular ones, but the majority is Catholic, so they would want a degree from a papal institution.

Dru Johnson (30:55)
And Poland. ⁓

I

didn’t even think about that. Yeah. I think, and I don’t know how much you have seen this. think one of the difficulties, well, especially with younger people who come and say, I read your work and I want to do kind of what you do. And I think, I don’t know if I would recommend coming straight into interdisciplinary work. I tend to say become an expert in one thing and then you can always put it in conversation with another thing, but, that there can be a danger in that. I think another danger can be.

⁓ that you just inappropriately grab ideas from other domains and, and you can make it, you can always make it sound good. ⁓ as we, we both know, you can make anything sound good, but, ⁓ I, I find that when I’m working in a very high interdisciplinary mode, which unfortunately I am almost all the time, my goal is that for somebody in that other field would read what I say and say, well, yeah, this isn’t completely wrong.

Elzbieta (32:03)
Yes, no, absolutely. And I think that there is some, you know, polarity to navigate here. I actually, ⁓ I’m hoping to write an article about that, growing from a conversation that I had with colleagues ⁓ on a very special training program that I hope we will touch on in our…

Dru Johnson (32:28)
Yeah, yeah,

we won’t talk about that now.

Elzbieta (32:29)
But that was, we were talking about interdisciplinarity and single disciplinarity and that is already published, an article. But I had a thought that there is, if we think that basically the higher purpose of studying something is ⁓ approaching some truth about that topic.

and the danger we want to avoid is misrepresenting this topic or saying something that really won’t be ⁓ useful either to us or to anybody else, then I think that both interdisciplinarity and single disciplinarity have their benefits, but also both have their dangers. So single disciplinarity has the upside of being a real expert in a methodology and

in the field. ⁓ But on the other hand, the natural downside of this is sort of, you know, it can be limiting. can help you see a lot of detail in a very small pixel size.

Dru Johnson (33:41)
I’m glad people do that work.

Elzbieta (33:43)
But if you become too entrenched in that, you can basically start just digging deeper and deeper into a tunnel that nobody else will understand and appreciate. And on the other hand, if you want to be interdisciplinary, too interdisciplinary or whatever, the downside of that is what you just said, you can be very superficial.

in what you’re doing and ⁓ chasing new methodologies all the time and never really getting to understand them ⁓ and ⁓ not seeing the context in which they were developed and the purposes that they were developed to serve. However, on the other hand, you can really open broader perspectives. You can include them in your vision of what you’re doing and you can really see in

how many different fields what you’re doing is relevant and how that can help you see more.

Dru Johnson (34:44)
What should

be the name of your next book is Chasing Methodologies. It’s a great title.

Elzbieta (34:49)
That should probably be title of my biography.

Dru Johnson (34:52)
Yeah, chasing methodologies like the wind. So let’s talk about this particular interdisciplinary project you’re working on between ⁓ empirical studies and pastoral theology, spiritual thinking. I don’t know why I didn’t catch it before, but Tobias Tampton is in that group. He’s from here in Oxford, right? Yeah. He’s written for us before on his embodied thinking stuff.

Elzbieta (35:14)
Yes, he is.

Dru Johnson (35:19)
⁓ okay. So what are you doing and, what, what two areas are you combining or maybe even three areas are you combining and what benefit do you think it’s going to have for the church?

Elzbieta (35:29)
Right. So let me just start by saying that ⁓ both Tobias and I are members of the same cohort of the cross-training in psychology for theologians, that is just coming to an end this coming month. The project is finishing for both cohorts. ⁓

So it was organized by a wonderful team at the University of Birmingham led by Carissa Sharpe, is a psychologist. And she brought together experts in ⁓ various areas in psychology of religion to train us theologians in psychological methods of study. And we had a period of training, of coursework.

⁓ followed by our own research projects that we prepared, worked on with our psychology mentors. Mine was ⁓ a wonderful Katherine Johnson from the Arizona State University.

Dru Johnson (36:41)
Okay. when you say coursework, were you taking like statistics and research methodologies kind of? Yeah. ⁓

Elzbieta (36:48)
think there’s methodology.

We

didn’t have to do the actual statistics. We had to just understand that it underlies the quantitative approaches. ⁓ But yeah, so we had a two weeks long intensive summer school to begin with, and then we had online training sessions as well. So it was really very intensive and incredibly useful.

So my work during that time, my project in collaboration with Katherine Johnson was dedicated to developing and applying a measure, a psychological measure, quantitative approach to an aspect of God representations. This particular aspect was

How and where people locate God’s presence? We started with the aspects of transcendence, so God being far away, separate from the world. Immanence, so God is present in the world. And indwelling, God is present within the human person. And then I wanted to apply it to see how

that aspect of God representation correlates with people’s prayer practices. And I studied ⁓ Polish population, Polish Catholics, that was divided into two groups. ⁓ One were people who were members of charismatic prayer groups and the other groups were not charismatic. By charismatic I mean people who are

⁓ praying in a way that is influenced by and similar to evangelical Christians’

Dru Johnson (38:53)
Like the charismatic renewal within the Catholic Church? Yes. Okay, got it.

Elzbieta (38:57)
Exactly. And so that this study of the two groups was qualitative, but it also helped us review the scale that we have always drafted. And it was quite a substantial revision. And then the finalized scale was applied to a larger sample of people who simply declared that they were practicing

Christians in Poland.

Dru Johnson (39:31)
⁓ so would it, would it spoil, ⁓ the research to tell us just now where do people put God? Where do they think God was? Or sorry, God’s presence, I should say.

Elzbieta (39:43)
No, of course not. I’m actually very excited about that. And ⁓ parts of the research have already been ⁓ published by Kathy Johnson and some are in the pipeline. ⁓ yes. Well, what I thought was especially exciting was to see that the qualitative ⁓ interviews I did actually made us revise our thinking.

Which I thought, wow!

Dru Johnson (40:15)
Exactly what you want to happen, right?

Elzbieta (40:18)
So actually the first thing that our interviewees opened my eyes to was that for them, for some of them especially, what mattered the most about God’s presence was God’s presence in the Eucharist. So in the Catholic theology, the real presence in the Eucharistic elements.

So of course we had to introduce this topic, ⁓ including also other sacraments as is understood in the Catholic Church. But especially the Eucharistic presence was prominent and also opened all sorts of new venues for further research. But ⁓ another important change we had to introduce

⁓ because of the input from the qualitative interviews and also further tests in the US when more data was gathered and statistics was applied, is that ⁓ actually ⁓ some of those… ⁓

some of the items clustered together, some of the categories clustered together. So actually, God’s immanence and dwelling statistically clustered together and even though… Yeah. …separated them in the qualitative interviews. And also, another input from the interviews was a very strong… ⁓

theme, very important to some interviewers, about God’s presence in relationships between people, which are termed ecclesial presence in the body of the Church. So again, we introduced those items, but they too clustered together with immanent and indwelling, because this is a form of God’s presence in the world.

This observation, but also from the wording we tried to suggest for the Eucharistic presence, ⁓ resulted in my observation that even though I did my best to become a psychologist in this project, I still was very attached to the theological commitments. I really wanted to be faithful to what

the community told me, to what my interviewers told me. And just to clarify, when we worked on the Eucharistic presence subscale, or set of statements that expressed the belief that God is present in the Eucharist, we tested a very general simple language statement, such as God is present in special objects. It just didn’t mean anything.

Dru Johnson (43:23)
Hmm.

Elzbieta (43:25)
to the respondents. It was too general. Even people who were… This is my hypothesis, but I think if I went back to the person who told me, and I quote, when you asked me about God’s presence, I thought we would be discussing Eucharist and the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.

Dru Johnson (43:47)
concrete specific that’s attached to the-

Elzbieta (43:49)
If I told her, look, so would that express your thinking? is present in special objects. She would most probably say, no, God is present in the Eucharist.

Dru Johnson (44:02)
There’s really interesting research, psychological research on the inability of people to think abstractly and reason abstractly. But when you give them concrete instances, they can do the exact same abstract reasoning like perfectly. It’s fascinating stuff. this, this very much tracks with the kind of standard of abstract reasoning research.

Elzbieta (44:22)
Very interesting, yes. So yeah, I wish I was aware of that at the time. But anyway, so we had to navigate that somehow. And then of course, for the psychological research as such, we decided to combine those three aspects that clustered together statistically. So immanent indwelling and ecclesial presence and we took it internal.

God in turn to the world. ⁓ But something in me was saying, look, as a theologian, do you think it actually represents what your interviewees wanted to say? So that’s when I really struggled and I was thinking that maybe I’m doing something not the way I should. I didn’t understand something fundamental.

But I talked to Carissa Sharp, the PI of the grants that organize the training, and she said, look, that’s exactly the tension between psychological and theological thinking here. So coming back to your question about the dangers, sometimes you just run into this tension, and that’s where or when the questions of identity become important.

And sometimes it doesn’t need to be exactly existential identity, sometimes it might just be the hat you’re wearing, the work you’re trying to do. So I decided that what I wanted to do was actually stay a theologian, but ⁓ benefit from the approaches that ⁓ psychology offers. After all, that’s what the project was about, to train us theologians.

in psychological methods. And I ⁓ started to develop the concept of theological measures, ⁓ methodologies that are fully rigorous, that really follow what quantitative ⁓ empirical methods entail, ⁓ but allow for this space that

what we create, measuring tools we create that would accommodate the voices of the communities we want to study. ⁓ we look for answers to theological questions. What is going on in the community? What is God doing in the church right now? And how can we see the spirit moving here through those numerical methods?

Instead of drawing general conclusions about the workings of the human mind, emotions and behaviors. So there’s this subtle shift and ⁓ yeah.

Dru Johnson (47:24)
But that is so necessary. mean, it’s part of the work I’m doing as well. mean, if you read enough theology, you realize people can just say things and they can put it in a system and it sounds very nice and everything. It kind of connected. But this, and that research I was talking about on abstract reasoning, the question that research was, okay, we think humans are logical in this particular way. Well, let’s go see if they are. Let’s like,

put these logic tests to them and see how they perform. the question was, how do people actually use reason? And you probably have heard some of this research where, depending on which language ⁓ they reason through, they will use different forms of logic to reason through a problem, depending on which language they’re thinking in. ⁓ And so it’s the problem of theology, not all of theology, but that there’s never a research question that can be posed to my thinking, right? There’s never…

I can say things in such a way that it really can’t be checked out against reality. And I think the Hebrew way of reasoning is it has to check out against reality.

Elzbieta (48:27)
That’s the, well, so it sounds like Hebrew thinking is empirical thinking. So I wanted to say that actually the…

Dru Johnson (48:33)
yeah, yeah, I’ve made this argument.

Elzbieta (48:39)
The place in theology where these kinds of questions are increasingly being asked is practical theology using empirical methods. Not all of practical theology uses empirical methods. Some of practical theology is reflective or simply theoretical, but a lot of it is practical using empirical methods. And this is something that was the first result for me of my training.

I realized that as a theologian, me personally, I will, with all my force, try to avoid the situations in which I make empirical claims without checking or at least projecting a way in which I could verify empirically the validity of this claim. So, yes, we also, my colleagues and I, reflected on whether or not

as theologians, we have something to offer too in social sciences, not just ⁓ taking the methods, but also are we partners in this interchange? And basing on our experiences working on the projects during the training program, we concluded that yes, we had things to offer as practical theologians.

because we could bring to the table both ⁓ our theological knowledge and understanding. But I have to say, it’s not like this is absent from ⁓ psychology of religion. People who do create those measures and prepare those studies are very well versed in theology and they collaborate with theologians. So, yes, it is often there. What was missing was the other component of that.

the practical component, giving importance to the voice of practice and ⁓ people’s own theological thinking. So practical theology has a lot to offer to the disciplines that study religion from different perspectives.

Dru Johnson (50:58)
Well, we’re going to have a whole other conversation offline about this because I, I, yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said on that last thing you just said. ⁓ help me with your last name.

Elzbieta (51:09)
I’m glad you’re not trying to pronounce it yourself. Łazarewicz Wyżykowska.

Dru Johnson (51:12)
Never.

Okay. Yep. I will not try it, but Ella, thank you so much for your wisdom. It’s been a pleasure.

Elzbieta (51:22)
Thank you, Dru. It was wonderful to talk to you about all those things.