I’m Ben Grace.
I literally slept my way to the top!
My auspicious ascent to co-host started as a guest on Episode 42 back in April 2019 where I admitted to eating fried chicken while drunk & naked on a Texas porch. Somehow that didn’t scare Karyn off dating me & I even managed to talk her into marrying me live on Facebook in the fall of 2020 in the middle of a global pandemic.
But my apostasy began a long time before that.
I was raised in the inner suburbs of Sydney Australia in a tiny sect of Christianity that is stubbornly non mainstream. With only about 50k members worldwide the Christadelphians are decidedly isolationist & proud of it.
And as a baby Enneagram 4 I was too. Until I wasn’t.
I was about 11 years old & sitting through a particularly boring sermon when I started thumbing through the book of Isaiah, one of the Old Testament prophets. We were really into Bible Marking so I had all sorts of colored pens & pencils inside my leather-bound Bible case & I started coloring in the word justice in pink if my memory serves me. And the passages started to stack up. The G*d of Isaiah was obsessed with justice for the poor, the widows, the fatherless, the stranger in the land. When the sermon finished & we stood up for the hymn I looked around at my white middle class church & my world began to shift.
I was a smart kid, the annoying kind that would be doing my Sunday school exam upside down in a car & still walking away with a high mark. I dueled with a girl in my Sunday school class to see who could memorize the longest scripture the fastest.
So I evolved into a pre teen that was on fire for the L*rd with a million questions & endless curiosity about faith. I was obsessed, zealous, & desperate to belong. Which was funny because wasn’t this faith community nearly all my family? How did I not feel like I belonged in this thing I had known my entire life. The only thing I had really known.
My long & winding search for belonging involves Rob Bell, moving to Manhattan, a Long Island church planter & his transgender father. I have swung like an over-oiled pendulum through Evangelicisim & lurched like a drunkard’s prayer into Franciscan theology. I fell in love with liturgy & out of love with organized religion. I got a tattooed by the husband of a Californian singer who I found on Youtube & tracked down on Facebook. I lost thousands of dollars worth of work when a close friend betrayed close confidences to a youth conference organization. I sat next to a 5 foot tall Jewish divorcee at a Co-dependents Anonymous meeting. I got insanely drunk & told my boss/lpastor & the guy who plays Pumbaa on Broadway that I was having an emotional affair.
My life probably looks like the scary slippery slope. And it kinda was.
But at the bottom I found some of the most incredible people. They would hold my gaze & I felt seen because something behind their smile told me that they knew grief also. Their life hadn’t turned out the way they thought or the way they had been taught. They’d been battered & bruised & bankrupt & dumped & divorced & downsized & declared dead. But when the dust settled they’d found that thing that I was searching for. Home. Self. Love. Acceptance. Belonging.
These days I’m surrounded by folks who’s only hill to die in is that each & every one of you deserves to know the truth, the whole truth & nothing but this truth:
You are loved.
You are not alone.
You belong.
So I’m thrilled to be a part of the Heathen team & I cannot wait to witness to the amazing stories unfolding in your life that you will share on the podcast & in the Facebook group. I’m honored to be included in the life saving work of being a soft place for deconstructing people to land.
Slainte!