The Wild Holy
The Wild Holy
Podcast Description
The Wild Holy is hosted by Faithe and Stephanie. Together, we explore the natural wildness of the Holy — from an everyday recognition in an awe inspiring sunrise to a mystical encounter that defies description.
Each week, we invite guests who have lived these experiences to share their stories: their brushes with grace, their thresholds of mystery, and the moments that changed them forever. Through their voices, we cast light on the ways the Holy shows up in our lives.
This is The Wild Holy — where we learn to recognize and stand in awe of the sacred for its beautiful, untamed essence.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on themes of spirituality, personal transformation, and mystical encounters. Topics include near-death experiences, the connection between love and fear, and the divine manifestations in everyday life, with episodes like Held by Love, which features a guest's life-changing encounter with the 'Love Force' that reshaped her understanding of faith and connection.
The Wild Holy is hosted by Faithe and Stephanie. Together, we explore the natural wildness of the Holy — from an everyday recognition in an awe inspiring sunrise to a mystical encounter that defies description. Each week, we invite guests who have lived these experiences to share their stories: their brushes with grace, their thresholds of mystery, and the moments that changed them forever. Through their voices, we cast light on the ways the Holy shows up in our lives. This is The Wild Holy — where we learn to recognize and stand in awe of the sacred for its beautiful, untamed essence.
In this conversation, Faithe and Stephanie welcome Sarah Vetter to explore the “dark night of the soul,” a season when the familiar ways we have known God, ourselves, and the world begin to fall apart.
Sarah, a minister in the United Church of Christ, shares from her own experience of spiritual disorientation, loss of old maps, and the slow, mysterious transformation that can happen when certainty gives way to surrender. Drawing on the wisdom of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Gerald May, and her own lived journey, Sarah describes the dark night less as divine abandonment and more as a process of being remade by love.
The conversation moves through spiritual consolation and its absence, the difference between depression and the dark night, motherhood as a disruption of former prayer rhythms, the ache of disorientation, and the surprising emergence of a deeper, subtler sense of God. Sarah offers the image of water tumbling down a mountain, disappearing into limestone, and eventually rising as a clear, life-giving pool, an image of purification, mystery, and trust.
The episode also explores how this inner transformation shapes presence, compassion, ministry, intuition, and the way we accompany others. Sarah names “pre-compassion” as a kind of grounded love that exists before choice or action, a way of seeing others from the deep truth of their belovedness.
For anyone who has felt spiritually lost, undone, or unsure whether the old maps still work, this conversation offers companionship, honesty, and hope. The dark night may be painful, but it may also be part of love’s hidden work, transforming us by love, into love.
Resources mentioned:
Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth
https://bit.ly/3QQWpHV
St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
A public-domain version of the spiritual text/commentary on the online Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
https://bit.ly/4vqiTOx
Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle / The Mansions
A public-domain online version available through Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
https://bit.ly/4gba8nm
Integral Christian Network / Integral Spirituality Network Practices
Sarah mentions a guided meditation practice that moves awareness through different “centers of spiritual knowing,” including head, heart, womb/gut, and feet.
https://bit.ly/3SUVp6h
Whole-Body Mystical Awakening Guided Meditation
The meditation Sarah described which moves through head, heart, spiritual womb, and feet.
https://bit.ly/4oWvxD3
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