A fertile underground, an author interview
Aimee Byrd talks about her new book, *The Hope in Our Scars*
Gentle reader,
Today, I’m honored to bring you an interview with
, who talked with us about her hot off the presses new book The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment (229 pages, Zondervan).
The interview follows:
BFJ: The cover uses beautiful imagery from kintsugi. Can you tell us about the cover?
AB: Kintsugi is a Japanese art that repairs broken pottery with precious metals such as gold and silver, highlighting what was broken. I love how subversive this is to the disposable way we treat things. And when we do repair it is often more functional, doing our best to hide the flaw. In beholding this art, we learn the value of broken pieces, the power of beauty in the mending, and the story that it tells. Author and artist Makato Fujimura has popularized Kintsugi to teach about mending from trauma. By using a sanctified imagination in beholding this mending, our eyes and minds are directed to the value of the testimony these broken pieces hold—their service over time, the hands they’ve been in, the humble power of their vocation, the families they belonged to, the artists who created them, and the wear and brokenness over time. The cracks and broken edges became the horizon where beauty can emerge.
I write about how this contrasts with the contrived beauty I have seen in looking for a new church and to the way that broken people are treated. Thinking about kintsugi made me ask the question, what do we value? What do we see as beautiful? Kintsugi is such a powerful metaphor for the hope in our scars and the testimony they bear. They are part of the living body that is so valued by God. I look at the picture we have in the Eucharist, the mystery of Christ’s body broken and transformed into Christ’s body given for our nourishment, the horizon where we see beauty emerge. It’s the gold poured over the seared edges, the highlight of our hope, the truth that testifies to the evil in this world and the horror of sin. It’s the history of our value, the disruption to what we think we want and need, and the testimony to where we are headed. It’s the givenness of love, embraced together, around the table.
BFJ: Beautiful. Why did you write The Hope in Our Scars?
AB: I’ve endured some pretty awful, public spiritual abuse from leaders in my former denomination. The process in trying to confront this abuse using proper church channels was worse than the harassment and plotting that I was facing. It caused a lot of disillusionment with the church. I realized that I had a false security in doctrinal precision and a faux belonging in my church community. It was difficult to sort out what was real in my community of faith and in what we confessed to believe. As I documented the public meetings regarding my case on my blog, many men and women reached out to me with their own stories of disillusionment. It’s important to name and lament harm from the church. Looking at our wounds is an act of hope. It is seeing it for what it is and recognizing what’s turned the wrong way. And in asking what is real, Christ ministered to me deeply in his word and in my friendships that remained. Many are deconstructing from the church because it failed to point us to what is real. I wrote The Hope in Our Scars as an invitation to listen and look for what Christ might be beckoning us to now.
BFJ: Give us the short version: what’s the book about?
AB: The Hope in Our Scars is about rising from disillusionment with the church and seeing what’s real. An important thing I learned from my own story is that theology without love is dead. We are seeing the consequences of this throughout the broader evangelical church. She is full of hurting and disillusioned disciples. We’ve missed something big in our quests to be right—the heart of the matter. Christ is preparing his bride/church for love. We need to face our disillusionment, learn how our own stories weave with the stories of our brothers and sisters in the faith under this metanarrative, and how we hold them together as a testimony to where we’ve come from, what we’ve been through, and the beauty Christ is inviting us into together. In this, we find freedom in belonging to Christ. We find that the beauty of his unitive love is an invitation to the real that rises above our disillusionment.
Aimee Byrd is an author, speaker, blogger, podcaster, and former coffee shop owner. Aimee is author of several books, including Why Can't We Be Friends?, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and The Sexual Reformation. Her articles have appeared in First Things, Table Talk, Modern Reformation, By Faith, New Horizons, Ordained Servant, Harvest USA, and Credo Magazine, and she has been interviewed and quoted in Christianity Today and The Atlantic.
BFJ: Share a detail you’re fond of from the book?
AB: Intertwined with sharing some of my own story and some of my friends’, I work from a book in Scripture that many may find weird: The Song of Songs. Christ ministered to me deeply in my pain through the words of the Song. In it, we get a glimpse of the holy of holies, where we encounter Christ in an intimate way. Allegory, poetry, and metaphor do something that propositional statements about God cannot: they stir our affections and direct our desires. And in this picture of Christ’s unitive and covenantal love for his bride, the church, we get a glimpse of the love that he is preparing us for. We see that the woman representing the bride/church in the Song is bold in her requests. She names her abuse, speaks out when Christ seems absent, and learns to see herself through his eyes. Man, that really connects with me. One part that I share that I am particularly fond of is Christ’s words for her to come out of the clefts of the rock. He’s so tender. He says, “My dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the crevices of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely” (Song 2:14). This is how he sees us. He wants to behold us. And he wants to hear our voice. That was very powerful for me as my own denomination was trying to silence me.
BFJ: A lot of us have moments when we despair of healing. Can you speak into that?
AB: So often, we cannot see a way forward. We just hurt. And I don’t think we can just jump to healing. Part of it is being able to name the pain, name what was done to us, name our own unmet desires and expectations, and lament. Grieving is an important part of healing. And we need people we can trust who care about us as witnesses to help hold our stories. This cannot be rushed. Sadly, church is often not a place where we can bring our raw pain and our discouragement. I write about “the underground,” where we die to our sole selves, looking at a poem of Malcolm Guite’s that is inspired from John 12: 24, “Truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces much fruit.” Guite speaks of this underground that we fall to, how it is actually a crowded place “where the other fallen gather.” I think this is where church needs to be hanging out. It’s where Jesus is. He is present in our suffering, and we see him in the faces of those in the underground. It’s also where many resurrections happen.
BFJ: Wow. I love that. What do people mistakenly assume when they hear about your book?
AB: There are a number of people who think I am out to lead others away from sound theology and the true church. I think these accusations are led by fear. I challenge those people to let that fear fall to the underground too. Christ has something so much greater for us. I love the church because she is Christ’s bride. But she is not as recognizable as we would like. In all my books, I aim to provide a rich, biblical theology of what I am working through. Even as I am pivoting some in my writing with memoir and a contemplative angle, I very much continue to pursue that richness, hoping to direct our gaze to the beauty we are invited into.
BFJ: How does the book relate to your experience of discipleship?
AB: I’m not one who originally aspired to be an author, but began writing out of a place of loneliness as a thinking woman in the church, wanting to answer the simple questions in early adulthood like: If we are to take this being a Christian thing seriously in adult life, what does that look like? If Christianity is true, what can we hold fast to when we don’t want to act like it? And how do we grow into maturity? I became an author while trying to figure all this out, writing books I couldn’t find in my own search for meaning as a disciple. And I stumbled as a woman in the church, trying to find a space and communicate. Each book was another step in trying to make sense of what I was seeing and experiencing, while asking the theological questions behind it.
But now I realize that I searched for something only to realize how very small my questions were. I was looking for the type of person that a Christian should be rather than for the personhood God is developing in each one of us in Christ. The whole picture looks different to me now. Hope is altogether different from striving, from perceived goodness, and optimism. Hope looks at the same picture and sees something else: what’s real—and the deadness of all our attempts to make our own version of goodness. Hope tells us where we do not belong. Like faith, hope resides near our anguish, the anguish of knowing how glorious we and the whole world are to be and how we are turned the wrong way. We must feel it, grieve it, and look again. This is all part of the glory of repentance. Ultimately, Christian discipleship is a search for beauty, significance, and where our true longings are met. I contemplate on this experience of learning and unlearning in the book.
BFJ: Amen. Are there difficulties in the spiritual life that your book can help to address?
AB: Oh man, yes! The Christian life is fraught with difficulties, and I share my own stumbling through them. But what if our difficulties and our disillusionment are tools that God uses to direct us to Christ and prepare us for his love? Then we must do the work in facing them and finding out what the cisterns of our minds and hearts and souls are holding.
BFJ: If you could gift everyone with one insight from the book, what would it be?
AB: Hope isn’t sentimental. It bears scars. And our scars are a testimony to where we’ve come from, what we’ve been through, and the beauty Christ is inviting us into together through them. In this, we find freedom in belonging to Christ. Freedom to be known, to love, to give, and to sacrifice for one another on our way. Freedom to promote one another’s holiness and goodness. Freedom to share our struggles and pain. Freedom to confess our sin. And freedom to seek beauty together, which helps us to see clearly and reminds us of our trajectory—communion with the triune God and one another.
BFJ: How has your spiritual life and prayer life changed as you’ve matured?
AB: I would say that my spiritual and prayer life is much more integrated into all of my life. It’s so easy to separate our spiritual lives and our prayer lives from what we do for the rest of the day. Is our spiritual life measured by how much we know about God? How much we pray and read the bible? How good our prayers sound? The good decisions we make and the sin we avoid? Now I am learning more about how spiritual maturity is not separate from just plain maturity. It’s not as easily measured as we’d like, because it is also more of a self-awareness. So I mourn over my sin more, but I also am developing and exercising more grace for myself and others. In addition to listening for the Holy Spirit speaking through his word, my spiritual life is an effort to behold Christ throughout my day, how he speaks through his creation and looking and listening for him in the faces of others. Many of my prayers sound more like groaning or waiting on God. Listening. Or just plain gratitude for all the love he gives and the surprises he shows. Asking him to show me what really matters. So much of it boils down to the greatest commandment and the one that is like it: loving God and neighbor with all my being. In that sense, I’m still very far off.
BFJ: What would your 10-year-old self say if she learned you’d grow up to write about this stuff?
AB: In some ways, I feel like I am returning to my 10-year-old self. She had a lot more insight than my self in my 20’s and 30’s gave her credit for. This is a funny question because I have a book coming out next year called Saving Face. I start that book with a memory of me when I was 10, looking in the mirror, and I close with what I would tell her now. So dear readers, stay tuned for a full answer to that question there!
BFJ: I’ll look forward to the release. Besides The Hope in Our Scars, what are your top reading recommendations for folks who want to think more deeply about these matters? Why do you recommend them?
AB: I’ve been ministered to lately by more contemplative writers such as St. Teresa of Avila, or contemporaries like Dallas Willard and Frederick Buechner. Reading fiction is so helpful for me. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, as well as Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God are impactful novels that pop into my mind right now. I love reading memoirs, as I learn from other people sharing their stories. Cole Arthur Riley’s This Here Flesh, Marcie Alvis Walker’s Everybody Come Alive, and Beth Moore’s All My Knotted-Up Life are some contemporary memoirs that I’ve learned a lot from. Malcolm Guite’s poetry, as well as his book Lifting the Veil have showed me how important the role of imagination is in theology. Likewise with Walter Brueggemann’s work. I’m currently working through his commentary on Jeremiah, and I continuously return to his book, The Prophetic Imagination. Esther Meek’s Doorway to Artistry and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way have me contemplating more on beauty and creativity lately. I’m also into learning about interpersonal neurobiology and how this knowledge integrates in strengthening and practicing my faith. Dan Siegel’s Mindsight and Curt Thompson’s The Soul of Desire have been some books that stand out. There are so many books in my endnotes for The Hope in Our Scars—too many to mention, but all books that I hope readers will check out!
Aimee writes a Substack at
. Many thanks to Aimee for sharing with us! Buy her book here.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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I am so looking forward to reading Aimee's book. It's awful what happened to her, but the beauty of God's restoring work in her life is an encouragement to those of us who have been disillusioned and harmed by those same ideologies that are heavy on truth but lacking in love. Those reading suggestions are great. I am really excited that she is looking at INPB. It's an approach I use in my therapy practice, as it is a helpful way to understand we are *whole* people–body, mind, and spirit, not just "brains on a stick" as James K.A. Smith says, to be stuffed full of theology.