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Evan Rosa: Hi friends. Before this episode on disillusionment today, I wanted to share a brief message from Miroslav, which speaks directly to disillusionment about the role of Christian faith in public life today. In so many ways, people are already tired of this election cycle and already tired of examining this question, but that disenchantment doesn't make the issue go away.
We recently released a curriculum series based on Miroslav's book, A Public Faith. How followers of Christ should serve the common good. The video curriculum is free and you can get access at our website at faith. yale. edu slash public. And in these troubled times, it's a real question how Christianity serves the common good.
In this new video series, along with a discussion guide, Miroslav walks through each chapter of that book, pulling out the most salient points and offering new perspectives straight from the heart of his public theology. Here's Miroslav from the trailer for this series.
Miroslav Volf: Oh, how precious a thing democracy is. In the authoritarian Yugoslavia where I grew up, religion was excluded from public life. My Christian faith and practice drew suspicion. As a member of a small Protestant community, the free exercise of our faith and free expression of our views were stifled and repressed.
Later, in the 1990s, I witnessed Yugoslavia splinter into independent states. In those days, religion was all too present in public life. Religions wrapped themselves in the flags of bellicose nationalisms and became instruments of exclusion. I know how dangerous a thing coercive religion is. As I look around the world today, I am troubled to see democracy in doubt.
Authoritarianism is on the rise, and many citizens of democratic countries are unconcerned. Some even look with envy toward the apparent strength and unity of authoritarian states. With echoes of former Yugoslavia, Many religious communities are signing on to support programs of exclusion and coercion.
I believe there is a better way to understand and to live Christian faith, a way that is more faithful to the teaching and practice of Jesus Christ. I believe a flourishing democratic culture is worth pursuing, one where people of all faiths and none can have equal voice, where rights are respected, and where vulnerable people are cared for.
Today, we need you. We need Christians who respect the many other voices that meet us in the public square, and who do so precisely because of our Christian commitments to love our neighbor and to freedom of conscience. We need a vibrant public faith whose adherents seek to honor everyone as the New Testament explicitly instructs us.
As our small contribution to this task, my colleagues and I at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture have created a small group discussion guide based on my book, A Public Faith, How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good. I wrote the book to push against coercive religion and to elevate the importance of genuine democracy.
The study guide is designed to help us have better conversations. about the positive role our faith can play. in improving and strengthening democracy. You can visit us at faith. yale. edu slash public to download the guide and join us in the search for a way of living our faith in public that is true to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith. yale. edu.
Aimee Byrd: Jesus wounds are a testimony. I think of that as our scars, because as our wounds are healing, we still bear these scars and scars feel different from the rest of our skin. And when we run our fingers over them, we're rehearsing the story of what happened to us and we're able to retell that. And it's a testimony to where we've been, what we're going through, where Christ met us in that, who showed us the face of Christ and that who stayed in the room with us there and our healing, who was able to help us imagine where we're headed.
And I think we really need a sanctified imagination and that takes community. You know, we can talk about all the different forms of disillusionment throughout history and the different, Forms of trying to get past cynicism and apathy. You know, all the different ways we can react and realism and what's true.
But I think that really what we need to recapture is our imagination. Our imagination is really what apprehends what's real.
Evan Rosa: This is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. There's a story about an English teacher trying to explain to students what a double negative means. And he points out that a double negative always makes a positive.
So if you're not unhappy, then chances are you're happy. We didn't go nowhere means we went somewhere. I ain't no dummy means I'm a dummy. But in contrast, a double positive can never be negative until a voice from the back of the classroom says, yeah, yeah. Now, the subject of today's episode is disillusionment, a double negative that still doesn't make a positive.
Disillusionment is full of negative connotation, isn't it? To become disillusioned is somehow to lose hope, become cynical. But what's so great about our illusions? That we wouldn't want to disabuse ourselves of them. That we want to stay connected to the truth? Don't we want to wake up from the trance?
The late author Stephen Heighton makes this point in his essay, The Virtues of Disillusionment. And I gotta give him a hat tip for that joke at the beginning, too. This puzzle about disillusionment is so psychologically telling about the human mind, but let's remember why disillusionment is seen as bad.
It means the loss of one's dreams, loss of fantasy, loss of ideals, and for some, loss of faith. Wherever you are on this, we live in a time of disillusionment. Trust is waning in the public sphere, religious affiliation is on decline, and some feel a deep tension. or ambivalence about their communities, whether it's region or family or political party or spiritual tradition.
How should we think about disillusionment, particularly the threat of becoming disillusioned with faith? My guest today is Aimee Byrd, author of several books on contemporary issues facing Christianity. And after her own experience of becoming disillusioned with the church, she wrote her most recent offering, The Hope in Our Scars, Finding the Bride of in the Underground of Disillusionment.
In this conversation, Aimee Byrd and I discuss how to diagnose and understand disillusionment, particularly disillusionment with the Church and the trappings of Christian faith and culture. The problem of spiritual abuse and the broken forms of faith that allow it to persist. She walks us through the Old Testament's Song of Songs, perhaps a surprising answer to disillusionment, exploring how it honors the depth of human longing and desire.
We talk about how beauty validates our yearnings and invites us toward a lasting faith and gives us new sight and recognition. And ultimately, Aimee takes a hard look at what it means to explore our wounds and scars in search of hope and faith. Thanks for listening today.
Aimee, thank you so much for joining me on For the Life of the World.
Aimee Byrd: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be on. Thanks for having me, Evan.
Evan Rosa: You recently came out with a book, The Hope in Our Scars. And what I wanted to bring you on the show to talk about is concept of, and I should say, experience of disillusionment that we see in the culture.
Not just, I think, in In the Christian community, whereby people who encounter disillusionment, it can lead to simply leaving the faith. It seems like the anxiety even about what people were referring to years ago is the rise of the nuns, people who declare nun instead of any kind of affiliation. But in particular, the ways that there's a new, there's, you know, a new book on exvangelicalism and people thinking of themselves And defining themselves, identifying as an ex evangelical, that really speaks to a lot of the disillusionment in Christianity.
And then, so this broader context too, for disillusionment outside of that, that, that comes through social media, through politics, disillusionment with America, disillusionment with our, the sense of our own humanity, like, whoa, there's a lot of this happening. So I want to begin really unpacking it. You spent some time thinking about disillusionment.
Where do you begin? When you think about that,
Aimee Byrd: I think that for each one of us, it isn't something that we can just kind of step away from and look at each one of us is coming with a story and all of us go through disillusionment of some sort and maturing and trying to figure out like the meaningfulness and life and what is good and what is true.
I think by my age, I'm 48 years old. It takes some sort of disruption in your life. To realize that, oh, okay, like I was striving for this image in the Christian life. I was striving for this image of what exactly a Christian believes and what they look like and how they raise their kids and whom they marry and how it all turns out.
And you realize that Okay, I don't look like that. So I start putting on this mask like I do in some ways, and I call it the hustle. We are striving and hustling to be this image of what we think goodness is supposed to look like. And then usually I would say it's a disruption in our lives that makes us step back and wrestle with the disillusionment of our beliefs, disillusionment about maybe even what thought to be true in society or whatever systems that we may be caught up in.
So for me, it was very personal. As a woman, I became an author out of just a sheer wanting to participate in the theological heart and center of the church and the creative part of church to answer these kinds of questions because I came from disillusionment in marriage. Both my husband and I come from broken families.
And we did not want that. And so I was holding on to this is the good life. This is what you do and stay married, happily married. And yet in the church, I was finding a lot of invisible fences as a woman, trying to be invested in trying to grow and learn more about, yeah, what is spiritual maturity? That's how I became an author, really.
I was writing books to try to speak into this neglect in women's discipleship that I felt like. And at first, you know, I was embraced. I was supported. I was encouraged. And I start getting invited to do a podcast with a popular academic and pastor who were men. And then I start getting invited into all these different speaking opportunities.
And I felt like I became a good bridge between like maybe the academy and the lay person. Then as I spoke more into maybe trying to critique from the inside, the experiences of being a woman in the church and trying to find a theological argument for That, um, man, Evan, I was met with just complete harassment from church leaders in my own denomination.
Groups of men calling me Jezebel and the great harlot of Babylon and calling ahead of my speaking engagements. to warn the leaders and sabotaging my Amazon page and, you know, awful, awful misogynistic comments too. So that was a major experience of disillusionment for me as I tried to address it in the proper church channels.
I thought I was in a denomination that valued theological precision and education and had these parameters set to address these sorts of things. And I went through a two year process of going from bad to worse. And so there were a lot of my whole world just crumbled around me.
Evan Rosa: You characterize this through the lens of spiritual abuse.
And I wonder if you would share both again, like, Continually in this kind of personal, you're a storyteller and you're good at it and from within story, but also like help set some parameters for how you conceptualize spiritual abuse and how you came to understand and integrate it with your story.
Aimee Byrd: Yeah.
I really had to ask those questions because I think that's a big word. And so I categorized like abuse, big categories, like physical harm, physical abuse and sexual abuse. And I wasn't. Experiencing that, and yet these feelings of unsafety in the very place where you're supposed to be shepherded. I'm going to these people for help and being either neglected or they're turning it on me or all these new terms I had to learn like gaslighting.
And if you were to use that word abuse, Oh, you're not abused. So I really wanted to be careful how I use that word, but in, in reading from the experts on it and actually being counseled by somebody who specializes in it. And it's funny because as I was even documenting the public meetings and what was going on publicly, not so much personally, a renowned expert on spiritual abuse reaches out to me in an email whom I did not know and said, Aimee, you are experiencing growth, spiritual abuse, and that's putting it mildly.
Oh, abuse is when people are okay with harming you, you know, to gain their own significance, power, whatever it is. And it's at your cost, which is really the opposite of Christianity, right? We're supposed to be for the other. We're supposed to give ourselves for the other. And so you have these leaders who want to harm you.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. The experience. Of abuse. It has a way of limiting the feeling of possibility. That's part of the t like traumatic nature of it. And that's part of the, the ugliness of it, right? The, the way that it can crush or really just contain a person eliminating possibilities.
Aimee Byrd: Yeah, and I would say for sure what you're saying, those questions were before me, like.
Where do I even belong? What do I believe now? Um, is God who I thought he was? You know, these basic questions surfaced again, because I'm hearing this, you don't belong. And Diane Langberg has written about the elements of personhood. And one of them is, to have agency and to have voice. And so what you're saying, like when there's no outlet there, when the pen's being taken from your story and you don't have a voice to speak into that, there's a lot of disillusionment.
Like you don't even know who you can go to. There's, there was profound betrayal. And so it rocks your own sense of self, your own ability to trust. Like I loved my church. I had great relationships there. I trusted in this. Presbyterian form of government. And so what does that say about me then and my ability to discern even like all of these questions come forward with disillusionment.
Yeah.
Evan Rosa: I want to talk a little bit about the character of disillusionment as you've thought about it, the kind of internal character, the feeling of it, the, you could say the phenomenology of it. What are those signs or symptoms that were, where it feels like this? Because I think that's one diagnosing factor that And you really approach this book and you approach your work in general through the, through a lens of honesty, just like really presentation of the truth and a kind of, Vulnerable bearing of oneself.
Let's talk about some of the like real and perhaps sharp or maybe dull feelings. Uhhuh of disillusionment,
Aimee Byrd: right? You know, you say sharp and dull and that's good because I think there were probably a lot of dull signs leading up to it. That's why I was writing in the first place, right? I'm writing into the sense of, okay, what is ostensibly being stated as their values?
In behavior and in experience, I'm finding something different values behind the surface of what they're saying. So there are those dull feelings of something's not right. Something's not right. When I got in my situation to where, oh, like I'm not even safe here. This is bad. I think the feelings then are like desperation and loss.
Some people might veer into depression from that. Some people might. And I think I did a little bit fight. For what I thought that denomination stated was valuable to them. Um, there's a sense of panic there. And then I know some will then want to doll that themselves and just keep push forward and pretend and, and be, think further into an illusion or a deception.
And then others might react by, you know, wanting to completely get rid of everything. um, and what you see with deconstruction. For me, what you're talking about in my writing, being raw, I think naming things, the ability to look at our wounds and name them is an act of hope. It's a speaking into, this is wrong, that there's something more than what's happening to me right here.
Something greater. There's this greater love and goodness that is not happening here. So I think naming and looking at our wounds is. is an act of hope, a very important part of healing, but also an invitation then into the goodness that we're invited into.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. This is one of those, I like this metaphor of looking into the wound and exploring the wound.
It's got a very, it's Thomas, right? The doubting Thomas thing. He got such a bad name in so many ways as a doubting Thomas, really he's exploring some and, and it looks like it's a kind of interesting. portrayal of disillusionment to, to ask, to explore the risen Christ's wounds. Uh, that's a pretty amazing metaphor.
Aimee Byrd: And they're there, right?
Evan Rosa: The risen Christ
Aimee Byrd: rises with the scars, we could say. The wounds are still there.
Evan Rosa: The wounds are still there.
Aimee Byrd: Jesus wounds are a testimony. And I, I think of that as our scars, because as our wounds are healing. We still bear these scars and scars feel different from the rest of our skin.
And when we'd run our fingers over them, we're rehearsing the story of what happened to us. And we're, we're able to retell that story. And it's a testimony to where we've been, what we're going through, where Christ met us and that who showed us the face of Christ and that who stayed in the room with us there and our healing.
And who was able to help us imagine where we're headed.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if you could share a bit about what, what seems like disparate and in some cases, like it's not conflicting because it just depends on the person and who experiences what that when they reach disillusionment for some people, it is the response is a kind of quiet shrinking away from faith or a, a becoming smaller.
In other cases, it's a kind of the anger that might be there, the resentment that might be there, or outrage might go to another extreme. It might be a kind of really public, visible effort to humiliate or to react in a different way. I'm so curious about the feelings that are there, so that as we explore these wounds, We might be able to give more naming to it and be able to add more language to it.
Aimee Byrd: And this is something I really wrestled with because what was happening with me was very public. This was a public group formed against me. So my reputation is kind of being ruined online by these men and some women and their leaders. They're not just regular, typical jerks on the internet. They're not critiquing my work so much as Just name calling and assigning motives to me.
And so I had to wrestle with all that stuff. What kind of person do I want to be in this? And what do I really believe here? And for me, their behavior was so incongruent, how I knew Christ in my life and what I felt I was called to in love. And even these meetings that I was involved in, Presbytery meetings and things like I'm seeing hours of debating.
The book of church order with no Christ. There was just no Christ in there and no love in it. And I'm being like humiliated in these meetings and being called this lady and I'm not allowed to speak. And so there was, I kind of regret in one sense, you're saying, thinking of all the different ways to react.
And I was so obedient, I wasn't allowed to speak. So I didn't speak. Where now I wish, what rule is that? In some ways I wish I would have been a little more disobedient, but
Evan Rosa: yeah,
Aimee Byrd: so there, there's a lot to explore in that. And for me, God's word was really helpful in this. And I had young adult children who aren't really children watching.
And so what Jesus says recorded in John, I believe 12, 24, he says, unless we're like a grain of wheat and fall to the earth and die. We are all alone, but if we die, we bear much fruit. And that's not what we want to hear, really. I had to wrestle with God in prayer and think, my reputation is a good thing.
We should want a good reputation. I want to be a good witness for Christ. And I thought, what is being a good witness for Christ? He's telling me this right here and just handing it over to him. He knows me. And I really got led to the poets and the mystics thumb and contemplative writing and the song of songs.
And one poet, Malcolm Gait, he wrote a poem about that verse. And it's more of a prayer. Oh, that I may be like this grain of wheat that falls to the earth. And when he talks about the earth, he talks about it as this. crowded undergrounds where the other fallen gather. And I thought, Yeah, it's painful. You don't want to let go of these things.
You want to react in certain ways, right? You want to hold on to your own righteousness and where you were right and they're wrong and you want them to be revealed for whatever. And yet, if you go down there, you hold on to these things, you're really alone. But if you let it go to the underground, you look to your left, you look to your right and you find here's where the other fallen gather.
The other ones who are listening to this. And they're often people who have been harmed and marginalized. That's where Christ hangs out. That's where he is. I think that's where the church should be. And coming from a Presbyterian, more reformed background, we talk a lot about reform, how the church needs reformed.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Aimee Byrd: But I think that this verse is even more subversive than that. It's that we need resurrection. More than every day. And there's resurrections, in a sense, happening every day. This breaking in, this heavenizing of earth. And so we want everything to be in these binaries all the time. We want right and we want wrong and we want clarity.
And there are a lot of binaries in the world. I mean, you've got heaven and earth. You've got the visible and the invisible. You've got the creator and the created. However, there's also this mixing going on in between those things, right? The invisible is here among the visible. And I'm listening and looking for that.
Um, the creator becomes flesh. And now Christians believe that he dwells within us by his Holy Spirit. So there's this mixing going on and that's not easy.
Evan Rosa: No, not at all. I love this idea that you're borrowing from Guy about that crowded underground where the other fallen meet together. There's a kind of belonging in it.
What, what's so fascinating about it is it's, it's prior to that falling to the ground, this kind of expression of humility in one way. Um, or death to self and in one way, um, prior to that, there's a lot of fear about belonging above ground, so to speak, or up high, right? And the temptation is to prop oneself up and keep up certain illusions, keep up certain facades in order to maintain that feeling of belonging, like so motivated by the acceptance of others.
And, and yet you describe that there's a part of you that knows that something isn't right here and parsing it out is difficult at times.
Aimee Byrd: It is. And I think we really need a sanctified imagination and that takes community. That takes other people. We can talk about all the different forms of disillusionment throughout history and the different forms of trying to get past cynicism and apathy, you know, all the different ways we can react and realism and what's true.
But I think that really what we need to recapture is our imagination. Our imagination is really what apprehends what's real, you know, things like love and beauty and goodness. and truth that transcend our time here, that are eternal. They're not something that easily measurable and propositional statement.
And so we don't like that because we don't feel like secure, but really there's a freedom there. There's a freedom to give ourselves. And I think that's what real freedom is and real agency to be able to be a gift for somebody else and to be accepted that way, because that's a reciprocal thing.
Evan Rosa: I love this phrase, the sanctified imagination.
But I want to point out that there's a kind of ambiguity there that can push you in one direction, right? Depending on how you interpret it, because some people might just interpret the sanctified imagination as being right. Yeah. It's just like constantly, you can see it through a binary, right? Yes. And just like constantly the effort to be right, to be certain and to Lord of that certainty over another, which looks like is at least partially operative in the way I'm hearing you tell your story.
Aimee Byrd: Right.
Evan Rosa: The kind of sanctified imagination that you're talking about is one where there is a more expansive, where there's an appreciation for complexity and there is a patience and a kind of presence to staying curious about these mysteries in the middle, you might say.
Aimee Byrd: Yeah. Like Walter Brueggemann says that the riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life.
Only grieving leads to joy and only embraced endings permit new beginnings. So I think we want to like skip over that part and just be like right or wrong all the time. But to sit there together and to be curious, like you're saying, like, how is God working in this situation? Rugemann talks about how the present is both darker and more glorious than how we really want to look at it.
And so it's that mixture that you're talking about. And Malcolm Gite also writes a lot about lifting this veil, the power of the imagination. And he says, to imagine the kingdom is always a prophetic. It's always a critique of this world, and it's always a call to hope and action. And so I think there is this, this being okay with taking risks.
And I think part of that is we picture this God that is wanting to condemn us right away for being wrong and doing the wrong thing where scripture isn't this book full of here's exactly how to live the Christian life and succeed. Scripture is story. It's all kinds of story of people who screwed up.
Like we see that it's not cured. His bride is not curated. And so we see the good, the bad, and the really, really ugly in there, and God works with all of that, which is just amazing to me that God is bigger than all the ways that we screw up our lives. So I think that we can take these risks. But are they in the direction of truly loving our neighbor and loving God?
Evan Rosa: Yeah. It takes some imagination to peer into the scar, peer into the wound. I should say wound, wound first, because sometimes it's just a raw open wound and it's not scarred up. It's not simply the memory of it. It's just the raw moment of it. We need to see that there's a little bit of a progression there from the inflicting of the wound and nursing the wound into its healing and treatment and eventual scarring over.
Aimee Byrd: Right. And God takes his time.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Instilling that imagination. It seems to me that, that you, in this book, you use the song of songs or the song Solomon as this mechanism for some of that imagination. And I really want to spend a little time looking at that because it's this. Glorious imagination, imaginative and ecstatic expression of spirituality in the scriptures that honestly makes all sorts of people uncomfortable.
And I think
Aimee Byrd: that's awesome. And it's funny because when I say, Oh, that's the song of songs ministered to me deeply in my time of opinion, it still does people get a little. uncomfortable with that. Maybe a little weird. There's a lot of weird language in there, and there is, but early church looked at the song of songs as the holy of scriptures.
If you want to find the most intimate presence and experience with Christ in this word, Go to the Song of Songs. And it was such a popular book all through medieval times, all the way up until, uh, the 19th century when they started changing what they believed it to mean, but all the way up till then, it was looked at as an allegory of Christ's.
Exclusive love for his bride. And they looked at the song, not just of this collection of Egyptian love poems or, or whatever, but this erotic language is actually a. all of scripture. It's the story of all of scripture in concentrate. So they were such students of the song that they would go to the song as a hermeneutical key if they were confused about somewhere else in scripture, which is funny because we don't do that now at all.
We, uh, trip all over it. Most people avoid the song. You don't hear sermons preached on song of songs anymore, hardly. And so here's a book of poetry, song, Metaphor, allegories, foolish typology. I think that you can learn so much through these metaphors and allegory that you just cannot learn in presuppositional statements or doctrinal confessions.
Um, it does something to you when you read it. It stirs your affections. It directs your longing. And here we have this book in the middle of scripture and the metaphor of a wedding is from it. Scripture begins with that metaphor, it ends with that metaphor. The prophets are full of this metaphor of God's love for his bride.
And we have this book in scripture where the woman's voice is dominant. Which, for what I was going through, really ministered to me. It gave me a whole different picture, I think, of what leadership and love is. It's a calling out of the other's voice. The woman who represents the bride, who represents the church, and the individual soul of every believer, he's giving her the stage.
He wants to hear her voice. She opens the book. She closes the book. Her voice is immodest. She says what she wants. She screams out like when she can't find God, sometimes he just doesn't seem present. That's the experience of all of our lives. And that's happening in there, the absence and presence motive.
And even in, in the genre, because he's hidden behind the allegory in the first place. And so God is hidden in those ways. She names her abuse twice, which I find very liberating. And part of the healing, it's the night scenes in chapter three and chapter five. where she is looking for the groom and it's the guards, the guardians of the wall.
Those who are supposed to help her in the first scene, they neglect her. And in the second scene, they don't only, they, they don't neglect her. They actually beat her. They take, they'd strip her. Here she is clobbered on the underground, I would say. And still she directs our eyes to Christ. And she tells us where to find him.
He's among the lilies, which is a symbol in ancient Near Eastern language of he's with his people. He's with his bride. And that's where we're going to find him in the face of his people, his beloved. And she names what she wants. She does all this. And what does he say to her? He's calling her from the cliffs of the rock.
And he says, Let me see your face. Let me hear your voice, for your face is lovely and your voice is sweet. Here we have love calling us. He's beckoning us to speak into the very next thing she says after that is, Catch the foxes that are in the vineyard because they're trying to ruin our vineyard and our lovers in bloom.
So there she is again naming, this is why I'm behind the cleft of the rock. So there's so much going on in there.
Evan Rosa: There is. And you talk about the darkness that she faces as well. And in the meaning of that, and The openness and the vulnerability of sharing from that position and being in that position and allowing a description of yearning and desire and love to be expressed from within that darkness.
It's incredibly vulnerable. And I have to, I have to say, at least from like a masculine perspective, like everything's pushing against that. There's not, it's not a space to be able to work into.
Aimee Byrd: Or in both ends, you know, the woman representing you as the bride, as a feminine thing, the bride of Christ. But also, when you look at the Christ figure in there, it's not all the things that our society wants to hold up as masculinity.
And even, she names her abuse in another place too, is with her brothers. She says, don't look at me for I'm swarthy because my brothers made me, they forced me into labor and through these vineyards and I couldn't care for my own vineyard. And there's betrayal and manipulation too, from her brothers. And controlling this, which she faces again at the end of the song.
It's a literary masterpiece too, because you see this chiasm going on too and the structure and this mirroring from the end to the beginning and speaks so much.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,
Aimee Byrd: I could just keep going
Evan Rosa: on. I would like you to do just that. In fact, so rather than shoot to the end, I wonder if we can represent that chiasm in, in what remains of our time.
Let's work through how you like to use Song of Songs as this kind of a new blueprint for finding hope in our scars.
Aimee Byrd: Yeah, I mean, the apex of it all is, is Christ looking at his bride and saying, you are beautiful, my love, there is no imperfection in you. And I just think, man, here at the beginning, she's telling him, don't gaze at me.
And then you see him calling everybody to look at his bride, the queen, they're jealous of her. And then, Here he, here she is on that wedding consummation. And so it's like complete nakedness and she's receiving the gaze of Christ, which is, I think what we all long for. And, you know, we come into this world looking for faces that are delighting in our faces.
And that answers the questions for us about who we are and why we matter and what our value is. But ultimately we long for, to behold the face of Christ. gazing at our face. But that very thing that we long for, we run from and we cover up because we have so much shame that we're dealing with all the time.
And in the song, we see Christ filling us with himself. And he can look at her and she can receive this gaze because he sees himself. in her and she is gift and there's this unitive love between them and so there is no imperfection in her which is we hear that echo in Paul and Ephesians where he talks about the church without spot or wrinkle and it's also an echo from I think the first look of Adam to Eve when he says at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh I mean I think Here's an echo, but really that was proleptic to what Christ is going to say to his bride.
And that's what we see at the end of Revelation, right? The bride coming down from heaven, and she's represented as a woman and a city, Gion.
Evan Rosa: There's this kind of moment of recognition there, right? And being recognized and, and the way that's so uplifting and to be seen requires some real effort to be. To allow oneself to be seen and to celebrate and give oneself over to that recognition and to being seen and known and loved.
It's, it seems to be very deep at the heart of Christianity in this sense. And I think you're really unpacking the way that Song of Songs is this kind of beautiful expression of it. I want to talk a little bit about being seen as beautiful. One of the, one theme in your book is that beauty rises. And we were talking about a grain of wheat falling and finding belonging there.
And yet in that beauty rises, there's a different direction there in this moment of song of songs right here in the middle. How do you see the role of beauty operating to allow the woman to rise?
Aimee Byrd: That's really good. Because yeah, at the beginning, she's like saying, don't look at me. She can't bear that gaze.
And yeah. He speaks to her right away, calling her beautiful over and over. Like if you look through the Song of Song, how many times this word beautiful is used and the groom is constantly telling her that, but then she repeats it. There's a lot of mirroring of language going on between them and the song.
This theme of beauty is prevalent through it. Christ is beautifying his bride. So beauty matters. We long for that. And a lot of philosophers now are talking about beauty as an event. It's like a glimpse of the future breaking into the present. It's eschatological. Beauty is an invitation into goodness.
And so that's why we're so attracted to it. It's like, we don't just want to consume beauty. That's the wrong way. It's not something we can consume or control or become in the sense of contriving, but that it's something we want to participate And so that is what you see happening in the song is this participation.
in the beauty. And so you have all this imagery of vineyard and garden scene and flowing water, the living water. This is something that's developing our taste, I think, for beauty.
Evan Rosa: I think you have the platonic transcendentals of truth and goodness and beauty. And it seems clear that at least in our moment, we've so weighted In particular, Christianity in this, in the context that we're talking about it, the weighting is all toward truth and goodness in so many ways and not in, and let's say not necessarily in proper ways, not in the fullness of the sense of what that should be, particularly through the lens of Plato, who thinks they're all unified.
They're all the same one thing. And so if you're leaving out this attention to beauty, now, my point here is that we've talked about the kind of black and white binary thinking. of certainty and uncertainty. We've talked about the kind of shame that emerges from the kind of moralizing elements of the church.
It's not to say that truth or goodness don't matter, but it's so fascinating to think about the invitation of beauty to participate. Why not start there? Why aren't we starting there? Why don't we utilize the aesthetic and the beautiful far more? Because I have to say. I'm most of the stuff that emerges from Christian culture.
I'm not particularly impressed. It's not particularly beautiful. It's not cool.
Aimee Byrd: Oh man. I'm with you there. Right.
Evan Rosa: I don't like it.
Aimee Byrd: Yes, Evan. I totally. And you know, so often we want to put Christian in front of it to make it
Evan Rosa: totally. Anything I did as a teenager, for instance, was just an imitation of what was beautiful in the secular culture.
So after a while, of course, you're going to get disillusioned with this.
And my goodness, we have amazing beauty out there in the world. Why isn't there a more of an invitation to beauty to find our way back through this kind of disillusionment, perhaps, of wanting to hide? Wanting to shrink away, but then there's this option that I don't think we fully found, but it's the idea of, uh, of imagination and the idea of leaning into beauty and to see oneself as beautiful and to, to participate in the beautiful.
It's just mostly missing, uh, where we need it most. It's really hard to pierce through the, the obsession with just being. And being right and being moral.
Aimee Byrd: Yeah. And turning it into some sort of formula, right? Like we just want to co opt goodness and we want to co opt beauty even and true. And what that does is it shrinks it, right?
And we settle for something much less the counterfeit of those things. And so then here we are again with. Deceptive appearance and illusion. But I think it's because we just so badly want to feel secure. And we have many ways and many means to feed that illusion of security. So if we could just co opt it in these ways and make our version of it, and it's a lot easier to follow and it's a lot more measurable and we can define it in these ways, but it doesn't capture our hearts and in certain ways that just stepping outside.
And just stopping and looking and list beauty involves all of our senses. So I feel like that's something that the church, we've been focused after the enlightenment just so much on our brains and reason. And at the cost of being more holistic, that beauty definitely involves all of our senses. and mindfulness to be able to stop and pause and observe and be curious.
And there's so much wonder and awe in that. So that makes us smaller. We're under something instead of being over something, which is where we feel more comfortable.
Evan Rosa: And you make the, you make this point in the book that, you know, and through, and even through the song of songs where there's that temptation towards security and that temptation toward, and it usually, it's a kind of like, Really meager or feeble security that we're opting for, even when it comes with a feeling of power, settle for that little thing, instead of being thrown out into the open ocean of joy and beauty, but we're just like happy with our comfortable little secure space.
That is really feeble and damage in so many ways. And it's, it emerges from trauma and damage. It'll, it leads to more trauma and damage. In so many ways. It's not really security in, in the true full sense. It just feels comfortable. It's, and it's, it's, it's a kind of repetition. Yeah. It's the repetition or habit of, of disintegration in so many ways.
Aimee Byrd: Hmm. And that's why I, I think like the role of the poets and the artists, it's so important. And not the ones who just say Christian art or Christian music, or Christian poetry, but no, the poets tell our secrets. Right. And the artists. They really look at the picture and then they look again, right? And the things that we're covering up, they reveal, you know, the good ones.
And so they have this ability to reveal our secrets that we're trying so hard to hustle over top of, but then that reveals our need, right? And, and then they can also give us these glimmers of beauty, even in, you know,
Evan Rosa: Isn't that amazing? You read a poem and you're like, how did you know this?
Aimee Byrd: Yeah, like that recognizability that you're talking about.
I
Evan Rosa: feel seen. I feel seen. I feel recognized. It's like, how did you know, Mary Oliver, that I was like this or whatever?
Aimee Byrd: Yeah. So I would love to see more poets and artists at the table with a theologian, you know?
Evan Rosa: Well, as you, as you see things moving through from there, like being beheld as beautiful, Lead us toward that chiasm.
Lead us toward where that goes.
Aimee Byrd: Yeah. At the end of the song, the brothers make another, and they're arguing about what are they going to do with their sister? Because they see that she's like physically maturing. And so they want to build walls around her, under the doors and keep her from the outside world.
And boy, the confidence in this woman's voice now, at the end, she speaks into this and she says, I am a wall and my breasts are towers, which is, whoa, okay, that's weird. But there's so much, like she's using like military language there, but she's even like recognizing who she is because. This word wall, there's so much there, like in the beginning of scripture, even where it says what part of Adam's side, uh, God uses to create woman.
Like she's not created from the dirt. She's created differently from man. She's created from his side. He has to be put down in a sense. He has to die in a sense for this life to be created. And that Hebrew word it's used throughout scripture to refer to the wall. Walls in the temple, usually, so it's a sacredness to it.
And I think it really points to the typology that we see in the song and that we see throughout scripture of the meaningfulness behind our sexuality is that woman is a picture of where we're headed, of Zion. And that all explodes, obviously, at the end of Revelation, but I think we see this here in the, at the end of the song too, she's, yes, I am a wall and calling her breast towers.
Like she's using military language that she's got this new perspective. Now she sees in a very good position now from the towers. And so she mocks Solomon at the end. It's interesting. He becomes like a foil character. She talks about how he has his land. And he actually has to sublet his land out and give money to these people in his vineyards.
But she has her own vineyard. And so it's very interesting, this language she's using. And then at the end, she's speaking to Christ with this confidence. It's not quite time yet, but she knows now that he's there for her. He's coming for her. And so it's this confidence in the time in between, I feel as well in his absence, but his presence still like the tension between all that.
She knows where she belongs. She knows her value. She knows her worth. And instead of being a victim of her brothers, she's able to speak from position of strength and confidence and completion.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I want to come back to the question of disillusionment through that lens. Yeah. Yeah. which is a confident in inhabiting of oneself where there was a kind of distance, right?
Like one of the, one of the kind of visual metaphors that I have when I think of disillusionment is a kind of dissociation or distance between this thing that is both dear and yet feeling more foreign. Right. Like it's this experience that I know I'm just, I'm like going right back into diagnosing, but because I just, this is like a kind of maybe a little of an obsession at the moment, but, um, but it is that kind of distancing, right?
What was familiar has become strange
Aimee Byrd: and not
Evan Rosa: in a, and not in a good way, right? Something's not right here. It was very familiar to me now, it's strange, something's gone wrong. And yet, as you move through that, and what I'm asking here is, You just, you describe so much confidence in this, right? And I like the movement from recognition into confidence, right?
That you can, that in receiving and in being beheld as beautiful and, and finding some power in that it's empowering and it moves toward confidence, faith in oneself.
Aimee Byrd: Yeah. And it's like all of a sudden now I'm saying, Oh, okay. I was looking for the type of person that a Christian should be. Rather than the personhood, Christ is developing in each one of us.
And so, you know, like the bride at the end, it's like the whole picture looks different and hope all together looks different from the striving and perceived goodness and our, like, nostalgia even and optimism that we had. And it feels right. Not about winning theological debates or nailing this apologetics lesson.
It's not even about how we get people to come through our doors at church, even as we see all these gatekeepers at the doors. Spiritual growth is, it's not about so much, even though doctoral precision is a good thing, that's not what it's about. It's not about being in the right denomination or the right school or the right church.
or leadership or hierarchy or having power over people. It's just plain and simple about love. And I think that's one of the most disillusioning things to me was that here are these leaders in the church. You've been through supposed really good seminaries and there are some of them are in the second half of their lives.
And then you're thinking, okay, look at the lack of spiritual maturity here. It's frightening. The lack of emotional maturity. It's frightening. And it's, It's all like incongruent with love. So I think that's where the gap really is and our ability to love. So Jesus was right all along with the greatest commandment and the one that is just like it.
Love your Lord with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul and love your neighbor as yourself because you're seeing Christ in them and you are in turn loving him and loving your neighbor.
Evan Rosa: You close the book with sight and recognition as, as to me, it speaks as like that pinnacle moment of being beheld, practically speaking, what describe what you're trying to communicate through a calling to sight recognition, being a community that sees differently.
Aimee Byrd: Yeah. And you were talking about our need for being known. for being seen. And that's so true to the core of our longings is that we need that. And church should be a place that, that sees everybody who walks through the door. Church should be a place that sees what's real. We can name the darkness. We can name it within our own selves and within our own communities and say, okay, this is off here.
This isn't loving here. What can we do? And And wants to learn from those who are being harmed. We need a church that sees Christ in one another. And this is what Jesus is calling us to in the gospels. When he talks about how there's going to be those who think they did so much for him. And he's going to say, I'll never near you.
I was thirsty. You didn't give me water. I was in prison. You didn't come to visit me. You know, I was thirsty. These are, this is what we're called to do is to see Christ in the marginalized, to see Christ in those in the underground. And we need a church that is looking for beauty, then, and looking for those invitations into goodness and taking risks and entering into those at even at our own cost.
And I think that's such a picture of what the Eucharist is anyway, is we have Christ becoming flesh so that now he, in some mystical way during communion, we have him offering himself to us and us being nourished by that as his body. I mean, there's just something so mysterious to behold in that.
Evan Rosa: There is.
And, um, if I might, you have toward the beginning of the book, you have the section, where else do we go? And it is in that context of Eucharist. It is in the context of communion where. In proclaiming, this is my body and this is my blood, all sorts of people walk off disillusioned and confused, maybe frightened.
And when Jesus turns to the disciples, it's to whom else shall we go?
Aimee Byrd: And I really felt that feeling actually going through when I went through in the church, that verse just stuck out to me because I know that I need to go to Christ. I know that he is truth. I know that he is love. I've experienced that deep in the core of my being.
So, There is this sense though of disillusionment in the disciples there, right? They know this important thing, but there's, it's still hard. They don't get it. And Jesus doesn't explain it all to them in a lesson, right then and there. He actually makes it harder to understand. So you see disillusionment in all the disciples, even after the resurrection.
We have seen upon seeing, uh, of disillusionment. You know, I feel like we're among the OG disciples here in our disillusionment, but we need to keep looking to Christ.
Evan Rosa: I think it's an important kind of thing. It's not resolution. And that's why it's important that it's a stopping point for now, right?
Because to stop with resolution would not be fitting, right? It's, it is progress. It's a long struggle. You know, you, you, you quote someone in the book, you know, hope is agonizing and that's that agony, that agon is, is that means struggle. Hope is a struggle.
Aimee Byrd: It's disruptive, it's subversive, but gloriously so.
Evan Rosa: So Aimee, thanks for writing this book. Thanks for joining me to really hone in on what disillusionment is, what it feels, and I think the really surprising and imaginative joy of looking at Song of Songs, this expression of way to find hope. In the scars.
Aimee Byrd: Thanks so much for having me on. Been a pleasure talking to you, Evan.
Evan Rosa: The life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Aimee Byrd Production assistance by Kacie Barrett. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online faith.yale.edu where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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