Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Surviving Saturday, a podcast about finding hope in the midst of life's disappointments. We resonate with the powerlessness that Jesus' first followers experienced as they waited between His crucifixion on Friday and His rising on Sunday morning.
Speaker: We feel led to bring light and goodness into a world that aches and wonders when relief will come. Here you'll find no easy answers, just honest conversations about actual pain through the lens of a suffering God.
Speaker: I'm Wendy Osborne, a licensed counselor based in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm her husband, Chris, a counseling intern and family law mediator. Join us as we wait together for more.
Speaker: Hi, welcome back to the Surviving Saturday podcast. We've taken a lengthy break to tend to some other things, and also I've been sitting with the question of what does it mean to be a Christian in a world like the one we're living in right now? It's not a new world, but it is a pretty contentious world.
Speaker: And I hear people using the name of Jesus to endorse very different behaviors and viewpoints, and And it's left me really thoughtful. And so I've wondered, what does it mean to know Jesus, to live and love like the one who gave his life for the world? And so I sat down with four people who are doing work that I consider really important and valuable in the times we're living in. So I hope that you'll enjoy this four-part series. I know that there will be things that are said or viewpoints endorsed that you may not agree with, but I think it's good for us to listen to different voices and be challenged. Not always have our minds changed, but to open our perspectives and to open maybe the possibility of what it really does mean to love Jesus. I know that I'm personally really confused right now. So I hope you'll enjoy this and see what God does. Take care. Hello and welcome back.
Speaker: I am here today with my friend Jenny McGrath. Hi, Jenny. Hello. Jenny is a graduate of the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology probably over a decade ago.
Speaker: is that right, Jenny? It is, yes. Currently a psychotherapist and a somatic experiencing practitioner, also an author and a speaker. And Jenny has a really rich story of life in this world.
Speaker: So Jenny, um what I remember is you were raised in a family of brothers and you were homeschooled. right? Out in, was it Colorado? It was, yes. Tell us a little bit about what was life for you like in those early years? I actually grew up 30 minutes east of Colorado Springs in the middle of nowhere. It was a 30-minute drive to the nearest grocery store or gas station when I was growing up and had a beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains and spent most of my days alone at home with my three older brothers and my mom. There was a lot I really loved about that world and that freedom. i leased my neighbor's horse and would spend hours riding in any direction any day. And there was just like pretty much not a house or community to be seen. It has significantly changed since I was a child. It is wild how much it
Speaker: Colorado Springs has sprawled out. um But I kind of had eclectic experience of a lot of different types of education. So I was homeschooled for my primary years and I did go to a private Christian school for one year in seventh grade.
Speaker: And then I was actually homeschooled again in eighth grade. And then I went to a public high school. So I sort of had this little mishmash of all of the experiences. Yes, this is kind of what we did with our children. Yeah, and I would say, you know, what really impacted my childhood, not only growing up in Colorado Springs, was growing up in Colorado Springs in the 90s. And so I sort of grew up in one of the apexes of purity culture. I often would go to a friend's purity ball. For my 13th birthday, I begged my parents to get me a purity ring. That was really interwoven with how I experienced my life and my coming into womanhood and and what I thought it meant to be a Christian at the time.
Speaker: What were you? So you were, what, probably 13 at this point? I wasn't in the purity culture proper. Like purity was always a conversation, but I was too old for that specific movement of the balls and the true love weights rings um But was this around 13? Yes. Yeah, I was around 13. So in 1997, it was actually in Colorado Springs that the first purity balls were held. And so I was right there in that world. i turned 13 several years after that. And so it was a really, really big part of my childhood. i remember my one of my older brothers reading i Kissed Dating Goodbye and um It was so much infused into the world that that I grew up with that I just thought it was had always been around. i didn't realize what a phenomenon it was in the nineteen ninety s
Speaker: Yes. Well, you know, um as a quick aside, Josh Harris is now doing an apology tour, and yeah he is coming to Charlotte at the beginning of March.
Speaker: And i he's with another author that I really enjoy, and he's trying to um really repent for some of the the binds that he put around young hearts that he now sees were not fair. But for you as a twain teen, what were you internalizing it meant to be a woman, a good girl? Like, how was this landing with you? i think some of the experiences that come to mind as you ask that question is when i went to private
Speaker: Christian school in seventh grade, me and the other girls would be pulled out of our math class and we would all be lined up in the hallway and we would have to reach our hands above our head. And if any part of our midriff showed, we were given a detention and had to wear clothes from the closet of shame for the rest of the day. Oh, because they probably didn't fit and they were probably not attractive. That's my guess. Right. Yes. And they were very scratchy intentionally, like very like harsh wool. Yeah, probably By the time I was in seventh grade, I was very tall. And so it was extremely difficult to find any clothes that really fit my body. And so I did find myself getting detentions and ah getting in trouble for causing my brothers to stumble. And so what I learned really early on was that my body was really dangerous. I learned that my body should be hidden. I should only frame my face And so I started wearing jeans that were probably five sizes too big. And I started wearing nothing but sports bras and giant footies because I felt like, well, I can't do anything but hide my body. And so that was the biggest message I feel like I took in this world.
Speaker: Yeah. I also had this message that... My value and my worth was in my virginity. And I remember a youth group pastor, he had a handful of Skittles and he was handing them out. And he's like, these Skittles are your value and what you have to offer your future spouse. But if you kiss someone, it's like you give them a few Skittles. And if you hold hands, you give them a few Skittles.
Speaker: And then you're left with nothing to give your future a partner. And so it was so much pride. pressure around treating my body like this commodity that was supposed to be preserved until I gave it away. It was never something I was supposed to have for me as a sovereign being moving through the world. Right. That's what I was thinking. Like your body is not your own. And I feel like isn't there a scripture that says that that people misquote like it was bought with a price. Right. But we use that in this movement that it belongs to some
Speaker: future male that we don't know, and we should be very glad to give it. But, you know, I came of age with a lot of body insecurity, like just the way that, yeah, here's my cat, the way that sex and sexuality and bodies and bodily functions were handled. Someone else having access to my body was actually very scary to me. But then I was supposed to be told, this is like the best thing I can give, and it will be such ah an amazing thing.
Speaker: But it didn't feel safe to me. You were more in the middle of the movement. Now, did your dad go to the ball with you? Like, those are the stories I've heard. Like, you go on a date with your dad. Like, is that how it was for you? It wasn't. ah I think partly because balls were really expensive.
Speaker: And that was a socioeconomic event that just was not, I think, where my family was at at the moment. We were we were OK, but we didn't have a lot of excess finances. So there was, i think that, I don't know if my dad would say this or not. I think there was some hesitancy of how how much he really agreed with or bought into this move movement. But I think he also thought, well, this is what good Christian fathers are supposed to do. And so he did give me a purity ring on my 13th birthday. And he came into my bedroom. It was a much less
Speaker: ceremonious event and he handed me this really beautiful ring and asked me essentially just, do you know what this means? And I said, yep. And i did. And i had no idea. And I really do think that that moment was a fork in the road that led to further shame, further dissociation from my own body. Because before then, I had had a pretty natural, healthy curiosity around sex and my body and, you know, talking about which hobbit my friends and I thought was the cutest in Lord of the Rings and things like that. Yeah. And then afterwards, my friend would be talking about boys she thought was cute. And I would be like, no, we're not we're not supposed to talk about that. We're not supposed to be sexual beings.
Speaker: And so it also was this confusing thing with my relationship with my dad, because essentially in that world, he was the one giving me my purity ring. And so essentially he was saying, I am responsible for your sexuality.
Speaker: And then I'm going to give your body to your future, presumably white woman. Yes. and so it was so it was this really weird ah really complicating dynamic between me and my dad where it it it introduced and induced this sexualization of my body in relation to my dad and so then any experience i had in my body was seeing through this really scary lens that that you own my body i don't have responsibility or privacy to My own choices and experiences and how move through the world. That sentence you just said about it led to a sort of sexualization of your body. It introduced that into the relationship because now he is also, i'm hearing, sort of equally charged with keeping you pure.
Speaker: for this man down the road. And he will then give your body to that man, which may, let's be honest, be a boy. Okay. May not be very mature. And so that just, I don't know, that just gives me a really yucky, it's very young word, yucky feeling, as you say that, right? It's introducing a concept, not the knowledge of sexuality, not education around bodies and sex, but But a sexualization that is different.
Speaker: You are now viewed as a sexual object. Right. Right. And I think that's the really confusing part, especially for white girls in purity culture, is that we are sexualized and desexualized concurrently. Everything we do is around our sexuality and keeping it pure. And yet we are not supposed to have a sexuality of our own.
Speaker: And so it's this really like whiplashy thing of everything is sexual and nothing is sexual. And therefore it just gets diffused and the shame gets diffused, I think, into so many relationships and experiences and how we move through the world. Okay, I want to hear you talk about that more because that really resonates with me of like, I'm supposed to not let my brother stumble. Like I even feel myself covering my chest. Not supposed to make anybody stumble.
Speaker: I'm supposed to be very careful, but I'm also supposed to be feminine and nurturing and gentle and kind, things that would draw attention And I'm supposed to exist at the same time for another person's sexual pleasure, but I'm supposed to enjoy it, but not really, but also want to give myself, right? It's like it's an impossibility being all of those things, right? I want to be sexual. No, I don't. I'll make you stumble, but then I have to imagine giving myself to you. It's an impossibility. And I'm sitting here thinking, no wonder my teenage clients are all struggling. Yeah.
Speaker: Right. Because they are right in the middle of this. OK, so tell talk a little bit more about this idea. i borrow this idea um from W.E. Du Bois about double consciousness, where I.
Speaker: Young white girls, young white women in this world, we have sort of this double consciousness where we are making decisions not out of true, you know, this is why I love the word indwell, like this truly embodied place from inside of us. We are making decisions based on performances of purity and white womanhood and what is expected of us. So we learn to live outside of ourselves lest we feel our own desires or pleasures or curiosities. My high school youth youth pastor's wife
Speaker: gave us this literal flannel board sort of sex education. But mind you, by the time I got my purity ring when I was 13, I still had no sex education. That was actually part of the intention of us being homeschooled it was that my parents wanted to keep us from sex education and learning about evolution. So there was this intentionality of of not giving us access to information about even what anatomical intercourse could be. And and yet I'm listening to my youth pastor's wife tell me and all of the other girls that have been separated from boys in in youth group about how painful sex is going to be on our wedding night. And that after that, it probably won't be as painful, but we'll learn to just kind of endure it. And there was never a sense of it doesn't have to be painful and it actually can be quite enjoyable. i think there's a difference between being sexualized and being sexual. So sexualization happens from the outside in, looking at this body as a sexual object. Sexuality is this embodied form of expressing eroticism and desire and vitality. That is so helpful. There's a difference between being sexual and being sexualized.
Speaker: We live in, i don't know how you would engage with this thought, but we live in a highly sexualized society. And I think there's a flip side to that. We're also...
Speaker: sexuality is not welcome. So I sort of feel that same dichotomy that you're talking about developmentally in some contexts where it's like everything is sexual, but then actually stay far from the sexual.
Speaker: I don't know. How do you view the world right now in this
Speaker: think not to say it doesn't happen in other places, but I think this is very unique to US American eye culture. You know, as I talked about purity culture in the 90s, that was a an iteration of it. But purity culture has existed since the inception of the United States. The very first colony, Virginia, was named not after the name of the queen, but after her supposed virginal status.
Speaker: and I have never heard that. And I lived in Virginia for years. Wow. And now I'm like, it's so clear, right? Virgin. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yep. And so a phrase that my therapist often used to say, which I love is the bigger the front, the bigger the back.
Speaker: And so we project this desexualized purity culture. And yet we are human beings. We have sexuality. And so if we work really hard to not educate people, not talk about it, not give informed consent,
Speaker: eroticism and energy don't disappear they just transmute so then i think we will see that energy and sexuality come out in different ways when we aren't creating the the channels and the movements and the expressions of it because of the way in which religious shame and indoctrination is so infused into american culture And honestly, that has been part of the the the legacy, if you will, of Christian nationalism is looking at many indigenous cultures throughout the Americas, the world that had polyamorous practices, had queer practices, had multiple genders, and use that as justification for Christianizing. And primitivizing and saying that these people are not developed because they have these sexual practices. And so it really has infused this policing of bodies and relationships and how we move through the world. Yes, this idea of policing of bodies and even what you just said about these people were considered underdeveloped by white people, by white Westerners, rather than different, rather than culturally independent. They needed us to change them. So no matter where you come down on any of those issues you just stated, there is, it seems to me, an arrogance in,
Speaker: i have a monopoly on the truth of how sexuality should look, how bodies should be dealt with. So no matter where you come down, it just, it feels there's an arrogance in it.
Speaker: As if that speaks for everything about the person, I guess is the other thing I'm saying. You finished high school in Colorado. And then, am I right that you became a missionary? I did, yes. So take us into that part of your journey. My story is complicated because everything I just said about my body and sexuality is true.
Speaker: And I also grew up as a dancer. And so I had this world that was very embodied and sensual and sexual and where I could feel freedom to be in my body so long as I was on stage and performing. There was there was this outlet. and In a context, and in a narrow context. Right. And I really do think that that is what helped me have a semblance of a healthy relationship to my body.
Speaker: And so I actually had wanted to move to New York and be a professional dance dancer. okay All I wanted, i even when I was 14 years old, I was looking at apartments and trying to figure out what I would do for a job. i could not get there seen enough. When I was 14 years old, my dance teachers took me and two other young girls, young women to New York um to take classes at Steps on Broadway and watch some Broadway shows and kind of get a feel of what being there could look like for us. Uh-huh.
Speaker: and And during that trip, ah my dance teachers snuck me and these two other girls into a bar where I was sexually assaulted.
Speaker: Because of a lack of teaching of consent and understanding about sexuality and power dynamics, I internalized that I had just betrayed my purity ring I had gotten one year earlier. And I had this huge shame. And several months after we came back from the trip, I didn't tell anyone about it. I just carried that shame and it really infused my dancing, actually. That was the one place I felt like I could express this secret storm that I was carrying.
Speaker: And I did a leap in dance class and i landed on my foot that crumbled and I shattered my bone and tore three ligaments and a tendon. And just like that, dance was gone for me. oh And it sent me into a really, really intense grief. ah yeah And also, very quickly, I spiritualized the experience to say, well, God didn't want me going down this slippery slope of debauchery of becoming a dancer. And so God broke my foot.
Speaker: And I internalized all of these messages that I am but clay. And so God needs to mold me into what God wants me to do. So while I was still at home recovering and on pain medicines and really unable to do much, one of my brothers had brought home this film he had watched in university called Invisible Children. And it was this documentary-like style film about quote-unquote child soldiers in northern Uganda. Yes. And the film did not tell the story of imperialism and power vacuums and how this situation came to be in the first place. It was this very binary story of good and bad.
Speaker: And i immediately felt this connection and also kind of used the grief in this film as a surrogate for my grief. my grief I couldn't embody and express, that somehow I could place it into the bodies of those that I was watching.
Speaker: So as a 14-year-old, I begged my parents to let me drop out of high school and move to northern Uganda. They did not let me. And as soon as I graduated, I joined Youth with a Mission, and I did their discipleship training school. And then I ended up going out with a team for a little bit, but I also stayed mostly by myself in northern Uganda.
Speaker: And I lived in the community there sort of as this bridge between YWAM and northern Uganda while trying to figure out how to use movement and dance therapeutically for former child soldiers, all the while sort of enacting this adjacent thing to what was true for my own desires and my own body.
Speaker: Okay, so you're 18-ish? Is this right? Yep. Yeah, I was 18 when I joined YWAM. I was 19 the very first time I went to Uganda. And then I was in Africa for the better part of four years. Tell us a little bit about what that was like for you. Like you were up against atrocity systems, like with such a good, tender, young heart, innocent on some levels, not on others. Okay, but so earnest.
Speaker: So what was this like? Yeah, it's a very complex experience. And I think about it now. Mind you, i did not have a smartphone.
Speaker: I did not even have a cell phone the first time I went over or a computer. i was navigating, know, riding buses for nine hours into the middle of nowhere in countries I had never been. Were you scared? with nothing were you i wasn't However, a big part of my experience in purity culture is dissociation.
Speaker: And so I don't think it's that I wasn't scared. I think it's that I was very, very, very dissociated. And one of the things that I look at in my research and in my work is that young white women transmuted our own eroticism into forms of missionary work. And instead of allowing the energy to inhabit our own bodies, we expunged it into services of doing good.
Speaker: And so i don't see this movement as separate from the suppression of my own body and my own sexuality. And so there was something that was able to come alive in Uganda that i didn't feel safe to experience in the white Christian context that I was in in the United States. And so I felt I loved it. Like there was so much about being in Uganda and Africa in general that that really gave me my body back, interestingly enough.
Speaker: yeah It was the very first time that I had been in impromptu drum circles and communities where dance was not a spectator sport. It was communal activity. And so there was so much that I learned to appreciate and and love about that experience.
Speaker: And i think I really took for granted the privilege that I had as a white American traipsing through these countries. I was I already was embodying power that I was bringing with me that gave me a sense of safety. Right. Right. You automatically, in your white body, brought a sense of power, whether you chose to or not.
Speaker: Right. um Okay. I'm really interested about something you said a minute ago, because some of the listeners have done short-term missions or have been on the mission field or family members on the mission field. Right.
Speaker: What is it for you that you got to tap into on the mission field that wasn't really available to you in white, Western, conservative Christian culture?
Speaker: I think it's in part what what we were talking about earlier with the bigger the front, the bigger the back, is that the desexualization of young white women is how we are expected to perform in our racial and gendered location. And so then what happens is that there is a hyper-sexualization of people of color.
Speaker: And we project our own eroticism, our own vitality, our own sensuality into bodies that have more melanin. And so as I was living with these bodies, I was still doing that and still touching into something in my own body that was not permissible in the white Christian spaces that my body had moved.
Speaker: It's not condonable in purity culture to shake your hips or, you know, shimmer your shoulders, which is so much a part of a lot of dances that i took part in. And so it was the first time I was like, oh, I can actually move my body. And it's not being seen as causing my brothers to stumble. It's being celebrated for how body. Right. It's a communal, right, activity. Yeah. That's fascinating, Jenny. Yeah. Okay, so why did you leave Africa?
Speaker: i know we're skipping over a lot, but your story is so rich. So why, what took you away four years later? Really, it was my body.
Speaker: As much as I loved the experience of living in Uganda, i I was trying to bridge ministry in Colorado Springs with Uganda. And so i was working from, ah you know, 6 a.m. m to 1 a.m. m every day, trying to get fundraisers, trying trying to speak to churches. And I was in a constant state of stress.
Speaker: And this is really feeling of superiority that I needed to save Uganda, that that it relied on me. So I burned my body out. um I had broken out in in shingles. I had boils all over my body. My hair was falling out. I could not do it anymore.
Speaker: And then i actually went to YWAM had a North American Leadership Conference in North Carolina. and But I attended while i my body was being ravaged. Dan Allender was one of the speakers at this conference. Okay. He was talking about longevity in serving professions. And so I heard that message and went, oh, okay, I just have to get some tools and get some skills so that I can figure out how to do this long term.
Speaker: and So I went up to him to talk to him afterwards, which is how I ended up hearing about the Seattle School. At that time, the Seattle School actually accepted me as a life experience equivalent to a bachelor's degree. So i never went to college, but I jumped into a master's. Even through my time in Seattle, I actually would go back to Uganda for the summers. And hey the intention was really that I was only going to be in Seattle for three years and then I would return to Uganda.
Speaker: ah And in Seattle was the first time I had stepped out of these really white Christian bubbles. um I really believed I was stepping into the den of Satan. when i moved to Seattle and ah was um there to proselytize to my entire graduate school and the city of Seattle. And instead, what I was met with was a lot of love and a lot of expansion in how I understood Christianity and Jesus and what it meant to be a follower of Jesus.
Speaker: And it was really the first time I was introduced to white privilege and to confronting why, as a 19-year-old, I was able to step into Uganda and be preaching in front of hundreds of people.
Speaker: And these i these things I had really taken for granted. And then my final trip to Uganda, i I was doing a research study about how to use movement and dance therapeutically. And I was working with Center for Victims of Torture. i had brought a colleague from the Seattle School with me. And we had parchment paper around so that the therapist could write more honest answers. And one of the questions was, what would you want Westerners to know if they were coming to do healing work in Uganda? Yeah.
Speaker: And essentially 100% of the answer said, understand how the Acholi people do healing, understand what community integration means to us.
Speaker: yeah And it was finally this moment where I was like, what makes me think that I should step into this culture that's not mine, to this community that I don't fully understand and say, yeah this is how you should essentially do what they already were doing. Because...
Speaker: for eons their community has used movement and dance and ritual to reintegrate people into into their their society. And so I couldn't ethically then step back as a missionary or as a professional worker. I really thought I need to figure out my own culture and my own trauma and my own embodied experience and and learn what it means to work through my own liberation, not out of white savior as unforeseen.
Speaker: That is such a loving sentiment, Jenny. Like, I need to understand myself, my own trauma, what it means for me to live free before I step into a culture that I do not understand because it is not mine, and I haven't been raised in it, and assume that I can tell them how to be well. Okay.
Speaker: Like, we all do this in different ways, right? We all bring our own arrogant baggage of I know better than. um but that is one of the most loving statements I've heard. Like, I need to figure out my own path to freedom from my own pain before I tell someone how to get free from theirs. And I think from there of Dan's frequent comment, I can't take anyone else farther than I've been.
Speaker: And you're essentially saying that, right? Like, my culture set me up at 19 just to think I could save Uganda. I'm saying that. Yeah, and I feel like I'm saying that. And maybe even for me, it goes a little bit further. That's like, okay I don't need to take anybody anywhere. I can trust that they're going to be on their journey. Yes, do And, you know, I think I think about Jesus's words of like, think about the log in your eye before you're going to try to take out the splinter in anyone else's. Like, yeah maybe I can just let that splinter go and I can keep working on my own healing, not to be like navel daisy, but to really know how my body is contorted by the systems of oppression and power that I think Jesus came to invite us to liberate ourselves from. Yes. um So when you were at the Seattle School, how did your understanding of Jesus or Christianity change? Yeah, it really did. think used to understand it more in compulsory obedience. As I grew up in Colorado Springs, a big part of James Dobson and focus on the family was corporal punishment. And you are loving your children if you spank them and if you teach them to be 100% obedient Yes.
Speaker: And so I really, really internalized that. I really wanted to be good in this world. And so for me, it really was a sense of you just need to follow the rules.
Speaker: And in 2012 was my first year at the Seattle School. And I debated another student in front of our cohort of over 100 Why I didn't think gay marriage should be legalized in the United States. and I had several really brave, kind people come up to me and say, can we have dinner? And I explained to you how what you said up there was incredibly harmful to me and my understanding of who Jesus is and my relationship to my faith. And it challenged me to my core. It really broke open these things that I had thought were non-negotiables and and really drove me to understand what was the historical context in which the verses that I had been told were written and how does understanding that allow me to be more in alignment with the Jesus who had way more to say about caring for the stranger, the immigrant, the refugee, the orphan, the widow, than he ever had to say about what someone did or didn't do with their body. I appreciate that you added like the character of Jesus and what Jesus did talk about and how Jesus carried himself with people. Because I think often the retort I hear from someone in a position like you who is debating something and using scripture to back it up, when approached by others, well, the truth hurts.
Speaker: And you need to take that up with God. And instead, you went open and soft and And we're willing to be taught about, is the point of Jesus the rules?
Speaker: Who is Jesus? How did he carry himself with people? What did he talk about? How did he love? like I feel like so many of us get caught in that structure of conformity, that to be a good, quote, Christian,
Speaker: I follow the rules, which to me, i mean, if we're saying Jesus is a Savior, then that kind of blows all that out of the water. We don't really need one if we can follow all the rules, right? But He really wasn't like a man walking the earth shouting out rules to everyone.
Speaker: He was living a life of love. So i just, I love the way that you... You responded. Yeah, I mean, I think we forget. You know, I think, sadly, I've seen more Christians follow words of Paul.
Speaker: and And, you know, I honor wherever folks are at. But the words of Jesus were all of the rules. are summarized in this love god and love each other yes yeah and and why isn't that where we start from and why isn't it that we start from what does it mean to love you well what does it mean to honor your sovereignty your your free will your body your joys recognize how in doing that i also learned to love my body better
Speaker: Because while I was a missionary, i I would say often my body is a machine. And I literally treated my body like a machine. And our bodies are not. They are living, breathing, sovereign beings with souls that need a lot of gentleness and care and kindness. Why do you think, Jenny, that we migrate toward rules and law rather than love? I think that it's really hard for us to hold nuance and messiness and complexity. yeah And I think we could say, quote unquote, purity culture for a million different types of communities and cultures. Because if someone says this is the rules, just follow them, then it gives us this false sense of security. OK, great. I will just abide by these and will, you know, do what I'm supposed to do.
Speaker: And I think about Aslan, so you know, being like, he's not safe, but he's good. and And I think it is a lot less safe to not have a rule book, to not have a sense of this is what you quote unquote should do.
Speaker: And yet I think that that's what Jesus demonstrated was that he broke the rules. He picked wheat on the Sabbath. He healed on the Sabbath. He talked and touched untouchable.
Speaker: Everything that he did was actually in revolt against the quote-unquote rules that people were supposed to live by. Yes. i And I think, too, that when we migrate to the rules and the law— We don't have to contend with ourselves, this selfish unlovingness. We do become machines or robots.
Speaker: I do this. I don't do that. I do this. I don't do that. And then I feel righteous. But I don't have to deal with the reality of my insides of why do I have to be told to do this or that or not? You know, like what what is guiding me? And there's something that feels secure if you tell me what to do and I follow it. There's something that just feels safer there.
Speaker: And I think part of that is because of the pseudo community, if I can say this, in a lot of white Christian spaces.
Speaker: Because what ultimately rocked me when I had this final time in Uganda was learning about the rituals that took place to reintegrate people who had killed people in their village.
Speaker: Uh-huh. And the type of growth and maturity to be able to hold that level of rupture and repair, I have not seen even 1% of in most of the Christian white spaces that I have moved through. That if there is a simple disagreement, it's as if you've never existed. And I think that we feel that in our core. We really don't feel safe in our communities. And so then we work really hard to perform being good and being condonable in those spaces.
Speaker: I think there is a lot of truth in what you're saying. I have to make myself condonable if I'm going to belong. And if I make a misstep, I may be sent away or frozen out or choose knowingly that I must leave. Now, you're saying a person in the community in Uganda who had murdered another member of the community, the community would at times actually integrate them back in by holding all the complexity of what had met. I mean, this is like reintegrating criminals, right? But instead, we're told their address, and we're told, you know, they basically have scarlet letters in many
Speaker: ways, you know, that they are not really welcome back. What do you think allowed the people to hold such complexity, which to me is the highest form of moral development? OK, we white Westerners know so much we need to go in and save them, but they actually have a higher developmental status than we do. Right. How did they do that? I think part of it is necessity, um that they live in a community where to ostracize somebody means that they will die. and the care for what it means to move forward it is something that they have needed.
Speaker: contended with. And i think that we have been conditioned now for hundreds of years in white capitalism to have both the privilege and the detriment of what we think of as individuality. And we are socialized to, quote unquote, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and invisibilize all of the labor that goes into making those boots in the first place. Oh. And when you live in a community where the bootmaker is down the street and the lacemaker lives across from you, it's a lot harder to believe this lie that you are doing this all on your own.
Speaker: And I think it's by design that that capitalism has essentially siloed us into nuclear families, into suburbs, into cars, into cubicles, into And so we forget how much we are deeply, deeply, deeply interdependent and interwoven with the beings that we see and that we don't relate to. Yet, you know, we we are we are talking right now on computers because of forced slavery and child labor in Congo that has um got extracted cobalt to be on our computer in our batteries. and And we don't want to think about that. And I think it is so important that we begin to think about that because then we actually loosen these labels of criminal or murderer. It's like I have actually murdered by using the computer that I'm using right now.
Speaker: And can I sit with how I am complicit in these systems so that we can learn how to find a more just, more free world that I think was what, again, coming back to Jesus, I think that was the example that he came to give. Given all this, Jenny, like, and I could keep talking.
Speaker: There's just so much that you bring to the table that's very interesting to me. But in our last few minutes, what would you say it could look like to be like this Jesus of Scripture in the world in which we live right now? Like, obviously, we have a lot of people using Jesus' name to do very, very different things. His name is being used on both sides of the political spectrum to justify things that I'm not sure emulate Him.
Speaker: um In fact, some of them I'm positive do not. And so what do you think it would mean to look like him in this world today?
Speaker: i think it would look like taking his words very, very, very seriously. And when his words say, if you have two coats and your neighbor has none, give them. yeah And when his words say, I was in prison and you didn't come visit me.
Speaker: I was hungry and you didn't give me food. The radical, uncomfortable, costly compassion that Jesus invites us to, I believe, is how we subvert the power structures that he subverted. The radical, uncomfortable, costly love.
Speaker: The sacrifice. Not merely a sacrifice to go around the world and help build a building for vacation Bible school. Maybe that's needed. But the radical love of walking down the street of my city and making eye contact with the man asking me for money and making a decision in that moment of what love would look like. Right. Like the being willing to sit with and listen to people who are not just different, but I have been conditioned to believe are wrong.
Speaker: And actually giving them dignity to know that Jesus himself was an emig immigrant. He was living in Egypt. Right. He had fled an unsafe land and to maybe have some more um broad views of what it means to love people among us who were not born here.
Speaker: Like, we are living in times where I think loving and living like Jesus is more obvious or not. You know, like, it is clear that we are being radical or we are not. And I think, to me, sometimes I look at it and say, oh, maybe it's time that, I don't want to say real believers, but Those who truly want to emulate Him come out into the world, come out and make their voices and their actions known. It's not enough right now to just be in our churches singing our own worship songs, right? Like, what does it mean to be in the middle of the messiness of life?
Speaker: So Jenny, I know that you do a lot of writing right now. i think you have a book coming out. um Tell us a little bit about that. And I also want people to know where they can find you and your work. The working title of my book, it may shift a little bit, um but right now is Anatomy of a Missionary.
Speaker: And so it weaves together my story that we've talked about and a research study I did interviewing many, many young white women who grew up in purity culture and became missionaries in the global South and looking at individual bodies and collective bodies and how does our flesh mirror what's happening on state and political levels. And so that I'm very, very excited to bring out into the world. It has been about a six year process of researching, writing and editing. So it will hopefully in about a year, maybe a little bit more because publishing takes out a long time, um but it is making its way there.
Speaker: Okay. Oh, I can't wait for it. Yes. Thank you so much. I do have a shorter article version, um and it is called Peer to Purpose Pipeline. And so that shares a little bit more of what we talked about today. i can send you a link for the show notes if that's helpful. That'd be great. Yes.
Speaker: Yes. My personal website is indwellmovement.com. So I have online courses that dive really, really deep into what we've been discussing. i have an online movement studio for helping folks, particularly who have struggled from religious trauma that has left them with a very complicated relationship with their body. I am on Instagram at indwell underscore movement. Those are probably the best places to find. I have done some of your classes and your groups, and you don't only have a kind heart, you have a wise mind, and you're just a good human. Like, you're you're lovely to work with. And so I love that you offer
Speaker: so much online. It's hard for people these days to always get somewhere, much less travel to a location. I appreciate that they can join you synchronously or asynchronously in some of these classes. So it can fit anyone's schedule.
Speaker: And it has been good for me um to try to restore connection with my own body. I know that some of the classes I've done with you, you've invited us to dance, but with our screens off. And I'm like, oh, I feel the freedom Because I'm so wired of my body is to perform. And what will people do with my body? Whether that's sexualization or just to have it as an object to be judged. And so there's so much freedom in the classes that you do. And I want people to know that.
Speaker: There's community. And there's also a sense of, like, alone together. You know, which I have come to really appreciate. Well, Jenny, it's been a treat. Um...
Speaker: Anything else before we go? You've shared so much. Thank you so much for holding this conversation. I'm aware we've covered a lot of very complicated chart topics. And um I love that we can hold space for what arises. And I really appreciate being here with you and what you are bringing into the world through these rich rich conversations thank you jenny
