003: Making Space for Everyone to be Welcomed with Jenai Auman

Have you ever felt pushed to the margins of a community? Made to feel like you don’t quite belong? Whether it’s for your politics, sexual identity, faith (or lack of it), or for naming bad behavior, we are made to feel “othered” for a wide variety of reasons.

In this week’s episode, artist and author Jenai Auman talks about her experience of being othered, and how she chose to name her experience and find a way forward. We talk about her new book, why and how it was written, and about reclaiming spaces for ourselves.

Learn how to reclaim your autonomy and agency. Hear the ways creating and fostering beauty help to mend our fractures. Make space to welcome yourself and the othered.

🔗 link to full Show Notes and transcript

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• Othered at Bookshop.org | on Amazon

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Transcript

Jenai Auman  0:00  
I don’t think it’s anyone’s responsibility to fix the church. I think it’s all of our responsibility to name our own hurt and figure out how we can lock arms with those around us. And so I have a very specific context that informs, like, why I think hope is so important, and I think a big part of that is why I still, I still believe in the Christian tradition today, and I make space for those who are still trying to figure out what faith looks like for them.

Brian Lee  0:26  
Welcome to episode number three of the Broken to Beloved Podcast. I hope to provide practical resources through compassionate conversations to grow in trauma awareness, set up safeguarding practices to prevent or avoid future trauma and move toward healing and wholeness. I’m your host, Brian Lee, and I’m so glad you’re here.

Today, we’re talking with Jenai about her new book, Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed and Marginalized. We have a deep and great conversation about naming the harm that comes to us, about what it means to be created in the image of God and the hope that she holds onto. Jenai has been a summit speaker for the last two years, and I’ve appreciated her vulnerability, her honesty and her candor.

Jenai is a Filipina American writer and artist. She draws from her years in church leadership, as well as her trauma informed training to write on healing, hope and the way forward. She’s passionate about providing language so readers can find a faith that frees. She received her bachelor’s degree in behavioral health science and is currently pursuing a master’s in spiritual formation at Northeastern Seminary. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and sons, and here is my conversation with our friend, Jenai.

Jenai, welcome to the Broken the Beloved Podcast!

Jenai Auman  1:40  
Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian Lee  1:41  
I’m so glad. This is our, what, third time recording together now I think?

Jenai Auman  1:46  
I think so.

Brian Lee  1:47 
Yeah, congratulations on your first book, Othered, which is super exciting. How do you feel?

Jenai Auman  1:55  
I am overstimulated. I believe it. I want to say great. I like want to say great. I mean, I do feel great. And also, there was a bit, I don’t know if you watch stand up comedy. In John Mulaney’s most recent stand up special, where he says, you know, I’m grateful I am and I wish I could just feel that one emotion, but I don’t. I feel other emotions. That’s how I feel, like I want to say I feel great, and only that one emotion, but I also feel other emotions. I’ve kind of written and shared with readers and on my sub stack that I’ve kind of cycled through, excitement, trepidation, anxiety, worry. And it’s not linear. I cycle back to excitement, anxiety, you know, and so I am good and also overwhelmed.

Brian Lee  2:45  
Yeah, yeah, well, and I appreciate the complexity of it. I found in preparing for our interview that I kept going back and forth to my conversation with Dr. Alison Cook and all the work she does with IFS and her latest book, I shouldn’t feel this way, and you both talk about naming things a lot, and just even in this, in holding lots of simultaneous emotions and feelings at the same time, and making room for that is a really beautiful thing, because we live in a both and world doesn’t have to be black and white, or either or.

Jenai Auman  3:14  
Yeah, yes, many, many parts.

Brian Lee  3:18  
That’s right. So you can be excited. You are allowed to be excited, and you’re also allowed to feel all the other things that come with it.

Jenai Auman  3:25  
Yeah.

Brian Lee  3:27  
I would love to start out by just hearing from you part of the introduction and part of the invitation that you opened the book with. For me, it so clearly captured the heart of what this book was and resonated deeply with what we do at broken to beloved. So if you’re ready, go for it, yeah.

Jenai Auman  3:44  
So this is page 12 of the invitation:

“I want to pause here and say this, you matter. You are valuable. Your thoughts and words hold the potential to bring heaven on earth. Your grief and sorrow deserve to be seen and held your value, your worth, has nothing to do with where you fall on the hierarchy of a faith community. It has everything to do with the truth that the God, who has the power to hold the universe in his hands, bends his ear in love and tenderness to you. You are beloved and worthy of belonging.”

Brian Lee  4:24  
I love it. Thank you.

Jenai Auman  4:26  
You’re welcome.

Brian Lee  4:28  
I mean, let’s just start there. I love that this whole book is about how much we all matter, how much everyone has worth, how much it lifts up the people who have been pushed to all the edges and the outsides and the margins, and what it does to help them to feel seen and affirmed and validated and valued. That’s my version of why you wrote the book. What’s your version of why you wrote it?

Jenai Auman  4:54  
I wrote it because I was mad as hell. So, um, it’s not funny, but it’s also like, there’s ways in which I have to bring levity. It’s a, it’s a heavy book. It’s not like a, it’s not a, I don’t think I make, and maybe I can do this in future work. I don’t make a lot of room for laughter in the book, because it wasn’t that sort of book, but I wrote the book, I say that this is the very first sentence of the invitation. “This book is for the othered. This book is specifically for those who don’t know what to do or where to go next, because their internal landscape has fallen apart because their external faith community has pushed them to the edges of that community.”

And so I wrote the book. I’ve kind of explained it like this, the ways in which the book was outlined, you know, it starts with naming, it ends with finding home. There’s bits on prophetic voice and other betrayal in there, and I’ve lined it out in such a way, because this is how I would make all of these arguments in the case that I make in the book, this is how I would have made it to my pastors and the brothers who who hurt me and harmed me, and I never got the chance to say all of those things to them.

And so I, you know, I, I wasn’t even with the book. I didn’t even try to make. I wasn’t going to argue for whether or not spiritual abuse exists. It exists. I’m going to go ahead and name it, whereas in real life, I was having to argue with them on whether or not it exists, and I never could even get to the definition of what it is, because they were too busy deciding, well, what is or isn’t real, what is or isn’t true. And I, you know, with all due respect, believe that if you’ve harmed as many people as my former church has, you don’t get to determine what is real or not real. When you have done a lot of work to leave things unnamed, to sweep them under the rug, you’ve lost that authority, at least in my life, personally. So I wrote this book really so that those who have specifically felt these wounds could find some way forward.

That is the primary reader for the book. Some people are not, are getting a hold of the book, who are not the primary readers. I think a lot of people were hoping that I would, I’d be more prescriptive. I’m not a prescriptive writer, so I don’t say this is what you need to do. You need to go out like I don’t say you need to do that. I don’t think it’s anyone’s responsibility to fix the church. I think it’s all of our responsibility to name our own hurt and figure out how we can lock arms with those around us. So it’s it’s always contextual. And so prescriptive advice was not really what I had in mind for writing it. So it’s really a spacious book that holds space for those who have had pain. And I use my story as a vehicle as kind of like this is how I crack the can open. But I try not to center in sharing my story. I actually want us all to connect with our own stories. So it was really, it really, truly was an invitation for other folks to dive into their stories as well.

Brian Lee  8:07  
Yeah, I love it. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, and I think at the end, towards the end of the book, I think you very clearly states like, Hey, I’m not going to offer prescriptions, and I actually actively resist those prescriptions. And it doesn’t feel like you’re telling us that we have to do anything. You’re telling us your story and your process and what worked for you. And yet, I think the truth of it, and the process of naming what you experienced helps us and helps so many people to feel seen and validated in a lot of those ways.

Jenai Auman  8:38  
Yeah, yeah. That’s what, that was the hope, yeah, yeah.

Brian Lee  8:42  
For me, it worked. It strikes me as you were reading the invitation for us, and thank you for doing that, that you also got to record your own audiobook.

Jenai Auman  8:52  
Yeah, yeah. It felt very reminiscent of that.

Brian Lee  8:56  
And I could feel it. I could feel you almost back in that space, in the way you were pacing yourself and read it intentionally and slowly and clearly. What was that process like for you? Like I imagine writing is one thing, but then to sit there and read the whole thing in your voice, out loud, maybe even differently, in a different tone than how you had originally written it. What was that, what was that like for you?

Jenai Auman  9:17  
Now I feel like I did write I read it in the tone that I meant it. I think sometimes, a lot, I try to read it with I think you can say hard things with a soft voice. I don’t think I need to say hard things with a loud voice. And also reading it, I not only got to read it, and I don’t take that for granted. A lot of folks, and I know more about the industry now, a lot of folks don’t have the opportunity to narrate their own audiobook when they really wanted that opportunity. So I I want to honor that, and I want to be respectful like I it was a tremendous opportunity. And not only that, they the audiobook company organizes the studio where you record based on where you live.

I live in Houston. I live in the same, Houston is also where my former church is, though I’ve moved away from that that area, but when I got the email for the recording studio, I realized it is in my old neighborhood. I could have walked to the recording studio from my old house. I know I had probably driven in front of that recording studio 1000 times on the way to work at the church where this book is about. And so that’s just a little it was bananas to me. And when I got that email, I thought, am I gonna be okay? I don’t go to that neighborhood very often anymore, intentionally. Am I gonna be okay?

And I realized I am going to be okay. And actually, this is a pretty redemptive moment. So reading it, I will say I have to give major props to anyone who narrate there. I mean, there are professional audiobook narrators who both do dramatic and non dramatic, like, what is? What I just did was a very non dramatic reading of a book. They do that professionally, full time, and I give major props, because I was exhausted after two and a half days, I was so tired each day I would come home and just flop onto my bed so felt like I was wrung out.

And also, it’s really cool that I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from folks who are listening to the audiobook. There’s a lot of people who prefer audiobooks. There’s a lot of people who prefer audiobooks that are read in the author’s voice. And so I’m really glad I got to do that for them. I think they, you know, the audiobook, they might those listeners might actually get like a they hear the tone of voice that I meant to read it in, which I think is really cool, but it was a great process. I will probably have to listen to the audiobook first to determine if I will ever do it again. So it was really hard. It was really hard.

Brian Lee  11:51 
Yeah, well, and I remember seeing the post or the reel or the story, whatever it was when it was happening, just thinking, man, what a full circle, crazy, crazy moment to have.

Jenai Auman  12:01  
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we got an hour break for lunch during recording, and I was like, Well, I mean, I know where everything is in this neighborhood, and also I wish I could go somewhere else, you know, like, I’ll just drive out. But I did. I ended up just driving out, but it was really special, and it was really cool, it was really exhausting. Again, it was one of those. I wish I just felt one feeling, but I feel so many feelings about it, but I’m really glad that I got to do it and that I got to offer audiobook listeners just to a different experience.

Brian Lee  12:36
Yeah, well, and especially with such a personal story, to hear it in the author’s voice, it just gives it something extra.

Jenai Auman  12:42
Yeah, yeah, it would. I mean, I guess it happens all the time, but I guess it might have been weird if someone else, like a guy, read my own story, you know. So I guess in that way, it is really, really cool.

Brian Lee  12:56  
Yeah, it is, well, I love the idea of reclaiming space, because that’s something I’ve been exploring since last summer, like we still live in the same neighborhood where my old church was, like, we literally live our two two corners away from our church building, and I drive past it on the way to my son’s school, drop off and pick up every single day.

And I remember last summer, we were invited to a wedding that I really wanted to go to, because I just loved this kid and loved the couple, and found out that our old pastor was going to be officiating, and it was the whole will we won’t be sort of a thing. And just in processing with my own counselor, and just kind of going back and forth, I was like, of course, I want to go to the wedding, and why would I deprive myself of that celebration? And them who invited me, right? The couple who invited me being part of that with them, just because this guy’s going to be there.

So we took it as an opportunity to reclaim that space for myself. It’s like, I can’t just hide and avoid community, because I think this one guy is going to be there. Yeah, and so for me, it was a really powerful example. And I think it was happening, that process was happening around the time you were recording your audiobook. So for me, it was, like, particularly resonant. I was like, Okay, this is me reclaiming my space, like I can go back and do these things. I can be in public where I’m not afraid, like, of this restaurant or this place or this coffee shop or whatever, because I’m afraid that he might show up there. Yeah, so I know just, just hearing about that process and watching it with you, felt very empowering and very much like reclaiming space and agency.

Jenai Auman  14:26  
Yeah, I, I’ve kind of called that blooming where they tried to bury me, or where they did bury me, and I dared to bloom, so I wasn’t going to stay down.

Brian Lee  14:37  
That’s right, that’s right. You talked a little bit about naming, and I’m learning that it’s, it is so important to name again that the Alison cook episode you write, it was the beginning of a cancer about your official first day at work, which is a heart wrenching story you wrote. It’s the beginning of a cancer that presented and metastasized over the next few years back then, I didn’t exactly know how to express it.

And now I can name the disease that rooted and grew. It was spiritual abuse. What did that beginning of a naming process do for you?

Jenai Auman  15:09  
Oh, it, for those who’ve left a church community, I assume, if your experience was maybe similar, you cycle through guilt, shame. Was I wrong for speaking up? Was I should have stayed quiet? What if I had just done what they had wanted me to do? What if I had fawned and kept with the people pleasing? What if I would have just done and all of those, what ifs I think I write this in the book too. All of those what ifs are quieted whenever you’re able to name the thing that happened to you, and whenever you’re able to name it as spiritual abuse, or it as trauma or and know that, like it’s not the onus is not totally on me, and if anything, I was naming it correctly, and because I was naming it, I think that’s how we have our voices used against us.

For those of us who speak up or those of us who dare to ask questions or to challenge or give feedback, we are told that we are I was told that I was harsh and abrasive, and so I was conditioned and discipled to distrust my voice, and daring to name what happened was a part of that reclamation. It was a part of the reclamation of my own voice, of my acknowledging that my discernment is not wholly off, as much as they try to tell me that you know you can’t trust your feelings or your feeling. And I was like my gut, my body was telling me something is not right, and I just kept shoving it all down.

So the naming process, it freed me. It was the beginning of liberation, because I write about this as well. You you can’t heal from a disease you haven’t named, or you might. You can treat the symptoms, but if you don’t get to the underlying cause, the different symptoms crop up and it comes out sideways or in different ways. And so really, I wanted to name the underlying symptom of, you know, not just, oh, this is a financial struggle or relational conflict on the staff. No, like, this was actually a spiritually abusive environment, and it impacted all of us. It didn’t. I was not the only one who was spiritually abused in this environment.

I think it was a spiritually abusive environment that affected everyone differently and because of my own personality or makeup or whatever, I was the one that was loudest about stopping it, and that ultimately ended in me being pushed out of the church, but then writing this book so naming it was incredibly important for me. I think people just need permission to say harm has come to me. Instead of saying, Yeah, people have different stories. I and I just want to say, like, you can stand in the power of saying they harmed me, that that’s not like a moral judgment on them, that’s not like a that’s not a dehumanizing statement of somebody who has harmed you. That’s just saying, “I have been harmed by these people,” and that’s the truth.

Brian Lee  18:11  
Yeah. Thank you. You mentioned trust a few times, so I want to jump there. You write about broken trust and betrayal, right? You say, “when the volcano of broken trust finally erupts like it did in my church, it fractures more than just the relationships within. It fractures every relationship in the community.” And that is, in so many ways, my own story, too.

I specifically remember having a conversation, I think, very similar to the one you had, where I walked into the senior pastor’s office and in what I thought was an extreme moment of vulnerability. Confessed to him, I said, Listen, you know my history, you know I’ve been through toxic situations and leadership and abuse before, and so I just want to confess to you is like, I don’t like, I’m new here. We don’t really know each other. I don’t know if I trust you yet. I think that’s something that’s going to have to be learned and earned. And for me, it was like it felt like a confession that took a giant weight off of my shoulders that I had been carrying, and I felt good about it.

And then the next day, I have another one on one. And as I’m leaving that meeting, he goes, Oh, and by the way, so I stopped him halfway to the door. He goes, when you told me that thing yesterday about not trusting me, I feel like you planted a seed of doubt, and now I no longer trust you.

Jenai Auman  19:26  
Oh my gosh.

Brian Lee  19:27  
And he completely made it about him. I was like, what I and I didn’t know what like I did. My whole body froze, and I didn’t know what to do with that. It was such a betrayal. Now that I have that language too, it felt like such a fracture in the relationship that really was never repaired, and that happened like within the first month. I think of my being there and you also write, “betrayal can only occur if someone abuses trust.” You sit down with one of your former pastors a year after leaving. You tell them how you’re internally fractured, that you thought you could no longer trust yourself.I mean, what does that mean? How does it feel today? How have you learned to trust yourself again? Do you trust yourself yet again?

Jenai Auman  20:06  
Yeah, yeah. I remember telling my former pastor that in the context of it was in the context of joining a new church, like, how? How do you trust leaders? But not only that, I no longer I trusted myself. I trusted that the people I was sitting under, learning from in my former church, were trustworthy, that they would hear me. There were so many times they would say, we hear you. And they revealed that they did not hear me. They revealed that they would, you know, interpret my words in a different way, and I would say, then, you’re not hearing me, because that’s not what I mean.

I put a lot of trust in the people who were teaching me my theology, my, you know, relational capacity, all of these things. I trusted them and for them to behave this way and and I didn’t see it coming. I think I started self blaming. I didn’t see, how did I not see this coming? Yeah, how did I not know in, you know, I talk about discipleship. I think a lot of us are discipled to not know or in trust. Is a very weird conversation to have in the church. Usually it’s about grace or about compassion, you know, like trust. I feel like not all of us are talked, are trained or equipped to know, like how to trust and discern and so I mean, yeah, whenever I was cast to the side, it was really a ruptures in all directions, rupture and relationship between my brothers and I, My pastors and I, but also a self rupture in that I called this so wrongly, I never would have predicted this would have happened.

And so in healing, I talk about this later in the book, but like I needed to learn what it meant to my belonging was so enmeshed. And for those that are kind of more who have learned like psychology, language or any like enmeshed dependence, where your identity and who you are, everything you are, is enmeshed unhealthily in the identity of another person or a group or whatever. I was kind of conditioned into that enmeshed dependence. I needed to learn how to differentiate, not necessarily how to perpetuate hyper individualism, but I needed to learn how to differentiate as a different person. So this is all like systems theory or family systems, like, how do you be different?

And I didn’t know what it was to be a self and so healing and learning to trust myself was understanding who I was apart from people who were pushing me around, who were coming at me. And for my particular story, I I know my personality, I usually err toward fawning behavior, people pleasing behavior. I know not everyone is that way, and so I needed to figure out who I was, apart from those kind of trauma responses and triggers. And so I needed space to figure out who I was.

And I would say, over the course of time, in writing this book, I have really learned to trust my voice. And not only that, like, not only like empowering myself to go and do an incredible thing like publishing a book, but also knowing my limitations of I can’t do this particularly, I don’t know that yet I can’t speak to this topic, because I’m not I’m not educated there.

So knowing myself is knowing where I am free to go, where I feel safe enough to go, and where I don’t know the things that I need to know and I get to learn. So it’s a it’s a holistic self awareness that acknowledges both my ability and my limitations, and in in acknowledging those limitations, I I can trust my yes and my no more astutely.

Brian Lee  23:54  
That’s really good. Yeah, yeah, thank you. I think that’s going to be really helpful, because I hear so many times from so many people who are part of this unfortunate community who have been through stuff. Like, it’s like, I don’t know how to trust myself. I don’t know how to trust anyone else. I don’t know like, I can’t tell what green flags or red flags are anymore. Like, everything seems so crazy or mixed up.

And I appreciate that you talk about taking the space and the time to learn to hear yourself clearly away from all the other voices that are going on. JS Park writes about, you know, the voices we carry, like all the different internal and external voices that are part of our lives. You write extensively about being in the wilderness and what that experience is like can be like on both kind of a positive and negative aspect of it and how it can really help to clear up a lot of the stuff that we carry with us, so that we learn to hear ourselves, hear God, hear whoever more clearly, or at least to be able to discern right about discernment and discipleship is discern what those truths are for us, and to be able to have that clear yes and clear no, I think that’s really important to have both.

Jenai Auman  25:06  
Yeah, yeah, and knowing, like, if there’s not a clear yes or not a clear no, like being okay to sit in the I don’t know. And not reacting to what you do or do not know yet. So just like being a lot of I would argue that this is kind of more a contemplative Christian tradition of not non reactive, being mindful, being slow.

So the wilderness chapter is definitely a switch into contemplative Christian traditions of like slowing down, not going at the same pace as the culture that forces you to move at a certain clip. But if you slow down long enough, you can see, oh, you know, speed is relative. You don’t feel like you’re going fast if you’re going 80 miles an hour on a freeway where everyone else is going 80 miles an hour. But if for someone who’s slowly walking into the side of the by the side of the road, and a car drives by at 80 miles an hour, it seems really fast. And so slowing down, you can actually name when things are fast or not fast, dangerous or not dangerous, safe or not safe.

For you in particular, it’s all subjective in many ways, it’s also communal in many ways, and sometimes is really cool. I was on a podcast interview about how you can get lost in a crowd of your people if you’re all wearing the same color, like if you’re all chanting for the same sports team, and how it can be really hard to find you know whoever you came with if they’re wearing the exact same thing as everyone else. And I would say in some ways that’s really cool, because it’s community, and also you are still an individual human being who needs to come home at the end of the day, and so your mom, you know, if it’s a kid, the mom needs to pick up the right kid, differentiate the right kid, and bring the right kid home.

And so I think many of us want to get lost in the crowd, but we don’t realize we’re losing ourselves as well, and that’s how we kind of take on the voices of others.

There’s this, really, this is kind of a sidebar. I was watching a Dave Chappelle special about polarization. Actually, I think he was helping name the auditorium at his old high school, and he was talking about how something he learned from a teacher there who said, like, if polarization is, if you can get everyone in the same room laughing at the same they will inevitably laugh at the same thing to varying degrees, like it kind of becomes contagious, this loss of self in a crowd.

Same thing happens with a capital riot. You know this contagious nervous system energy, you get lost in the crowd. And I think something similar happens within faith communities. You lose yourself when you know you’re put in a constant state of toxic stress or nervous system dysregulation. That’s not okay.

And so slowing down, becoming more contemplative. Learning your own voice in the silence is really silence can be very debilitating, and also, when you’re there long enough, you’re like, wow, actually, this is kind of nice, because it’s not just loud all the time. Silence can be oppressive, like for those who sleep with a sound machine. Silence can be like deafening, but when you go out from the city to, you know, nature, and you sit in the silence of nature, it’s actually very refreshing. So I try to flip the script on, like you can actually hear yourself when things get quieter. And that’s how I’ve learned to trust myself. I had to trust myself in the quiet.

Brian Lee  28:41  
Yeah. Thank you. I want to go back. You said something that really stuck out to me about losing yourself in the crowd. And if you’re in front of this crowd and they’re laughing, eventually everyone’s going to be laughing at the thing to varying degrees, right? And this sense of losing yourself in that crowd, and you have, I think, several passages in the book, and I know I have several examples in my life where, when it comes to your mixed race, and people just making side or offhanded comments about it, whether it’s about you, your kids, whatever the thing is, and you just kind of, like, nervously laugh or like, don’t address it in the moment, yeah, and identifying that as a sense of losing yourself in the moment, yeah, to what at the expense of yourself always, and being othered, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

But I’ve experienced that so many times, too, and I want to kind of bring that around. But there’s a quote on page 81: “If you want to know what most divides a church, I don’t think it’s teaching or doctrine or secondary or tertiary theological issues, how the church does or doesn’t care for its people is the biggest divide in the church today.”

And I think it’s that it’s that wrapped up with the way that we lose ourselves or over identify ourselves with a larger group when we don’t have that sense of self, when we don’t have that sense of belovedness and belonging and all those things that in order to fit in, in order to belong, I must lose myself to this crowd and decide whatever it is that they say goes.

Jenai Auman  30:16  
Yeah, yeah.

Brian Lee  30:18 
I don’t even know that I have a question about that. It just struck me the way that you said that when you were telling the Dave Chappelle story. It’s like, oh my gosh, this has happened so many times.

Jenai Auman  30:26  
Yeah, it’s like a feeling of like I’ve lost, I’ve gotten swept away, like I’m no longer in control of my own faculties. It’s I actually have a poignant example to what Dave Chappelle was saying in that special he talks about this. And I, as he was talking about it, I remembered my husband and I went to New York probably about nine years ago now, and we got tickets to watch the monolog rehearsal for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. And so we didn’t get studio recording tickets for the actual taping of the show. We just had tickets to the monologue rehearsal so we could hear the jokes that they would say.

And I remember going, we were prepping to go into this room, and the lady was like, just laugh. Just laugh a lot. And I was like, but don’t you want to know if like, these jokes will actually land? Don’t you want us to laugh genuinely? And everyone kind of, I mean, there’s like 20 or 30 of us at this monolog rehearsal, not very many people. The studio is actually pretty small, too, and we’re sitting there, and Jimmy Fallon comes out, he’s giving us these jokes, and everyone’s laughing. I’m laughing too.

And I remember having a very self aware moment of like, I actually don’t think this is funny. I wouldn’t laugh at this if I were at home. And I look at my husband, and he’s laughing too, and I know him. I’ve known him since we were 17. He would also not laugh at this if we were at home, but like, because we had this kind of call to action, to just laugh, and everyone else the the understood standard was just laugh. I felt like there was no other way. And so when you when you talk about, like, people having off handed comments about my mixed race or calling me oriental, which is not okay if anyone’s listening.

Brian Lee  32:10  
Thank you.

Jenai Auman  32:12  
But, but, like, I realized, Oh, I am with a in a church where everyone does not know that that’s not okay, and I feel a greater pool to assimilate to their standard, rather than hold my own and say, actually, that is not a politically correct word. That is not an okay word to use. It’s actually really objectifying. And I did not have because I think I had so easily lost who I was. I didn’t have the words to tell them to stand in that truth and say, I’m going to say this to them, because I really did think, Oh, I might be ostracized for saying this. And I think that is a real it’s a real threat that many people face.

Brian Lee  32:51  
Yeah, it is. It is well, and even even when you do have the tools, I find that we often, for whatever reason, find ourselves fractured or divides, like I just I didn’t like it happened to me. So recently, I took my hit boys to the pool at the state park nearby, and some little kids, I think we bumped I was playing with a 10 month old in the pool, just kind of, you know, floating them around through the through the shallow end, accidentally bump into some kids. Oh, sorry, because I’m walking backwards, carrying him, and they make some kind of ching chong, offhanded comment,

Jenai Auman  33:24  
No.

Brian Lee  33:24  
Yeah. So I’m like, okay, so this, this is still happening, yeah, like, and I had flashbacks to, like, fourth grade and middle school and high school. And I did and they’re kids. She was like, maybe nine years old, exactly. She didn’t learn that from nowhere. And I almost said something, and I just kept on. I was like, I’m, you know, just I’m, I don’t know why I didn’t, and I kind of have, obviously, had been thinking about it ever since, but I’m just like, I couldn’t, I think just the shock of the moment overtook me, and

Jenai Auman  33:59  
Part of me would is like, Hey, where’s your mom?

Brian Lee  34:04  
Yeah, where’s your grown ups? Can you point them out? Because we’re gonna go have a conversation. Yeah, it’s one of those things.

Jenai Auman  34:11  
I’m so sorry.

Brian Lee  34:12  
Yeah, thank you. It’s so weird. It’s like it was just such a shocking moment and a divided moment for myself. It’s like I’m feeling all these things at the same time, and for whatever reason, I don’t think it’s a conscious choice, but I’m gonna keep on walking, I’m gonna keep on floating by and just sit with it.

But yeah, it’s one of those things that’s just still so very real and alive today, and finding the agency, having the tools and the presence of mind, I guess, in the moment when things happen, to speak up and to advocate for ourselves or to call out bad behavior when we see it. I think if my older son had been near me and with me and heard it, I would have absolutely said something on his behalf. But I think because it was just me, I was like, You know what? I’m just gonna let this one go and I don’t know why.

Jenai Auman  35:02  
And then sometimes it’s like a it’s not a canned response that’s at the ready. Every time it’s a situational, “am I okay enough to have this conversation?”

Brian Lee  35:12  
Yeah.

Jenai Auman  35:13  
And sometimes I am, and sometimes I am not. If I’m too mad, it’s usually mad—anger that empowers me to go have the conversation. And sometimes that’s not exactly when I should have the conversation, because I’m so you know, have you ever been so mad that like, you no longer speak like, like, like, let like, intelligible words, they just come out, and then the sentences are like, what is that even?

Um, there’s some times where I like, Okay, I don’t have the presence of mind to have this conversation. I need to go be angry and scream all the words somewhere else. But yeah, it’s all it’s it’s a situational thing.

Like, do I have the presence of mind to actually address this conflict and in a way that I can still love my neighbor as myself, even though they just said something vitriolic or not okay to me. Can I love my neighbor and not other my neighbor in this moment, in the name of justice or whatever?

Brian Lee  36:14  
Yeah, yeah, that’s good. Speaking the truth or acknowledging the truth. You say acknowledging the truth, speaking it out loud or privately to myself, has helped me make has helped make me whole. I am slowly finding that to be true for me as well. And part of that starts with the naming process, because it’s hard to acknowledge the truth and we don’t know what to call it, right? For people who aren’t going to write a book or feel like they have some kind of community or support system in place to tell the truth to or to share it somewhere for them, if it’s privately to myself, What does acknowledging the truth look like?

Jenai Auman  36:54  
Yeah, self affirmation, particularly for people who’ve experienced abuse or trauma or some sort of dehumanization where you have been made less than acknowledging the truth of I was dehumanized. I was objectified. I was like that self validation really helps when we we should have communities that support one another.

We should have folks in our lives who were saying, You are not crazy for thinking this. You are, you know, but sometimes we don’t have those people, and that’s infuriating, and I’m almost mad for the people that, and just lamenting that for the folks that don’t have that sense of community. But there are moments in your life where you have to be brave enough to say, I live this. I know I live this, and I will no longer gaslight myself into thinking, Oh, this was trivial. Oh, this was this was nothing. I’m not going to self abandon.

So speaking the truth to yourself privately means that you will no longer self, betray, self, abandon or self erase your own experience just to make the people around you happy, or just to feel like, well, I need some cheap sense of belonging, so I will cave, and I will just not acknowledge these things a part of my that are a part of my story, so that I can belong. That’s a really cheap sense of belonging. So you begin belonging to yourself when you when you no longer, when you speak the truth of what you’ve lived to yourself, and you experience that self compassion. 

So instead of self abandonment, self betrayal, self erasure, you experience self compassion, which enables you when you know how to give compassion to yourself. You know how to love your neighbor as yourself. And I think learning to speak these things to yourself is not only for the sake of yourself, it is for the sake of the community as well. You become a much more holistic whole, holy human being when you can stand firmly in a very insecure world, you can help yourself restabilize on the truth of what you’ve lived and what you know.

Brian Lee  39:06  
That’s really good. Thank you. You write that our common denominator is being made in the image of God, and that includes seeing ourselves as fellow creators and authors. And you also talk about autonomy, that it’s part of our origin story the moment God named us and invited us to imitate him. And then you talk about creating and doing beautiful things. And I love that you quote Makoto Fujimura. I also think of Curt Thompson, who quotes him along as well. And this whole idea of we are created to create, we are created to see and create beauty and put ourselves in the path of oncoming beauty, if autonomy is part of our origin story, how do we reclaim it when we feel like it’s been stripped from us? And the other part of that question has to do with the creation part is, how do we view ourselves as fellow creators and authors with God, with that autonomy.

Jenai Auman  40:57  
It’s so interesting because there are many Christian traditions who do not believe that you are made in the image of God, unless you are, you have come to saving faith right in Jesus and so many people, many folks, depending on the tradition, particularly reformed traditions, would disagree with my definition of what the what constitutes the Imago Dei.

That’s well and good. I totally stand by my interpretation, because I think it is theologically grounded in that, like we were all created in the image of God. It was just fractured. It’s not that we lost it. We lost some of it, but there’s a there’s a crack in the facade, and we’ve we’re trying to mend it, and that is the work of creator.

So Makoto Fujimura talks a lot about Kintsugi theology, yeah, the piece of pottery, it may not be able to hold water anymore when it breaks, or tea or whatever it is supposed to hold it. It can’t hold anything when it’s broken. But that doesn’t mean it’s no longer a piece of pottery. It is still a piece of pottery. It’s, it’s just lost its original intention and what it was created for. So it is the work of makers and menders creators.

So as the only, only being in the universe who created from nothing. Or, you know, bang, Big Bang, the Universe in existence, however you want to think about that, cosmologically speaking, the only person that, or the only being that created without using broken pieces, was God. So us as image bearers of God, we have to use the things that he’s given us, around us that was a part of cultivating the garden. We have to use the things around us to grow goodness. But from after the fall, things are broken. There’s things in schism.

Part of that is internal, external, communal. And so it’s the work of makers and artists to take pieces different mediums and make them whole. And actually an artist imagines what a finished piece could look like. And so because they have an imagination for wholeness, they can actually work toward that end. And so I believe fully in absolutely, that that is one way, one tremendous way that we we have the maker’s mark on us, in that we are fellow creators that are mending those fractures that have fractured our autonomy. I think whenever you dare to start making you are actually using your autonomy. Some people can try to exploit your autonomy that but that doesn’t mean that you still you don’t have the power to create and foster and make and it’s there’s a really cool, interesting analogy.

That is, you know, obviously in the Exodus story, Pharaoh oppresses the Israelite, the Hebrew people. But philosophers think about this concept of the self and the other, which is the whole phenomenological concept, philosophical concept. But one cool interpreter said, you know, if you want to know more about the pyramids and how they were made, you don’t go to Pharaoh. You go to the you go to the slaves. You go to the people who are oppressed. Because the pyramids don’t have the fingerprints of Pharaoh. The pyramid itself has the fingerprints of the slaves all on it. They have instilled a piece of themselves into what they’ve created.

And so it’s never the oppressor who oppressor, who exploits, who really, truly knows how to be a meaning maker. They only know how to use. It’s those who have been used and forsaken and or exploit who know, who dare to work within the brokenness of the world to create something that actually know how to embody Christ-likeness. 

Brian Lee  44:46  
Yeah, wow. Thank you. Yeah. Two more questions. Okay, if you had to pick an opposite term for othering that moves toward that healing and wholeness, what would it be?

Jenai Auman  44:58  
Oh, that’s a really...an opposite word...welcome. I think welcome, maybe, I mean, I there’s a part of me that wants to say belonging. I think belonging is so convoluted with, fitting in. There’s something about like, hospitality...yeah, something about like othering, welcoming.

There’s a part of me that also wants to use the word love, but love also has come with a lot of baggage, and how we’ve been love bombed by, you know, hurtful people, and what I think it’s just a spacious welcoming would probably be, you know, I can be different than you, but I’m still welcoming you to the table. Yeah.

Brian Lee  45:36  
I think it works. I love it. The last question is, given everything that you’ve been through, given everything that you experienced and you didn’t grow up in the church, you came to faith at 17 later in life. Experienced this in the church, in working at the church, you still write with such a deep sense of faith and trust and belief in the good news and the goodness of the gospel of God, of his work, after experiencing what you did, how or why? 

Jenai Auman  46:08  
Yeah, I think, Well, part of it’s I’m stubborn. I think part of it really is, is I’m stubborn, and there is this adamant part of me that says you do or those guys do not get to hold my faith captive. They don’t get to control what I do or don’t do anymore, like they don’t get to do that. So there is a very stubborn part of me that knows, you know what I’m gonna I’m gonna thrive without you. I’m gonna do this without you. I’m going to flourish without you.

I don’t need to seek revenge or retribution. I don’t need any of that. I don’t even need I don’t need to avenge myself. I will flourish without you, and that will speak louder than any any anything. So there’s that part of me that feels that way, and there’s another part of me that because I didn’t grow up in the church, I know, and I know for so many who did grow up in the church, they’re coming with a different baggage, different context. But I know how awful the world can be outside, like apart from faith, how toxic. I know that toxicity is not only within the church.

I came to the church to find belonging, to find welcome, to find a sense of home, to help you know, find my voice, my sense of self, to find that I mattered because of how the world chewed me up and spit me out as a kid, not only as a kid, but within my own family, within my extended family, some of the ugly things that I heard that were said to me, that were done to me, and like I witnessed, I know how toxic the church can be, and I know I truly believe that there is something within my faith, something that I learned theologically, that was making it made too much meaning in my life.

God made too much me, He meant too much to me for me to walk away. I really believed he—God, who is technically without gender, I say he for the sake of clarity or just ease—but he really was the source of goodness and hope. You know, what is the human experience without hope?

And my dad left the faith when he was a kid so long before I was on the scene and I saw what a lack of hope in his life did to him, and what it did to the people around him, and how he treated the people around him. And so I have a very specific context that informs, like, why I think hope is so important, and I think a big part of that is why I still, I still believe in the Christian tradition today, and I make space for those who are still trying to figure out what faith looks like for them.

Brian Lee  48:49  
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think we both have mutual friends and individual friends who have chosen to walk away. And I don’t blame them a single bit, because I’ve seen it. I’ve been there. It’s like, you get to make that choice for yourself?

Jenai Auman  49:01  
Yeah, it’s I, I’m proud of them, the folks that like feel like they have to walk away because they’re doing the thing that’s going to, you know, essentially piss off all the Christians around them, um, and I know that there’s no scripture verse that I can say to them to know those things, you know, yeah. And I just know that sometimes you have to wrestle with the hard things in life. It’s their journey.

Brian Lee  49:24  
Yeah.

Jenai Auman  49:24  
I just want to be a compassionate witness and say, hey, I’m here to walk alongside you in any way that you’d like for me to that’s that’s loving my neighbor as myself, that’s my responsibility. Is just loving them and watching them bloom in their own ways. And some of them, some of them do, come back to Faith that looks different, and that’s really cool to witness, too, and I’m so glad to be a part of it.

Brian Lee  49:48  
Yeah, agreed. Man, this was a rich conversation, where can people find you or connect with you?

Jenai Auman  49:53  
Oh, I’m everywhere. Everywhere. I hang out more on Instagram. I feel like that’s more of my social media home. I’m going to be writing more on Substack, but everyone can find find me if they search Jenai Auman. I’m everywhere at Jenai Auman. I’m accessible. Find me on my website. If you ever have a question, feel free to send me an email. I actually answer my emails, unless I get 200 emails in a day, then give me a second. But I’m around. I’m a human being, and I just love genuinely connecting with folks. So yeah, just say hi.

Brian Lee  50:26 
Thank you. I will confirm you are a human being and a very lovely one, gracious one. Everyone, go get a copy of Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed and Marginalized wherever books are sold. We’ll have all the links for everything in the show notes.

Jenai, thank you so much for being with us today. 

Jenai Auman  50:43  
Yeah, thank you for having me.

Brian Lee  50:45  
Wasn’t that a rich conversation? If you enjoyed it as much as I did, be sure to follow Jenai and say thanks for being on the show. You can find links in all the things in the show notes at brokentobeloved.org. Subscribe or follow the show to get new episodes automatically.

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Coming up on the show, we have Scot McKnight, Laura Barringer, Tim Whitaker and many more. And next time, we’ll be talking with JS Park about his work as a chaplain, a grief catcher, a therapist, and his new book, As Long As You Need.

Thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to listen. I hope it’s been helpful. Here’s to moving toward healing and wholeness together. I’ll see you next time.