Hello, friends! It’s the fifth week of May, which means we have a bonus essay for you. This is a topic we’ve been mulling over for a while, as it shows up repeatedly in our community communication. If this is not your cup of tea, carry on! We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled practices next week!
I (Mariko) have the vaguest memory of some sort of wilderness adventure class in college (apparently, I’m now old enough that my college memories are dimming…) where we were learning the basics of climbing. Unexpectedly, the first thing they taught us about climbing was actually how to fall. Because they assumed we would and wanted us to do it correctly.
As it turns out, there is an art to falling - bending of knees, tucking of chin, etc. But the weirdest one: RELAX. You hear the same thing from paramedics: drunk people often fare better in car accidents, because their intoxicated brains forget to tell their bodies to tense up in anticipation of a crash. And relaxed bodies often crash better - less severe injuries, better recovery, etc.
I guess that’s what I’m hoping to do here. I want to help you crash better.
The Book of Belonging and The Belonging Workshop have become safe gathering places for folks who have complicated relationships with the Christian faith. We love that and we’re listening to your feedback. Our inboxes are full of messages from folks in different stages of… deconstruction/reconstruction/untangling/reimagining/whatever phrase sits well with you. (We often say “liminal faith space” as an expansive, catch-all but for the sake of this essay series, we’re going to use the term deconstruction.)
I hear you saying things like, “I feel like I’m free-falling! This is hard. This is scary. This is painful.” Often, I hear your voices ratchet up, when kids come into the picture: “THIS IS HARD - help me make it easy on them! THIS IS SCARY - help me introduce a God of peace! THIS IS PAINFUL - how do I instruct but not truamatize!?”
You feel yourself falling, you’re tensing up and I hate to break it to you, but I think that tension (justifiable as it may be!) is making it all worse.
So here’s what I’ve got.
It’s not a plan for not falling. (I’m starting to believe that a life lived in authentic pursuit of the Divine requires at least one, big fall*.)
It’s not a plan for picking yourself up. (Though, I have one idea.)
It’s a plan for crashing.
*Does it bother me to realize that the analogy I chose will inevitably remind folks of “The Fall” - a made-up term for the events in Genesis 3 and the Western tradition of portraying Eve and Adam as “falling from perfection” instead of failing to grow up into mature relationship with Yahweh? Yes. But hopefully I’ll come full circle and counterbalance that!
Step One: Acknowledge Your Fall
As we’ve explored in some of our other posts, spiritual life is often a mix of a Thing and then our posture toward that Thing. For example, we did a practice about examining our posture towards our difficult feelings and the ease that can come from treating those feelings with hospitality. (“Hello, Shame, what are you trying to tell me today?”)
Most folks are dealing with layers of shame, guilt and fear on top of the already painful process of deconstruction. It’s helpful to start acknowledging that jumble of emotions.
In our climbing analogy, imagine you slip while you’re hiking and start to tumble down an incline. You scurry to grab the edge but find yourself in a free-fall. The quicker you notice, “I am falling. Time to implement my training and start positioning my legs, tucking my chin and protecting my spine” the less damage you will sustain. The more likely you are to find your footing and get to where you want to be. (Or maybe to a new path that you wouldn’t have discovered before!)
But what if , after slipping, you spent those precious minutes thinking “I can’t believe I missed that handhold. I’m so weak. Karen would never fall on a hike like this. My fellow hikers are going to judge me for this. They might not let me hike with them anymore. This is that Slippery Slope I was warned about and I still fell!”
Welp. That would be silly and a waste of your time. You’d still be falling, but you’d be doing it in a less safe and far more terrifying way.
So let’s start by acknowledging the fall and maybe even normalizing it.
What if you saw deconstruction as a normal step in a life of spiritual faithfulness? What if you saw it as a process to be handled with curiosity and compassion?
Let me explain.
I’ve never met a person in gleeful deconstruction. I’ve never met someone who is thrilled about the process. In my experience and observation, deconstruction is a grief process.
Some folks are grieving places and traditions that affirmed and defined them as children.
Some folks are grieving leadership they now feel betrayed by.
Some folks are grieving seasons where their efforts and hopes were exploited and taken for granted.
Some folks are grieving the loss of community or employment.
Some folks have an agonizing mix of it all.
But similar to any grief process, I observe the following about deconstruction:
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