One of the things that’s most surprising about my seminary journey is the way my faith is being deconstructed. To be honest, sometimes it feels as if God is dying, and perhaps this is true. What I mean is this: old, tired ways of thinking about God, and even more important, the boundaries we as humans love to put around God, are crashing down around me. I am more and more convinced that the desire to be right is what’s killing us all, and most of all, it’s killing God.
A dying God seems at first to be a disappointing God — a God who is unworthy of praise, of worship, of even pondering. Let’s just leave this faith thing behind, and get on with it. We’ve a life to live, after all, and faith doesn’t always make for an easy life. Faith calls us to something beyond ourselves, and this gets messy.
A deconstructed faith, however, is a faith that has been deeply cared for. A faith ignored is not the same thing; a faith abandoned isn’t, either. But a deconstructed faith — now that’s a faith that’s been tenderly turned over in the palm of your hand. It’s been rubbed and polished to a shine. It’s been examined carefully for kinks and dents and broken pieces. A deconstructed faith is a faith deeply cared for.
She goes on to say much more about the process of watching previous understandings of the Bible and of belief crumble under examination. What is exciting is that she recognizes that this is not a “loss of faith” but the death of things that need to die precisely as part of the process of caring for faith, pruning it so that it can blossom. And she recognizes that that is a longer-term process, that pruning looks like death to those who don’t know that they have to wait for spring to arrive. And so I highly recommend reading the entire post.
This is a topic that I have blogged about in the past on more than one occasion…
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