When I tell folks I spent my 30s deconstructing faith and then my 40s deconverting, the number one series of questions they ask is about the how, why’s, and what that looked like for me. I think the curiosity comes from a few different directions:
They are deconstructing their faith and wonder what that looks like for others (Are you doing it right? The answer is yes.).
Those who are afraid to fall away from their faith so they want to avoid any steps that could cause them to slide down that slippery slope. They are attempting to “deconstruction proof” their faith journey.
Folks who need to pick apart my previous and current beliefs to prove that my faith was never deep enough so I was never a true believer. This approach just points back to number 2. They are terrified this will happen to them so they need to hyperanalyze why and how. They are so afraid of shifting and what coming undone could mean for their lives/souls.
But I did come undone and there is no easy way to describe it and define it.
How It Started
In the autumn sixteen years ago, I sat across from a friend and laid out hard truths between us. Our relationship was one-sided. She was taking and taking on her terms and I needed more. I needed a friendship that was deep, wide, and church proof. I did not like who I had become and who we were becoming together. We reached a crossroads - a friendship on our terms or a friendship based on building resentments and lies.
It didn’t end well. She was angry and hurt. These were understandable and legit reactions to a friend calling you out on lying and hiding, but instead of shifting and leaning in so we could be adults and walk out a mature, healthy friendship, she handed her hurt to the church ladies. In turn, the church ladies did what church ladies do - enforce leadership directives and silence dissenting voices as harmful to the mission of their church community. Over a very short time period, I was shunned, silenced, and removed as unsafe. It was painful. I slipped into a very unsafe mental health space for a very long time.
This was one part of a larger undercurrent of life themes and patterns that had been growing in my late 20s. It was the final rattles of a Christian good girl narrative dying. The week of my 30th birthday… they sent an enforcer for a final meeting to make sure I kept my silence and knew my place. Keeping the circles small was their only directive. My health, my marriage, my family - none of these mattered to them.
I would spend the next decade coming undone and putting myself back together again.
She Walks With Me in Silence
I can remember that year of silence. The silence flowed naturally from that first year of mourning. After drying my tears and facing my grief, I took up what had been forced upon me when they silenced my voice. I embraced the shifting to quiet nothingness away from the hurried busyness of churched life. It was shocking to my system. I leaned into the ordinary rhythms of motherhood. I took up a camera and learned how to see while walking the path. I embraced gratitude. I wrote morning pages. I learned how to see through a fresh lens.
After spending years being indoctrinated and groomed into a specific faith tradition, I had no clue who I was behind their definitions. Now, I had to grow up out of what I had been taught and studied to uncover what my voice was in the midst of the competing narratives of the god people.
I recall watching the sunrise from a bench facing the neighborhood lake. I would walk the paved path around those waters every Sunday morning. I would sit in my grief and ask the god of the universe why he had left me alone. At the peak of early motherhood, birthing babies, and raising very young children while living far away from family, I was all alone. When I walked away from the god people, I had no one near me to hold me and love me with the exception of my husband. There was no one to listen to my grief and shame.
I was coming undone with only nature to witness my pain. I settled into that silence by the waters. I uncovered pieces of me I did not know existed under all the good Christian girl varnish. I began a very long process of dismantling the foundation of me.
When I say I spent a year in silence, this is not hyperbole. It is true. I had been so deceived and let down by the very humanness of believers and friends. I had no idea what I looked like outside the god narratives.
I was a young woman untethered but trying to navigate the chains that still clung to my flesh. I was exhausted, depressed, ashamed, and quiet. I felt duped. In reaction to all that sloshing off, I think a part of me simply shut down in the silence to rest.
She walks with me beside still water; She restores my soul. (J.McGuire)
Dew Drops on Sleeping Bumbles
I had never witnessed another Christian’s story of coming undone. All I had read and listened to my whole life had been stories of people dying for their faith and/or finding Jesus while lying in the gutter. The great faith warriors had taken up their crosses and followed Jesus. I had never encountered a story where a Christian encountered Jesus, laid down their cross, and walked away. Everyone around me insisted my faith was big enough to walk this out. I just needed to get over it. I modeled my first steps in silence after the stories I knew. But my skin stretched too tight as I felt confined and suffocated.
I remember an early summer morning walk. The sun was just coming up and my camera was in my hands. I could take deeper breaths now. My heart and mind did not feel as dark. On this chilly morning, I found sleeping bumblebees tucked into a bush along the water’s edge. They were covered in dew. I felt this too. The chilly mornings of grief when my soul couldn’t get warm enough. It felt like I was slowly coming awake. It felt like a new beginning because it was. I was being reborn - without the god definitions.
We look for the quick and easy. Maybe that is the 4th type of person asking the hows of my faith adventures - the person who wants an easy step-by-step guide to deconstructing and putting themselves back together again.
I don’t have a quick and easy guide. I have a messy and chaotic swirling of walking in silence with an adventure in putting my new pieces back together again. I learned how to save myself. I’ve been dismantled and put back together repeatedly in the last 16 years.
Anyone who tells you - their way is the way - and their end result is THE end result for those deconstructing… those folks are full of shit.
The greatest teacher when a world swirls and comes undone is Nature.
The greatest rhythm to heal your soul is silence.
The end result - who knows? We are all winging it.
J.
Your 1, 2, 3, list at the beginning of your post has been my experience as well. Keep sharing your truth.