The Dream: I was driving a rutted path in the middle of a forest. While it was not a roadway, it was well-traveled with deep marks in the soft earth. I stopped. The path moving off ahead of me into the distant woods - dark. To my right, the forest gathered tall above my head as the sunlight beamed through the treetops. It was quiet. I saw a woman walking through the tall grass moving away from me. She was gently pushing the foliage down with her feet creating a fresh path through the woods to my right. I watched as she reached out her fingers to caress the grasses at her hips as she walked. This wasn’t two roads diverged in a yellow wood. This was me in the forest of my mind looking at the long-worn path ahead and stopping to watch as a piece of me wandered off into the quiet, calm light.
I used to crave it like comfort food - the path. It was manmade and well-paved around the perfectly planned neighborhood lake. A committee once upon a time plopped a path around the water for a community in the Washington, DC suburbs. I was one of many who took to the path every day. It was miles of my deconstruction journey run into the asphalt. A sacred space to land after coming undone. I spent months of Sunday sunrises watching the light touch the water and sky while I mourned the losses and attempted to put myself back together again. I didn’t know how to define me without Him (the Christian god). My legs shook and my heart bled as my soul wept at losing my life’s definitions.
Once, when the path felt too oppressive and I felt like a racecar driver taking the same left turn again and again and again… I stepped off the path and into the tall grasses. I walked right into the forest edge and kept moving. I took the wild route, and I finally became one with the feral. I took the path that no one knew I was taking. I didn’t warn my husband that I’d be walking a new route, I just took it. Without cellphone, without fear, I wandered right off the paved way and into a world as wild as you can get in the burbs.
During those years, Mother Nature was a consistent, wise teacher. She sat with me as the new day took shape and bore witness to my becoming. She showed me sleeping bumbles and freshly born goslings as I mourned what would not be for me. I was learning the gift of silence and being still.
In silence, I sharpened my knives and honed my words, but it was all too safe and well-paved. I kept to the approved more progressive lines of faith - not diverging too far from the familiar route of my youth. In my grief at losing the good Christian girl that I had so desperately fought to maintain, there was still a huge pieces of me that needed to be dismantled. I clung to that Xtian god with white knuckled fear because I had no clue what letting him go would mean. When you spend your whole life being told that the worst thing that can happen to you is being separated from god and god’s will, it is terrifying to stand at the edge of the unknown and jump anyways.
I did not know how to welcome the feral pieces of me that I had been taught to mask, to hide, to shame, and deny. I did not know how to embrace the pieces of me that I had been taught were sin nature and required divine intervention for me to be whole.
I had a lot to learn about how to welcome my feral, undone spaces. It is in the undone space that I found a wholehearted life because I never needed saving. There wasn’t anything wrong with me.
Deconstructing Faith in a Way that Lands Safely vs. Feral
In the deconstructing Christian religion sphere, you often hear the stories of folks grappling with god. They share how they let some things go, honed beliefs into something that makes sense for their current needs and shifted to adapt around a slightly different version of the faith and God narrative. They found a religion that is more inclusive, less oppressive, more focused around red letter words, and accepting a wider variety of people while holding to some of the fundamentals. Their gatherings feel safer to them.
On another slippery slope, we hear of folks who completely drop the god narratives for atheism - rooted in however they choose to define their new normal. The deconverted.
Many deconstructing folks flock closer to the same types online and in real life gatherings, but without the bigotry. For their needs, the isms seem to be better managed. Not that they have removed all the things that make those isms possible. They just put on a new shiny veneer on the surface and shift into something more palatable.
However, there are little moments of red flags that appear when you realize that the deconstructed aren’t as safe as they claim. It’s a new version of the same god. It’s a new message from the same mob mentalities. So, when the critiques and criticisms come, the progressive becomes much like their conservative counterparts. The critic is swarmed, discredited, their concerns minimized as “not that bad,” and shamed while the mob is left swirling and proclaiming their loyalty to a cause, a man, a god, a name and we realize, it really isn’t any safer on the new shelf. It’s just not as dusty over here.
Back to That Dream
As I stood watching the woman drag her fingertips through the tall grasses, I felt longing. I wanted to be with her wherever she was headed. I wanted the light and the unknown that felt important. I looked back toward the rutted road ahead of me - I saw the dark and the well-worn. I felt dread. I recoiled and looked back through the forest to the woman who was moving away from me. A voice spoke into the dream saying, “This is your home.” I knew it. I recognized it. I knew I was dreaming and that the moment was important. I woke up to my home in the city. The ceiling fan spun in the shadows overhead as my husband slept in the bed beside me. I turned my head to find the clock shining 3:00 AM on the nightstand. My heart raced from the quick shift to awake and my head was still groggy. I wanted to remember the images before they were lost to the fog again.
J.