Twenty-two years ago last Sunday, I was baptized at the Pacific Baptist Church at the south end of Lincoln City, Oregon. May 12th was Mother’s Day back then as it was this year, so the little church of roughly 15 total members was packed with nearly 50 people that day. Had I known there’d be a crowd, I might not have gone through with it.
But back then I was struggling. I know now that it was depression – deeply seated as if it were clinging to the marrow in my bones – but back then I genuinely didn’t see a way forward. I felt like my friends weren’t really my friends, my family was only tolerating my existence, and that there was nothing special about who I was. As an introvert, I cherish my alone time, but this was an unshakeable loneliness. And in the wake of a trip to Portland, Oregon for a Christian concert, I suddenly felt not only seen, but needed. I felt like I had a purpose, that I was meant for something more.
On the surface, getting baptized was simply the commemoration of the journey I had already started. I was reading the Bible, learning who Moses was, who the different Apostles were, and learning what God wanted for me. But deep down, I believed getting baptized was going to take away that lonely feeling. I thought that if I just got baptized, I wouldn’t cry myself to sleep anymore, and that everything would turn around.
On Sunday I spent a little while thinking about my time in seminary, and how all through each of my classes, I felt a similar sense of purpose. Seminary was supposed to be a steppingstone to a PhD program, which would then lead to a job as a professor. I had a few professors in my undergraduate days who taught with such passion and expertise that I hardly remember what they were saying, but I definitely remember wanting to be like them. I wanted the balance of giving lectures during the day, grading papers during the night. I’d daydream about having several books published on my particularly-niche area of interest, so niche that you probably wouldn’t know what it was, which of course would allow me to give countless mini lectures on the importance of… whatever my area of expertise might be.
Seminary fueled this desire even more, but it also brought forward a different set of challenges that I had never expected to face. You see, in my deconstruction process, seminary gave me all the skillsets I’d need to not only form my own opinion on a subject, but to do so with such conviction that no one could possibly persuade me otherwise. But I always thought I’d be still involved with some type of Christian community.
One of my favorite books from my life before seminary is called A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. He was a close friend of C.S. Lewis and in that book, Vanauken writes a poem that depicts a gap between faith and un-belief. Essentially, knowing what he learned about faith prevented him from turning back to the life he had before he started asking questions. For him, it was a leap toward faith. For me, the learning I had in seminary prevented me from returning to the simplicity of faith – the kind I was expected to accept for my life by virtually every evangelical I’d met.
Yet with every question I’d ask, there was a greater distance between the evangelicalism I had come to believe in and where I felt compelled to go. There wasn’t a shared reverence for the mystery of God anymore; my evangelical “friends” wanted to correct me, to reel me back into the acceptable form of faith. Their acceptable form of faith. And I couldn’t turn back with them.
The “gap” that I had first encountered way back as a young teenager was one that many teenagers experience. It wasn’t a gap between un-belief and faith, though I had been convinced that it was. Instead, it was between isolation and community. It was between believing I didn’t belong in this world because I was a mistake, and believing that regardless of how I was brought here, I was meant to be here. It would take years to deconstruct the manipulation that occurred in this 8th grade paradigm shift, but I think there’s still something fascinating about the whole experience. Because while it was a manipulation of my insecure emotions, it was also my own narrative construct that brought me through it.
When I came up out of the baptismal water, I immediately started to shiver. Though everyone assured me that they did their best to heat it up, it was hardly above room temperature. But the 50 or so people in the church cheered, and then prayed over me as I huddled myself into a giant towel. I don’t remember what anyone said in that prayer, but I remember thinking, This is it. I’m finally going to start feeling better.
It wasn’t magical like I had hoped it would be – like the switch from Peter Parker to Spider-Man, but on a smaller scale. In fact, there wasn’t really any physical sensation at all (beyond the shivering). Instead, I was now constantly reflecting on my role in life. I was constantly engaged with the question of meaning and whether or not I was living up to it.
Little did I know that this would be an existential awakening that arguably saved my life. Truthfully, it wasn’t God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, despite how many evangelicals told me it was. Rather, it was the act of embracing the existential struggle of finding my own meaning. It got mirky at the beginning because I had to borrow the rhetoric of evangelicalism to articulate things a little better and find my footing. But this journey has only ever been my own since getting baptized.
This is why I think it was so easy to walk away – because in actuality, I had always only ever been on my own journey. I followed the longing for purpose and meaning into the church, then followed the teachings of Jesus out. Then came seminary, August of 2014 (IYKYK), a Trump presidency, and a whole slue of things where evangelicalism kept showing its true colors (or rather, a lack thereof). What started as questions about meaning and purpose as a teen led to questions about inerrancy in college, which turned into questions about feminism while in seminary, then questions about liberation theology, then questions about critical race theory, and now here I am, two decades later, still engaged with the existential.
My podcast idea, “Existentially Speaking,” is intended to tap into that same questioning, that same sense of meaning-making. Twenty-two years ago, I had a limited imagination about what a meaningful life might look like, and only really presented with one possible answer. What I think about now is how I was led to believe that there even had to be an answer – that this sense of wonder I had about the world could never be satisfied with simply a deeper understanding of the biology of life. “This universe was created, thus there had to be a creator,” I was often told. But in my time away from evangelicalism, I’ve met countless people who have either believed in a different God or no god at all – and all of them treated people better than what evangelical culture tends to allow.
Deconstruction has only ever allowed me to see life in a healthier, clearer lens than what I had as an evangelical. Unlike what evangelicals might say about deconstruction, it isn’t a slippery slope into godlessness. Some who’ve deconstructed have remained within Christianity, some have found other religious practices more fulfilling, and some have embraced a limbo state of belief, which is where I find myself. For me, deconstruction has not been a single event, or a fixed process that I went through once and now I’m done. It isn’t past tense; it’s ongoing.
May 12th used to have a huge significance in my spiritual journey. It was a mile-marker for my faith, my commitment to Jesus. But that sense of “faith” was only ever self-serving. I didn’t learn better ways to process my emotions, like I have through deconstructing. I didn’t treat people better, I didn’t seek to learn someone else’s truth, I wasn’t comfortable with mystery, I had no sense of awe for the gentle things in life, I internalized a toxic masculinity, and I had a pathetic sense of love.
My 2002 self would have been horrified at who I’ve become, but deconstruction has helped me see that who I might have been had I tried to stay is far more horrifying to think about.
And maybe this clarity can help heal what that kid was going through.
Scribal Practices 