Reading update 6.25.24…

In an effort to post more regularly and stay actively reading, I’m hoping to do weekly updates from my reading list. As you’ll see in what follows, there’ll be some overlap between books, and some repeated discussions perhaps, but I feel there’s no real way to avoid that. Plus, one thing I noticed when I keep a reading journal, which is sort of the vibe I’m going for here, is that your perspective about a book can change as you continue to read through the book. Yes, this should be obvious, but even the most avid readers (myself included) often make the mistake of judging a book by its cover.

And I think this might be the best space for me to process what I’m reading (and hopefully pick up a few reading recommendations, too).

So let’s start with what I recently finished: Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa. This is probably the fastest I’ve read through a new book and that’s because it was hard to put this one down. Starting in Ein Hod, the story focuses on one Palestinian family in the years leading up to 1948, when Israel began its aggressive occupation of the land. And as the Zionists become more violent, life for this family becomes a living hell. The descriptions are vivid and thorough, and there were points where it felt as though I were reading a current event out of Gaza or the West Bank. While the events this family faces are frequently horrifying and occasionally catastrophic, their devotion to each other and the dream of a free Palestine make this a tragically beautiful read.

Next up are my current reads. I’m still working through The Hundred Year’s War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi, but it’s honestly been tough. Every day since October 7^th, 2023 has brought a new hellish story out of Gaza. It’s impacted my reading trends where I feel drawn to reading more novels rather than non-fiction stories. It seems easier to wade into the realities Palestinians face when I read Palestinian novels; it’s not as easy when reading non-fiction accounts of Israel’s atrocities. It’s like I need a narrative structure to tether me through the hellish world forced upon Palestinians. All this to say it’s been difficult to read Rashid’s historical account because I might read a chapter, then open Instagram or TikTok and see that Israel has yet again committed war crimes and advanced their blood-thirsty genocide. That things have only grown worse. But yet it’s still a critical read for those who’d like to deconstruct the US/Israeli propaganda and learn how Palestine is being systematically erased from their homeland.

I’m also making good progress with Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty. This is quickly becoming a book I can’t put down. It’s a collection of Morgan’s own short-stories (kind of like Never Whistle at Night where Talty also has a short story), and they’re not all horror, either. Some are just depictions of everyday life for Indigenous people, and that’s what makes the horror elements that much more chilling. Talty uses subtle little details to carry a lot of weight in turning an everyday event – walking to the store and back, hanging out with your friend at the bar – into a flashpoint where the story shifts to a thriller. But by the end of each story (so far), I’m also left reflecting on the painful realities that inspired these stories.

Lastly, I’ve got one more book queued up called The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens & Ghosts by Tiya Miles. This was a recommendation from a professor I had during my MFA program and I’ve been meaning to read it for a while. I had actually kind of forgotten about it until I saw it on the shelves behind a BookTok creator I watched a week or so ago. The professor I’d had recommended it after I had asked for books that blend the discussions of Critical Race Theory with discussions of Indigenous identity. I may not get to this one right away, but I’m quite excited for it.

In light of my last post about how I miss studying theology, I’m also contemplating dusting off one of my books from seminary that’s probably academically outdated, but might stir my curiosity. Blending in something that keeps me reflecting on my time as an evangelical should definitely help with my own novel I’m working on – I’m aiming for psychological thriller that doubles as a story of deconstruction from evangelicalism. Thus, it’d be autofiction, but with a psychological thriller flare.

Upon mentioning keeping a reading journal, I might make that another blogging series where once a week I take a single text I’m reading and I work through the questions I developed for the reading journal I kept through my MFA program. Generally speaking, the journals were intended to get us to connect what we were reading with what we were writing. And I think that might stir some helpful discussions here.

That’s all for now. If you’ve got reading recommendations similar to the ones I mention here, please let me know in the comments. Or if you want to share what you’ve been reading, feel free to comment with that as well.

Keep calm and read on!

Side effects of going rogue…

I miss studying theology.

Evangelical nostalgia – the kind of longing for a specific way of living out the Christian lifestyle – has been hitting hard lately. I find that when I’m most stressed or anxious, this longing for the way things used to be increases drastically. Early on in my deconstruction process, I had often forced myself to stay within the confines of the theological paradigms of evangelicalism so that I didn’t have to deal with that sense of waywardness wrought by questioning everything. I didn’t want to feel adrift, which is what happens when the beliefs that shaped and guided your day-to-day start to unravel.

But knowing what I know now prevents me from going back.

What I’ve noticed this time around, though, is the nature of the nostalgia has shifted. This isn’t merely a desire for the sense of comfort and safety (both of which are conditional within evangelicalism), but rather for the sense of purpose I felt when I studied theology. As an evangelical, it felt like I was feeding my soul – not just reading the bible, either, but rather connecting certain verses and passages to specific beliefs. And when I got to seminary, it felt like I was learning new ways to better understand God – feminism, womanism, liberation theology, etc., were all couched in the framework of understanding the image of God and what practices we might adopt to honor God’s image.

The theology I’d study actually meant something beyond getting others to agree with me. In fact, it was the opposite. Studying theology helped me navigate the biblical text in such a way that challenged my thinking and/or my behavior, which then compelled me to challenge others. The deeper I’d dive into the text, the more of a “woke liberal” I’d become – and for no other reason than believing I was following what God was teaching me.

On the outside of evangelicalism, though, there isn’t always that shared sense of purpose, let alone having a similar upbringing. Many that I know now either had a healthy religious upbringing where beliefs were taught, but never forced, or had no identifiable religious influence at all. Talking about Jesus now often introduces an entirely new concept where I have to double-back and summarize bits of the bible just so whatever point I’m trying to make has a chance at being understood. In a lot of ways this can be a good thing – it allows a fresh perspective on long-held beliefs or ways of understanding, which can then further the deconstruction process.

And yet at the same time it was nice to have companions on a similar theological journey. It made me feel connected to something bigger than myself, which in turn kept me from retreating within myself and/or pushing everyone else away. With all that’s been going on for the last 9 months, I guess I’m just afraid that I’ll reach a point where I’ll choose to close myself off, where I’ll choose callousness over connection.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in these last 9 months it’s that Islam is not a religion for the individual. Every Muslim I’ve encountered is deeply enmeshed in a community – where everyone’s fed, everyone’s clothed, everyone’s housed. Everyone’s connected. I’m not saying I’m interested in converting to Islam (or reverting? I don’t know, I’m still learning); I don’t think I can convert to any religion anymore. But I do think that if at its core, evangelical Christianity hadn’t been so tied to capitalism and harmful ideologies, I wouldn’t be feeling the side effects of having gone rogue.

Any other former evangelicals feeling this? Or something like it?

May 12th, 22 years later…

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.

A Decade Apart…

April 11^th, 2024 marked 10 years since my Grandpa’s passing. There are times where it’s easy to accept the reality that he’s gone, but there are times where it’s not. And those moments seem more frequent lately.

His passing wasn’t a surprise even if it was sudden. His health had been declining for several years and in January of 2014, he was rushed to the hospital because he had trouble breathing. That’s when they discovered a mass they believed to be cancerous. Based off of its perceived growth rate, the doctor gave a timeframe of 1-2 years of life left. But the cancer grew faster than they predicted and not even 3 months later, he was gone.

For many people, the passing of a grandparent is still sad, maybe even tragic, but not necessarily devastating. For my siblings and me, though, our Grandpa was one of the few stable father figures we’ve ever had – and for my older brother and me, he was the only father figure. It would take years to sift through the emotional turmoil I was thrust into in the wake of his passing, and I don’t think I’ll ever be done with the process. It’s like an injury suffered years ago that still requires physical therapy to manage the pain.

But I think I have the cause of the turmoil mostly figured out. For many orphans, there’s the stigma that we all have abandonment issues that cause us to become possessive and controlling over the people we love. Or we totally close ourselves off from the people around us so that we don’t get hurt again. All of this, we’re told as orphans, is because our parents left us and now we have this deeply seated insecurity, and we’ll always struggle with relationships.

Hardly any of this was ever true for me. Evangelicalism compelled me to internalize that narrative; that I’ll only ever find true fulfillment in God as my “real Father.” But the more I tried to believe it, the less emotionally stable I became. For a while I rationalized this as the Spirit “convicting” me and that to find true healing, I just had to have these emotional breakdowns a bunch. Eventually I’d be healed and living a full life dedicated to Jesus.

When you’re in the thick of evangelicalism, it’s not the community that holds it all together. It’s the cognitive dissonance. It’s the compulsion to believe a particular narrative regardless of the evidence in front of you. Starting with the base assumptions of the Bible being perfectly true and everything being within God’s plan, one could confidently reject any contradictory evidence because God does not mislead His children.

Watching my grandfather’s skin turn from a dusty pale to a ghastly yellow as all the air left his body and he became eerily still – this obliterated any cognitive dissonance I may have had. There was no going back to what I had left behind. Because it hadn’t been any abandonment issue that caused this pain; it was an all-encompassing loneliness. It was like I couldn’t breathe because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. Grandpa was supposed to live long enough to see me graduate my Master’s program and maybe even see me get married. He wasn’t supposed to go this soon.

When you don’t have what most of your classmates have in the way of parents, you cherish what you do actually have. But there was a part of me that, because everyone else’s dads were a key part of their adult lives well into their 30s and 40s, believed I’d be able to have that, too. Despite the orphan part. In my mind, because he had been there through pretty much every key event any normal kid might have, I didn’t really think of myself as an orphan. And then he was gone, and I was reminded all over again, and alone all over again – just like that time when I was taken from my birth mother in the back of a cop car and dropped off with some stranger whose kids were bullies.

That was the core of the turmoil. My Grandpa had been my anchor when I was left adrift and his passing, though expected for literal decades, was like the tether snapping apart and I was immediately sucked into an emotional maelstrom. If it hadn’t been for my older brother, I don’t really know where I’d be right now. But I know that if I had tried to stay within evangelicalism, I would never have escaped that maelstrom.

I also know that whatever turmoil I may have suffered in the immediate wake of my Grandpa’s passing was far better than the absolute shitstorm he kept me and my siblings from. All things considered, he gave us a sense of peace and stability, which enabled a relatively normal childhood. We never went hungry, always had clothes (even if they weren’t always new), and we never had to wonder where we’d sleep each night. Through meeting these basic necessities, my Grandpa gave us a chance to dream.

And being able to dream feels like a superpower in a world of nightmares.

Quick thoughts on Deconstruction…

The first time I encountered the concept of deconstruction was in my Intro to Literary Theory class during the summer of 2009. I forget what we were reading, but I remember the class discussion vividly. It was the first time I ever willingly spoke up during class, and that was only because… I was a devout evangelical.

Deconstruction, which is essentially the process of critically analyzing language of meaning (e.g. religion, philosophy, politics, etc.) in order to better understand its assumptions as well as its impact, invaded my evangelical brain as a demonic force. And if I hadn’t spoken up to highlight the obvious contradiction that you can’t say, “There is no meaning,” without assuming meaning to each of those words, I would have failed my church, my faith, and my God.

Or so I thought.

During May of last year, I went with a group of friends to float the river, and I was naively ill-equipped with what could generously be described as a pool floaty. For most of the trip, we were fine. We hit a couple shallow spots and scraped a few rocks, then got stuck once along the bank, but overall, it was an enjoyable ride. But eventually we came to a bend in the river that caused my floaty to capsize and I flipped backward into the river, and because our floaties were tied together closely, I was sort of trapped under the water.

The actual time elapsed with me under the water was probably no more than 20 or 30 seconds. Surprisingly, I never panicked while submerged, but my legs had cramped so severely that I couldn’t kick anymore. Thankfully, one friend found me, pulled me up, and in no time at all, I had my floaty around my waist. Not even 10 minutes later, we were pulling ashore where I could start to warm up. Every muscle in my body was exhausted and in pain. And as I sat within the little sunshine left to the day, I reflected back on the several articles I had read the week before about the dangers of floating or swimming in rivers in the PNW during May, when the river water is cold with freshly melted snow. I was mere moments away from becoming a statistic.

Near death experiences have the tendency to cause people to have existential crises – moments where we either question the way we’ve been living or realize that way of living hasn’t been enjoyable or meaningful in any way. These experiences are a visceral lesson in deconstruction. That Literary Theory class left me just as jarred as when I had emerged from the river, and I started to question what I believed to be true.

It started with inerrancy, a doctrine that states the Bible is literally perfect because God breathed it into existence. My own specific church did not value inerrancy as an essential doctrine and not long after this became public, our church had to close its doors. But once I started critically engaging the text, inerrancy fell apart like a sandcastle at high tide. And while I could have just kept rebuilding it, there was no motivation to do so, because at that point I had already discovered that its importance was fictional. Its foundation was sand.

Leaving evangelicalism altogether still took some time, even after our church shut down. I was still convinced that we were onto something good where we focused on actually loving our neighbors as ourselves and building a viable church alternative to anything evangelical. But convincing yourself that you aren’t evangelical while operating only amongst evangelicals within evangelical culture might be possible, but no one’s going to think you’re doing anything different. Of course, the most logical thing I could do was go to seminary.

I write all this for several reasons, but mostly to keep the term “deconstruction” where it belongs: in a positive light. Recently I watched a TikTok where someone in their evangelical fervor was “declaring war on the deconstruction movement and its founder,” whoever that is. The person who stitched the video highlighted that instead of addressing the valid reasons people are leaving the church, this “war” is being declared on the people who left and the means by which they did so.

But this “war” assumes that everyone who deconstructs from evangelicalism is now an atheist or agnostic, that we’ve conspired with the Devil by renouncing our faith. The reality is that there is no singular outcome for those of us who deconstruct. Some turn to atheism or agnosticism, yes, but many choose to remain within the Christian faith, just not evangelicalism. And some find other faith expressions to be more meaningful for them, based upon how they’ve deconstructed from their evangelical upbringing.

Deconstruction is not a movement; it’s a method of critically engaging what we believe to be true. It allows us to see our realities with more clarity where we’re less reliant on theological or political presuppositions (these can still exist, though, in a white supremacist society). And it enables us to decide for ourselves what we value in life and what kind of communities we want to be a part of. It breaks things down so we can build something better.

That Literary Theory class wound up becoming one of my favorite classes I’d ever taken. It changed the way I read, wrote, and engaged the world around me. For me, deconstruction is not something that’s going to end. It informs the way I do everyday things – eating, sleeping, drinking, working, voting, living. Because once you acknowledge that we make our own meaning, you only have the time and energy to do just that. We don’t have to accept the premise that there’s only one intended purpose for our lives – or that there’s a purpose at all. Deconstructing allows us to knock, to ask, to seek… even if we never find.

And I think that’s what makes it worthwhile. It’s an ever-expanding horizon, compelling me to keep going.

 

Writing For Me…

Late Friday night, I submitted my final essay for the first semester of my MFA program. In the last four or five months, I have written well over 100 pages and 50,000 words, and have read more than a dozen books. And while I still feel as though I didn’t get much of an opportunity to fully invest in school this semester, I’m a little amazed that I was able to accomplish this.

It wasn’t necessarily the volume of material that was amazing to me, though I have never had a semester of school in my life that produced this much material (the closest would have been my Master’s thesis in seminary, but even that took two semesters to get this much material). What was amazing to me, though, was the fact that I still haven’t quite found my sense of self. I do not think I have found my voice.

I started writing in the spring term of my freshman year of college in 2007. I had written plenty before in a red velvet sketch book that I kept as a journal, but that was merely a few events of the day, and updates on the various crushes I had throughout high school. It wasn’t reflective and it certainly wasn’t written as though someone else might read it. But when I had read Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, I had suddenly wanted to share my thoughts. So I opened a Word doc and started punching. Flash forward to today and that journal has amassed more than 1,000,000 words and 800 pages with a 9 point font and half-inch margins.

But Miller’s book had drawn my attention to the way that I thought about things at the time. His words and my thoughts were very similar and I figured that there should be no reason why I couldn’t put those thoughts on paper. So I started writing about my time in college, about how I missed being in Lincoln City where I grew up, and about my faith in God. As time went along, I’d sometimes write notes for Facebook, offering my own insight or application to certain bible verses or passages. And in no time at all, I had started my own blog dedicated to sharing the spiritual journey I was on (a blog that I deleted not too long ago because it just wasn’t me anymore).

Yet in the past few years, I have noticed that the way I wrote back then wasn’t quite as authentic as I had hoped it would be. Sure, I was sharing my own thoughts and striving to be as vulnerable as I could, but overall, I was still writing because I had adopted the persona of a Christian blogger. Miller’s subtitle of “Non-religious thoughts on Christian spirituality” became my genre, but I only shared them with my fellow believers (or with anyone I was trying to convert). In the middle of all of this, though, I was writing for others to get something out of my writing – I wasn’t writing for me to process things.

As I sit here reflecting over the work I’ve done this last semester, and over all the shit I’ve gone through within the last decade, I feel the need to refocus the why of my writing. Is it about fulfilling the identity as a writer or is it about telling my story? Is it about garnering a small following or about connecting with other people who’ve gone through similar stuff? Is it about simply relaying details of the stories I want to tell or is about drawing others in to the emotions I felt as well?

Evangelicalism took the majority of my twenties from me. It abused my love of reading, it made me believe that certain people were my friends, and it took advantage of my writing. With a new year dawning in the middle of a new program, I feel compelled to shift my focus inward – not for the purpose of being self-absorbed, but for finding the wounds that still need healing. For finding the core of who I am apart from such a destructive ideology.

I need to write for me.

I guess this is sort of a New Year’s resolution, but with a focus on my writing and in light of where my work was taking me toward the end of this first semester. I processed stuff that I didn’t even know was there. And in my last creative piece, I think I’ve finally untapped the direction I had been trying to go since the start of the program.

I just have to let go of everything evangelicalism taught me to get there.

Thanks for reading.

Closing the Distance…

Going into this MFA program, I was nervous about a number of things. For one, it’s been three years since I’ve been in school, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle the academic rhythm. But one of the biggest things I was nervous about was the particular style of this program. You see, unlike my seminary experience, this program involves extensive amounts of creativity. I hadn’t allowed myself to be creative in a long time – possibly 7 or 8 years at least. There was a tiny bit of creativity with writing my research papers, but not really. Those essays had to cater to an innumerable amount of rules and format regulations that were often subject to change. And the content was produced by the quality of research I’d conduct. So those weren’t creative pieces; they were, in some respects, simply passing along information I’d uncovered in dusty old books at the George Fox library.

There just didn’t seem to be a lot of crossover between my seminary days and the MFA days that lie ahead. But in the effort of writing a whole new 18-page essay, I had spent the entire weekend before the due date of the 17th doing all sorts of digging through old journals and essays. My topic was a particular aspect about myself, which is both easier and harder to write about, but I needed more details. Some of the moments I wrote about have been forever seared into my brain, but some of them are a blur – happening so fast that I only remember snippets of sentences. And on the second day of digging through stuff I had long buried – both in my closet and in my mind – I had realized that I was still doing the academic rigor I did in seminary.

The difference now is that I’m researching myself.

Again, this is both easier and harder. The easy moments practically pour out of my mind and onto the page as I recount every relevant detail or emotion I felt as the events took place. Like a Bare Naked Ladies song or LOTR quote, these memories slip out almost subconsciously. The only work I really have to do is make sure they’re craftily pieced together.

But the difficult moments are another beast altogether. Sometimes it isn’t about the lack of details remembered; it’s that you remember them all. Like when my step-dad threatened my mom with violence and my older brother and I had to hide under our beds in our shared room, occasionally getting up to check through the cracked door if he had actually done anything yet. Or the day my grandpa came back from the hospital without my grandma, telling me she’d never come home, and how I’d played street hockey by myself every day for a week because I didn’t know how to be at home without my grandma. Even though the details aren’t fuzzy, the pain is still there. And when you’re digging through forgotten journal entries, you don’t really know how difficult it will be to write about it all.

Yet after this project, I’m nervous for a different reason. Researching myself – specifically the moments where I began and continued to process my racial identity (both Indigenous and not, both white and not) – involves, in some ways, exposing many of my deeply-guarded truths. These are things I once vowed never to share with anyone. But as the days go on, these are the things that keep me up at night if I don’t begin to walk through them again. These are things I buried deep within myself with the naïve justification that they were merely the adversities that framed the person I was becoming. Yet that naïveté was mixed with a hopelessly evangelical lens of the world, which only hardened the soil under which these memories were buried.

One of the side effects of evangelicalism is to make you feel completely detached from the world – that nothing in this world has any long-term impact over your life. Because whatever happens in your life is God-ordained – be it neglect, abuse, or what have you. Your eternity is guaranteed in heaven, they say, if you only believe in (their version of) Jesus. Part of unlearning evangelicalism involves recognizing that we are not detached from this earth – that in fact we are no more separated from this world than water is separated from the ocean. And with this revelation comes a sense of awareness – of both self and others. Writing as an evangelical was writing as someone who was unseen – these words I wrote weren’t my words, they were God-breathed because God had inspired me to write them. This is the logic I lived by. But it was a logic that allowed people – often including myself – to never see the real me.

In his book, We Were Eight Years In Power: A Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about his increasing notoriety after publishing his essay “The Case For Reparations”:

The adolescent in me loved the attention and admiration. The senior citizen in me loved the financial security that came from the fame, since it meant the payoff of old debts and the possibility of a respectable retirement. But the part of me that I most identified as “me,” the part that felt the truest, was mortified. I had come to love the invisibility of writing – the safe distance between my face and the work. The distance was closing. (161, emphasis mine)

Though the reason is different, I feel the distance closing. And this is what makes me nervous. Through my evangelical days and even through most of seminary, I had shared in that same invisibility of writing. I could write endlessly about biblical passages that I thought best expressed God’s love for humanity. I could wax poetically about how Jesus undoes so much damage, and how we’re all being healed if we follow him (whatever that means). But I couldn’t talk about certain memories not just because they were buried, but because I didn’t know how to handle them. I didn’t know how to write about them.

And now I’m compelled to tell the stories I never should have buried. Maybe someone reads them and relates to them, maybe they don’t. Nevertheless, I have to write about them.

I have to close that distance.

Writing to unlearn the evangelical voice…

Being back on Facebook has mostly been uneventful, which is exactly what I need. Given the amount of drama that seems to regularly unfold on Twitter, having an online space where that doesn’t happen is nice. And it’s weird that I’m talking about Facebook.

But when I came back, I had to do away with a few things. There are countless evangelical status updates that would bring nothing but embarrassment, if not shame. Yet there were also a ton of Facebook notes that I had written before I launched a blog. And those were cringeworthy.

Like, yuck.

It is such an eerie feeling to be looking into a former version of yourself knowing you are never going back to that world. But at the time I was writing those notes, I could not imagine a different world. I couldn’t imagine being apart from the church communities I was involved with. I couldn’t imagine not reading my bible on a daily basis. And I couldn’t imagine a reality where I’d live my day to day as though I didn’t have that sense of calling – that sense of purpose beyond the hum drum of American society.

Evangelicalism is extremely persuasive when it comes to making its congregants believe a Grand Narrative in which each individual plays a key role. That’s why the Purpose Driven Life is so prominent amongst evangelicals; it feeds that belief that God has a special plan for me. It is in God’s divine providence to fulfill my American dream – because if we dedicate everything we do to God, God will bless us!

This belief was at the heart of my obsession with making U of O’s golf team, my interest in law school, and even my decision to attend seminary – at least some version of God’s providence. And as I talked about last time, I felt adrift when I decided to join my fiancé in pursuing an MFA. It wasn’t a choice based upon some prayer time or the interpretation of a certain verse or passage taken out of context.

It was a decision made out of the desire to write and learn how to do it well.

And to unlearn the evangelical, I-know-the-Truth voice.

It’s the voice behind every one of those Facebook notes I wrote. It’s the voice I’d use when talking to my non-Christian friends about really anything. It’s the voice our pastors, worship leaders, and even baristas would use when talking about “living the gospel message.” It’s the reason anyone would ever ask, “How are things with God?”

I doubt any of the evangelicals I used to know would want to hear my answer now.

But the issue I face isn’t a relationship status; it’s learning where my voice begins and the evangelical voice ends. It’s learning how to talk and write about my truths, rather than some subjective version of “the Truth.” And I won’t find that in the bible. I’ll find it in the hurt I hold, the hurt I’ve caused, and the healing I’ve found as I’ve gotten older.

My voice was in those Facebook notes, but it was hardly distinguishable. I couldn’t cuss, I couldn’t be sarcastic or “snarky,” I couldn’t do so many different things that I regularly do because that wouldn’t be “reflecting Jesus.” You see, evangelicalism is all about breaking down the unique, the individual, the different because anything not adhering to the hegemonic Christ doesn’t “glorify God.” That’s why so many pastors simply regurgitate what other pastors say; they’re too afraid to use their own words.

And this fear, even if it’s only a mild hesitation at first, is what I need to unlearn.

I need to learn to be vulnerable.

I need to learn to express the parts of me I was told to repress.

I need to learn to write in such a way that connects me with my own humanity as well as the humanity of others. Because, unlike what evangelicalism seems to teach, writing isn’t about the individual. It’s a communal process.

And on that note, I turn it to you: are you a former evangelical/Christian? If so, has it been difficult for you to find your voice apart from the group you left? Has writing helped in your deconstruction or have other mediums aided along the way? Would love to hear from you (unless you’re here to leave a mean comment).