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.

 

Redefining “vulnerability”…

What does it actually mean to be real?

As I wrote yesterday, my MFA project demands more from me than what I might typically write. But this morning I was reminded of my old blog, Cushman’s Chronicles, wherein I’d write about any number of my “struggles”; beliefs, doubts, not giving in to the ways of the world, etc. It wouldn’t happen often, but with a few posts, I was thanked by fellow church members for “being so vulnerable.”

This feels different now than it did then. In my evangelical days, I thought that by being open about the things that caused me severe pain put me on the path toward healing – that by “placing it in God’s hands,” I’d eventually have peace about those things. So I’d “share my testimony” almost any chance I got, but mostly in my blogs because I’m introverted like that.

What I realize now, though, is that more often than not, “sharing my testimony” meant re-living the pain or trauma. So instead of finding any type of peace or healing, I was further harming myself by having those painful memories directly attached to my “walk with God.” Rather than finding meaning in what it meant to pursue – to enact, to create – God’s kingdom here on earth and in my immediate environments, I only felt meaning in being an orphan and fatherless. Being vulnerable meant rehashing this pain over and over and over again, thinking that I’d eventually find healing.

There was no restriction in what could be shared and the more traumatic details you had, the more vulnerable and “real” you became. This was treated as a good thing – that we were all drawing closer to God because we were all totally open about the things we had experienced. But not only was this over-sharing, and not only did this sense of vulnerability expose those of us on the margins to be further marginalized (reinforced stereotypes about children of color having absent dads, which only fed the stereotype of both men of color and orphans having anger issues), it was also manipulative. It gave the reward of being seen as a “true believer” for sharing my pain, which then meant if I wasn’t sharing that pain, I wasn’t “being real” anymore and thus I was drifting, or “flirting with the slippery slope,” as someone once told me.

On the outside of these evangelical contexts, though, I now know that vulnerability should never require someone to relive their trauma. And it should never be coerced out of you. Your vulnerability is something that you give to others – you have the agency with what you share, how much you share, with whom, and when. This is not just true for evangelical settings, but for really all settings – because capitalism always exploits the vulnerable.

In answering the question, “What does it actually mean to be real?” I think it’s more about connecting with others at a human level than about sharing “juicy” details. I think it’s more about bringing others into the journey you’re on than about reciting the things you’ve survived. All of that is important, but it isn’t the full story. And I think whatever level of vulnerability you wish to enter into should be about sharing where you’re going, not just where you’ve been.

What are your thoughts about vulnerability? What does being real mean to you?

As always, thanks for reading.

Back to Blogging: My hopes for this space in 2021…

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. I’m not really writing in any other place besides my creative work for my MFA program and occasionally for my journal, but I honestly miss this. I miss processing things in a semi-public forum where I wouldn’t necessarily feel judged for saying or asking the wrong thing. Evangelicalism is definitely to blame for that feeling.

But even beyond what evangelicalism’s influence was, I still found ways to write in a blogging space and have conversations that I was less likely to have in person (especially in church settings). And now with the pandemic severely limiting in-person interactions, it seems that this would have been the primary place where I’d seek to have discussions – really of any kind. But things were stressful for me even before the pandemic began and as 2020 came to a close, my fiancé and I went through some of the worst situations we’ve ever been through.

I do *not* want to write about 2020, though. If my last post is any indication, there was quite a bit that happened that I’ll eventually want to process, but right now I think I’d be inclined to re-live it. And I don’t have the energy for that.

But maybe it is time to take stock of what I want to blog about in 2021 and how I’m utilizing this space. Maybe it’s time to put in the work toward the non-MFA creative things I want to do (like drawing a comic series as part of a Patreon or start a YouTube channel talking about post-evangelical life). And maybe it’s time I take my writing more seriously and submit something to be published for once.

What I know from my own tendencies is that I get excited about an idea, maybe pursue it for a few days or weeks, then wind up sputtering out. I don’t want to do that anymore, and I think one thing that could help change that is if I commit, as I’m sure I’ve talked about elsewhere, to the process of creating things rather than the demand of having something polished. This would allow me to write or draw with a little less pressure, and allow me to be more open to discussions and feedback from other creators.

What I have in mind for this space, though, is aimed toward deconstructing what evangelicalism taught me as well as philosophizing about what to do with the good things leftover. One way that I’d like to try this is to resurrect a series I was a part of during my early seminary days called “Wednesdays with Wright.” It comes from a biblio-blog that was really formative for me in my journey out of evangelicalism and through seminary called Near Emmaus. This specific series engaged with the work of N.T. Wright, a prominent and influential scholar on the works of Paul specifically, and the Christian Testament[1] more broadly.

What I hope to do, though, is less about engaging Wright’s work specifically and more about utilizing his work as a means of processing what evangelicalism taught me.[2] It’ll be a way through which I can re-engage with the biblical texts as someone who is no longer committed to a specific religious agenda, but still has a seminary degree that’s mostly collecting dust. But it’ll also be a space to help others process what they – maybe even you? – experienced.

There are other ideas for this blog space floating around in my mind, but none of them are really all that clear yet. I have a few posts about politics and sports in the works, but those will likely be one-off posts and at random. What I intend for this Wright series (still undecided on a series title), though, is to post something every Sunday. Sometimes it might be some fully-synthesized thoughts or sometimes just a passage with a few notes. I’m leaving it open-ended for now.

I certainly aim to write also about my MFA experience in a similar way that I used to about seminary (those posts were for a blog that I wound up deleting, but I had the idea a while ago to bring them back and comment on them with updated perspectives – we’ll see). Again, some of what I’ve experienced is tied up with what my fiancé experienced as she is also in the program. Those things will take some time to unpack and wade through, but there have been many constructive things that I hope to write about.

But as I’m still forming a plan for this blog and this year, I’m curious to know what you are interested in reading from me? I know some readers arrive here from Twitter, some from Facebook, and even fewer from subscribing to this blog, but I want this to be a space for discussions, too. Much of what other social media platforms include is, at the very least, noisy – comment wars and Twitter ratios. I want a break and to break from that. So what would you like to read or discuss here?

Stay safe, wear a mask (it goes over your nose), sanitize everything you buy, and thank you for reading.

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[1] I prefer to refer to the “New Testament” as the Christian Testament and the “Old Testament” as the Hebrew Bible because this places the emphasis on the specific claims each religion is making with their respective sacred texts. This also de-centers Christianity so that Judaism can stand on its own as a viable religion not subject to Christianity’s exclusive narrative. And no, the Hebrew Bible is not the same exact thing as the Old Testament. The HB is the Jewish text; the OT is the Christian interpretation of the Jewish text. Not calling it the OT again allows for Judaism to be understood apart from Christianity’s influence.

[2] N.T. Wright is certainly *not* an evangelical, but he is popular among evangelicals.