An Invitation to Reconstruction

Deconstruction. With that word, some of you may have rolled your eyes and stopped reading. Some of you may have endured painful flashbacks or a battle you retreated from long ago. But spiritual deconstruction, or unlearning the religion that we’ve been handed, is real, and it has been happening across the cultural landscape for quite a while now.

Our culture is currently plunging headlong into a post-Christian landscape, and deconstruction is like the tsunami that is washing over that landscape whether we like it or not. The “nones,” or the group of people who have never or no longer see themselves as having any faith at all, are still growing, especially in the West.

Some of us, though at one time we felt like we were drowning, have learned to swim through the tsunami of deconstruction, navigate it, and have found solid ground again (though it most certainly looks different from the places we thought we were standing before). Those are the folks that have deconstructed toward the reconstruction of something better – something more true, more real, more genuine.

And some have deconstructed until there are only ruins. Or, like the Grinch taking even the tacks used to hang the stockings and leaving only a crumb that was too small for a mouse - there is nothing left of their faith.

At the end of the day, deconstruction is about questions. Think about it. If you’re reading this and believe that you have no questions about your faith or lack thereof…well, to put it bluntly, yes, you do. You may not be in a season of deconstruction, or post-deconstruction, but we all carry big questions, all the time – whether we spend much time thinking about them or not.

But in this moment in history, many, many people are doing just that: thinking about the big questions.

So, there is something about our big questions that we must choose the wisdom to see: our biggest and deepest questions are actually mirrors to our own hearts.

I experienced my own deeply painful and frustrating season of deconstruction, which followed an excruciating season of clinical depression and anxiety. Like anyone who suffers and has any idea of who God might be, I began to question God regarding the disparities I believed there were between my suffering and my construct of God.

My experience of suffering and my ideas about God’s nature seemed to be at odds. Perhaps you can relate, or could at one time.

But do you know what I was really asking through my deconstruction? Do you know what I was really feeling? I can look back now and see that I was really saying, “God, I have been to the deepest place of pain that I have ever experienced. Where were you? Why were you silent? What is still true about you? These were the questions behind the questions.

I was afraid to engage these questions, because I felt like I had to know the answers in order to grow in my relationship with God. What I was failing to see was that approaching God with my fear-based demands was the true obstacle to my relationship with him.

Pontius Pilate once asked Jesus, “What is truth?” But like Pilate, we miss the Truth when it is all we seek. Let me put it this way: we miss the truth when the questions become our masters and the answers become our idols. Because truth is so much more than facts to be understood. Truth is a Person to be known – a grace to be experienced. 

The death of these idols can feel like the death of parts of who we are. Each idol is connected with strong roots to our ego. Our egos have to know. They must control and categorize to make us feel safe. But faith, authentic faith, means not having to know. The release from these lesser pursuits frees us from our own constructs, which in turn (ironically) gets us to some of the answers we sought all along. It can also give us the wisdom to release the questions that mattered less. We are more able to sit with the tension of holding questions without being…tense.

The death of our idols of understanding a paint-by-number God can be so painful. But in the disillusionment of that death, a newer, truer version of God is born. A God who can be known by experience – not just by our own understanding.

When our fragile God-construct jar is shattered, His true nature begins to run rampant and wild and free all over our minds and our hearts. It is in that space that we engage God, possibly for the first time, in a truly open space. We surrender to the sacred dance in the places between questions and answers, between certainties and doubts.

I wrote a lot during my season of painful questioning, and here is one of the poems from that time:

untether me

from this station

from systemic constructs

of comforts and certainties

of convention and cruel devotion

of approved idols and sanctioned exclusion

and I will drift into oblivion

into the black void

and let me find you

not in clenched fist claims

not in a book of magic

but in the the terror of liberty

the fidelity of betrayal 

let me find you

wherever

whoever

you Are 

The terror of liberty. I hope you find yourself there sometime. Because if we can own our questions…if we can surrender our ego and its demands…if we can allow our post-enlightenment, post-modern, post-Christian minds to become reawakened to the enchanted reality of being the created, beloved creatures of Love Himself…then we may just find ourselves closer than we’ve ever been to the answers we were really after all along.

So, to the “nones” and the Pharisees, to the sinners and saints, to the deconstructed and the doubtful: there is a third way. It is the Way of grace. And the Way leads to Love.

Author: Benjamin NeSmith

Benjamin NeSmith has spent his life working with people. He put his social science education degree to use teaching students of all ages, including those with special needs, for over a decade. He spent years as a recording and performing musician and is now a Certified Professional Coach and Pastor at Element Church Tampa. Benjamin enjoys family time, hiking, interior design, and creating meaningful liturgical experiences for others.