Birth requires death
Photo by Alex Hockett on Unsplash
“Am I really this stupid?” I wondered as I put down the book I was reading. For the past several years, I’ve made continuous efforts to grow as a person. I’ve been devouring books and podcasts, reflecting, meditating, and all the other “good stuff,” and yet I still couldn’t get what this author was trying to say. I could feel in my gut that what he was saying was very important, and I did know what all the individual words meant, but the concepts themselves were somehow beyond me!
I read a portion of the page to my husband, hoping he could explain it to me. He’s usually pretty smart with stuff like this, after all. But nope, he couldn’t grasp it either. Like me, he didn’t have any issue with the words. It was the concept that was so abstract that made it challenging for us. I was crushed. Despite working at growing as a person for a long time, not understanding this made me felt like a small baby on the journey to maturity. I confessed this to my husband, and he responded in the most beautiful way I could imagine. He said, “At least you’ve been born. There are many people who never are.”
“At least you’ve been born. A lot of people are never born into this world, and they spend their whole lives in darkness, without even knowing. ”
I used to consider myself a Christian — and not just the Christmas and Easter church-going type. I believed my relationship with Jesus was the most important relationship I would ever have. To me, my faith was so important that it’s what started to define me as a person. It gave me meaning and purpose. It provided me with the structure on how to live a good life. It became so important to me that I didn’t actually know where it stopped and I started. But then doubts began creeping in and the pieces of my “life puzzle” started not fitting together as cleanly as they once had.
If the shapes don’t fit then it’s just a mess, not a nicely solved puzzle. Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash
These doubts marked the beginning of a new phase in my life. A phase that for a long time I called my “deconstruction phase.” It became a long-going struggle filled with grief, anger, and pain. I remember fighting hard to keep my foundational beliefs and identity from crumbling apart into nothing. I pushed aside any doubts that I had, burying my head in the sand for fear of what was coming. Despite the great amount of pain this caused me, I was convinced I would experience more pain if I faced the reality that I no longer knew who I was, what I believed, or what purpose I had on this earth. With that gone, would I even want to be alive? I had my doubts.
In the end, it was a losing battle for me. I had spent a lifetime trying to fill a container that could tell me who I was, only to have it slide through my fingers. So I tried harder to hold it together, but the harder I tried, the faster it slid away into nothingness. I felt as if I was just a void, taking up space, using up oxygen with no real purpose, value, or significance. I felt numb to the world around me. Something of great value died in me, as well as the most important relationship in my life. When this happened, I thought my life was over, and yet my body just kept breathing.
For a long time, I held on to my Christian faith, even after I realized it was drowning me. Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash
For a long time, I thought I had lost my faith in the abyss of my existential crisis. If someone had told me that this is normal — even healthy — I wouldn’t have believed them. I had been taught my whole life that once you become a Christian the only thing you have to do is learn and grow so you can be more like Jesus. So when I started losing what I had gained instead of adding more to my “toolbox of Christianity,” I believed I was moving in the wrong direction, and it turns out I wasn’t the only one. I soon discovered that the church wasn’t exactly a fan of my new direction either.
Many of the Christians that I still knew or talked to tried converting me back to their belief system. But when I admitted to them that it wasn’t working for me anymore, some began avoiding me. Others just tried harder. It got to the point where they told me the things that I had actually experienced never actually happened because it didn’t line up with their belief system. I realize now that my doubts probably shook their foundations, and if they could “fix” me, then their foundations could continue to stand firm. The reality is they were probably just scared deep down by the same things that were scaring me. But at the time, it hurt. It made me feel like I was all alone. That Jesus hated me because I didn’t know if I believed in him. That I didn’t have a place in my community. My family. That the people I used to have around me were now crushing me, and that when everything was falling apart, they just blamed me for it. I had hoped that they would still love and accept me despite everything, but the truth was, they only loved the image of themselves that they saw in me. Once I lost that, I could no longer be a part of the community. My people had become an unsafe place for me.
The whole experience of losing myself, the most foundational relationship in my life, and my community all at once forced me to begin looking for something more — and it was here that I started to be “born” again into a bigger life than before. It was one of the most difficult experiences of my life — at the time, I wouldn’t have wished it upon my worst enemy. But the more I dug into spirituality, the more convinced I became that this loss of faith was a natural and healthy thing. I discovered that like many forms of growth, there are different stages to spiritual growth (six, actually, according to Fowler’s Stages of Faith). The church had taught me what they believed the last stage was, but I was quickly discovering that they were wrong. It’s true that it’s typically the last stage for many people who remain in the church, but in reality, there are actually two stages that come after this. Unfortunately, few people in religions make it this far — for a couple of reasons.
The first reason is that it’s very difficult to teach someone to move to a spiritual place that you are not at. Basically, you can’t teach what you don’t know, which leads to a catch-22 in spiritual communities that don’t have (or have lost) their folks who have found their way to these stages. The second reason is that the way many churches are set up, leaders are often prevented from even looking into the last two stages, because to move beyond the first four stages you literally have to move beyond them. And no one gets there without a little push, which comes in the form of life getting too complex for the “old ways” to keep working for you. In other words, everything that you ever knew or were told has to fall apart, die, and somehow needs to get put back together again as you struggle through that loss. Which in a church setting often means you’re a lost sheep and going to hell. In other words, someone who needs to be “brought back” from that journey, not helped along it.
When the candle of certainty burns out we are finally able to adjust to the dark and see with new eyes. Photo by Eyasu Etsub on Unsplash
Many people who make it this far end up leaving religions behind altogether because they find that there isn’t a place for them there. When I found myself in this stage, I left my church because it was no longer a spiritually or psychologically safe place for me. At first, I was really angry with them, but now I actually feel bad for them because I’ve discovered that there is so much more to spirituality than religion can offer, but they aren’t yet able to see that. Real spirituality is more about actually learning how to see than anything else. It’s about letting go of the ego so you can truly see the world for who and what it is. I believe you can’t embrace love as a lifestyle if you can’t actually see the person you are trying to love. It’s an incredibly beautiful experience to be free to love yourself and have the ability to love and accept others as they are.
Photo by Sarah Ardin on Unsplash
Most of the time, becoming more is an incremental thing, like a snake shedding its skin as it outgrows it. As we grow, we take the foundations that we’ve built and extend them out. But sometimes, what you’re holding onto just doesn’t fit with the place you need to go. This is what I learned the hard, painful way when I discovered that I couldn’t keep moving forward while maintaining a grip on everything I’d built up for myself. Having to let that go and accept the death I felt at its loss was one of the most painful experiences of my life. At least I’ve been born, though — born into a beautiful new way of being. And as I realize this, I can see how sometimes death isn’t the end of something, but the beginning of something new. The challenge for me now — for all of us — is to learn to see the life that lies beyond our deaths, and let that beauty overcome our fear. Only then can we let go of the security of the womb and be born into what waits for us beyond ourselves.