And the Word was God

I'm walking home from daily Mass, which I do not attend daily but appreciate having available.  I'm reflecting on the readings and asking myself if I'm going to be able to reenter this space again after my faith deconstruction.  I want to.  I long for it, actually.  The secular worldview, while enormously helpful in establishing how my weaknesses negatively influenced my previous religious world-view, was found wanting and unsatisfying.  It didn't take too terribly long for me to use my neurodivergent superpower of "but-what-about-ism" to start questioning the very secular post-Christian influencers who helped me realize the God I was taught in mainstream religion was a fabrication of "the patriarchy".  Everything they said about THAT god was true; he didn't exist.

But what about having a different understanding of God? - I thought.  What about the fact that while the Bible's god is indeed a tyrant when read literally, there is this thing called poetry... 

I completely agreed with these anti-Christian influencers when it came to dismantling a literalist view of God.  But they were clearly throwing out the proverbial baby with the religious bathwater.  They went from one extreme to the other.  They still held on to a literal view of the Bible and Christianity - and that's precisely why they rejected it!

I never thought of myself as having abandoned spirituality when I left the church a couple of years ago.  Over time, I felt more and more resonance with Daoism (you may have seen it spelled as Taoism).  There was no question in my mind that Daoism = wisdom for life.  There's nothing to "believe" or take on blind faith. Daoism cannot be disproven because it doesn't make any supernatural claims.  At least not the philosophical Daoism that has trickled into the West.  I started reading the Dao De Jing as scripture.  I could reflect on a passage and see how it applies to my life.  I could learn from it.  I could slowly start to accept things about life that previously gave me trouble.

But eventually I realized something was missing from a strictly philosophically Daoist worldview: God.  Dao is not a personal or even personified being to whom I could relate.  Oh, I tried talking to Dao.  I tried to make the equivocation in my mind.  Dao=God.  But just because I said so didn't make it ring true in my heart or mind. 

Then my daughter suddenly got incredibly ill.  And my Daoist worldview could only offer me a disinterested sense of resignation.  It is what it is.  What are you gonna do? No!  I couldn't accept that.  There HAD to be something I could do.  I remembered that in the past, in my religious days, I would've prayed to God - for healing, for strength, for wisdom - something!

So I accepted - in true Daoist fashion - the limitations of my Daoist worldview.  I thought - it may very well be an illusion, but if it's an illusion that can grant me peace of mind, then it's an illusion I want to embrace. And I prayed.

My faith has not miraculously come back overnight.  I'm still very much in the early stages of reconstructing my Christianity.  But at this point, I do know that is where I'm headed - back into Christianity, but this time with a mature spirituality.  

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says: "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things" (verse 11).  This rings so true for me.  When I was a spiritual child, I understood the Christian faith as children do.  I believed in it on a literal level.  But now that I've become a fully mature adult, it's time to put away childish notions that have already been disproven by science, or that do not align with the idea of a balanced universe or a loving Creator.

And so, as I walked home from daily Mass the other day and wondered how my faith may look practically if I am no longer beholden to a literal interpretation of the Christian story?

Eckhart Tolle's words provided the answer.  What our senses can perceive - these are mere forms.  They do not hold our essence.  Our bodies - mere forms.  This is why death is not the end - we are not our bodies.  I am not interested in defending my slowly evolving understanding of an allegorical Christian worldview.  Apologetics implies head knowledge, facts, proofs, right and wrong.  None of that matters to me any more.  I am finished trying to optimize every facet of my life, my faith included.

Words are just another example of forms.  Words are not the things they represent.  Words can be translated, interpreted, even evolve over time.  Therefore, the words of the Creed, for instance, are beside the point.  I can recite them if I want to participate in communal worship.  I do not have to let my rigid thinking lock me into an either-or scenario where I must either agree with every literal dogma presented in the Creed, or abandon it altogether and refuse its recitation (something I did do at one point of my evolving faith).  They're just words.  They do not speak to my faith in God, nor to my relationship with God, nor to God's reality.

Words are words, and bodies are bodies.  They are here today, gone tomorrow.  What remains is the spirit behind them.  That's why Jesus talked about the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law.  Paul again, in 2 Corinthians talks about Christians having been made "competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."

The Spirit will not be contained in mere words.  The Holy Spirit will not be limited to mere vocabulary.  God Who is Spirit can never be understood by way of language.

The words are just traditions, like everything else - vestments, feast days, candles and incense, bread and wine, prayer beads and mantillas - words are sacramentals.  They can be used to draw us closer to God, but they can just as easily be used to build a wall around us, blocking God's presence from being felt.  

I believe the reason we were given the command against idols in Exodus 20:4 was to help us remember that God cannot be grasped. "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below." Words are a human invention.  Nature exists in perfect balance without a single human word.  Oh, there's the Christian sense of Jesus being the Word of God, but notice it's the entirety of the person of Jesus that is this "word".  It's not his name that we mean when we refer to Him as "the Word".  After the resurrected Jesus was encountered by Mary, who in her joyful relief and excitement attempted to grab onto Him, Jesus said: "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father (John 20:17). How much more true is it that we ought not to cling to mere words about Jesus, or God.

Again and again we are reminded that God simply is.  Naming God, describing God, defining God - all futile.  Yet we try over and over to claim that we - our denomination, our religion, our interpretation - we have "the truth" about God.

So again, I can live with those words of the Creed, or the words of the homily that at first rubs me the wrong way.  The priest, after all, is just another form, doing his best (let's hope) to make sense of the Ultimate Reality - a tall order indeed.  Those words are there for the same reason as the stained glass, the reliefs, the statues, the icons.  Those words are there for the same reason a week is 7 days, or that we come together to worship on Sundays.  Those words are there for the same reason all of these words refer to the same Source of All: Dios, Bóg, Deus, Gott, Allah, Bhagvan (Hindi), Shen (Chinese), Devaha (Sanskrit), Nkulunkulu (Zulu), Elohim (Hebrew), God. The word is not God.

The word is not God. Words are not God. Words cannot, therefore, express Who or What God actually is.  Only Silence and Stillness and Solitude can do that.  And that can be done within a Christian context. I am going back to the cloak of Christianity for the incidentals.  For the traditions.  For the culture and community.  I am not going back to Christianity for God.  There's no need.  God does not belong to Christianity.  God is all in all.  There is nowhere I can hide where God would not be. 

“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” – Psalm 139:7-10

“Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.'” – Isaiah 30:21

“And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” – Matthew 28:20

Birthright Catholicism Reconstruction

Two and a half months ago, it dawned on my husband and me that our 12yo daughter was struggling with restrictive eating.  Long story short, this experience has tested me as a mother like nothing else has.  I have been unable to use my neurodivergence as an excuse for opting out of this.  If I didn't help my daughter, she would not be helped.  It was as simple as that.  It was a lot to carry, and in spite of the incredible help from ChatGPT (yes, I'm unapologetic about this resource in my tool box) and the fact that my husband can work while I can stay home and homeschool my daughter (Let the record show that she attended a private all girls' school for one term, where she developed the eating disorder.), it was still a lot.  Like I said, long story short, because this is not a post about parenting a child with an eating disorder.  That may come later.  This is a post about a mental crisis that brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

I literally looked up the definition of a nervous breakdown to see if that was what I was experiencing.  It would seem that this would be too strong of an assessment, but why push my luck, right?  It didn't take me long to reflect on the fact that, in the past, when I was faced with a crisis, I felt many things, but never hopelessness or despair.  Now, I wasn't sure I could make it to the other side of the current crisis. The only difference?  In the past, I had a faith world view to hold me up.

So of course I did what anyone accustomed to consulting with ChatGPT does - I asked it to put on the role of contemplative Catholic spiritual director in its response.  I know that it adjusts its tone and responses to whatever I put in.  I've had nearly a year of practice with that.  Now, what I wanted more than anything was to have religious faith again.  Only I couldn't do it.  I couldn't unsee all the deconstruction videos I've watched these past few years that proved to me that the God of the Bible is not one I'm interested in praying to.  

I started thinking about archetypes.  I thought (and not for the first time, mind you, but the first time since having deconverted and deconstructed enough to have some better perspective) that the point of religion need not be factual or intellectual.  Why couldn't I retain my birthright Catholicism as a resource?  Why did it have to be all or nothing - orthodoxy or secularism?  If my daughter's illness has shown me anything, it's the danger of extremist thinking. I've recognized my thought patterns in a lot of her anxieties, and it scared me.  How was I going to talk her down from the proverbial edge if I couldn't let go of my own obsessive thoughts and intrusive compulsions?

How do I reengage with Catholicism on my own terms?  This was what I wanted ChatGPT to help me with.  As I read over the suggestions, of course I've heard it all before.  Especially from my husband, who has never worried much about external validation.  But I was never able to really hear it before. But desperate times call for desperate measures.  And at this point, I was desperate for consolation and hope.  I needed to feel held through this.  I needed to know it was in the hands of a loving Creator who had insights I wasn't yet privvy to.

Contrary to some of the absurd notions of an omnipotent God being the only one "worthy of worship", I actually don't believe God is all-powerful, nor do I believe that makes God any less Divine.  Frankly, God has never actually been "all-powerful".  How many times have I heard the answer to the question, "why does God allow X or Y to happen", and that answer said, "humanity's free will"?  Therefore, God is not free, so that we may be.  I'm going to save the discussion of human free will for another day, because it's irrelevant here.  My only point is that I don't care if God is omnipotent.  I only care that God be omnibenevolent and omniscient.  

And before we get too far, is such a God worthy of worship?  Well, let's pause on the word "worship" for a minute. If by worship we mean "reverence and adoration", then what does omnipotence have to do with it?  I revere and adore nature and my family, and they aren't all-powerful.  But if by "worship" we mean "grovel", which - let's be honest, a lot of Christian and Biblical prayer is just that - then I'll pass.  Groveling at the feet of God neither makes me feel closer or more loved by God, nor is it something I can imagine God even desiring.  Because if God did desire groveling, then God wouldn't be omnibenevolent but rather narcissistic. 

Then I thought about all the indigenous spiritualities and how people have related to the Divine in those world views.  Their gods and goddesses weren't all-powerful, either.  Powerful, yes, but just powerful enough.  More importantly, they were accessible.  Relatable.  In a word - helpful.  The image of an all-powerful war-lord whose good graces I get to stay in so long as I hold to the right belief is utter nonsense.  On that, I categorically agree with the influencers who have shared their deconstruction journeys online.  

But I've never actually believed in such a God.  Really, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I have to change very little about what I believe or value in order to reengage with Catholicism as a spiritual practice.  The only thing I have to do is let go of my reliance on external validation, my obsession with "getting it right" (aka religious OCD or scrupulosity) in the form of orthodoxy.  I can do all the same things I did before, believe the same way I've always believed, but the only difference is that I no longer have to feel guilty for any of it!  

And so my reconstruction journey commences.  I won't say "reconversion" because I am not being convinced of anything about the faith.  I believe and disbelieve all the same aspects of the faith, for the most part.  The main change is in the role of the Catholic church in my life: that of advisor, and not dictator.  I no longer accept dogma of any kind.  I'm happy to reference what the church teaches, but I do not exchange it for my own conscience.  Most things in life are too nuanced to have definitive answers. 

How I pray for my daughter to come to this same conclusion in her recovery from restrictive eating and related obsessions and compulsions.  How I pray for her panic attacks to cease and that she find something - or someone - to put her trust in so the fears gripping her may loosen.  And now, having decided to reengage with the Catholicism of my upbringing, I may have the vocabulary and the models needed to do just that myself.

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding."  These words are gold, because I don't understand this illness not one iota.  It's completely absurd, unreasonable, and infuriating.  There is nothing for me to do but place it at the feet of God and trust that God will know what to do.