Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost: The Deconstruction Movement Part 1
“I can’t stand your religious meetings.
I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions.
I want nothing to do with your religion projects, your pretentious slogans and goals. I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes, your public relations and image making. I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music. When was the last time that you sang to me?
Do you know what I want?
I want Justice - oceans of it.
I want Fairness - rivers of it.
That’s what I want.
That’s all I want.”
From the years 2011 - 2019, I trained students for Christian ministry at a Seminary. In almost all my classrooms, at the start of Semester, in order to stimulate dialogue I would lie to my students and reassure them that ‘there is no such thing as a stupid question.’
Of course there are stupid questions. Are you kidding me?
Perhaps stupid is too harsh. Perhaps what we are searching for here is a sliding scale situation where we can sort questions from being completely pointless, to highly constructive. That might be better.
When I was growing up in church, at question time in bible study at youth group, when the awkward silence would fall, someone would inevitably ask (as a joke) ‘how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?’ This is an excellent example of a stupid question. Sure, we can debate it, but what is the point? There are a few questions that have been bandied around in church-land for as long as I can remember which remind me of the angel and the pin question. One of the most common is the question that goes something like “why does God allow pain and suffering?” To be fair, this isn’t exactly a stupid question. It is however, a one-way ticket to pointless debate. This question has provoked so much beard-stroking and glasses-polishing, ivory-tower academic rumination, that it has sparked its own little intellectual field, called ‘theodicy’. I’m not going to get into theodicy here, because its boring. See also: apologetics. The very last thing that Divine needs is for humans to defend Her. Every time a theodicy / apologetics debate begins, 5 angels facepalm and a million more groan “whyyyyyy?” In my Seminary days, whenever either of these topics would get brought up, my brain would flood with the exact right neurotransmitters required to put me into a nap-coma until it was over.
Seriously though, a much more interesting and productive question to ask might be, “Since there is suffering in the world, how can I respond as someone who believes that there is a Loving Goodness holding this whole shit-show together, present and available in this very moment and ready to co-create something better with me?” That question is inestimably more answerable, and also more useful.
The question I want to tackle in this piece is similar. It has been asked in a way which is getting old and stale and a bit pointless. But if we come at it from a slightly different angle all sorts of possibilities begin to break open.
The question plaguing so many pastors in churches all over the western world right now is “how can we prevent our people from deconstructing and leaving the church?’
This question reveals a central concern with business-continuity for churches, and de-centres the lived experience of the deconstructing ones. For this reason, its only ever going to yield reaction-formation type answers which remain rooted in capitalism and utilitarianism, which are woefully inadequate tools with which to approach soul-work.
A much better way to ask this question would be, “Since so many of our people are deconstructing, how can we hold intelligent space for them to do that, and love them well in the midst of it?”
Deconstructing is a bit like suffering. It’s always been here, its always going to be here.
And a bit like suffering, it requires high EQ and a firm grasp on how to facilitate supportive and open dialogue, AND a leader who has their ego firmly in check, in order to respond to it well.
It’s not often that I dedicate a post, but I am writing this specifically for those of you beautiful souls who have been called to the fearsome task of shepherding, preaching, teaching, pastoring and leading in faith communities. Go you. You are heroes. Your work matters, you matter, what you are doing is important and generative and life-giving and life-saving. You are front-line people for the lost, the hurting, the broken and the lonely.
So many of my nearest and dearest are people with their shoulders to this particular plow, and I respect, admire and love them. I have the privilege of having a slightly different perspective on things than they do these days, so I thought I would stop ranting about this stuff in my private chat threads with my mates and finally put this out there, in case its useful to any of you. You can send this to your pastor if you want, I promise I won’t use any f-bombs in it.
From where I am sitting (and I know, I know, I know, I don’t have to worry about budgets and building upkeep and staff retention), but I gotta tell you, this deconstruction thing looks like the most exciting thing to happen to the church in a long time. It might look like a mass-exodus from where you are sitting, but to me, it looks like a mass-awakening, a revival. It looks like those words from the prophet Amos, the quote I started this piece with, are resonating in the hearts of millions of people all over the globe. When I see prophetic indignation and power start to ripple out across the world and wake people up to the absolute centrality of justice and mercy and stop wondering when it is coming, and realise that we are the ones who must bring it, I get really excited. These people who are getting up and speaking out, asking hard questions, demanding accountability, insisting on the full inclusion of every last single soul on the planet at their table, seeking financial transparency and bringing their leadership up on charges of fraud, bullying, harassment or abuse, are listening deeply to the voice of God. They are not bringing ‘spiritual attack’ or ‘sowing division’ or manifesting ‘unteachable spirits’ or any other such nonsense. They are embodying the prophetic voice of Divine, looking for justice and mercy and walking out of places where ego-trips, capitalism, fear-mongering and power-games have corrupted to the core.
There is, to be sure, a wholesale dissatisfaction with the status quo in church land, and I will say it again, this is a good thing.
The church has been fostering unholy soul-ties to the world of empire since the second century, when the grandfather of Catholic theology, Irenaeus insisted that the Roman (Catholic) church was the only trusted source for salvific sacrament and ritual. In reaction to both the geo-political instability in the region at the time and the persecution of Christians as well as the propagation of gnostic sects purporting to have secret knowledge of oral tradition traced back to Jesus, he wanted to stabilise and unify The Church, bringing it under the powerful protection of the Empire. To do this, he brought to the tumultuous and contested arena the powerful trifecta that the church is still bound by: the authority of the scriptures, church tradition and the priesthood as apostolic succession. This kind of easily-controlled mechanism for delivering religion to the masses suited both the early clergymen and the empire. And so the deal was struck. The un-holy marriage between church and state was consummated and we are STILL dealing with the karma from this, by which I mean - spiritual cause and effect.
The reason I am going back to Irenaeus, is that he is the one who essentially decided what was ‘orthodoxy’ and what was ‘heresy’. And his ideas about that have formed the foundation and much of the architecture of modern theological thought. As I have read and researched, my observation about this (somewhat arbitrary) line in the sand drawn by an ancient, celibate, male Bishop is that anything we would now recognise as sacred feminine wisdom was relegated to the realm of ‘heresy’, (and later ‘witchcraft’) whereas the sacred masculine wisdom was severed from its natural counterpart (effectively neutering it, but that is a story for another day), and elevated as orthodoxy. Once the radical, marginal and mysterious Christological narrative became split from its feminine wisdom tradition, centralised, government approved, controlled and mass-produced for easy consumption, it lost something of its essential power and beauty. Because Divine is Divine and always finds a way, threads of possibility and hope and healing and powerful encounter have always been available inside the construct of “The Church Proper”, largely helped along by mysticism, eco-feminism and non-violent theologies. But 21st century free-thinking, global citizens living in a digital era of information saturation are no longer content with the old ‘scripture, tradition and priestly power’ type model for spirituality. Our generation is looking instead, for intuitively-supported, coherent, flourishing-life type spirituality. The kind that is good news for everyone, not just the rich, the powerful and the masculine.
This is why deconstruction is good news for the world. As more and more excellent public theology is being practiced helping people to read the Bible in more intelligent and discerning ways, people are learning that their holy text is perhaps not as ‘clear’ as they may have once been lead to believe. As more and more people are being excluded from faith communities because their lives don’t mirror what the church tradition has always taught, those traditions are being critiqued and dismissed as heteronormative, patriarchal, homophobic and misogynistic. As more and more priests and pastors are being called up on charges of spiritual, sexual, financial and psychological abuse, exactly no-one (except the uber religious, the political right and the fundies of all stripes) trusts the authority of the apostolic succession anymore.
People are deconstructing because they are paying attention. Not because the church is being persecuted by Satan and his minions. The church is becoming less and less relevant to an increasingly shrinking constituent base. This is bad news for Church Business. But good news for the world. If the church is ready to put its faith in its own central mandate, maybe it can start to wonder if salt and light are best released from the sanctuary and scattered to the four winds? Perhaps it can begin to notice that the upside down kingdom of God preached by Jesus really is here and now and is good news for the poor, the broken, the lost and the lonely? Perhaps it can stop speaking so loudly and begin to listen, and hear the star-music resonating with the wisdom that Divine is much bigger, more powerful and infinite than they have been taught, and is being offered directly to humanity now, bypassing the priesthood and the ecclesiastic hoops altogether?
I grew up in and loved the church, and as I said, I love it still. But I cannot bring myself to go anymore. Even to the ones here where I live which I know are doing brilliant and beautiful stuff. And there are many. Sometimes I hope God will let me go back. Sometimes I’m glad that door got closed behind me. I do know that I feel l stand in the void still, caring about what happens to the church, unsure of perhaps what my role might be now that I’ve made the choices I’ve made, walked the roads I’ve walked and experienced things that have changed me forever….
I have a confession to make to you.
I did ask to be released. To walk away from the Christian framework altogether and withdraw all my energy from it. Only because I’ve got so many things on the go these days, that I thought perhaps it would be good to just pull the pin and go full-hermit. I loved being gone from the internet, from social media, from my writing. I am so deeply nourished and supported in my own spiritual practice, that selfishly, I just wanted to turtle in and stay there quietly. I asked permission to fold this website in on itself and leave it behind. To stop writing. Most of the people who read this are Christians, or were recently Christians, and I sometimes wonder if I have journeyed so deep into mystery and direct connection so as to appear nonsensical to people still inside the church…My friends assure me that this is, in fact, the case. And they laugh and get the popcorn out and sit back and watch eagerly any time I start engaging with Christian content online. I am not interested in triggering people, as much as I don’t care whether the masses think I have lost my way or not. From their perspective, I have certainly lost my way. From my own, I am deeply inside of the mystery of The Way and that’s exactly how I like it.
On the day I sat with this question, in my daily meditation, I was asking the Spirit to show me how this whole thing works. Irenaeus, the Church fathers, the crumbling of the patriarchy, the witness of scripture, the spiritual awakening, the mass exodus of deconstruction. My mind was searching for connecting threads, trying to make sense of a picture so much more complex than I am capable of comprehending, trying to understand what the way forward might look like.
As I sat in a pool of sunshine on my carpeted bedroom floor and waited, the Spirit took me into a vision-quest. I used to experience this as an outer-body experience, but I have learned the discipline necessary to make my consciousness pliable enough so that this doesn’t feel like being hijacked anymore it feels like going on a trip into the quantum field, and like I can stop and pause and move and interact with the environment, not like I used to. I used to be just like a stunned mullet standing there slack-jawed until it was over. Since I was 12 I have been learning how to operate in and out of this space, how to wilfully move into it, and how to remain in conscious engagement with it so I can remember it later. I’ve written a bit about this before, but mostly I don’t like talking about it because it makes me sound a bit kookoo, or like I’m tryna be some wannabe pentie hype-girl. I assure you neither of these things are the case. But I also believe there are times where it is important that I share some of these visions, I have about 3 a week on average. This is the one that was given to me as information best shared publicly, for the benefit of those who will read it and be nourished by it. And so here we go:
We arrive in the air over a giant castle, grey stone nestled into bright green grass on a sunny, warm spring day. I can hear bees buzzing and hear a brook. The sounds of village life - animals, people talking, the distant clanging of lunch bells and smithy irons and the smell of cooking smoke and fresh fields. Think Hogwarts on steroids. Or Winterfell. This castle sprawls over huge grounds. There are stables and kitchens and laundries and staff accommodation, groundskeepers workshops, smithies and animal pens. As we began to zoom in, I see there are many different entrances leading into the interior of the castle. Fancy stone archways, stout wooden doors, hidden back cellar entries, gates of wrought iron, kitchen gates, side chapel entrances and many many more. At each doorway, is standing a group of people. All are speaking in different languages, wearing different dress, working with different customs. Some are burning incense or larger fires, others are chanting, still others wailing. Many are meditating or singing quietly. All of them, I realised, are worshipping. I found a doorway where I recognised some people. “Those are my people, get me in closer.” We zoom right in, and now I’m standing in their midst, but they can’t see me. They are playing guitars and drums and singing songs I know and swaying, their eyes shut tight, their hands raised in loving adoration. It was a church service, the kind I used to go to, and sometimes preach at. “What is happening here?” I ask the Spirit. What was communicated to me next changed the way I see this forever.
“Each of these people groups have found the Castle of Divine.” Said the Spirit. (I interrupt, ‘ahhh! Like Teresa of Avila’s vision, this is her castle! I’ve read about this!” Awkward pause as I realise I’ve literally interrupted God. More pause while the Spirit waits for me to catch up with the fact that of course I read that ages ago so that my brain could have the mental construct for the vision. Next I’m realising too many tabs are open in my mind and I return, somewhat abashed and apologetic, ‘sorry, sorry’ from the distraction of being neurodiverse whilst on a spiritual vision-quest.) “The Castle is much bigger than any of them know.” The Spirit carries on when I snap back into attention hoping I haven’t missed anything important. “All they have seen so far is the doorway they stand at. They have fallen down in glorious praise at the very sight of the doorway, because all doors are sacred portals. They have been standing here worshipping for centuries, knowing that they have found the dwelling place of God. They are stuck in the doorway, because they have not yet learned that they are welcome to walk right inside the Castle, and come into direct union with My Self”
Next, we float in through the doorway hidden behind music gear and cords and a pulpit and some other evangelical church-stage paraphernalia that are all familiar to me, and into the hidden expanse inside. Inside, I saw many things that I had already experienced, known, seen and had revealed to me over the past 30 years. Private things. Hidden things. Familiar and safe and sacred things between me and Divine. I spent some time in this space, in the quiet and cool with the Spirit. Receiving some instruction, some healing, a bit of an energetic upgrade, the normal kind of thing that happens in my meditation. During this part, the Spirit showed me that all the doorways opened into the interior of the castle, and that any one of the groups worshipping outside were welcome to walk inside. All of them had found the right Castle. They all saw a piece of it, and assumed it to be the whole. They had all thought they had found the right (the only) doorway. They were all right. The unified field of loving presence which I was raised to call God, is called by a million other names, worshipped in a million different ways, known by all. This vision was effectively a metaphysical confirmation of what some people standing in the Evangelical Christian doorway will call ‘universalism’. I just call it ‘sensible’. There’s so much more to say on that front, but no scope here. This was not the end of the vision, but the rest was about my own archetypal calling in relation to it, and not for public consumption.
The doorways to the castle in this vision, are metaphors for holy texts (like the Bible) or doctrine, or church traditions and sacraments, worship songs, or a building. It is anything which can act as a portal to Divine union, but itself is not the actual Selfhood of the Divine. For a long time, these things were enough. For hundreds of years they were enough for most. They were never enough for all, though. The mystics and prophets were never content with the doorway-worship. But things are changing. The Spirit is being poured out on all people. Young men are prophesying. Old men are dreaming dreams. Mature women are learning how to heal their bodies and reclaim their rightful place as sacred vessels of Divine mystery. Young women are being raised to know how to stay plugged directly into Divine Source Energy (in accordance with their blueprint) and are far more free and wild and untamed than any of their fore-mothers have ever been. The Spirit showed me in this vision the evolution of the planet from a matter-based existence, to an energy-based existence. People are tuning in more and more, waking up to swirling energy signatures, and talking about what ‘resonates’ with their soul. All of us were created with the Divine blueprint inside us, Divine DNA, Divine longings, Divine goodness and the capacity to love and be loved, see and be seen, know and be known by God. To be fair to church leaders, none of them have necessarily been equipped with the knowledge, skills and tools needed to support people to come into sacred contact with this energy which enlivens and sanctifies everything. And so how can they? We weren’t teaching it in Seminaries, we barely knew it existed. Things are changing so rapidly. People dissatisfied with remaining in the doorway of the Castle know that these longings they have are real, and holy and good and worth making room for. They also know that church doesn’t speak the language of soul yearning. Most leaders, unless they have had the courage to walk through the door themselves and know what is inside, are unable to hold gracious and intelligent space for the kind of wandering and wondering that these energetically intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful people need as they ‘deconstruct’.
In fact, ‘deconstruction’ is just deciding that the doorway won’t cut it anymore. People want what’s inside or they are going to walk away and try a different door. If the gate-keepers and door-guardians of the clergy and eldership of the church won’t facilitate the door-opening behind them (and how can they if they don’t realise that they need to?) then people will either assume there is no door (and therefore its a giant ruse, and many in the deconstruction community believe that) or they are going to figure out another way to get inside. I know I had to. I got inside by violently awakening to my own archetypal blueprint and beginning to trust it.
The church doesn’t have a monopoly on Divine encounter. It doesn’t have a monopoly on Jesus. Millions of people all over the world are encountering the mystery of the Christ Consciousness, the Krystos, the Sacred One, the Source of All. It is a mystery which goes by a million names. All of them sacred, holy and true. All of them an invocation, an invitation, a dare to Divine to flood us with presence and power and love.
For some of us, the deepest and most profound encounters with Divine that we know that we need, that we are ready for, that our hearts sing to us about, just cannot be had inside the walls and constructs of a church. There are many reasons for that, and I hope we can get into them in a later piece. For now, I wonder if you can start to use your imagination, and start to be curious if perhaps leaving the church is the way many people need to take in order to finally meet with God? Maybe what looks to you like ‘backsliding’ is actually ‘awakening’? Maybe the magic words that they teach us at bible-camp as kids, where we have to recite the sinners prayer and ‘welcome Jesus into our heart’ is an old door that doesn’t work very well anymore? Maybe this generation of energetically attuned and highly sensitive young people need something more experiential and intimate than doctrine, dogma, tradition and sacrament?
Maybe its time for the latent sacramental imagination within our best teachers, mystics and prophets to awaken and begin to craft new portals for Divine entry into the churches? These portals exist in abundance in nature, at yoga classes, in women’s sacred circles, in meditation, in tantra, Tai Chi, in sound healing and energy modalities, in art and music and anything beautiful. There’s nothing to say that the churches can’t have some of this juicy goodness. There is more than enough to go around.
Its just a question of will they be open? Will they willingly follow the wisdom of the deconstructing ones and do away with barriers to human / divine encounter? Or will they cling to them as bastions of safety, security and the status quo?
Not even Divine knows the answer to that. The timelines are shifting and changing and free will still trumps all.
For now, I know that I have not been released from this witness-bearing office that I now hold, and I will speak and write when I am instructed to, and I will return to silence from time to time to re-calibrate and re-attune to the collective-consciousness awakening now unfolding rapidly around us all.
Until next time…
Go gently.