ending up free: maybe losing my faith and maybe finding more

A year ago today I faced yet another tragedy, and it felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I looked to the sky in agony but couldn’t bring myself to pray. And I haven’t since. 

 

A year ago, I felt so unprepared for what I was facing: letting go of everything I thought I knew about God, about reality, about hope. I was terrified. I was in a master’s of biblical studies;  I studied harder, and yet the things I kept learning confirmed that nothing was as I had thought. On the “good” days I thought this was a hard season that would deepen my Christian faith. On the “bad” days I wondered if I was a Christian at all. 

The February before all this, I went to Kaua’i. I kept gazing out to the ocean and pondering God. “Surely,” I thought, “if the physical ocean is so huge and so unknown, how much more is it preposterous to think we could know and understand God?” I couldn’t shake the growing feeling that there had to be so much more to all this - my Christianity, my view of God - than the system we’ve created. To say that we know anything about God while staring at the ocean felt ridiculous. And mesmerizing. I wanted to dive in. I was still reading my Bible on the beach each morning at sunrise, walking with Jesus down the shoreline. I wasn’t doubting the “essentials,” but felt like I was on the exciting edge of discovering a far bigger and grander God that I had known before. Bigger than a holy book, bigger than fundamentalist issues, bigger than religion. I said I was ready for whatever was next, but this wasn’t what I’d expected. 

I had asked God to shatter the boxes I kept putting him in, but I never thought that when the boxes shattered I’d feel like I was finding they'd been empty. 

It was devastating to me for a long time. I felt like I lost my best friend; I certainly did lose a version of him. It felt like grief: tears, loneliness, the constant subconscious, disassociation, being misunderstood, feeling alone in my head, feeling like my heart was torn in half, feeling like I hardly knew myself anymore.

So for a year I’ve been somewhat hiding behind the mask of my own face: the face of faith and devotion that so many know me as. I hid because I didn’t know yet what I was going to find or who I was going to become. I still don’t know, but I don’t want to hide anymore. 

I told people that I was “asking a lot of questions,” but rarely did I really share what those questions were, or what answers I was or wasn’t finding. They were questions like these:

If God can put an end to suffering, and if he plans to in the future, why doesn’t he now? Why does he let this reality of tragedy and evil go on? 

How harmful has it been for me as woman to have God presented to me as male, when we know “he” is not? If we have constructed God as masculine based on culture and language, what else have we constructed?

Why did the church never teach me about the formation of the Bible? What do I do with the knowledge that these are cultural religious documents, shaped by the needs of the authors? Why does Paul, who never even met Jesus, get to shape nearly all of Christian theology?

Who was Jesus really? Can I even know? Is it possible to see past the layers of tradition that are present already in the Gospels? 

What is the gospel? Why did I think I had to believe in hell, when it is blurry at best in the Bible, and a non-essential in early Christianity? If there’s no hell, what is salvation? What was Jesus doing here? Was he divine? Or was he just like me? 

Why did we turn Jesus’ teachings into a new religion? Was Christianity what Jesus wanted?

I felt like I was betraying my community, God, and myself by asking these questions and not accepting the apologetic answers I’d known for years. I felt like it went against everything I was, my entire being. But slowly I’ve begun to realize that actually this journey has been deeply me. Every step has been propelled by my deep love for truth and for Jesus. But I was finally allowing the destination to be open-ended. 

I didn’t speak out for a long time because I didn’t want my questions - and discoveries - to harm anyone else’s faith. I don’t have an evangelistic approach, I’m not out to make converts to anything. Partially because I haven’t planted my flag anywhere yet - maybe I won’t. And partially because I don’t see Jesus telling Jews not to be Jewish, or gentiles not to be gentiles. I think he was after something deeper than a religious label, and so I haven’t felt like I needed to lose mine or convince anyone else to lose theirs. 

But now I’m speaking out. To say: Here I am. Here I am in the land of uncertainty, of pain, of holding loosely to everything, even the things I thought I had to hold firmly. And you are welcome to be here too. We are in the company of a history full of uncertain humans. 

And so, over a year, I’ve begun to discover again who I am and where I want to go. I want to back away enough to see better what creative Being is behind this dazzling universe, if I can. I’m more eager than ever to keep studying this holy book and others that have shaped our ideas of God and humanity for millennia. And I don’t know if Jesus would be a “Christian” or not, but I want to be whatever he was, because he’s still the most beautiful and compelling figure in history to me, even with all the God-elements of him in question. 

To be as clear as I’m able right now: I haven’t landed the plane. I’m not “in” or “out,” and that is intentional. In a culture that is obsessed with knowing, with believing, and with being right, I am waiting, challenging, and allowing myself to always take the next step, whatever direction it leads. 

Jesus died a blasphemer in the first century. He would have died a heretic under Christendom in the middle ages. He wouldn’t fit perfectly in any denomination today. So I’m no longer trying desperately to avoid being “wrong.” I am not so afraid anymore.  

Maybe that’s freedom. 

If I could go back one year ago to the woman terrified of the dark void of doubt she felt all around her, I would say:

You are allowed to ask these questions. 

You are allowed to follow where they lead. 

You will not end up alone. 

You will end up free.