Why I still believe [post-deconstruction]

It's been a rough decade or so on my faith journey, and here I am

I have been mad at God more often than not the past few years. Which is kinda laughable when I am in a reasoned state of mind around this, but often I am not.

And it occurred to me that I really do stand there with my arms crossed at God, making demands and being mad that things don’t work out the way I want them to.

My audacity around this stuns me for a brief moment occasionally. When I consider that if God really is an all-powerful Supreme Being (forgive me that my mental image of this is Thanos from the Marvel stories, I don’t really have a good grasp on the magnitude and power of a ‘god’, so that visual helps me). In the presence of an awe-inspiring, all-powerful could-smite-me-at-any-moment Being…well, to be ‘mad’ at Them seems foolish at best.

And it’s taken me nearly a decade to make some peace with God about all the ways I think They’ve failed me. How I’ve been lead a merry chase from childhood on about a God who loves me and sees me and then I am standing in a life and circumstances that oftentimes don’t seem like I am loved or seen.

(I am compelled at this point to indicate that I have had a pretty remarkable life with a fair amount of difficulty and some horror growing up, but not a lot of real tragedy, honestly. Certainly comparatively.)

And so.

I see myself being mad at God and also wanting to believe They care and see me and that my life matters.

Being mad about my life absolutely generates less-helpful aspects of myself—I’m angry, bitter, jealous of other people’s lives (especially their houses, le sigh, careers and sense of purpose), cranky, whiney, unhappy.

Photo by Thomas Vitali on Unsplash

A few years into spiritual deconstruction, I had my umpteenth soul-searching conversation with my wiser older sister. (A note that my deconstruction meant realizing that organized religion is filled with inherently flawed humans and thus, what they create in those institutions can easily be very flawed and that I had agreed with a lot of it for years. That gut-punch of the flawed Church and my history of agreement with it led to a whole spiral about what I believe about God and people, and it rocked me to my core.)

“How can you still believe in God?”

I asked this over brunch, our usual location for deep conversations. I recall she carefully took her next bite and chewed thoughtfully before answering.

“I like who I am and who I am trying to be when I believe. I’m a better person. If nothing else, that’s enough.”

And that gave me a tiny toehold to consider.

I bet that on a general, cosmic scale, this is the point of believing in something beyond yourself. I could get behind that. No matter what humans believe in, I think that being aware that there is a call forward from an outside source beyond ourselves, some kind of Supreme Being or Force or Something has the impact of helping us stay soberminded about the weaknesses of our humanity and also compels us to seek and find how to work through those weaknesses and to honor our strengths.

But did I believe in, you know, the Judeo-Christian version of God and in Christ, the Christian belief as a bridge between God and Humans, the evidence of a God who cares about me and sees me?

My belief about this has a high degree of variability. And, with a bit of embarrassment at my lack of maturity, it does tend to follow how things are going for me on any given day.

Faith—who’s she?

I am becoming more aware of the part about believing that requires faith—the evidence of things hoped for, but not yet seen. For me, it’s that deep faith I am dancing with. Stumbling around, wondering how I could know God sees me and loves me on the days/weeks/months/years when it doesn’t feel like it.

What does it feel like when I DO know I am loved and seen? Joy. Peace. Contentment. Ease - even when things aren’t going my way.

Choosing to believe creates this—I can choose or not choose under any circumstance. Is it ‘easier’ to choose when things are good? Helz yes. But it’s choosing, nonetheless, either way.

And choosing to believe does help me create a life where I am also choosing to be a better human. How can it not? If I act as if the God of the Universe, the Supreme Being, sees me and loves me, I want to be called forward and am free to move in my strengths and to grow into more, knowing my failings don’t exclude me from love and being known.

On the other side of deconstruction, for me, has been the intentional choice to believe in God. Now with more understanding of what being a person of faith actually means and who I am choosing to become along this journey. On the daily. It feels a lot like letting go of my mad to open my mind to the idea that being loved doesn’t depend on how I feel. Being loved is about knowing I am, even when I’m mad.

(A note that I use They/Them pronouns for God because of the Trinity thing, and also, the classic ‘He’ designation rattles my post-deconstruction sensibilities.)