Over the next few weeks, writers Michael Lecy and Sarah Southern will collaborate and mutually share four essays reflecting on various aspect of spiritual deconstruction. We hope these contemplative and thoughtful pieces will encourage and resonate with our many readers across the deconstruction spectrum.
A few years ago, I stood on the edge of a fog-shrouded Grand Canyon. I knew wonder existed just beyond the ledge, a grandness nearly incomprehensible for its magnitude and oldness and beauty. But I couldn’t see anything. Heavy fog surrounded the few of us standing in brutal cold, our bodies exhausted from sleeping in a tent in the single digits for the possibility of witnessing how water and wind and time can warp the land. I don’t know how long we stood shivering, silently praying our long trek to Arizona wouldn’t be in vain.
There’s a sort of lingering hope in the knowledge that something big exists beyond ourselves, obscured in mystery but still there. In deconstruction, I’ve felt the heaviness of a spiritual fog closing in, when certainty crumbled and I stood on the brink of great unknowns. I didn’t know how to hold the mystery, how to continue holding out for spiritual hope as faith dimmed.
Mystery was once an essential component of faith, an understanding much cannot be easily answered though hope can still be found in the unknowable. But much of my early formation was absent of tough questions and honest wrestling. We seem to forget even the disciples following in the literal footsteps of Jesus had many doubts. We’re thousands of years removed from an embodied Christ and yet we hear faith alone is sufficient and the Bible is inerrant as if saying it is enough.
Faith is a mystery and mystery is terrifying. We must acknowledge the way body, mind, and soul affects and influences our faith. I believe in Something but faith alone can’t always sustain that—not when every absolute and theological conviction comes crashing down around me.
. . .
That morning on the edge of the Grand Canyon, I believed in its existence. I’d seen it before, even hiked a few miles into its depths. But judgment is easily clouded and beliefs can be obscured by so many things. Knowing the Canyon is there beyond the haze isn’t the same as seeing it. My whole life I’ve known there must be Something out there, Something to give hope to a decaying world, Something to affirm my own significance in an impossibly vast universe. Knowing (or at least hoping) can’t be summed up in facts or five theological points. Many combat questions with admonitions of “just trust.” But just trust what? That mystery exists outside of myself? If I can’t trust I’m safe to doubt, then what am I trusting in? Why is blind belief upheld as proof of great faith but not the continued searching of a confused soul? I do doubt but I also seek, and I hope the God deeper than the Grand Canyon, more enveloping than any black hole, can be patient with my own tiny brain and disbelieving heart.
Sometimes, the fog abates a little. Sometimes we catch a glimpse. Not proof. Not necessarily answers. But an unveiling. As the fog lifted that day, I was caught off guard by a familiar but transcendent sight as thick haze lifted from the depths. The fading fog illuminated a great expanse, perhaps the most profound natural scene I’ve ever witnessed. How many particles of vapor must exist to fill the Grand Canyon? I cannot even fathom it. Most of the time, I cannot fathom a God who created the universe and also somehow loves and knows me. I cannot grasp the goodness of one gospel message and the confounding wickedness of another. We are all transforming, catching glimpses of magnitude, drowning in mystery.
As I emerge from the heaviest doubt into a place of residual hope, I know hope is not assimilation, “correct” answers, or coercion. Hope isn’t forcing myself to trust in mysterious divinity. Nor is it pushing down the questions, pretending myself out of deconstruction.
Hope comes when the chaos settles, when weary souls find respite, when we can acknowledge the paradox of belief and disbelief. Hope is the thing beyond the fog, encased in mystery, a love that reaches out and invites us in. I have few answers anymore, but I am resting in a hope for that Something, that presence, that Love that does not let go.
Sarah Southern is a Denver-based writer who ‘writes from the spiritual desert where doubt and faith coexist,’ exploring themes of deconstruction, beauty, connection, home, and curiosity.
i love the way you have captured this feeling, waiting and hoping in the fog... i felt that. thank you!
very grateful for your metaphor. very