This Strange In-Between

on nebulous places, un-firm foundations, and 'ceasing to understand the world'

For years, I haven’t known how to describe my faith. I’ve vacillated between various identifiers: Christian? Spiritual? Religious? A sort of vacuous ambivalence became my normal—not so much desert or wasteland but a never-ending, ever-expanding cosmos or ocean. Here I float, suspended above all the excess that once tethered me to certainty—this strange in-between space of all-consuming mystery. 

The other night, I caught the hazy end of a brilliant sunset. They’re all brilliant. They’re all, as John Green writes, perfect (because so much is perfect). The scene was nearly obscured by thick, indigo clouds filling the entire sky except for the tiniest strip separating ocean from cloud. Neon rays spilled into the sea, bursting towards mostly darkened waves, illuminating the horizon line for the briefest moment before the sun dipped fully into the abyssal depths.

Sometimes I wonder if faith is like these brief moments of witnessed light, when we turn around just in time and glimpse the transcendent. Whatever I am, there’s still room in my heart for such moments. 

But the sure foundation piece, the bit that’s supposed to remain intact and secure for an entire human life, is long gone. I’m not convinced rock is any sturdier than stand. You start questioning metaphors when standing on the brink of a collapsed caldera or driving through Yellowstone National Park where the earth bubbles and explodes. Christians cling so hard to this ambiguous idea of a fixed landscape, as if the earth is a settled thing, as if the layers and crusts beneath our feet aren’t constantly shifting, eroding, collapsing.

Perhaps I buck against a firm foundation because the metaphor is especially painful when the ground gives way. I was once terrified to admit my dissatisfaction, my growing detachment from the faith I’d known. I was, to quote The Message, “burned out on religion,” on maintaining a particular “rightness” with God, on proving my long eroded foundation. I wasn’t just standing on a pile of debris; I was falling through it.

Modern evangelicalism offers little room for change, referring back to postures and attitudes and actions: “well, are you staying in the word?” “well, are you giving it to Jesus?” “well, are you falling for that deconstruction mumbo jumbo?” There’s a misunderstanding that faith should be constant, that the ground shouldn’t shift. There’s a sense of hurry to right every person in supposed danger of misbelieving or unbelieving because the threat of hell is so pervasive.

When We Cease to Understand the World

A few weeks ago, I read the brilliant When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, a fictional account of famous scientists who grappled with existence and often stumbled into madness. Labatut explores the moral consequences of exploring too far, learning too much, how in the pursuit of knowing, we can cease to understand. 

He writes, “The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.” 

I hope Labatut will forgive my comparison of this book and these themes to a religious context —the pursuit of God and the hubris of certainty, the ways we can immerse ourselves in scripture, pray without ceasing, attend weekly services, and still falter, still, somehow, “cease to understand the world.”

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Lately, I’ve felt a quiet contentment. A distilled sense of optimism even. I am unhurried. I am strangely calm. I’m eager to learn but not so eager to know or return to a certitude that could buckle beneath me. I have no desire to return to evangelical madness, high on Jesus, oblivious to a rotting infrastructure.

But there is goodness in this strange in-between where definitions falter and lines blur between faith and doubt. I am enduring towards the sort of understanding that accepts whatever this place is.

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Things I’m loving

Memoir: Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

“Sometimes the whole sea looks like a mirror of beaten silver…sometimes a bird dives into the mirror of the water, vanishing into its own reflection, and the reflective surface makes it impossible to see what lies beneath.”

One book I haven’t stopped thinking about is Rebecca Solnit’s memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence. It’s a “portrait of the artist as a young woman,” a literary masterpiece exploring the feminine body and the inherent dangers of living in such a body. Read my whole reflection here.

Poetry: The City in Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee

Is it cheating to admit I only read this book of poems because it was required reading in my Writing Across Genres class? But still, I adored it. I’m in awe of Lee’s poetic brilliance, his mastery with emotion-laced language. It’s one I’ll be visiting again and again and again.

Pottery: East Fork’s Big Sky

If you follow me on Instagram, you’re probably aware of my obsession with handmade pottery. But one of my favorite spots, located in beautiful Asheville, NC, is East Fork. And I’m particularly in love with this seasonal color: Big Sky, a nod to “atmospheric blue,” a color that makes me think (especially) of the vastness of western skies.