Birthing a New Spirituality

I haven’t written much about my religious beliefs or spiritual journey. It’s not that I’m avoiding the topic… just that I feel no need to explain myself and I’d rather live out my beliefs and let people gain an understanding that way. But I’m beginning to feel that sharing some of my story might be helpful, so here it goes.

The first time I heard the word “deconstruction” was in 2016. I was sitting around a campfire with friends when one of them used that word to describe his changing relationship with Christianity—his process of examining each piece of his belief system to see if it matched up with his understanding of God, the world, and himself.  

While I had started a similar faith transition two years prior and understood what he was saying, I didn’t resonate with the word “deconstruction”. At its core, my experience felt wholly constructive rather than destructive. 

Until last year, I didn’t have the words to properly describe it. That’s when I picked up a book called The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd (one of my favorite authors) and she gave me the perfect metaphor for my experience of this process: Birth.

Long, messy, and painful, but ultimately constructive and deeply rewarding, my faith journey felt like giving birth to a new version of myself, a new relationship with God, a new foundation for my faith, and a new understanding of the world around me. 

Ultimately, I’ve landed in a place where my beliefs are pretty fluid and adamantly label-free. Experiencing God with no boundaries—just an openness to learn and grow and love—allows God to be so much bigger than I ever could’ve imagined. And by letting God out of the box I’d kept tightly shut for the first 30 years of my life, I was also able to let myself out of the box I’d kept myself locked up in for all that time.

By default, this opening (or smashing in some cases) of the boxes comes with the realization of how harmful those limited beliefs were for us. That realization is often the most devastating part for people who go through this process of reexamining their faith… it certainly was for me. 

Particularly excruciating for me was opening the box in which I’d kept my beliefs about faith and gender and realizing how much those beliefs had hurt me. Forming and birthing a new perspective on the intersection of those two issues was a doozy of a process for me. 

I had all the feelings, and as I’ve explained previously, I don’t do so well with feelings. They generally cause me physical pain and make me feel like I’m dying. Again, the birth metaphor is just spot on. 

And while I still have moments of deep grief and pain around that specific issue, the freedom I eventually found outside the walls of the gender prison I’d lived in for so long was glorious. 

Like… Julie Andrews singing and spinning in a field of wildflowers in the Austrian Alps glorious. 

I felt free and untethered. But not in the disorienting way that so many of my friends have described over glasses of wine or campfire beers. 

And I think there’s one very specific reason why I never felt lost among the rubble of my belief system: Two months after I broke God and myself out of the tiny box we’d been forced into, I stepped into graduate school. I started a two-year program that is literally designed to help you build a new, healthier, more justice-oriented way of seeing the world. It’s grounded in faith (though a much freer, more open version than the one I grew up with) but oriented around love, peace, and justice. 

So instead of feeling lost when I untethered myself, I wandered out into the wilderness and was met by a series of guides: My professors. They gently, kindly, and empathetically provided a variety of resources and perspectives to help me develop a new, working understanding of myself, God, and the world. So instead of feeling like I was losing my faith, I felt like I was finding it. Or… birthing it.

This fortuitous timing, I think, contributed most to my faith transition feeling more generally positive than so many others. I want to make it clear that it had absolutely nothing to do with me doing it “right” or “better” (I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a “right” or “wrong” way to do this… we’re all just muddling through) and everything to do with the fact that I wasn’t alone. It was the fact that I had partners and guides to help me through the worst of it that prevented me from ever feeling like I was floating away into fateful, terrifying nothingness like Sandra Bullock in Gravity. 

I wish more people had that kind of support when reexamining their belief system.

The last thing I think contributed to my experience being so different from other people’s goes back to opening the gender box. I’ve written and spoken fairly extensively about the personal crisis I experienced in 2015, triggered by my ongoing failure to fit into the gender box I’d been given. 

It wasn’t that I was unhappy—having fully bought into a toxic patriarchal theology, I had very little value for my own happiness—it was that after 15 years of trying my absolute damndest, I completely failed to fit the mold of “Biblical womanhood” that I’d been given.

No matter how hard I tried to contort or shrink myself, I couldn’t fit into that box. I was too loud, too opinionated, too ambitious, too driven, too confrontational, too sexy, too harsh, too confident… just too much. 

Now… in all fairness, I probably was too much of all of those things for most of my life because I was never taught how to manage those aspects of myself. I was just told and expected to squash them altogether. Then, when I tried and failed to completely eliminate the essence of who I am, I became increasingly angry, depressed, ashamed, and frustrated.

So when I finally realized that the problem wasn’t me—that the problem was actually the box itself—I was so utterly relieved and vindicated that it didn’t feel like a loss. Yes, I absolutely felt hurt and grief and anger over the fact that I’d been handed that bullshit box in the first place and wasted so many years trying to fit into it. 

But stretching myself out and joyfully taking up the space I was intended to take up felt so wonderfully amazing that I didn’t want to waste any more time on the stupid box. 

It was time to live and explore who I was meant to be. To enjoy every beautiful Divine thing and go about becoming the very best version of myself. And that process right there, of experiencing the Divine wherever and whenever I find it, of inviting the Divine into every moment, every interaction, every decision, every moment… that is the beautiful faith birthed out of all that pain and mess.

If you’ve experienced this process, or are currently experiencing this process, I want you to know that you are not alone and you don’t have to endure the pain of it alone.

We can be midwives and doulas for one another during this process. Holding hands, encouraging, mopping up our messes, screaming in unison.

Birth is not The End… it’s a beginning.