SABBATICAL REVIEW PART 2: DECONSTRUCTION
Two most fundamental deconstruction spheres have been about my experiential understanding of who God is and who I am. To be sure, there are secondary deconstruction spheres that flow out of the two major domains I mentioned above. How I view the Bible, the human history, the world as God’s creation (as in how I view humanity and physical creation) as well as the world as systemic “principalities of the air,” how I view my life, how I view my faith tradition, and how I view missions are the kinds of significant domains I wrestled with. In many ways, I realize my earnest struggle with deconstruction will not cease, and I find strange comfort by saying to myself it is as it should be.
You might have caught glimpses of my processes through my blog this year, as much of my blog posts dealt with my own sense of the deconstruction process. What I thought I knew for sure was not the entire or the right picture. This is humbling, unsettling, and even upsetting depending on the topic. Mark Twain supposedly has said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” So experientially true. It is especially challenging, since I’ve given more than 30 years of my life to what I thought was built on a perfectly solid and sure foundation. It is not to say that my life has been wasted. As I have alluded to in my previous blogpost, God doesn’t waste anything. God saves what we think we lost and tosses aside what we think we gained. Often, how God redeems and what God does after redemption just do not match what we imagined. Deconstruction is coming to grips with unlearning and releasing. Meister Eckhart has said that spiritual maturity is not about addition, but subtraction. It is the ability and the posture to unlearn and let go. Modern-day Christianity is obsessed with winning, adding, and attaining rather than subtracting, “losing,” and loving.
One thing I’ve been processing is the connection between my view of God and the Bible. We all are “theologians.” A notable preacher and theologian, Frederick Buechner said, “theology at its heart is autobiography.” His curt summary of theology is experientially based on each of our lives. In this sense, we all do theology, whether we admit it or not.
The late Dallas Willard in his book, Divine Conspiracy, talks about how to “test your theology.”
“The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is; “Not really,” then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God—a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being—before ordinary people, we have gone wrong. We should not keep going in the same direction, but turn around and take another road.”
Willard launches off the Great Commandment and asks whether the God we are imagining can be loved with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. I find this probing question challenging and refreshing at the same time. Challenging because it forces me to reexamine my understanding of who God is if it doesn’t pass the acid test. Refreshing because it is ultimately about loving God with all our heart and soul rather than arriving at a “perfect” theology. Anything less than a “lovable God before ordinary people,” it is time to admit we have gone wrong. This is a strong and bold statement, but my soul knows it to be true. In a related vein, a few of the questions I have raised are: Does my God divide between people or play favoritism? What does my God require of me? Why the discrepancy between the Old Testament depiction of God and the New Testament? What and how does Jesus speak of his God? How did Jesus view Scripture (the Old Testament)? These are all pertinent questions that need wrestling.
During this sabbatical, which unexpectedly coincided with Covid-19, I experienced an ultra-extreme form of slowing down through silence and solitude. Being far removed from the constant and busy activism often associated with titles and/or roles, my understanding of who I am (St. Teresa of Avila called this self-knowledge) was accentuated like no other. I did not always like what I saw. It was at times like seeing myself naked and vulnerable with nowhere to hide. My thought was, “I might as well get used to it.” Occasionally, I “saw” and “heard” myself like I was watching an old YouTube footage of myself. Sometimes, I found myself cringe, at least question, and sometimes just laugh about it. While loving myself as God loves me is still an uphill climb, I find myself more at peace than before with who I am. What gives me hope more than anything is that I also caught the peripheral glimpses of my true self (what Richard Rohr calls “The immortal diamond”) and desperately want more of that.
When I look back in life, genuine encounters I had with God boils down to love. The late Father Thomas Keating simply said, “love alone can change people.” It is God’s love landing, sometimes gently and sometimes overwhelmingly, on me as compassion, forgiveness, grace, kindness, admonishment, joy, etc. So experientially more and more, I know God as love. From this vantage point, I have asked disturbing and unsettling questions about the God in the Old Testament and began the deconstructing work of reinterpreting the God that is portrayed in the Old Testament. In this process, I am learning that the way is Jesus. I must embrace Jesus’ God as my God.