Episode 126 - Is Deconstruction Bad?

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our world is built with stories sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other the liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart [Music] today's story deconstruction is bad welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] i love that i'm changing and evolving in a way that i think is healthy i believe that holding my beliefs with an open hand instead of a swinging fist is a much healthier way to be i feel like i have more empathy now i feel like it's contributed to me healing in a lot of ways shame resilience all that stuff but i hate the grief i'm grieving the connection that having a fixed and firm belief system had i i'm really grieving that i'm not quite christian enough for christians um but i'm a little too christian for non-christians and so it's lonely the good is the new person i am and the new way i see the world and how much more open and inclusive my my world has become i think the bad is that there are still parts of me the current me that i can't share with people who are still part of the world i used to be a part of probably deconstructing my faith has saved my life and i can see this really with a clear conscience and the god that i know now at this age of almost 50 is a god of compassion a god who is not wagging his finger and judging me and keeping criticism on me but it's a god who knows me and loves me and is giving me the opportunity to wrestle with my faith for me deconstruction has been a great experience in insofar as my ability to really care about other people especially people that aren't christians it's helped me to view them as an actual human being and not some type of person that i have to convert or change in order to truly care about them it's also been really tough because there have been a lot of times to where i have that old sense of doing the wrong thing or guilt and shame creep in i mean it's been several years and i still feel like i'm going to hell some days but overall it's been a wonderful experience hey everybody this is michael gunger and i'm hilary mcbride and today we're looking at this story deconstruction is bad and we're asking that question is it is it actually bad and i think a lot of us have conversations about deconstruction in the liturgists world but i don't know if we've ever like really directly talked about what it is if you're kind of new to this world what are we talking about when we're talking about deconstruction so hillary you got got some uh for us yeah you know conversation i think if we were just to speak in generalities it would be kind of the pulling apart of a story that felt like maybe we were never allowed to pull it apart and pull it apart maybe to burn it all down pull it apart maybe even just to be curious to question like i was given a story about what faith is i was given a story about how to do belief and maybe some of the things that i was given a long time ago don't work anymore and i'm ready for something new and maybe i don't want to leave all of the all of the old story but i i don't want to keep it all either i think about it being this careful sifting thoughtful examining maybe even critique of belief structures that is often accompanied by an emotional response perhaps grief perhaps a sense of anger or frustration or sadness but ultimately is about making space for questions making space for thinking about things differently that we've always been told have to be thought about a certain way does that does that line up with your experience or your thoughts about it how i'm describing it yeah yeah i yeah i think like any i always kind of tend to move towards like creative analogies because yeah yeah that's what i spend my day doing a lot but yeah anytime i'm trying to make something i think this where the construction work comes from too deconstruction like if you're trying to make make something beautiful or make something new there's a there are a lot of times is an erase tool in there you know like sometimes you have to get rid of things that are in the way like if you're going to build a if you're going to redo your kitchen sometimes you have to pull out old cabinets before you can put in new ones sometimes you have to tear out old walls and old plumbing and stuff that that actually just stands in the way of you being able to do anything new and a lot of times with our beliefs there are these old constructs and and walls that by themselves say do not go past here or this this question shuts down the conversation and there's things that like block any new growth or new new understanding new ways of being and so even though the word deconstruction kind of has a negative connotation in it as far as like deconstructing like destroying the it's it's part to me in my experience and and perspective it's part of the creation it's part of the creative process it's part of the of life it's part of a healthy life well just what you said there i think is so important because you you acknowledge that deconstruction is a step among many in the process of creation of creating faith and belief and for a lot of people that's where it stops or it feels like it stops there that i deconstruct and then that's it but you i think you mentioned something so important which is how how do i deconstruct in such a way that it makes room for something new that there's something that comes after deconstruction too yeah i like how you talked about it's clearing the way for your life it's clearing the way for faith for wonder for for living in a way that's more true to your heart and what your body wants to do in its when it's less restricted and less constricted and less locked down yeah okay so why if that's if it's part of of an important part of faith of life why does it get such a bad rap like why does this story this story that deconstruction is bad i i don't think i'm alone in having felt that story before because i think a lot of our from what i hear from listeners and a lot of my friends there's like kind of a shame around it there's kind of a fear around it sometimes that i mean i know when i was younger um asking questions about is this actually true what does the bible actually mean when it's talking about this at first was really scary and then it was even even if the bible means this is that correct or like yeah the more you answer ask these questions there there could be a lot of social pressure to not ask these questions like shh it's like the emperor has no clothes don't talk about it don't ask those questions it's scary and they can be really internalized and it can feel i remember even a simple funny thing like when i started questioning the literal mark of the beast in revelation that was one of my first big deconstruction questions oh wow okay i would have assumed it was the the creation or evolution piece yeah at first for me funny enough was the mark of the beast amazing normally i think because i i was still very much a biblical literalist and very much like concerned about making sure that my salvation that i was going to go to heaven and stuff and it was i would just i would be freaked out about the antichrist coming and i had seen that movie uh thief in the night and they would be head people that didn't get the mark of the beast oh boy and i was just terrified i remember i would like at sunsets if the sunset was particularly orange or red i'd be like oh oh it's the end of days wow this is me as a kid and like here comes the antichrist any second i'm gonna have to decide with the mark of the beast and then when i first kind of wondered like why would the literal 666 on your hand suddenly be the thing i thought we're always talking about faith in jesus and it's all about your heart now and it's not about the law anymore about these external things so i was like maybe that's a metaphor and so that first question of is that a metaphor for my world i felt like that was not a safe question yeah which is funny now but at the time that felt like the most scandalous thought yeah well do you do you remember what would happen to people if they asked those questions like what kind of social response would happen to the people who did did question what what did you see was the consequence of the questioning yeah there's this guy i remember this guy named pep in our church who was a he was kind of a hippie guy okay and he had he had asked questions and he kind of went off the deep end you know he got involved in greenpeace oh [Laughter] and then you know he started quite thinking about universal salvation these really dangerous ideas so it was the slippery slope thing it's like and and everybody kind of like we're like ooh pep has really gone down a dark path and he's kind of is he one of us anymore he really had that feeling of like is he one of us or is he one of them and so you start like secretly being one of them in ways that's really scary what about you did you did you have any experiences where you felt questions or deconstruction that you were starting to experience was bad in some way you know it i have it a little bit of a different experience um i i've never used because you're canadian because yeah that's that's the primary reason of course yeah things are very different up here you know i i've never used the word deconstruction for my faith journey i've i've actually never identified with that word and i think the reason is and this hints at your question that the expanding and unfolding and development of a belief system was always expected to happen in my family yeah and i think like so if i back it up i know that some people know a little bit about this because i've talked about it before but both my parents are therapists and researchers and my my dad one of his regularly occurring phrases is human growth and development that's just a you know one human growth and about four words that regularly come out of his mouth and he's like well of course you know at the dinner table growing up well of course because of natural human growth and development like of course such and such would happen and of course right or that would interrupt that process and so the assumption was that there's a trajectory that happens over the lifespan that's natural and good and you're not supposed to see the world at two the way you see the world at eight the way you see the world at 16 the way you see the the world at 30 if you've had a kid then at 50 if you're going through menopause then it you know 75 like there is a a way of seeing the world your psychological faculties should change they should and that i think that assumption carried over into belief structure for me so i remember it like i think i was nine and an awana and you remember rowana did you ever do wanna oh i remember i remember yeah yeah i did not do it but you did it but you know you're like you're with the homeschool crew uh yes strollers yes that in my world that was kind of they kind of went hand in hand okay okay um so i was at awana and there was a guy who was talking about the israelites as the chosen people and i think i was nine and i stood up he's like do you have any questions or something and i stood up and i was like why you know why are the israelites the chosen people if you know god would just come along and knew he had a plan the whole time that jesus was coming and was just going to be like hey sorry bait and switch actually it's this other group of people who are chosen because i i was kind of told that like the israelites were chosen and then they had to say like and then they were told essentially through the process of jesus coming you you're not chosen anymore unless you adapt your faith and it looks like this now so i remember thinking like that's kind of mean like why would why would god do that to people who he was like you're my beloved just kidding now you have to do something different for me to get in like to to love to love me for me to love you and i remember the guy who was who was speaking was super awkward and said he didn't have a good answer for that but he appreciated the question so even in that like i can see myself questioning some of the stories at nine in a really developmentally appropriate way but i wasn't punished socially for asking that question no one gave me an answer but no one told me you can't ask that you can't question the leader you can't you can't say those things and so i think my experience growing up of being told what fits for you at 10 should not fit for you at 20. it shouldn't your cognition is designed to change that plus not being ostracized by asking questions meant that it felt very safe to keep opening and opening and opening and expanding and expanding and expanding in a way that i never felt like i had to do a kind of painful tearing down but more just like making the way like thinking about the house analogy like i'm just gonna make an addition i don't need to tear the kitchen wall down to keep it within this framework i'm gonna build an addition and then i'm gonna build this other edition and then guess what i'm gonna do a renault and i'm gonna have a building on top now of this other building and there's like the kind of it doesn't have to stay within these four walls like whoa i can keep adding and adding and adding and adding so the word deconstruction doesn't really apply i don't i don't feel comfortable using it but i think that's because i always had space to expand and i didn't have to tear down restrictive walls around my belief structure that makes sense that's really cool that's actually super encouraging to me as a parent we we try to provide as spacious of constructs as possible for the for the kids but also like encouraging them to to build themselves and it's encouraging to hear somebody that that it worked you know like that it's yeah that it can be effective um if we look at developmental psychology we actually need specific and concrete ideas when we're young because our br our cognition is not advanced enough to hold multiple realities at the same time to hold uncertainty it's actually like threatening to our nervous system to not know things and so i think it's okay for us to say to kids and to have been told certain things if we were also given the support when we started to have questions to to do that questioning or to expand or to be told like well you know i remember i told you like jesus was in your heart when you were growing up i want you to know that jesus is in everybody's heart and and that's a that's an idea not you know there isn't like a little person who lives in there like giving expanding ideas as we develop is really important and supports a natural kind of deconstruction in a way like you believe that the tooth fairy is real and santa claus is real when you're growing up and then there's a point at which you realize like oh wait a man doesn't come down the chimney and that's good but then sometimes you come back and you're like oh isn't this a fun story to tell because it captures the spirit of like you know something beautiful happening at this time of the year where we center around this story and it gives us hope and excitement and anticipation and it helps us see things that we wouldn't normally see yeah so there's kind of like a a transcend and include kind of feeling that you're that i'm hearing from you yeah yeah and that like these some of these constructs can be transcended and that you maybe you reach a stage of growth where you realize it wasn't literal anymore yeah but you don't have to actually like burn it all to the ground you can transcend and include it in future growth and construction yeah yeah but think about the santa claus analogy like there are some kids who when they figure out the santa claus isn't real if they have a younger sibling who who still believes santa claus is real so the parents are still telling the santa claus story then that older sibling will be like mom don't lie to him you know don't lie to him because i know santa claus isn't real and then there are other kids who are like i want to play along in the santa claus story because i want to keep the magic alive for somebody else because experiencing that magic through their eyes lights magic up in me too so even as we start to pull apart a story and if we're still using this you know the christmas santa claus metaphor like sometimes in the pulling it apart we want to we really want to pull it apart mom don't even don't don't put cookies out don't put cookies out because we know santa claus isn't coming it's just dad dad comes down the stairs and eats them and leaves a note like you're like you're not fooling me but then other times we can be like oh i want to protect that for other people even though i don't i know it's not real for me because it's a really helpful beautiful story and it creates some magic wow [Music] is it interesting that like the story of deconstruction being bad kind of reinforces how severe the deconstruction needs to be in some way like if the walls like if the parent really makes it a a fundamentalist thing about santa claus they really stress i would imagine that if if that kid really was told that it's literal in a way that so much so it was important that it was literal that they felt embarrassed at some point or they experienced some sort of pain as they realized that it was a metaphor i would imagine there'd be more of a backlash of needing to be like no that's not literally but if it had been more playful and kind of wink-wink throughout right maybe there's if the more open-handed that the that the tradition and the story had been played with i would think there'd be less need to push back so if you know if creationism god's saying or us saying god created the world in seven days is is done in a playful and poetic and story driven way a narrative way and then when at the same time of brains processing they're going maybe santa claus isn't literal they can go oh maybe seven days and a garden and a talking snake isn't literal if they can all kind of go together rather than putting up these really firm if you keep in if you if you question that stage of growth of literalism or how you're interpreting or asking or conceiving of your faith or of your world be on this boundary then you're wrong and you're you're sinful or it can even be more subtle later like even after it was you're really sinful and out if you question there was still even in my kind of pseudo-progressive circles later on sometimes there was some more subtle shaming about questioning some of the taboos that we're not supposed to question or they're kind of like oh you're just being you know you're just being you think you're cool because you're questioning right right meanwhile my questions were tearing me apart you know i didn't want to be questioning and then having somebody casually dismiss it as me trying to be cool or hip or relevant or something just to society rather than just embracing my faith yeah that like there was just this kind of shaming nature about it still even if it wasn't the threat of hellfire there was still the unspoken threat of social ostracism yesterday yeah and that story deconstruction is bad in a way like reinforces itself if you can if you can shame people by making the boundaries of what you can't question feel really strong and important it actually makes the deconstruction process more destructive right yeah well think about it i guess from a hierarchy of needs perspective to i'm just i know we talk about this all the time on the podcast but because we're social animals we we need belonging we need belonging it's an important part of our survival it's an important part of the way that we can feel safe enough to move through the world and if if our belief structure is related in some ways to belonging then things get kind of messy right there's something natural that's supposed to happen in the unfolding of cognition around whatever idea in the same way that like life feels different when you become a parent it's supposed to things are supposed to change because your priorities are different like life is supposed to include train change and transformation but when that's restricted by our social environment that puts us in a tension that i think gets in the way of a natural developmental process like i've i think i've used the analogy somewhere before that if you like it's fun to play in a box as a kid at two or three and it's a spaceship and then the boxes everything it helps you travel to other worlds but that box at 40 like you're gonna need to bust out of that box it's actually you're not you're physically not even going to be able to fit in it anymore because your body is changing because you're the way you see the world because your needs are changing and the box now feels restrictive but maybe maybe there's some other similar form that approximates that box in some way that still feels like a journey to travel to another world but we it gets complicated here when we're trying to do belonging with a group of people and we're trying to stay honest about the things that are going on in the side inside of us that are natural and i i just want to affirm that tension is real and that there's so many people who have had both to silence their questions and their curiosity about faith in order to belong and that there's so many people who have had to lose their belonging completely in order to stay honest about their questions and i'm sad that those are reality but in face structures that say or in community structures that say your belonging here is conditional on you having the same belief system as us sometimes there isn't any other way i wish i could have told my earlier my my younger self it would have been nice to to be able to look into like okay so there's this there's this shame around and fear around asking these questions and and finding the the truth can be a scary endeavor and what's more likely what's what's a more likely scenario that that it is god you know truth capital t himself herself itself that is would be more insecure with me grappling with the questions and really seeking and pulling it apart or is it more likely that the human beings who speak for god have more to lose if i start pulling apart these assumptions and and seeking for truth beyond the accepted boundaries like what's am i am i really running up against god that that god is not okay with me seeking truth in absolutely a courageous bold 100 of myself in way or is it that maybe there are some power structures and people that have some things to lose if this particular interpretation is questioned or if because their power in some ways related to that particular interpretation if they're if if my interpretation of god's purpose in the world is tied to and limited by this one pastor and their church and me giving my money and my attendance and my believing the bible and and all the dogmas and doctrines and stuff that that particular denomination or church or pastor is espousing that gives that person a lot of power that gives that denomination a lot of power um if they can control my sexuality if they can control my money my eternal condition if it's like if i have to go through them for god's blessing man they have a lot of power over me of course i better be touched absolutely it's absolute power and so of course there's going to be social pressure put structures that are built on that kind of thing structures that are built on needing people's needing power and control over human beings they're gonna put up some electric fences in really important places for them you know like do not question the man of god do not question the bible do not question whatever because if you do then why would you obey what i'm telling you to do why would you you know like if i need you to give me 10 of your income i don't need you questioning the literal application of that first right you know right yeah yeah yeah so what what what it would have been nice to parse out and think about like where is this pressure to not ask these questions coming from yeah i felt it it just felt so acute like it's dangerous dangerous dangerous i could feel the electric current every time i walked up against that electric fence but because it was just so visceral and extreme it seemed to me like it was partly god too like this is god that doesn't want me to do this and am i being bad am i like am am i sinning by by bumping up against this electric fence or is or is it possible that some of this is externally imposed upon me by human beings yeah well think about how the when you're in that process of trying to question i believe structure that you're still really in you're going to use the existing belief structure to make sense of the questioning yeah like when you're in that liminal space of like i'm i'm not out and i don't have a new framework but i'm starting to to kind of pull up the edges of this what's really hard i think for people is feeling like this the same paradigm that they're trying to get away from is also controlling or restricting their ability to get away from it i think that's kind of what you were saying earlier but it if you have a shame-based narrative of the world and there's a part of you that goes maybe i want something more for myself it would make sense that if you're still in that shamed shame-based narrative that even you want to try and get out of it that that would circle back and be a way that you think about yourself like wristlap i'm so bad for thinking this even though that paradigm of being shame-based is something you're trying to get away from if you don't have something new yet it would be the only way to respond to yourself about trying to come out of it yeah like i i was talking about this with someone the other day and it it just kind of struck me the parallel to therapy we we talk about content and process in therapy so the content is like the the information that i'm giving you it's if you read a transcript of a therapy session the words that we'd be there but the process is like how we do things what's happening under the surface what's happening between the client and i what's happening moment to moment in our bodies that maybe maybe we have to dick into because it's a little bit more implicit but if someone comes to me and is telling me about an experience of abuse and i respond like even though they're saying it out loud if i respond in a shaming way nothing is therapeutic about that there's something that has to be different about the response for the trauma to be healed so if a person is is moving through a faith deconstruction and they're trying to start to pull at these edges and the content is different but the process is the same the process is still shame underneath even the questioning then then they haven't really changed anything and so one of the things that i often say to people who are coming into therapy for faith deconstruction and the surrounding anxiety of that is to say it's okay to be compassionate with yourself and in being compassionate to yourself about the questions you're already reconstructing you're already doing something different than was done before and the system fundamentally underneath the questioning isn't going to be motivated by shame or fear it's going to be motivated by kindness which already is doing something different even if you're still asking the same questions forever if you can be kind to yourself about that then right then something is already different than the old system that you came out of so i always like to tell people like it's even if you ask questions forever even if you end up going back to a system that feels like it works for you what what you could do differently is just make space for the questions and to be kind to yourself about them instead of shaming yourself and joining in the shame that's coming from the system you're trying to walk away from yeah that's good so is is uh is deconstruction bad is it bad well what do you think what do you think you say first no it's not bad yeah it's not bad yeah it's it's a healthy part of of being alive and a healthy part of growth just just as just as digestion yeah is a healthy part of being a living organism you don't just take on food and then just it just exists as that for all of eternity and just like have whole cucumbers and chickens sitting in your stomach for the rest of your life yeah like uh your body takes it processes it takes what it can use and then gets rid of the rest yeah and that deconstruction to me is like getting rid of what you don't need what's not no longer useful for you yeah that's right and you're on your way to growth yeah yeah i've i agree with you it's important and i would say if i could back up and not just use the word deconstruction i would say change change is good and whether you feel like you need to to really sift through and sort through something if you feel like you need to expand and widen your perspective whatever the language is around that the change is good and it's so healthy and it's such an important part of maturing and developing as a human instead of staying 12 or 20 or eight uh you're you're meant to grow up and that's meant to mean that you see the world differently and so it's okay if things change in fact it's very good and a sign of health there you go stories pulling us apart have been pulled apart i just thought you mentally kind of stamp this in your mind pulled apart got it pulled apart completely all right everybody well hope to see you at the sunday thing this week online thanks to the patrons for making this happen thanks for listening everybody